DEFINITIONS AND HISTORY.
Definitions: tribe, sub-tribe, local group, phratry, class, totem kin.
"Blood" and "shade." Kamilaroi type. History of Research in
Australia. General sketch.
Before proceeding to deal with the Australian facts it will be well to
define the terminology to be employed, and give a brief survey of a
typical organisation. Looking at the population from the territorial
point of view in the first place, we find aggregates of tribes; these
may be termed _nations_. The component tribes are friendly, one with
another; they may and often do hold initiation ceremonies and other
ceremonials in common; although the language is usually syntactically
the same, and though they contain many words in common, the vocabularies
differ to such an extent that members of different tribes are not
mutually intelligible. How far the occurrence of identical kinship
organisation and nomenclature should be taken as indicating a still
larger unity than the nation is a difficult question. _Primâ facie_ the
nation is a relatively late phenomenon; but the distribution of the
names of kinship organisations, as will be shown later, indicates that
communication, if not alliance, existed over a wide area at some
periods, which it is difficult to suppose were anything but remote.
The idea of the _tribe_ has already been defined. It is a community
which occupies a definite area, recognises its solidarity and possesses
a common speech or dialects of the same.
Between the tribe and the family occur various subdivisions, known as
sub-tribes, hordes, local groups, etc., but without any very clear
definition of their nature. It appears, however, that the tribal area is
sometimes so parcelled out that property in it is vested, not in the
tribe as a whole, but in the _local group_, which welcomes
fellow-tribesmen in times of plenty, but has the right of punishing
intruders of the same tribe who seek for food without permission; for a
non-tribesman the penalty is death. In some cases the local group is
little more than an undivided family including three generations; it may
then occupy and own an area of some ten miles radius. In other cases the
term is applied to a larger aggregate, the nature and rights of which
are not strictly defined; it may number some hundreds of persons and
form one-third of the whole tribe; it seems best to denominate such an
aggregate by the name of _sub-tribe_.
The term _family_ may be retained in its ordinary sense.
Superposed on the tribal organisation are the kinship organisations,
which, in the case of most Australian tribes, are independent of
locality. Leaving out of account certain anomalous tribes, it may be
said broadly that an Australian tribe is divided into two sets, called
phratries, primary classes, moieties, etc. by various authors; the term
used in the present work for these divisions is _phratry_. Membership of
a phratry depends on birth and is taken _directly_ from the mother
(_matrilineal descent_) or father (_patrilineal descent_).
In Queensland and part of N.S. Wales the phratry is again subdivided,
and four _intermarrying classes_ (sometimes called sub-phratries) are
formed, two of which make up each phratry. In North Australia and
Queensland a further subdivision of each of these classes is found,
making eight in all. Descent in the classes is _indirect_ matrilineal or
indirect[37] patrilineal, the child belonging to the mother's or
father's phratry as before, but being assigned to the class of that
phratry to which the mother or father does not belong. The classes of
father and son together are called a _couple_. The parent from whom the
phratry and class name are thus derived is said to be the _determinant
spouse_.
These phratries and classes regulate marriage. It is forbidden to marry
within one's own phratry. This custom is termed _exogamy_. When the
husband removes and lives in his wife's group the marriage is
_matrilocal_; if the wife removes it is _patrilocal_.
In addition to the division into classes each phratry is further divided
into a number of _totem kins_. A _totem_ is usually a species of animals
or plants; a body of human beings stands in a certain peculiar relation
to the totem species and is termed the totem kin; each member of a totem
kin is termed a _kinsman_. Membership of the totem kin usually descends
directly from parent to child.
The existence of these kinship organisations is universally recognised.
Mr R.H. Mathews has recently asserted the existence of yet another form
and at the same time controverted the accepted views as to the operation
and meaning of those described above. He distinguishes in certain tribes
of New South Wales kinship organisations running across the phratries;
these are of two kinds, according to the author, but they do not seem to
differ in function. They are termed by Mr Mathews "_blood_" and
"_shade_" divisions, and are held by him to be the names of the really
exogamous groups. The subject is discussed in detail below.
