It may also be a patruate-group and an avunculate
group. It may also be a patruate cousin-group and an avunculate
cousin-group; and in general, every member of a brother-group has
the same consanguineal relation to persons outside of the group as
that of every other member.
Two postulates concerning primitive society, adopted by various ethnologic
students of other countries, have been erroneously applied to the American
aborigines; at the same time they have been so widely accepted as to
demand consideration.
The first postulate is that primitive men were originally assembled in
chaotic hordes, and that organized society was developed out of the
chaotic mass by the segregation of groups and the differentiation of
functions within each group. Now the American aborigines collectively
represent a wide range in development, extending from a condition about as
primitive as ever observed well toward the verge of feudalism, and thus
offer opportunities for testing the postulate; and it has been found that
when higher and lower stages representing any portion of the developmental
succession are compared, the social organizations of the lower grade are
no less definite, perhaps more definite, than those pertaining to the
higher grade; so that when the history of demotic growth among the
American Indians is traced backward, the organizations are found on the
whole to grow more definite, albeit more simple. When the lines of
development revealed through research are projected still farther toward
their origin, they indicate an initial condition, directly antithetic to
the postulated horde, in which the scant population was segregated in
small discrete bodies, probably family groups; and that in each of these
bodies there was a definite organization, while each group was practically
independent of, and probably inimical to, all other groups.
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