SOCIAL ORIGINS
BY
ANDREW LANG, M.A., LL.D.
PRIMAL LAW
BY
J. J. ATKINSON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1903
TO
ANNABELLA ALLEYNE
Dear Annie,
As you first pointed out to me the facts which are the germ of my
Theory of the Origin of Totemism, you are one cause of my share in this
book. The other is affection for the memory of the author of ‘Primal
Law.’
Yours always,
A. LANG.
St. Andrews: Feb. 13, 1903.
INTRODUCTION
The portion of this book called ‘Primal Law’ is the work of the late
Mr. James Jasper Atkinson. Born in India, of Scottish parents (his
mother being the paternal aunt of the present editor), Mr. Atkinson
was educated (1857-1861) at Loretto School, then managed by Messrs.
Langhome. While still young he settled on certain stations in New
Caledonia bequeathed to him by his father, and, except for visits to
Australia and a visit to England, he lived and died in the French
colony. His ingenious mind was much exercised by the singular laws
and customs of the natives of the New Caledonian Archipelago and the
adjacent isles. These peoples have been little studied by competent
European observers--that is, in New Caledonia. Mr. Atkinson wrote an
account of native manners before he had any acquaintance with the
works of modern anthropologists, such as Mr. Tylor, Mr. McLennan,
Lord Avebury, and others. To these he later turned his attention; he
joined the Anthropological Institute, and, in the course of study and
observation, he discovered what he conceived to be the ‘Primal Law’
and origin of morality, as regards the family. In his last illness,
in 1899, he was most kindly attended by Commander John Haggard, R.N.,
then Her Majesty’s Consul in New Caledonia. Mr. Atkinson’s mind, in his
latest moments, was occupied by his anthropological speculations, and,
through Mr. Haggard, he sent his MS. to his cousin and present editor.
I have given to it the last cares which the author himself would have
given had he lived. But I have also taken the opportunity to review, in
the following pages, introductory to ‘Primal Law,’ the present state
of the discussion as to the beginnings of the rules regulating marriage
among savages.
The discussion is now nearly forty years old, if we date it from the
appearance of Mr. J. F. McLennan’s _Primitive Marriage_ in 1865. Yet,
in spite of the speculations of some and the explorations of other
distinguished students, the main problems are still in dispute. Was
marriage originally non-existent? Was promiscuity at first the rule,
and, if so, what were the origins, motives, and methods of the most
archaic prohibitions on primitive license? Did man live in ‘hordes,’
and did he bisect each ‘horde’ into exogamous and intermarrying
moieties, and, if he did, what was his motive? Are the groups and
kindreds commonly styled ‘totemic’ earlier or later than the division
into a pair of moieties or ‘phratries’? Do the totem-kins represent the
results of an early form of exogamous custom, or are they additions to
or consciously arranged subdivisions of the two exogamous moieties?
Is a past of ‘group marriage’ or ‘communal marriage’ proved by the
terms for human relationships employed by many backward races, and by
survivals in manner and custom?
These are among the questions examined in the introductory chapters
that may be read either before or after Mr. Atkinson’s _Primal Law_. To
him I am indebted for the conception of sexual jealousy as a powerful
element in the evolution of exogamy.
Since my attention was first directed to these topics, I have felt that
a clear and consistent working hypothesis of the origin of totemism
was indispensable, and such an hypothesis, with a criticism of other
extant theories, is here offered. Throughout I have attempted to
elucidate and bring into uniformity the perplexing and confused special
terms employed in the discussion. Here it should be explained that
by ‘marriage’ in this work I mean permanent cohabitation of man and
woman, sanctioned by tribal custom, and usually preceded by some rite
or initiation which does not prelude to casual amours. By family or
fire circle I mean the partners to this permanent cohabitation, their
offspring, and such kinsfolk by blood or affinity as may be members of
their camp. In the first sentence of the book I speak of the family as
‘most ancient and most sacred,’ and I do so deliberately. The primitive
association described I take, with Mr. Darwin and Mr. Atkinson, to be
‘most ancient,’ and to be the germ of the historic family, which is
‘most sacred.’ But to ‘sacred’ when I apply the word to the primitive
fire-circle I give no religious sense, such as the Greek hearth enjoyed
under Hestia, youngest and oldest daughter of Zeus. I mean that the
rules given to the primitive fire-circle by the sire were probably the
earliest and the most stringent, though not yet sanctioned by a tabu or
a goddess.
Such a small circle, and not a promiscuous horde or commune, I
conceive, with Mr. Darwin and Mr. Atkinson, to have been the earliest
form of human society.
The book deals only with the institutions of races certainly
totemistic, and mainly with the Australian and North American tribes,
which present totemism in the most archaic of its surviving forms. But
little is said, and that tentatively, on the question as to whether or
not the ancestors of the great civilised peoples, ancient and modern,
have passed through the stage of totemic exogamy, as our evidence is
weak and disputable. Too late for citation in the body of the book I
read Mr. A. H. Keane’s theory of the origin of totemism.[1]
Mr. Keane’s theory is much akin to my own as it stood in _Custom and
Myth_ (1884) and to that of Garcilasso de la Vega, the oldest of all.
Garcilasso (1540-1616), an Inca on the mother’s side, describing the
animal and plant worship of the low races in the Inca Empire, says
‘they only thought of making one differ from another and each from
all.’[2] But it may be that he had not totemism in his mind; the
passage is not too explicit.
Mr. Keane says: ‘And thus the family, the initial unit, segments into
a number of clans, each distinguished by its totem, its name, its
heraldic badge--which badge, becoming more and more venerated from age
to age, acquires inherited privileges, becomes the object of endless
superstitious practices, and is ultimately almost deified.... Its
origin lies behind all strictly religious notions, and it was at first
a mere device for distinguishing one individual from another, one
family or clan group from another.[3] Thus among the Piaroas of the
Orinoco below San Fernando de Atabapo the belief holds that the tapir,
originally the totem of the clan, has become their ancestor, and that
after death the spirit of every Piaroa passes into a tapir; hence they
never hunt or eat this animal, and they also think all the surrounding
tribes are in the same way each provided with their special animal
fore-father. It is easy to see how such ideas tend to cluster round
the clan[4] or family totem, at first a distinguishing badge, later a
protecting or tutelar deity of Protean form. It should be remembered
that the personal or family name precedes the totem, which grows out of
it, as seen by the conditions still prevailing amongst the very lowest
peoples (Fuegians, Papuans of Torres Strait[5]).’
I am indebted in various ways to assistance, chiefly in the interchange
of ideas, from Mr. A. C. Haddon, Mr. G. L. Gomme, Miss Burne, and Mr.
A. E. Crawley, author of _The Mystic Rose_. Mr. Crawley kindly read
the book, or most of it, before publication, and collaborated most
efficiently in the way of suggesting objections. It is not implied that
any of these students accept the ideas of the two authors. I regret
that it has been found impossible to wait for the publication of a new
book by Mr. A. W. Howitt, from which we may expect much new information.
The question of the relations of religion and totemism is scarcely
touched on in this work. A certain amount of regard is given to their
totem animals and plants by some of the Australian tribes, to the
extent of not killing, plucking, or eating them, except under stress
of need, but even this is not universal. There also exists, in some
cases, a sense of kinship with them. They are not worshipped. That
magic is worked for their preservation and propagation, as by the
Arunta, proves nothing in the nature of a religious attitude towards
them. In my opinion this religious regard for the totem does not
appear till ancestor worship, which does not occur in Australia, has
made considerable advance and a myth arises that an ancestral spirit
or family god is incarnate in the animal which originally was only a
totem. If so, totemism is not an element in the origins of religion,
but a field later invaded by religion.
On the other hand, Dr. Achelis, of Bremen, writes that to savage man
‘animals are his equals. To the ancient worship of animals is added,
under the influence of sympathetic emotion, the worship of ancestors
and totemism, which sees in a beast worshipped as a god the ancestor of
the whole tribe.’[6] Clearly this sentence is replete with errors and
confusions. The whole tribe, in Australia, does not regard any animal
as its ancestor. No beast is worshipped as a god. No ancestors are
worshipped. If the animals are ‘his equals,’ why did man worship them,
and that apparently before the worship of ancestors and totemism arose?
In an essay like that of Dr. Achelis on _Ethnology and Religion_ the
facts ought to be correctly ascertained.
I have been obliged to place in Appendix A certain facts about group
names derived from animals which came late to hand, among them Mr.
Robertson’s interesting letter on many such names in the Orkneys, and
some remarks on village names derived from animals among the ancient
Hebrews.
[Footnote 1: _Man, Past and Present_, Cambridge, 1899, pp. 396, 397.]
[Footnote 2: _Royal Commentaries_, i. 47.]
[Footnote 3: _The Import of the Totem_, Amer. Ass., Detroit, 1897.]
[Footnote 4: M. Chaffanjon, _Tour du Monde_, 1888, lvi. 348.]
[Footnote 5: _Ethnology_, pp. 9, 11.]
[Footnote 6: _The International Quarterly_, Dec.-March, 1902-1903, p.
321.]
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE FAMILY
The family. Theory of Mr. Atkinson--Primitiveness in man--Recent
history of the speculation as to the early human family--What is
exogamy? Difficulties of terminology--Totemism and exogamy--Theories of
exogamy. Mr. McLellan’s theory--Mr. Crawley’s theory--Dr. Westermarck’s
theory--Mr. Morgan’s theory--Return to the author’s theory
CHAPTER II
THE CLASS SYSTEM
The class system in Australia--The varieties of marriage divisions in
Australia--Mr. Fison on the great bisection--‘Primary classes?’--The
‘primary divisions’ are themselves totemic and exogamous--The totem
difficulty
CHAPTER III
TOTEMS WITHIN THE PHRATRIES
American support of the author’s hypothesis--Deliberate
arrangement--Totems all the way--Distribution of totems in the
‘phratries’--The ideas of Mr. Frazer. His earlier theory--Objections
to Mr. Frazer’s early theory--Mr. Spencer’s theories of the
bisection--Advantages of the system here proposed--The Arunta--Arunta
metaphysics--Arunta totem eating and traditions--Dr. Durkheim on
the Arunta--The relations of totems and ‘phratries’ among the
Arunta--Arunta myths--Mr. Spencer on Arunta legends
CHAPTER IV
ARUNTA PHRATRIES AND TOTEMS
Views of Dr. Durkheim--How did the Aranta anomaly arise?
