3. A noteworthy character of ethnogamic union is the absence of capture of either bride or groom. Any semblance of capture would indeed be wholly incongruous with the rigid confinement of union to members of the group: it would also be incongruous with the exceeding formality and necessary amicability of both preliminary and concomitant arrangements.
4. Another noteworthy character is the total absence of purchase on either part. Although a material condition attends the union, it is essentially a test of character, and is applied in such wise as to dignify the feminine element rather than to degrade it like barbaric wife-purchase; while any semblance of purchase would be incongruous with the economic condition of a tribe practically destitute of accumulated property or even of thrift-sense.
5. A significant character of ethnogamic union, as exemplified in the type tribe, is the ceremonial or constructive monogamy. While there are obscure (and presumptively vestigial) traces of polyandry or adelphogamy, and while an informal polygyny is practiced by the chiefs and older warriors, the formal matings are between one man and one woman, and appear to be permanent.
Now, on comparing these characters with those revealed in the marital customs of other tribes and peoples, they are found to betoken a notably provincial and primitive culture-stage. Perhaps the nearest American approach to the Seri customs is found among certain California aborigines, notably the Yurok and Patawat tribes, who recognize the institution of “half-marriage”;[325] but here the material test of Seriland is replaced by purchase, while no trace of the moral test is found (even as among the Carolina Indians, according to Lawson); moreover, while these tribes discourage alien connections, they are not absolutely eschewed and reprobated as among the Seri. Other notably primitive customs, like those so fully described by Spencer and Gillen, have been found among the Australian aborigines;[326] but even here a part only of the marriages are regulated by amicable convention, while others are effected by (1) charm, (2) capture, and (3) elopement; and these collateral devices imply intertribal relations of a kind incongruous with the ethnogamic habit and utterly repugnant to the ethnogamic instinct. In both cases, accordingly, the marital customs clearly imply (and actually accompany) a much more highly differentiated socialry and economy than that of the Seri. The same is true of that vestigial custom of the Scottish clans known as handfasting, which is, moreover, a direct antithesis of the Seri custom in that it carries a warrant for, rather than an abridgment of, conjugal prerogatives; and the same might be said also of various South American, African, and southeastern Asian customs.
Certain representative North American customs have already been seriated in connection with the Seri customs, and their relations are of sufficient significance to warrant recapitulation. The series begins with the maternally organized and practically propertyless Seri. Next stand the Zuñi, with an essentially maternal organization, the vestigial moral test of the groom noted by Cushing, and a concomitant material test verging on purchase; so, too, monogamy persists, while the function remains largely collective, and is regulated by the elders, though the bride enjoys special prerogatives; and the fierce tribal endogamy is relaxed, though clan exogamy is enforced. Measurably similar to those of the Zuñi are the marital customs of the peaceful Tarahumari tribe of northern Mexico and the once warlike Seneca tribe of northeastern United States, although among both of these more cosmopolitan peoples the regulations are less closely similar to the Seri customs than are those of the Pueblo tribe named. Next in order of marital differentiation stand the Kwakiutl and Salish tribes of British Columbia, in which the social organization has practically passed into the paternal stage; here the laws of monogamy, clan exogamy, and tribal endogamy are materially relaxed, the moral test is lost among the Kwakiutl and reduced to a curious vestige among the Salish, while the material test is commuted into the making of expensive presents. Still more remote from the initial stage is the marriage of the paternally organized Omaha, among whom tribal endogamy is prevalent but not absolute, while polygyny is customary; among whom the moral test seems wholly obsolete, while the material test is completely replaced by purchase (or at least by the interchange of expensive presents); and among whom, concordantly, the feminine privileges are few and the females are practically degraded to the rank of property of male kindred or spouses. These several customs fall into a natural order or series definitely coordinated with the esthetic, the industrial or economic, and the general institutional or social conditions of the respective tribes; and it is noteworthy that they mark successive stages in that passage from the mechanical to the spontaneous which characterizes demotic activity.[327]
In brief, ethnogamy, as exemplified by the type tribe, accompanies that strictly maternal organization which marks the lowest known stage of social development; it accompanies also a rudimentary esthetic condition in which decorative symbols are restricted to the expression of maternal relation; it accompanies, in like manner, an inchoate economic condition characterized by absence of property and thrift-sense; while its most essential concomitant is extratribal antipathy too bitter to permit toleration of alien blood, or even of alien presence save under the constraint of superior force.
MORTUARY CUSTOMS
The prevailing opinion among the better informed Caucasian neighbors of the Seri is that the tribesmen display an inhuman indifference to their dead; and this opinion is one of the factors—combining with current notions as to cannibalism and arrow-poisoning and beastlike toothing in battle—involved in the widespread feeling that the tribesmen are to be accounted as mongrel and uncanny monsters rather than human beings.
The opinion that the Seri neglect their dead on occasion would seem to rest on a considerable body of evidence; Mendoza’s record of the numberless neglected corpses of warriors polluting the air and poisoning the streams of Cerro Prieto in 1757 would seem to be unusual only in its fulness; and Señor Encinas, albeit so conservative as to repudiate the reputed anthropophagy and to recognize better qualities among the folk than any contemporary, declares that they are utterly negligent of their dead, save that when the bodies lie near rancherias heaps of brambles are thrown over them to bar—and thus to lessen the disturbance from—prowling coyotes. Quite indubitable, too, is the specific testimony of vaqueros to the effect that Seri raiders overtaken by the Draconian penalty of the frontier merely lie where they fall, even when this is well within reach of the tribesmen, Don Andrés Noriega’s verification of his boast (ante, p. 113) being an instance in point. On the other hand stands the conspicuous fact (unknown to the frontiersman) that well-marked cemeteries adjoin some of the rancherias of interior Seriland. The sum of the somewhat discrepant evidence accords with a characteristically unsatisfactory statement by Mashém, to the effect that the mourning ceremonies are important only in connection with women—i. e., matrons—because “the woman is just like the family” (“la muger es como la familia”); and this intimation, in turn, is corroborated by the single known instance of inhumation in Seriland, as well as by certain indirect indications connected with the scatophagic customs (ante, p. 213). On the whole it seems certain that the mortuary ceremonies attain their highest development in connection with females, the recognized blood-bearers and legislators of the tribe.
The special dignification of females in respect to funerary rites is without precise parallel among other American aborigines, so far as is known, but is not without analogues in the shape of (presumptive) vestiges of a former magnification of matrons in the mortuary customs of certain tribes. The vestiges are especially clear among the Iroquoian Indians, whose aboriginal socialry coincided with that of the Seri at various points; witness the following passage from the Onondaga mourning ritual, as collected and translated by Hewitt: