Rivers on Oceanic Kinship

The foundations of kinship study, laid by Morgan and McLennan, continued by Starcke, Seebohm, N. W. Thomas and Rivers, were based upon the recognition of four main sets of problems: the categorization of kin beyond the elementary family, as indicated particularly by kinship terminology; the different kinds of formalized relations between different types of kin, and the linkage of these with specific kin terms; the relation of different forms of marriage to kin terminologies; and the specification of different types of kin units, with consequent variation in marriage forms, functions of kin, and kin terms. As Rivers himself stresses, the linguistic aspects of the situation of collection are adequate, and granted also that no bias has entered into the choice of which kinship terms have been collected, there is still the great question of what these ‘bodies of dry fact’ really mean in their principles of arrangement and in their social context

Geography · Kinship · Sociology · Anthropology · Environmental Science · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Geology · Oceanography

• Marshallese royal marriages; Generalized exchange in eastern Micronesia

  Open Access•Per Hage•Bijdragen tot de taal- land- en…•1998

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