人間家族の起原 : プライマトロジーの立場から

抄録

1. How did the human family appear on this earth? In this paper I approach this problem from the primatological point of view and treat it from the wider perspective of the evolution of subhuman societies. For this purpose I have selected four criteria which ought to distinguish the human family from the prehuman primate family. These are incest taboo, exogamy, community, and the economic division of labor between male and female. 2. The subhuman society is characterized by a cluster consisting of males and females. There are two levels in the formation of a cluster. In the lower level which is represented by the level of monkeys, consort relationship between males and females in a cluster is not fixed, while in the higher level which is represented by the level of apes, it is fixed as in the human society. A term "familioid" is proposed to designate the latter type of cluster in the ape society. 3. In most of the subhuman societies the male usually withdraws from the cluster in which he has been born before or after he reaches adolescence. This he does without being forced out by the leader of the cluster or his father. This induces him naturally to mate out (SLATER)-a form of exogamy (WHITE). On the other hand any incestuous behavior of a young male towards his mother has not been observed among Japanese monkeys. Therefore the Freudian explanation of the origin of incest and exogamy is highly dubious in so far as primatological evidences are concerned. 4. Each cluster of monkeys has its own territory, and there always exists an antagonistic relationship between two different clusters. Gibbons, though they are apes, still remain at this level of territorial organization. Among the familioids of gorillas, however, we can recognize the neighborhood relationship (IMANISHI, 1949). Though the neighborhood relationship must surely be the forerunner of human community, we can find no instance of cooperation between familioids such as is observed between human families. 5. Through the neighborhood relationship a young male withdrawn from his native familioid may be accepted by some other familioid with which he is acquainted without being repelled by the male head. There he can also find a spouse (spouses), one or more young females from his own generation. Thus two fixed consort relationships of different generations are established in one familioid. As a consequence within a particular familioid, not only father-daughter incest and son-in-law-mother-in-law adultery must be avoided, but mother-son incest and brother-sister incest must also be avoided in order that these two fixed consort relationships may be maintained. I would suggest as a hypothesis that the forerunners of incest taboo, exogamy and community organization might all have been formed in this way without verbal communication, awaiting their future institutionalization and elaboration with the invention of human speech. 6. No trace of economic division of labor can be found on the familioid level. The earliest division of labor may probably have originated in the mode of life in which the male hunted animals in the savannah while the female collected vegetables in the forest, at some time in the past when they lived a conjugal life in the borderland between the savannah and the forest. 7. When the man together with his women and children migrated out from the forest to the savannah, hitherto separate human families must have been concentrated into a band in accordance with the law of concentration (IMANISHI, 1950). Under these circumstances cooperation for survival among them may have been carried out more decisively. Present-day food-gatherers who are still organized in terms of simple families, uncomplicated by other structural features, may represent examples of secondary adaptation, and not of the primary adaptation described above.