THE FAMILIAL CLAN IN AUSTRALIA AND AMERICA.
I. _The Family._
II. _The Family in Melanesia._--Melanesian rape--First formation
of societies--Exogamy--The Australian clans--Native marriage
state--Marriage of clans among the Kamilaroi--Their social
incest--How a clan originates--Fictitious fraternity and the
_totem_--How individual marriage is made among the Kurnai--Maternal
filiation--Agnation tends to be constituted--Evolution of the family
in Melanesia.
III. _The Family in America._--The Redskin clans--Common
dwellings--Rights and duties--Exogamy of the clan--Clans of the
_Pueblos_--The family among the Indians of South America--Relationship
among the Redskins--Communism--Maternal filiation--Distinction between
the matriarchate and the maternal family--Origin of the ideas of
relationship.
I. _The Family._
I shall now attempt to retrace as clearly as I can the history of the
evolution of the family, first of all ascertaining the facts that
have been observed, and then using these facts as a touchstone to try
the solidity of the various sociological theories that have been put
forth on the subject. Among these theories, there are some which have
been very favourably received, and not without reason. Insufficient as
they might be, they reduced a chaos of facts into order, and contained
a certain amount of truth. All of them are open to criticism and
contest, both because they are the fruit of a too hasty generalisation,
and because their authors have claimed for them a certainty which
sociological facts do not easily bear out. Human groups have always
lived as they could, without caring about theories; their social
conduct inevitably results from a sort of compromise in the conflict
between their appetites, their aptitudes, and the necessities dictated
by their physical environment.
Before hazarding any general conclusions, I shall be careful, as
before, to refer to comparative ethnography, and to interrogate the
various human races, from the lowest to the most elevated. This inquiry
will enable us to form a rough idea, with a certain approximation to
truth, in regard to the probable evolution of the family in humanity.
But in order to approach this subject with sufficient impartiality,
it is absolutely necessary to clear our minds from all the current
theories in regard to the family. There is, in fact, no theme which
has inspired more empty oratorical lucubrations. The doctrine has been
firmly held that the family, as we have it instituted in Europe and
in European colonies, is the _beau idéal_, the sacred and immutable
sociological type. Ethnography, however, and even history, teach us
that the present familial type of Europe has not always existed, and
that it is the result, like everything else, of a slow evolution;
from whence it is reasonable to infer that it will still continue to
be modified. But facts are more eloquent than reflections; I will
therefore approach them, beginning with the lowest human races, the
Melanesians.
II. _The Family in Melanesia._
In my sketch of the family in the animal kingdom, I have already had
occasion to remark that the family, such as we understand it, is not
indispensable to the maintenance of societies, since the ants do
without it in their republics, in which we find neither paternity nor
maternity, in the sense we attach to them, but simply three classes of
individuals, the breeders, the young, and the educators.
With these last, the working ants, by a paradoxical contradiction,
maternal love has survived the atrophy of the generative function; it
is even purified and widened, for it is lavished without partiality on
all the young ones, which form the hope of the republic; and though
thus diluted, it seems to have lost none of its energy.
Nothing at all similar is seen in inferior human societies, but the
family is still, however, in a confused state; paternity, in the social
sense of the word, does not exist; filiation is especially maternal,
but the actual degrees of consanguinity are not well distinguished in
detail; parenthood is not yet individual, but is constituted in groups.
In the present day we may still study this familial confusion in
certain Australian tribes. We have seen that marriage, or what goes by
that name, resulted in Tasmania, Australia, Bali, etc., from a violent
and brutal rape, generally ratified by a compensation and a simulation
of retaliation between the tribe of the woman and that of the ravisher.
