R. Needham Age, category, and descent

In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 122 (1966), no: 1, Leiden, 1-35

This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl AGE, CATEGORY, AND DESCENT

To Professor Raymond Firth

he topic of this essay is the influence of relative age on the employment of categories of relationship and in the analysis Tof them. The investigation originated in plain empirical observations among small groups of forest in the interior of Borneo, but the issues raised seem to have a wide theoretical significance for social .1 I Introduction "All words necessarily classify according to certain principles", as Kroeber wrote, and there must be general agreement with his conten- tion, although it has been largely neglected in practice, that there is "no conceivable reason why terms of relationship should be an excep- tion, and no evidence that they are" (Kroeber, 1917, p. 390). This characteristically clear-sighted view of the great American scholar was much later developed by Radcliffe-Brown into what was rather grandiosely called a "theory of type relationships" (1941, p. 16), which means simply that "For all the relatives who are denoted by one term, there is normally some element of attitude or behavior that is

1 The first draft of this paper, based on the same field researches and making essentially the identical argument, was presented to a seminar conducted by Professor Dr. C. von Fürer-Haimendorf at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of , in October 1955. A generous but unauthprised notice of it, evidently based on a copy of a summary which was circulated to members of the seminar, has been published anonymously, under the title "Relative Age and Kinship Categories", in the Eastern Anthropologist, vol. 10, no. 1, 1956, p. 68. In addition to more recent published , the present version has been augmented particularly by reference to an article by Professor Raymond Firth (1930) which I had not read earlier but which is by f ar the most useful single contribution to the study of the problem of relative age. I am happy to offer Professor Firth this essay as a token of recognition of his perceptive and pioneering enquiries into this topic in Tikopian society.