Richard Thurnwald, Die Gemeinde der Bánaro (1921)

Richard Thurnwald’s Die Gemeinde der Bánaro is an ethnological monograph on marriage, kinship, and social organization among a community in the interior of New Guinea, drawing on his research journey of 1913–15. The 1921 German work is a revised version of the English Bánaro Society (1916). Its scope extends beyond the description of a particular community: Thurnwald uses Bánaro institutions to reconsider the historical relations between family and state. The central conceptual move is to distinguish forms of association that evolutionary accounts too readily collapse into one another. Sexual relations, family membership, kinship classification, and political organization must each be understood through their own organizing principles, even where they intersect.

The correspondence between communal architecture and social arrangements provides a concrete entry into this argument:

Der Symmetrie des Hallenbaus entspricht eine Symmetrie des Gesellschaftsbaus.

English translation: A symmetry of social organization corresponds to the symmetry of the hall’s construction.

The hall makes social order spatially legible. Thurnwald’s formulation treats the arrangement of a building as evidence for the arrangement of relationships: material form and collective organization exhibit corresponding patterns. The significance lies less in architecture considered independently than in its capacity to reveal divisions and connections within the community. “Society” is therefore approached as an articulated structure, not simply as an aggregate of individuals or households.

This attention to organization also governs the treatment of marriage and family. Thurnwald explicitly separates the premises of family relationships from those of sexual relationships:

Man ersieht daraus, daß die Familienbeziehungen und die geschlechtlichen Beziehungen von ganz verschiedenen Voraussetzungen ausgehen.

English translation: One can see from this that family relationships and sexual relationships proceed from quite different premises.

The distinction prevents sexual conduct from becoming a universal key to the interpretation of domestic institutions. A pattern of sexual relations cannot, by itself, establish the constitution of a family or explain the social affiliations attached to it. Conversely, family arrangements cannot simply be read as a transparent record of sexual exclusivity. Thurnwald’s comparative argument thus depends on distinguishing relationships that may involve the same people but carry different institutional meanings. The Bánaro case becomes useful precisely because it invites these categories to be examined separately rather than assumed to coincide.

His concise account of kinship makes a related methodological point:

Die Verwandtschaft wird gruppiert nicht berechnet.

English translation: Kinship is grouped, not calculated.

The contrast shifts attention from the calculation of individual genealogical distances to the formation of socially meaningful groups. Kinship, in this formulation, is not exhausted by tracing links between particular persons. Its organization involves classifications through which relationships acquire collective significance. This does not establish that descent is irrelevant; it establishes that genealogical calculation alone is an inadequate description of the institution. Together, the passages on the hall, family relationships, and kinship suggest an ethnography concerned with patterned association and with the differences between social classification and biological connection.

The comparison of marriage forms leads into the work’s broader theoretical conclusions. Thurnwald challenges the use of “promiscuity” as an empirically established starting point for the history of marriage:

Die Promiskuität in dem obigen begrifflichen Sinn konnte bisher nirgends festgestellt werden, wie schon A. A. Post¹) fand.

English translation: Promiscuity in the conceptual sense specified above has so far been established nowhere, as A. A. Post¹) already found.

The qualification “in the conceptual sense specified above” matters: this is a claim about a defined theoretical category, not an assertion that all societies share one sexual morality. Thurnwald places a burden of evidence on reconstructions of an original condition. Observed arrangements should not be forced into a developmental sequence whose supposed first stage remains unverified. His earlier separation of sexual and family relationships gives this criticism its analytical basis.

The concluding movement proceeds from marriage comparison to discussions of the state, biological considerations, ethics, and a comparative supplement. The passage on political organization again places relationships before an abstract institutional model:

Der primitive Staat beruht auf den persönlichen Beziehungen der Mitglieder.

English translation: The primitive state rests on the personal relationships of its members.

Within the work’s historical vocabulary, political cohesion is grounded in relations among members. This connects the discussion of the state to the ethnographic concern with organized association, without making political membership identical to kinship. The distinction becomes explicit in Thurnwald’s rejection of a simple derivation of the state from the family:

Der Staat ist auch nicht aus der Familie „entstanden“, so wenig wie die Religion aus der Zauberei „entstanden“ ist¹).

English translation: The state has no more “arisen” from the family than religion has “arisen” from magic¹).

The analogy challenges a mode of explanation that converts connections between institutions into straightforward stories of origin. Family and state may be related without the former constituting a sufficient account of the latter’s emergence. Thurnwald’s contribution is consequently both ethnographic and conceptual: the Bánaro material supports an analysis of distinct but intersecting orders of relationship, while the comparative conclusions question overly simple genealogies of institutions. The work’s enduring relevance lies in this insistence that spatial organization, sexual relations, kinship groups, and political bonds must be interpreted in their specific configurations before being assigned places in a universal history of society.