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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FAMILY AND SIB By ROBERT H. LOWIE ETHNOLOGISTS in the United States are agreed that the North American peoples of crudest culture are loosely organized, with the family as the basic unit; that tribes definitely organized into sibs (Morgan's gentes, clans of English writers) represent a higher cultural plane at which, however, the influence of the family is clearly discernible; that accordingly the sib is a later, superimposed product, not the invariable predecessor of the family. It remains to define the mechanism by which such a transformation might have been effected. The sib, like the family, is a kinship group. It is at once more and less inclusive than the rival unit. On the one hand, it excludes one half of the blood-kindred—the father's side of the family in matronymic, the mother's side in patronymic societies. On the other hand, it admits on equal terms all kindred of the favored side regardless of degree and even individuals considered blood-relatives merely through legal fiction, whence the rule of sib exogamy. The sib normally embraces not merely the descendants through females of an ancestress, or through males of an ancestor, but several distinct lines of descent, which are only theoretically conceived as a single line. This particular form of inclusiveness, based on adoption, coalescence of ceremonial units, or what not, is too familiar a phenomenon to present any great difficulty to our comprehension. The real problem lies in the origin of what Dr. Goldenweiser calls the maternal and the paternal family pattern rather than in the expansion of these unilateral bodies of kindred to form larger groups of the same type and in theory identical with them. It is my purpose to show that the characteristic features of the sib organization are in some measure prefi...