ABSTRACT
Tikopia kinship has been treated in this volume from several points of view. First the local grouping of the people has been analysed in order to isolate the basic kinship unit, which has been empirically ascertained to be the family, and the position of this in terms of household arrangements has been defined. Then the relationships between the component members of the family have been examined, to show how the recognized genealogical ties emerge in concrete behaviour in situations of production and consumption of food, education, bodily contacts, conversation and other minutiae of domestic life. The enquiry has been pushed out further along the same lines to cover the relationships between members of the family and those of associated units, whether linked by consanguinity or marriage. Again, the corporate activities of these individuals regarded from the point of view of their aggregation in specified larger groups has been described. All this has represented a kind of dissection of the anatomy of the society, viewing the kinship links as part of the skeletal structure giving the society its form; to this has been added a consideration of the linguistic factor in such relationships, which by implementing and making effective action between individuals, is like part of the musculature of the society. The angle of approach has then been changed again, and analysis has been made of the relationship of individuals and groups of individuals to their economic resources in land, of their reactions to the biological factor of sex endowment, of the crystallization of them around any single one of their number who is at such critical stages in his social development as represented by initiation or marriage. This, to continue the analogy, is like investigating aspects of the physiology of the society. The biological parallel cannot be taken as exact; it does not imply that a society can be studied as a unitary organism, but it is a convenient way of characterizing the examination of the morphology and functioning of a diffused phenomenon such as kinship. Explanation of the recognition of the crude fact of the connection of persons through sex union and birth involves tracing out a series of relationships through the whole fabric of the social life.
