Part 6

It is more probable, however, that the use of descriptive terms in the languages of the Semites and of the Shilluks and Dinkas has been the outcome of a definite form of social organisation, viz., that in which the social unit is neither the family in the narrow sense, nor the clan, but that body of persons of common descent living in one house or in some other kind of close association which we call the patriarchal or extended family, the _Grossfamilie_ of the Germans. It is a feature of the Semitic and Nilotic systems, not only to distinguish the four chief categories of cousin, but also the four chief kinds of uncle or aunt, viz., the father’s brother, the father’s sister, the mother’s brother and the mother’s sister, all of whom are habitually classed together in our system, while some of them are classed with the father or mother in the classificatory system. The Semitic and Nilotic terminology is such as would follow from a form of social organisation in which the more intimate relationships of the family in the narrow sense are definitely recognised, but yet certain uncles, aunts, and cousins are of so much importance as to make it necessary for social purposes that they shall be denoted exactly. The brothers of the father and the unmarried sisters of the father would be of the same social group as the father, while the brothers and unmarried sisters of the mother would be of a different social group, which would account for their distinctive nomenclature, while within the social group it would be necessary to distinguish the father from his brothers. It would be too cumbrous to call this variety of system after the extended family, and I suggest that it should be called the “kindred” system.

Analogy with other parts of the world suggests that all those of the same generation in the social group formed by the extended family may once have been classed together under one term, and that, as later there arose social motives requiring the distinction of different relatives so classed together, descriptive terms came into use to make the necessary distinctions. You must please regard this only as a suggestion. We need far more detailed evidence concerning the social status of different relatives among the peoples who use these descriptive terms. Such knowledge as we possess seems to point to the dependence of the Semitic and Sudanese terminology upon the social institution of the extended family, just as our own system depends on the social institution of the family in the narrow sense and the classificatory system upon the clan.

If this descriptive mode of nomenclature be thus the outcome of a social organisation of which the essential element is the extended family, I need hardly point out how natural it is that we should find this kind of nomenclature so widely in Europe. The presence of this descriptive terminology in Celtic and Scandinavian languages, in Lithuanian and Esthonian, would be examples of the persistence of a form of nomenclature which had its origin in the kindred of the extended family. On this view we must believe that, in other languages of Europe, this mode of nomenclature has gradually been replaced by one dependent on the social institution of the family in the narrow sense.

At this point I should like to sum up briefly the position to which our argument has taken us. I have first shown the dependence of a number of special features of the classificatory system of relationship upon special forms of marriage. Then I have shown that certain broad varieties of the classificatory system are to be referred to different forms of social organisation and to the different degrees in which the regulation of marriage by means of clan-exogamy has been replaced by a mechanism dependent upon kinship or genealogical relationship. From that I was led to refer the general features of the classificatory system to the dependence of this system upon the social unit of the clan as opposed to the family which I believe to be the basis of our own terminology of relationship. I then pointed to several features of the classificatory system which suggest that it arose in that special variety of the clan-organisation in which a community consists of two exogamous moieties, forming the social structure usually known as the dual organisation. I considered more fully the dependence of our own mode of denoting relatives upon the social institution of the family, and then a study of the descriptive terminology of relationship has led me to suggest that certain modes of denoting relationship in Egypt, the Sudan and many European countries may be examples of a third main variety of system of relationship which has arisen out of the patriarchal or extended family. We should thus have three main varieties of system of relationship in place of the two which have hitherto been recognised, having their origins respectively in the clan, in the family in the narrow sense, and in the extended or patriarchal family. These three varieties may be regarded as genera within each of which are species and varieties depending upon special social conditions which have arisen within each kind of social grouping, either as the result of changes within each form of social organisation or of transitions from one form to another. We know of a far larger number of such varieties within the classificatory system than within those due to the two forms of the family, and this is probably due in some measure to the fact that the classificatory system is still by far the most widely distributed form over the earth’s surface. Still more important, however, is the fact that among the peoples who use the classificatory system there is an infinitely greater variety of social institution, and especially of forms of marriage, than exist among civilised peoples whose main social unit, the family, is not one which is capable of any extended range of variation. The result of the complete survey has been to justify my use of the classificatory system as the means whereby to demonstrate the dependence of the terminology of relationship upon social conditions. It is the great variability of this mode of denoting relatives which makes it so valuable an instrument for the study of the laws which have governed the history of that department of language by which mankind has denoted those who stand in social relations to himself.

* * * * *

You may have been wondering whether I am going to say anything about the merits of the controversy which has till now given to systems of relationship their chief interest among students of sociology. I have so far left on one side the subjects which have been the main ground of controversy ever since the time of Morgan. You will have gathered that I regard it as a grave misfortune for the science of sociology that the topics of promiscuity and group-marriage should have been thrust by Morgan into the prominent place which they have ever since occupied in the theoretical study of relationship. Even now I should have liked to leave them on one side on the ground that the evidence is as yet insufficient to make them profitable subjects for such exact inquiry as I believe to be the proper business of sociology. Their very prominence, however, makes it impossible to leave them wholly unconsidered, but I propose to deal with them very briefly.

