Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia

by Northcote Whitridge Thomas

We must now revert to the question of the origin of the so-called "terms of relationship." Are they expressive of kinship or only of status and duties? Neither Lewis Morgan nor the authorities on Australian marriage customs—Dr Howitt and Messrs Spencer and Gillen—discuss the question at length, but seem to regard it as an axiom (although they warn us that all European ideas of relationship must be dismissed when we deal with the classificatory system) that all these terms may be interpreted on the hypothesis that the European relationships to which they most nearly correspond actually existed in former times, not, as in Europe, between individuals, but between groups. The case on which Spencer and Gillen rely is that of the unawa relationship. They argue that a man is unawa to a whole group of women, one of whom is his individual wife; for this individual wife no special name exists, she is just unawa (= noa) like all the other women he might have married. Consequently the marital relation must have existed formerly between the man in question and the whole group of unawa women. The reasoning does not seem absolutely conclusive, and our doubts as to the validity of the argument are strengthened when we apply it to another case and find the results inconsistent with facts which are known to the lowest savage. Not only has a man only one name for the women he might have married, and for the woman he actually did marry, but a mother has only one name for the son she actually bore, and for the sons of the women who, if they had become her husband's wives, would have borne him sons in her stead. From this fact by parity of reasoning we must draw the obvious conclusion that during the period when group marriage was the rule, individual mothers were unknown. If we are entitled to conclude from the fact that a man's wife bears the same name for him as all the other women whom he might have married, that he at one time was the husband of them all, then we are obviously equally entitled to conclude, from the fact that a woman's son is known to her by the same name as the sons of other women, either that during the period of group marriage she actually bore the sons of the other women or that the whole group of women produced their sons by their joint efforts. Finding that the term which is translated "son" is equally applied by the remainder of the group of women to the son of the individual woman, whose case we have been considering, we may discard the former hypothesis and come to the conclusion that if there was a period of group marriage there was also one of group motherhood. This interesting fact may be commended to the attention of zoologists.

It is perhaps unnecessary to pursue the argument any further. The single point on which Spencer and Gillen rely is sufficiently refuted by a single reductio ad absurdum. If more proof is needed it may be found in Dr Howitt's work[151]. We learn from him that a man is the younger brother of his maternal grandmother, and consequently the maternal grandfather of his second cousin. Surely it is not possible in this case to contend that the "terms of relationship" are expressive of anything but duties and status. It seems unreasonable to maintain in the interests of an hypothesis that a man can be his own great uncle and the son of more than one mother.

From the foregoing discussion it will be clear that there are very grave, if not insurmountable, difficulties in the way of regarding the "terms of relationship" as being in reality such. In reply to those who regard them as status terms it is urged that if they are not terms of relationship, then the savages have no terms of any sort to express relationships which we regard as obvious, the implication being that this is unthinkable.

Now in the first place it may be pointed out that the converse is certainly true. Civilised man has a large number of terms of relationship, but he has none for such ideas as noa; a boy has no term for all men who might have been his father; a woman has no name for the children of all women who might have married her husband, if she had not anticipated them. To the savage this is just as unthinkable as the converse seems to be to some civilised men.

In the second place it is perfectly obvious that the savage has, as a matter of fact, no names for the quite unmistakeable relationship of mother and child. The name which an Australian mother applies to her son, she applies equally to the sons of all other women of her own status; the name which a son applies to his mother, he applies equally to all the women of her status, whether married or unmarried, in old age, middle life, youth, or infancy. If there is no term for this relation we can hardly argue that the absence of terms for other relations is unthinkable.

Morgan attempted to meet this objection by urging that in a state of promiscuity a woman would apply the same name to the children of other women as to her own, because they were or might be by the same father. But in the first place this assumes that the relationship to the father was considered rather than the relationship to the mother, and this is against all analogy. In the second place, even granting Morgan's postulate, the relation of a mother to her son is not that of a wife to the children of other wives of a polygynous husband. Poverty of language is therefore established in this case, and may be taken for granted where the obvious relationships are concerned.

It has been pointed out more than once that there are grave difficulties in the way of any hypothesis which assumes that terms of relationship, properly so called, were evolved in a state of pure promiscuity. It has now been shown that no intelligible account of the meaning of such terms can be given, even if we dismiss the difficulties just mentioned and assume that terms were somehow or other evolved, and a transition effected to a state of regulated promiscuity. If on the other hand we regard the "terms of relationship" as originally indicative of tribal status and suppose they have been transformed in the course of ages into "descriptive" terms such as we use in everyday life, the difficulties vanish.

For one proof of this hypothesis we need look no further than the terms of relationship applied by a mother to her own (and other) children, an illustration which has already done duty more than once. It is abundantly clear that what this term expresses is not relationship but status, the relation of one generation to the next in the Malayan system, of the half of a generation to the next generation in the same moiety of the tribe among the Dieri, and so on.

It is admitted even by believers in group marriage that the terms of relationship do not correspond to anything actually existing; beyond the "survivals" which we shall consider below, they can produce no shadow of proof that the terms ever did correspond to actual relationships, as they understand them. They can give no proof whatever that they did not express status.