# Family Sentiments

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| Autor: | Robert Briffault |
| Illustrator: | {{{ILLUSTRATOR}}} |
| Titel: | Family Sentiments |
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| aus: | Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Jg. 2, S. 355–381 |
| Herausgeber: | Max Horkheimer |
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| Entstehungsdatum: | |
| Erscheinungsdatum: | 1933 |
| Verlag: | Librairie Felix Alcan |
| Drucker: | {{{DRUCKER}}} |
| Erscheinungsort: | Paris |
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Like all established social groups, such as the tribe and the nation, the family has been conceived as an idealised object of emotional sentiment. In several instances, as in China, India, ancient Rome, the family has been the object of established religious cults. One of the main purposes served by those cults was to impart sanctity to family ties and to lend emotional emphasis to family obligations. Apart from such organised cults, sentiments of devotion to the family are accounted among the most important of moral duties and virtues, while deficiency of feeling in that respect is looked upon, like lack of patriotism, as immoral, perversely unnatural, if not criminal.
In burgher societies the family virtues and affections are accounted the foundations of social life, happiness, and good repute. The domestic circle gathered round the hearth of the home is the ideal of earthly blessedness and the goal of endeavour. If in typical bourgeois society the family is not, as in China, the object of a ritual cult, it is nevertheless held to be sacred. Family ties are inviolable. Love of the family and respect for the obligations it imposes are the basis of social virtues. To honour one's father and mother is set down among the cardinal commandments. It is "the first commandment with promise" for such filial piety is said to insure long days in the land. The family is the foundation of society.
Those sentiments owe obviously a great deal to tradition and education. The devotion of a Chinese to a person bearing the same name and whom he has never beheld before arises from [356] traditional principles, and not from spontaneous feelings. The cultivation of family sentiments by traditional education is carried out with as much attention as the cultivation of national patriotism.
The social group, or "family", which is the object of traditional reverence and moral obligation varies considerably in its composition in different societies. It is a very differently constituted group in China, in India, from what it is in England or in France. In the former countries the "joint family" includes a multitude of more or less nominal relatives; in England the family circle is narrowed down to a small number of members. In some societies the moral obligation of family devotion is represented by a like obligation towards the whole tribe or clan. Among the Arabs, as in all tribal societies, that sentiment is "a fierce overpowering passion and at the same time the first and most sacred of duties". A similar devotion to the clan was conspicuous among the North American Indians. But they, at the same time, regarded their wives as "strangers", and their children as not belonging to the group to which their allegiance was addressed.
A large number of writers on social anthropology have based their accounts of the origin of those social groups, and of the family in particular, upon the supposition that those groups owe their origin to the sentiments with which they are regarded. The family, according to those writers, arose primarily as a result of the operation of "natural sentiments", or "instincts", or "functional" responses. But it appears more probable that the sentiments are a consequence, rather than a cause, of established social groups. The policies governing family relationships and transactions were until quite recent times openly avowed as resting upon economic interests. In pagan times, among our Nordic ancestors, "marriage was not based upon mutual love and affection, but on wealth and social standing. It was a business affair". The description applies accurately to the generality of marriages among the well-to-do classes, and to a large extent among property-owning peasants also, throughout European countries until very recent times.
The romanticism which became current in the period following [357] the French Revolution, and which gave rise to much literature exhibiting the conflict between love and lucre, was largely a revolt, particularly on the part of the women, against that state of things. The notion that the contracting of marriage unions should be determined by affection was regarded by conservative opinion as savouring of libertinism and immorality, and as tending to weaken the security of family ties and the stability of the institution's foundations. But a survey of the whole history of marriage shows that those economic motives were no less absolute in the most lowly societies as among the propertied European classes, and that all usages and regulations affecting marriage and family policies have been determined by economic conditions. For similar reasons parental affection toward female children was often scanty, and the joys of motherhood and fatherhood were not regarded as fully realised unless they had for their object a son and heir.
The European conception of that social group which holds such an important place in ideas of morality and of sociology that it has been constantly referred to as the foundation of society derives, like all European social and cultural concepts, from Rome. It is, indeed, noteworthy that a term denoting that social group does not exist in most non-European languages, and is entirely lacking in the languages of lower cultures. Familia derives from the Oscan, famus, a slave or servant, and denotes originally the whole of a man's possessions and chattel. "Familia", says Sir Henry Maine, "in classical Latinity, means always a man's slaves... In the language of Roman Law... the group consists of animate and inanimate property, of wife, children, slaves, land, and goods, all held together by subjection to the despotic authority of the eldest male of the eldest ascending line" The term "family", by which the sacred social group is denoted, has thus in its origin a purely economic denotation.
In all juridic relations, the family is represented by its head, the other members of the family having no juridic authority. That authority of the head of the family is an essential part of the concept. A family group in which all members should be juridically equal and which could only act as a democratic whole would differ totally from the established notion of the family. Abolish the principle of authority, and you abolish the family. The expression, "the family is the foundation of society", thus really means that society is constituted by heads of families, that is, by owners of property. The aphorism is closely equivalent to the English political dictum that the body politic is constituted by [358] those who possess "a stake in the country". One of the chief social arguments for marriage, and against celibacy, is that a man cannot be regarded as fully conscious of his responsibilities as a citizen unless he possesses a family. "The history of jurisprudence must be followed in its whole course", remarks again Sir Henry Maine, "if we are to understand how gradually and tardily society dissolved itself into component atoms, by what insensible gradations the relation of man to man substituted itself for the relation of the individual to his family, and of families to each other".
The Roman cult of the family lares — a term identical with the Etruscan lars, meaning a chief, ruler, or master — by which the sacred character of the family was ritually commemorated and family sentiment promoted, was an exclusive privilege of the patrician, or property-owning families. The plebs or proletarians, who owned no property, were excluded from such a cult, and were understood not to have families. The juridic relations of proletarians, who merely proliferated without founding a family, had reference to the clan, not to the family. The Christian Church, which, after at first rejecting the institution of marriage, adopted the juridic conceptions of Roman law, gave in the sixth century, its official recognition to the marriages of noble classes owning property, while it did not consider it necessary to concern itself with the marriages of "common people".
An enormous amount of discussion and controversy has taken place with reference to the origin of the family. In harmony with the sentiments centering round its importance as the "foundation of society", the group has commonly been regarded as representing the original foundation of human association also, that is, as the first form of a social group. One of the conclusions to which the extension and analysis of ethnographical knowledge, during the period of its active growth, led such students as Tylor, L. H. Morgan, McLennan, Robertson Smith, Sir James Frazer, Letourneau, Köhler, was that the family group does not exist in the lower cultures. More recently many writers on social anthropology, such as Westermarck, Malinowski, Lowie, Keller, and others, have, however, devoted their activities to interpreting ethnographical facts so as to retain the conception that the paternal family has been from the first the foundation and nucleus of social organisation.
