OTHER BARS TO MARRIAGES
The prohibitions on marriage, with which we have hitherto been
concerned, are based on what savages regard--while we do not--as
relations of kindred. Men and women of the same ‘phratry’ or ‘primary
division’ may not intermarry (where such divisions exist), nor may
men and women of the same totem name. Civilised society, at least in
Europe, now recognises no such things as the ‘phratry’ or the totem
kin. When Mr. George Osborne, in _Vanity Fair_, was asked whether he
was akin to the ducal House of Leeds, he replied that he bore the same
arms--these having been conferred on his father by a coach-builder. In
savage society, Captain Osborne’s answer would have been satisfactory.
He would really have reckoned as a kinsman of all other Emus, if his
totem and badge (coat of arms) was an Emu. In Scotland the Campbell
name used to be regarded as implying at least a chance that the bearer
was of the blood of the Black Knight of Loch Awe, and had a right
to the Campbell tartan, and badge, the gale, or bog-myrtle. But, of
course, as a rule, in modern society, a common surname is no proof of
kinship, and coats of arms are usually home by the middle classes, and
peers of recent creation, without much inquiry.
So far, then, the totemic rules which prohibit certain marriages,
have no resemblance to our own definite ‘forbidden degrees,’ based on
nearness of blood. The savage rules, as they stand, include our notions
of kindred, but these notions, as far as they are recognised, are not
conterminous with ours. But the ‘phratry’ prohibitions, and the totem
prohibitions, are not the only bars to marriage among such peoples as
the Australians.
The other bars are lucidly described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.[1]
‘There are still further restrictions to marriage ... and it is here
that we are brought into contact with the terms of relationship.’
We find that a woman may belong to a totem kin (and phratry) into
which a man may lawfully marry, ‘yet there is a further restriction
preventing marriage in this particular case.’ Thus a male Dingo (among
the Urabunna) may marry a female Water Hen, as far as ‘phratry’ and
totem are concerned. But he may not marry a woman of the Water Hen
totem if she reckons (1) as his father’s sister (i.e. of his father’s
generation), (2) if she is his child, or his brother’s child (of the
_next_ generation), (3) if she be one of his mother’s younger brother’s
daughters: but he _may_ marry her if she (4) be one of his mother’s
elder brother’s daughters. All women of that category (4) are Nupa, or
nubile, as far as this man goes. In category I, the women (including
‘paternal aunts,’ as we reckon) are of an older generation than the
man; in category 2 they are of a younger generation (including our
‘children’ and ‘nieces’); in category 3 the women include our cousins
on the maternal side, by uncles younger than our mothers, and, in
category 4, they include our cousins on the maternal side, by uncles
older than our mothers. We Europeans, being males, may not marry into
categories 1 and 2, but if not Catholics, we may marry into categories
3 and 4; if Catholics, we may--if we can get a dispensation.
In the Australian system the oddest thing is that a male may marry into
what, in our phrase, includes his younger maternal uncle’s daughter,
but not his elder maternal uncle’s daughter. But we here use the
words ‘uncle,’ ‘aunt,’ and ‘cousin,’ only by way of illustration. The
Urabunna, and tribes of their level generally, have no such words.
All children (category I) ‘of men who are at the same level in the
generation, and belong to the same class and totem, are regarded as
the common children of these men,’ or, perhaps we should rather say,
are called by the same name, Biaka, as a man’s own children are styled.
A man knows very well which children he reckons his own, though, as
will be seen, he has little ground for his confidence. In the same
way a child, though he calls all men of his father’s class, totem,
and level in the generation, _Nia_ (fathers), knows well enough which
_Nia_ feeds him, pets him, thrashes him for his good, and, generally,
plays the paternal part. For example, a man informs you that this or
that native, by personal name Oriaka, is his _Okilia_, ‘and you cannot
possibly tell without further inquiry whether he is the speaker’s own
or tribal brother, that is the son of his own father, or of some man
belonging to the same particular group’ (by ‘phratry,’ totem, and
seniority) ‘as his father.’[2] But you can learn ‘by further inquiry:’
the actual relationship, in our sense of the word, is recognised.
‘GROUP MARRIAGE’
These facts necessarily lead to the question, are all men of one class,
totem, and seniority, actual husbands of all women of the opposite
class, different totem, and equivalent seniority? (Group Marriage).
Or, if this is no longer the case, was it once the case? and are these
sweeping uses of names which include our ‘father,’ ‘mother,’ ‘brother,’
‘child,’ survivals of such a stage, called ‘Group Marriage’? This
question is still undecided; good authorities take opposite views of
the question, which has bred, in the past, much angry controversy.
MR. MORGAN AND THE CLASS SYSTEM
The arrangement by ‘classes,’ ‘the classificatory system,’ was first
brought into scientific prominence by the late Mr. Lewis Morgan, an
American gentleman affiliated to the Iroquois tribe, in his very
original studies of the names for degrees of kinship.[3] A great deal
may be said, and has been said, especially by Mr. McLennan and Dr.
Westermarck, against Mr. Morgan’s ideas and methods, but his large and
careful collection of facts is of high importance. On what he called
‘the Malayan system,’ one name denoting kin includes all my brothers,
sisters, and cousins. Another name includes my father, mother, my
uncles, aunts, and all the cousins of my father, mother, aunts,
and uncles. The generation of my grandparents and their relations
is included in a third name; a fourth covers my children and their
cousins, and the grandchildren of my brothers and sisters, with their
children, bear the same name, for me, as my own grandchildren. From
the names Mr. Morgan inferred the existence of certain facts in the
evolution of systems of kindred. Everybody of the same generation
lived together, once, on his theory, in ‘communal marriage,’ brothers,
sisters, and cousins. There was promiscuity between all men and women
in the same generation. Of course this involves the converse of Mr.