Among the least savage tribes of Melanesia, this rape is often
fictitious, in which case it is no more than a survival; but sometimes
it is still real, and it surely must always have been so at the origin
of the Australian societies. But however gross these societies may be,
they are none the less the result of a long evolution. In the interior
of Borneo there are still existing human beings compared with whom the
Australians are civilised people. These absolutely primitive savages of
Borneo are probably the remains of negroïd peoples, who must formerly
have been the first inhabitants of Malaya. They roam the forests in
little hordes, like monkeys; the man, or rather the male, carries off
the female and couples with her in the thickets. The family passes the
night under a large tree; the children are suspended from the branches
in a sort of net, and a great fire is lighted at the foot of the tree
to keep off the wild beasts. As soon as the children are capable of
taking care of themselves, the parents turn them adrift as animals
do.[873]
It is doubtless thus, after the manner of the great monkeys, that
primitive human societies have been formed. With the chimpanzees these
hordes can never become very large, for the male progenitor will not
endure rivals, and drives away the young males as long as he is the
strongest. The first men were surely more sociable, because of their
human nature. The young males of the human horde were able to remain,
in greater or less number, within the association, but the jealousy
of the progenitor-in-chief, the father of the family, must often have
obliged them to procure one or several females by capturing them from
neighbouring or rival hordes; they thus became more or less exogamous;
and, in their embryo societies, marriage, or rather sexual union, ended
by being prohibited between brothers and sisters, not because there was
the least moral scruple about incest, but because, within the limit of
the horde, the young women were claimed by the most robust males, who
would not yield them up. We know that this is still the case in the
Australian tribes.[874]
In this gross social state it is necessarily the mother who is the
centre of the family, just as she is in the families of mammifers; it
is, therefore, quite natural that the children should bear her name and
not that of their father, which, for that matter, is not always easy
to designate. When once the custom of exogamy was well established,
what was at first a necessity ended by becoming an obligation, and men
were forbidden to unite themselves with women of the group to which
they belonged, and which bore the same name as their own. Such is still
the general rule in Australia.[875] But in Australia this group is
often only a sub-tribe, a _gens_ or clan; for the hordes, becoming too
numerous, are subdivided into factions or large families, who unite
together for common defence or vengeance. The children of each group
belong sometimes to the clan of the mother, and there is then no legal
parenthood between them and their father;[876] also, in case of war,
the son must join the maternal tribe.[877] But this is not a universal
rule, and in many tribes the children now belong to the paternal
clan.[878]
These are general cases, common to the greater part of the Australian
tribes, but not to all. There are some who have organised their
marriage and their family into classes, thus regulating, in a certain
measure, the primitive confusion, and establishing by this very
regulation a sort of limited promiscuity. The word “classes,” employed
by travellers who have made us acquainted with these curious customs,
is improper, for neither social classes nor castes exist in Australia.
These so-called classes are simply sub-tribes or clans, analogous to
the Roman _gens_.
In certain of these tribes a sort of categorical promiscuity is kept
up. Thus, among the tribes of Mount Gambier, of the Darling River, and
of Queensland, each tribe is divided into two sub-tribes, and within
each of these clans all the men are reputed brothers, and all the
women are sisters, and all marriage between these brothers and these
sisters is strictly forbidden.[879] This is a primordial law; the
violation of it is an act of the deepest guilt, which not only stains
the individual, but the group to which he belongs; it is more than
incest, and the Australians, who have a very lively sentiment of duty,
feel intense horror of such an act. But if every man is brother to
all the women in his clan, on the other hand he is husband to all the
women of the other clan of his tribe. Consequently, all the men of one
group are called husbands by all the women of the other, and inversely.
Marriage with these Australians is not therefore an individual act,
as with us; it is a social condition, resulting from the fact of
birth.[880] However, the actual communal union is not obligatory in
the least. A man or woman may stop at the nominal or reputed marriage;
they may merely call each other husband and wife; but in principle,
the right is admitted, and the men sometimes offer temporary wives of
their own class to strangers who visit them.[881] Thus in the tribe of
the Kamilaroi, near Sydney, every man of the Kubi clan has the right
to call “my wife” every person of feminine sex belonging to the Ipai
clan, and to treat her as such. There is no need of proposals, or of
contract, or of ceremony; a man is a husband by right of birth, but the
intimate union does not imply association by couples; the woman passes
from one to the other, or even from several to several others. On the
other hand, within the limit of the clan, all the men and all the women
call each other brothers and sisters, and are bound to respect each
other. In uniting with the men of the other sub-tribe having conjugal
right over them, the women do not on that account cease to reside in
their own clan, the sub-tribe of their “brothers.”
