[Rezension zu] Richard Thurnwald: Die Gemeinde der Bánaro. Ehe, Verwandtschaft und Gesellschaftsbau eines Stammes im Innern von Neu-Guinea

Eugen Peter Schwiedland on Thurnwald’s Die Gemeinde der Bánaro (1922)

Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s review presents Richard Thurnwald’s study of marriage, kinship, and social organization among the Bánaro of New Guinea as a contribution to understanding the historical relations between family and political institutions. Its organizing concern is how familial arrangements, reciprocal duties, and ceremonial practices constitute a social order.

The review gives family organization a foundational role without reducing communal life to descent alone:

Die Familienverfassung bildet die Grundlage der inneren Organisation der Gemeinwesen und in den Zeremonien kündet sich die Auffassung von den Beziehungen zwischen den Menschen untereinander sowie zu den übernatürlichen Mächten.

English translation: The constitution of the family forms the basis of the internal organization of communities, and the ceremonies express the conception of relations among human beings as well as with supernatural powers.

Ceremony thus makes social relationships intelligible while connecting them to religious powers. Kinship, in turn, is characterized through the obligations it organizes:

In den Verwandtengruppen werden diejenigen Personen zusammengefaßt, die bestimmte gleichartige Pflichten gegeneinander haben.

English translation: Kinship groups bring together those persons who have particular obligations of the same kind toward one another.

This formulation shifts attention from genealogical classification to reciprocal responsibilities. Schwiedland describes the Bánaro political constitution as simple and without social stratification, distinguishing groups principally by age and sex. The clan’s division into two halves becomes a problem of historical explanation: he reports the conjecture that older men in one subgroup relinquished young women to men in the other. The conjectural status of this reconstruction matters; an observed institutional division does not itself establish the marriage arrangements from which it arose.

The review’s broader account connects changes in marriage and kinship with warfare, chiefly authority, dependency, and economic differentiation. These connections allow familial institutions to be treated as historically variable rather than as an autonomous sphere of custom. Its conceptual distinction between family and state likewise separates their functions while retaining their interaction: political association concerns protection, whereas family formation concerns reproduction and subsequently acquires greater economic independence.

Schwiedland’s appreciative emphasis falls on the study’s clarification of social units and relationships. The review’s central contribution is to present kinship as an organization of duties and family arrangements as part of a wider institutional history, while distinguishing descriptions of Bánaro society from hypotheses about its development.