The question has a much wider bearing than may at first appear. It involves much more than a conception of the mode [359] of origin of primitive societies. Upon the view taken concerning it depends the conception of the entire course of social history and of the factors which have been at. work throughout the process. If it be supposed that the family, in much the same form as it is now found in Christian European societies, has existed from the first, or from a very early stage of social history, it must then be postulated that all the social phenomena, relations, and institutions which are indissolubly connected with that form of social group are likewise coeval with social origins. The principle of private property giving a man individual right over his wife and children, and setting a precedent for all other forms of personal ownership must be regarded as having been fully developed from the beginning. The principle of authority, giving the male head of the family power over his wife, transferring her on marriage from her home to his, and bestowing upon him the like possessive claims over his children, must be supposed to have been established in the most primitive societies and to have been ready to blossom out into all other forms of authoritarian power. The primitive societies conceived as composed of paternal families would be in fact individualistic societies, consisting of heads of families, in which every male member had personal rights of property and authority to defend, and in which, by virtue of the principle of paternal authority, the prepotence of one or more senior patriarchs would be automatically operative. The social historian who holds the view that paternal families existed from the first and constituted the foundation of human society will not have to enquire into the origin of the above principles. He will not be concerned with tracing the evolution of marriage institutions, of systems of sexual morality, of sentiments of pudicity, which are intended to safeguard them. It will be superfluous for him to study the rise of individual economic power. He will have no difficulty in accounting for the authority of the state or its representatives. For all the elements of a fully developed individualistic economic society, similar in all essentials to those of Western civilisation, will be by his hypothesis, present ab origine. Upon that view depends therefore much more than the elucidation of the nature of the most primitive social groups. Nothing less than the whole conception of social history and of the scope, principles and methods of social science is involved. And in fact if the views and treatment of that history and that science by those who hold that human society arose out of paternal families be perused with reference to any social phenomenon, it will be found that their entire scheme of social science and the ideological principles founded upon it are determined by the initial hypothesis. [360] That hypothesis is, in my opinion, conclusively excluded by the facts of social ethnography. In societies where economic conditions have not given rise to important private property, paternal families are not formed. The men have not the right to remove women from the latter's homes and to transfer them to theirs; they have no juridic rights over their children, who are not reckoned as members of their social groups, and they exercise no authority over either wife or children.
Those conditions are found very extensively distributed over every continent, in every race, and in every region. Wherever they do not obtain at the present day, and the practice of removing a wife at marriage to her husband's home is now observed, conclusive evidence exists that it has been preceded by matrilocal usages, and there is nowhere any indication of a change of custom in the opposite direction. The evidence that matrilocal marriage was the original custom extends to those peoples who offer most conspicuous examples of fully developed patriarchal social organisation in paternal families, such as the Chinese, the Aryan Indians, the Semites, and the Greeks, which latter observe the matrilocal usage to this day in the more secluded islands of the Aegean. Roman society itself, whence the European constitution of the paternal family is derived, followed at one time the maternal order of succession, not from father to son, but from maternal uncle to sister's children, and the Roman tribes or curiae, reckoned their ancestry in the female line.
But there is an even more clinching proof that the paterna family has everywhere been preceded by the matrilocal family.
Wheresoever the former is established, the right of the man to remove his wife and to count the children as his has to be acquired by means of an economic transaction. That right, upon which rests the constitution of the paternal family, exists nowhere unless it has been purchased. The authority of the head of the family over wife and children, has been everywhere established by economic acquisition.
After prolonged, detached viewing of that evidence and those arguments, I consider that it is no overstatement to say that they exclude completely the hypothesis that the paternal family has anywhere been the original form of social group, and that estimate has been confirmed by competent judges.
That conclusion has, as might be expected, been rejected, or waived aside, or ignored by those numerous social anthropologists [361] who regard the paternal family as having been the original foundation of society. Professor R. H. Lowie contends that all peoples recognise children as having both a mother and a father, and his deduction from that truism is that what he terms the "bilateral" family is universal. The argument bears a strong resemblance to that of Professor Malinowski that, since a child can have no more than one father and one mother, all families are monogamous and polygamy has never existed. The rule, general in the matrilocal marriages of hunting tribes, that the product of the man's chase goes to the wife, and is distributed by her among her relatives, has been interpreted as the fulfilment of parental economic functions towards his wife and children by the husband. But since, in all primitive instances of the arrangement, the husband leaves his group altogether to join that of his wife, the distribution of the food obtained by him among all members of the clan in which he dwells does not differ from the practice which he would follow in his or any other clan. The fact that, when physical separation from his own clan is not complete, he has no juridic right to the food cooked by his wife, but may be obliged to obtain food from his sister, or members of his own clan scarcely bears out the "functional" reality of his membership of a "bilateral" family.
In discussing the constitution of primitive social groups an enormous amount of attention has been paid to the various terms used to denote what is regarded as kinship. All forms of social groupings, national states, tribes, clans, as well as families, have represented the bonds which bind their members as bonds of blood or kinship. Kinship is the concept which imparts an emotional content to nationalism and racialism, to such political aims as Pan-Germanism, Aryanism, the Union of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, etc., which inspires Semitic tribalism, savage totemism, and in fact every form of group solidarity.
Most lower societies use, as is well known, terms of kinship which are startlingly at variance with those current in European societies. These so-called systems of kinship were described by L. H. Morgan as "classificatory", while those used in our societies were called "descriptive", the implication being that our terms describe actual kinship while the "classificatory" kinship of lower cultures is an arbitrary and artificial convention. But some of our terms of kinship are quite as artificial, and do not refer to any biological, but to juridic relations.
The whole notion that social organisation is founded upon [362] kinship is erroneous. The truth is the exact reverse: kinship is founded upon social organisation. The discrepancies between the "classificatory" terms of kinship and biological relationship arise from the circumstance that the terms were never intended to denote biological, but social relations. If an Australian aboriginal calls a score or more women by the same term as he calls his mother it is not in consequence of a paradoxical biological theory, but because his social relation and status towards those women is the same as towards his mother, and because his individual relation to the latter has no particular social significance. It has been stated or assumed by practically all writers on the subject that the reckoning of kinship starts from the observable and concrete fact of motherhood. But all classificatory systems in use in lower cultures show that it does not. They include the observable fact of motherhood because it is impossible to ignore it, but they take no account of either motherhood or fatherhood as individual relations. They do not "start" from a biological fact, which they set aside, because they are not concerned with recording biological, but social facts. In the same manner as the Australian or the Melanesian do not distinguish individual motherhood because it has no social significance, so for the same reason, the European draws no distinction between his various undifferentiated uncles or his various undifferentiated cousins. If the Australian draws a distinction between his elder and his younger sisters, it is because his social relation towards the two is different; he may not speak to the latter while he may speak to elder sisters. Systems of kinship, whether "classificatory" or "descriptive" are not devised from interest in biology, but from interest in social relations. The interest of a Court of Chancery or of a College of Heralds in biology is merely incidental.