CHAPTER V
OTHER BARS TO MARRIAGES
‘Group marriage’--Mr. Morgan and the class system--Difficulties of
Mr. Morgan’s theory--Mr. Morgan on terms of relationship--How the
terms of relationship originally arose--Supposed survivals of group
marriage--Piraungaru and piraura--Growth of social rules in the
tribe--Group marriage and Mr. Tylor’s statistics
CHAPTER VI
THE CHANGE OF CLASS AMONG THE NEW GENERATION
The system of Herr Cunow--Classes again
CHAPTER VII
THEORIES OF LORD AVEBURY
Lord Avebury on totemism--Lord Avebury on the origin of totemism
--Communal marriage--Lord Avebury on relationships
CHAPTER VIII
THE ORIGIN OF TOTEM NAMES AND BELIEFS
Sacred animals in savage society--Proposed restriction of the use
of the word ‘totem’--The word ‘totem’--The totem ‘cult’--‘Totem
gods’--Savage speculations as to the origin of totemism--Modern
theories--Mr. Max Müller’s theory--The theory of Mr. Herbert
Spencer--Mr. Frazer’s theories--Suggestion of Mr. N. W. Thomas--Dr.
Wilken’s theory--Miss Alice Fletcher’s theory--Mr. Hill Tout’s
theory--Messrs. Hose and McDougall--Mr. Haddon’s theory--An objection
to all the theories enumerated--Statement of the problem--The author’s
own conjecture--The connection between groups and totems--No ‘disease
of language’--Hypothetical early groups before totemism--How the
groups got names--Illustration from folk-lore--How the names became
known--Totemic and other group names. English and North American
Indian--Theory that Siouan gentes names are of European origin
CHAPTER IX
THE MELANESIAN SYSTEMS
How the origin of totem names was forgotten--Other sources of
sacredness in plants and animals--Recapitulation--An objection
answered--Other objections answered--Totems and magical
societies--Totem survivals--Did the ancestors of the civilised races
pass through the Australian stage?
PRIMAL LAW
CHAPTER I
MAN IN THE BRUTAL STAGE
Mr. Darwin on the primitive relations of the sexes--Primitive man
monogamous or polygamous--His jealousy--Expulsion of young males--The
author’s inferences as to the evolution of Primal Law--A customary
rule of conduct evolved--Traces surviving in savage life--The customs
of avoidance--Custom of exogamy arose in the animal stage--Brother
and sister avoidance--The author’s own observation of this custom in
New Caledonia--Strangeness of such a custom among houseless nomads in
Australia--Rapid decay under European influences
CHAPTER II
SEXUAL RELATIONS OF ANIMALS
Brother and sister avoidance, a partial usage among the higher
mammals--Males’ attitude to females in a group dominated by a single
male head--Band of exiled young males--Their relations to the
sire--Examples in cattle and horses--In game-fowl--Strict localisation
of animals--Exiled young males hover on the fringe of the parent
group--Parricide
CHAPTER III
MAN VARYING FROM ANIMALS
Effect of the absence of a special pairing season on nascent
man--Consequent state of ceaseless war between sire and young males
--Man already more than an ape--Results of his prolonged infancy
and of maternal love--A young male permitted to live in the parent
group--Conditions in which this novelty arose
CHAPTER IV
EARLIEST EVOLUTION OF LAW
Truce between semi-human sire and son--Consequent distinction taken
between female and female, as such--Consequent rise of habit of brother
and sister avoidance--Result, son seeks female mate from without--Note
by the editor
CHAPTER V
AVOIDANCES
Results in strengthening the groups which admit several
adult males--Disappearance of hostile band of exiled young
males--Relations of sire and female mates of young males now within
the group--Father-in-law and daughter-in-law avoidance--Rights as
between two generations--Elder brother and younger brother’s wife
avoidances--Note on hostile capture
CHAPTER VI
FROM THE GROUP TO THE TRIBE
Resemblance of semi-brutal group, at this stage, to actual savage
tribe--Resemblance merely superficial--In this hypothetical
semi-brutal group paternal incest survives--Causes of its decline
and extinction--The sire’s widows of the group--Arrival of outside
suitors for them--Brothers of wives of the group--New comers
barred from marital rights over their daughters--Jealousy of their
wives intervenes--Value of sisters to be bartered for sisters
of another group discovered--Consequent resistance to incest of
group sire--Natural selection favours groups where resistance is
successful--Cousinage recognised in practice--Intermarrying sets of
cousins become phratries--Exceptional cases of permitted incest in
chiefs and kings--No known trace of avoidance between father and
daughter--Progress had rendered such law superfluous
CHAPTER VII
TRACES OF PERIOD OF TRANSITION AVOIDANCES
Survivals in custom testify to a long period of transition from group
to tribe--Stealthy meetings of husband and wife--Examples--Evidence
to a past of jealousy of incestuous group sire--Evidence from
teknonymy--Husband named as father of his child--Formal capture as
a symbol of legal marriage--Avoidance between father-in-law and
son-in-law--Arose in stage of transition--Causes of mother-in-law
and son-in-law avoidance--Influence of jealousy--Examples--Mr.
Tylor’s statistics--Resentment of capture not primal cause of this
avoidance--Note on avoidance.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CLASSIFICATORY SYSTEM
The classificatory system--The author’s theory is the opposite of Mr.
Morgan’s, of original brother and sister marriage--That theory is based
on Malayan terms of relationship--Nephew, niece, and cousin, all named
‘sons and daughters’--This fact of nomenclature used as an argument
for promiscuity--The author’s theory--The names for relationship
given as regards the group, not the individual--The names and rules
evolved in the respective interests of three generations--They
apply to food as well as to marriage--Each generation is a strictly
defined class--Terms for relationship indicate, _not kinship_,
but relative seniority and rights in relation to the group--The
distinction of age in generations breaks down in practice--Methods
of bilking the letter of the law--Communal marriage--Outside suitors
and cousinage--The fact of cousinage unperceived and unnamed--Cousins
are still called brothers and sisters; thus, when a man styles his
sister’s son his son, the fact does not prove, as in Mr. Morgan’s
theory, that his sister is his wife--Terms of address between brothers
and sisters--And between members of the same and of different
phratries--These corroborate the author’s theory--distinction as
to sexual rights yields the classificatory system--Progress outran
recognition and verbal expression--Errors of Mr. Morgan and Mr.
McLennan--Conclusion--Note--‘Group marriage’
APPENDICES
A.--ENGLISH, ORCADIAN, AND HEBREW VILLAGE SOBRIQUETS
B.--THE BA RONGA TERMS OF RELATIONSHIP
INDEX
SOCIAL ORIGINS
AND
PRIMAL LAW
CHAPTER I
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE FAMILY
THE FAMILY. THEORY OF MR. ATKINSON
The Family is the most ancient and the most sacred of human
institutions; the least likely to be overthrown by revolutionary
attacks. In epochs of change the Family naturally invites the
attentions of impetuous reformers, like Shelley (who advocated a scheme
more than any other apt to shock the conscience of a savage), and
like the friends of ‘Free Love,’ who would introduce a license beyond
the Urabunna model. The horror aroused by certain relations, such as
that of brother-and-sister marriage, is perhaps the oldest of moral
sentiments, yet it has lost its hold of some barbaric races, and has
been overcome by dynastic pride, as in the Royal House of the Incas
of Peru, and in that of Egypt. While the Family, everywhere almost,
has been secured by a religious and all but instinctive dread of
certain aberrations, the laws or customs which may not be broken have
varied in different lands, and in different stages of civilisation.
What is incest in one age or country is innocent in another; still
certain unions, varying in various regions, have always been regarded
with loathing. No such emotion is known to be felt among the lower
animals, and scientific curiosity has long been busy with the question,
why should the least civilised of human races possess the widest
list of prohibited degrees? What is the origin of the stringent laws
that, among naked and far from dainty nomads, compel men and women to
seek their mates outside of certain large groups of real or imagined
kindred? The answers given to this question have varied with the
facts of savage law which chanced to be at each moment accessible to
inquirers, and all attempts to solve the problem must be provisional.
New knowledge may upset even the most recent theory, and, indeed,
new knowledge of the rules of certain Australian tribes has already
produced fresh hypotheses, as regards certain aspects of the problem.
The whole subject is thorny, and I must crave pardon for venturing to
differ, provisionally, on several important points, from authorities
whose learning, research, and experience far exceed my own. The facts
which they have collected from personal knowledge of savages, and
from reading, often group themselves otherwise in my eyes than in
theirs--the perspective is different. My observations, therefore, are
submitted to criticism with all diffidence. Only the main lines of a
complex discussion are here traversed, and the works cited are, as a
rule, either by English-speaking authors, or, at least, are sometimes
accessible in English translations. It will be seen that students have
differed greatly, not only from each other, but, at different times,
from themselves, under the influence of new facts brought in from the
most remote and isolated of savage races. One author is most interested
in this, another in that, factor of the problem. The difficulty of the
subject cannot be exaggerated; for the origins of our human society
cannot be _historically_ traced behind the institutions of the races
now lowest in the scale of culture. We are driven to risk hypotheses.
Again, it is by no means certain that some of these lowest peoples of
to-day (say the Arunta of Central Australia) represent a moment in the
main current of the stream of tendency, a point through which all
progress has passed. The ideas and institutions of such tribes may
be mere local ‘sports,’ other divergencies may have arisen in other
quarters, and it would be an error (repudiated by Mr. McLennan, the
founder of the study in England) to suppose that, everywhere, exactly
the same series of changes evolved itself in due sequence. ‘In one
place or another everything may have been going on,’ I have heard Mr.