Marriage within this sub-tribe is the abomination of desolation, the
sin for which there is no forgiveness. Whoever commits it is outlawed
from society, driven from the tribe, tracked through the woods like
game, and put to death. He has dishonoured the association, and the
children who are born of these social incests are exterminated.[882]
Thus, all real consanguinity has been set aside, and a fictitious
fraternity created between all the members of the same clan, similar
to paternity by adoption. Is this artificial parenthood the result of
practical exogamy, or has it, on the contrary, produced it? We cannot
tell; but wherever it exists, its rule is absolutely inflexible. If,
for example, as often happens in Australia, the important men, the
chiefs, the sorcerers, or the strong adults, seize a certain number of
women for their personal use, they only do it in conformity to the law
of exogamy between the sub-tribes. If one of the women thus confiscated
runs away and is re-taken, she is not restored to the man who had
usurped possession of her, but belongs by right to those who have
caught her.
Moreover, certain neighbouring tribes are subdivided into sub-tribes,
or clans of the same name; they have probably sprung one from the other
at some former period. If it happens that a man steals a woman from one
of these tribes, the captured woman is immediately incorporated into
the corresponding clan of the ravisher’s tribe, and she becomes the
“sister” of all the women of this clan, to which will also belong her
children. As for the ravisher, he is always a member of another _gens_,
or clan, of the same tribe. If the tribes of the captured woman and of
her captor are not symmetrical--that is to say, have not corresponding
clans--then the woman may become the founder of a new clan belonging to
the tribe of the man who has carried her off.[883]
If a woman is captured by a party of warriors, and not by one
individual only, the first care of the captors is to inflict on her
a collective violation, on the condition, however, that none of them
belong to a clan homonymous with that of the ravished woman; if any
one of their party is an exception to this, he must abstain from so
doing.[884]
The sign of the fictitious fraternity of the Kamilaroi, and of all the
Australian tribes organised in the same manner, is a common emblem,
the _totem_. All the men bearing the same _totem_ are united by the
bond of a conventional fraternity, which is none the less strict for
that reason. The _totem_ has evidently been invented in a primitive
epoch, when the different degrees of consanguinity were not easily
distinguished, and were therefore replaced by an artificial union far
wider than the limits of the natural family.
Whenever a single individual wished to escape from this tribal
marriage, he was obliged to resort to various artifices. One of these
transitional processes has remained in use in the Kurnai tribe, in
Gippsland, Victoria.
The terms still in use with them to designate kinship recall the
former existence of a fraternal marriage; but in practice they have
none the less adopted individual marriage. The manner in which these
individual marriages are contracted probably indicates what must have
happened in primitive times, when some innovators attempted to escape
from tribal marriage by carrying off the women they preferred, and
were only re-admitted to their tribe after having obtained pardon and
the ratification of their audacious enterprise. Among the Kurnai every
marriage must be made by the capture of one of the women of their
tribe, even when this rape has been preceded by a friendly exchange
of sisters, which is usual enough. This simulated rape is punished by
a simulation of vengeance. The fugitives are pursued; they are even
ill-treated, but short of being actually killed. Their punishment is
simply an act of obedience to ancestral customs. When all is concluded,
and the fugitive couple reinstated among their people, the woman
belongs to the man who has carried her off; he is no longer obliged to
offer her to the visitors of his clan, as old Australian hospitality
required;[885] she belongs to him alone. Sometimes the ravisher
legalises his right of sole proprietor by first giving notice to his
friends, and offering them the use of his wife, after which he can keep
her to himself.[886]
In proportion as tribal marriage was being transformed, owing to the
breaches made in it by individual instinct, the consanguineous family
was gradually arising in place of the collective and fictitious family.
It seems most likely that uterine filiation, or the maternal family,
was first established. The Australian Motas still have filiation by the
woman’s side, and among them the property of the uncle is transmitted
to the uterine nephew; but already the paternal family is beginning to
be constituted, and the relatives on the male side seek to redeem the
heritage by means of an indemnity.[887] With other and more advanced
Australian tribes, fanatical evolution is more complete; masculine
filiation is already instituted, and agnation adopted; there is even
a worship of the manes of male ancestors.[888] The Melanesians of
Australia and Tasmania present, therefore, a tolerably complete picture
of the evolution of marriage and of the family, from the primitive
rape, followed by a tribal period in which marriage is merely a limited
and regulated promiscuity, and in which real consanguinity is replaced
by a fictitious fraternity, down to the _régime_ of individual marriage
and masculine filiation, previously passing through uterine filiation,
or the maternal family. We shall find traces of this evolution among
other races, but nowhere is the lower stage so well preserved as in
Australia.
