Kinship I

XXI. The Nature of the Extensions.

Thus each successive transformation of kinship bonds is, as a rule, associated with a biological stage in human life; each corresponds to a different type of social setting; each is conditioned by different functions performed by the group. Kinship invariably begins in the family —mother, father and child, the latter depending for nourishment, comfort and safety upon its parents. From the individual house hold and the mainly biological functions of the family, the child passes into the social horizon of a few associated households, which by the first extension of kinship, furnish him with his "substitute" parents, brothers and sisters, and by the formation of new relation ships, supply his grandparents, his maternal uncle, paternal aunt and his cross-cousins. At, and after, puberty, he learns, in a more explicit and systematic manner, the principles of his tribal kinship and law. This is done through initiation or training within the horizon of the local community. Entering afterwards the stage of active life, as a member of his clan he takes part in most tribal concerns—economic, ceremonial, legal, warlike or religious. Soon, also, he makes a choice of his matrimonial mate, according to the kinship rules regulating marriage in his tribe.

One side of the whole process consists in the gradual assimila tion of the new ties to the old ones ; the other side, in the creation of new interests, adoption of new functions and formation of new ties. Even when the old ties are purposely destroyed, as in initia tion, the new ones are built on their pattern. Throughout the process each extension leads to the formation of new ties and thus to the weakening of the old ones, but never to their complete obliteration, nor to the confusion of the two sets. The new rela tionships receive some elements of the old ones, which become incorporated in them, but invariably they contain new elements also.

At the end, the individual finds himself not with one confused or amalgamated mass of kindred, but rather, surrounded by a number of gradually widening circles : the family, the collateral relatives, the local kinsmen and relatives, the clansmen, and the relatives within the tribe; and, cutting athwart this concentric system, his own new household and his relatives-in-law.

XXII. The Persistence of Family Ties.

Why does the Xxii. The Persistence of Family Ties.—Why does the family pattern persist throughout these extensions, not only in terminology, but in legal fiction, in totemic tradition and in the character of the various rules? It must never be forgotten, of course, that kinship at the tribal end is by no means identical with kinship at the family end. As the ties widen, their original family character becomes more and more attenuated and diluted by other ingredients. Tribal kinship bears only a remote, at times mainly figurative, resemblance to the family ties, but that it is built under their influence and as an extension of them is beyond doubt.

The main force which brings about this extension is the extreme strength of family ties. The power of the earliest family expe riences to influence all subsequent social relations is a universal fact which was not sufficiently appreciated until recently. In spite of their exaggerated claims and fantastic distortions, psychoana lytic writers have helped to show how all-pervading the family sentiments are in society, and how the reminiscences of paternal authority and of maternal tenderness enter into most relations of later life.

In the small communities of savages, where all social relations are direct and personal, where all co-operation is by actual con tact, where solidarity and substitution operate within groups of people constantly in touch with each other, the family pattern can be adapted to all wider formations much more concretely and liberally. In all the extensions the new bonds and obligations are formed on account of the old ones; therefore, to an extent, in their image. The unilateral principle deflecting the spread of the family pattern to one side only, makes its sway within the clan only the more concentrated, while it frees from its constraint a whole sphere of relations—those between clans.

The final product of the process of kinship extensions: the clan system, with its twofold relationships within the kinship group and across the groups, is thus the natural product of the influences which drive family kinship into wider spheres of action and of the unilateral principle.

XXIII. The Clan and the

Family,---Nothing is as important Xxiii. The Clan and the Family,---Nothing is as important and difficult in the study of primitive sociology as the correct understanding of the nature of the clan and its relation to the family. The primary and fundamental elements of parent to child kinship—the bonds of procreation, the physiological services, the innate emotional response—which make up the family bonds, vanish completely from the relationship within the clan. Totemic identity, the mythological fiction of common totemic descent, magical, religious and legal functions, are new elements which have entered into it, and which constitute the greatly modified kinship of the clan.

But though the clan is essentially non-reproductive, non-sexual and non-parental, though it never is the primary basis and source of kinship, its connection with the family is real and genetic. The clan grows out of family kinship round one of the parents by the affirmation of the exclusive procreative relevance of this one parent, by the injunction of legal solidarity with one side of kin dred, accompanied often by legal fiction and linguistic metaphor. The clan differs from the family, however, not only in the nature of its bonds but also in structure. It is the result of the widest possible extension of kinship ties, but on one side only.