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.