The Secret of the Totem

But of the three types, Urabunna, Arunta, Fijian, the Urabunna, except in its degree of permanence, is the least licentious, least invades law, and it is a curious question why incest increases at these feasts as culture advances, up to a certain point. The law invaded by the Urabunna Piraungaru custom is not the tribal law of incest, nor the modern law of incest, but the law of the sanctity of individual marriage. It may therefore be argued (as against my own opinion) that the sanctity of individual marriage is still merely a nascent idea among the Urabunna, an idea which is recent, and so can be set aside easily; whereas the tribal laws of incest are strong with the strength of immemorial antiquity, and therefore must have already existed in a past age when there was no individual marriage at all. On this showing we have, first, the communal undivided horde; next, the horde bisected into groups which must not marry within each other (phratries), though why this arrangement was made and submitted to nobody can guess with any plausibility. By this time all females of phratry A might not only marry any man of phratry B, but were, according to the hypothesis, by theory and by practice, all wives of all men of phratry B. Next, as to-day, a man of B married a woman of A, with or without the existing offensive rites, but his tenure of her is still so insecure and recent that it is set aside, to a great extent, by the Piraungaru or Pirauru custom, itself a proof and survival of "group marriage," and of communal promiscuity in the past. Such is the argument for "group marriage," which may be advanced against my opinion, or thus, if I did not hold my opinion, I would state the argument.

This licentious custom, whether called Piraungaru or by other names, is, with the tribal names for human relationships, the only basis of the belief in the primal promiscuous horde. Now, as to these names of relationships, we may repeat the adverse arguments already advanced by us in Social Origins, pp. 99-103. "Whatever the original sense of the names, they all now denote seniority and customary legal status in the tribe, with the reciprocal duties, rights, and avoidances… The friends of group and communal marriage keep unconsciously forgetting, at this point of their argument, that our ideas of sister, brother, father, mother, and so on, have nothing to do (as they tell us at certain other points of their argument) with the native terms, which include, indeed, but do not denote these relationships as understood by us… We cannot say 'our word "son" must not be thought of when we try to understand the native term of relationship which includes sons – in our sense,' and next aver that 'sons, in our sense, are regarded [or spoken of] as real sons of the group, not of the individual, because of a past [or present] stage of promiscuity which made real paternity undiscoverable.'"

Manifestly there lurks a fallacy in alternately using "sons," for example, in our sense, and then in the tribal sense, which includes both fatherhood, or sonship, in our sense, and also tribal status and duties. "The terms, in addition to their usual and generally accepted signification of relationship by blood, express a class or group relation quite independent of it."38

Thus the tribal names may result from an expanded use of earlier names of blood relationship, or names of tribal status may now be applied to include persons who are within degrees of blood relationship. In the latter case, how do we know that a tribe with its degrees of status is primitive? Starcke thinks that Mr. Morgan's use of terms of relationship as proof of "communal marriage" is "a wild dream, if not the delirium of fever." "The nomenclature was in every respect the faithful reflection of the juridical relations which arose between the nearest kinsfolk of each tribe. Individuals who were, according to the legal point of view, on the same level with the speaker, received the same designation. The other categories of kinship were formally developed out of this standpoint." The system of names for relationships "affords no warrant" for Mr. Morgan's theory of primitive promiscuity.39

Similar arguments against inferring collective marriage in the past from existing tribal terms of relationship are urged by Dr. Durkheim.40 He writes, taking an American case of names of relationship, as against Professor Kohler: "We see that the (Choctaw) word Inoha (mother) applies indifferently to all the women of my mother's group, from the oldest to the youngest. The term thus defines its own meaning: it applies to all the women of the family (or clan?) into which my father has married. Doubtless it is rather hard to understand how the same term can apply to so many different people. But certain it is, that the word cannot awake, in men's minds, any idea of descent, in the usual sense of the word. For a man cannot seriously regard his second cousin as his mother, even virtual. The vocabulary of relationships must therefore express something other than relations of consanguinity, properly so-called… Relationship and consanguinity are very different things … relationship being essentially constituted by certain legal and moral obligations, which society imposes on certain individuals."41

The whole passage should be read, but its sense is that which I have already tried to express; and Dr. Durkheim says, "The hypothesis of collective marriage has never been more than an ultima ratio" (a last resource), "intended to enable us to envisage these strange customs; but it is impossible to overlook all the difficulties which it raises."

An analogous explanation of the wide use of certain terms of relationship has been given by Dr. Fison, of whom Mr. Howitt writes, "Much of what I have done is equally his."42 Dr. Fison says, "All men of the same generation who bear the same totem are tribally brothers, though they may belong to different and widely separated tribes. Here we find an explanation of certain apparently anomalous terms of relationship. Thus, in some tribes the paternal grandson and his grandfather call one another 'elder brother' and 'younger brother' respectively. These persons are of the same totem."43 "Many other designations" in Mr. Morgan's Tables of Terms of Relationship "admit of a similar solution."44 The terms do not denote degrees of blood relationship, but of brotherhood in the totem (or phratry, or matrimonial class). It is so, too, with the Choctaw term for Mother. Every one knows who his mother, in our sense, is: the Choctaw term denotes a tribal status.

