Kinship and Social Organisation: Together with The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry (LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology)

These lectures were delivered at the London School of Economics. They are largely based on experience gained in the work of the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to Melanesia of 1908, and give a simplified record of social conditions which will be described in detail in the full account of the work of that expedition. This is a fantastic book that goes right into the heart of Pacific Island and other culture in the early days. 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 marriage, a subject still of lively theoretical interest. Also included is the same author's The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Enquiry, first published in 1910, a classic of anthropological methodology, and Professor Raymond Firth of the London School of Economics and Professor David Schneider of the University of Chicago provide commentaries estimating the past and present importance of Rivers in British and American Anthropology respectively.