It is obvious that, unless we imagine apes or their immediate pithecoid descendants to have been engaged in devising systems of kinship, the social aggregate is antecedent to any such system, Social groups have been originally constituted by aggregation on a given territory; they have not been constituted by kinship. Much of the discussion on the subject assumes, consciously or unconsciously, that the question of kinship was first considered in a group consisting of a single family. That is what Professor Malinowski terms "the initial situation". But it need scarcely be insisted on that mankind must necessarily have proceeded a very long way in social aggregation beyond a single family before being called upon to consider that or any theoretical question. The hypothesis that the family was the origin of society cannot possibly be taken seriously in a literal sense. For no family, [363] whether paternal or maternal, living in isolation, could acquire either human culture or the means of preserving its mere existence. Sir Henry Maine, who was the outstanding advocate of the theory of social origins from the paternal family, which he upheld with an incomparably greater logical acumen than any modern apologist of that theory, says: "From the moment when a tribal community settles down finally upon a definite space of land, the land begins to be the basis of society in place of kinship... For all groups larger than the family, the land on which they live tends to become the bond of union between them at the expense of kinship." Any relation of juridic kinship to physiological kinship is constantly set aside by widespread adoption, by admission of strangers to the tribe, by exchange of children, and even by the transfer of individuals from a forbidden marriage-class to a licit one. Such opportunistic tampering with "kinship" is a daily commonplace in primitive organisation. What appears to be the most primitive form of kinship denotation which we know, that of the totemic system, has reference to sharers of food in common, a definition of the "family" which still obtained among the Celts, and not to any connection through generation. Totemic kinship can be, and constantly is, bestowed by ritual. Adoption, which appears as a breach of the kinship principle, is in reality its foundation. Relations within the social group formed by the fact of common dwelling-place and common food have been determined by respective status, sex and age; not by kinship, except in so far as the fact of birth could not be wholly ignored. To conceive that a group of primitive savages should amid the stress and strain of their rude and arduous lives, devote their leisure to the study of genealogy is as grotesque as to suppose that they should take up the study of numismatics. The notion is but one more importation from civilised societies founded upon paternal families into primitive societies not so constituted. The paternal family can maintain the record of its ideal identity within a larger miscellaneous group only by taking note of exact kinship. In such a society the question of the exact relationship of Mr. Jones to the uncle of Mrs. Smith is an interesting subject of discussion. In a savage group where are no paternal families, it has no meaning. It is true that the observance of the rules of exogamy requires that the distinction between marriage groups should be ascertainable. [364] But all points to the conclusion that marriage groups were originally territorially distinct. They were, and still are in many instances, distinguished by their totems. Beyond that distinction, knowledge of degrees of kinship has no functional use where the identity of the paternal family, the transmission of property, and the claims of authority are not at stake. Sheaves of discussion have been devoted to debating whether the kinship nomenclature of savage societies do or do not prove group-marriage, communal motherhood, or other social usages the evidence for which depends on the observation of social facts. What those nomenclatures do prove is that paternal-family kinship is not regarded as a subject of interest or importance in those societies. If terms of family denotation have not come into existence, they obviously did not correspond to any fact of social interest, and a paternal family, not being recorded in the terms of kinship in use, had not and could not preserve without such record any existence as a social fact.
The view that kinship, and in particular family kinship, has been the source of social organisation implies, and is expressly represented as implying, that the sentiments associated with kinship have been prime factors in giving rise to the organisation. Professor L. T. Hobhouse says: "Love and the whole family have an instinctive basis, that is to say, they rest upon tendencies inherited within brain and nerve." Mr. Havelock Ellis says that "its existence may even be said to be woven into the texture of the species". But the facile resource of accounting for social facts by supposing the sentiments with which they are regarded as being "instinctive" is not now admitted by any competent psychologist. The only relevant evidence that behaviour arising from such social sentiments is instinctive consists in showing its unmistakable presence in animals. The chief concern of the older advocates of that theory, such as Dr. Westermarck, was accordingly to show that paternal families and paternal behaviour are found among animals, a view for which an abundance of erroneous evidence was available. Professor Malinowski, although professing to dispense with that evidence, considerably improves upon it by [365] stating that "the family life of mammals always lasts beyond the birth of offspring… We know that the male is indispensable there, because, owing to long pregnancy, lactation, and the education of the young, the female and her offspring need a strong and interested protector". But anthropomorphic natural history is no longer so uncritically accepted as to admit the promulgation of such extravagant inexactitudes. No instance of paternal behaviour is known among mammals. The male, which is usually driven away by the pregnant and suckling female, and is neither stronger nor interested, never protects her, or provides for her.
The social state differs, in humanity, so profoundly from any form of animal aggregation that notwithstanding a whole literature on "animal societies", any analogy between the two is profoundly invalid and misleading. The most distinctive characters of human societies, are division of labour in the procuring of subsistence, and the existence of a social tradition by which cultural products, ideas and sentiments are transmitted. Neither of those characters occurs in any animal assemblage. The supplying of food to an animal by another occurs only in the feeding of immature young, either by means of maternal secretions or by the procuring of nourishment. In certain insects such parental care leads to elaborate physiological and genuinely instinctive division of labour. But among vertebrate animals there exists no division of labour among adults. Even among the anthropoid apes every adult individual, male or female, fends for itself as regards the procuring of the means of existence. Of social tradition there exists no analogue among infra-human animals.
There is, however, one character of social grouping which is common to both human and animal groups, namely a certain solidarity between members of the group and a much more pronounced antagonism toward other individuals or groups. Animals which live together, whether in large herds or smaller groups, almost invariably resent the intrusion of a stranger. Carnivorous animals live either solitary or in very small groups, consisting sometimes of a pair, in a given territory, and the presence of a stranger in that territory is resisted. Even their offspring are driven away as soon as they reach maturity. An intruder in a herd of ruminants, wild horses, or elephants is attacked and driven away. This happens even though the apparent intruder is a stray member of the herd which is attempting to rejoin his former companions. Wild dogs, in cities like Cairo and Constantinople, [366] have been observed to defend their territory and to drive away any intruder. The feature has been particularly noted among monkeys, who invariably resent the intrusion of a stranger into their horde. In a study of bird life which has become a classic, Mr. Howard has elaborately shown that nidicolous birds are chiefly concerned with defending their territory, and that many of the types of behaviour which have been set down to mating affection or to jealousy arise in reality from a desire to retain a given territory.
