Richard Thurnwald · 1932
Richard Thurnwald’s second volume of Die menschliche Gesellschaft treats the family not as an isolated domestic unit but as a cluster of institutions through which societies regulate reproduction, alliance, descent, childhood, age, obligation, and authority. Its comparative argument is that kinship rests on bodily facts—sex, age, birth, dependence—but becomes social only through variable rules, sanctions, names, rites, and forms of association.
Es gibt ja keinen Menschen an sich, sondern nur männliche oder weibliche, junge oder alte.
English translation: There is no such thing as a human being in the abstract, but only male or female, young or old ones.
The sentence marks Thurnwald’s refusal of an abstract, undifferentiated “human being.” Persons enter society as placed beings: male or female, young or old, marriageable or forbidden, child, parent, widow, initiate, elder. Yet he does not turn these positions into biological determinism. The sociological object is the crossing of natural conditions with historical forms of ordering.
Erst aus dem Ineinanderwirken dieser beiden Hauptquellen der Gesellungsgestaltung ergibt sich das jeweils von zwei Blickpunkten richtig erfassbare Bild.
English translation: Only through the interplay of these two principal sources of social formation does the picture emerge that in each case can be correctly grasped from two vantage points.
This double perspective structures the whole volume. Thurnwald criticizes evolutionary schemata and ideal-typical classifications when they make matriarchy, patriarchy, clan, or family appear as clean logical forms. He instead follows functions in social process: who may marry, where a couple resides, who claims the child, who inherits, who performs ritual duties, and how kinship names express recognized relations. Mother-right and father-right are therefore not total social regimes but different distributions of claims over children, property, descent, and group continuity.
The chapters on sexuality and marriage challenge the notion of primitive sexual disorder. Premarital relations, prostitution, bridewealth, polygyny, widow inheritance, exogamy, endogamy, and prohibited degrees all appear as governed practices, even where they differ sharply from European law. Marriage is less a private contract than a device for classifying persons and forming alliances between groups.
Die Wirklichkeit sieht anders aus. Sie zeigt eine außerordentliche Mannigfaltigkeit verschiedener Ordnungen, nicht nur negativer Beschränkungen der Heiratsmöglichkeit, von Ehehindernissen, sondern auch von einer großen Zahl positiver Vorschriften.
English translation: Reality looks otherwise. It shows an extraordinary diversity of different orderings—not merely negative restrictions on marriageability, marriage impediments, but also a great number of positive prescriptions.
In this light, incest is not explained simply as horror at blood mixture. Thurnwald reads incest rules as protections of the social map: lineage boundaries, rank, ritual categories, residence groups, and marriageable classes. The offense often lies in violating a public order of relations rather than a narrowly biological taboo.
Man wird daher vielfach richtiger von „Gesellschaftsschande“ denn von Blutschande in unserem Sinne sprechen müssen.
English translation: One will therefore often have to speak more accurately of "social disgrace" than of incest in our sense.
The same method governs his treatment of kinship terminology, adoption, fictive kinship, descent, and inheritance. Kin terms are not transparent biological labels, but they are also not arbitrary: they preserve evidence of marriage circles, residence, authority, and descent emphasis. Fictive kinship shows with particular clarity that belonging may be assigned by ritual, recognition, service, or substitution as well as by birth.
The later parts shift from descent to generation and association. Children matter because society must reproduce formed members, not merely bodies. Education, initiation, secrecy, religion, and magic turn puberty into recognized social status. Age grades, men’s houses, widowhood rules, secret societies, and other bonds then demonstrate that kinship is supplemented by institutions that may reinforce lineage, cut across it, or create rival loyalties. The book’s enduring value is its synthetic view of family and kinship as living arrangements where reproduction, classification, alliance, gender, age, ritual, and power converge.
This work was divided into 169 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 169 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian