relationships, in the “classificatory system,” were merely terms of address, as among ourselves when a preacher calls any adult Rival theories. male “brother,” when an old woman is addressed as “mother,” when an elder man calls a junior “my son.” He also showed that his own system accounted for the terms. The controversy is still alive; one set of writers regarding the savage terms of relationship as indicating a state of things in which human beings dwelt in a “horde,” with promiscuous intercourse; another set holding that the terms do not indicate consanguineous kinship, but degrees of age, status, and reciprocal obligations in a local tribe, and therefore that they do not yield any presumption that there was a past of promiscuity or of what is called “group marriage.” On Morgan’s side (not of course accepting all his details) are L. Fison and A. W. Howitt, and Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen. Against him are Starcke, Westermarck, A. Lang, Dr Durkheim, apparently, Crawley and many others.
5. A second presumption in favour of original promiscuity has
been drawn by the eminent Australian students, Baldwin
Spencer and F. J. Gillen, and by A. W. Howitt, from
the customs of some Australian aborigines. In each
tribe, owing to customary laws which are to be
Evidence
of original promiscuity.
examined later, only men and women of a given status
are intermarriageable (nupa, noa, unawa) with each other.
Though child-betrothals are usual, and though the woman is
specialized to one man, who protects and nourishes her and all
her children, and though their union is immediately preceded by
an extended jus primae noctis (such as Herodotus describes among
the Nasamones), yet, among certain tribes, the following custom
prevails. At great meetings the tribal leaders assign a woman as
paramour (with what amount of permanence remains obscure) to
a man (pirrauru); one woman may have several pirrauru men,
one man several pirrauru women, in addition to their regularly
betrothed (tippa malku) wives and husbands. The husband
occasionally shows fight, and bitter jealousies prevail, but, at
the great ceremonial meetings, complaisance is enforced under
penalty of strangling. Thenceforth, if the husband permits, the
male pirrauru has matrimonial rights over the other man’s
tippa malku wife when they meet. A symbolic ceremony of
union precedes the junction of the pirrauru people. This institution,
as far as reported, is peculiar to a group of tribes near Lake
Eyre, the Dieri, Urabunna, and their congeners,—or perhaps to
all who have the same “phratry” names as the Dieri and
Urabunna (Kiraru and Mattera, in various dialectic forms).
Elsewhere the pirrauru custom is not known: but almost everywhere there are licentious festivals, in which all marriage rules except those which forbid incest (in our sense of the word, namely between the closest relations) are thrown to the winds. Also a native travelling among alien tribes is lent women of the status into which he may legally marry.
Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, and A. W. Howitt, regard pirrauru as “group marriage” and as a proof that, at one time, all intermarriageable people were actually husbands and wives, while the other examples of licence are also survivals, in a later stage of decay, of promiscuity, and Group marriage. “group marriage.” To this it is replied that “group marriage” is a misnomer; that if pirrauru be in a sense marriage it is status, not group marriage. Again, it is urged, pirrauru is a modification of tippa malku, which comes first; a woman is “specialized” to a man before she can be made pirrauru to another, and her tippa malku husband continues to support her, and to recognize her children as his own, after she has become pirrauru to another man or other men. Without the foregoing tippa malku union, the pirrauru unions are not conceivable; they are mere legalized paramourships, modifying the tippa malku marriage (like the Italian cicisbeism); procuring a protector for a woman in her husband’s absence, and supplying legal loves for bachelors. The custom is peculiar to a given set of kindred tribes. The festivals are the legalized, restricted and more or less permanent modification of the casual orgies of feasts of licence, or Saturnalia, which have their analogies among many people, ancient and modern. Pirrauru is no more a survival of and a proof of primitive promiscuity, than is the legalized incest of ancient Egypt or ancient Peru. If these views be correct the argument for primitive promiscuity derived from pirrauru falls to the ground.
6. The questions at issue obviously are, was mankind originally promiscuous, with no objections to marriage between persons of the nearest kin; and was the first step in advance the prohibition of marriage (or of amatory intercourse) between brothers and sisters; or did mankind originally The historical problem. live in very small groups, under a jealous sire, who imposed restrictions on intercourse between the young males, his sons, and all the females of the “hearth-circle,” who constituted his harem? The problem has been studied, first, in the institutions of savages, notably of the most backward savages, the black natives of Australia; and next, in the light of the habits of the higher mammalia.
As regards Australian matrimonial institutions, it has been known since the date of the Journals of two Expeditions of Discovery, by Sir George Grey (1837–1839), that they are very complex and peculiar, in points strongly resembling the customary laws of the more backward Red Indian tribes of North America. Information came in, while McLennan was working, from G. Taplin (The Narrinyeri, 1874), from A. W. Howitt and L. Fison, and many other inquirers (in Brough Smyth’s Aborigines of Victoria, 1878), from Howitt and Fison again (in Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 1880), and many essays by these authors, and finally, in Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) and Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen; and in Howitt’s Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904), with R. Roth’s North-West Central Queensland Aborigines (1897). All of these are works of very high merit. Knowledge is now much more wide, minute and securely based than it was when McLennan’s Studies in Ancient History, second series, was posthumously published (1896). We know with certainty that in Australia, among archaic savages who have neither metals, agriculture, pottery nor domesticated animals, a graduated scale of matrimonial institutions exists. First there are local tribes, each tribe having its own dialect; holding a recognized area of territory; and living on friendly terms with neighbouring tribes. Territorial conquest is never attempted. In many cases a knot of tribes of allied dialects and kindred rites may be, or at least is, spoken of as a “nation” by our authorities.
7. Customary law is administered by the Seniors, the wise, the magically skilled, who in many cases are “headmen” of local groups or of sets of kindred. As to marriage, persons may wed within the local tribe, or into a neighbouring local tribe, at will, provided that they Primitive restrictions on marriage. obey the restrictions of customary law. The local tribe is neither exogamous nor endogamous, any more than is an English county. The restrictions, except where they have become obsolete, fall into six main categories:—
(1) In the most primitive, each tribe consists of two intermarrying and exogamous divisions, which are often styled phratries. Each such division has a name, which, when it can be translated, is the name of an animal: in the majority of cases, however, the meaning of the phratry name is lost. In one instance, that of the Euahlayi tribe of north-west New South Wales, the phratry names are said (by Mrs Langloh Parker) to mean “Light Blood” and “Dark Blood.” This, as in the theory of the Rev. J. Mathews, Eagle and Crow, might be taken to indicate a blending of two distinct races.
Taking, for the sake of clearness, tribes whose phratry names mean “Crow” and “Eagle Hawk,” every member of the tribe belongs either to Eagle Hawk phratry or to Crow phratry: if to Crow, the man or woman can only marry an Eagle Hawk, if to Eagle Hawk, can only marry a Crow. The children invariably belong to the phratry of the mother, in this most primitive type. Within Eagle Hawk phratry is one set of totem kins, named usually after various species of animals and plants; within Crow phratry is another set of totem kins, named always (except in one region of Central Australia) after a different set of plants and animals. With the exception mentioned (that of the Arunta