III. _The Family in America._
Nothing similar to the gross tribal marriage of the Australian
Kamilaroi is to be found among the American Indians, whose familial
organisation, however, strikingly recalls that of the Melanesian clans,
though already in a higher degree of evolution.
The tribes of the Redskins were, and are still, divided into phratries,
which are again subdivided into clans. Now these clans are composed of
real or fictitious relatives. In each phratry the corresponding clans
have the same _totem_, and it is strictly forbidden to marry a woman
belonging to the group bearing the same _totem_. This organisation is
very ancient; it existed in Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest,
and the French found it in the eighteenth century among the Redskins of
Canada. The Hurons, Charlevoix tells us, were divided into three clans:
the wolf, the tortoise, and the bear.[889] The _totem_, or emblem of
the clan, served to sign treaties.[890] This is a general fact, and the
subdivision of the tribe into clans or _gentes_ is observed among the
Tinneh Indians, the Choctaws, the Iroquois, the Omahas, the Indians
of Columbia, etc., etc. Each clan forms one large family, inhabiting
sometimes a common house, as do still the Indians of the Pueblos, as
did the Iroquois at the time they were first discovered, and as did the
Mexicans at the epoch of the Spanish conquest. The “long houses” of the
Iroquois were buildings a hundred feet in length. A large corridor,
closed at the two extremities by a door, traversed its entire length.
To the right and left of this central corridor, and opening on it,
were stalls, or niches, each serving as the apartment of a family. The
number of these families varied from five to twenty.[891]
The members of a Redskin clan had common rights and duties. When a
man died, any personal objects he might possess were deposited in
his tomb, for they might be useful to him in the future life. The
remaining property of the deceased belonged principally to the clan,
or the _gentiles_; his near relatives, however, were considered first.
Thus, among the Iroquois, the widow, the children, and the maternal
uncles claimed the largest part, while a very small portion of the
heritage came to the brothers. The general principle was that the
property should remain in the clan. In the present day the old customs
are modified, and with the Iroquois, the Creeks, the Cherokees, the
Choctaws, the Crows, etc., there is no longer any gentile heritage; all
passes to the children.[892]
The political organisation was, or still is, republican. The members
of a Redskin clan have the right to elect and to depose the chief of
the community, and the liberty to adopt strangers. They are united
by a strict solidarity, and have a mutual duty to help and to avenge
each other. And lastly they have their council and their sepulture in
common.[893]
But the most rigorous obligation for the members of the same clan is
that of not marrying in it. To take a wife having the same _totem_ is
considered as a most culpable act; it is a crime sometimes punished by
death.[894] The Iroquois law regulating marriages recalls, in a certain
degree, that which takes place among the Kamilaroi of Australia. Thus
an Iroquois of the Seneca tribe and of the Wolf clan must not marry a
woman belonging, not only to his own clan, but to all the clans of the
same name in the five other tribes of the Iroquois. On the other hand,
he is perfectly free to marry in any of the seven other clans of his
own Seneca tribe.[895] In short, an Iroquois may be endogamous in the
tribe, but he must be exogamous from the point of view of the clan or
clans.
The motive of the prohibition of marriage within the clan is always the
supposed relationship. Thus the law of the Tinneh Indians forbids a man
of the Chitsang clan to marry a woman of the same clan because that
woman is his sister.[896]
The children always belong to the _gens_, or clan, of their mother.
These rules vary more or less from tribe to tribe, except the
prohibition of marriage within the clan, which is strict and general.
