The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

their nephews and nieces; the children of my father’s sisters are his nephews and nieces, and they are all my cousins. For while the husbands of my mother’s sisters are still her husbands, and likewise the wives of my father’s brothers are still his wives—legally, if not always in fact—the social stigmatization of sexual intercourse between siblings has split the siblings, previously treated indiscriminately as siblings, into two classes. The one remains as before (more distant) brothers and sisters among themselves; the others, the children of the brother here and the sister there, can no longer be siblings; they can no longer have common parents, neither father nor mother nor both. Therefore, the class of nephews, nieces, and cousins becomes necessary for the first time here, which would have been nonsensical under the earlier family order. The American system of kinship, which appears entirely absurd in any form of family based on some kind of individual marriage, is rationally explained and naturally justified down to its smallest details by the Punaluafamilie Punaluan family. To the extent that this system of kinship was widespread, at least to that same extent, the Punaluan family must have existed.

This form of family, proven to be currently existing in Hawaii, would likely have been handed down to us from all of Polynesia if the pious missionaries, like the Spanish monks in America of old, had been capable of seeing something more in such un-Christian conditions than the simple "abomination."*) The traces of indiscriminate sexual intercourse, its so-called "swamp generation" that Bachofen Johann Jakob Bachofen, Swiss legal scholar believes he has found, can be traced back—as can no longer be doubted—to the Punaluan family. "If Bachofen finds these Punaluan marriages 'lawless,' a man from that period would find most current marriages between close and distant cousins on the paternal or maternal side incestuous, namely as marriages between blood-related siblings." (Marx.)