Atkinson’s Primal Law, as Mr. Atkinson observes in his eighth chapter.
In place of the prohibition of brother and sister union being the
earliest of prohibitions (as in Mr. Atkinson’s system), the rule that
they must unite, caused, in Mr. Morgan’s opinion, the earliest form of
the human family.
DIFFICULTIES OF MR. MORGAN’S THEORY
Mr. Morgan’s theory, it must be observed, landed him at once in the
fallacy of supposing that prohibitions of marriage of kinsfolk were
originally the result of ‘a reformatory movement.’[4] We have seen
that, granting, for the sake of argument, Mr. Morgan’s premise of
an original ‘undivided commune,’ Mr. Fison is also deposited in the
same difficulty, and was once even inclined to regard a theory of
intervention ‘by a higher power’ (the Dieri myth) as not necessarily
out of the question, if marriage was once communal. To reform such
marriage relations, he says, ‘would be a step in advance so difficult
for men in that utter depth of savagery to take, that they would not
be able to take it, unless they had help from without. This might be
given by contact with a more advanced tribe; but if all the tribes
started from the same level, that impulse would be impossible in the
first instance, and must have been derived from a higher power.’[5] Mr.
Fison, as we saw, has since expressed the opinion that the origin of
exogamy is probably indiscoverable, but I cite again his early remark
to prove his sense of the insuperable difficulty of Mr. Morgan’s theory.
How were men in his hypothetical condition to know that there was
anything to reform? It needed a divine revelation!
Mr. Morgan was himself aware of this difficulty, and tried to get out
of it, by using Darwinian phrases about ‘natural selection’--‘blessed
words,’ but here unavailing. He was in the posture of Mr. Spencer,
between direct legislation to introduce exogamy, and gradual
evolution of exogamy, as the slow result of the felt need of ‘_some_
organisation,’--its nature and purpose unknown. Thus Mr. Morgan,
speaking of communal marriage, and its results, says that ‘emancipation
from them was slowly accomplished through movements which resulted in
unconscious reformation.’ These movements were, first, the ‘class’
system, then the ‘_gens_’ (totem system), ‘worked out unconsciously
through natural selection.’[6] This means, if it means anything, that,
by a freak or sport, some people did not marry in and in, that they
unconsciously evolved the totem system, that they therefore throve,
while others who married in and in, and did not evolve the totem
system, perished, and so we have the results of ‘natural selection.’
But why did some people avoid the habit of marriages of near kin which
was so general? The position is that of Dr. Westermarck, who adds an
‘instinct,’ developed by natural selection,[7] an idea which involves
arguing in a circle.
Again, that peoples marrying in the communal way would die out has to
be proved: science has no certainty in the matter.
In any case, Mr. Morgan presently deserts his opinion about slow
unconscious reformation, and his natural selection. ‘The organisation
into classes seems to have been directed to the single object of
breaking up the intermarriage of brothers and sisters, which affords
a probable explanation of the origin of the system. But since it does
not look beyond this particular abomination it retained a conjugal
system nearly as objectionable....’[8] The reader sees that Mr.
Morgan cannot keep on the high Darwinian level. He relapses on a
supposed moral reform with a single object of things ‘abominable’--to
us--and ‘objectionable’--to us. But how did the pristine savages
find out that such things were ‘abominable’? Presently the totem
prohibition (‘the _gens_’) ‘originates probably in the ingenuity
of a small band of savages,’ for the purpose of modifying marriage
law, and the daring novelty ‘must soon have proved its utility in
the production of superior men.’[9] Here we have the legislation
due to human ‘ingenuity,’ and natural selection comes in to aid and
diffuse the system. Later ‘the evils of the first form of marriage
came to be perceived’ (what were they?) and this led ‘if not to its
direct abolition, to a preference for wives beyond this degree. Among
the Australians it was abolished by the organisation into classes,
and more widely among the Turanian tribes by the organisation into
gentes.’ The Australians have ‘gentes’ (totem groups) quite as much
as the ‘Turanians’ or ‘Ganowanians,’ and we have tried to show that
totems are prior to ‘classes.’[10] But the Australians ‘abolished’
a form of marriage by an ‘organisation,’ which implies deliberate
legislation. From this difficulty of legislation, so early and so
moral, no advocate of the ‘bisection’ of an undivided commune and of
its ‘subdivision’ into totem ‘phratries’ and kins, can escape, however
he may make a push at ‘natural selection,’ and gradual evolution.
MR. MORGAN ON TERMS OF RELATIONSHIP
These perplexities do not predispose us in favour of Mr. Morgan’s
theory of the terms of ‘Relationship,’ which we have illustrated by the
case of the Urabunna. He himself takes the Hawaiian terms, which are to
the same effect. In brief, all the men and women of a generation are’
brothers and sisters,’ all those of the prior generation are ‘fathers
and mothers,’ all those of the following generation are ‘children.’
Now, if ever all the men and women of a generation married ‘all through
other,’ promiscuously, these terms of ‘relationship’ would be in place.
First, we are told, brothers and sisters in a family intermarried,
and the process ‘gradually enfolded the collateral brothers and
sisters, as the range of the conjugal system widened.’ And then ‘the
evils came to be perceived,’ what evils, how perceived, we do not
know, and Reformation set in. It definitely began with the Australian
‘Bisection,’ ‘the organisation into classes’ (really into ‘phratries’),
and about the difficulties of that theory enough has been said.
