Abstract
FRAZER MEMORIAL LECTURES.—Some admirers of Sir James Frazer's work in social anthropology have contributed to a fund for the establishment of an annual lecture at Oxford. The first lecture in the course was recently delivered by Dr. E. Sidney Hartland, who naturally selected as his study a subject which he has made his own, “The Evolution of Kinship” based upon the important monograph by Edwin W. Smith and the late Andrew M. Dale on “The Ila-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia.” The Ba-ila, or Ila people, inhabit the very centre of the continent, on the banks of the Kafue, a tributary of the Zambesi, being descendants of more than one stream of Bantu immigrants from the north and north-east, coming probably by different routes and at different times. The social organisation of this primitive and hitherto little-known community has been skilfully investigated by Dr. Hartland. Like all Bantu tribes, their civilisation is based on the matrilinear clan, the family being a newcomer into the social field, which is struggling with the clan for influence. Its development into a patrilinear institution is plausibly accounted for by the rule that on marriage a wife goes to her husband's dwelling and makes her home there: he does not come to that of her kindred. Thus the developmental sequence, as among the Australian tribes, is from mother to father right. If succeeding contributors to this foundation maintain the high level of Dr. Hartland's inaugural lecture, the Frazer Memorial Lecture marks an important extension of the study of social anthropology in this country.
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Research Items. Nature 109, 825 (1922). https://doi.org/10.1038/109825a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/109825a0