Kinship and marriage

Although the subject of kinship and marriage has long dominated anthropological thinking and teaching, there is no introductory book on it. Radcliffe-Brown's excellent 'introduction' to African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (1950) is still the only piece of general work that can be recommended to first-year students and interested laymen, and it is rapidly becoming out of date. There are sections or chapters in some anthropological text-books of course, but these are rather brief. There is a need for a general book that will try to give an outline of some of the methods of analysis used in the anthropological treatment of kinship and marriage; a book that will be useful to the student approaching the subject for the first time, and of interest to the layman who wishes to know more about this central topic of social anthropology. THERE must be few of us who are not susceptible to the suggestion of famous or notorious ancestry. Most of us are fascinated by family trees' and indeed there are firms mak ing a handsome profit from the compilation of genealogies particularly for Americans. Even if the best we can muster is proven descent from someone hanged for sheep stealing in the seventeenth century, we still derive a sense of pride from the knowledge that our ancestry is known in such depth. In noble families, length of genealogy is a measure of relative prestige; and who has not heard a commoner relate with obvious delight, but without obvious foundation, that he is descended from the illegitimate offspring of an eight eenth-century duke?

There is no practical advantage to be gained from making such claims, so why should there be pride in, and fascina tion with, ancestry and descent? Psychologically it may be that there is security to be derived from a sureness about one's ancestry. We perhaps feel less contingent and our place in the scheme of things may seem less arbitrary, if we know that we are part of a chain stretching into the past. This knowledge rids us of anonymity: we are not drop ped into the world without a history. To use the metaphor most often associated with the search for ancestry, we have

These feelings may seem out of place in our modern world simply because nothing of practical importance attaches to them; but over a large part of the globe both at the present time and throughout history, they have been supremely important. In many societies, both primitive and sophisticated, relationships to ancestors and kin have been the key relationships in the social structure; they have been the pivots on which most interaction, most claims and obligations, most loyalties and sentiments, turned.