McLennan observe.
Once more, the subject is obscure because the races apparently ‘nearest
the beginning,’ the naked Australians, houseless hunters, just
emerging from the palæolithic condition as regards implements, are,
as to society and system of thought, very far from being ‘primitive;’
very remote from ‘the beginning.’ Their social rules are various and
extremely complex, especially as regards marriage: some of their social
customs are perhaps inexplicable--a field for modern guesswork--their
speculative philosophy is, in one instance, ingenious, elaborate,
and highly peculiar. The ‘beginning’ lies far behind them, yet their
society and institutions may have their germs (on the Darwinian theory)
in a state of all but complete brutality.
To trace human institutions back to that hypothetical stage of first
emergence from the brute is the purpose of the following treatise,
‘Primal Law,’ by Mr. Atkinson. It were superfluous for me to dwell on
the audacity of his enterprise. Of thoroughly human man we know a good
deal: of the brutes we know something. Of a hypothetical creature, not
wholly brute, but not yet ‘articulate-speaking man,’ we know nothing,
and as to the ways of his supposed next of kin, ‘the great extant
anthropoid apes,’ our knowledge is vague, resting on the accounts of
native observers. Such a creature, however, half ape, half human, is
in part the theme of Mr. Atkinson’s speculations, on which I venture
to express no opinion: as not being persuaded that man ever had such a
direct ancestor.
PRIMITIVENESS IN MAN
As to men really primitive, and their social arrangements, I only
venture to conjecture that, in the nature of the case, they probably
lived a nomadic life, ‘selecting a temporary place of abode, whether
a cave, rock, shelter, or hut, influenced chiefly by the amount of
edible materials to be found in the neighbourhood.’[1] The area of the
wandering of each group of hearth-mates would be limited, probably, by
the existence of other groups, which would resent poaching. A large
trout may often be seen to turn angrily and drive away a little trout
that has ventured too near the bend of the brook which the large trout
finds a good station for flies; and human groups would also, as in
cases to be cited they do, mortally resent intrusions. I conceive that
the males would be polygamous (like the gorilla) and jealous, killing
or expelling the young males, as in the theories of Mr. Darwin and Mr.
Atkinson. Thus groups would, on the whole, be hostile,[2] ‘wandering
from one locality to another, now gathering fruits and seeds, now
hunting wild animals, or, as a last resource, feeding on shell-fish and
other produce of the shore.’[3] The implements now used by backward
savages for fish-catching, nets, spears, and barbed hooks, cannot be
precisely primitive. Primitiveness, we must remember, does not depend
on antiquity of date.
The Australians, though now their groups have coalesced into local
tribes in defined areas, and though their customary law is extremely
complex, are least remote from the primitive, least remote, but very
far removed. They are, though our contemporaries, infinitely beneath
the status in culture of palæolithic man of the mammoth and reindeer
period. It is not improbable that he had domesticated the ox, goat,
pig, horse, and dog. ‘They manufactured fine needles of bone, with
which they sewed their skin garments. They adorned their persons
with a variety of beads....’ Their art was of notorious and amazing
excellence. Dr. Munro says that they were ‘ignorant of the rearing of
domestic animals,’[4] but also that ‘there seems to be no inherent
improbability in the idea that some of them’ (ox, goat, horse, pig,
and dog) ‘had been domesticated by the indigenous inhabitants prior
to the coming of the neolithic brachycephals into France.’[5] A
palæolithic sketch of a horse ‘with a supposed cover,’ and another of
a horse with a bridle,[6] may be misinterpreted: Dr. Munro thinks that
the horse-cloth ‘may be no more than the hunter’s skin coat thrown
over the back of the animal when led home by means of a halter made
of thongs or withes to be there slaughtered.’ If palæolithic man had
advanced as far as Dr. Munro supposes, it was a short step to the
domestication of the horse. It is hardly conclusive to say that, if
he had tamed the horse, ‘we would undoubtedly ere now have had an
equestrian representation of the fact,’ though it is also said that ‘we
have only as yet a preliminary instalment of these most interesting
art productions.’[7] The representation may later be discovered. That
palæolithic man, so far advanced as he was, was ‘ignorant of the
principles of religion,’[8] seems a hasty conclusion. If he had the
beliefs of our Australians in such potent beings as Baiame, Nooreli,
Daramulun, Mungun-ngaur, Pirmaheal, and Pundjel, that belief would
leave no material traces, except, perhaps, the Bull-roarer, whose noise
represents the voice of one or other of these beings. Now a small but
unmistakeable pair of palæolithic bull-roarers in bone, or of amulets
which are bull-roarers in miniature, one of them decorated with the
sacred Australian pattern of herring-bone and concentric circles, have
been found in a quaternary station in France.[9]
Palæolithic man in France, countless ages ago, was thus, especially
if he had domesticated animals, immensely more remote from ‘the
beginning’ than contemporary wild Australian tribes. They, again, with
their copious languages, ingenious implements, complex institutions,
and prolonged tribal assemblies, are infinitely in advance of those
really primitive men among whom we must tentatively seek the origins of
customary law regulating the family and marital arrangements. A society
almost incalculably ancient may have been much more advanced than a
society of to-day, and the society of the lowest known modern savages
must be equally advanced from the status of ‘primitive man’.
The best proof of all that no Australians are now in or near ‘the
chrysalis state’ of humanity, is to be found in their combinations
into large friendly tribes, each covering a wide extent of country,
and holding stated meetings, for social, political, religious, and
commercial purposes. Mr. Matthews remarks on ‘articles of barter,’
exchanged ‘at the great meetings which were held for the initiation of
the youths of the tribes.’ Among these articles were stone hatchets,
first chipped, then ground, the tribes having passed out of the
stage in which mere rude flaking sufficed. ‘At the conclusion of the
ceremonies, before the people dispersed, a kind of fair was held, when
natives in whose country stone was plentiful, would barter their things
with other people for reeds for making spears, rich plumage of birds,
&c. ... or for any other articles brought by the various tribes for the
purpose of exchange.’[10] We can scarcely conceive that this amount
of tribal or inter-tribal unity was possible to man really primitive.
Backward and conservative as the Australians are, we must not expect
to find among them, with their highly complex customary laws, anything
like the first beginnings of social regulations. To look for these,
even among the naked and houseless hunters of Australia, is to organise
failure in this research as to origins.
RECENT HISTORY OF THE SPECULATION AS TO THE EARLY HUMAN FAMILY
From the age of Aristotle onwards, inquirers naturally began with a
belief in the Patriarchal Family as the original social unit. To this
opinion, in a peculiar form, Mr. Atkinson returns, as will be seen.
The idea was natural. Aristotle, like Hesiod, starts from ‘the Man,
the Woman, and the labouring ox,’ though men and women were wedded
long before oxen and other animals were domesticated. The Biblical
account in Genesis opens with the same theory of the primal pair, whose
children, brother and sister, must have married each other, as in the
late Mr. Morgan’s hypothesis of the ‘Consanguine Family;’ but, contrary
to almost universal savage custom, and to Mr. Atkinson’s ‘Primal Law.’
In 1861, Sir Henry Maine’s celebrated book, ‘Ancient Law,’ appeared.
Herein he wrote that it was difficult to say ‘what society of men had
not been originally based on the Patriarchal Family.[11] His studies
had lain chiefly in the law of civilised peoples, Romans, Hebrews,
Greeks, Irish, and Hindoos; not in the customary law of the lowest
races. He, like Mr. Freeman, concluded that the patriarchal family, by
aggregation of descendants (and aided by adoption of outsiders, and by
the _ownership_ of the family by its Head), formed the gens, while the
aggregation of _gentes_ formed the tribe, and the aggregation of tribes
made the State. But, as the _gentes_ had traditions contrary to this
theory, traditions of separate origins, he supposed that ‘the incoming
populace should feign themselves to be deduced from the same stock as
the people on whom they were engrafted.’ Thus we know that McUlrigs
(Kennedys) of Galloway joined the remote Macdonnells of Moidart and
Glengarry, and wore the Macdonnell tartan[12] (1745-1760), and so might
come to pass as Macdonnells, though they still regard the Marquis
of Ailsa, a Kennedy, as their chief, at least in Eilean Shona (Loch
Moidart). In the same way the Camerons of Glen Nevis, though called
‘Camerons,’ were really MacSorlies, a branch of the Macdonnells, and
from the sixteenth century to 1754 were always on ill terms with the
chief of the clan Cameron, Lochiel. These are very modern instances,
but illustrate Sir Henry’s theory of incomers.
The members of the Roman tribes had traditions that they were _not_,
really, of the same original blood with each other. Only by a fiction
were they of the same blood. They did not all descend by natural
increase from one patriarchal ancestor. There really did exist ‘a
variety of alien groups in a local tribe,’ however they might all
adopt the same name, and assert descent, in West Scotland from
Somerled, let us say. This fact, of heterogeneousness within the
‘tribe’ among others, was so obvious and so imperfectly explained,
by friends of the Patriarchal theory, that it occupied ‘writers
belonging to the school of so-called prehistoric inquiry,’ as Sir Henry
styled it.[13] They were not satisfied with the theory that Society
arose in the Patriarchal Family, based on direct descent from, and
ownership by, a single male ancestor. To be sure a Cameron will ‘cross
the hill,’ and call himself Stewart, and a Chinese immigrant into
Australia has discreetly entitled himself Alexander Mac-gillivray.
But such accretions, and such legal fictions, do not explain the
heterogeneousness of the local tribe, which, by the theory of some
historians, is of common descent. ‘Prehistoric inquirers’ could not
but notice that, among ruder ‘non-Aryan’ races of various degrees
of culture, ‘the family is radically different from the Patriarchal
Family,’ and suggests a different origin.
