32 swanton: aboriginal terms for brother and sister 



and "sister" are extended to a large number of individuals of 

 the same clan or gens and of approximately the same age as the 

 speaker, but even experienced investigators are not so vividly 

 conscious of the fact that they are by no means confined to that 

 clan or gens. The idea of such a limitation is largely due to the 

 fact that very many tribes, such for instance as the Iroquois, 

 Choctaw, Chickasaw, Tlingit, Haida, and several of the Plains 

 tribes, have only two exogamous groups, and that in such 

 groups the men called collectively " fathers" are the husbands 

 of the women called collectively "mothers." It happens, 

 therefore, that the children of the father's brothers and the 

 mother's sisters are the very same set of individuals and must 

 always be of the exogamous division of the speaker and his own 

 brothers and sisters. Thus it might be thought that the terms 

 brother and sister were applied because the individuals so called 

 were of the same clan or gens as self. 



In order to discover the true reason for the application of these 

 terms we must turn to tribes having three or more exogamous 

 groups. Among peoples of this kind with matrilineal descent 

 the men of the father's clan will be able to marry into two or 

 more others and their children will be of the same number of 

 clans, while if the descent is patrilineal the women of the mother's 

 clan will have the same variety of choice. Now, if the terms 

 for brother and sister are primarily clan or gentile terms, they 

 will not be applied to children of the father's clan or the mother's 

 gens not of the clan or gens of the speaker. If they are primarily 

 consanguineal terms they will be so applied. 



In the present article I shall not attempt an exhaustive study 

 of this question but confine myself to an examination of the 

 lists given by Morgan in his Systems of Consanguinity and 

 Affinity 1 and those recorded by Rivers in The History of Mel- 

 anesia?! Society. The internal diversity of the two regions, 

 each of which presents examples of tribes with exogamous di- 

 visions and tribes without, tribes with matrilineal descent and 

 tribes with patrilineal descent, tribes with dual divisions and 

 tribes with multiple divisions, along with their remoteness from 



Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. 17. 



