Kinship and Social Organisation

W. H. R. Rivers, who has been called 'the founder of the modern study of social organization', exerted an immense influence on his contemporaries and successors. This volume reprints three of his lectures, delivered in 1913 and first published in 1914, which provide a short and brilliant exposition of his theoretical approach, and are exemplary of his handling of ethnographic evidence. His theme is the relationship between kinship terminologies and social organization, more particularly forms of