Three Types of Social Organization in Insular Southeast Asia
Three Types of Social Organization in Insular Southeast Asia

Summary/Abstract: Over a hundred years ago Lewis Henry Morgan, comparing the structures of the kinship terminology systems of the Dravidians and the American Indians, strove to see in the similarity of a kinship classification an argument in support of the idea of the Asian origin of the New World aborigines. Now this thought of the great American ethnographer is cited as perhaps a desk-book example of an ethnographic error. Already in those years he realized that the kinship terminology system (KTS) was derived not from the historical and genetic contacts between peoples, but from the character of social organization. Since then to this day the commonly adopted view of ethnographic (anthropological) science is reduced to the assumption that the kinship systems are, in the final analysis, determined by the social structure.

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