ABSTRACT
W. H. R. Rivers's contribution, in various publications between 1907 and his posthumous Social Organization, has been highly influential, perhaps because in some ways it does not depart greatly from ordinary English usage of the key terms kinship, relationship, descent, inheritance, and succession. Indeed, in the past several decades Rivers has been widely cited as the authority for a distinction between "kinship" and "descent" which, it is sometimes said, substantially advanced sociological analysis and comparison. Being "related by descent" or by "common descent" is, therefore, much the same thing as being "related by blood" or "by birth", and persons who are so related are kin of one another. From Rivers's perspective, the reason why there is "little sense" in speaking of descent in relation to a kindred is not that this is a bilaterally, rather than unilaterally, constituted category, but that the statuses of persons as kin of one another do not descend and are not transmitted from one person to another.
