SOME MOOT PROBLEMS IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Abstract

American Anthropologist NEW SERIES Vol. 36 JULY-SEPTEMBER, 1934 No.3 SOME MOOT PROBLEMS IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AXIOMS By ROBERT H. LOWIE recent papers on social organization 1 explain the distribution of social phenomena by diffusion from a single world centre. Conclusions of such import challenge scrutiny as to the methods by which they have been reached. In my judgment they are corollaries of questionable axioms. According to Professor Olson, unilateral descent is an almost incon­ ceivable anomaly, hence multiple origin is unthinkable: not only have all American clan systems sprung from one source but that source must lie in the Old World to save us from the awkward plight of positing their special creation within the New World (pp. 411-14). The axiom is no~ new, since Lewis H. Morgan (Ancient Society, pt. II, ch. XV) considered. the clan (gens) an essentially abstruse institution and alleged the improbability of its repeated reproduction in disconnected areas. Those who do not accept the dogma naturally have offered hypotheses to account for clans. Professor Olson chides them for explaining the esoteric in terms of the prosaic. What does he conceive an explanation to be? Should it reduce the unknown to the unknowable? There is one attempt to prop the axiom. Unilateral reckoning, it seems, is esoteric because it contradicts the duality of parenthood,and results in an unnatural stressing of one side of the family.... Children naturally feel that the parent bestowing clanship is of more importance than the one who is nothing more than a biological accessory. Yet in our own so­ ciety the father alone bestows familyship without reducing the mother to the status of a mere biological accessory. Correspondingly, in primitive matrilineal societies the father is not eliminated; he and his kin remain' important, as the Crow, Trobriand Island, Banks Island, Hopi data irrefutably demonstrate. Indeed, the avunculate is so frequently balanced by the position of the father's sister that I have suggested the term amitate to express her status. IE. M. Loeb, Die soziale Organisation Indonesiens und Ozeaniens, A 28: 649-62, 1933. R. L. Olson, Clan and Moiety in Native America, UC-PAAE 33: 351-422,1933. T wo