When this work appeared it was received with favor by ethnologists, because as a speculative treatise it touched a number of questions upon which they had long been working. A careful reading, however, disclosed deficiencies in definitions, unwarranted assumptions, crude speculations and erroneous conclusions. Mr. Herbert Spencer in his “Principles of Sociology” (Advance Sheets,
Popular Science Monthly, Jan., 1877, p. 272), has pointed out a number of them. At the same time he rejects the larger part of Mr. McLennan’s theories respecting “Female Infanticide,” “Wife Stealing,” and “Exogamy and Endogamy.” What he leaves of this work, beyond its collocation of certain ethnological facts, it is difficult to find.
It will be sufficient under this head to consider three points.
I. Mr. McLennan’s use of the terms “Exogamy” and “Endogamy.”
“Exogamy” and “endogamy”—terms of his own coinage—imply, respectively, an obligation to “marry out,” and an obligation to “marry in,” a particular group of persons.
These terms are applied so loosely and so imprecisely by Mr. McLennan to the organized groups made known to him by the authors he cites, that both his terms and his conclusions are of little value. It is a fundamental difficulty with “Primitive Marriage” that the gens and the tribe, or the groups they represent, are not distinguished from each other as members of an organic series, so that it might be known of which group “exogamy” or “endogamy” is asserted. One of eight gentes of a tribe, for example, may be “exogamous” with respect to itself, and “endogamous” with respect to the seven remaining gentes. Moreover, these terms, in such a case, if correctly applied, are misleading. Mr. McLennan seems to be presenting two great principles, representing distinct conditions of society which have influenced human affairs. In point of fact, while “endogamy” has very little application to conditions of society treated in “Primitive Marriage,” “exogamy” has reference to a rule or law of a gens—an institution—and as such the unit of organization of a social system. It is the gens that has influenced human affairs, and which is the primary fact. We are at once concerned to know its functions and attributes, with the rights, privileges and obligations of its members. Of these material circumstances Mr. McLennan makes no account, nor does he seem to have had the slightest conception of the gens as a governing institution of ancient society. Two of its rules are the following: (1.) Intermarriage in the gens is prohibited. This is Mr. McLennan’s “exogamy”—restricted as it always is to a gens, but stated by him without any reference to a gens. (2.) In the archaic form of the gens descent is limited to the female line, which is Mr. McLennan’s “kinship through females only,” and which is also stated by him without any reference to a gens.
Let us follow this matter further. Seven definitions of tribal system, and of tribe are given (Studies, etc., 113-115).
“Exogamy Pure.—I. Tribal (or family) system.—Tribes separate. All the members of each tribe of the same blood, or feigning themselves to be so. Marriage prohibited between the members of the tribe.
“2. Tribal system.—Tribe a congeries of family groups, falling into divisions, clans, thums, etc. No connubium between members of same division: connubium between all the divisions.