Types of Kinship Systems and Their Historical Interrelationship

Abstract

The regularities governing the development of primitive society and its transformation into class society have in recent years attracted the attention of many Soviet scholars. It is becoming clear that a number of general and special problems in this sphere of historical knowledge are still far from any final solution. The problem of periodization of preclass society is a matter of debate; ideas about the historical evolution of the clan and its relationships with other forms of social organization are contradictory; the specific courses of development of the most archaic forms of the commune are not entirely clear. The same can also be said of so significant a type of social relationship in preclass society as relationships of natural kinship. A point of common agreement among the views held by a majority of Soviet historians of primitive times is the recognition of the determining role of relationships of blood kinship among people at the early stages in the development of society, and the gradual decline in their significance as humanity's forward development proceeded. "The point is," writes A. I. Pershits, for example, "that extensive kin relationships, which were a spontaneously developed form of production relations in the primitive clan commune, became a burden at the new stage of development, a kind of brake on the development of the forces of production. Kin relationships and the associated duties of mutual aid in the clan became an obstacle to the free accumulation of property, the emergence of private property, and the stratification of society into rich and poor.… Relationships between neighbors, which replaced kinship, corresponded more fully to the essence of the new relationships of production." (1)