The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

line is recognized. This is, in fact, the case among all peoples belonging to the wild and lower stages of barbarism; and to have discovered this first is the second great merit of Bachofen Johann Jakob Bachofen, Swiss legal scholar. He designates this exclusive recognition of the line of descent from the mother and the inheritance relationships resulting from it over time with the name Mutterrecht mother-right/matrilineal descent; I retain this name for the sake of brevity. It is, however, inaccurate, because at this stage of society, there is no talk of "right" in the legal sense yet.

If we now take from the Punaluafamilie Punaluan family one of the two sample groups, namely that of a series of biological and more distant sisters (that is, those descended from biological sisters in the first, second, or more distant degree), together with their children and their biological or more distant brothers from the maternal side (who, according to our assumption, are not their husbands), we have exactly the circle of persons who later appear as members of a Gens clan in the original form of this institution. They all have a common matriarch, by virtue of descent from whom the female descendants are sisters by generation. The husbands of these sisters, however, can no longer be their brothers, and thus do not descend from this matriarch, so they do not belong to the consanguineous group, the later gens; their children, however, belong to this group, since descent from the maternal side alone is decisive because it alone is certain. As soon as the stigmatization of sexual intercourse between all siblings, even the most distant collateral relatives of the maternal side, is established, the above group has also transformed itself into a gens, that is, it has constituted itself as a fixed circle of blood relatives in the female line who are not allowed to marry one another, and which from then on strengthens itself more and more through other common institutions of a social and religious nature and distinguishes itself from the other gentes of the same tribe. More on this in detail later. But if we...