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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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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[1]. 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[2] 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
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 361. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/43&oldid=- (Version vom 31.5.2022)
