The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

foundation of a fully elaborated kinship system, which is capable of expressing several hundred different kinship relations of a single individual. Moreover. This system is not only in full effect among all American Indians (up to now no exception has been found), but it also holds almost unchanged among the indigenous inhabitants of India, among the Dravidian tribes in the Deccan and the Gaura tribes in Hindustan. The kinship terms of the South Indian Tamils and the Seneca Iroquois in the State of New York still agree today for more than two hundred different kinship relations. And even among these Indian tribes, as with all American Indians, the kinship relations arising from the current form of the family stand in contradiction to the kinship system.

How, then, is this to be explained? Given the decisive role that kinship plays in the social order of all wild and barbarous peoples, one cannot dismiss the importance of this so widespread system with mere phrases. A system that is generally valid in America, also exists in Asia among peoples of a completely different race, and of which more or less modified forms are found in abundance everywhere in Africa and Australia, demands to be explained historically, not talked away, as, for example, MacLennan attempted. The designations father, child, brother, sister are not mere honorary titles but entail very specific, very serious mutual obligations, the entirety of which constitutes an essential part of the social constitution of those peoples. And the explanation was found. On the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), there existed even in the first half of this century a form of family that yielded exactly such fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces as the American-Ancient Indian kinship system requires. But remarkably! The kinship system that was in effect in Hawaii