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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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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,
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 362. 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/44&oldid=- (Version vom 31.5.2022)
