ABSTRACT
IMPLICIT in the writings of early anthropologists is the idea that a society's rules relating to proprietary rights in children and to membership in groups of kinsmen are a direct reflection of the form of family organization. A society's form of family organization, in turn, is regarded as a direct reflection of its members' conception of parenthood (especially fatherhood) ; and this conception is assumed to depend on what the society's members understand about the biological facts of procreation. Anthropologists used the term "descent" to refer to theories of biological kinship, forms of family organization, rules of kin group membership, and rules of succession to political office and to social and property entitlements as if they were all necessarily reflections of the same thing. And so they largely were, of course, in Euro-American folk ideology and law. But there is no natural logical reason why they should be so viewed, and many other peoples in the world treat them independently.
