THE BEGINNINGS OF MONARCHY: AFRICAN CHIEF SEATED IN STATE AMONG HIS HEADMEN
The tribal state has a fixed form of government. The chiefs or patriarchs of the various families stand at the head of affairs, the position of chief being either hereditary or elective. In most cases, however, it is determined by a combination of both methods, a blood descendant being chosen, provided he is able to give proof of his competence.
Group-marriage is the form of union established by the association of two hordes, or packs, according to which the men of one group marry the women of the other; not a marriage of individual men with individual women, but a promiscuous relationship, each man of one group marrying all the women of the other group—at least in theory—and vice versâ; not a marriage of individuals, but of aggregates. Certainly with such a sex-relationship established, sooner or later regulations develop from within the community, through which the marital relationships of individuals are adjusted in a consistent manner; but the principle first followed was, as community in property, so community in marriage; and this must of itself lead to kinships entirely different from those with which we are familiar.
Group-marriage was closely bound up with religious conceptions; single hordes, or packs, considered themselves the embodiment of a single spirit. And since at that time spirits were only conceived of as things that existed in nature, the horde felt itself to be a single class of natural object—some animal or plant, for example; and the union of one pack with another was analogous to the union of one animal with another. Each group believed itself to be permeated by the spirit of a certain species of animal, borrowed its name thence and the animal species itself was looked upon as the protecting spirit. The ancestral spirit was worshipped in the animal, and the putting to death or injuring of an individual of the species was a serious offence.
Such a belief is called Totemism. “Totem”—a word borrowed from the language of the Massachusetts Indians—is the natural object or animal assumed as the emblem of the horde or tribe, and correspondingly the group symbolised by the class of animal or natural object is called a Totem-group.
This belief led to a close union of all who were partakers of the spirit of the same animal; it also strictly determined which groups could associate with one another. And as the totem-group mimicked the animal in its dances, and fancied itself to be possessed by its spirit, it also ordered the methods of partaking of food, and all marriage, birth, and death ceremonies in accordance with this conception. It is said that, the totem being exogamous, marriages were not possible within the totem, but only without it. Precisely so; for the original conception was not that individuals formed unions, but that the whole totem entered the marriage relationship; a single marriage would have been considered an impossibility.
To which totem the children belonged—to the mother’s, to the father’s, or to a third totem—was a question that offered considerable difficulty. All three possibilities presented themselves; the last mentioned, however, only in case the child belonged to another group, a sub-totem, and in that event its descendants could return to the original totem.
The First Ideas of Kinship
Descent in the male or in the female line occasioned in later times the rise of important distinctions between nations. If a child follow the mother’s totem, we speak of “maternal kinship”; conversely, of “paternal kinship” in case of heredity through the father. Which of these is the more primitive, or did tribes from the very first adopt either one or the other system, thus making them of equal antiquity, is a much-vexed question. There is reason to believe that maternal kinship is the more primitive form, and that races have either passed with more or less energy and rapidity to the system of descent through males, or have kept to the original institution of maternal succession. There are many peoples among whom both forms of kinship exist, and in such instances the maternal is undoubtedly the more primitive; from this it appears very probable that development has thus taken place, the more so since there are traces of maternal kinship to be found in races whose established form is paternal.