The Journal Of The Anthropological Institute Of Great Britain And Ireland Volume 1 PDF Download

Excerpt from The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1872, Vol. 1 Our own system of relationships naturally follows from the marriage of single pairs; and it is, in its general nomenclature, so mere a description of the actual facts, that most persons tacitly regard it as necessarily general to the human race, with, of course, verbal and unimportant differences in detail. Hence but little information can be extracted from dictionaries and vocabularies. They generally, for instance, give words for uncle, aunt, and cousin; but an uncle may be either a father's brother or a mother's brother, and an aunt may be either a father's sister or a mother's sister; a first cousin, again, may be the child of any one of these four uncles, and aunts but practically, as we shall see, these cases are in many races distinguished from one another and I may add, in passing, it is by no means clear that we are right in regarding them as identical and equivalent. Travellers have, on various occasions, noticed with surprise some special peculiarity of nomenclature which came under their notice; but Mr. Morgan was the first to perceive the importance of the subject, and to collect complete schedules of relationships. The special points which have been observed have, indeed, been generally regarded as mere eccentricities, but this is evidently not the case, because the principle or principles to which they are due are consistently carried out, and the nomenclature is reciprocal generally, though not quite without exceptions. Thus, if the Mohawks call a father's brother, not an uncle, but a father, they not only call his son a brother and his grandson a son, but these descendants also use the correlative terms. We must remember that our ideas of relationships are founded on our social system, and that, as other races have very dif ferent habits and ideas on this subject, it is natural to expect that their systems of relationship would also differ from ours. I have elsewhere pointed out, that the ideas and customs with reference to marriage are very dissimilar in different races, and we may say, as a general rule, that, as we descend in the scale of civilisation, the family diminishes, and the tribe increases, in importance. Words have a profound influence over thought, and true family-names prevail principally among the highest races of men. Even in the less advanced portions of our own country, we know that collective names were those of the tribe, rather than the family. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.