That feature of animal behaviour is manifestly founded upon economic factors. It is the hunting ground or the pasture which is defended against rivals whose presence would increase competition in obtaining food. The size of all animal groups is determined by that economic factor. Herbivorous animals whose food supply is not seriously jeopardised by their associating in large numbers are commonly found in herds, while carnivora which depend upon the quarry scattered over a large region live in small groups or are altogether solitary. Within the same order and the same species, the relation of the size of the group to the requirements and opportunities of the animal is constant. Thus chimpanzees occur in large troups, while the gorilla, whose huge body requires a much larger supply of food and which moreover is not a climber, is restricted to aggregates of smaller size.
The same correlation is constant in human groups also. Hunting tribes, especially when living in forests, where game is very scattered, live in relatively small groups. Pastoral and agricultural tribes gather together in large societies. The size of the social aggregate is dependent upon the capacity of economic sources to support it. Organised civilised societies lead to a far greater density of population, and modern industrialism has caused the population density to become trebled and quadrupled at a rapid rate.
The motive which, in tribes of primitive hunters, determined the exclusion of strangers and antagonism toward them, and the correlated sentiments of solidarity toward the group itself are identical in kind with those which give rise to a similar behaviour in groups of quadrumana. Such societies have usually a definite territory. Intrusion into the territory is resented and its invasion by any member of a strange group is regarded as a hostile act. In such communities the members are generally spoken of as mankind, and all strangers as enemies. The sentiments toward the group and toward strange groups rest, like those of national [367] patriotism on an economic basis. Loyalty toward the tribe, which is cultivated by tradition, by religious and other ideas, is grounded upon the economic interest of every member in the efficient cooperation of the tribesmen in obtaining the means of subsistence and defending the territory against the assaults of competitors. Thus the sentimental bonds which bind the groups have their ultimate basis in economic facts.
There is another social sentiment which cannot be left out of account in considering the psychical basis of primitive human social groups. The original source of aggregation, both human and animal, is the association of offspring under maternal care. The maternal family formed by mother and brood is the biological foundation of any social group. The basis of the sentiment which gives rise to maternal behaviour is, in the true sense, instinctive, for its development can be followed in the animal kingdom through purely physiological provisions, reflex reactions, the organised chain reflexes of insect behaviour, and the analogous behaviour of vertebrates up to the highly developed maternal behaviour of quadrumana. The forms of maternal behaviour in the lower cultures are strikingly similar to those exhibited by quadrumanous females. We are therefore justified in using here the much abused term "instinct", which after being grossly misapplied has rightly tended to be discarded from scientific speech in referring to human behaviour.
The operation of the maternal instinct in behaviour, as we may observe it in animals, presents certain very definite features. In most mammals it is periodic. Its manifestations are correlated with pregnancy and delivery, and it ceases to operate when the offspring has reached a condition of independence. In birds, rodents, ungulates, and carnivora, the offspring which has been tended with solicitude is driven away as soon as it reaches maturity, and the instinct is completely obliterated. The periodicity and transiency of the maternal function appears to be less sharply marked in the quadrumana among which, owing to more prolonged infancy, maternal care is also more continuous.
There is another very definite and notable character about the operation of the maternal instinct. There exists no correlation whatsoever between that operation and the fact of physiological kinship. Among all animals which manifest maternal behaviour, that behaviour is identical whether the young are own offspring of the mother or not. The strangest spectacles result from maternal solicitude for substituted offspring of entirely different species. Such foster-mother behaviour is common and marked in proportion to the high development of maternal behaviour. Commonly [368] the object of maternal solicitude is intentionally adopted offspring. That feature, universal in the animal kingdom, is particularly marked in the quadrumana, which frequently steal one another's offspring, and are invariably eager to adopt any young.
That definite character of maternal behaviour is one which it is important to bear in mind in regard to the human manifestations of maternal functions. It may at once be definitely stated that whatever is instinctive in human maternal behaviour, its relation to natural kinship is not. The passionate sentiments of the human mother for her own offspring, her own son, owe that association with true kinship wholly to conceptual factors, and not to any instinctive reaction.
There is in several parts of the world, more especially in Polynesia and Micronesia, in Celebes, Torres Straits, and among the Dayaks, but also in some parts of India, Africa, and South America an extraordinary prevalence of the strange practice of adoption or fosterage without any apparent reason or cause except the force of traditional custom. In Nukohiva, for example, it is the first care of a woman when she becomes pregnant to make arrangements for another woman to adopt her child. Such is the generality of the custom in some regions that it is impossible to ascertain the true relation of mother and offspring from the social relation and to ascertain it by enquiry. In some districts of Australia and Melanesia the communal suckling of children by various mothers is carried out as a ritual observance.
There is no obvious explanation, in existing social conditions, for those customs. It has been suggested that they have originated in a desire to emphasise the impersonal character of motherhood in primitive groups, and that they are, like many of our educative customs which are intended to cultivate opposite family sentiments, designed to cultivate the communal character of the relation and to obliterate the fact of individual kinship as represented by the fact of motherhood. It is impossible to prove that such an explanation is correct; but it is equally difficult to suggest any other. If such customs are survivals of usages arising from the intention suggested, they are entirely in accordance with the actual undifferentiated operation of maternal behaviour in primitive societies, as also in animal groups, and with the fact that individual motherhood is not denoted by the terms of "kinship" used.
As regards the sentiments of males in the lower cultures towards the children, observation bears uniform testimony to the marked [369] fondness shown, which is quite characteristic, and contrasts with the indifference or irritation commonly exhibited by the civilised male as regards young children. But that sentiment is, to an even more pronounced extent than is the case with maternal behaviour, directed towards all young children irrespectively of bonds of kinship, so much so that it would be inexact to refer to it as a parental sentiment. Marked fondness and devotion is commonly shown by men to children of their sexual associate by a different father. The remark of an Iroquois to Father Le Jeune expresses well the contrast between savage and civilised sentiment in this respect: "You love only your own children", the Indian said, "we love all the children of the tribe". Everyone who has been familiar with uncultured societies will readily recognise the difference of attitude described. It is impossible to tell, in most lower cultures, from the behaviour of a man towards children whether they are his own offspring or not. Professor Malinowski speaks of a "tenderness and affection… mysteriously associated with fatherhood", but he gives no evidence for the discovery of a mystery entirely unknown to either savage or civilised psychology. It is equally news that in the lowest cultures the father is the "guardian of the woman during her pregnancy", in view of the very general rule that the woman is ritually separated from her husband during the greater part of pregnancy and suckling and that no association of any kind between a man and a woman is established until after the birth of the child.
