not definitely stated, by Dr. Frazer when in his Adonis, Attis, Osiris he has used mother-kin in place of mother-right.[1] This title implies that a man is only kin with the members of the group of his mother, and the term has been used with this significance by others. The ascription of this meaning to the word seems to me to depart so widely from the customary, as well as the legal, meaning of the word in the English language that I cannot regard it as satisfactory, and I have proposed elsewhere that on the contrary "kin" and "kinship" shall be limited to relationships which can be shown to exist genealogically.[2] The special point to which I wish to call attention now is that, as we have seen, the relationship between a man and his father's sister, which so far as functions go is of the nearest, perhaps nearer than that of parent and child, is one in which, according to the view of some, the two persons would not be kin. Our ideas of kinship are so intimately associated with honour and obedience that it seems to me to be a pity to use the word in such a sense as to exclude the relative who is honoured and obeyed before all others. I think we shall be keeping much more closely to the general meaning of the word if we use it to denote genealogical relationship, and find some other word for the relationship set up by common membership of a social group.
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The Father's Sister in Oceania.
59
W. H. R. Rivers.
