The History of Melanesian Society Author:W. H. R. Rivers General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1914 Original Publisher: University Press Subjects: Ethnology Society, Primitive Primitive societies Melanesia Social Science / Anthropology / General Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no ... more »illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER XVII MELANESIAN GERONTOCRACY ff In the comparative study recorded in the last chapter certain bizarre and extraordinary features of Melanesian systems of relationship were put aside for further discussion, viz., those features of the system of Pentecost Island which have been shown to be the result of marriage with the granddaughter of a brother, and certain similar features of the systems of the inland tribes of Viti Levu. In this chapter I propose to deal with these anomalous features, and also with the Buin system of Bougainville which possesses characters evidently related to those of Pentecost and Fiji. The study of Oceanic systems has so far shown the close dependence of systems of relationship on social institutions. We have seen in the last chapter that the cross-cousin marriage found in widely separated parts of Melanesia is, wherever found, accompanied by features of the systems of relationship which are clearly the direct result of this form of marriage. In some cases, and especially in the Eastern Solomon Islands, these features have been found in the systems of people who do not now practise the cross-cousin marriage and yet are so close to those who still practise it, both in general culture and in geographical position, that the features of systems of relationship must certainly be the survivals of this form of marriage. Next, it has been shown that another anomalous form of marriage, tha...« less