(i.) The theory can by no possibility apply to tribes with three or more main exogamous divisions or phratries, such as we find in North America. In a three-phratry tribe we are reduced to suppose that there were three sexes, or resort to some other solution not perhaps compatible with the theory. (ii.) We have no evidence that any totemic people, except the Navajoes, think the closest sexual unions injurious to the parties or their offspring. The theory is thus merely extracted from the facts—certain unions are forbidden, therefore they must have been deemed injurious. Now, even if they were generally thought injurious, the belief would be a mere inference from the fact that they were forbidden. (iii.) The supposed original legislative exogamous division produced a very different effect than that said to be aimed at, namely, the prohibition of marriage between brothers and sisters. It forbade to every man marriage with half the women of his tribe, most of whom were not, even in the wide native use of the term, his “tribal” sisters, that is, women in a man's phratry of the same status as his own sisters. Such relationships, of course, could not exist before they were created by the supposed Act of Division. It would have been easy to prohibit marriages of brothers with sisters directly, just as, though no exogamous rule forbids, the father, in tribes of female descent, is directly forbidden to marry his daughters. The natives can take a simple instead of a bewildering path. To this natural objection Mr Frazer replies:[1] “If we assume, as we have every fight to do, that the founders of exogamy in Australia recognized the classificatory system of relationship, and the classificatory system of relationship only, we shall at once perceive that what they intended to prevent was not merely the marriage of a man with his sister, his mother, or his daughter in the physical sense in which we use these terms; their aim was to prevent his marriage with his sister, his mother and his daughter in the classificatory sense of these terms; that is, they intended to place bars to marriage not between individuals merely but between the whole groups of persons who designated their group, not their individual relationships, their social, not their consanguineous ties, by the names of father and mother, brother and sister, son and daughter. And in this intention the founders of exogamy succeeded perfectly.” Mr Frazer's theory of the origin of exogamy appears now to waver. It was[2] that the primal bisection of the tribe was “deliberately devised and adopted as a means of preventing the marriage, at first, of brother with sisters. . . .” Here was the place to say, if it was then intended to say, that the Australians “recognized the classificatory system of relationships only.” As a matter of fact they recognize both the consanguine and the classificatory systems. It is not the case that “the savage Australian, it may be said with truth, has no idea of relationships as we understand them, and does not discriminate between his actual father and mother and the men and women who belong to the group, each member of which might have lawfully been either his father or his mother, as the case may be.”
This statement is made inadvertently and unfortunately by Messrs Spencer and Gillen,[3] but it is contradicted by their own observations. An Arunta can tell you, if asked, which of all the men whom he calls “father” is his very own father.[4] The Dieri have terms for “great” (actual) and “little” (tribal) father, and so for other relationships. In Arunta orgies a woman's “tribal” “fathers” and “brothers” and “sons” are admitted to her embraces; her actual father and brothers and sons are excluded.[5] Thus, if the prohibition be based on aversion to unions of persons closely akin by blood, as the actual father is excluded, the actual father, among the Arunta, is, or has been, amongst that people, regarded as near of blood to his daughters. The Arunta are ignorant, we are told, of the part of the male in procreation. Be it so, but there has been a time when they were not ignorant, and when the father was recognized as of the nearest kin by blood to his daughters. If not, and if the prohibition is based on hatred of unions of close kin, why is the father excluded? Nothing, in short, can be more certain than that Australian tribes distinguish between “social” or “tribal” relations on the one hand, and close consanguine relations on the other. Among the Arunta office is inherited by a man from his mother's husband, his father quem nuptiae demonstrant; not from any “tribal” father.[6]
Mr Frazer[7] apparently meant in his earlier statement that brothers and sisters consanguine, and these only, were to be excluded from intermarriage, because he went on to say that science cannot decide as to whether the closest interbreeding is injurious to the offspring of healthy parents, however near in blood; and that very low savages could not discover what is hidden from modern science. He had therefore marriages of consanguine brothers and sisters present to his mind: “the closest interbreeding.” Brothers and sisters were finally forbidden, on this theory, to intermarry, not because of any dread of injury to the offspring. “The only alternative open to us seems to be to infer that these unions were forbidden because they were believed to be injurious to the persons engaged in them, even when they were both in perfect health.”[8] These “incestuous unions” are between brothers and sisters, mothers and sons. Here brothers and sisters consanguine, children of the same mother in each case, certainly appear to be intended. Who else, indeed, can be intended? But presently[9] we are to assume that the Australians, before they made the first exogamous division of the tribe “recognized the classificatory system of relationship, and the classificatory system only.” They meant, now, to bar marriage between “whole groups of persons,” related by “social, not consanguineous ties.” But this seems to be physically impossible. These “whole groups” never existed, and never could exist, as far as we can see, till they were called into being by the legislative division of the tribe into two exogamous phratries—which had not yet been made. How could a man call a whole group of women “nupa,” as at present (the word being applied to his wife and to all women of the opposite phratry to his whom he might legally marry) before the new law had constituted such a group? In what sense, again, were all women of a certain status called my “sisters” (like my actual sisters) before the new law made a new group of them—in regard to marriage as sacred as my own sisters now were to me? It cannot be said that all women of my status were called, collectively, my “sisters” before the new division of the tribe and new rule arose, because previously, all women of my status in the tribe have been my “sisters.” Who else could be collectively my “sisters”? If to marry a “sister” were reckoned dangerous to her and to me, I must have been forbidden to marry all the women of my status in the tribe. How could a law which merely halved the number of my “sisters” remove the unknown danger from half of them? If any women except my actual sisters were, before the new rule, reckoned as socially my sisters, all women in the tribe of a certain status must have been so reckoned, If all dangerous, I must marry none of them. But by the new rule, I may marry half of them! Why have they ceased to be dangerous?
If the theory be that originally only brothers and sisters consanguine were thought dangerous to each other in sexual relations, and the superstition was later extended so as to include all “classificatory” brothers and sisters, who were in these days (before the exogamous division) classificatory brothers and sisters? How and for what reason were some marriageable girls in the tribe classificatory sisters of a young man while others, equally young and marriageable, were not? The classificatory brothers and sisters must have been all the marriageable youth of both sexes in a generation, in the tribe.
But then if all the youth of a generation, of both sexes, were classificatory brothers and sisters, and if therefore their unions were dangerous to themselves, or to the crops, the danger could not be prevented by dividing them into two sets, and
