Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/42

 expressing several hundred different relations of a single individual. More still, this system is not only fully accepted by all American Indians—no exception has been found so far—but it is also in use with hardly any modifications among the original inhabitants of India, among the Dravidian tribes of the Dekan and the Gaura tribes of Hindostan.

The terms of relationship used by the Tamils of Southern India and by the Seneca-Iroquois of New York State are to this day identical for more than two hundred different family relations. And among these East Indian tribes also, as among all American Indians, the relations arising out of the prevailing form of the family are not in keeping with the system of kinship.

How can this be explained? In view of the important role played by kinship in the social order of all the savage and barbarian races, the significance of such a widespread system cannot be obliterated by phrases.

A system that is generally accepted in America, that also exists in Asia among people of entirely different races, that is frequently found in a more or less modified form all over Africa and Australia, such a system requires a historical explanation and cannot be talked down, as was attempted, e.g., by McLennan. The terms father, child, brother, sister are more than mere honorary titles; they carry in their wake certain well defined and very serious obligations, the aggregate of which comprises a very essential part of the social constitution of those nations. And the explanation was found. In the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) there existed up to the first half of the nineteenth century a family form producing just such fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, as the old Indo-American system of kinship. But how remarkable! The Hawaiian system of kinship again did not agree with the family form