The Algonquins speak of cases where men have been put to death by their nearest kinsfolk for marrying women of their own clan.[8] Among the Asiniboin, a Siouan tribe, a chief can commit murder with impunity if the murdered person be without friends, but if he married within his gens he would be dismissed, on account of the general disgust which such a union would arouse.[9] The Hottentots used to punish alliances between first or second cousins with death.[10] A Bantu of the coast region considers similar unions to be “something horrible, something unutterably disgraceful.”[11] The Busoga of the Uganda Protectorate held in great abhorrence anything like incest even amongst domestic animals.[12] Among the Kandhs of India “intermarriage between persons of the same tribe, however large or scattered, is considered incestuous and punishable with death.”[13] In the Malay Archipelago submersion is a common punishment for incest,[14] but among certain tribes the guilty parties are killed and eaten[15] or buried alive.[16] In Efate, of the New Hebrides, it would be a crime punishable with death for a man or woman to marry a person belonging to his or her mother’s clan;[17] and the Mortlock Islanders are said to inflict the same punishment upon anybody who has sexual intercourse with a relative belonging to his own “tribe.”[18] Nowhere has marriage been bound by more severe laws than among the Australian aborigines. Their tribes are grouped in exogamous subdivisions, the number of which varies; and at least before the occupation of the country by the whites the regular punishment for marriage or sexual intercourse with a person belonging to a forbidden division was death.[19]
[8] Frazer, Totemism, p. 59.
[9] Dorsey, ‘Siouan Sociology,’ in Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn. xv. 224.
[10] Kolben, Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, i. 155 sq.
[11] Theal, History of the Boers in South Africa, p. 16.
[12] Johnston, Uganda Protectorate, ii. 719.
[13] Macpherson, quoted by Percival, Land of the Veda, p. 345. Cf. Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal, iii. 81.
[14] Wilken, Huwelijken tusschen bloedverwanten, p. 26 sq. Riedel, De sluik- en kroesharige rassen tusschen Selebes en Papua, p. 460.
[15] Wilken, Over de verwantschap en het huwelijks- en erfrecht bij de volken van het maleische ras, p. 18.
[16] Glimpses of the Eastern Archipelago, p. 105.