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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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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
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 371. 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/53&oldid=- (Version vom 8.6.2022)