In order to make the working of these regulations plain, let us take as
an example the Kamilaroi tribe of N.S. Wales, with two phratries, four
classes and various totem kins. The phratries are named Dilbi and
Kupathin; Dilbi is divided into two classes, Muri and Kubi; Kupathin
into Kumbo and Ipai. The Dilbi totems, which may belong to either of the
classes, are kangaroo, opossum and iguana; those of Kupathin are emu,
bandicoot and black snake. Every member of the tribe has his own
phratry, class and totem; these all come to him by descent.
We have little or no information as to the local grouping of the
Kamilaroi tribes, but it was possibly not unlike that of some of the
tribes to the north-west. In the case of the latter the tribal area was
some 3000 sq. miles in extent, it was split up into smaller areas,
thirty or more in number, which were the property of the local groups; a
local group consisted frequently of three generations of relatives. When
we come to deal below with marriage regulations it will be shown that
husband, wife and child under the four-class system all belong to
different classes; there were therefore in each group at least three
classes, if not four, and consequently members of two phratries. If we
assume that the same conditions prevailed among the Kamilaroi, the local
groups would then be made up of members of both the Dilbi and Kupathin
phratries; and probably all four classes, Muri, Kubi, Ipai and Kumbo,
would be found in each group, which in Australia varied in size
according to local conditions from 20 or 30 to 200; under special
conditions, such as prevailed in the neighbourhood of Lake Alexandrina,
the number might run up to 600 or more, but this was exceptional.
From the fact that the totems are divided between the phratries it is
clear that the local group may also have members of all the six totem
kins mentioned above, among its members.
The rules by which marriage and descent are regulated are apparently
very complicated but practically very simple. Taking the Kamilaroi tribe
again, the rule is that Muri marries Butha (a female Kumbo) and their
children are Ipai and Ipatha: Kubi marries Ipatha and their children are
Kumbo and Butha; in each case the children belong to the same phratry as
the mother but to the other class in that phratry. This is termed
indirect matrilineal descent.
The rule of descent for the totem among the Kamilaroi was simpler;
membership of a totem kin descends directly from a mother to her child.
The combined effect of these rules is that if, for example, a male Dilbi
of the Muri class and iguana totem wants to marry, he must choose a wife
of the Kupathin phratry, the Kumbo class, and either the emu, bandicoot,
or black snake totems; suppose he marries an emu woman; then his
children are of the Kupathin phratry, the Ipai (or Ipatha) class, and
the emu totem. These regulations are naturally more complicated among
the eight-class tribes; on the other hand, where only phratries and
totems are found, but no classes, descent is much simpler; for in each
case the child takes the phratry and totem of its mother, where
matrilineal descent prevails, or of its father, where patrilineal
descent is found.
The general rule in Australia is that the wife goes to live with her
husband; in other words, she leaves the local group in which she was
born and becomes a member of her husband's local group. The effect of
this is very different according as descent is reckoned through the
mother or through the father. Taking the Kamilaroi again, the
Muri-iguana man brings into his group a Butha-emu woman; their children
are Ipatha-emu. If, therefore, a local group is made up of the
descendants of a single family, the phratry, class, and totem names vary
from generation to generation; for the girls go to other groups, and the
men bring in wives of a phratry, class, and totem different, as a rule,
from their own; the children of the next generation take their kinship
names directly or indirectly from the mother.
If, on the other hand, descent is reckoned through the father, the
phratry and totem names are always the same from generation to
generation; from this it follows that the phratry of the wife, who comes
from without, is also the same from generation to generation, though her
totem name does not of necessity remain the same. The class name
alternates both in the case of the family and of the wives in successive
generations. It has already been pointed out that reckoning of descent
in the male line tends to bring about local grouping of the kinship
organisations. In the eight-class tribes, and in parts of Victoria, the
phratries, elsewhere the totem kins, tend to be or are actually limited
to certain portions of the tribal area.
