Of the Port Lincoln Tribe in Australia, Schürmann says (223) that the
brothers practically have their wives in common.
"A peculiar nomenclature has arisen from these singular
connections; a woman honors the brothers of the man to
whom she is married by the indiscriminate name of
husbands; but the men make a distinction, calling their
own individual spouses yungaras, and those to whom they
have a secondary claim, by right of brotherhood,
kartetis."
R.H. Codrington, a scientifically educated missionary who had
twenty-four years' experience on the islands of the Pacific, wrote a
valuable book on the Melanesians in which occur the following luminous
remarks:
"All women who may become wives in marriage, and are
not yet appropriated, are to a certain extent looked
upon by those who may be their husbands as open to a
more or less legitimate intercourse. In fact,
appropriation of particular women to their own
husbands, though established by every sanction of
native custom, has by no means so strong a hold in
native society, nor in all probability anything like so
deep a foundation in the history of the native people,
as the severance of either sex by divisions which most
strictly limit the intercourse of men and women to
those of the section or sections to which they
themselves do not belong. Two proofs or
exemplifications of this are conspicuous. (1) There is
probably no place in which the common opinion of
Melanesians approves the intercourse of the unmarried
youths and girls as a thing good in itself, though it
allows it as a thing to be expected and excused; but
intercourse within the limit which restrains from
marriage, where two members of the same division are
concerned, is a crime, is incest.... (2) The feeling,
on the other hand, that the intercourse of the sexes
was natural where the man and woman belonged to
different divisions, was shown by that feature of
native hospitality which provided a guest with a
temporary wife." Though now denied in some places,
"there can be no doubt that it was common everywhere."
Nor can there be any doubt that what Codrington here says of the
Melanesians applies also to Polynesians, Australians, and to
uncivilized peoples in general. It shows that even where monogamy
prevails--as it does quite extensively among the lower races[12]--we
must not look for monopolism as a matter of course. The two are very
far from being identical. Primitive marriage is not a matter of
sentiment but of utility and sensual greed. Monogamy, in its lower
phases, does not exclude promiscuous intercourse before marriage and
(with the husband's permission) after marriage. A man appropriates a
particular woman, not because he is solicitous for a monopoly of her
chaste affections, but because he needs a drudge to cook and toil for
him. Primitive marriage, in short, has little in common with civilized
marriage except the name--an important fact the disregard of which has
led to no end of confusion in anthropological and sociological
literature.[13]