Kinship and social organisation / by W.H.R. Rivers.

  • Rivers, W. H. R. (William Halse Rivers), 1864-1922.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Kinship and social organisation / by W.H.R. Rivers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    there was no problem. There was no reason why the subject should have awakened any interest, and so far as I have been able to find, it is only since the discovery of the classificatory system of relationship that the problem now before us was ever raised. I imagine that, if students ever thought about the matter at all, it must have seemed obvious that the way in which they and the other known peoples of the world used terms of relation¬ ship was conditioned and determined by the social relations which the terms denoted. The state of affairs became very different as soon as it was known that many peoples of the world use terms of relationship in a manner, and accord¬ ing to rules, so widely different from our own that they seem to belong to an altogether different order, a difference well illustrated by the confusion which is apt to arise when we use English words in the translation of classificatory terms or classifi¬ catory terms as the equivalents of our own. The difficulty or impossibility of conforming to complete truth and reality, when we attempt this task, is the best witness to the fundamental difference between the two modes of denoting relationship. I do not know of any discovery in the whole range of science which can be more certainly put to the credit of one man than that of the classifi¬ catory system of relationship by Lewis Morgan. By this I mean, not merely that he was the first to point out clearly the existence of this mode of denoting relationship, but that it was he who