The reader will naturally ask, What is the original meaning of the
words now used by Hawaiians, and Urabunna, and others, for the
relations in which our ‘father,’ ‘son,’ ‘wife,’ ‘husband,’ ‘mother.’
‘daughter,’ ‘brother,’ ‘sister,’ are included? Do the words embracing
our terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ in Hawaii, or elsewhere, imply
procreation, and issue (as in Greek), ‘from the same womb’? Among the
Arunta they cannot mean procreation, if they do not even know (as
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen tell us), that there is any such thing as
procreation. ‘A spirit child enters a woman,’ that is all. In the times
of this primeval ignorance, words for relationships could not imply
bearing and begetting; they must have meant something else. Say that
they meant relationships in point of seniority: ‘my male elder,’ ‘my
female elder,’ ‘my male junior,’ ‘my female junior,’ ‘my male coeval
or friend,’ ‘my female coeval or friend,’ ‘the man I may marry,’ ‘the
woman I may marry,’ ‘the woman or man I may not marry.’
If low savage names for relationships meant that (no doubt they do not,
or not often) then they would undeniably prove nothing as to a system
of communal marriage. A baby points to any man or woman and says ‘pa’
or ‘ma,’ without any theory of communal marriage. Thus philologists
must first interpret for us the original significance of these savage
names of relationships. Once given, they would last, whatever they
originally implied. Dr. Westermarck has urged this point.[11] In the
terms themselves there is, generally, nothing which indicates that
they imply an idea of consanguinity.’ ‘Pa, papa’ (father), ma, mama
(mother), and scores of others, ‘are formed from the earliest sounds
a child can produce,’ and ‘have no intrinsic meaning whatever.’ Dr.
Westermarck gives a long list of such words, applied to ‘fathers,
and all the tribe brothers of fathers,’ and the same for mothers,
concluding ‘that we must not, from these designations, infer anything
as to early marriage customs.’ He does not deny that other terms of
relationship have roots of independent meaning, ‘but the number of
those that imply an idea of consanguinity does not seem to be very
great.’ In Lifu (Melanesia), the word for ‘father’ means ‘root;’ for
‘mother,’ ‘foundation’ or ‘vessel;’ for ‘sister,’ ‘not to be touched;’
for ‘elder and younger brother,’ ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled.’[12] The terms for
father and mother denote consanguinity; the others, customary law, and
status.
If we only knew the meanings, say, of the Urabunna words for
relationships, we should learn much. But the truly amusing fact is that
Mr. Fison, for example, did not know the language of the natives, and
thought that probably not six white men in Australia had an adequate
knowledge, and an adequate access to the notions, of the tribesmen. Of
these one had been initiated, and, like a gentleman, declined to break
the oath of secresy.[13] This was in 1880. Things may have improved.
But unless our authorities know the languages, where are we? We do know
that seniority is indicated: Father’s elder brothers are Gampatcha Kuka
(Warramunga tribe).
Mr. McLennan thought that all these terms were ‘terms of address,’
used to avoid the employment of personal names, and Dr. Westermarck
holds that ‘there can scarcely be any doubt that the terms for
relationship are, in their origin, terms of address.’ Messrs. Spencer
and Gillen, after impartial consideration, cannot accept this view,
for Australia; where the terms are very numerous, and stand for
relations very complicated, connected with the intermarrying groups,
and with social duties. In addressing a person, his or her individual
name (our Christian name) is freely used.[14] They believe that the
terms can only be explained ‘on the theory of the former existence of
group marriage, and further, that this has of necessity given rise
to the terms of relationship used by the Australian natives.’ These
opinions are shared by Messrs. Fison and Howitt. The former says, ‘It
must, I think, be allowed that the classificatory terms point to group
marriage,’ and though Bastian denies this, Mr. Fison supports his
theory by the Dieri custom of allotting paramours (pinauru) to men and
women, out of the sets which may intermarry.[15]
To this problem we return; meanwhile it may seem impertinent in mere
ethnologists of the study to hint a doubt as to the conclusions of
observers on the spot. Mr. Crawley, however, has no hesitations. The
use of the terms of relationship, he thinks, does not testify to a past
of ‘Group Marriage,’ or to a remoter past of promiscuity, but is ‘the
regular result of the primitive theory of relationship; the system
codifies a combination of relation and relationship, “address,” and
age.’ The terms in use ‘do not in themselves necessarily point to a
previous promiscuity, or even to a present group marriage,’ as Messrs.
Spencer and Gillen believe.
The point is one on which I almost hesitate to venture a decided
opinion. Much seems to depend on the original sense of the various
terms, and on that point, in the case of Urabunna, and many other
tribes, we have no light. But often the terms do not express
consanguinity at all. There seems to be no word for ‘daughter’ as
distinct from ‘son,’ ‘nephew,’ and ‘niece.’ The grandfather _maternal_
is _Thunthie_, and _Thunthunnie_ is Urabunna for totem, so that it
is tempting to guess that _Thunthie_ means ‘a sire of the maternal
totem.’[16] Kadnini, again (I speaking), means grandfather paternal,
grandmother maternal, _and_ grandchildren.[17] These relationships
imply duties and services. ‘One individual has to do certain things
for another ... and any breach of these customs is severely punished.’
An Arunta of the Panunga class calls all Kumura men ‘fathers-in-law.’
He gashes his flesh if any one of his ‘fathers-in-law’ dies, and he
drops his dead game if he meets any one of them. They all have that
advantage over him.[18] Thus these terms of relationship--communal in
appearance--really involve certain duties, rather than relations of
blood and affinity. But emphatically the terms are more than mere terms
of address, as in Mr. McLennan’s theory.
