Note 18 — Chapter I · THE SOCIAL ORGANISATION

Different societies have different systems of relationship. This means, not only that they attach different duties to particular relations, but also that they have different ways of reckoning the relationships themselves. The vast majority of primitive peoples have some one or other form of what is known to ethnologists as the “classificatory system of relationship18.” This system is intimately connected with the existence of the social divisions known as “clans.” In the Andamans there are no clans, and the system of relationship is fundamentally different from all the classificatory systems.