Page:Kinship and social organisation.djvu/87

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SOCIAL ORGANISATION
75

terms are only used of persons who stand in a close relation to the family of the speaker. We have only one term used with anything approaching the wide connotation of classificatory terms of relationship, and this term is used for a group of relatives who have as their chief feature in common that they are altogether outside the proper circle of the family and have no social obligations or privileges. They are as eligible for marriage as any other members of the community, and only in the very special cases I considered in the first lecture are they brought into any kind of legal relation. The dependence of our own use of terms of relationship on the social institution of the family seems to me so obvious that I find it difficult to understand how anyone who has considered these terms can put forward the view that the terminology of relationship is not socially conditioned. It seems to me that we have only to have the proposition stated that the classificatory system and our own are the outcome of the social institutions of the clan and family respectively for the social causation of such terminology to become conspicuous. I find it difficult to understand why it has not long before this been universally recognised. I do not think we can have a better example of the confusion and prejudice which have been allowed to envelop the subject through the unfortunate introduction of the problem of the primitive promiscuity or monogamy of mankind. It is not necessary to have an expert knowledge of