Kinship and Social Organisation

by W. H. R. Rivers

The subject of group-marriage is one about which I do not find it possible to speak so dogmatically. It would take me more than another lecture to deal adequately with the Melanesian evidence alone, and I must content myself with two remarks. Firstly, I think it desirable to throw aside the term group-marriage as only confusing the issue, and to speak rather of a state of organised sexual communism, in which sexual relations are recognised as orthodox between the men of one social group and the women of another. Secondly, the classificatory system has several features which would follow naturally from such a condition of sexual communism. I have evidence from Melanesia which places beyond question the former presence of such a condition, with features of culture which become readily explicable if they be the survivals of such a state of sexual communism as is suggested by the terminology of the classificatory system. This evidence comes from only one part of the world, but it is enough to convince me that we have no right to dismiss from our minds a state of organised sexual communism as a feature of the social development of mankind. The wide distribution of the classificatory system would suggest that this communism has been very general, but it need not have been universal, and even if the widespread existence of organised sexual communism be established, it would not follow that it represents the earliest stage in the evolution of human society. There are certain features even of the classificatory system itself which suggest that, if this system be founded in sexual communism, this communism was not primitive, but grew out of a condition in which only such ties of kinship were recognised as would result from the social institution of the family.

I must be content with this brief reference to the subject. The object of these lectures is to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social conditions, and the dependence of the classificatory system upon a condition of sexual communism is not now capable of demonstration. The classificatory mode of denoting relationship should, however, act as a suggestion and stimulus, and as a preventative of dogmatic statement in a part of our subject which, in spite of its entrancing interest, still lies only at the edge of our slowly spreading circle of exact knowledge.

In conclusion, I should like to point out briefly some of the lessons of more general interest which may be learnt from the facts I have brought before you in these lectures. I hope that one result has been to convince you of the danger lying in the use of the reductio ad absurdum argument when dealing with cultures widely different from our own. In the literature of the subject one often meets the adjectives “absurd” and “impossible” applied in some cases to social conditions in which the actual existence of the absurdities or impossibilities can be demonstrated. I may take as an example the argument of Mr. N. W. Thomas, which I have already mentioned, in which the classing of the maternal grandfather with the elder brother by the Dieri is regarded as reducing to an absurdity the contention that classificatory terms express ties of kinship. If Mr. Thomas had had a more lively faith in the social meaning of terms of relationship, he might have been led to notice that the Dieri marry the granddaughter of a brother, a fact he appears, in common with many other readers of Howitt, to have missed; one result of this marriage is to bring about just such a relationship as Howitt records without a man being his own great-uncle, as is supposed to be necessary by Mr. Thomas.

Still another example may be taken from Professor Kroeber. He states that the classing together of the grandfather and the father-in-law which is found in the Dakota system, when worked out to its implications, would lead to the absurd conclusion that marriage with the mother was once customary among the Sioux. Here again, if Professor Kroeber had been less imbued with his belief in a purely linguistic and psychological chain of causation, and had been ready to entertain the idea that there might be a social meaning, he must have been led to see that the features of nomenclature in question would follow from other forms of marriage, and two of these, whatever their apparent improbability in America, cannot well be called absurd, since they are known to occur in other parts of the world. Following Riggs, Professor Kroeber does not specify which kinds of grandfather and father-in-law are classed together in Dakotan nomenclature, but in the full list given by Morgan, it is evident that one term is used for the fathers of both father and mother and for the fathers of both husband and wife. The classing of the father’s father with the wife’s father would be a natural result of marriage with the father’s sister, while the common nomenclature for father’s father and husband’s father would result from marriage with the brother’s daughter. It is not without significance that the features of nomenclature which would be the result of one or other, or of both these marriages, occur in a system which also bears evidence of the cross-cousin marriage, for these three forms of marriage occur in conjunction in one part of Melanesia, viz., the Torres Islands.

The foregoing instance, together with many others scattered through these lectures, will have pointed clearly to another lesson. In the present state of our knowledge a working scheme or hypothesis has largely to be judged by its utility. A way of regarding social phenomena which obstructs inquiry and leads people to overlook facts has its disadvantages, to say the least, while a scheme or hypothesis which leads people to worry out and discover things which do not lie on the surface will establish a strong claim on our consideration, even if it should ultimately turn out to be only the partial truth. I will give only one instance to illustrate how a belief in the dependence of the terminology of relationship on forms of marriage might act as a stimulus to research.

In a system from the United Provinces recorded by Mr. E. A. H. Blunt in the Report of the last Indian Census, one term, bahu, is used for the son’s wife, for the wife, and for the mother.[35] Mr. Blunt puts on one side without hesitation the possibility that such common nomenclature can have been the result of any form of marriage, and ascribes it to the custom whereby a man and his wife live with the husband’s parents, in consequence of which the son’s wife, who is called bahu by her husband, is also called bahu by everyone else in the house. The causation of the common nomenclature which is thus put forward is a possible, perhaps even a probable, explanation. In such a case we should have a social chain of causation in which the son’s wife is called bahu because she is one of a social group bound together by the ties of a common habitation. It can do no harm, however, to bear in mind as an alternative the possibility that the terminology may have arisen out of a form of marriage. It is evident that the use of a common term for the wife and the son’s wife would follow from a form of polyandry in which a man and his son have a wife in common. A further result of this form of marriage would be that the wife of the son, being also the wife of his father, would have the status of a mother.[36] We have no evidence for the presence of such a marriage in India, but our knowledge of the sociology of the more backward peoples of India is not so complete that we can afford to neglect any clue. The possibility suggested by the mode of using the term bahu should lead us to look for other evidence of such a form of polyandry among the ruder elements of the population of India, of whose social structure our present knowledge is so fragmentary.

Another important result of our study of the terminology of relationship is that it helps us to understand the proper place of psychological explanation in sociology. These lectures have largely been devoted to the demonstration of the failure to explain features of the terminology of relationship on psychological grounds. If this demonstration has been successful, it is not because the terminology of relationship is anything peculiar, differing from other bodies of sociological facts; it is because in relationship we have to do with definite and clean-cut facts. The terminology of relationship is only a specially favourable example by means of which to show the value of an attitude towards, and mode of treatment of, social facts which hold good, though less conspicuously, throughout the whole field of sociology.

In social, as in all other kinds of human activity, psychological factors must have an essential part. I have myself in these lectures pointed to psychological considerations as elements in the problems with which the sociologist has to deal. These psychological elements are, however, only concomitants of social processes with which it is possible to deal apart from their psychological aspect. It has been the task of these lectures to refer the social facts of relationship to antecedent social conditions, and I believe that this is the proper method of sociology. Even at the present time, however, it is possible to support sociological arguments by means of considerations provided by psychological motives, and the assistance thus rendered to sociology will become far greater as the science of social psychology advances.

This is, however, a process very different from the interpolation of psychological facts as links in the chain of causation connecting social antecedents with social consequences. It is in no spirit of hostility to social psychology, but in the hope that it may help us to understand its proper place in the study of social institutions that I venture to put forward the method followed in these lectures as one proper to the science of sociology.[37]