Our knowledge of these matters has not, of course, been gained at a
bound. Before indicating the present extent of our information, it may
be well to give an historical sketch of early discoveries in this field.
Some seventy years ago the attention of students of primitive social
institutions was drawn to the marriage regulations of the Indian tribes
of North America by an article in _Archaeologia Americana_[38]; in which
the author, drawing his conclusions partly from earlier writers, partly
from his own investigations, showed that the totem kin was an exogamous
group, while in some cases the kin bearing the name of a given totem
were not only exogamous, but not even permitted to choose their wives
from any of the other kins at will, being restricted in their choice to
certain groups or, in many cases, to a single group of totem kins,
according as the tribe was arranged in two or more phratries.
At least two observers had detected the existence of Australian
organisations of the same nature as the American phratries, so far as
our scanty information from West Australia goes, even before the
publication of _Archaeologia Americana_. The honour of being the first
to publish information on the subject belongs to Nind, who had spent
some time in the neighbourhood of King George's Sound in 1829, and
published his observations on native customs in the _Journal of the
Royal Geographical Society_[39] for 1832. Close on his heels came the
authors of _Journals of Explorations in West Australia_, which appeared
in 1833, and described journeys undertaken between 1829 and 1832.
The phratries were discovered in South Australia by the Rev. C.W.
Schürmann, whose Vocabulary[40], published in 1844, contains a mention
of the Parnkalla phratries, without, however, any indication of their
connection with marriage customs and exogamy. Five years earlier,
however, Lieutenant, afterwards Sir George Grey, had observed
institutions of the nature of totem kins, phratries, or intermarrying
classes in West Australia, and had detected their connection with the
marriage laws of the natives[41].
In 1841 and 1842, G.F. Moore[42] called attention to the grouping of the
native divisions or kins, and anticipated Schürmann, as will be shown
later. Grey, before the publication of his _Journal_, had read the
_Archaeologia_; but though he mentions the naming of "families" after
animals, he makes no mention of any grouping, but merely distinguishes
between "families" and "local names." Some of the names which he gives
seem to be those of phratries, and if he had been led by his study of
_Archaeologia Americana_ to the discovery of exogamic regulations
dealing with the relations of individual totem kins to one another, it
seems on the whole probable that he would not have overlooked the
grouping of the kins which is, with certain exceptions, of a more or
less local character, common to the whole of Australia, so far as our
information goes. Singularly enough this information, very full,
relatively, for the eastern and central tribes, has, so far as
South-West Australia is concerned, only just been completed, although
more than sixty years have elapsed since Grey wrote, the last twenty of
which have seen much additional light thrown on the organisation of the
tribes of the remainder of the continent.
The American tribes, where simple totemic exogamy is not the rule, are
organised in two and sometimes three or more, up to ten, phratries. It
is possible that Grey, in spite of his attention having been drawn to
the bi- or trichotomous organisation of American totem kins, failed to
understand the Australian system owing to the presence of an element,
discovered a few years later at a point remote from the scene of Grey's
researches, to which no American analogue exists. In addition to the
grouping of the kins into phratries, the Australian tribes over a large
part of the continent subdivide each phratry into two or four classes or
"castes," as they were frequently termed by the early investigators. The
effect of the class system is to further limit the choice of a given
individual, restricted to one-half of the women of the tribe under the
simple phratry system, to one-fourth of them or one-eighth, as the case
may be. Probably the first person to publish the fact of the existence
of these classes, which he regarded as differing in rank, was C.P.
Hodgson[43], who found them in 1846 among the blacks of Wide Bay. From a
letter of Leichardt's however it appears that the discovery must have
been made nearly simultaneously by several observers. Writing in
1847[44], he says that the castes are the most interesting and most
obscure feature among the tribes to the northward, and mentions F.N.
Isaacs as having noticed the existence of the classes among the natives
of Darling Downs, adding that Capt. Macarthur had also found them among
the Monobar tribes of the Coburg Peninsula. "These castes," he adds,
"are probably intimately connected with the laws of intermarriage."