There are several ethnographical instances of men complaining of the hardship of matrilinear rules of kinship, and expressing the wish that their own children might be related to themselves by juridic kinship instead of belonging, as they do, to the clan of their mother. In some parts of Africa, as among the southern Taureg and the Felatah, that hardship is commonly circumvented by raising children from purchased concubines, and thus regarding "illegitimate" offspring as the true offspring. But it is to be noted that in all those instances the cause of complaint against matrilinear rules arises out of the question of the disposal and transmission of property. What the father desires is not a son, but an heir, and his desire arises from anxiety that his property should remain in his own family instead of going to his sister's family.
This brings us to the process of differentiation which has taken place and is traceable in social sentiments, from those stages [370] where they are, as in the case of animals, undifferentiated in their objects to those in which they have become particularised and individualised.
In social groups whose subsistence is derived from hunting, fishing, or any other hand-to-mouth economic source, there is a pronounced solidarity and sentiment of loyalty between all members of the. group. That sentiment coincides with the economic interests of all the members of the group. It is almost impossible or extremely difficult in most regions of the world for an isolated individual, or even two or three individuals, to obtain secure and continuous sustenance by hand-to-mouth hunting or the like. Security of life depends upon cooperation and sharing. Unless the food obtained by the individual be shared with other members of the group, he would run the constant risk of starving. All means of subsistence are accordingly shared in hunting and fishing tribes, the rule being universal and extending to such ridiculous extremes as the communal division of a sprat or of a small piece of cloth. This constitutes primitive communism. It is absolutely imposed by the conditions, and there exists in such social groups no form of property, except weapons and utensils, which are themselves subject to communal use, susceptible of being personally accumulated or advantageous to retain for individual use. On the other hand such communities have a common proprietary right in the hunting or fishing territory. Those territorial rights are very clearly conceived and observed, being amicably agreed upon between friendly clans, or jealously enforced against hostile intruders. The sentiment of solidarity between members of the group is thus reinforced and defined by a common sentiment of antagonism and hostility toward other groups, which are "strangers" or "enemies".
Under those conditions the men, who possess no economic wealth, cannot purchase the right to remove women from their homes and to reckon the women's children as their own. Nor does there exist any inducement or motive to advance the latter claim, since the question of transmission of property does not arise. Sexual association is accordingly matrilocal, under the rule of exogamy. Where clans, camps, or territorial groups are contiguous the observance of matrilocal usage may become lax, and the place of residence of small account. But the wife continues to belong to her clan, her children are likewise members of her clan, and the kinship conventions are matrilinear. They have no reference to a paternal family. Such a family has no economic existence; neither is it represented in social sentiment, nor is it, accordingly, represented in the terms of kinship or in name. [371] The rise in importance of the paternal family as a social group and institution coincides with the development of conditions which impart a value to private property and which bestow individual economic power upon males. Those conditions vary naturally, in different regions and societies according to local circumstances. Rights to productive land, either as hunting or fishing grounds, or for purposes of primitive cultivation, are difficult to establish and enforce in societies of low culture on account of the long recognized traditional communal character of such property. Cultivation being very generally carried out by the women, these are regarded as having a prescriptive claim to such land, where questions of ownership arise. In general, it is only where claims to land ownership are established by rights of conquest and an aristocratic caste of conquerors is formed, that landed property comes to acquire importance in societies of low culture. But the negotiation of land transfer is a complex juridic transaction, which is in point of fact only effected by marrying the woman landowner, and individual ownership in land, when such exists and is the sole or chief form of private property, does not provide a practical means of economic exchange.
Such a means becomes available for the first time in the cultural development of the lower societies with the domestication of cattle. Domesticated cattle, pecus, is accordingly the earliest form of readily negotiable private property, and is universally the original basis of pecuniary transactions and important economic power.
It is accordingly found that the social importance of the paternal family assumes for the first time a notable development as a social factor in pastoral societies. In all such societies we find, with a uniformity which admits of no exceptions, that the rights of men over their wives, the removal of these to the men's homes, paternal juridic claims over the children, are acquired by the payment of cattle. Those pastoral societies, in Africa, among the Semites, in the Asiatic pastoral lands, are marked with unqualified uniformity by the high development of paternal rights and authority, and by the extent to which those rights bestowed by economic power are used in the form of polygamy, which reaches in those societies its maximum extent. On the continent of America, where no domestication of cattle has taken place, with the unimportant exception of the use of lamas in the Peruvian region, no marked development of the paternal family and of patriarchal principles is to be found.
The domestication of cattle is a relatively late event in cultural history. In most pastoral societies, accordingly, the survival of [372] forms of social organisation corresponding to an antecedent condition in which the paternal family had not yet acquired economic and social importance is to be found, and examples of every combination of de facto paternal rights and authority with such features as partial or ritual matrilocal marriage, avuncular authority, or even matrilinear kinship are observed.
Adaptation of traditional social organisation, usage, custom, and sentiment to new functions arising from changed social conditions takes place, but that adaptation is remarkably gradual and slow, and the persistence of social tradition is overcome only where it is in direct opposition to urgent and powerful interests. The factor which determines that adaptation, and likewise the preservation of traditional survivals where they favour existing interests, is a very definite and concrete one. It is the economic interests at stake in the social situation.
The adaptation to altered social situations is often accompanied by important changes in sentiment, that is to say, in the emotional values which attach to social facts and relations. It is, as already indicated, a common illusion that the adaptation which takes place is the effect of those changed sentiments, of changes in "public opinion", or other psychological factors. In truth it is the change brought about in the interests at stake by altered economic situations which gives rise to changes in sentiment, in public, and often in scientific, opinion, and not vice versa.
Maternal sentiments towards offspring have, as noted, a truly instinctive basis, but the instinctive operation of those dispositions [373] have no reference to the circumstance of physiological kinship. With the development of the paternal family, maternal sentiment undergoes a notable transformation. In the polygamous families of pastoral societies, the communal tending of children, which are regarded as belonging to the family as a whole rather than to any particular mother, proceeds to an even more marked extent than in the clan-group. In more advanced social and economic stages, however, where one of the wives brings economic advantages to the husband, generally in the form of a dowry of land or other wealth associated with aristocratic birth, the children born of the various wives are accounted as children of the noble, or chief, wife. Social economic relations thus once more overrule biological relations in the reckoning of kinship. The economic advantages arising from the acquisition of a wife who brings a dowry and is the heiress to land have led to the decay of the polygamy of purely pastoral societies, and to a gradual tendency towards monogamy in those societies where land cultivation is combined with pastoral holdings. Under those conditions the individualised maternal sentiments become centred upon the mother's own offspring. The children of other women, which in primitive societies equally stimulate the operation of maternal dispositions, come to arouse jealousy, more especially where they imperil in any way the economic prospects of the mother's own offspring, and still more if they are the offspring of the same father by another woman. The maternal sentiments assume a new possessive and individual character. They are conceived, by the assumption of a physiological law unknown to biology, to rest upon the fact of kinship. The sentiments of the mother towards her offspring are due, she supposes, to the fact that these are "her own flesh and blood". Those maternal sentiments are particularly centred upon male offspring, daughters being often regarded as poor substitutes as objects of maternal affection. That preference has doubtless a sexual basis, but that is greatly reinforced by the importance of male offspring in the transmission of family property under patriarchal usage.