But these are usages of the system as it stands to-day. Is there behind
it an ‘undivided commune,’ as Mr. Morgan held; is there actual ‘group
marriage’? I am not apt to believe that there is. Language shows, in
the terms of relationship, a group of ‘Mothers’ for each child; but, as
Mr. Darwin remarks, ‘it seems almost incredible that the relationship
of the child to its mother should ever have been completely ignored,
especially as the women in most savage tribes nurse their infants for
a long time.’ A man’s mother is _one_, and _must_ be known, though he
calls many women by the same name as he gives to his mother. She is
lumped, in the terms of relationship, in one term with all the women
whom the father might legally have married, but did not. The son, in
addressing or speaking of his mother, overlooks the ‘one love which
needs no winning,’ and his term has reference only to the present
marriage law of his tribe. That law ‘codifies’ the terms, they result
from that law, and that law, again, is based, if I am right, on totem
prohibitions, on the desire to keep marriage between people of the
same generation, and on the rights and duties of the generations.
These prohibitions, of phratry, ‘class,’ totem, and age, leave only a
certain set of women marriageable to a certain set of men. The name of
this set of women is _Nupa_ to their coevals, _Luka_ to the succeeding
generation. There is no name for ‘wife,’ no name for ‘mother;’ there
are only names expressive of customary legal status, itself the result
of the existing rules. Whatever their original sense, they all now
connote seniority and customary legal status, with its reciprocal
duties, rights and avoidances. ‘It is the system, and not group
marriage, which has given rise to these terms of relationship,’ says
Mr. Crawley.[19]
But what gave rise to the system? Mr. Fison has told us. 1. ‘The
division of a tribe (community) into two exogamous intermarrying
classes....’ 2. ‘The subdivision of these two classes into four,’ or,
he suggests, the amalgamation of two tribes. 3. ‘Their subdivision into
gentes distinguished by totems.’[20]
But all of this theory we have already declined to accept for reasons
given, and mainly because it involves (as I try to show) deliberate
primeval reformatory legislation--without any conceivable motive.
Again, we cannot accept Mr. Fison’s system because it involves the
hypothesis that a tribe, or ‘community,’ large enough to feel the
necessity of bisecting itself for social and moral purposes, existed
at a period when the difficulties of commissariat, of food supply,
and of hostility, could seldom, if ever, permit its existence. A tribe
is, I repeat, a local aggregate of small groups become friendly: it is
not a primeval horde which keeps on subdividing itself, legislatively,
for reformatory purposes. What social cement kept such a primeval
horde, such an ‘undivided commune,’ together; and how did the animal
jealousy of men so near to the brutal stage fail to rend it into
pieces? How was it fed? How can we imagine a human herd--how supplied
with food, who knows?--wherein each male sees each other male approach
what female he pleases, perhaps his own preferred girl, without
internecine jealousy? I cannot imagine this indifference to love in
such a primitive Agapemone; I cannot understand its economics; any
more than I can guess why such a state of affairs ever seemed--to its
members--‘abominable’ and ‘objectionable,’ and a thing to be reformed;
yet they ‘bisected’ it, and ‘subdivided’ the segments, all in the
interests of morality--such is the theory.
As for the good-humoured laxity which enables all men and women to
live together matrimonially at random, Mr. Morgan found an example, as
he thought, in the _Punalua_ of the Hawaiians. The word _Punalua_, when
observed (1860) by Judge Andrews, meant ‘dear friend,’ or ‘intimate
companion.’ A man called his sister’s husband (our ‘brother-in-law) his
‘dear friend,’ and a woman styled the wife of her husband’s brother
(her sister-in-law), _her_ ‘dear friend,’ or _Punalua_. This shows that
relations-in-law were not ‘Foes-in-law,’ or, at least, that this was
not the official view of the case. It really does not follow that all
the wives ‘shared their remaining husbands in common.’ Judge Andrews
thought that this happy family ‘_were inclined_ to possess each other
in common.’ That was only the Judge’s theory, also the theory of the
Rev. Artemus Bishop. Probably there was a great deal of genial license
and indifference among loose luxurious barbaric people, living in
‘summer isles of Eden,’ where food and necessaries were ready made by
benignant Nature.[21]
Each shepherd clasped, with unconcealed delight,
His yielding fair, within the Captain’s sight;
Each yielding fair, as chance or fancy led,
Preferred new lovers to her sylvan bed.[22]
This is vastly well, and the poet adds, in a liberal spirit,
What Otaheite is, let England be!
It is very well, but it by no means represents, probably, the manners
of primitive man.
‘We may conclude,’ says Mr. Darwin, ‘from what we know of the jealousy
of all male quadrupeds,... that promiscuous intercourse, in a state
of nature, is extremely improbable.... The most probable view is that
primeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many
wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously
guarded against all other men. Or he may have lived with several wives
by himself, like the Gorilla, for all the natives agree that but one
adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows up a struggle
takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving
out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community. The
younger males, being thus expelled and wandering about, would, when at
last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close interbreeding
within the limits of the same family,’ just as the other male did.[23]
This second view of Mr. Darwin’s is much like the theory of Mr.
