At first sight, it might be thought that there is little difference between this explanation of “marriage by capture” and that given by Sir John Lubbock, but in reality they differ completely. Sir John Lubbock supposes a violent capture from another tribe without any reference to the question of clanship. On the other hand, in the explanation above proposed, there is a change in the position of the woman, but it is brought about by arrangement, the pretended combat having relation to the rights of the clan, but having no reference to the wider organisation of the tribe. The sham-fight is simply a phase of the ceremonies, destined to show the objection entertained by a family group to part with one of its members, and, what is of still greater importance, to give up the interest they possess in the future offspring of the woman who is to be cut off from the clan. The essentially pacific character of the sham-fight is shown by the manner in which, as described by Colonel Dalton, it is conducted in Gondwana. Among the Muasi of this district, when the cavalcade of the bridegroom approaches the house of the bride, there issues from it a merry troop of young girls, who are headed by the mother of the bride, bearing on her head a vessel full of water, surmounted by a lighted lamp. When the girls come near the bridegroom’s friends they throw at them balls of boiled rice, after which they beat a retreat. The young men pursue them to the door of the house, which, however, they cannot enter until they have made presents to its female defenders. The fact that among nearly all the peoples who have “marriage by combat,” the children belong to the clan of their father, confirms the truth of the conclusion I have sought to establish, that the ceremony in question has relation to the clan, and not to the bride. Among the primitive peoples to whom it would be necessary, on the hypothesis of Sir John Lubbock, to trace the origin of that curious custom, the children usually belong to the family group of their mother. The sham-fight could be introduced when a change has taken place in the condition of women; but this would imply a phase of civilisation much more recent than that of the Australians and other barbarous tribes, to whose practice of stealing women for wives, which is mere forcible marriage, has been wrongly traced the origin of “marriage by capture.”
[CHAPTER IX.]
DEVELOPMENT OF THE “FAMILY.”
Mr. M’Lennan has remarked, in relation to the curious customs of capturing women for wives found among peoples in all parts of the world, that “in almost all cases the form of capture is the symbol of a group-act—of a siege, or a pitched battle, or an invasion of a house by an armed band, while in a few cases only, and these much disintegrated, it represents a capture by an individual. On the one side are the kindred of the husband; on the other the kindred of the wife.”[250] Whatever may be the true explanation of the origin of exogamy, with which the custom referred to is connected, there can be no doubt of the truth of the statement that the wife-capture is now usually, although it sometimes has relation solely to the individual, the symbol of a group-act. This may not be in the sense intended by Mr. M’Lennan, who looks upon exogamy and polyandry as referable to one and the same cause, and who regards “all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous.”[251] The phenomena of wife-capture prove conclusively, however, that the family group to which the woman belonged possessed, or thought themselves entitled to, certain rights over her—rights of which they resisted the invasion, whether by an individual alone, or by a group of persons, or by an individual aided by the other members of a group. It is important to notice that the groups in question appear to consist, not of strangers to each other, or to the man or woman more immediately concerned, but of persons bound together by certain ties of blood. This is shown to be so by the fact that the capture is atoned for by the payment to the relations of the woman of the marriage-price, if this has not been agreed on beforehand.[252] It is required, moreover, by the conclusion arrived at by Mr. M’Lennan, that the tribes among whom the system of wife-capture prevails are chiefly those whose marriages are governed by the law of exogamy.[253] By exogamy is meant the practice of marrying out of the tribe or group of kindred,[254] and it is founded on a prejudice against marriage with kinsfolk.[255] There is some uncertainty as to the nature of M’Lennan’s primitive group, but, judging from his statement that “promiscuity, producing uncertainty of fatherhood, led to the system of kinship through mothers only,”[256] we may suppose that it consisted of a number of persons, all of whom, as the result of promiscuity, were related by blood. The first division into which he classes uncultured peoples, according to their marriage-rules, is that where tribes are separate, and all the members of the tribes are, or feign themselves to be, of the same blood.[257] Mr. Morgan very properly criticises this definition, which, he says, “might answer for a description of a gens; but the gens is never found alone, separate from other gentes. There are several gentes intermingled by marriage in every tribe composed of gentes,”[258] a fact which would seem to distinguish the primitive group of M’Lennan, although consisting of consanguinei, from a gens or clan proper. Moreover, as Mr. Morgan shows, exogamy has relation to a rule or law of a gens, considered as “the unit of organisation of a social system,” and therefore the gens (of which, as an institution, the rules are prohibition of intermarriage in the gens, and limitation of descent in the female line[259]), or rather the family from which it has sprung, may be regarded as the earliest social group of which we have any knowledge.