If Leichardt's words mean, as apparently they do, that the Monobar
classes are regulative of marriage, and if his information was correct,
the first mention of classes in Australia is found, not in Hodgson's
work, but in Wilson's account[45]. Neither he, however, nor Stokes[46],
who mentions them as existing among the Limba Karadjee, makes any
mention of their connection with marriage regulations. And Earl, at a
later period, omits in like manner to say what constituted membership of
a caste, though he states that they differed in rank. The
names--Manjarojally (fire people), Manjarwuli (land people), and
Mambulgit (makers of nets, perhaps, therefore, water people), as well as
the anomalous number of the classes, seem to indicate that they are of a
somewhat different nature to the real intermarrying classes found
elsewhere[47]. It is of course well known that the initiation ceremonies
and totemic system of the northern tribes on both sides of the Gulf of
Carpentaria differ somewhat widely from the normal Australian form.
None of the observers hitherto mentioned can be said however to have
applied himself to the scientific study of the questions raised by the
facts which they recorded. Anthropology was in those days in its
infancy. The first to make a really serious effort to clear up the many
difficult questions, some of them still matters of controversy, which a
closer study of the native marriage customs brought to the surface, was
a missionary anthropologist, a class of which England has produced all
too few. In 1853 the Rev. William Ridley published the first of many
studies of the Kamilaroi speaking tribes, and, thanks to the impetus
given to the investigation of systems of relationship and allied
questions by Lewis Morgan, was the pioneer of a series of efforts which
have rescued for us at the nick of time a record of the social
organisation of many tribes which under European influence are now
rapidly losing or have already lost all traces of their primitive
customs, if indeed they have not, like the tribes formerly resident at
Adelaide and other centres of population, been absolutely exterminated
by contact with the white man with his vices and his civilisation, or by
the less gentle method euphemistically termed "dispersion," which, if
other nations were the offenders, we should term massacre.
After Mr Ridley, Messrs Fison and Howitt turned their attention to the
Kamilaroi group of tribes. The progress of these investigations is
traced, historically and controversially, in the second series of
Maclennan's _Studies in Ancient History_, and it is unnecessary to deal
with it in detail. More and more light was thrown on totemism, marriage
regulations, and intermarrying classes by the persistent efforts of Mr
Howitt, by Dr Frazer's little work on Totemism, and by other students,
until it seemed that the main features of Australian social organisation
had been clearly established, when in 1898 the researches of Messrs
Spencer and Gillen seemed to do much to overthrow all recognised
principles, so far as the totemic regulation of marriage was concerned.
How far this is actually the case it is unnecessary to consider here. It
may be said however that the work of these two investigators and the
enquiries of Dr Roth in North Queensland make it more than ever a matter
for regret that the British Empire, the greatest colonial power that the
world has ever seen, will not afford the few thousand pounds needed to
put such researches on a firm basis.
Having defined the various terms, and shown the actual working of the
system by the aid of the best known example, we may now pass, after this
brief historical sketch of the development of our knowledge, to the task
of giving the broad outlines of the phratry and class organisations.
If our knowledge of Australian phratries and classes is far from
exhaustive, we have at any rate a fair knowledge of the distribution of
the various types whose existence is generally recognised; that is to
say, we can delimit the greater part of the continent according to
whether the tribes show two phratries only, or two phratries, which may
be anonymous, with the further subdivision into four classes, or into
eight classes. We also know approximately the limits of the matrilineal
and patrilineal systems. New South Wales, Victoria, the southern portion
of Queensland and Northern Territory, the eastern part of South
Australia, and the coastal regions of West Australia, are now known
with more or less accuracy from the point of view of kinship
organisations. On the other hand, from the Cape York Peninsula, and the
part of Northern Territory north of Lat. 15°, we have little if any
information. The south coast and its hinterland from 135° westwards, as
far as King George's Sound, is virtually a terra incognita; in fact
beyond the south-western corner and the fringe which lies along the
coast we know little of the West Australian blacks, and the frontiers
between the various systems must in these areas be regarded as purely
provisional.