Atkinson, and is very unlike Mr. Morgan’s theory of a human horde,
living in communal marriage, or group marriage. Mr. Darwin’s idea,
moreover, the primitive groups being small, does not encounter the
economic difficulties raised by the hypothesis of the ‘undivided
commune.’ The strongest male practically enforced exogamy, as far as
he was able, and maybe conceived to have entertained no scruples as to
connection with his daughters. Mr. Darwin admitted that ‘the indirect
evidence’ for communal marriage, and fraternal incest, was ‘extremely
strong,’ but then ‘it rests chiefly on the terms of relationship which
are employed between members of the same tribe, implying a connection
with the tribe alone, and not with either parent.’ If, however, we
have successfully explained these terms of relationship as not usually
meaning degrees of consanguinity, but of customary legal status, under
the prevalent customary law, the evidence which these terms yield for
promiscuity, or group marriage, is extremely weak, or is nil, above all
if our theory of how the legal status arose is accepted. And, if it is
not accepted, back we come to primeval ‘reformatory movements.’
In Lifu, the word for ‘sister’ means ‘not to be touched,’ land this is
a mere expression of customary law. A man ‘must not touch’ any one of
the women of his generation whom the totem tabu and the rule of the
exogamous ‘phratry’ (in origin, we suggest, totemic) forbid him to
touch. All such women, in a particular grade, are his sisters. Many
women, besides his actual sisters, stand to him in the degree thus
prohibited. All bear the same name of status as a man’s actual sisters
bear, but the name does not _mean_ ‘sisters’ at all, in our sense of
that word: namely, daughters of the man’s real father and mother. It
means tabued women of a generation. If the ‘classificatory’ terms which
include our ‘fathers,’ ‘sisters,’ ‘wives,’ and the rest meant what our
‘fathers,’ ‘sisters,’ ‘wives,’ and so on mean, then the evidence from
the terms, for communal or group marriage, would really be ‘extremely
strong.’ But, as Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say, ‘unless all ideas of
terms of relationship as counted among ourselves be abandoned, it is
useless to try and (_sic_) understand the native terms.’[24] Yet the
whole force of the argument for communal marriage derived from savage
terms of relationship rests precisely on our not ‘abandoning’ (as we
are warned to abandon) ‘all ideas of terms of relationship as counted
among ourselves.’
The friends of group and communal marriage, it seems to me, keep
forgetting that our ideas of sister, brother, father, mother, and so
on, have nothing to do (as they tell us at certain points of their
argument) with the native terms which include, indeed, but do not
denote these relationships, as understood by us. An Urabunna calls a
crowd of men of his father’s status by the same term as he calls his
father. This need not point to an age when, by reason of promiscuity,
no man knew his father. Were this so, a man of the generation prior
to his father might be the actual parent of the speaker, and all men
under eighty ought to be called ‘father’ by him--which they are not.
The facts may merely mean that the Urabunna styles his father by the
name denoting a status which his father shares with many other men; a
status in seniority, ‘phratry,’ and totem. We really cannot first argue
that our ideas have no relation to the terms employed by savages, and
then, when we want to prove a past of communal marriage, turn round and
reason as if our terms and the savage terms were practically identical.
We cannot say ‘our word “son” must not be thought of when we try to
understand the native term of relationship which includes sons in our
sense,’ and next aver that ‘sons in our sense, are regarded as real
sons of the group, not of the individual--because of a past stage of
promiscuity making paternity indiscoverable.’
As Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say, we must ‘lay aside all preconceived
ideas of relationship,’ when we study the Urabunna or other
classificatory terms of relationships.[25] Let us do so, and the
evidence borne by these terms to a past of communal marriage vanishes
at once. That the terms often denote status in customary law is
demonstrated. ‘There are certain customs which are enforced by long
usage and according to which men and women of particular degrees of
relationship may alone have marital relations, or may not speak to one
another, or according to which one individual has to do certain things
for another, such as providing the latter with food, or with hair, as
the case may be, and any breach of these customs is severely punished.
The elder men of each group very carefully keep alive these customs,
many of which are of considerable value to themselves....’[26]
Thus, you have speared a fish, or an opossum, but if you meet any man
of your father-in-law’s set, you must drop your spoil and make off.
Consequently, I venture to take it, the terms of relationship in no way
answer to our ideas of kin, but merely denote legal status.
HOW THE TERMS OF RELATIONSHIP ORIGINALLY AROSE
We cannot, as a rule, recover (or Australian students have not
recovered) the original sense and etymology of terms like Biaka, Nia,
Nupa, and so forth. We are thus left to choose between two competing
theories of their nature and diffusion. If we advocate the hypothesis
of consanguine marriage and group marriage, we must suppose that the
members of the ‘undivided commune’ of the theory, had once names
absolutely identical in sense with our ‘father,’ ‘mother,’ ‘sister,’
‘brother,’ ‘son,’ ‘daughter,’ and so forth. But the speakers, in each
case, were obliged to apply these words with the utmost laxity, because
who knew _who_ A’s father might be, and whether C’s sister were really
his sister or not, while every girl was the wife of every male of her
generation, not barred by other laws, and so on? The promiscuity of
living, then, made this lax use of words for relationships inevitable.
This is the usual hypothesis, and the sweeping scope of savage words
for human relationships is accepted as proof that consanguine and
group marriage once existed and left their marks in language. On the
other hand, if communal marriage prevailed, the people who lived in
that condition could not possibly have had ideas equivalent to our
father, son, daughter, brother, wife, and so on. Our ideas of these
relationships could not enter the human mind, at the hypothetical
stage of culture when nobody knew ‘who is who’ and the hypothesis is
wrecked on that fact.