Roughly speaking, the groups of real or fancied kindred among various
low races exhibit the peculiarity that the kin-name is often inherited
from the mother, not from the father; that the maternal blood is
stronger in determining such cases of inheritance as arise; and that
marriage is forbidden within the recognised limits of the _maternal_
kinship. It was natural for inquirers to derive this condition of
affairs, this reckoning in the female line, from a state of society
in which fatherhood (owing to promiscuity, or to polyandry--several
husbands to one wife) was notably uncertain. Bachofen, who first
examined the problem, attributed the system to a supposed period of the
Supremacy of Women: McLennan to dubious fatherhood, and possible early
promiscuity. The recovery of supremacy by men, or the gradual advance
in civilisation, especially in accumulation of property, would finally
cause descent to be reckoned through the male line, as among ourselves.
As to the question of early promiscuity--sexual relations absolutely
unregulated--Dr. Westermarck, Mr. Crawley, and others have argued,
and Mr. Atkinson argues, that it never existed, at least to any wide
extent, and with any potent influence. We hear rumours of savages
utterly promiscuous, say the Mincopies of the Andaman Islands, just
as we hear of savages utterly without religion. But later and better
evidence proves that the Andamanese have both wives and a God.[14]
Again, the lowest savages known are so far not ‘promiscuous,’ that they
recognise certain sets of women as persons with whom (as a general
rule, subject to occasional exceptions) certain sets of men must have
no marital relations. It was the opinion of Mr. Darwin, as of Mr.
Atkinson, that sexual jealousy, from the first, must probably have been
a bar to absolute promiscuity, even among the hypothetical anthropoid
ancestors of human race. To tell the truth, our evidence on these
points, as to existing savages, is, as usual, contradictory.[15]
WHAT IS EXOGAMY? DIFFICULTIES OF TERMINOLOGY
In these inquiries a great source of confusion arises (as all students
must be aware) from the absence of exact terminology, of technical
terms with a definite and recognised meaning. Thus when my friend,
the late Mr. John Fergus McLennan, introduced the word ‘Exogamy,’ in
‘Primitive Marriage’ (1865), he probably knew perfectly well what
he meant. But he did not then, from lack of practice in an inquiry
practically novel, and originated by himself, express his meaning with
exactness. He at first spoke of exogamy as the rule ‘which prohibited
marriage within the tribe.’[16] But the word ‘tribe’ was later taken
by Mr. McLennan to mean, and is now used as meaning, what cannot be a
primitive community, a local aggregate of groups amicably occupying
a considerable area of country; say the Urabunna tribe of Central
Australia. Mr. McLennan did not wish to say that exogamy forbids an
Urabunna tribesman to marry an Urabunna tribeswoman; he meant that
exogamy prohibited marriage within the recognised kindred--that is,
in this case, between members of totem kindreds of the same name,
say Emu or Kangaroo. This fact he later made perfectly clear. But
meanwhile such terms as ‘horde,’ ‘tribe,’ ‘sub-tribe,’ ‘family,’
‘gens,’ ‘section,’ ‘phratria,’ ‘clan,’ many of them derived from
civilised classical or Celtic usage, have been tossed up and down,
in company with ‘class,’ ‘division,’ ‘section,’ and so on, in a
way most confusing.[17] Odd new terms come from America, such as
‘socialry,’ ‘tutelaries,’ ‘ocular consanguinity,’ ‘ethnogamy,’
‘conjugal conation,’ and so forth.[18] Most perplexing it is to find
words like clan, family, tribe, _gens_, phratry, words peculiar to
civilised peoples, Greek, Roman, or Celtic, applied to the society of
savages. ‘The term “clan” implies descent in the female line,’ says
the late Mr. Dorsey, following Major Powell; but why take the Celtic
term ‘clan,’ which has no such signification, and confer it on what
is really a totem kindred with descent in the female line?[19] Next,
‘several of the Siouan tribes are divided into two, and one into three
sub-tribes. Other tribes are composed of phratries, and each sub-tribe
or, phratry comprises a number of _gentes_.’ Is there a distinction
between the ‘sub-tribes’ of some tribes, and the ‘phratries’ of others,
or not? Apparently there is not, but the method of nomenclature is most
confusing.
I shall understand the terms which I employ, as follows:
The tribe, speaking of the Australians, for instance, is a large
aggregate of friendly or not hostile human groups, occupying a
territory of perhaps a hundred square miles, and holding councils and
meetings for social and religious purposes. It is so far ‘endogamous’
that its members _may_ marry within it--that is to say, it is no more
endogamous than the parish of Marylebone. An Urabunna man, a man of
the Urabunna tribe, may marry an Urabunna woman--if no special native
law interferes. He may also at pleasure marry, out of his tribe, say a
woman of the neighbouring Arunta tribe, again, if no special law bars
the arrangement. So far the tribe, the large local aggregate of groups,
stands indifferent. But, within the tribe, there are laws barring
marital intercourse. First, each tribe is usually composed of two
‘primary exogamous divisions,’ or ‘phratries,’ so called; in the case
of some tribes the phratries are named; for example, _Matthurie_ and
_Kirarawa_. Every man and woman, in such tribes, is either a Matthurie
or a Kirarawa, and can only marry into the opposite division, and the
children follow the name of the mother. These two divisions are called
‘primary classes’ by some students; ‘phratrias’ (from the Greek:
Φρατρία) by others; ‘sub-tribes’ by others; or, again, ‘moieties,’ or
‘groups.’ I shall, in each instance, use the term (‘class,’ ‘phratria,’
‘moiety,’ ‘primary exogamous division,’ ‘group,’ and the like) employed
by the author whose opinion I am discussing, though I prefer ‘phratry,’
as ‘class’ has another significance; so has ‘group,’ &c.
Again, the tribe contains a number of totem kindreds (often called
‘clans’ or _gentes_, rather at random), that is, of sets of kin
deriving their names from _totems_, plants, animals, or other objects
in nature. To the possible origin of Totemism we return in a separate
section. No Urabunna man may marry a woman of his own ‘phratry,’ nor
of his own _totem_, and the children inherit the phratry and totem
names from the mother. Finally, there are sets of relationships,
roughly indicating, it would seem, seniority by generations, and
degrees of actual or supposed kindred. Within many of these, which
I shall style ‘classes’ (they have other terms applied to them),
marriage is forbidden. Thus there are bars of three several sorts on
the intermarrying of an Urabunna man with an Urabunna woman. In a way,
there are three grades of exogamous prohibitions.
Mr. McLennan, who introduced the word ‘exogamy,’ defined it thus: ‘an
exogamous marriage is a marriage between persons of different clans of
kinship, not entered into fortuitously, but because of law declaring
it to be incest for a man to marry a woman of his own clan.’[20] The
same community cannot be ‘both exogamous and endogamous,’ as some
suppose. Thus Lord Avebury writes, ‘some races which are endogamous as
regards the tribe, are yet exogamous as regards the gens.’ But really
‘exogamy is the law prohibiting marriage between persons of the same
blood or stock as incest--often under pain of death--and endogamy is
the law prohibiting marriage except between persons of the same blood
or stock.’[21] In Mr. McLennan’s sense I shall take the word ‘exogamy,’
while dealing with peoples apparently nearest the beginning.
Later, when descent in the male line is established, the prohibition
on marriage within the totem name comes to apply, sometimes, to
marriage within the local district held by the men of the name. The
old prohibition, we see, is to many within the recognised limit of the
blood kinship, or stock, designated by the totem name. But, as tribes
advance to kinship through males, and as, thereby, groups of one totem
name come to possess one region of country, it often happens that
exogamy prohibits marriage between persons dwelling in that region.
Whereas Grouse was forbidden to marry Grouse; later, the Grouse living
together, say in Corradale, the exogamous prohibition takes the shape
‘persons dwelling in Corradale must marry out of Corradale.’ The name
marking the exogamous limit is now, in such cases, local, but the
prohibition is derived from the older tabu on marriage between ‘persons
of the same blood or stock’--all those in Corradale being conceived to
share the same blood or stock. This origin of ‘local exogamy’ must be
kept in mind, otherwise confusion will arise. There are a few cases,
even in Australia, where even local exogamy has become obsolete, and
marriage, as with ourselves, is prohibited between persons of near
kindred simply.
Now, if I may venture to interpret the mind of Mr. John Fergus
McLennan, I conceive that he regarded the totemic division as older
than the ‘phratry’ or the ‘class’ bar, and he thought it the oldest
traceable exogamous limit. Not to marry within the totem name (no
male Emu to marry a female Emu) was, in Mr. McLennan’s opinion, the
most archaic marriage law.[22] This appears from the words of Mr.
McLennan’s brother, Mr. Donald McLennan.[23] He writes: ‘As the theory
of the Origin of Exogamy took shape, and the facts connected reduced
themselves to form in his mind, the conclusion was reached that the
system conveniently called “Totemism” ... must have existed in rude
societies, prior to the origin of Exogamy.[24] This carried back the
origin of Totemism to a state of mind in which no idea of incest
existed. From that condition my brother hoped to trace the progress of
Totemism--necessarily a progress upwards--in connection with kinship
and Exogamy. It may here be said that he had for a time a hypothesis of
the origin of Totemism, but that he afterwards came to see that there
were conclusive reasons against it.’
Meanwhile may we not, then, assume that, in Mr. McLennan’s opinion, the
earliest traceable human aggregate within which matrimony was _legally_
forbidden was the totem kin, indicated by the totem name, the totem
tabu, and the totem badge, or symbol--where it existed?