I begin with the question whether the classificatory system of relationship provides us with any evidence that mankind once possessed a form of social organisation, or rather such an absence of social organisation, as would accompany a condition of general promiscuity in which, if one can speak of marriage at all, marriage was practised between all and any members of the community, including brothers and sisters. I can deal with this subject very briefly because I hope to have succeeded elsewhere in knocking away the support on which the whole of Morgan’s own construction rested.

Morgan deduced his stage of promiscuity from the Hawaiian system, which he supposed to be the most primitive form of classificatory nomenclature. In an article published in 1907 I showed[33] that it rather represents a late stage in the history of the more ordinary forms of the classificatory system. My conclusion at that time was based on the scanty evidence derived from the relatively few Oceanic systems which had then been recorded, but my work since that article was written has shown the absolute correctness of my earlier opinion, which I can now support by a far larger body of evidence than was available in 1907. It remains possible, however, that the Hawaiian system may have had its source in promiscuity, even though this condition be late rather than primitive, but it would be going beyond the scope of these lectures to deal fully with this subject here. I cannot forbear, however, from mentioning that Hawaiian promiscuity, in so far as it existed, was not the condition of the whole people, but only of the chiefs who alone were allowed to contract brother and sister marriages, while I have evidence that the avoidance of brother and sister in Melanesia, which has so often been regarded as a survival of man’s early promiscuity, is capable of a very different explanation.[34] Our available knowledge, whether derived from features of the classificatory system or from other social facts, does not provide one shred of evidence in favour of such a condition as was put forward by Morgan as the earliest stage of human society, nor is there any evidence that such promiscuity has ever been the ruling principle of a people at any later stage of the history of mankind.

[33] _Anthropological Essays presented to E. B. Tylor_, Oxford, 1907, p. 309.

[34] For the full evidence on these topics see my forthcoming book _The History of Melanesian Society_.

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.

[35] _Census of India_, 1911, vol. xv., p. 234.

[36] In such a case the use of the term by other members of the household, including women, would be the result of a later extension of meaning.

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]

[37] See also “Survival in Sociology,” _Sociological Review_, 1913, vol. vi., p. 293. I hope shortly to deal more fully with the relations between sociology and social psychology.

It may be that there will be those who will accept my main position, but will urge that these lectures have been devoted to the criticism of an extreme position, the position taken up by Professor Kroeber. They may say that they have never believed in the purely psychological causation of the terminology of relationship. In reply to such an attitude I can only express my conviction that the paper of Professor Kroeber is only the explicit and clear statement of an attitude which is implicit in the work of nearly all, if not all, the opponents of Morgan since McLennan. Whether they have themselves recognised it or not, I believe that it has been this underlying attitude towards sociological problems which has prevented them from seeing what is good in Morgan’s work, from sifting out the chaff from the wheat of his argument, and from recognising how great is the importance to the science of sociology of the body of facts which Morgan was the first to collect and study. I feel that we owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Kroeber for having brought the matter into the open and for having presented, as a clear issue, a fundamental problem of the methods of sociology.

Lastly, I should like to point out how rigorous and exact has been the process of the determination of the nomenclature of relationship by social conditions which has been demonstrated in these lectures. We have here a case in which the principle of determinism applies with a rigour and definiteness equal to that of any of the exact sciences. According to my scheme, not only has the general character of systems of relationship been strictly determined by social conditions, but every detail of these systems has also been so determined. Even so small and apparently insignificant a feature as the classing of the sister-in-law with the sister has been found to lead back to a definite social condition arising out of the regulation of marriage and of sexual relations. If sociology is to become a science fit to rank with other sciences, it must, like them, be rigorously deterministic. Social phenomena do not come into being of themselves. The proposition that we class two relatives together in nomenclature because the relationships are similar is, if it stand alone, nothing more than a form of words. It is incumbent on those who believe in the importance of the psychological similarity of social phenomena to show in what the supposed similarity consists and how it has come about--in other words, how it has been determined. It has been my chief object in these lectures to show that, in so far as such similarities exist in the case of relationship, they have been determined by social conditions. Only by attention to this aim throughout the whole field of social phenomena can we hope to rid sociology of the reproach, so often heard, that it is not a science; only thus can we refute those who go still further and claim that it can never be a science.

INDEX

“Absurd” in sociology, 32, 87.

America, North, 10, 18, 49, 55.

Anaiteum, 22.

Aniwa, 22.

Assiniboin, 51.

Australia, 11, 32.

Avoidance, 85.

Banks Is., 12, 16, 28, 42, 53, 61, 68.

Bellamy, R. L., 56.

Blunt, E. A. H., 90.

Bougainville I., 40.

Brother-in-law, functions of, 12.

Buin, 40.

Canarese, 47.

Celtic terms, 78, 81.

Cherokees, 53.

Chiefs, 85.

Choctas, 53.

Christianity, 30.

Clan, 67, 71, 74.

Classes, matrimonial, 32, 39.

Classificatory relationship, 2, 4, 19, 83.

Codrington, Dr., 28, 30, 68.

Communism in property, 12; sexual, 62, 86.

Concomitant variations, method of, 70.

“Creek” Indians, 53.

Crees, 50, 55.

Cross-cousins, 20, 28; _see_ marriage.

“Crow” Indians, 53.

Dakotas, 51, 88.

Descent, 34, 39, 73.

Descriptive system, 76; terms, 77, 81.