Broadly speaking, the tribes of the whole of the known area of
Australia, certain coast regions of comparatively small extent excepted,
have a dichotomous kinship organisation. The accompanying map (Map II)
shows how the various forms are distributed. Along most of the south
coast, and up a belt broken perhaps in the northern portion, running
through the centre of the continent in Lat. 137°, are found two
phratries without intermarrying classes; for the area west of Lat. 130°
we have, it is true, only one datum, which gives no information as to
the area to which it applies; this portion of the field therefore is
assigned only provisionally to the two-phratry system. On the Bloomfield
River, which runs into Weary Bay, associated with the name of Captain
Cook, is an isolated two-phratry organisation, unless indeed we may
assume that the class names have either been overlooked or have passed
out of use.
The four-class system extends over the greater part of New South Wales,
and Queensland; a narrow belt runs through the north of South Australia
and broadens till it embraces the whole coastline of West Australia, the
north-eastern area excluded. An isolated four-class system, which does
not regulate marriage, is found in the Yorke Peninsula of South
Australia.
The eight-class system forms a compact mass, between the Gulf of
Carpentaria and Roebuck Bay, extending south as far as Lat. 25° in the
centre of Australia.
In reality the rule of the eight-class system extends considerably
further south, but the classes are nameless or altogether non-existent.
Thus, the southern Arunta have nominally four classes, but each of these
has two sections, so that the final result is as though they were an
eight-class tribe. In the same way the marriage regulations of the
two-phratry Dieri are such that choice is limited among them precisely
as it would be if they had eight classes. The same may be true of the
remainder of the western branch of the four-class system, which is
closely allied in name to the Arunta type; the boundary between the
related sets of names is unknown.
Among the Narrinyeri and the Yuin the kinship organisation, which is
confined to totemic groups, takes a local form; here the regulation of
marriage depends on considerations of the residence of the pair. Local
exogamy also prevails among the unorganised Kurnai. The Chepara appear
to have had no organisation, and among the Narrangga ties of
consanguinity constituted the sole bar to marriage. We are not however
concerned with the problems presented by these aberrant types of
organisation, to which no further reference is made in the present work.
The area covered by the dichotomous organisations is divided almost
equally between matrilineal and patrilineal tribes. The latter occupy
the region north of Lat. 30° and west of an irregular line running from
Long. 137° to 140° or thereabouts. In addition a portion of Victoria and
the region west of Brisbane form isolated patrilineal groups. The
problem presented by these anomalous areas has already been discussed in
the chapter on the Rule of Descent. Where local exogamy is the rule,
kinship is also virtually patrilineal.
In the remainder of Australia, non-organised tribes of course excepted,
the rule of descent is matrilineal, save that in North Queensland a
small tribe on the Annan River prefers paternal descent. The
accompanying map shows the distribution of the two forms.
[Illustration: MAP I. RULE OF DESCENT.]
[Illustration: MAP II. CLASS ORGANISATIONS.]
[Illustration: MAP III. PHRATRY ORGANISATIONS.]
FOOTNOTES:
[37] Save in the Anula and Mara tribes.
[38] Vol. II.
[39] Vol. I, p. 38.
[40] _Vocabulary_, _s.v._ Kararu.
[41] Grey, _Journals_, II, 228.
[42] _Descriptive Vocabulary_, p. 3 etc.; _Colonial Mag._ V, 222.
[43] _Australian Reminiscences_, p. 212.
[44] Bunce, _23 Years Wanderings_, p. 116.
[45] _J.R.G.S._ IV, 171, p. 88, _Narrative of a Voyage round the World_
p. 88.
[46] _Discoveries_ (1846), I, 393; cf. _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 64.
[47] Cf. the local groups of the Yuin, the Wiradjeri and other tribes,
Howitt, _passim_.