We now see how heterogeneous elements came to exist in the tribe of
locality, a puzzle to the friends of the theory of the Patriarchal
Family. For the nature of totemism, _plus exogamy_ and _female
descent_, is obviously such that under totemism, each family group
even (each ‘fire circle’ of men, wives, and children), _must_ contain
persons of different totems. The father and mother _must_ be of
different totems (persons of the same totem not intermarrying), and
the children must inherit the totem either of the father or of the
mother.[25] When paternal kinship is not only recognised (as, in
practical life, it always is), but becomes exclusive in its influence
on customary law, and when an approach to the Patriarchal Family, with
the power of the patriarch, is evolved, all the members of the family
in all its branches will (if Totemism persists) have the same totem;
derived from the father. Thus there will now be a _local_ totem group,
a group mainly of the same totem name, as is practically the case in
parts of Central Australia.[26]
It is necessary to understand this clearly. Take a very early group,
in a given district; suppose it, at first, to be anonymous, and let it
later be called the Emu group. So far, all members of the group will
be Emus, they will form an Emu _local_ group. But, next, suppose that
there are many neighbouring groups, also at first anonymous; let them
later be styled Rat, Cat, Bat, Sprat. Suppose that each such group now
(for reasons to be indicated later) takes its wives not from within
itself, but from all the other groups; that these women bring into the
Emu group their group names; and that their children inherit their
names from their mothers. Then the name, ‘Emu group,’ will cling to
that _local_ aggregate, as such; but, in time, the members of the Emu
group will all be, say, Rats, Cats, Bats, and Sprats, so called from
the group-names of their alien mothers. Suppose that, for one reason
or another, children at last come to inherit their names and totems
from their fathers. Then a Cat father will have Cat children, though
his wives may still be of different totems, and his sons’ children will
also be Cats, and so the local group will become mainly, if not wholly,
a group of one totem, the Cat. The Arunta of Central Australia do trace
kinship in the male line, and thus there is ‘one area which belongs to
the Kangaroo men, another to Emu men, another to Hakea flower men,’ and
so on. This has reached such a pitch that ‘in speaking of themselves
the natives will refer to these _local_ groups,’ not by the prevalent
totem names in each, but ‘by the name of the locality which each of
them inhabits,’ namely, as men of the Iturkawura camp, and so on.[27]
Thus we might say ‘the Glen Nevis men,’ ‘the Corradale men,’ and so on.
Thus we begin with an anonymous group, or group of unknown name, a
local group. We introduce Totemism, and that group becomes a local
group with a totem name. Granting exogamy (prohibition of marriage
within the group), and reckoning in the female line, it soon developes
into a local group made up of various totems, but, at first, _as a
local group_, it probably retains its original totem name among its
neighbours. Reckoning, still later, through the male line, we again
meet, as at first, a local totem group, but already Totemism is on
the wane, and the groups are soon to be called by the territorial
names of their lands. At this stage totem names are tending to decay,
and the next step will probably be to style the group by the name of
some remembered, or mythical, male ancestor, such as ‘children of
Donald’--Macdonalds.
Thus if, at a given time, the name of a certain male ancestor is
substituted, as ‘eponymous,’ for the totem name, or the district name,
we shall find a local group of, say, Sons of Donald, into which other
groups, Sons of Sorlie, or Ulrig, will enter, as occasion serves, and
be more or less absorbed. A State may at last arise, say, ‘Softs of
Israel.’
We are not assuming, however, that all human societies have passed
through the totemistic and exogamous stages.
TOTEMISM AND EXOGAMY
But what was the original unit, the totem group, or other division
outside of which alone could marriages be arranged? And why was the
totem name the limit? Returning to Mr. Donald McLennan’s account of the
opinions which his brother did not live to set forth, Totemism arose
‘in a state of man in which no idea of incest existed.’ On this theory,
I presume, there would be totem groups before exogamy arose; before
it was reckoned ‘incest’ to many within the totem name. This, as we
shall see, appears to be sometimes the opinion of the best Australian
authorities, Messrs. Fison and Howitt, and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.
It is also the theory of Arunta tradition. The totem belief, as it now
exists, imposes many tabus: you may not (as a rule) kill, eat, or use
the plant or animal which is your totem; still less perhaps, in the
long run, may you ‘use,’ sexually, a woman of your totem. If _this_,
or a kindred totem tabu, is the origin of exogamy, then to exogamy (as
a law, though not necessarily as a tendency) the totem is prior in
time. But I have no reason to suppose that Mr. McLennan ever regarded
the totem tabu as the origin of exogamy. In his published works he
offers another theory, not commonly accepted.
But the important thing to note is that exogamy may conceivably
(contrary to Mr. McLennan’s opinion, but in accordance with that of Mr.
Atkinson) have existed, or rather tended to exist, before totems arose;
much more, then, previous to the evolution of totem names, of totem
tabu, and of the idea of incest, _as a sin_, or mystic misdeed, and as
an offence to the totem--a religious offence to God, or to ancestral
spirits. Persons may have been forbidden to marry within their local
group, their ‘fire circle’ before that group had a totem, or a totem
name, and they may have been forbidden for reasons purely secular, to
which the totem later lent a sanction, and a definite limit. Thus Mr.
Tylor, our most sagacious guide in all such problems, writes ‘Exogamy
can and does exist without Totemism, and for all we know was originally
independent of it.’[28]
It is part of my argument that exogamous tendencies, at least--that
is, a habit of seeking female mates outside of the fire-circle--may
very well have prevailed before any human group had even a totemic
name. But exogamous tendencies are not, of course, the same thing as
exogamy strictly defined, and sanctioned by religious or superstitious
fear, and by secular penalties inflicted by the tribe. Against the
notion that exogamy may have been prior to Totemism, Mr. Robertson
Smith argued that very early man would not be restrained from
marriages by such an abstract idea as that of kindred--‘not to marry
your near kin’--while the idea of kindred was still fluid, and not
yet crystallised around the totem name.[29] But, without thinking of
kindred by blood, perhaps without recognising consanguinity (though it
must have been recognised very soon), early man may have decided that
‘thou shalt not marry within this local group or crowd, of which I am
head.’ Nothing abstract in that! There was no tribal law--there were as
yet (I suppose) no tribes--only the will of the head of each small set
of people practically enforced exogamy.
We can have no certainty on this point, for we know of no pre-totemic
race, no people who certainly have not yet entered into the totemic
stage. Any such people, probably, in the remote past, had no idea of
incest as a sin, or of exogamy as a law sanctioned by a tabu. But they
may have, at least, had a strong tendency to marry outside of the
circle of the hearth, the wandering hearth of homeless nomads ranging
after food.
The reader of Mr. Atkinson’s treatise will find that this kind of
exogamy--marriage outside the local group--would, on his theory, be
the rule, even when no idea of blood kindred, or of incest as a sin,
need have arisen; and no totem, or anything else, had yet been named.
The cause of the prohibition would, in Mr. Atkinson’s opinion, be the
sexual jealousy of the hypothetical patriarchal anthropoid male animal;
and, later, the sexual jealousy of his adult male offspring, and of
the females. Still later the group, already in _practice_ exogamous,
would accept the totem name, marking off the group from others, and
the totem name, snipe, wolf, or what not, would become, for the time,
the exogamous limit. No man and woman of the same totem name could
intermarry. Still later, a myth of kinship with the totem would arise,
and would add the religious sanction of a tabu.
A prohibition may perhaps have arisen very early, even if Mr.
Atkinson’s hypothesis (that the rule of marriage outside the group
arose in a state of brutality) be rejected. ‘The origin of bars to
marry is, in fact, complex,’ writes Mr. Crawley. A dislike of marriage
with a group-mate, familiar, through contiguity, from infancy, may
have been developed among early men;[30] and may have been reinforced
by the probably later superstitions which create ‘sexual tabu,’ and
mutual avoidance, among many existing peoples. Men and women are,
by savages, conceived to be mysteriously perilous to each other,
especially when they live in close contiguity. Mr. Crawley also allows
for Mr. Atkinson’s main factor, jealousy, ‘proprietary feeling,
which is one crude means by which the family has been regulated and
maintained.’[31] If these things were so (whether we go back to Mr.
Atkinson’s semi-brutal ancestors, or not), then, contrary to Mr. Donald
McLennan’s opinion, and to general opinion, it would not ‘appear to be
possible to demonstrate that Totemism preceded exogamy,’ or at least
preceded the exogamous tendency. For, in the first place, exogamy might
conceivably tend to arise before the explicit idea of kinship--whether
male or female--arose. Mr. Atkinson’s ‘primal law’ would be unuttered
in speech (speech, by his theory, there was none), but would amount
to this: ‘I, the patriarchal bull of this herd, will do my best to
kill you, the adult young bulls, if you make any approaches to any of
the cows in this crowd.’ There is no notion of ‘incest,’ but there is
jealousy producing the germ exogamy. The young bulls must find mates
outside of the local herd--or do without. This rule persisted, on Mr.
Atkinson’s theory, till the hypothetical anthropoid became a man, and
named his group (or had it named for him, as I later suggest) by a
totem name.
But real human and speaking beings might enforce marriage outside of
the group, though they did not perhaps think explicitly of kindred (or,
at least, did not think the idea fully out), still less of ‘incest,’ as
sin. Mr. McLennan’s theory, as given in his works, was partly identical
with that of Mr. Atkinson. ‘The earliest human groups can have had
no _idea_ of kinship’--they must, therefore, have been rather low
savages. ‘But,’ he said, ‘they were held together by a _feeling_ of
kinship,’ not yet risen into explicit consciousness. Cat and kitten
have, probably, _feeling_ of kinship, and that _feeling_ is very
strong, while it lasts, in the maternal cat, while between semi-human
mothers and children, arriving so very slowly at maturity, mother-kin
must have been consciously realised very early. Mr. McLennan then
showed the stages by which the savage would gradually, by reflection,
reach explicit consciousness of female kinship, of mother-relationship,
sister and brother relationship, and all the degrees of _female_ kin.