Thus, among the Omahas, a man may take a wife in another tribe, even
if this woman belongs to a clan of the same name as his own; but he
cannot marry within his own clan, because all the women of this clan
are reputed to be his relations--sisters, aunts, nieces, daughters,
etc. We shall see presently to what women these various appellations,
which among the Redskins have a much wider sense than with us, are
applied.[897]
These customs, or very analogous ones, were in force with a great
number of American tribes. At the present day the Indians of the Moqui
Pueblos still live in their common habitations, as at the time of the
conquest, and they are divided into nine clans.[898]
In the Pueblo of Orayba the relatives of a married woman who dies take
her property and her children, only leaving to the husband his horse,
his clothes, and his weapons;[899] for by marrying the woman does not
cease to belong to her original clan. Among the Pipiles of Salvador
a genealogical tree with seven branches was painted on the wall of
the common house, and save in the case of a great service rendered
to the clan, a man could not intermarry with any persons related up
to the degree indicated by the genealogical tree.[900] In reality,
this people had got beyond familial confusion, or of purely _totemic_
relationship, but the principle regulating conjugal unions had not yet
changed. In Yucatan marriage between persons of the same name--that is
to say, of the same clan--entailed the penalty of being considered as
a renegade.[901] The savage Abipones were also exogamous, according
to Dobritzhoffer. This rule naturally gives way in proportion as
civilisation develops. The Nahuas still prohibited marriage between
consanguineous relatives; but at Nicaragua the prohibition only applied
to relatives of the first degree.[902]
We have previously seen, in describing the family amongst the animals,
that it is habitually maternal; it is around the female that the young
group themselves. As for the male, if he does not abandon the family,
he exercises no other function but that of chief of the band. It must
surely have been thus that the first human hordes were formed, and when
man became intelligent enough to take note of filiation, it was uterine
parenthood alone that he considered worthy of account. The primitive
family was maternal, for in the confusion of sexual unions paternal
filiation would have been difficult to determine; no importance was
therefore attached to it in early times, and the father was not looked
upon as the parent of his children.
We shall find the maternal family, or at least traces of it, in many
countries, but it is especially among the Indians of North America
that it has been the best preserved and the best studied. In the
eighteenth century it was already remarked by Charlevoix, Lafitau, and
Lahontan,[903] that the Redskins always bear the name of their mother,
and that it is through a man’s sister that his name is transmitted
to descendants. The American clan is based on uterine filiation; it
comprehends all the descendants, in the female line of an ancestral
mother, real or hypothetical. It is therefore exactly the contrary of
the agnatic _gens_ of the Greco-Roman world.
The Redskin clan is composed of all the families reputed to be related
to each other; it is a little republic having the right to the service
of all the women for the cultivation of the soil, and of all the men
for the chase, war, and _vendettas_. It is to the woman that the wigwam
or family dwelling belongs, as well as all the objects possessed by
the family, and the whole is transmitted by heritage, not to the son,
but to the eldest daughter or to the nearest maternal relative,[904]
sometimes to the brother of the deceased woman. Nevertheless, this
heritage must be understood in the sense of a simple usufruct. It was
the maternal clan in reality who was the proprietor, and none of the
members of the community could seriously alienate the social property.
The husband alone, in most of the tribes, had no right over the goods
or over the children; they all remained in the maternal clan;[905]
it was maternal filiation which regulated the name, the rank, and
the hereditary rights in the clan.[906] A sort of communism reigned
there. All the provisions, whether they were the produce of the soil,
of the chase, or of fishing, were placed in public storehouses, under
the control of an aged matron; and if it ever happened that a family
had exhausted its provisions, another family immediately came to its
aid.[907]
But maternal filiation was, or is, in force even where the clans did
not live in common houses, as we find it still among the Mohicans, the
Delawares, the Narrangasetts, the Pequots, the Wyandots, the Missouris,
the Minnitaris, the Crows, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees,
etc.
With the Iroquois and the Hurons, the father, says Charlevoix, was
almost a stranger to his children. “Among the Hurons,” continues the
same observer, “dignity and succession are inherited through the women.
