Lang Andrew
Social Origins and Primal Law
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.157 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…'158
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.'159
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.160
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.161 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.162 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.163 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.'164 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.165 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.166 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.
CHAPTER VI
THE CHANGE OF CLASS AMONG THE NEW GENERATION
We have hitherto, for the sake of lucidity, spoken chiefly of two 'primary classes' ('phratries'), such as the Kirarawa and Matthurie of the Urabunna. But among the Arunta, and many other tribes, there are four or even eight such 'classes.' The reader may refer to the extract from Mr. Mathews's description (p. 39).
Each of these classes roughly corresponds to a different generation of the tribe. But, with female descent, each child belongs to the class to which its mother does not belong. The classes, that is, alter with each generation. What is the cause of this curious rule? One generation is A, its children are B, its grandchildren are A again.
Here we meet the explanation of Herr Cunow, which may as well be given in summary.
THE SYSTEM OF HERR CUNOW
The theory of Herr Cunow167 is in the first place opposed to the systems of all who regard the 'phratries' as divisions made in an original group, or horde, for purposes of exogamy. I have not observed that any of our writers have noticed the book of Herr Cunow. In his opinion, as was said earlier, authors err in confusing 'phratries' with 'classes:' 'a phratry is not a class, and a class is not a phratry; these two sorts of bodies have been developed out of different antecedents, and have different tendencies. The two "primary divisions," say Kroki and Kumite, are phratries, but are not classes in the same sense as the Ippai and Kumbo, Murri and Kubbi classes of the Kamilaroi' (p. 24).
Herr Cunow regards the 'classes' as in origin earlier168 than the divisions of totem kin, or the 'phratry' divisions, and thinks that the 'classes' were originally non-intermarrying divisions based on seniority. They were devised or developed, not to prevent marriage between near kin, but between persons of different generations, or rather degrees of seniority. This is proved, he thinks, by the etymology of some of the names of the classes (about which we need much fuller information). Thus the word Kubbi (Kamilaroi), already cited as a class name, is derived, he says, from Kubbura, 'young, new,' and originally designates a youth who has passed the initiatory ceremonies. Ridley's vocabulary of the Kamilaroi tongue is the source for this fact. Kumbo, another class name, is the Kombia or Kumbia, of the tribes on the Lower Murray river, and means 'great,' that is, 'old.' On the Lower Darling, the word is gumboka, Kumbuka; compare Kumba, Kumbera, 'old woman,' Kumbeja, 'father.' 'Great' and 'old,' 'little' and 'young,' are equivalent in sense. Bonda, a class name of the Kabi, means 'new' or 'young,' and the class-name Darawang, or Tarawang, is the Kabi word darami, 'little,' or 'young.' Obu, a class name, is the Queensland jabu, jobu, jabbo bobu, 'father.'
Thus the class names, Herr Cunow holds, originally indicate divisions of youth and age in the 'horde,' by which term Herr Cunow understands a local set of from forty to sixty people, a local aggregate of several such 'hordes' being a 'tribe' (pp. 25-28). The fact of Australian attention to degrees of seniority is demonstrated by the stages of initiation, and by the various dues, of food gifts and so on, paid by the juniors to the seniors of the tribe: by the food which persons of different status in seniority may eat, and so forth. Indeed Dr. Roth has regarded the 'classes' as originally evolved to regulate the distribution of the food supply, and such regulations would, I think, be elements among other regulations of matrimonial and other rights, dependent on seniority. 'What a man may eat at one stage is at another stage forbidden, and vice versa.'169
The 'horde,' then, in Herr Cunow's opinion, was primarily divided into non-intermarrying persons of three stages of seniority. This is the original organisation, that of totem kindreds being later, in Herr Cunow's theory, which is not ours (pp. 36, 37). The word 'father' does not, in the Australian dialects, at first, signify what we mean by the word, but merely 'senior;' and 'mother' is a term of the same meaning. 'Father' and 'mother' with all of their seniority are 'the big ones;' children are 'the little ones.' These terms become 'class' names.
An example is taken from Mr. Bridgman, superintendent of the tribes at Port Mackay. These have two 'phratries,' Yungaru and Wutaru (totemic names), and four 'classes,' Gurgela, Bembia, Wungo, and Kubaru.170 The terms for family relations are not understood in our sense. Mr. Bridgman had a name and status in the tribe. His name was Gunurra; his phratry was Yungaru, his class was Bembia, and his children, if he had any, were Wutaru (by phratry), Kubaru (by class). If a girl came by, and Mr. Bridgman asked who she was, and if she was Kubaruan, he was told 'she is your daughter.' This 'daughter' is a young woman of the class to which Mr. Bridgman's daughters, if he had any, would belong.