Therefore either the names now used under the ‘class system’ are of
unknown original sense; or, human marriage was, from the first, so
far, ‘individual’ that our ideas of father, mother, brother, sister,
son, daughter, could arise and could find expression in terms that
still survive, say, among the Urabunna or other Australians. But while
tribal customary laws as to classes, totems, generations, marriage
rules, and many other social duties were being evolved; some of the
ancient names for father, son, brother, sister, were perhaps taken up
and applied to each of the large sets of persons whose customary legal
status was _now_ (as groups coalesced into large tribes) on the level
of actual fathers, sons, brothers, sisters, and the rest. Obviously,
in a primitive group of a male senior, his female mates and children,
there could not exist (other groups being, on my theory, strange or
hostile) large sets of persons occupying a common legal status, as in
modern tribes. The existence of such sets of persons is the result of
the later and _tribal_ society, of society in which many groups are
reconciled and united in a local tribe. Only in such a tribe, which
cannot be primitive, is the classificatory system of naming sets
of people necessary. It is only in _tribal_ law that the grades of
customary status answering to all the many terms can exist, and tribes
with their laws cannot be primitive. Most names for the various grades,
therefore, are later than Mr. Darwin’s hypothetical stage of small and
perhaps hostile groups; they were, in a few cases, perhaps originally
names for such relationships as our own father, mother, son, brother,
&c., but in the evolution of tribal customary law, such names have been
extended out of their _family_, or fire-circle, into their _tribal_
significance, out of recognised kinship, or close contiguity, into
terms including all who have the same status, rights, and duties.
SUPPOSED SURVIVALS OF GROUP MARRIAGE
If our suggestion as to the origin and significance of the
‘classificatory terms of relationship’ be plausible, then the theory
of a pristine past of ‘communal’ or of ‘group marriage’ will lose what
Mr. Darwin deemed the chief evidence in its favour, the evidence from
terms of relationship. But there remains the evidence from ‘survivals,’
in institutions. For example, among the Urabunna, women of a certain
seniority, totem and ‘phratry’ are _Nupa_ to men of the relative status
among males. They are the men’s potential wives. In actual practice
each individual man has one or perhaps two of these _Nupa_ women who
are specially attached to himself, and live in his camp. They are his
wives. But each man has also, or many men have, other women of the
_Nupa_ set, who by an allotment, which the elders arrange, are his
_Piraungaru_, He is, that is to say, their ‘second master,’ after their
husbands. This is a kind of _Cicisbeism_, recognised and regulated by
customary law, and sanctioned by a definite ceremony. Messrs. Spencer
and Gillen therefore say ‘individual marriage does not exist, either
in name or in practice, among the Urabunna tribe.’ Their idea appears
to be that once every man was the husband of every _Nupa_ woman who
was accessible, and that the _Piraungaru_ arrangement is a nascent
restriction upon, or survival of, this communal marriage. It is
admitted that a man may now try to prevent his wife from having sexual
relations with her Piraungaru man, just as an Italian of the eighteenth
century might have done in the case of his wife’s _Cicisbeo_. ‘But this
leads to a fight, and the husband is looked upon as churlish.’ The
Italian husband would have undergone the same reproach, yet _he_ lived
in a society which in theory, and as Christian, insisted on individual
marriage.
The question arises, is the _Piraungaru_ arrangement a modified
survival of communal marriage, or is it a mere chartered libertinism in
customary practice, and not a ‘rudimentary survival’? It is certainly
found among the tribes most tenacious of archaic institutions. Mr.
Crawley thinks, however, and, under correction, I agree with him, that
the _Piraungaru_ system is no survival, and that it ‘has never been
more fully developed than it is now.’[27]
PIRAUNGARU AND PIRAURA
As to this Piraungaru affair, as usual we need, and do not get, the
help of philology. What does the word ‘Piraungaru’ literally mean?
Among the Dieri the Piraungaru custom prevails, and the persons
affected by it are called Piraura--the resemblance to Piraungaru is
striking. Now Mr. Howitt tells us that the Headman of the Dieri is
called _Pinaru_, from _pina_, ‘great,’ but he also calls these Headmen
_Piraurus_, the same title as he gives to the men and women allotted to
each other on the system of native Cicisbeism.[28]
Clearly there is here either a misprint, or a curious fact. Either
the Headmen are Pinarus, not Piraurus, or Headmen and supplementary
wives and husbands have one and the same title! One great Headman was
Jalina _Pira_ murana. Is ‘great’ _pina_ or _pira_? If Australia does
not produce an adequate philologist in the native tongues, who will
specially study these matters, it will be a heavy blow to the research
into native institutions.
It is worth observing that the Dieri Piraura are ‘permitted new marital
privileges at the ceremony of circumcision.’ Now license amidst the
large assemblies brought together from all quarters on such occasions
(in some places even transgressing the sacred rules of totem, phratry,
and close relationship in our sense) is merely part of that periodical
general ‘burst’ which survived in the Persian Sacæa and Roman
Saturnalia. Many examples may be found in Mr. Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough.’
Every kind of law is, at these ‘bursts,’ deliberately violated.
Perhaps, then, the due selection of Piraura, by the Dieri seniors, is
really rather a restriction of Saturnalian license than a relaxation of
marriage laws, or a survival of communal marriage. That the license of
the Saturnalia was a return to primitive ways was a Roman theory. For
Australia it is the theory of the Arunta themselves.[29] The adjacent
Urabunna have the same Piraura usages, and what looks very like a form
of the same word, Piraura, Piraungaru. The relations thereby indicated
exist, when occasion serves, after the season of license.
A wife, at marriage, is subjected to a disgraceful ordeal (modern
ideas will break in), which I take, as Mr. Crawley does, to be a
mere initiation (due to a well-defined superstition) into the life
matrimonial.[30] Meanwhile, though a definite and disgusting set of
proceedings forms the Urabunna marriage ceremonial, I am not aware
that the same doings precede and sanction the establishment of the
Piraungaru or Piraura relation, which, if not, is no marriage at all.
