Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/53

47 and collective household existing far into the middle stage of barbarism, involved a certain maximum size of the family, variable according to conditions, but still limited in a degree. As soon as the conception of the impropriety of sexual intercourse between children of the same mother arose, it naturally became effective on such occasions as the division of old and the foundation of new household communities (which, however, did not necessarily coincide with the family group). One or more series of sisters became the center of one group, their natural brothers that of another. In this or a similar manner that form which Morgan styles the Punaluan family developed from the consanguine family. According to Hawaiian custom, a number of sisters, natural or more remote (i.e., cousins of the first, second and more remote degrees) were the mutual wives of their mutual husbands, their natural brothers excepted. These men now no longer addressed one another as "brother"—which they no longer had to be—but as "Punalua," i.e., intimate companion, associate as it were. Likewise a series of natural or more remote brothers lived in mutual marriage with a number of women, not their natural sisters, and these women referred to each other as "Punalua." This is the classical form of a family, which later admitted of certain variations. Its fundamental characteristic was mutual community of husbands and wives within a given family with the exclusion of the natural brothers (or sisters) first, and of the more remote grades later.

This form of the family, now, furnishes with complete accuracy the degrees of kinship expressed by American system: The children of the sisters of my mother still are her children; likewise the children of the brothers of my father still his children; and all of them are my brothers and sisters. But the children of the brothers of my mother are now her nephews