Page:Kinship and social organisation.djvu/69

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SOCIAL ORGANISATION
57

which is used by men for other men of their own generation and social group, but the term is also applied by an old man or woman to one of a younger generation. Again, in Tubetube[1] the term for a husband, taubara, is also a term for an old man, and the term for the wife is also applied to an old woman. These usages may be nothing more than indications of respect for a husband or wife, or of some mechanism which brought those differing widely in age into one social category, but with the clue provided by the Trobriand term of relationship it becomes possible, though even now only possible, that the Wagawaga and Tubetube customs may have arisen out of a social condition in which it was customary to have great disparity of age between husbands and wives, and social relations between old and young following from such disparity in the age of consorts.

In Tubetube there is yet another piece of evidence. Mr. Field[2] has recorded the existence in this island of three named categories of persons, two of which comprise relatives with whom marriage is prohibited, while the third groups together those with whom marriage is allowed. The grandparents and grandchildren are included in one of the two prohibited classes, so that we can be confident that marriage between these relatives does not now occur. The point to which I call your attention is that the class of relative with

  1. The Melanesians of British New Guinea, Cambridge, 1910, p. 482.
  2. Rep. Austral. Ass., 1900, viii., 301.