Thus, so far as our information goes, and with all deference to the
great Australian authorities, I do not see that the evidence for a
past stage of communal or of group marriage is such as compels our
assent. On the other hand, as has been shown, the theory of communal
marriage forces all its advocates, unwillingly or unconsciously, into
the other theory of a primeval moral and social reformatory movement,
deliberately undertaken, perhaps under direct divine inspiration,
for what other motive could exist? The economical and biological
difficulties which also beset that hypothesis have been sufficiently
explained, and Mr. Darwin has dwelt on the psychological difficulty,
the sexual jealousy of the primitive male. These objections, at least,
do not hamper the hypothesis or conjecture, which we have ventured to
submit as an alternative system. As a proof of survival of communal
or group marriage, Mr. Fison quotes Mr. Lance: ‘If a Kubbi meets a
strange Ippatha’ (female), ‘they address each other as spouse.’ (They
belong to intermarrying phratries.) ‘A Kubbi thus meeting an Ippatha,
though she were of another tribe, would treat her as his wife, and
his right to do so would be recognised by her tribe.’ His right,
as far as phratry prohibitions go, would certainly be recognised,
but how her husband, if she had one, would view the transaction is
another question. The morality is that of the Scottish ballads, in
which such _bonnes fortunes_ are frequent, and the frail pair only
ask questions--afterwards. In the ballad of _The Bonny Hind_, in the
_Kalewala_, and elsewhere, the answers prove that the pair are brother
and sister. Suicide follows, but it does not follow that communal or
group marriage prevailed in Scotland, or in Finland.
GROWTH OF SOCIAL RULES IN THE TRIBE
It is probable that the rules now defining the privileges,
prohibitions, and duties of sets of people, rules interwoven now with
those of ‘class’ and totem, have been gradually evolved in the wear and
tear of ages. Tribes which hold such large and protracted assemblies,
or palavers, as the Arunta of to-day, discuss and debate common affairs
with all the diffuseness of our Parliament at Westminster. It is not
to be supposed that tribal peace existed over hundreds of square miles
of country, and that the group representatives, so to speak, flocked
in from far-off regions, to parliament, in the ages when the pristine
rules of exogamy were evolved. We might as wisely imagine that, in
the beginning of Totemism, groups travelled to a tribal folk-mote,
and arranged the details of a kind of magical co-operative society
to preserve and increase the foodstuffs of the tribe. In ages really
pristine the tribal peace and union cannot have arisen; deliberate
legislation for a vast scattered tribal community could not have
entered into men’s dreams. No such community could have existed. But
the tribes of to-day, and notably the Arunta, being remote from truly
primitive conditions, do hold prolonged assemblies, and work at public
problems, so very remote from the primitive are they.
The Arunta, in their pseudo-historic legends, throw back upon the past
the reflection of their actual estate, and ascribe the rule which
practically limits marriage within the generation to a leader of the
Thurathwerta group, living near what is called, by Europeans, Glen
Helen, in the Macdonnell range. He was backed by the Emu people of
four widely separated localities.[31] One is not, however, to suppose
that, at some witan of the tribes, names indicative of generations,
and of their respective rights, were suddenly invented and dealt out
by ‘the legislator,’ any more than that totems were thus invented and
dealt out. As Mr. Atkinson remarks (Chapter VIII.): ‘Gradually each
generation ... would, _qua_ generation, come to be a distinctly defined
class, with certain separate rights and obligations. In this simple
classification of the connected persons, we see the origin of the
classificatory system itself’ (as far as generations are concerned),
‘as an institution.... The classificatory system evolves itself merely
as the result of a desire to define certain rights, and the division by
generations was the most natural and feasible for the purpose.... Thus
we find a desire for distinction, as regards rights in sexual union, to
be the genetic cause of the classificatory system, both as concerns the
generation and its component members.’
The marriage rules prevalent, with many variations, among the people
least advanced in material culture, the Australians, are thus seen,
on the whole, to be based (1) on totem rules (in which, with Dr.
Durkheim, we include the ‘primary classes’ or ‘phratries’), and (2)
on the distinction of generations. It is clear, from the case of the
Arunta and other tribes, that the rule of counting on the spindle side
may break down, male descent being substituted, in times excessively
rude; while again, as in the Pictish Royal House, it may elsewhere
last into a stage relatively civilised. All manners of conditions and
superstitions may affect and alter the course of social development in
various places.
GROUP MARRIAGE AND MR. TYLOR’s STATISTICS
In 1899, Mr. Tylor published a sketch of ‘A Method of Investigating
the Development of Institutions, applied to Laws of Marriage and
Descent.’[32] He had catalogued the usages of 350 peoples, and examined
(1) the rule of avoidance between husbands and wives’ relations, and
vice versa. (2) The naming of husband (or wife) after their children;
as Odysseus says, ‘May I no longer be called the father of Telemachus.’
(3) The nature of inheritance in widows. (4) The Couvade in which the
husband pretends to lie in, while his wife is really doing so. (5) The
custom of capture. (6) Exogamy and the classificatory system. Mr. Tylor
was led to believe that, so far as the statistical evidence goes, the
husband first lived with the wife’s family (A); next, after a residence
with the wife’s family, went back to his own home (B); last, (C) took
the wife at once to his own home. (Husband to Wife. Removal. Wife to
Husband.)
Now statistics are rather vague evidence without full knowledge of the
social concomitants in each case. In what exact stage of culture, in
each instance, does the husband go to live with the wife’s relations?
