Kinship I

KINSHIP. I. Kinship in Human Culture.—Birth, suckling and the tender cares bestowed by the parents on their offspring establish bonds of union between the members of a family, both in human and in animal societies. The devotion of the suckling mother is not an exclusively human virtue ; the watchful and protecting father is to be found among many species of birds and mammals; and the pathetic response of the young to their parents moves the heart of the animal lover as well as of the philan thropist. With many animals, kinship, the protective sentiment of the parents, and the child's response to it, constitute part of the innate endowment indispensable for the survival of the species.

With man, however, we find physiological kinship deeply modi

fled and grown into what is perhaps the most important social institution of mankind. Kinship controls family life, law, social organization and economics, and it deeply influences religion, mor ality and art. With us the parental relation figures in the ten commandments; maternal love remains the symbol and proto type of many moral virtues; the relations within the Trinity, the obligations between man and his Maker, and those of Christian to Christian are conceived in terms of kinship—Son to Father; child to One addressed as "our Father which art in heaven"; brother to brother. In other societies, the cult of a Mother Goddess, or again ancestor-worship, or kinship with animals or spirits give the dominant tone to religion, morality and art, and directly influence law, social organization and economics. Every human culture is built upon its own system of kinship, that is, upon a special type of personal bonds primarily derived from procreation and family life. Without a deeper understanding of kinship it is impossible to grasp the organization, the modes of thought and the general character of human civilization from its humblest origins to its highest development.

II. The Family as the Source of Kinship.

At first sight kinship, the bonds of union between parents and children and be tween more remote relatives, appear to be simple enough : the typical family (q.v.), a group consisting of mother, father and

their progeny, is found in all communities, savage, barbarous and civilized; everywhere it plays an important role and influences the whole extent of social organization and culture.

Indeed it seems hardly to differ at all from its modern, civi lized counterpart, as we know it from our own experience. Among native tribes mother, father and children share the camp, the dwelling, the food and the life. The intimacy of family existence, the daily round of meals, the domestic occupations and outdoor work, the rest at night and the awakening to a new day, run in both civilized and savage societies on strictly parallel lines, allow ing for the difference in levels of culture. The members of the household are as a rule as closely bound together in a native tribe as they are in a European society, attached to each other, sharing life and most of its interests, exchanging counsel and help, com pany, cheer and economic co-operation. The same bonds unite them as unite our family, the same distances and barriers separate them from other households. In Australia, as well as among most North American Indians, in Oceania and in Asia, among the African tribes and in South America, the individual undivided family stands out conspicuous, a definite social unit marked off from the rest of society by a clear line of division.

It would be easy to illustrate this picture by a host of actual descriptions. In no ethnographic area is the family absent as a domestic institution. Putting these facts together with our child hood's vision of the first marriage—Adam and Eve in paradise— with the patriarchal traditions of the Bible and of classical an tiquity, with the early sociological theories from Aristotle onwards, we might conclude with Sir Henry Maine that it would be im possible to imagine any form of social organization at the begin ning of human culture, but that of the patriarchal family. And we might be led to assume that our own type of family is to be found wherever we go, and that kinship is built on the same pattern in every part of the world.