VI. Clans, Moieties and Classes of Relatives.—Thus the classificatory use of kinship terms is not alone in grouping people into classes of kindred. The majority of native tribes are actually divided not only into families, but into bigger groups, which yet possess to a certain extent a kinship character. Thus in certain areas, the tribe falls into two halves or moieties. Each of these has its name, its collective sense of unity, usually a special myth defining its character and its relation to the other moiety. The division of certain Australian tribes into the moieties of Eagle hawk and Crow and the bipartition of the eastern North Amer ican Indians are classical examples of this division. Usually this halving of the tribe is associated with strict prohibitions of mar riage within the same moiety, so that a man of the first must marry a woman of the second and vice versa. (See DUAL ORGANI ZATION.) In other tribes there are four clans or classes, in others again eight, these sections regulating marriage and playing a con spicuous part in ceremonial and economic life. (See MARRIAGE CLASSES.) Among the majority of peoples, however, there is an odd number of clans which cannot be brought under the dual or any other numeric principle.
What makes it difficult to understand these modes of grouping is precisely their kinship character. The members of a clan regard themselves as kindred, trace their descent from a common an cestor, conceive of their exogamous prohibitions as of a variety or extension of incest, and, under certain conditions behave to each other like kinsmen.
Thus there exist tribes where an individual really seems to acknowledge many "fathers," many "mothers," "sisters," "wives," and so on. And yet in every such case, the man also possesses one real or own relative, a father, a few own brothers and own sisters and certainly an individual mother.
VII. The Hypotheses of Group Marriage and Group Kin ship.—As to the fathers, a plausible hypothesis suggests that their plurality might be perhaps due to uncertainty of fatherhood under a system of primitive group marriage. Was not marriage originally promiscuous, communal, between two groups rather than between two individuals? Was not therefore Kinship, derived from such group-marriage, originally group-kinship? Is not the classifica tory use of kinship terms partly the expression of such group family relations as they still persist, partly the survival of a more definitely communistic kinship of primeval times? And we see how a plausible reasoning has led many an anthropologist—from Morgan to Rivers, from McLennan to Frazer, from Bachofen to Sydney Hartland—to the theory of a primitive group-marriage and group-family, and to the assumption that primitive kinship was a class kinship, between groups and not between individuals.
On the other hand this position has been vehemently disputed by the other school, who cannot reconcile it with the supreme im portance of the family, with the apparently primeval nature of marriage between single pairs and with the individuality of Motherhood. By Darwin as well as by Westermarck, by Andrew Lang and by Crawley almost every assumption of the group kinship school has been disputed, while recently Lowie and Mali nowski have tried to show by the analysis of actual facts that the family is after all the foundation of all social order.
VIII. Individual and Collective Kinship.—The problem Viii. Individual and Collective Kinship.—The problem has been undoubtedly vitiated by the uncompromising champion ship of the clan versus the family, primitive monogamy versus group-marriage, individual relations versus clanship. The question is not whether Kinship is individual or communal—it evidently is both—but what is the relation between its two aspects? It is an undeniable fact that the family is universal and sociologically more important than the clan which, in the evolution of humanity, it preceded and outlasted. But the clan is in certain communities extremely vital and effective. What is the relation between them? Individual legal prerogatives and self-interest are always predomi nant, but corporate feeling, co-operation, joint ownership and joint responsibility are important elements in primitive justice and legal organisation. All these bonds and relations, individual as well as communal, are founded on kinship and the sense of kin ship. The real task of the enlightened anthropologist is not to join either "school" in denying or belittling one side of kinship or the other, but to establish the relation between the two sides.
IX. The Variety of Meanings in each Classificatory Term. —The traditional approach to the problem, since Morgan, has been through language. The classificatory character of the terms made a great impression upon anthropologists (cf. above, V.)—but they failed to analyse it linguistically! Now in all human languages we find homonyms, that is, words with a variety of meanings, and in primitive languages such words abound and do not cause any confusion. Thus in technology we frequently find that the same word is used to designate the natural objects from which the material is taken, the material in its raw form, the various stages of manufacture, and finally the finished object. In Melanesia, for instance, the same term waga describes a tree as it stands in the forest, its felled and lopped trunk, the dug-out in its various stages, and the finished canoe. Similarly such words as "magical power" (mana, wakan, orenda, etc.), "prohibition" (tabu), and what not, cover a great variety of meanings.