We have not this information. But if this be really the earliest stage,
how is it compatible with group marriage? If a man is husband to ‘a
thousand miles of wives,’ how can he go and live with the relations
of all his wives? Even within his actual region of wandering, how can
he do this? Nor, perhaps, can he bring all his wives to live with the
relations of each of them in turn?
Either there was no group marriage, or it did not exist when, on the
hypothesis, the husband, in the earliest stage, habitually resided with
his wife’s relations. Again, take the maternal and paternal systems,
the reckoning in the female or male line, the female line, as we hold
with Mr. Tylor, being the earlier. If so, on Mr. Tylor’s hypothesis,
it ought to arise in his first epoch, when husband goes to live with
wife’s people. ‘The lines’ (of a diagram) ‘show the institutions of
female descent, avuncular authority, &c. arising in the stage of
residence on the female side, and extending into the stages of removal
and residence on the male side.’
Now we have tried to explain the reckoning in the female line, by the
differentiation, in the supposed original local totem group, of the
captive women, each retaining, and handing on to her children, the name
of her own totem group, this bequest of the totem name continuing into
the tribal state of peaceful betrothals. But Mr. Tylor’s theory of the
first stage (husband goes to live with wife), implies a peaceful state,
and groups not hostile. For the reasons given, early hostility and
sexual jealousy, I am unable to hold that, in the beginning, husbands
always joined their wives’ groups. It seems, granting hostility and
jealousy, to be impossible. A Malay example of polygamy plus residence
with wives’ relations, proves nothing for primitive man. Therefore we
need to know the exact stage of culture of the peoples among whom the
husbands go as subdued hangers-on, ‘not recognised,’ into the wife’s
family. Are these people all precisely primitive? The ‘husband to wife’
stage implies peaceful relations. These were produced, on my theory, by
the arrangement of the phratries. When these are once constituted, the
husband may go to live with the wife’s family as much as he pleases.
But I fail to see how he could have done so ‘in the beginning.’
Moreover I am disinclined to suppose that exogamy was instituted for
the purpose of strengthening a group by matrimonial alliances.
_Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube!_
Exogamy has this effect, but it was not devised purposely to produce
this effect.
I may casually remark that Mr. Tylor mentions an Assineboin case
in which the husband enters ‘his lodge,’ where his father and
mother-in-law ‘shirk’ or avoid him. But, in the next page but one, the
lodge is described, not as the husband’s, but as that of the father and
mother-in-law.[33] Whose lodge was it really? Was the husband staying
with his wife’s family, or were the old people on a visit to their
married daughter?
Among several Australian tribes, a feigned form of capture precedes
marriage.[34] Is this a survival of actual capture in the stage of
hostility, the pre-tribal stage? Or is it the result of girlish modesty
in the bride?
Note: Mr. Morgan’s ‘Reformatory Movement’: It is proper to note that,
in his preface to _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_ (p. 5), Mr. Morgan wrote,
‘it is not supposable that savages design, consciously, reformatory
movements in the strict sense.’ For his theory cannot escape the
conclusion that, in fact, they did.
[Footnote 1: _Op. cit._ p. 61.]
[Footnote 2: Spencer and Gillen, p. 57.]
[Footnote 3: _Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human
Family_ (1871); and _Ancient Society_ (1877); earlier in _The League of
the Iroquois_ (1854).]
[Footnote 4: So Mr. Fison candidly states, and Mr. Morgan saw his work,
and wrote an introductory essay. _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 99.]
[Footnote 5: _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, pp. 160-161.]
[Footnote 6: _Ancient Society_, pp. 49-50.]
[Footnote 7: Cf. _The Mystic Rose_, pp. 444-445. Westermarck, p. 352.]
[Footnote 8: _Ancient Society_, p. 59.]
[Footnote 9: _Ibid_. p. 74.]
[Footnote 10: By ‘classes’ Mr. Morgan here seems to mean phratries.]
[Footnote 11: Westermarck, pp. 85, 96.]
[Footnote 12: Lord Avebury, _Origin of Civilisation_, pp. 442-449,
1902.]
[Footnote 13: _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 60.]
[Footnote 14: Spencer and Gillen, pp. 56, 57, 59.]
[Footnote 15: _J. A. I._, May 1895, p. 368.]
[Footnote 16: Spencer and Gillen, p. 60.]
[Footnote 17: _Ibid._ p. 66.]
[Footnote 18: _Ibid._ p. 75.]
[Footnote 19: _The Mystic Rose_, p. 476.]
[Footnote 20: _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 27, cf. p. 70.]
[Footnote 21: _Ancient Society_, pp. 427-428.]
[Footnote 22: Captain Cook, of His Majesty’s ship _The Endeavour_.]
[Footnote 23: _Descent of Man_, ii. 362, 363. Dr. Savage, _Boston Jour.
of Nat. Hist._ v. 423.]
[Footnote 24: Spencer and Gillen, p. 65.]
[Footnote 25: _Op. cit._ p. 67.]
[Footnote 26: Spencer and Gillen, pp. 67, 68.]
[Footnote 27: Spencer and Gillen, pp. 62-64. _Mystic Rose_, pp.
477-478.]
[Footnote 28: _On the Organisation of Australian Tribes_, pp. 107, 108.]
[Footnote 29: Spencer and Gillen, p. 97.]
[Footnote 30: _Ibid_. pp. 92-96. _The Mystic Rose_, pp. 479, 480.]
[Footnote 31: Spencer and Gillen, pp. 420-421.]
[Footnote 32: _J. A. I._ vol. xviii., no. 3, pp. 245-272.]
[Footnote 33: _Op. cit._ pp. 246-248.]
[Footnote 34: Howitt, _Organisation of Australian Tribes_.]