It is the son of the sister who succeeds, and in default of him the
next relative in the female line.”[908]
“With these peoples,” says Lafitau, “marriages are arranged in such
a way that the husband and wife do not leave their own family to
establish a family and a cabin independently. Each one remains at home,
and the children born of these marriages belong to the families that
have produced them, and are counted as members of the family and cabin
of the mother, and not at all as belonging to those of the father. The
possessions of the husband do not go to his wife’s cabin, to which
he is himself a stranger; and in his wife’s cabin the daughters are
heirs in preference to the males, who have nothing there but mere
subsistence.”[909]
“Besides this,” continues Lafitau, “the wife’s cabin has rights over
the product of the husband’s, hunting; all of this must be contributed
during the first year, and a half only afterwards.”[910]
The mothers negotiated the marriages, and naturally did so without
consulting the interested parties. When the affair was once settled,
presents had to be made to the gentile relatives of the bride. It
was the care of these relatives, in case of conjugal dissensions
between the married pair, to attempt a reconciliation and to prevent a
divorce.[911] At the present time, among the Santi-Dakotas, if a wife
is ill-treated by her husband, the mother-in-law has the right to take
back her daughter; the husband’s power must yield to hers.[912] Does
the institution of filiation by women, or the maternal family, entail,
as some have pretended, the _régime_ of the matriarchate? North America
being _par excellence_ the country of exogamy and of the maternal
family, the theorists of the primitive matriarchate have often drawn
arguments from thence which it is interesting to weigh.
At the epoch during which the Seneca-Iroquois still lived in their
“long houses,” it seems that the influence of the women in the
community was very great. The missionary, Arthur Wright, wrote in
1873:--“It was the custom for the women to govern the house. The
provisions were in common; but woe to the unfortunate husband or
lover too idle or clumsy to bring home from the chase a sufficient
booty. Whatever the number of his children or the value of the goods
he possessed in the house, he might be ordered at any moment to take
up his blanket and pack off.” After that, unless he obtained the
intercession of some aunt or grandmother, he was forced to obey, return
to his own clan, or contract an alliance elsewhere. “The women were the
chief power in the clans, and they did not hesitate, when necessary, to
depose a chief, and make him re-enter the ranks of simple warriors. The
election of the chiefs always depended on them.”[913]
Among the Wyandots there is in every clan a council composed of four
women elected by the female chiefs of the family. These four women
choose a chief of the clan from among the men; then the _totem_ of the
clan is painted on the face of this chief. The council of the tribe
is formed by an assemblage of the clan councils; four-fifths of it,
therefore, consist of women. The sachem, or chief of the tribe, is
chosen by the chiefs of the clans.[914]
Charlevoix relates that in 1721 the Natchez Indians were governed by
a very despotic chief, the Sun, who was succeeded by the son of his
nearest of kin. This was the female chief, and she had, like the Sun,
the power of life and death over the people. At the death of the female
chief in 1721, her husband, not belonging to the family of the Sun, was
strangled by her son, according to custom, and that without prejudice
to other human sacrifices.[915] The ancient Spanish chroniclers also
speak of the submission of the husbands to their wives in Nicaragua;
they seem to have been treated as servants (Herrera, Audogoya).
Lastly, among the Redskins the matrons had the right to baptise the
children--that is to say, to make them enter either the maternal or the
paternal clan.[916]
These facts are curious. They prove, indeed, that with the Redskins the
women enjoyed a notable influence, especially in ancient times. With
the Seneca-Iroquois they could expel the incapable hunter; but this
was evidently by their title of housekeepers of the clan. Among the
Wyandots, they figured numerously in the council; but nevertheless,
the supreme chief was a man. As for the woman-chief of the Natchez
Indians, we find an equivalent of it in certain little despotic
monarchies of black Africa. Among the Ashantees, and in Darfour, etc.,
the princesses dominate their husbands or their lovers by the prestige
of royalty. Nothing is more natural than that a plebeian husband should
be strangled on the tomb of his wife with other human victims, when we
consider the prevailing ideas of future life and the absolute servility
of the subject in primitive monarchical states. In fact, the power
of women among the Redskins was more apparent than real. Charlevoix
himself declares that their domination is fictitious,[917] “that they
are, in domestic life, the slaves of their husband,” that the men hold
them in profound contempt, and that, amongst themselves, the epithet of
“woman” is a cutting insult.
Important affairs were kept secret from them;[918] polygamy was
habitually permitted to the men, but polyandry was nearly always
prohibited to the women. In fact, among the Redskins the woman is the
slave of her husband, and the latter thinks so slightly of her, that
frequently the men live conjugally for years without communicating with
their wives otherwise than by signs, as owing to exogamous marriage
they speak different languages.[919] The authority that the husbands
concede to their wives in certain tribes is entirely domestic; it is a
household royalty.