The whole maternal disposition becomes moulded by social culture and sentiment as the chief function of the mother becomes the rearing of heirs. That which was a biological instinctive response is so overlayed with cultivated concepts and sentiments that it becomes hard to distinguish what is natural from what is cultural. The whole being of the women of a patriarchal society where their function is the production of heirs to property becomes shaped with a view to that function. A special code of morals arises for the purpose of protecting proprietary marital rights. [374] Bridal virginity, unknown or dreaded in the lower cultures, acquires an inordinate significance. Bodily modesty comes to be accounted an "innate" feminine sentiment. The submissiveness, helplessness, physical debility and fragility, delicacy, the mental torpor and incapacity for intellectual labour of women come, as parts of the same ideal, to be accounted equally "innate" sexual characters.
The sentiment with which women are regarded by men undergo a no less profound transformation. The relations between the sexes have not, in the lower social phases, the sentimental associations which are marked in patriarchal societies, so that, love, in the romantic sense, may rightly be said to be absent.
The fact is that all sentiments of social affection undergo a profound change when the social group, instead of being constituted by a clan or similar assemblage, in which the paternal family is either entirely absent or wholly subordinate in social and economic importance to the larger group, comes to consist definitely of paternal families. The primitive social group is an undivided whole in which are no appreciable conflicts of economic interests. A society composed of paternal families, each of which is an imperium in imperio, is a battle-field for the strife of contending interests. The paternal family is, we saw, but an avatar of the individual as an economic unit, since it is represented by its head as holder of individual rights and claims of property and authority. From a relation of cooperation and solidarity between its members, the social group passes, with the advent of the paternal family, into one representing a competition of rival interests. The whole psychological basis of social sentiments becomes changed with the change in the economic basis. The social sentiment with which all members of the social group were regarded, no pronounced difference of attitude distinguishing particular individuals, whether male or female, come to be canalised, in a competitive individualistic society, and individualised. The savage usually refers to all members of his clan as "my friends". The term "friend" has not in his society an individual connotation; it is merely the opposite of stranger, or enemy. The individualisation of friendship and affection in a competitive individualistic society, has reference to the trust which, with the savage, is felt towards all members of the group.
That individualisation of affectionate sentiment and trust takes on a notable development as regards sexual companionship. The absence of romantic or passionate individual love in savage society is largely the effect of the diffused character of social sentiment. [375] As Mary Kingsley well expressed it, "affection, with the savage, is not deeply linked with sex". The emotional intensity of affection in the member of an individualistic society is the release of painfully inhibited reactions, an eagerly desired liberation from the strain of self-defence, watchfulness, and mistrustful antagonism which social life among "strangers" imposes.
Monogamic conditions arising from purely economic factors have given rise to monogamic sentiment, in which escape from strife, mistrust, and loneliness is sought in the affection of a trusted companion bound by the ties of common economic interests. The sentimental ideal of connubial union between life-long companions, which is held up as the ideal of sexual union in the exaltation of the paternal family, is in part realised by the long sharing of economic interests and the common battle against individualistic competition. The sentiment is, as in every other instance, the effect, and not, as has been represented, the cause of the economic relation.
When the paternal family became a medium for the consolidation and transmission of private property, marriage acquired a social significance which it did not previously possess. Social sanctions to sexual unions have reference in lower societies to the traditional tribal usages of exogamy and preferential mating. Terms such as "concubinage", "free love", "illegitimacy", are devoid of meaning except in reference to such breaches of tribal usage. Marriage ceremonies are absent and legitimacy does not depend upon them. Marriage becomes an important contract which has to be publicly registered, confirmed, and sanctified, only when important private property is involved. The word "sacrament", which was adopted by the Christian Church to denote sacredness, signified in current Roman legal parlance the sum of money put down as a stake in a court of law as a guarantee of good faith in the fulfilment of a contract. From the earliest stages of propertied society, as in Polynesian society, down to Roman and early Christian society, the celebration of marriage with ceremonial ritual has been confined to the propertied classes. In Hawaii, for example, marriage was confined to chiefs. The bridal couple are in several countries expressly assimilated to a king and queen. In the marriage ceremonials of peasants and poor people, the couple, tricked out in unwonted fancy dress, masquerade for the time being as aristocratic landowners. The sacramental sacredness of the union derives from its original [376] economic importance. That sacramental character, which had at first exclusive reference to the legal guarantee of the economic transaction, came to be understood as referring to the sacredness and permanency of the sentiments between the contracting parties.
The character and extension of family sentiments vary in different countries according to the conditions of the economic factors involved. For example, the solidarity and traditional force of family sentiment is considerably more apparent in the bourgeoisie of France, where according to the Code Napoleon property is divided among all immediate relatives, than it is in England where the laws of succession are founded upon the principle of primogeniture. Acts which concern the family as a whole are in France traditionally subject to the decisions of "conseils de famille", and the duty of maintaining social intercourse with related kindred is much more profoundly established in French, than it is in English habits. The scrupulous conscienciousness with which every branch of a French family assumes the funereal garb of deep mourning upon the decease of a great-aunt twice removed often imparts to a French community the appearance of a society of undertakers. In England, family feeling, though imbued with no less profound moral sentiment, is generally conceived in a more restricted acceptation. Reverence towards the father, as the authoritative head of the family, is more pronounced, while the independence of brothers and sisters from one another is greater. The position of the English wife and mother is more subordinate and surrounded with less sentiment than that of the French "mère". Solidarity is a more conspicuous trait in the French family; duty and respect for paternal authority in the English. The attitude of the English father partakes of that benevolent despotism which has characterised the relation of the English ruling classes towards their dependents, and is known as paternalism.
The profound social-economic changes deriving from the industrial revolution have not failed in profound repercussions on family sentiment. Industrial wealth, which has come to overshadow in importance the more settled and permanent wealth of older forms of property, being less stable and more fluid, is in a much larger measure individual and is less closely associated with inherited family holding. The family as a medium for the transmission of property has lost much of its former importance in fully developed industrial society. It is therefore not surprising that in the later phases of the industrial era the axioms of family sentiment have tended to lose much of their traditional authority. [377] This has been particularly the case in America, where industrialism and industrial individualism have attained their greatest development, and where those tendencies have not been counteracted by a feudal tradition.
