Page:Kinship and social organisation.djvu/80

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KINSHIP AND

where marriage is regulated solely by clan-exogamy, but it is possible to arrange Melanesian and Polynesian societies in a series according to the different degrees in which the principles of genealogical relationship is the determining factor in the regulation of marriage. At one end of the series we should have places like the Banks Islands, the northern New Hebrides and the Santa Cruz Islands, where the clan-organisation is so obviously important that it was the only mechanism for the regulation of marriage which was recognised even by so skilful an observer as Dr. Codrington. At the other end of the series we have places such as the Hawaiian Islands and Eddystone Island in the western Solomons, where only the barest traces of a clan-organisation are to be found and where marriage is regulated solely by genealogical relationship. Between the two are numerous intermediate cases, and the series so formed runs so closely parallel to that representing the transitions between different forms of the classificatory system that it seems out of the question but that there should be a relation between the two. Of all the places where I have myself worked, the two in which I failed to find any trace of the regulation of marriage by means of a clan-organisation were the Hawaiian Islands and Eddystone Island, and the systems of both places were lacking in just those distinctions the absence of which characterised the Malayan system of Morgan. Only in one point did the Eddystone system differ from