It is of the greatest importance to the discovery of the nature of the primitive human family to understand the origin of the gens or clan. As defined by Morgan, it is “a body of consanguinei descended from the same common ancestor, distinguished by a gentile name, and bound together by affinities of blood.” Mr. Morgan affirms that the gens originated in three principal conceptions, “the bond of kin, a pure lineage through descent in the female line, and non-intermarriage in the gens.”[260] The most essential feature is that of tracing kinship through females only, and the discovery of the origin of this custom will throw light on that of the clan-institution itself, and therefore on the nature of the primitive family.
Mr. M’Lennan finds the origin of kinship through females only in the uncertainty of paternity, arising from the fact that, in primitive times, a woman was not appropriated to a particular man for his wife, or to men of one blood as wife.[261] The children, although belonging to the horde, remain attached to their mothers, and the blood tie observed between them would, as promiscuity gave place to polyandry of the ruder kind in which the husbands are strangers in blood to each other, become developed into the system of kinship through females.[262] An earlier writer, Bachofen, was so much struck with certain social phenomena among the ancients, that he believed women to have, at an early period, been supreme, not only in the family but in the state. He supposed that woman revolted against the primitive condition of promiscuity, and established a system of marriage, in which the female occupied the first place as the head of the family, and as the person through whom kinship was to be traced. This movement, which had a religious origin, was followed by another resulting from the development of the idea that the mother occupied a subordinate position in relation to her children, of whom the father was the true parent. Mr. M’Lennan very justly objects to this theory that, if marriage was, from the beginning, monogamous, kinship would have been traced through fathers from the first.[263] He adds that “those signs of supremacy on the woman’s part were the direct consequences (1) of marriage not being monogamous, or such as to permit of certainty of fatherhood; and (2) of wives not as yet living in their husband’s houses, but apart from them, in the homes of their own mothers.”[264] The meaning of this is, that the phenomena referred to by Bachofen were due to the former prevalence of a system of polyandry, such as still exists among the Nairs of Southern India. It is very improbable, however, that kinship through the female only could have had the origin supposed by Mr. M’Lennan. According to him one cause of the supremacy of woman referred to by Bachofen was the fact of wives living apart from their husbands in the homes of their own mothers. This custom must, therefore, have preceded the supremacy of woman, assuming this to have existed, and the tracing of kinship through females which gave rise to it. We must believe that originally women lived alone with their daughters (and their sons also, until these set up a separate establishment for themselves, taking with them probably their favourite sisters, as with the Nairs at the present day),[265] there being no male head of the family. If, however, we trace our steps back in thought to the most primitive period of human existence, we shall see that such a domestic state as that here supposed cannot have been the original one. Among savages there is never that subordination of the man to the woman which we should have to assume. We cannot suppose that the primeval group of mankind consisted of a woman and her children, and if the woman had a male companion we cannot doubt, judging from what we know of savage races, that he would be the head and chief of the group. The very notion, however, of the family group having a male as well as a female head is inconsistent with Mr. M’Lennan’s theory, and we must trace the origin of female kinship as a system to a different source from the polyandry to which he ascribed it.