The categorical character of the debt of gratitude owed by children to their parents for having brought them into the world has come to be more critically viewed. The value of the family group as an educational agent has been more than questioned. The paternal family has afforded in some measure a haven sheltered from the sharp conflicts and competitions of individualistic society, where sentiments of social affection have had a better opportunity of developing than in the fray of competitive strife. But against that advantage are to be set grave and pernicious effects. Parental influence rests upon an arbitrary and objectionable authoritarian principle. By its very nature that principle gives rise inevitably in the children subjected to it, to resentment and revolt more or less secretly smouldering under the imposed disguise of reverence, duty, and obligatory affection. That very situation sets all other family influence upon a foundation of insincerity and hypocrisy which tends to extend to all. The educative direction given to that influence by the great majority of parents is ignorant and baneful. In times when the movement of thought and of changing values is rapid, parents must needs represent, as a general rule, the more backward, effete, and obsolete types of opinion, and this is the more likely to be the case the higher the value which they set upon the dogmatic sanctity of family authority. In proportion as the sentimental influence of the family is greater so is its paralysing influence upon the generation rising up within it. Parenthood bestows no special qualification for the educative functions which traditional family sanctification assigns to parents. The paternal or the maternal claim to determine the education of their children, the political, social, or religious instruction which they shall receive, is no less a tyrannous abuse when exercised by parents than if it were exercised by public censors and "licencers of thought". Children do not "belong" to parents, as the tradition of ancient Rome transmitted to modern societies proclaims. The concept of domination or possession first developed in human society with the paternal family is as arbitrary in any other relation as in that of patria potestas.
The fiction that parenthood constitutes a sacrifice for which the child, even when grown to manhood or womanhood, remains beholden, commonly leads on the part of the parent to the claim of a real sacrifice from the son or daughter of their independant development. In some greater or less measure that sacrifice [378] always takes place where the debt and the bond of family sentiment are regarded as sacred and binding. Thus upon each succeeding generation is laid the heavy hand of the preceding one, and the authoritarian paternal family invested with sentimental sacredness acts as a drag on human development as a whole.
The force of those considerations is becoming more and more vividly felt at the present time, when the economic conditions of industrial society are moving to a critical climacteric. The defence of traditional sentiments attaching to the paternal family is an aspect of the defence of the conditions of private property upon which the family group is founded. The fears for the security of the paternal family are fears for the economic order of which that social group is rightly regarded as the foundation. The defence of traditional sentiments and relations attaching to the paternal family is an aspect of the defence of the conditions of private ownership which it represents. To the anxieties felt by the moralist in regard to the decay of family life and sentiment is added as an ally the interest shown by the conservative social thinker and anthropological scientist in upholding by their interpretations the credit of the institution. The concern exhibited by a large section of academic social science to prove that the paternal family has been the original basis of social organisation is an expression of those anxieties. As Professor Malinowski correctly states: "Functional anthropology is an essentially conservative science".
The controversy between such conservative social science and progressive science reflects the conflict of economic and social powers by which the contemporary world is more and more sharply divided and by which all thought and all values are inevitably coloured.
The decay of family sentiment is not, however, equivalent to the decay of social sentiment. The formation, with the development of personal property, of the paternal family within the larger social group constituted, in a sense, an impairment of social solidarity, a form of social disruption. The emotional reactions which previously had reference to the whole group became canalised within the channel of the paternal family and concentrated on individuals, whether or not in association with the sexual urges. If the decay of the family as a consecrated ideal were to give rise to stark individualism, the process of dissolution would, so far as regards the psychological basis of social bonds, be carried a stage further, and the social aggregate would be broken up into its individual atoms. That is the term of the tendency so long as the [379] economic advantage of the individual is represented competitively by the economic disadvantage of all others.
But the signs of decay in the paternal family go hand in hand with no less pronounced symptoms of decay in the conditions of profitable economic individualism. The diminished importance of cultivated family sentiments cannot therefore give rise to intensified individualistic sentiments. It is, on the contrary, towards a quite opposite result that the decay of a social group, which has, as we saw, stood for intensified economic individualism, seems to point. Social sentiments, inhibited by self-defence and mistrust in individualistic societies, where they seek refuge in the family, will no longer require for their free development the shelter of a closed corporation. Sentiments of companionship and brotherhood will no longer be artificial ideals, hypocritically professed as insincere formulas, and impossible of realisation in a competitive society, but will be the natural reactions to economic conditions. The cultural development of discriminating personal sentiments which has taken place in individualistic societies will probably not altogether disappear with the economic foundations of that individualism. The sentimental attachment which has become superadded to sexual attraction, instead of resting upon the crude basis of common economic interests, will tend, to rest more on mental and intellectual grounds of sympathy. If arbitrary and objectionable claims of parental authority and possessive rights on children are weakened, that by no means signifies that social sentiments towards the old or towards the very young must be enfeebled. Primitive societies where the familial group has no institutional sentimental prestige, are marked in general by greater care and tenderness towards the aged and towards children than societies where those sentiments are enforced as a familial duty. Between the intelligent and benevolent care of children, where that care is the common interest of the whole community, and the misdeeds perpetrated in the name of parental education, there is no comparison. Individualism is often defended on the score of realism in respect of supposed characters of "human nature". To a large extent social individualism has had the effect of stifling and inhibiting, much rather than of developing and cultivating, the spontaneous reactions of human sentiment.
Die "family sentiments" sind nichts Ursprüngliches, sondern entfalten sich erst beim Vorhandensein bestimmter ökonomischer Tatbestände. Sie können deshalb auch nicht als Erklärung für den Ursprung der Familie dienen. Die jeweils herrschenden Auffassungen über die Grundlagen der Verwandtschaft sind ganz verschieden; jedenfalls bildet diese nicht etwa selbst die Grundlage der gesellschaftlichen Organisation, sondern das umgekehrte Verhältnis trifft zu. Die juristische Verwandtschaft beruht häufig nicht auf Blutszusammengehörigkeit, und die Nomenklatur der Unterscheidung der Grade der Verwandtschaft gewinnt erst in der patriarchalischen Familie ihre volle Bedeutung. Die Gefuhle zwischen den Familienmitgliedern können nicht als naturgegeben gelten, denn sonst müssten sie auch bei den Tieren vorkommen. Der Zusammenhalt zwischen den Mitgliedern einer Gruppe, der bei Tieren beobachtet wird, beruht nicht auf gefühlsmässiger Bindung, sondern auf ökonomischen Faktoren, Die Bindung der Mutter an die Kinder findet sich gewiss auch bei vielen Tieren, aber was wir Mutterliebe nennen, ist etwas anderes, denn jene Bindung bezieht sich bei dem Muttertier unterschiedslos auch auf fremde Junge. Besonders wichtig für die Beurteilung des Charakters der "family sentiments" ist die Differenzierung der Gefühle zwischen den Mitgliedern einer Gruppe, wenn die ökonomische Grundlage sich ändert, sowie die Anpassung der Gefühle an neue Funktionen. Weitere Beispiele für die Abhängigkeit der "family sentiments" von ökonomischen Tatbeständen bieten die Erklärung ihrer Verschiedenheit in der englischen und französischen Familie oder die Folgen der industriellen Revolution. Mit dem Sieg der liberalistischen Wirtschaft ändert sich die ganze psychologische Basis für die "family sentiments", alle gefühlsmässigen Beziehungen werden individualistisch. Die schwere Krise, in die das kapitalistische System geraten ist, greift auch tief in die Familienbeziehungen ein. Jedoch werden die bisher in der Familie aufbewahrten menschlichen Gefühle sich in einer besser organisierten Gesellschaft besser entfalten können.
