ABSTRACT
T H E INQUIRY I HAVE BEEN PURSUING IS CONCERNED WITH THE PROBLEM THAT LAY AT the heart of Morgan's researches and speculations and remains the central one for us today. Stripped of its historicist pretensions and restated in structural terms, it is the problem of how kinship and polity are interconnected in tribal society. Modern field research has shown that "civitas" does not identify a specific "type" or "stage" of advanced society by contrast with a conjecturally "primitive" or historically antecedent form of society founded exclusively upon ties of "blood." "Status," in the sense of Maine's juristic equivalent for Morgan's "societas," does not characterize primitive or archaic forms or stages of society in contradistinction to the principle of "contract" which is supposed to be the hallmark of "progressive" societies. The evidence is indisputable that these antinomies and others that have been linked with them do not identify different forms of social and politico-jural organization. They represent correlative and interdependent institutional complexes that work together in all social systems. Our paradigmatic specimens exemplify this over a wide range of phenotypically diverse societies. It is true that variations in demographic scale, economic complexity, and politico-jural differentiation regulate the ways in which these complexes are manifested and interlinked. It is evident, likewise, that variations in the kinds of symbolic representation and in the schemes of philosophical
apprehension available in different cultures shape the ways in which their nature and their interconnections are conceptualized and handled. But their occurrence is not contingent upon any of these factors. Where there is society, there is both kinship and polity, both status and contract. What is distinctive is their relative elaboration and differentiation, their relative weight and scope in different sectors of social life.