Herr Cunow's theory, then, starts from the 'horde,' divided into not intermarrying degrees of seniority. That such hordes, not separate family groups, were the initial stage of society, he is persuaded.171 He rejects Morgan's theory of communal marriage.172 Next, he thinks, arose objections to brother and sister and other near akin marriages (why we are not told), and a man would thus be driven to seek a wife out of his own horde. Why was this? Herr Cunow merely refers to the Dieri tradition already cited; evils followed on kindred marriages, and were perceived and, by divine decree, were reformed.173 That such evils did arise and were perceived, and being perceived were reformed, by very low savages, is to the highest degree improbable. However it came about (we suggest by dint of reflection on the totem and phratry restrictions), there is now an objection to intermarriage between persons 'of the same flesh.' How this arose does not seem to be a question that Herr Cunow chooses to dogmatise upon.
The horde now developes itself into a group of kin, of which the members regard each other as 'too nearly related by blood,' to intermarry. 'As a mark of these groups of kin they later take different beast or plant names, usually from such species as exist in their districts. No reverence would originally be paid to the totem animal;' the Narrinyeri eat it without scruple,174 like any other; the totem name is originally a name of a genossenschaft; a comradeship, the Narrinyeri word for totem, 'Ngaitje,' is equivalent to 'friend.'
All this is rather vague. Why did groups of comrades or of recognised kin take plant and animal names? Why did they forbid intermarriage? What was the origin of the objection to marriage between blood kindred? It does not arise out of 'moral ideas,' nor out of 'wife-capture,'175 and Herr Cunow speaks neither of 'sexual taboo,' nor of 'sexual jealousy,' while the theory of 'personal totems' become hereditary, or of magical co-operation in totem breeding, is not mentioned; indeed, when Herr Cunow wrote (1894), the magical theory was unborn. The hordes merely developed into groups of comrades or of kin, as such not intermarrying among themselves, and marking themselves for no assigned reason, with plant or animal names: reverence of the totem came later.
'Still later than the totem association the phratry seems to arise,' and the phratries are described as allied local totem groups. This is my own opinion, but by 'local totem group,' I here mean (as already explained), the original local totem group, with the other totems which had become its elements, through exogamy, and female descent. Herr Cunow, if I follow him, means on the other hand a local totem group of the kind which now results among the Arunta from reckoning descent in the male line. 'The forbidding of marriage extended beyond the local group, passing into the neighbouring hordes, till at length morality enjoined the obtaining of wives from remoter districts. Hence was developed a come-and-go of marriage between two out of several larger local totems, and these larger local communities are the original types of the Australian phratries. Suppose that the hordes of the Kurnai had gradually developed themselves into local totem groups like those of the Narrinyeri, and … that it became the rule for the Brataulong to take their wives from their south-western neighbours, the Kulin, and vice versa, till the two groups waxed into a great community, and we have the probable development' (of the 'phratries') 'before us.' The groups 'Brataulong' and 'Kulin' would now be a great community of two intermarrying phratries.
All this implies, I think, a more advanced society, and larger communities, than we can easily conceive to have existed in the distant past when phratries arose. Moreover Herr Cunow, as we shall see, takes descent, even at this primitive period, to have been reckoned in the male line. Again, we have observed that phratry names, when they can be translated, are usually totemic, an opinion expressed by Mr. Fison and Mr. Howitt. The same sort of totemic names marks Red Indian phratries. Granting male kinship, the phratries of Herr Cunow's hypothesis might well have totem names, but he tries to show that phratry names are usually local; he gives seven cases out of which only two names of phratries are totemic.176 But he offers no authority for his assertion that the other five names are non-totemic (Eigennahme) and Yungaru and Wutaru, represented by him as non-totemic, are really totem names.
We know that as a result of reckoning in the male line local or district names tend to supersede totem names, and large local totem groups thus arise, a feature of the decay, not of the dawn, of Totemism. My own hypothesis, on the other hand, shows why phratry names are totemic. Herr Cunow concludes 'the phratry is originally nothing but an exogamous local group composed of several hordes.' Like Mr. Daniel McLennan, Herr Cunow quotes the legend of the wars of Eagle-Hawk and Crow, which ended in the establishment of the intermarrying phratries of Crow and Eagle-Hawk.177 Herr Cunow's theory of phratries appears to me to find, in the remotest past, the most recent institutions of the Australians, and to confuse the primitive local totem group with the local totem-group later developed out of reckoning descent in the male line. He throws back into the distant past the large modern associations, which could not exist in times really primitive. He makes the hordes develope themselves into totem kins, in place of being, originally (as in my system), small associations united by contiguity, and receiving totem names from without.178 He makes reckoning in the female line later than reckoning in the male line – the Narrinyeri reckoning in the male line (p. 84) – and perhaps this method, he thinks, is a result of ignorance of fatherhood, consequent on the Piraungaru custom (p. 135). Unluckily we find reckoning descent in the female line among many races, the Red Indians for example, where the Piraungaru custom is unknown. The priority of male to female descent is not admitted as a rule, by Mr. Tylor or any other English authorities.