Les "family sentiments" ne se developpèrent qu'en rapport à certains faits èconomiques. lis ne sauraient donc servir à expliquer l'origine de la famille. Les conceptions quant à la base de la parenté (en particulier sur la naissance des enfants) qui dominent dans les différentes phases du développement de l'humanité sont très distinctes l'une de l'autre. La base de l'organisation sociale est formée par d'autres éléments que les "family sentiments". La parenté reconnue ne repose souvent pas sur la parenté du sang. Les noms désignant les degrés de la parenté gagnent leur signification actuelle avec l'apparition dans l'histoire de la famille patriarcale. — Les sentiments entre les différents membres de la famille ne sauraient être considérés comme des données naturelles, car si tel était le cas, on trouverait ces mémes sentiments également chez les animaux. Les liens entre membres [381] d'un groupe, observés aussi bien chez les animaux que chez les hommes ont pour base des facteurs d'ordre matériel. Le sentiment qui lie la mère à sa progéniture se trouve, il est vrai, chez de nombreux animaux, mais ce n'est point ce que nous appelons aujourd'hui l'amour maternel. Ce lien de la femelle se rencontre aussi bien à l'égard de la progéniture des autres animaux que pour la sienne. Pour être à meme de bien juger le caractère des "family sentiments", il importe surtout d'observer l'adaptation de ces sentiments à de nouvelles exigences, c'est-à-dire comment les sentiments entre membres d'un groupe subissent un changement quand la base économique se trouve modifiée. B. donne d'autres exemples pour la dépendance es "family sentiments" de facteurs économiques, dans son exposé sur la différence des sentiments dans la famille française et anglaise, tout en décrivant les suites de la révolution industrielle. Avec la victoire du libéralisme économique, la base psychologique pour les "family sentiments" se transforme entièrement: tous les sentiments revêtent un caractère individualiste. La grande crise dans laquelle le système actuel de l'économie est entré, influence sensiblement les relations psychiques. Les sentiments qui, jusqu'à présent, étaient restreints dans le cadre de la famille, se développeront dans une société mieux organisée que celle de notre époque.
* ↑ Der Autor dieses Beitrages ist der Verfasser der "Mothers". Da dieses für die Sozialforschung bedeutende Werk in Europa heute noch viel zu wenig bekannt ist, gibt unser Mitarbeiter Erich Fromm im Anschluss an diesen Aufsatz eine Besprechung des Buches. In einem der nächsten Hefte dieser Zeitschrift wird E. Fromm die Bedeutung der Mutterrechtsheorie für die Sozialforschung ausführlich behandeln. Die Schriftleitung.
* ↑ R. Dozy, Islam in Spain, p. 7.
* ↑ Knut Gjerset, A History of the Scandinavian Peoples, vol. 1, p. 91.
* ↑ In England, where the family sentiments are so highly developed, "marriages were arranged among people of good estate and condition with a very frank display of mercenary motives". One lady writes, discussing a match: "Her father will give her five thousand pounds, as she is sickly and not likely to marry." Another relative wrote: "Here is a match for your son, Mr. Wilson's daughter of Surrey, that I think is worthy your consideration; they offer 5,500." (G. Hill, Women in English Life, vol. 1, p. 168 sq.)
* ↑ Ancient Law, p. 208; Early Institutions, p. 310.
* ↑ Ancient Law, p. 185.
* ↑ J. Zhishman, Das Eherecht der orientallschen Kirche, p. 140.
* ↑ The full evidence is given in my work, The Mothers, vol. 1, p. 268 ff
* ↑ Primitive Society, p. 64 and passim.
* ↑ G. H. Loskiel, Indians of North America, p. 59.
* ↑ Cf. Carveth Read, Man, XIV, p. 183; Clark Wissler, An Introduction to Social Anthropology, p. 33: "Three or four adults cannot support a series of social Institutions."
* ↑ Early Institutions, p. 68 f.
* ↑ Anthropological writers like Prof. Malinowski, who spend a great deal of discussion on terms of kinship, continue to allege that the views of primitive social organisation which they oppose are founded on the linguistic evidence of terms of kinship, notwithstanding the fact that those social organisations had been fully described forty years before the terms of kinship were known, and studied in detail before the publication of Morgan's work.
* ↑ Morals in Evolution.
* ↑ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Supplementary Volume.
* ↑ Sex and Repression in Savage Society, p. 197.
* ↑ H. E. Howard, Territory in Bird Life.
* ↑ The Mothers, vol. II, p. 598-605.
* ↑ Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. I, p. 254.
* ↑ Parenthood, p. 147.
* ↑ It may here be noted that the tendency of some writers to belittle or deny the significance of "survivals" — a term which they print in quotation marks — cannot be justified. The school of social anthropologists who at the present day uphold the hypothesis of social origins from a paternal family have adopted what they designate as a "functional method". Social phenomena, according to this "method", are to be interpreted exclusively in accordance with the "function" which the writer supposes them to perform under the actual existing conditions, and without reference to the past or to parallel usages elsewhere. It would take more space than can here be used to enumerate the fallacies which are involved in such a conception. But it may be remarked that the whole of social development depends upon the continuity of transmitted tradition, and would not have been possible without it. Every complex of social phenomena presented by any social stage is thus inevitably made up for the greater part of traditional survivals. The constitution of our own societies may be said to consist of ninety-nine per cent of traditional survivals, and of one per cent of functional adaptations. The fact would seem too obvious to require elaboration. As Lord Raglan remarks, "that a custom can be explained by its functions is a complete fallacy. The functions of a custom, in so far as they exist objectively, and not merely in the mind of the observer, are the effects which the custom has on the members of the community in which it is observed, and the effect of a custom obviously cannot be its cause". (Jocasta's Crime, p. 27.) It would be truly difficult to recall from the annals of science any theory deliberately put forward as a scientific "method" so compact of glaring logical fallacies as that which is pretentiously styled "functional anthropology".
* ↑ West African Studies, p. 142.
* ↑ Maine, Early Institutions, p. 255.
* ↑ A. M. Hocart, Kingship, p. 101.
* ↑ Parenthood, the Basis of Social Organisation, p. 168.