KINSHIP 



foreign rulers and the loss of supernatural powers 

 which they believe to be essential to their welfare. 

 Placed in such a dilemma it is not surprising that 

 they have preferred to offend the temporal powers, 

 thus bringing immediate disaster on themselves and 

 serious trouble and expense to their rulers. With 

 knowledge of the fact that the chief is a rain-maker 

 who must not leave his hill, it would have been easy 

 for the official either to visit the hill himself or use 

 some other intermediary. 



Another subject which may be taken to illustrate 

 the effects of ignorance of the institutions of 

 savage and barbarous peoples is that of relationship 

 or kinship. Among most of the peoples of the earth 

 social relations are regulated by means of a system 

 of kinship so widely different from our own that 

 their languages have no exact equivalents for any 

 of our terms of relationship and they have no 

 terms which can be used as the equivalents of ours. 

 The most widely diffused system of the kind is that 

 known as "classificatory" in which such a term as 

 father is not used for one person, but denotes a 

 large class of relatives whom we distinguish from 

 one another as father, uncle, first cousin once 

 removed or even still more distant relatives. There 

 is a similarly wide use of mother, brother, sister 

 and other terms which among ourselves are limited 

 to a single person or to a small group of near 

 relatives. Moreover, these terms are not mere 

 modes of address but are associated with complicated 



