Social Origins and Primal Law. Lang Andrew
of sexual tabu … and if we understand by "house-mates" those upon whom sexual tabu concentrates, we have explained exogamy.'56
Scarcely, for sexual tabu against marriage, in fact, now, at least, concentrates on people of near kin, and on totem-mates, man and woman of the same totem, and they may be 'house-mates,' or 'hearth-mates,' or they may not (in polygamous society), and the hearth-mates (as far as the totem rule goes, but not now in practice) may thus be intermarriageable, as not of the same totem, while totem-mates, from opposite ends of a continent, are not intermarriageable (except in the peculiar case of the Arunta and cognate tribes).
But Mr. Crawley may reply that each totem, originally, did really pertain to all members of each small local group, and that the totem prohibition was extended, later, to all groups of the same totem name, however distant in space. Thus according to the Euahlayi blacks there were originally no totem names, but the divine Baiame gave them to mortals with the rule that no pair of the same totem name were to marry, 'however far apart their hunting grounds.' Thus considered, the tabu which forbids an Emu man to marry an Emu woman, would mean no more, originally, than that marriage between persons living in the close contiguity of the same local group (in this case the Emu group) was forbidden. There might be no original intention of prohibiting marriage with a person of an Emu group, dwelling a thousand miles away; probably no such group was known to exist. The original meaning of exogamous law, I repeat, would be merely 'you must not marry a hearth-mate,' – or a 'house-mate,' in Mr. Crawley's phrase – the hearth-mates, in this particular instance, being delimited by the name 'Emu.' So far my conjecture agrees with that of Mr. Crawley. The extension of the prohibition to persons of the same totem-name, however remote their homes and alien their blood, I am content to regard as a later kind of accidental corollary. There came to be totem kins of the same name, far remote, and thus, as it were casually, the law acquired an unpremeditated sweep and scope, including persons not really of the same group or blood, only of the same name.
But why was there originally any objection at all to marrying the most accessible bride, the female hearth-mate? Here, as I have tried to show, Mr. Crawley would explain by his idea of sexual tabu. All men are regarded with superstitious dread by all women, and vice versa; above all, as a daily danger, the men, or women living in close contiguity must avoid each other. To keep them apart all sorts of tabus and avoidances are invented, including the tabu on their marriage.
This is a plausible and taking theory, and I am far from arguing that it cannot be a true theory. But the insuperable difficulty of deciding arises from the circumstance that we know nothing at all about the intellectual condition of the more or less human beings among whom the prohibition of marriage within the group first arose. Were they advanced enough to be capable of such a superstitious dread of each other as the supposed cause of the prohibition takes for granted? Males and females, among the lower animals, have no such superstition. It requires human imagination. On the other hand, animal jealousy was well within their reach, and Mr. Atkinson derives the original prohibition of marriage within the group from the sheer sexual jealousy of the animal-patriarch. In his opinion the consequent aversion to such wedlock crystallised into a habit, as the race advanced towards full humanity.
Even before his anthropoid clients were completely human, the group would be replete with children of females not of the full group blood, captives, and therefore these children (if blood kin through females were regarded) would be eligible as wives. But this would not yet, of course, be understood. Perhaps it would not be fully understood till the totem name was given to, and accepted by, each group, and so there was a definite mark set on each woman brought in from without the group, and on her children, who bore her totem name. After that, each totem group obviously contained members of other totems, and those, being now recognised by their mother's totem names, were technically intermarriageable. What had been a group not explicitly conscious of its own heterogeneous elements, became, in fact, an assemblage of recognised heterogeneousness, capable of finding legal brides within itself, and no longer under the necessity (had it understood) of capturing brides from without in hostile fashion. Such an assemblage would, or might, come to consist of families, dwelling, or rather wandering, within a given region, all on terms of friendship and mutual aid. I take it that, by this time, improved weapons and instruments, and improved skill, enabled groups larger than the small original groups to live in a given area. In fact, the group would, or might, be a small local 'tribe,' but, probably, was unconscious of the circumstance. If conscious, one cause of hostility among the groups was at an end, there was no necessity for stealing women, a system of peaceful betrothals within the group might now arise, though certain facts, to be dealt with later, raise a presumption, perhaps, that this relatively peaceful state of life did not appear until two of the original local totem groups coalesced in connubium, intermarrying with each other, in fact becoming 'phratries.'
To produce the new condition of affairs, two factors were necessary: first, a means of distinguishing the captured women within every group from each other, and from the group into which they were brought by capture. This means of distinction was afforded by the totem names. Next, a recognition of kinship was needed, and this was supplied, let us conjecture, by naming the children of each of the captive women after the totem name of the group from which she was captured. If all the children indiscriminately were called by the totem name (say Emu) of the local group into which their mothers had been brought – that is, by the totem name of their fathers – there would be no recognisable heterogeneity within that group, and so there would be, within the local group, no possible wives, under the exogamous rule. Whether polyandry then existed, or not, still all the fathers were of one local totem name, say Emu, and children could only be differentiated by styling them after the totem names of their alien mothers. This is usually done among the savages who are least advanced, but not among the Arunta, whose totem names, as we shall see, by a curious divergence, do not indicate stock, but are derived from a singular superstition about ancestral spirits, of various totems, incarnating themselves in each new-born child.
Mr. McLennan, in Primitive Marriage (1865), had arrived at conclusions very like these. The primitive groups 'were assumed to be homogeneous… While as yet there was no system of kinship, the presence of captive women in a horde' (group), 'in whatever numbers, could not introduce a system of betrothals' – the women and their children not yet being differentiated from each other, and from the group in which they lived. Mr. McLennan, in 1865, did not ask how these women ever came to be distinctly differentiated, each from each, and from the group which held them, though that differentiation was a necessary prelude to the recognition of kindred through these women. But presently, in his Studies of Totemism (1869), he found, whether he observed the fact or not, the means of differentiation. Differentiation became possible after, and not before, each primitive group received a totem name, retained by its captive women within each group to which they were carried, a name to be inherited by their children in each case.
He says, 'heterogeneity as a statical force can only have come into play when a system of kinship led the hordes to look on the children of their foreign women as belonging to the stocks of their mothers.' That was impossible, before the totem or some equivalent system of naming foreign groups arose, a circumstance not easily observed till Mr. McLennan himself opened the way to the study of Totemism.57
It thus appears that Mr. Crawley's theory of exogamy and mine are practically identical in essence (if I rightly interpret him). The original objection was to the intermarriage of the young of the group of contiguity, the hearth-mates. If there was but one male of the elder generation in the group of contiguity, these young people would be brothers and sisters. If there were two or more males of the elder generation, brothers, the group would include cousins, who (even before the totem name was accepted by the group) would also be forbidden to intermarry. When the totem name was accepted, cousins, children of brother and sister, and even brothers and sisters, children of one father, by. wives of different totems, would be, technically, intermarriageable: though their marriages may, in practice, have been forbidden because they were still of the group of contiguity, and as such bore its local totem name, say, Emu, while, by the mother's totem name, they may have been Bats, or Cats, or anything. Where I must differ from Mr. Crawley is in doubting whether at this hypothetical early stage, the superstitions which produce 'sexual tabu' had arisen. We cannot
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