But Mr. Fison and others have argued powerfully against this
theory.[32] Moreover, we find male relationships, as we saw--‘descent
counted in the male line’--among the Arunta of Central Australia,
whom Mr. J. G. Frazer regarded, in 1899, as actually ‘primitive;’
while the neighbours of the Arunta, the Urabunna, reckon through the
female line.[33] Mr. Crawley, for various reasons, says, ‘the famous
Matriarchal theory’ (the prepotency and dominion of women) ‘was as
exaggerated in its early forms as was the Patriarchal.... It is a
method of tracing genealogy, more convenient in polygamous societies
and more natural in primitive times when the close connection of
mother and child during the early days of infancy emphasises the
relation.’[34] Dr. Westermarck argues to a similar effect.[35] His
motive is to discredit the theory of promiscuity, and consequent
uncertainty of fatherhood, as the cause of reckoning on the spindle
side. But the Arunta, who reckon on the sword side, actually do
not even know that children are the result of sexual intercourse,
according to Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. How they can have any idea
of blood-kinship at all is, therefore, the mystery. It may perhaps be
argued that they have none. But these ignorant Arunta reckon descent
through the male line--while the Royal Picts, in early Scotland,
infinitely more civilised, reckoned by the female line.
For myself, I still incline to the opinion[36] that the reckoning of
descent through the woman is the more archaic method, and the method
that, certainly, tends to dwindle and disappear, as at last it did
among the Picts. This applies to human society, not to that of Mr.
Atkinson’s hypothesis, in which the question is not of kin, but of
property. ‘Every female in my crowd is my sole property,’ says--or
feels--Mr. Atkinson’s patriarchal anthropoid, and the patriarch gives
expression to his sentiment with teeth and claws, if he has not yet
learned to double up his fist, with a stone in it. ‘These were early
days.’
THEORIES OF EXOGAMY. MR. MCLENNAN’S THEORY
In any case, Mr. McLennan’s hypothetical first groups, like Mr.
Atkinson’s, were very low indeed. They developed exogamy, not (as
in Mr. Atkinson’s theory) through sexual jealousy on the part of
the sires, but, first, through regular female infanticide. This
practice, being reasonable, could not prevail among Mr. Atkinson’s
anthropoids.[37] Girl babies being mostly killed out, women became
scarce. Neighbouring groups being hostile, brides could only be
procured by hostile capture. Each group thus stole all its brides and
became exogamous, and marriage inside the group became a sin, by dint
of ‘a prejudice strong as a principle of religion.’
This theory of Mr. McLennan’s is, I think, quite untenable. The
prevalence of female infanticide, at the supposed very early stage of
society, is not demonstrated, and did not seem probable to Mr. Darwin.
Even if it existed, it could not create a prejudice against marrying
the few women left within the group. Mr. McLennan, unhappily, was
prevented by bad health, and death, from working out his hypothesis
completely. His most recent statement involves the theory that the
method of the Nairs of Malabar, living in polyandrous households (many
men to each woman) was the earliest form of ‘marriage.’ But people who,
like the Nairs, dwell in large households, are far indeed from being
‘primitive.’ ‘A want of balance between the sexes’ led, Mr. McLennan
held, to ‘a practice of capturing women for wives,’ and was followed
by ‘the rise of the law of exogamy.’ The first prohibition would be
against capturing women of the kindred (marked by the totem), for such
capture, if resisted, might involve the shedding of kindred blood.
Women being scarce, through female infanticide, kindred groups would
not give up or sell their women to each other (though to the males of
the groups, such women could not be wives), nor could women be raided
from kindred groups, as we saw. So they would be stolen from alien
groups, ‘and so marriages with kindred women would tend to go into
desuetude.’ The introduction of captured alien wives would change the
nature of matrimonial relations. Under the Nair system ‘a woman would
live in the house of her mother, and under the special guardianship and
protection of her brothers and her mother’s brothers. She would be in a
position of almost absolute independence of her husbands....’
But really pristine man and woman can have had no houses, no
matriarchal rule of women. The Nairs, not being primitive, have
houses, and their women have authority: pristine man was not in their
condition. However, captured alien wives would, Mr. McLennan argues, be
property, be slaves; and men would find this arrangement (now obsolete)
so charming that polyandry and the reign of woman would go out. The
only real legal marriage would be wedlock with an alien, a captive,
a slave woman. Marriage with a woman of the same stock would be a
crime and a sin. It would be incest.[38] Really it would be, at worst,
concubinage.
This theory seems untenable at every point, community of wives, female
infanticide, household life, supremacy of women in the household,
living with a non-captive wife reckoning as incest, and, in short, all
along the line. Even if the prejudice against marrying native women
did exist, it could not be developed into the idea of sin--granting
that the idea of sin already existed. To be sinful, endogamy within the
group must have offended some superstitious belief, perhaps the belief
in the totem, with its tabu.[39]
MR. CRAWLEY’S THEORY
To disengage from his learned book, _The Mystic Rose_ (1902), Mr.
Crawley’s theory of the origin of exogamy is no easy task. He strongly
insists on the ‘religious’ element in all early human thought, and
as in ‘religion’ he includes the vague fears, misgivings, and ideas
of ‘luck,’ which haunt even the least religious of modern men, we
may say that ‘religion,’ in this sense, mingles with the thought of
all ages. The present writer, like Dr. Johnson, is an example of
the ‘religious’ character, and of Mr. Crawley’s remark that ‘human
nature remains potentially primitive.’ To the ‘religious’ man or
woman (using ‘religious’ in this sense) the universe is indeed a
thing of delicate poise, and may ‘break, and bring down death,’ if
we walk under a ladder, or spill the salt, or enter a doorway with
the wrong foot foremost, or fail to salute a magpie, or the new moon.
The superstitious anthropologist, of course, knows that all these
apprehensions of his are utterly absurd, but the savage is careful
and troubled about them. The Philistine, on the other hand, is proud
of his conquest of these airy terrors: he ‘cannot imagine what people
mean by such nonsense,’ and, exactly so far as he is sincere, he cannot
comprehend early mankind.
Now, as to exogamy, our difficulty is to understand why breach of
the rule against certain marriages is, everywhere, so deadly a sin:
so black an offence against ‘religion.’ Mr. Crawley’s explanation
is not, perhaps, easily to be disengaged from the mass of his work,
but it begins in his appreciation of the δεισιδαιμονία of early men,
their ever-present sense of ‘religious’ terrors. ‘Thus all persons
are potentially dangerous to others, as well as potentially in
danger....’[40] This sense of peril arises ‘in virtue simply of the
distinction between a man and his fellows.’ Much more, then, are women
dangerous to men, and men to women, the sexes being so distinct from
each other. We know that the most extraordinary precautions are taken
to avoid contact with women in certain circumstances, and a well-known
story of Sir John Mandeville’s is only one case of the fact that the
bridegrooms of some races, from a superstitious terror, insist on being
made _cocus en herbe_. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen give the instance
of ‘the marriage ceremony’ (an odious brutality) among the Arunta of
Central Australia.[41] It is perhaps intended to deliver the bridegroom
from a peril imagined by superstition (as in Mandeville’s tale);[42]
and, without it, the Australian would resemble the man derided in the
old Scottish song:
The Bridegroom grat when the sun gaed doon.
Thus a ‘religious’ dread attaches among savages (the theory holds) to
all marriages; all are novelties, new steps in life, and therefore
are so far ‘sinful’ that they involve a peril, vague but awful, the
creation of superstition. Marriages contrary to the exogamous rule,
are only especially and inexplicably bad cases of the ‘sin’--that is,
mystic danger--of marital relations in general, as I understand Mr.
Crawley. Marriage ceremonies of every kind are devised to avoid ‘sin,’
as our Marriage Service candidly states, using ‘sin’ in the Christian
sense of the word. But there are savage marriages, those forbidden
by the law of exogamy, which, as a general rule, no ceremony can
render other than sinful. So great and terrible is the danger of such
marriages--namely, among many savages, between persons of the same
totem, that it threatens the whole community, just as the marriage
of Charles I. with a Catholic bride caused the Plague, according to
the Rev. Mr. Row, and therefore such unions are punished by the death
penalty, and are but seldom left to the automatic vengeance of the
tabu. Foremost in this black list of sins are the unions of brothers
and sisters of the full blood, though, we must remember, these are not
more heavily punished than marriage between a man and woman of the
same totem, even if the pair come together from opposite ends of the
continent, and are not blood relations at all. Why is this?
As I understand Mr. Crawley, the sexes, in savagery, avoid each other’s
society in everyday life, partly from ‘sexual tabu’--the result of the
superstitions already indicated; partly because of ‘sexual solidarity,’
perhaps even of ‘sexual antipathy.’ In fact, men and women are often
very much in each other’s way. We do not want women in our clubs and
smoking-rooms--nor do savages--and we despise a man who lurks in
drawing-rooms when his fellows are out of doors; a man who is a pillar
of luncheon parties and of afternoon tea. But this separation of the
sexes is especially rigid between the children of the same hearth, even
among nomads. The boys go with the father, the girls with the mother.
The manlike apes have the same ideas. ‘Diard was told by the Malays,
and he found it afterwards to be true, that the young Siamangs, when
in their helpless state, are carried about by their parents, the males
by the father, the females by the mother.’ ‘The nests ... are only
occupied by the female and young, the male passing the night in a fork
of the same tree or another tree in the vicinity.’[43]
These facts of ape etiquette would, to use an Elizabethan phrase, have
been ‘nuts’ to Mr. Atkinson, and prove that sexual separation of the
children is a very early institution. In Australia, New Caledonia,
and other countries, brothers and sisters must not even speak to each
other, and must avoid each other utterly. Thus the danger and ‘sin’
of the most innocent intercourse between brothers and sisters is
emphasised; much more awful, then, are matrimonial unions of brother
and sister. ‘The extension’ (of this idea) ‘by the use of relationships
produces the various forms of exogamy,’ says Mr. Crawley.[44] There are
difficulties here; for example, Mr. Crawley tells us that incest did
not ‘need prevention,’ though the rules of brother-and-sister avoidance
seem really to mean that it did, or was thought to do so (but perhaps
only superstitious dread of ordinary intercourse caused the rule?), and
though we know of regions where such incest, in early youth, is said
to be universal.[45] ‘Such incest,’ says Mr. Crawley, ‘is prevented by
the psychological difficulty with which love comes into play between
persons either closely associated, or strictly separated before the
age of puberty....’[46] Now we know that lust does come into play--for
example, among the Annamese--between brothers and sisters not closely
separated; and we also know that, the more persons are ‘strictly
separated,’ the more does the novelty and romance, when they do meet,
produce natural attraction, as between Romeo and Juliet. Incest among
the young is really prevented by the religious horror with which, by
most peoples, it is regarded; as well as, among the civilised, by the
constant and sacred familiarity of family life. The bare idea of it
can only occur, as a desirable notion, to a boyish revolutionary, like
Shelley, or to minds congenitally depraved.
