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Historical SummaryIn the chapter on habit formation the reciprocal conditioning of mother and child was illustrated, and originating in this physiologically and socially profound intimacy based on the hunger contractions of the child a solidary familial and kinship habit system is developed, involving the father in a provident and protective way and including eventually aunts and uncles, grandparents, and different ramifications of consanguinity and affinity. And in this situation there is elaborated a code of obligations, claims, and prohibitions defining the situation of every individual with reference to every other, and a classification of kindred and affinities into divisions whose members are to some extent equivalents from the standpoint of behavior reactions. Lowie has generalized the tendency of primitive groups to arrange personalities in classes on the basis of degrees and kinds of obligations and claims, and to regulate social intercourse on this basis, and Radcliffe-Brown has pointed out that among the Australian Kariera the individual is not able to undertake any relationship whatever with those for whom the behavior reactions have not been thus stereotyped:
CHAPTER V
Kinship Behavior
In primitive communities . . . a specific mode of behavior may be rigidly determined for each and every possible form of relationship. From the point of view of any individual this means that his tribesmen are classified into certain categories, each one of which implies an altogether special set of social rules to be observed by him. He is bound to render services to an individual of one class; with a member of another he may jest and take liberties; with persons of a third category he must have nothing to do except through intermediaries; and so forth. Proximity of relationship may or may not count; usually, as Mr. Brown has explained for the Kariera, a savage owes the same type of conduct to a more remote as to a closer kinsman addressed by the same relationship term, but the intensity of the obligation is greater for the nearer relationship. As this author further remarks, a native may be at a complete loss how to treat a stranger who falls outside of the established rubrics. What most frequently happens is that by a legal fiction, or it may be by marriage with a member of the community, the new arrival comes to occupy a definite status. Thus, in a Plains Indian myth a young boy
finds a strange girl whom he adopts as his sister; automatically she becomes the sister of his brothers, who accordingly are prohibited from marrying her. In real life these implications are consistently carried out, so that the stranger would be a daughter to her adopters’ parents, a sister-in-law to their wives, and so forth. In short, she would be classified for the entire family circle and her social relations would be regulated thereby.1
1Lowie, R.H.n/an/an/an/a, , 80–81 (Liveright Publishing Company. By permission).
Chicago: Primitive Society in Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, ed. Thomas, William I. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1937), Original Sources, accessed April 27, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=BZZGMUWFIRQS4M2.
MLA: . Primitive Society, in Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, edited by Thomas, William I., New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1937, Original Sources. 27 Apr. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=BZZGMUWFIRQS4M2.
Harvard: , Primitive Society. cited in 1937, Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, ed. , McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York. Original Sources, retrieved 27 April 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=BZZGMUWFIRQS4M2.
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