Original scientific paper
Three types of social organization in insular southeast Asia
M. A. Chlenov
; USSR Academy of Science, N. N. Mikloukho - Maklay Institute of Ethnography, Moscow, Russia
Abstract
Over a hundred years ago Lewis Henry Morgan, comparing the structures of the kinship terminology systems of the Dravidians and the American Indians, strove to see in the similarity of a kinship classification an argument in support of the idea of the Asian origin of the New World aborigines. Now this thought of the graet American ethnographer is cited as perhaps a deskbook example of an ethnographic error. Already in those years he realized that the kinship terminology system (KTS) was derived not from the historical and genetic contacts between peoples, but from the character of social organization. Since then to this day the commonly adopted view of ethnographic (anthropological) science is reduced to the assumption that the kinship systems are, in the final analysis, determined by the social structure.
Keywords
Southeast Asia; social organization; kinship terminology
Hrčak ID:
75790
URI
Publication date:
2.6.1991.
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