The idea of a special relationship subsisting between a woman and her children might no doubt be originated during the period when the men of a group, “in the spirit of indifference, indulged in savage promiscuity,”[266] if such a condition of things ever existed, but that alone would not be sufficient to establish kinship through females only. It may be questioned, indeed, whether there ever was a time when the uncertainty of paternity, which Mr. M’Lennan’s whole theory requires, was so pronounced as to prevent kinship through males being acknowledged. Mr. Morgan agrees with Mr. M’Lennan so far as to say that, “prior to the gentile organisation, kinship through females was undoubtedly superior to kinship through males, and was doubtless the principal basis upon which the lower tribal groups were organised.” He affirms truly, however, that “descent in the female line, which is all that ‘kinship through females only’ can possibly indicate,” is only the rule of a gens, and that relationship through the father is recognised as fully as that through the mother.[267] I have elsewhere, however, given reasons for believing that this statement does not go far enough, and that the earliest forms of the classificatory system of relationships, on which Mr. Morgan bases his special theory, require actual kinship, and not relationship merely, through the male quite as fully as through the female.
It is surprising that Mr. Morgan says little as to the origin of descent in the female line. He says: “The gens, though a very ancient social organisation founded upon kin, does not include all the descendants of a common ancestor. It was for the reason that, when the gens came in, marriage between single pairs was unknown, and descent through males could not be traced with certainty. Kindred were linked together chiefly through the bond of their maternity.”[268] We have here apparently two reasons stated for the establishment of kinship through females, the absence of marriages between single pairs, and the uncertainty of paternity. Both of these conditions are found by Mr. Morgan to exist in the consanguine family groups which he supposes to have been formed when promiscuity ceased. The Polynesian peoples, among whom he finds traces of the consanguine family, have preserved the recollection of female kinship, although, according to Mr. Morgan, the gens is unknown to them.[269] The classificatory system of relationships, the origin of which he traces to the consanguine family, can, however, receive a totally different interpretation, and the existence of that family itself is very doubtful. Further, the difficulty of tracing descent through males, which Mr. Morgan supposes, is the result only of the polyandrous unions his theory requires, and if they ever really existed they could supply no further explanation of the origin of female kinship than the polyandry of the Nairs. He would have done better to have sought to connect it, as Mr. M’Lennan does, with the special relation supposed to exist between a mother and her child.
Mr. Herbert Spencer shows how this idea may have arisen. Unlike the other writers I have referred to, he does not think that promiscuity in the relation of the sexes ever existed in an unqualified form.[270] He thinks, indeed, that monogamy must have preceded polygamy, although, owing to the extension of promiscuity, and the birth of a larger number of children to unknown fathers than to known fathers, a habit would arise of thinking of maternal kinship rather than of paternal, and where paternity was manifest children would come to be spoken of in the same way.[271] Mr. Spencer adds, that the habit having arisen, the resulting system of kinship in the female line would be strengthened by the practice of exogamy.[272] The defect of this explanation lies in its requiring uncertain paternity, and I shall show that the system of female kinship has not arisen from the simple association in thought of a child with its mother in preference to its father. It is, moreover, inconsistent with the fact mentioned by Mr. Spencer himself, that where the system of female kinship now subsists “male parentage is habitually known.”[273] It is true that he supposes male kinship to be disregarded, but this conclusion appears to me not to be supported by sufficient evidence.
That there may have been a short period of barbarism in which the intercourse between the sexes was unrestrained by any law of marriage is possible. Probably, as female chastity before marriage is even now but slightly regarded among most uncultured peoples, all sexual alliances were allowable, so long as the rule as to consanguinity was not infringed, and so long as no offspring resulted from the alliance,[274] where this was entered into without the consent of parents. This consent would be necessary in all cases where such alliances were formed by females for marital purposes, and the sanction required would be that of the family head at the early period we are treating of. Judging from what we observe among modern savages we cannot doubt that self-interest chiefly would govern the father in connection with his daughter’s marriage. He would make certain requisitions as the price of his consent. Whether the marriage was to be a permanent or a terminable engagement, the father would stipulate that his daughter should continue to live with or near him, and that her children should belong to the family group of which he is the head. In this case not only would the children form part of the family to which their mother belonged, but the husband himself would become united to it, and would be required to labour for the benefit of his father-in-law.