Again, men and women of the same totem have no ‘avoidances’ forced
upon them, as far as I know (and, as they may not marry, this is an
oversight); yet their marriages are as terribly sinful as marriages
between brother and sister of the full blood. Mr. Crawley writes,
‘Obviously the one invariable antecedent in all exogamous systems,
indeed in all marriage systems, is the prohibition of marriage “within
the house.”’ But, we reply, A (a male) and B (a female), of the same
totem, may never have been in the same house, or in the same degree
of latitude and longitude, before they met and fell in love. As to
‘house,’ houses they may have none. Yet their union is a deadly sin.
Mr. Robertson Smith is said to have ‘set the question in the right
direction,’ when he wrote, ‘whatever is the origin of bars to marriage,
they certainly are early associated with the feeling that it is
indecent for house-mates to intermarry.’[47]
But what is early need not be primary.
Again, if Mr. Crawley reads on, he will find, I think, that the context
of Mr. Robertson Smith’s argument shows him not to have held that
exogamy arose in ‘the feeling that it is indecent for “house-mates”’
(or tent-mates) ‘to marry.’ For Mr. Robertson Smith adds, ‘it will not
do to turn this argument round, and say that the pre-Islamic law of
bars to marriage may have arisen ... in virtue of a custom that every
wife and her children shall have their own tent.[50] In any case, we
cannot speak of ‘house-mates’ before there were houses. But if for
‘house-mates’ we read ‘hearth-mates,’ then no sense of ‘indecency,’
as on Mr. Crawley’s theory, need necessarily attend their marriage,
for hearth-mates may be of different totems, derived from different
mothers, and may be marriageable enough, at least as far as totem
law is concerned. A, male, an Emu, marries B, a Bandicoot, and C, a
Grub. His children by B have the Bandicoot totem, his children by C
have the Grub totem. As far as totem law goes, these children may
intermarry, but this is not allowed in practice to-day. Mr. Mathews
says, of the Kamilaroi, ‘in order to prevent such a close marriage’
(of brother and sister on the father’s side), ‘every tribe has strict
social customs, founded upon public opinion, which will not tolerate
the union of a man with a woman whose blood relationship is considered
too near.’[48] Australian ethics, long trained under the old totem
and phratry prohibitions, are now sufficiently enlightened to reject
unions which we also forbid. But it cannot have been so in the
beginning, or the totem and phratry tabus on marriage would have had
no occasion to exist. It would have sufficed to say, ‘Thou shalt not
marry thy sister, or mother,’ and the totemic rule would have been a
cumbrous superfluity. Superfluous it would have been, even under the
hypothetical ‘group marriage system,’ where the law would have run
‘Thou shalt not marry thy group-sister or group-mother.’
While Mr. Matthews gives a kind of bye-law, forbidding marriage, under
female descent, with the paternal half-sister, Mr. Fison avers that the
Kamilaroi do allow such unions. ‘It is marriage within a phratria,’ but
not within a totem.[49] The fact was denied, or at least questioned,
by many correspondents, but Mr. Fison believed it to be authentic.
‘The natives justified it on the ground that the parties were not of
the same _mudji_’ (totem). Apparently these natives, who let a man
marry his father’s daughter, had not arrived at an objection to unions
of ‘too near flesh.’ But mere decadence, under European whisky, may
be the explanation. Mr. Matthews denies, as we saw, what Mr. Fison
asserts, as to the Kamilaroi. Mr. Crawley writes, ‘if we apply to the
word “indecent” the connotation of sexual tabu ... and if we understand
by “house-mates” those upon whom sexual tabu concentrates, we have
explained exogamy.’[50]
Scarcely, for sexual tabu against marriage, in fact, now, at least,
concentrates on people of near kin, and on totem-mates, man and woman
of the same totem, and they may be ‘house-mates,’ or ‘hearth-mates,’
or they may not (in polygamous society), and the hearth-mates (as
far as the totem rule goes, but not now in practice) may thus be
intermarriageable, as not of the same totem, while totem-mates, from
opposite ends of a continent, are not intermarriageable (except in the
peculiar case of the Arunta and cognate tribes).
But Mr. Crawley may reply that each totem, originally, did really
pertain to all members of each small local group, and that the totem
prohibition was extended, later, to all groups of the same totem name,
however distant in space. Thus according to the Euahlayi blacks there
were originally no totem names, but the divine Baiame gave them to
mortals with the rule that no pair of the same totem name were to
marry, ‘however far apart their hunting grounds.’ Thus considered,
the tabu which forbids an Emu man to marry an Emu woman, would mean
no more, originally, than that marriage between persons living in the
close contiguity of the same local group (in this case the Emu group)
was forbidden. There might be no original intention of prohibiting
marriage with a person of an Emu group, dwelling a thousand miles
away; probably no such group was known to exist. The original meaning
of exogamous law, I repeat, would be merely ‘you must not marry
a hearth-mate,’--or a ‘house-mate,’ in Mr. Crawley’s phrase--the
hearth-mates, in this particular instance, being delimited by the
name ‘Emu.’ So far my conjecture agrees with that of Mr. Crawley. The
extension of the prohibition to persons of the same totem-name, however
remote their homes and alien their blood, I am content to regard as a
later kind of accidental corollary. There came to be totem kins of the
same name, far remote, and thus, as it were casually, the law acquired
an unpremeditated sweep and scope, including persons not really of the
same group or blood, only of the same name.
But why was there originally any objection at all to marrying the most
accessible bride, the female hearth-mate? Here, as I have tried to
show, Mr. Crawley would explain by his idea of sexual tabu. All men are
regarded with superstitious dread by all women, and _vice versa_; above
all, as a daily danger, the men, or women living in close contiguity
must avoid each other. To keep them apart all sorts of tabus and
avoidances are invented, including the tabu on their marriage.
This is a plausible and taking theory, and I am far from arguing that
it cannot be a true theory. But the insuperable difficulty of deciding
arises from the circumstance that we know nothing at all about the
intellectual condition of the more or less human beings among whom
the prohibition of marriage within the group first arose. Were they
advanced enough to be capable of such a superstitious dread of each
other as the supposed cause of the prohibition takes for granted? Males
and females, among the lower animals, have no such superstition. It
requires human imagination. On the other hand, animal jealousy was well
within their reach, and Mr. Atkinson derives the original prohibition
of marriage within the group from the sheer sexual jealousy of the
animal-patriarch. In his opinion the consequent aversion to such
wedlock crystallised into a habit, as the race advanced towards full
humanity.
Even before his anthropoid clients were completely human, the group
would be replete with children of females not of the full group blood,
captives, and therefore these children (if blood kin through females
were regarded) would be eligible as wives. But this would not yet, of
course, be understood. Perhaps it would not be fully understood till
the totem name was given to, and accepted by, each group, and so there
was a definite mark set on each woman brought in from without the
group, and on her children, who bore her totem name. After that, each
totem group obviously contained members of other totems, and those,
being now recognised by their mother’s totem names, were technically
intermarriageable. What had been a group not explicitly conscious of
its own heterogeneous elements, became, in fact, an assemblage of
_recognised_ heterogeneousness, capable of finding legal brides within
itself, and no longer under the necessity (had it understood) of
capturing brides from without in hostile fashion. Such an assemblage
would, or might, come to consist of families, dwelling, or rather
wandering, within a given region, all on terms of friendship and mutual
aid. I take it that, by this time, improved weapons and instruments,
and improved skill, enabled groups larger than the small original
groups to live in a given area. In fact, the group would, or might,
be a small local ‘tribe,’ but, probably, was unconscious of the
circumstance. If conscious, one cause of hostility among the groups
was at an end, there was no necessity for stealing women, a system of
peaceful betrothals within the group might now arise, though certain
facts, to be dealt with later, raise a presumption, perhaps, that this
relatively peaceful state of life did not appear until two of the
original local totem groups coalesced in _connubium_, intermarrying
with each other, in fact becoming ‘phratries.’
To produce the new condition of affairs, two factors were necessary:
first, a means of distinguishing the captured women within every group
from each other, and from the group into which they were brought by
capture. This means of distinction was afforded by the totem names.
Next, a recognition of kinship was needed, and this was supplied, let
us conjecture, by naming the children of each of the captive women
after the totem name of the group from which she was captured. If all
the children indiscriminately were called by the totem name (say Emu)
of the local group into which their mothers had been brought--that is,
by the totem name of their fathers--there would be no recognisable
heterogeneity within that group, and so there would be, within the
local group, no possible wives, under the exogamous rule. Whether
polyandry then existed, or not, still all the fathers were of one
local totem name, say Emu, and children could only be differentiated
by styling them after the totem names of their alien mothers. This
is usually done among the savages who are least advanced, but not
among the Arunta, whose totem names, as we shall see, by a curious
divergence, do not indicate stock, but are derived from a singular
superstition about ancestral spirits, of various totems, incarnating
themselves in each new-born child.
Mr. McLennan, in _Primitive Marriage_ (1865), had arrived at
conclusions very like these. The primitive groups ‘were assumed to
be homogeneous.... While as yet there was no system of kinship, the
presence of captive women in a horde’ (group), ‘in whatever numbers,
could not introduce a system of betrothals’--the women and their
children not yet being differentiated from each other, and from the
group in which they lived. Mr. McLennan, in 1865, did not ask how
these women ever came to be distinctly differentiated, each from
each, and from the group which held them, though that differentiation
was a necessary prelude to the recognition of kindred through these
women. But presently, in his _Studies of Totemism_ (1869), he found,
whether he observed the fact or not, the means of differentiation.
