Ancient society

by Lewis Henry Morgan

These forms of polyandry are used in Mr. McLennan’s speculations as though universal in practice. He employs them in his attempted explanation of the origin of the classificatory system of relationship. The Nair polyandry is where several unrelated persons have one wife in common (p. 146). It is called the rudest form. The Tibetan polyandry is where several brothers have one wife in common. He then makes a rapid flight through the tribes of mankind to show the general prevalence of one or the other of these forms of polyandry, and fails entirely to show their prevalence. It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. McLennan that these forms of polyandry are exceptional, and that they could not have been general even in the Neilgherry Hills or in Tibet. If an average of three men had one wife in common (twelve husbands to one wife was the Nair limit, p. 147), and this was general through a tribe, two-thirds of the marriageable females would be without husbands. It may safely be asserted that such a state of things never existed generally in the tribes of mankind, and without better evidence it cannot be credited in the Neilgherry Hills or in Tibet. The facts in respect to the Nair polyandry are not fully known. “A Nair may be one in several combinations of husbands; that is, he may have any number of wives” (p. 148). This, however, would not help the unmarried females to husbands, although it would increase the number of husbands of one wife. Female infanticide cannot be sufficiently exaggerated to raise into general prevalence these forms of polyandry. Neither can it be said with truth that they have exercised a general influence upon human affairs.

The Malayan, Turanian and Ganowánian systems of consanguinity and affinity, however, bring to light forms of polygyny and polyandry which have influenced human affairs, because they were as universal in prevalence as these systems were, when they respectively came into existence. In the Malayan system, we find evidence of consanguine groups founded upon brother and sister marriages, but including collateral brothers and sisters in the group. Here the men lived in polygyny, and the women in polyandry. In the Turanian and Ganowánian system we find evidence of a more advanced group—the punaluan in two forms. One was founded on the brotherhood of the husbands, and the other on the sisterhood of the wives; own brothers and sisters being now excluded from the marriage relation. In each group the men were polygynous, and the women polyandrous. Both practices are found in the same group, and both are essential to an explanation of their system of consanguinity. The last-named system of consanguinity and affinity presupposes punaluan marriage in the group. This and the Malayan exhibit the forms of polygyny and polyandry with which ethnography is concerned; while the Nair and Tibetan forms of polyandry are not only insufficient to explain the systems, but are of no general importance.

These systems of consanguinity and affinity, as they stand in the Tables, have committed such havoc with the theories and opinions advanced in “Primitive Marriage” that I am constrained to ascribe to this fact Mr. McLennan’s assault upon my hypothesis explanatory of their origin; and his attempt to substitute another, denying them to be systems of consanguinity and affinity.

II. That Mr. McLennan’s hypothesis to account for the origin of the classificatory system does not account for its origin.

Mr. McLennan sets out with the statement (p. 372) that “the phenomena presented in all the forms [of the classificatory system] are ultimately referable to the marriage law; and that accordingly its origin must be so also.” This is the basis of my explanation; it is but partially that of his own.

The marriage law, under which he attempts to explain the origin of the Malayan system, is that found in the Nair polyandry; and the marriage-law under which he attempts to explain the origin of the Turanian and Ganowánian system is that indicated by the Tibetan polyandry. But he has neither the Nair nor Tibetan system of consanguinity and affinity, with which to explain or to test his hypothesis. He starts, then, without any material from Nair or Tibetan sources, and with forms of marriage-law that never existed among the tribes and nations possessing the classificatory system of relationship. We thus find at the outset that the explanation in question is a mere random speculation.

Mr. McLennan denies that the systems in the Tables (Consanguinity, pp. 298-382; 523-567) are systems of consanguinity and affinity. On the contrary, he asserts that together they are “a system of modes of addressing persons.” He is not unequivocal in his denial, but the purport of his language is to that effect. In my work of Consanguinity I pointed out the fact that the American Indians in familiar intercourse and in formal salutation addressed each other by the exact relationship in which they stood to each other, and never by the personal name; and that the same usage prevailed in South India and in China. They use the system in salutation because it is a system of consanguinity and affinity—a reason paramount. Mr. McLennan wishes us to believe that these all-embracing systems were simply conventional, and formed to enable persons to address each other in salutation, and for no other purpose. It is a happy way of disposing of these systems, and of throwing away the most remarkable record in existence respecting the early condition of mankind.

Mr. McLennan imagines there must have been a system of consanguinity somewhere entirely independent of the system of addresses; “for it seems reasonable to believe,” he remarks (p. 373), “that the system of blood-ties and the system of addresses would begin to grow up together, and for some little time would have a common history.” A system of blood-ties is a system of consanguinity. Where, then, is the lost system? Mr. McLennan neither produces it nor shows its existence. But I find he uses the systems in the Tables as systems of consanguinity and affinity, so far as they serve his hypothesis, without taking the trouble to modify the assertion that they are simply “modes of addressing persons.”

That savage and barbarous tribes the world over, and through untold ages, should have been so solicitous concerning the proper mode of addressing relations as to have produced the Malayan, Turanian and Ganowánian systems, in their fullness and complexity, for that purpose and no other, and no other systems than these two—that in Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and America they should have agreed, for example, that a given person’s grandfather’s brother should be addressed as grandfather, that brothers older than one’s self should be addressed as elder brothers, and those younger as younger brothers, merely to provide a conventional mode of addressing relatives—are coincidences so remarkable and for so small a reason, that it will be quite sufficient for the author of this brilliant conception to believe it.

A system of modes of addressing persons would be ephemeral, because all conventional usages are ephemeral. They would, also, of necessity, be as diverse as the races of mankind. But a system of consanguinity is a very different thing. Its relationships spring from the family and the marriage-law, and possess even greater permanence than the family itself, which advances while the system remains unchanged. These relationships expressed the actual facts of the social condition when the system was formed, and have had a daily importance in the life of mankind. Their uniformity over immense areas of the earth, and their preservation through immense periods of time, are consequences of their connection with the marriage-law.