Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia

by Northcote Whitridge Thomas

First and foremost among the points with which Morgan has failed to deal is that of the constitution of the primitive group. Was it composed of parents and children only or were more than two generations represented? If the former, why were the children expelled? if the latter, how are brother and sister marriages introduced, when ex hypothesi the father of any given child was unknown and may have been any adult male? If Morgan and his supporters evade this difficulty by defining brother and sister as children of the same mother, they are met by the obvious objection that no revolution in a promiscuous group would result in the marriage of children of the same mother. Ex hypothesi there were several child-bearing women in the group, and their children, if a reform were introduced prohibiting marriage outside one's own generation, would intermarry; but the children of these women are, on the definition adopted, not brothers and sisters.

If brother and sister does not mean children of the same mother, what does it mean?

By what process are these names supposed to have come into existence in a promiscuous group? If brother in this sense is taken to imply common parentage, the name must clearly denote the relation between two males because, although a whole group of men had access to the mother, the male parent was or may have been the same person in each case, and this whether the mother was the same or not. Now, quite apart from the fact that primitive man was unlikely to have evolved a term for such an indefinite relationship, except in so far as it involved rights or duties, it is obvious that great complications would arise which would in practice make the nomenclature unworkable. For to call two boys brothers because they have the same group of men as possible fathers is only practicable in a society which has already evolved a system of age grades, and has established restrictions on intercourse between different generations, to use a somewhat indefinite term. For it is clear that in a state of promiscuity the class of adults is continually being recruited and that the boy passes at puberty, in so far as restrictions in the nature of initiation ceremonies are not imposed, from the class of sons to that of fathers. In other words, if a group consists of M1 M2 M3 M4, and they have male children of all ages N1 N2 N3 N4, as soon as N1 reaches puberty he becomes a possible father of the children O1 O2 O3 O4, who differ in age from N4 only by a few years at most and reckon as his brothers. But this means that N1 is the son of M1, for example, but at the same time the father of O1, who is likewise the son of M1; in the same way O1 is the brother of N4, who is the brother of N1; but O1 is not the brother of N1. The extraordinary complexity of the relations that would arise is at once obvious, and it seems clear that relationship terms could never come into existence under such circumstances unless they implied something beyond mere relationship and denoted rights and duties[148]. But if they denoted rights and duties, these must have preceded the relationship term, which consequently need not be held to apply to kinship in any proper sense of the term.

It is clear that the same difficulties apply when we try to work out the development on the hypothesis that a group of mothers existed. We are therefore reduced to the supposition that the term brother denoted originally a person born within a given period of time, and that this period was the same for whole sections of the community; in other words that the name brother was given to all males born between, let us say, B.C. 10,000 and B.C. 9,990. This is of course equivalent to the establishment of age grades and is in itself not unthinkable; age grades are of course perfectly well known among primitive peoples; but the establishment of age grades implies a degree of social organisation; and, what is more important, this hypothesis makes the term brother quite meaningless as a kinship term; for at the present day a common term of address for members of an age grade does not imply any degree of consanguinity, and unless it be proved that age grades are a product of the period of "group marriage" it cannot be argued that they ever did imply kinship.

It is sufficiently clear from these examples that Morgan entirely failed to work out the process by which the transition from pure to regulated promiscuity came about. But if the process is uncertain the causes are equally obscure. In Mr Morgan's view, or at any rate in one of the theories on which he accounted for the change, it was due to "movements which resulted in unconscious reformation"; these movements were, he supposes, worked out by natural selection. These words, it is true, apply primarily to the origin of the "tribal" or "gentile" organisation, as Mr Morgan terms totemism, but they probably apply to the original passage from promiscuity to "communal marriage," and I propose to examine how far such a theory has any solid basis.

Natural selection is a blessed phrase, but in the present case it is difficult to see in what way it is supposed to act. The variation postulated by Mr Morgan as a basis for the operation of natural selection is one of ideas, not physical or mental powers. Now under ordinary circumstances we mean by natural selection the weeding out of the unfit by reason of inferiorities, physical or psychical, which handicap them in the struggle for existence. But it cannot be said that the tendency to marry or practice of marrying outside one's own generation is such a handicap to the parents. How far is it injurious to the children of such unions? Or rather, how far have children who are the offspring of brothers and sisters or of cousins a better chance of surviving than the offspring of unions between relatives of different generations?

It is at the outset clear that savages are not in the habit of taking account of such matters. Even if it were otherwise, it is not clear how far they would have data as to the varying results of unions of near kin. For though on this question, so far as the genus homo is concerned, we have very few data on which to go, such data as we have hardly bear out his view. Modern statistics relate almost exclusively to the intermarriage of cousins, and apply, not to primitive tribes, such as those with which, ex hypothesi, Mr Morgan is dealing, but to more or less civilised and sophisticated peoples, among whom the struggle for existence is less keen owing to the advance of knowledge and the progress of invention, and among whom possibly the rise of humanitarian ideas not only tends to counteract the weeding out of the unfit, but even makes it relatively easy for them to propagate their species. What the result of the intermarriage of cousins is when war, famine, and infanticide are efficient weeders out of the unfit, we cannot say. Possibly or even probably the ill results would be inappreciable. It must not be forgotten that the marriage of near relatives is only harmful because or if it hands on to the children of the union an hereditary taint in a strengthened form, a result which is likely to follow in civilised life because hereditary taints are allowed to flourish unchecked by prudence and controlled by natural selection only so far as humanitarianism will permit it. These hereditary degeneracies however are probably largely if not entirely absent among savages. It is therefore open to question how far intermarriage of cousins would prove harmful under such conditions.

Statistics of the influence of cousin-marriage are not however what Mr Morgan wants. It is essential for him to prove that father-daughter marriage is more harmful than brother-sister unions.

It might be imagined that the data for estimating the effect of the union of father and daughter would be non-existent, but this is not so. Within the last few years it has been stated that such unions are common in parts of South America, and that the children, so far from being degenerates, are remarkably healthy and vigorous[149]. This is of interest in connection with Mr Atkinson's speculations as to the history of the family. In this connection it may be pointed out that such unions, ex hypothesi, are unlikely to result in continual in-and-in breeding, and would in all probability seldom be continued beyond the first alliance of this nature.

We are practically in complete darkness as to the results of brother and sister marriage in the human species. We have of course various cases of ruling families who perpetuated themselves in this way, but the data from such peoples refer to an advanced stage of culture and to a favoured class. They are not therefore applicable to similar unions among savages where they formed, as Mr Morgan suggests, the invariable practice. It is however possible to deduce from very simple considerations the probabilities as to the respective effects of adelphic and father-daughter unions. In the first place, as has been already pointed out, the father-daughter union implies only one family of in-and-in-bred children; in the case of brother and sister marriage, on the other hand, this state of things may go on indefinitely. If this is not enough to turn the scale against adelphic unions there is the further fact that, taking the descendants of the first pair of intermarrying descendants of common parents, whose tendency to disease or deformity is we will suppose x1 on both sides, and assuming that this tendency increases in a simple ratio, the offspring have the same tendencies to the second power of x. If their children marry each other the measure of degeneracy in the third generation is x4. Suppose now a father and mother with index of degeneracy each x1; a daughter of this union will have as her index x2; if the daughter bears children to the father, their index will be not x4, but x3, if the simple law which I have assumed for the purposes of argument holds good.