Differentiation became possible after, and not before, each primitive
group received a totem name, retained by its captive women within each
group to which they were carried, a name to be inherited by their
children in each case.
He says, ‘heterogeneity as a statical force can only have come into
play when a system of kinship led the hordes to look on the children of
their foreign women as belonging to the stocks of their mothers.’ That
was impossible, before the totem or some equivalent system of naming
foreign groups arose, a circumstance not easily observed till Mr.
McLennan himself opened the way to the study of Totemism.[51]
It thus appears that Mr. Crawley’s theory of exogamy and mine are
practically identical in essence (if I rightly interpret him). The
original objection was to the intermarriage of the young of the
group of contiguity, the hearth-mates. If there was but one male of
the elder generation in the group of contiguity, these young people
would be brothers and sisters. If there were two or more males of
the elder generation, brothers, the group would include cousins, who
(even before the totem name was accepted by the group) would also be
forbidden to intermarry. When the totem name was accepted, cousins,
children of brother and sister, and even brothers and sisters, children
of one father, by. wives of different totems, would be, technically,
intermarriageable: though their marriages may, in practice, have been
forbidden because they were still of the group of contiguity, and as
such bore its _local_ totem name, say, Emu, while, by the mother’s
totem name, they may have been Bats, or Cats, or anything. Where I must
differ from Mr. Crawley is in doubting whether at this hypothetical
early stage, the superstitions which produce ‘sexual tabu’ had arisen.
We cannot tell; but certainly, as soon as the totem name had given rise
to the myth that the totem, in human beings as in animals and plants,
was inviolable--the beast or plant of the totem blood not to be killed
or eaten,[52] the woman of the totem name not to be touched--so soon
would endogamy, marriage within the totem, be a sin, incest. This it
would be; the totem tabu once established, whether sexual tabu, or
sexual jealousy, or both, caused the first prohibition, not to marry
group, mates. Here we may briefly advert to Dr. Westermarck’s theory of
exogamy, though it interrupts the harmonious issue of our speculations.
DR. WESTERMARCK’S THEORY
As to exogamy, Dr. Westermarck explains it by ‘an instinct’ against
marriage of near kin. Our ancestors who married near kin would die out,
he thinks, and they who avoided such unions would survive, ‘and thus
an instinct would be developed,’[53] by ‘Natural Selection.’ But why
did any of our ancestors avoid such marriages at all? From ‘an aversion
to those with whom they lived.’ And why had they this aversion?
Because they had an instinct against such unions. Then why had they
an instinct? We are engaged in a vicious circle. ‘Lastly it is not
scientific to use the term instinct of this kind of thing.’[54]
MR. MORGAN’S THEORY
As to Mr. Morgan’s theory, in his _Ancient Society_ (1877), of a
movement of sanitary and moral reform, which led to prohibition of
‘consanguine marriages’ I shall return to it in a later part of this
essay (‘Other Bars to Marriage’). Here it will be found that Mr. Morgan
is the source of certain other theories which we are to discuss, a fact
involving a certain amount of repetition of arguments already advanced.
RETURN TO THE AUTHOR’S THEORY
We conclude, provisionally, that exogamy, for various reasons of
sexual jealousy, and perhaps of sexual superstition, and of sexual
indifference to persons familiar from infancy, may, at least, have
tended to arise while each little human group was anonymous; before the
acceptance of totem names by local groups. But this exogamous tendency,
if it existed, must have been immensely reinforced and sweepingly
defined when the hitherto anonymous groups, coming to be known by
totem names, evolved the totem superstitions and tabus. Under these, I
suggest, exogamy became fully developed. Marriage was forbidden, amours
were forbidden (there are exceptional cases), within the totem name.
This law barred, of course, marital relations between son and mother,
between brother and sister, but, just as it stood, permitted incest
between father and daughter, so long as the totem name was inherited
from the mother. But that form of incest, in turn, came to be barred
by another set of savage rules, which, whatever their origin, prohibit
marriage _within the generation_. That set of rules, noted specially
in Australia and North America, is part of what is usually styled ‘The
Class System.’
[Footnote 1: Dr. Munro, _Archæological Journal_, vol. lix. no. 234, pp.
109-143: (_Tire à part_, p. 1.) See also later, _Hypothetical Early
Groups_.]
[Footnote 2: To this point, hostility, I return later.]
[Footnote 3: Dr. Munro, _Archæological Journal_, vol. lix. no. 234.]
[Footnote 4: Munro, _Archæological Journal_, vol. lix. no. 234, p. 22.]
[Footnote 5: _Ibid._ p. 32.]
[Footnote 6: _Ibid._ p. 18.]
[Footnote 7: _Ibid._ p. 20.]
[Footnote 8: _Ibid._ p. 22.]
[Footnote 9: L’Anthropologie, Mars-Avril, 1902. For a brief
bibliography of the bull-roarer see Mr. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_,
iii. pp. 423-4, note 1.]
[Footnote 10: _Journal and Proceedings Royal Society N.S.W._, vol.
xxviii. p. 305. See also Roth, _Ethnological Studies_, pp. 132-138.
1897.]
[Footnote 11: Ancient Law p. 132.]
[Footnote 12: Major Kennedy’s portrait of 1750-1760 represents him in
Macdonnell tartan. He was an agent of Prince Charles.]
[Footnote 13: _Early History of Institutions_, pp. 310, 311.]
[Footnote 14: Westermarck, _History of Human Marriage_, pp. 53-57.]
[Footnote 15: Mr. John Mathew declares that ‘jealousy is a powerful
passion with most aboriginal husbands’ in Australia. Messrs. Spencer
and Gillen, on the other hand, represent the aboriginal husband as
one of the most complacent of his species, jealousy being regarded
as ‘churlish.’ Messrs. Spencer and Gillen are decidedly the better
authorities. Mathew, _Jour. Roy. Soc. N.S.W._, xxiii. 404. Westermarck,
p. 57. _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 99.]
[Footnote 16: _Studies in Ancient History_, 1876, p. 41.]
[Footnote 17: The late Major Powell, of the American Bureau of
Ethnology, used _gens_ of a totem kin with descent in the male line,
_clan_ of such a kin with descent in the female line, and his school
follows him. Mr. Howitt, on the other hand, uses ‘horde’ for a local
community with female, ‘clan’ for a local community with male descent.]
[Footnote 18: ‘The Seri Indians,’ by W. J. McGee. _Report of Bureau of
American Ethnology_, Washington, 1898.]
[Footnote 19: ‘Siouan Sociology,’ _Report of American Ethnological
Bureau_, 1897, p. 213.]
[Footnote 20: _Studies in Ancient History_, second series, p. 265.]
[Footnote 21: _Studies in Ancient History_, second series, p. 46. In an
appendix to Mr. _Morgan’s Ancient Society_, Mr. McLennan’s terms are
severely criticised.]
[Footnote 22: I shall call each set indicated by a totem name a ‘totem
group,’ if the members live together; a ‘totem kin,’ if they are
scattered through the tribe.]
[Footnote 23: _The Patriarchal Theory_, pp. 6, 7, 1885.]
[Footnote 24: Meaning by Exogamy, not a mere tendency to marry out of
the group, but a customary law with a religious sanction.]
[Footnote 25: Here the unusual case of the Arunta offers an exception
to the rule; a point to be discussed later.]
[Footnote 26: Spencer and Gillen, pp. 8-10.]
[Footnote 27: _Ibid_. pp. 8-9.]
[Footnote 28: ‘Remarks on Totemism,’ _Jour. Anthrop. Inst._, August,
November, 1898.]
[Footnote 29: _Kinship in Early Arabia_, p. 187.]
[Footnote 30: But, as Dr. Durkheim says, man and wife might soon
abandon each other, if familiarity breeds contempt.]
[Footnote 31: _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, May, 1895, p.
444.]
[Footnote 32: _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 132. 1880.]
[Footnote 33: Spencer and Gillen, p. 70. Frazer, _Fortnightly Review_,
April, May, 1899.]
[Footnote 34: _The Mystic Rose_, p. 460.]
[Footnote 35: _History of Human Marriage_, pp. 105-113.]
[Footnote 36: Tylor, _J. A. I._ xviii. 3, 254.]
[Footnote 37: The practice however, is attributed to tame canary birds.]
[Footnote 38: _Studies in Ancient History_, second series, pp. 57-65.]
[Footnote 39: Cf. _Custom and Myth_ (A. L.), p. 258.]
[Footnote 40: _Mystic Rose_, p. 31.]
[Footnote 41: Spencer and Gillen, pp. 92-93.]
[Footnote 42: Lord Avebury’s view that the ‘rite’ implies compensation
to the other males of the community will be considered later.]
[Footnote 43: Westermarck, p. 13. Citing Brehm, ‘Thierleben,’ i. 97,
_Proceedings R.G.S._ xvi. 177.]
[Footnote 44: _Mystic Rose_, p. 443.]
[Footnote 45: Westermarck, p. 292.]
[Footnote 46: _Mystic Rose_, p. 222.]
[Footnote 47: _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_, p. 170.]
[Footnote 48: _Proc. Roy. Soc. N.S.W._ xxxi. 166.]
[Footnote 49: _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, pp. 42,46, 47, 115.]
[Footnote 50: _Mystic Rose_, p. 443.]
[Footnote 51: See _Studies in Ancient History_, pp. 183-186.]
[Footnote 52: This is the view of Dr. Durkheim, who explains the blood
superstition. Cf. Reinach, _L’Anthropologie_, x. 652.]
[Footnote 53: _History of Human Marriage_, p. 352.]
[Footnote 54: Compare Mr. Crawley, _Mystic Rose_, pp. 444-446.]