Thus, with the Selisches, the cabins containing the provisions are
confided to the women, and the husband himself can take nothing without
their permission.[920] The husband or the son commands in the woods and
on the prairie; but in the interior of the wigwam it is the most aged
woman or the mother who governs and assigns to each one his place.[921]
These customs and the marriages by servitude have led several observers
to attribute to the women a considerable authority which they do not
really possess. In fact, they are nearly always purchased, and are very
submissive. The maternal family and the matriarchate are very different
things. The first is common; the second is very rare, if indeed it has
ever existed. The Australians, who have the maternal family, none the
less treat their wives as we should not dare to treat our domestic
animals. And again, in order that filiation by the female side should
give women a notable social influence, it is necessary that society
should be very civilised, that there should be exchangeable values,
and that women should become rich by inheritance. Then they are in a
position to exercise the power that fortune gives in every country. But
among the Redskins private property as yet hardly existed; the clans
preserved the prior claim; personal property had not a great value;
there were no domestic animals; it was difficult for any individual,
man or woman, to become rich. Lastly, the chief occupations, those
which were reputed noble, those also on which the existence of the
tribes depended, were the chase and war; now the women took no part
in these. They have not therefore been able to exercise a dominant
influence, even in the tribes where they were treated with relative
mildness. Among the Redskins in general, all the painful labours fall
to the women, except the fabrication of arms. It is she who takes care
of the home, who cooks, prepares the skins and the furs, gathers the
wild rice, digs, sows and reaps the maize and the vegetables, dries the
meat and the roots for the winter-provision, makes the clothes and the
necklaces, etc. She even works at the construction of bark canoes, but
in this, man comes to her aid. With that exception, he confines himself
to hunting and fighting, smoking, eating, drinking, and sleeping.
In his eyes work is a disgrace.[922] Such are the customs of living
Redskins. Were they different last century? Not at all, if we may
believe the authorities even who are invoked by the modern theorists
of the American matriarchate. Charlevoix tells us that the Huron
husbands prostituted their daughters and their wives for money,[923]
that the Sioux cut off the noses of their unfaithful wives and scalped
them,[924] and that all the hard work was left to the women, the men
glorying in their idleness.[925] Lafitau enumerates, with still greater
detail, the many and painful occupations of the women,[926] and he
narrates the story of a husband who burnt his adulterous wife at a
slow fire.[927] It is not then amongst the Redskins that we can find
the matriarchate. Their familial system is none the less very curious,
especially if we compare it with that of the Australians.
The familial clan of the Australians and of the Redskins enables us
to retrace the origin of the ideas of kinship. Nothing similar seems
to exist among the animals. In the best endowed species, the parents,
especially the females, have an instinctive love of their young, but
only as long as they are young. After that period they no longer
recognise them, and often even drive them away.
Man, who has certainly begun his existence in the same way as the
animals, has early attained, not to ideas of precise filiation, but to
a vague idea of consanguinity between all the members of his horde.
In these little primitive groups, no distinction has at first been
made between real and fictitious kinship. All the men of the same clan
have been brothers, all the women have been sisters, and by the help
of an inveterate habit of exogamy, a gross morality has been formed,
which condemned social incest. But as the life of the clan was, before
all things, communal, while marriages within the clan were prohibited,
it was decided that the clans of the same name--that is, those who
had sprung one from the other--should be united by a sort of social
marriage, all the women of the one being common to all the men of
the other. Then, in the course of time, the instinct of individual
appropriation having undermined the primitive community, the women
were distributed amongst the men; they formed families which were
often singular ones, and of which I shall have to speak again. There
was no longer promiscuity from clan to clan, but the wife was to be
taken from an allied clan. The first filiation which was established
was surely maternal filiation: primitive conjugal confusion would not
permit of any other. But at length, when the family became more or
less instituted, the relations could be classified, and the degrees of
consanguinity distinguished.
It was not without difficulty that man succeeded so far. A long period
of time was required to disentangle the skein of family relationships;
and fictitious kinship continued to be confounded with real kinship
for many ages. Change came only by a slow evolution, which we will now
proceed to study.
FOOTNOTES:
[873] Lubbock, _Orig. Civil._, p. 9.
