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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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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[1]. 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[2]." Mr. Havelock Ellis says that "its existence may even be said to be woven into the texture of the species[3]". 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
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 364. 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/46&oldid=- (Version vom 5.6.2022)
- ↑ 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.
