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N. Y. State Mus., Bull.
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Historical SummaryThe blood-kinship tie, rooted in a habit system continuous from infancy, is stronger than any later artificial bonds, or differs in character from them, and is the one remaining when others fall away. Wives flee to their parents and brothers from marital situations and there are both everyday and classical examples of the choice of a brother as against a husband in emergencies. When Darius, for example, gave the wife of Intaphernes permission to claim the life of a single man of her kindred, she chose her brother, saying that both husband and children could be replaced,12 Under an exogamous system, involving the removal of either men or women in residence from one kinship group to another, there are always in any group a number of persons who are there precisely because they are not kindred. The composition of a group is therefore never homogeneous but consists of a group of blood kin plus a number of men or women who are domiciled there and never completely identified with the blood group. A form of this composition is described by Thomson:
CHAPTER IX
Patterns of Avoidance and Transition
A clan, in a patrilineal society, consists of a man and all his relatives in the male line; that is, his father, his father’s brothers and sisters, his own brothers and sisters, and his sons and daughters, and all the children of the male members of the clan only. All these men, however, marry women who are members of other clans, and again their sisters and daughters marry men of other clans, so that the group of people popularly spoken of as a "camp," that is found at any time within a clan territory, really consists of members of many clans, and for this group the word horde will be used. Thus a horde consists of all the male members of the clan whose territory it inhabits, with their wives, who, though they are members of the horde, are not members of the clan (since entry to a clan is by birth alone), and less those women of the clan who have married into other hordes. But while they may change their
hordes by marriage, they can never change their clans. It is clear, therefore, that although the horde is the war-making group, the clan, and not the horde, is the landowning group; a clan is a stable, permanent, structural unit of society; but the horde is unstable; it is a sociological entity the membership of which is constantly changing. I do not propose to go more fully into this subject here, but brief mention must be made of the bond that unites members of the two groups. It may be noted that solidarity within the clan is maintained by the bond furnished by (1) common descent, (2) the possession of common totems, (3) the possession of a common territory. Solidarity within the horde rests upon none of these permanent foundations: it depends solely upon the cohesive force supplied by such social institutions as marriage and the bond set up between a man and a woman (who are members of different clans) by the family, centered in their children, and by the sharing of normal activities of everyday life, by fighting with other hordes—in all of which a bond of solidarity within the horde is affirmed and strengthened by collective ceremonies such as dancing, especially war, funeral, and vengeance dances.1
The admission of an unrelated man to a kinship group and, especially, the removal of a girl to an unrelated group fall in the category of bargaining, and marriage frequently gives rise to emotional reactions, the employment of peculiar power devices, and eventually to certain norms of customary law. The incorporation of a strange element through marriage is further accompanied by forms of avoidance which register a state of hesitation between habit systems and are calculated to provoke respect and eventually submission and service from the intruder.
1 Herodotus (ed. Rswlinson) 1: 173.
2 Line 905 ff.
1 Thomson, D. F., "The Joking Relationship and Organized Obscenity in North Queensland," Amer, Anth., N.S., 37: 462–463, note.
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Chicago: Rswlinson, ed., "N. Y. State Mus., Bull.," N. Y. State Mus., Bull. in Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, ed. Thomas, William I. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1937), Original Sources, accessed October 30, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=3P581SN1473I8A2.
MLA: . "N. Y. State Mus., Bull." N. Y. State Mus., Bull., edited by Rswlinson, Vol. 1, in Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, edited by Thomas, William I., New York, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1937, Original Sources. 30 Oct. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=3P581SN1473I8A2.
Harvard: (ed.), 'N. Y. State Mus., Bull.' in N. Y. State Mus., Bull.. cited in 1937, Primitive Behavior: An Introduction to the Social Sciences, ed. , McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York. Original Sources, retrieved 30 October 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=3P581SN1473I8A2.
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