Grandparents | Fathers\ | /Mothers \ | / Brothers---- M ----Sisters / | \ Sons/ | \Daughters | Grandchildren
higher, are grandfathers and grandmothers; below, are sons and daughters and the grandsons and granddaughters. The same, of course, holds also for women. Thus, the system as a whole comprises five generations.
Now, it was maintained that this system could have arisen only out of a previous condition of general promiscuity. For, unless the actual father were universally unknown, how could it be possible that a person would call by the name of father every man within the same kinship group who might, as regards age, be his father? If, however, we propose this argument, we immediately strike a weak point in the hypothesis, since all women of the older generation are called mother just as its men are called father. We should certainly expect that the real mother would be known, because the child derives its nourishment from her during a period which is especially long among primitive peoples, and because it grows up close to her. And, furthermore, the hypothesis is hardly reconcilable with the fact that, for the most part, Malayo-Polynesian languages differentiate relations by marriage even more sharply than do our own. An Hawaiian man, for example, calls the brother of his wife by a different name than does a woman the brother of her husband. Thus, in place of our word 'brother-in-law' they have two expressions. In any event, the term 'brother-in-law' is applied to an individual, and therefore implies marriage. To meet this point, we would be obliged to fall back on the supposition that these terms represent later additions to the original nomenclature of relationship. But even then the fact would remain that, in their direct reference, these terms are merely names for differences in age. It therefore remains an open question whether the terms also designate relationship; to the extent of our observation, this is certainly not the case. The native of Hawaii, so far as we know anything about him, knew his father and mother: what he lacked was merely a specific name for them. Whenever he did not call his father by his given name, he evidently called him by the same name that he applied to the older men of his immediate group. Among European peoples also, the terms 'father' and 'mother' are sometimes used in connection with men and women outside this relationship. For example, the Russians, particularly, have a custom of addressing as 'little father' and 'little mother' persons who are not in the least related to them. That which makes it highly probable that in the so-called Malayan system of relationship we are dealing not with degrees of relationship but with age-periods, is, in the last event, a different phenomenon--one that has hitherto been overlooked in connection with these discussions. In the very regions whose languages employ this nomenclature, custom prescribes that the youths and men live in separation from the women and children from their earliest years on. This is the institution of the men's club with its age-groups. Its social rôle is an important one, crowding even the family association into the background. Under such circumstances, the individual is naturally interested first of all in his companions of the same age-group, for each of these usually occupies a separate apartment in the men's house. Thus, the so-called Malayan system of relationship is really not a system of relationship at all, but a nomenclature of age-groups based on social conditions. These conditions bring it about that companions of the same sex are more closely associated than are men and women. In the men's houses a companion of the same group is a brother, one of the next older group, a father. Together with these men the individual goes to war and to the hunt. Thus, these phenomena cannot be said to belong to the lowest stage of culture. Nor, obviously, does this terminology, which has reference to differences of age, exclude any particular form of marriage. In this case it is a mistake to associate the names 'father,' 'mother,' 'brother,' etc., with the concepts that we attach to these words.