[874] Lang, _Aborigines of Australia_.--Eyre, _Discoveries in Central
Australia_, vol. ii. p. 385.
[875] _Grey’s Journal_, vol. ii. ch. ii.
[876] Tylor, _Researches in Early History of Mankind_, vol. i. ch. ix.
[877] Giraud-Teulon, père, _Origine de la Famille_, p. 44.
[878] _Folklore, etc., of the Australian Aborigines_ (Adelaide,
1879), pp. 28, 50, 57, 58, 65, 67, 87, 89, 92, 93.--Fison and Howitt,
_Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, 215.
[879] Fison and Howitt, _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, 50.
[880] _Id._, _ibid._
[881] _Id._, _ibid._
[882] Fison and Howitt, _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, pp. 65, 66.
[883] Fison and Howitt, quoted by Giraud-Teulon, fils, in _Origines du
Mariage et de la Famille_, p. 120.
[884] Fison and Howitt, quoted by Giraud-Teulon, fils, in _Origines du
Mariage et de la Famille_, pp. 86-88.
[885] Fison and Howitt, _loc. cit._, p. 200.
[886] _Id._, _ibid._
[887] Giraud-Teulon, _loc. cit._, p. 447.
[888] Giraud-Teulon, fils, _loc. cit._, p. 446.
[889] _Hist. et descrip. générale de la Nouvelle-France_, etc.
[890] _Ibid._ t. v. p. 393.
[891] L. Morgan, _Ancient Societies_, p. 70.--Lahontan, _Voy._, etc.,
t. ii. pp. 104, 183.
[892] L. Morgan, _Ancient Societies_, pp. 528-531.
[893] _Id._, _ibid._ pp. 70, 71.
[894] _Id._, _ibid._ p. 97.
[895] L. Morgan, _loc. cit._ p. 513.
[896] _Notes on the Tinneh_, Hardisty, in _Smithsonian Reports_, 1866.
[897] _Omaha Sociology_, p. 255, in _Smithsonian Reports_, 1885.
[898] L. Morgan, _Ancient Societies_, p. 178.
[899] _Id._, _ibid._ p. 535.
[900] Bancroft, _Native Races_, etc., vol. ii. p. 665.
[901] _Id._, _ibid._ vol. ii. p. 665.
[902] _Id._, _ibid._ vol. ii. pp. 251, 666.
[903] _Voyages_, etc., t. ii. p. 154.
[904] A. Giraud-Teulon, fils, _Orig. du Mariage_, etc., p. 191.
[905] _Id._, _ibid._ p. 186.
[906] _Id._, _ibid._ p. 177.
[907] A. Giraud-Teulon, _Orig. du Mariage_, p. 185.
[908] Charlevoix, _Hist. de la Nouvelle France_, t. v. p. 395.
[909] Lafitau, _Mœurs des Sauvages Américains_, t. I^{er.} p. 69, etc.
[910] _Id._, _ibid._ t. ii. pp. 252, 268.
[911] L. Morgan, _Ancient Societies_, p. 454.
[912] J. Owen Dorsey, _Omaha Sociology_, p. 261, in _Smithsonian
Reports_, 1885.
[913] L. Morgan, _Ancient Societies_, p. 455.
[914] J. W. Powell, _Wyandot Government_, in _Smithsonian Reports_,
1881.
[915] Charlevoix, _loc. cit._, t. vi. pp. 177-179.
[916] L. Morgan,_ Ancient Societies_, p. 169.
[917] Charlevoix, t. v. pp. 397-421.
[918] _Id._, _ibid._, t. vi. p. 172.
[919] Lubbock, _Orig. Civil._, p. 152.
[920] Doménech, _Voy. pitt. dans les déserts du Nouveau Monde_, p. 508.
[921] _Ibid._ p. 543.
[922] Doménech, _loc. cit._, pp. 338, 425, 467.
[923] Charlevoix, _Journal_, etc., t. vi. p. 39.
[924] _Id._, _ibid._, t. v. p. 271.
[925] _Id._, _ibid._, t. vi. p. 44.
[926] _Mœurs des Sauvages_, ii. 266; iii. 56, 69, 70, 72, 76, 92, 97,
98, 120.
[927] _Ibid._, t. ii. pp. 274, 275.