It is doubtless thus, after the manner of the great monkeys, that primitive human societies have been formed. With the chimpanzees these hordes can never become very large, for the male progenitor will not endure rivals, and drives away the young males as long as he is the strongest. The first men were surely more sociable, because of their human nature. The young males of the human horde were able to remain, in greater or less number, within the association, but the jealousy of the progenitor-in-chief, the father of the family, must often have obliged them to procure one or several females by capturing them from neighbouring or rival hordes; they thus became more or less exogamous; and, in their embryo societies, marriage, or rather sexual union, ended by being prohibited between brothers and sisters, not because there was the least moral scruple about incest, but because, within the limit of the horde, the young women were claimed by the most robust males, who would not yield them up. We know that this is still the case in the Australian tribes.[874]
In this gross social state it is necessarily the mother who is the centre of the family, just as she is in the families of mammifers; it is, therefore, quite natural that the children should bear her name and not that of their father, which, for that matter, is not always easy to designate. When once the custom of exogamy was well established, what was at first a necessity ended by becoming an obligation, and men were forbidden to unite themselves with women of the group to which they belonged, and which bore the same name as their own. Such is still the general rule in Australia.[875] But in Australia this group is often only a sub-tribe, a gens or clan; for the hordes, becoming too numerous, are subdivided into factions or large families, who unite together for common defence or vengeance. The children of each group belong sometimes to the clan of the mother, and there is then no legal parenthood between them and their father;[876] also, in case of war, the son must join the maternal tribe.[877] But this is not a universal rule, and in many tribes the children now belong to the paternal clan.[878]
These are general cases, common to the greater part of the Australian tribes, but not to all. There are some who have organised their marriage and their family into classes, thus regulating, in a certain measure, the primitive confusion, and establishing by this very regulation a sort of limited promiscuity. The word “classes,” employed by travellers who have made us acquainted with these curious customs, is improper, for neither social classes nor castes exist in Australia. These so-called classes are simply sub-tribes or clans, analogous to the Roman gens.
In certain of these tribes a sort of categorical promiscuity is kept up. Thus, among the tribes of Mount Gambier, of the Darling River, and of Queensland, each tribe is divided into two sub-tribes, and within each of these clans all the men are reputed brothers, and all the women are sisters, and all marriage between these brothers and these sisters is strictly forbidden.[879] This is a primordial law; the violation of it is an act of the deepest guilt, which not only stains the individual, but the group to which he belongs; it is more than incest, and the Australians, who have a very lively sentiment of duty, feel intense horror of such an act. But if every man is brother to all the women in his clan, on the other hand he is husband to all the women of the other clan of his tribe. Consequently, all the men of one group are called husbands by all the women of the other, and inversely. Marriage with these Australians is not therefore an individual act, as with us; it is a social condition, resulting from the fact of birth.[880] However, the actual communal union is not obligatory in the least. A man or woman may stop at the nominal or reputed marriage; they may merely call each other husband and wife; but in principle, the right is admitted, and the men sometimes offer temporary wives of their own class to strangers who visit them.[881] Thus in the tribe of the Kamilaroi, near Sydney, every man of the Kubi clan has the right to call “my wife” every person of feminine sex belonging to the Ipai clan, and to treat her as such. There is no need of proposals, or of contract, or of ceremony; a man is a husband by right of birth, but the intimate union does not imply association by couples; the woman passes from one to the other, or even from several to several others. On the other hand, within the limit of the clan, all the men and all the women call each other brothers and sisters, and are bound to respect each other. In uniting with the men of the other sub-tribe having conjugal right over them, the women do not on that account cease to reside in their own clan, the sub-tribe of their “brothers.”
Marriage within this sub-tribe is the abomination of desolation, the sin for which there is no forgiveness. Whoever commits it is outlawed from society, driven from the tribe, tracked through the woods like game, and put to death. He has dishonoured the association, and the children who are born of these social incests are exterminated.[882] Thus, all real consanguinity has been set aside, and a fictitious fraternity created between all the members of the same clan, similar to paternity by adoption. Is this artificial parenthood the result of practical exogamy, or has it, on the contrary, produced it? We cannot tell; but wherever it exists, its rule is absolutely inflexible. If, for example, as often happens in Australia, the important men, the chiefs, the sorcerers, or the strong adults, seize a certain number of women for their personal use, they only do it in conformity to the law of exogamy between the sub-tribes. If one of the women thus confiscated runs away and is re-taken, she is not restored to the man who had usurped possession of her, but belongs by right to those who have caught her.
Moreover, certain neighbouring tribes are subdivided into sub-tribes, or clans of the same name; they have probably sprung one from the other at some former period. If it happens that a man steals a woman from one of these tribes, the captured woman is immediately incorporated into the corresponding clan of the ravisher’s tribe, and she becomes the “sister” of all the women of this clan, to which will also belong her children. As for the ravisher, he is always a member of another gens, or clan, of the same tribe. If the tribes of the captured woman and of her captor are not symmetrical—that is to say, have not corresponding clans—then the woman may become the founder of a new clan belonging to the tribe of the man who has carried her off.[883]
If a woman is captured by a party of warriors, and not by one individual only, the first care of the captors is to inflict on her a collective violation, on the condition, however, that none of them belong to a clan homonymous with that of the ravished woman; if any one of their party is an exception to this, he must abstain from so doing.[884]
The sign of the fictitious fraternity of the Kamilaroi, and of all the Australian tribes organised in the same manner, is a common emblem, the totem. All the men bearing the same totem are united by the bond of a conventional fraternity, which is none the less strict for that reason. The totem has evidently been invented in a primitive epoch, when the different degrees of consanguinity were not easily distinguished, and were therefore replaced by an artificial union far wider than the limits of the natural family.
Whenever a single individual wished to escape from this tribal marriage, he was obliged to resort to various artifices. One of these transitional processes has remained in use in the Kurnai tribe, in Gippsland, Victoria.
The terms still in use with them to designate kinship recall the former existence of a fraternal marriage; but in practice they have none the less adopted individual marriage. The manner in which these individual marriages are contracted probably indicates what must have happened in primitive times, when some innovators attempted to escape from tribal marriage by carrying off the women they preferred, and were only re-admitted to their tribe after having obtained pardon and the ratification of their audacious enterprise. Among the Kurnai every marriage must be made by the capture of one of the women of their tribe, even when this rape has been preceded by a friendly exchange of sisters, which is usual enough. This simulated rape is punished by a simulation of vengeance. The fugitives are pursued; they are even ill-treated, but short of being actually killed. Their punishment is simply an act of obedience to ancestral customs. When all is concluded, and the fugitive couple reinstated among their people, the woman belongs to the man who has carried her off; he is no longer obliged to offer her to the visitors of his clan, as old Australian hospitality required;[885] she belongs to him alone. Sometimes the ravisher legalises his right of sole proprietor by first giving notice to his friends, and offering them the use of his wife, after which he can keep her to himself.[886]