Social Origins and Primal Law

by Andrew Lang; J. J. Atkinson

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.'[27]

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.[28]

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.[29] 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.[30] 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.