You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author has written this book in the belief that there was a need for a work which gave in brief outline a description of primitive social organization. The general reader, who does not consult original sources, is still very largely dependent upon Morgan's Ancient Society written in 1877 for any such statement. The immense amount of anthropological data and the numerous hypotheses which have accumulated since that date make it quite an unreliabe guide.
In the fifteen chapters of the book the major questions of the family, social, and government institutions and organizations are described and discussed with a wealth of illustrative matter brought from the most recent researches. Each chapter is an admirable brief of the present anthropological status of the matter discussed.
Perhaps the leading motive in the work as a whole is a determination to stick to the actual facts and not be led astray by attractive theories or catchwords. With this determination he discusses some of the attractive ideas which have held sway for so long, particularly the beliefs in an original communistic society, an early matriarchate, preceded by sexual promiscuity. He comes to the conclusion, that whether or no such were the facts there is absolutely no evidence in the structure of primitive groups, as we know them that gives warrrant for such hypotheses. Interesting to readers of The Psychoanalytic Review is that he takes issue with Freud on his theory of Totemism.
The book is an extremely valuable one and should be read by all who still harbor the belief that primitive man is essentially simple in his psychology and his social organization. What with his description of the family, kinship usages, sib organizations, age classes, secret societies, property, the administration of justice, etc., this view will be thoroughly dispelled. Primitive man, if that is really an appropriate term, as we know him in existing tribes, is already a highly complex being, both in his psychology and his soc