GOLDENWEISER] A NEW APPROACH TO HISTORY 37
This conception is perhaps the most surprising and least acceptable in the entire volume. There is something quaintly humorous in the idea of these magical geographical termini at which, again and again, time-worn traditions and customs, including kindred or- ganization itself, are shed like old scales, to make room for in- dividualism, political organization and the modern world. One fears that the "migration-political organization" constant might turn top-heavy, if to its other burdens is added this one of the breakdown of kinship; for history, after all, is not wont to indulge in anything quite so alluringly romantic, and, if she does, she does not repeat herself.
The three primitive areas mentioned before where political organization has reached its culmination points, may incidentally serve as illustrations of possible types of historic relation between social and political units. Among the Iroquois, the political system has emerged through a double integration, of tribal units, on the one hand, and of clans, on the other. In this process, while the tribal units have lost a great deal of their former independence, the clan units do not seem to have been similarly affected, remaining in full possession of multifarious functions, notwithstanding the extension of some of the latter to homologous clans throughout the League. In Africa, the socio-political systems present the curious picture of mostly gentile organizations of obviously great antiquity overlaid by political structures of more recent origin. The gentes, moreover, have undergone mutations in various ways; thus, the numbers of individuals constituting a gens, originally no doubt limited to proportions compatible with a society based on genuine kinship grouping, have grown so large, extending often into many thousands, that the kinship character of the gentes has of necessity become very much attenuated; again, many gentes have assumed functions associated with the requirements of the political system, functions which originally must have been foreign to these units. The kinship organizations of Africa are evidently on the way of passing into something which is no longer a kinship organization. In Polynesia, finally, the clan basis of society, of which the traces are obvious enough, has almost wholly ceased to exist, ceding its
�� �
