The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry

IT is a familiar fact that many peoples preserve long pedigrees of their ancestors, going back for many generations and often shading off into the mythical. It is perhaps not so well known that most people of low culture preserve orally their pedigrees for several generations in all the collateral lines so that they can give in genealogical form all the descendants of the great-grandfather or of the great-great-grandfather and therefore know fully all those whom .we should call second or third cousins and sometimes their memories go even farther back. It is this latter kind of genealogy which is used in the method I propose to consider in this paper. I begin with the method of collecting the pedigrees which furnish the basis of the method. The first point to be attended to is that, owing to the great difference between the systems of relationship of savage and civilised peoples, it is desirable to use as few terms denoting kinship as possible, and complete pedigrees can be obtained when the terms are limited to the following:father, mother, child, husband and wife. The small pedigree