HISTORY OF FAMILY

In his book “Ancient Society”, Lewis Henry Morgan has put five successive forms of the family to treat the history of the family and the manner in which the earlier forms passed upward into the Monogamian form now prevalent throughout most of the civilized world. The five forms are designated as follows: 

  1. The Consanguine family

  2. The Punaluan family

  3. The Syndyasmian family

  4. The Patriarchal family

  5. The Monogamian family

It is observed that Morgan does not assume that the earlier forms passed uniformly and as a whole into the higher forms, but that this order prevailed generally, each form taking on phases varying with the people and the period. 

  1. The Consanguine family:

The Consanguine family was founded on the intermarriage of brothers and sisters, own and collateral, in a group, and is not now represented, save sporadically, among even the most primitive tribes: but numerous traces of this form are found in the succeeding system, the Punaluan, which is still to be found among many peoples, notably the tribes of India and the American aborigines. 

  1. The Punaluan family:

The Punaluan form of the family follows the Consanguine, of which it was a modification. Its chief characteristics were the intermarriage of several sisters, own and collateral, with each others’ husbands in a group, and of the intermarriage of several brothers, own and collateral, with each others' wives in a group. In each case a group of men were conjointly married to a group of women. This family has existed in Europe, Asia, and America within the historic period, and in Polynesia within the past century. It prevailed in savagery and the lower stages of barbarism, and among the Britons persisted until that people had reached the middle status of barbarism. 

  1. The Syndyasmian family:

The Syndyasmian family was founded on marriage between single pairs but without exclusive relations, the marriage continuing only during the pleasure of the pairs. The pairing was a matter of convenience and arranged by the parents, more especially the mothers, with or without the consent of the contracting parties. Several pairs usually dwelt together, forming one household in which the principle of communism in living was practiced. In this system we have the nucleus of the Monogamian family. 

  1. The Patriarchal family:

The Patriarchal family was founded on the marriage of one man with several wives and in general by the seclusion of the wives. The essential characteristic of this form was the organization of a number of persons, bond and free, into a family under paternal power for the purpose of holding lands and for the care of flocks and herds. In Morgan’s words, this family “marks that peculiar epoch in human progress when the individuality of the person began to rise above the gens, in which it had previously been merged, craving an independent life and a wider field of individual action. Its general influence tended powerfully to the establishment of the Monogamiau family, which was essential to the realization of the objects sought. …… In the consanguine and punaluan families, paternal authority was impossible as well as unknown; under the syndyasmian it began to appear as a feeble influence; but its growth steadily advanced as the family became more and more individualized, and became fully established under monogamy, which assured the paternity of children.”

  1. The Monogamian family:

Although until recently it has been generally believed that the Monogamian family, the union of single pairs, was the fundamental and general form of the family, Morgan clearly shows that it did not come into existence until the advance-guard of human progress had achieved civilization and not until much later than this among the classical nations. With the Greeks the wives did not become the equals of the husbands in dignity, personal rights, and social position even during the period of their highest development. The Monogamian family, as finally constituted, has “assured the paternity of children, substituted individual ownership of real as well as personal property for joint ownership, and the exclusive inheritance by children in place of agnatic inheritance. Modern society reposes upon the Monogamian family. The whole previous experience or progress of mankind culminated and crystallized in this pre-eminent institution. It was a slow growth, planting its roots far back in the period of savagery—a final result toward which the experience of the ages steadily tended. Although essentially modern, it is the product of a vast and varied experience.”

Morgan found a record of the Monogamian family running back nearly three thousand years, during which, it may be claimed, there has been a gradual but continuous improvement in its character. It is destined to progress still further, until the equality of the sexes is acknowledged and the equities of the marriage relation are completely recognized.

Morgan must share the honour of being the first to enter this vastly unexplored field of study with Tylor and others, but he must be given the credit of going directly to original sources for his information and, after the accumulation of a great body of data, erecting therefrom a system which, although it is based on Morgan's conception of the development of the family—the central idea in the social structure—is supported by a vast body of observations drawn from a multitude of sources.

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