If it be said that, because a man calls his wife his Noa, and also calls all women whom he might have married his Noa, therefore all these women, in past times, would have been his wives; it might as well be said that all the women whom he calls "mother" would, in times past, have collaborated in giving birth to him. As far as these terms indicate relationship, "a man is the younger brother of his maternal grandmother," and the maternal grandfather of his second cousin!45 The terms do not denote relationship in blood, clearly, but something quite different.

The custom of Piraungaru, or Pirrauru, and cases of license at festivals, and the names for tribal relations, are, we repeat, the only arguments in favour of the theory of the communal horde.46 We have shown that the terms of relationship do not necessarily help the theory. That theory, again, is invalidated by its inability to account for the origin of the rules forbidding marriage between persons of the same phratry (for it does not tell us why the original medicine man conceived the idea of regulations), or even to account for the origin of the phratriac divisions.

But why, on our system, can the Piraungaru custom break the rule of individual marriage more easily than the law prohibiting incest? Why it can do so on the theory of pristine promiscuity we have explained (p. 41, supra).

We reply that individual marriage has not, among savages, any "religious" sanction; it is protected by no form of the phratry or totem tabu; by no god, such as Hymen; but rests, as from the first it rested, on the character and strength of the possessor of the woman or women, and falls into abeyance if he does not choose to exert it. If the males of the Urabunna have so far departed from the natural animal instincts as usually (with exceptions) to prefer to relax their tenure of women, being tempted by the bribe of a legalised change of partners all round, they exhibit, not a primitive, but a rather advanced type of human nature. The moral poet sings: —

"Of Whist or Cribbage mark the amusing Game,The Partners changing, but the Sport the same,Then see one Man with one unceasing Wife,Play the long Rubber of connubial Life."47

This is the "platform" of the Urabunna and Dieri, as it is of the old Cicisbeism in Italy, and of a section of modern "smart society," especially at the end of the ancien régime in France. Man may fall into this way of thinking, just as, in Greece, he actually legalised unnatural passions by a ceremony of union. "That one practice, in many countries, became systematised," as Mr. J. F. McLennan wrote to Mr. Darwin.48

This is not the only example of a legalised aberration from nature, or from second nature. Abhorrence of incest has become a law of second nature, among savage as among civilised men. But Dr. Durkheim publishes a long list of legalised aberrations from the laws of incest among Hebrews, Arabs, Phœnicians, Greeks, Slavonic peoples, Medes, Persians, Egyptians, Cambodians, and Peruvians.49 If these things, these monstrous aberrations, can be legalised "in the green tree," why should not jealousy fall into a kind of legalised abeyance among the Urabunna, under the law of partner-shifting? The Piraungaru custom does not prove that earliest man was not ferociously jealous; it merely shows that certain tribes have reached a stage in which jealousy is, at present, more or less suppressed in favour of legalised license.

We catch the Urabunna and Dieri at a moment of development in which the abandonment of strict possession of a wife is compensated for by a legalised system of changing partners, enduring after the feast of license is over. But even so, a man is responsible, as father, for the children of his actual wife, not for the children of his Piraungaru paramours. For these their actual husbands (Tippa Malku) are responsible.

Mr. Howitt says, in his earlier account of this institution, that among the Dieri, neighbours of the Urabunna, the men and women who are made Pirauru are not consulted. The heads of the tribe do not ask whether they fancy each other or not. "The time is one of festivity, feasting, and amusement," only too obviously! "Dancing is carried on." "A man can always exercise marital rights towards his Pirauru, if they meet when her Noa (real husband) is absent, but he cannot take her away from him unless by his consent," except at the feasts. But the husband usually consents. "In spite of all this arrangement, most of the quarrels among the Dieri arise out of this Pirauru practice… "A son or daughter regards the real husband (Noa) of his mother as his Apiri Muria, or "real father"; his mother's Pirauru is only his Apiri Waka, or "little father." At certain feasts of license, such as intertribal marriages, "no jealous feeling is allowed under penalty of strangling, but it crops up afterwards, and occasions many bloody affrays."50 Thus jealousy is not easily kept in abeyance by customary law.

The idea of such a change of partners is human, not animal, and the more of a brute the ancestor of man was the less could he dream, in times truly primitive, of Piraungaru as a permanent arrangement. Men, in a few tribes, declined into it, and are capable of passing out of it, like the Urabunna or Dieri man, who either retains so much of the animal, or is rising so far towards the Homeric standard, as to fight rather than let his wife be allotted to another man, or at least to thump that other man afterwards.

The Dieri case of the feast of license, just mentioned, is notable. "The various Piraurus (paramours) are allotted to each other by the great council of the tribe, after which their names are formally announced to the assembled people on the evening of the ceremony of circumcision, during which there is for a time a general license permitted between all those who have been thus allotted to each other." But persons of the same totem among the Dieri may not be Piraurus to each other, nor may near relations as we reckon kinship, including cousins on both sides.

In this arrangement Mr. Howitt sees "a form of group marriage," while I see tribe-regulated license, certainly much less lawless than that of the more advanced Fijians or the Arunta. Mr. Howitt did not state that the Pirauru or Piraungaru unions are preceded (as marriage is) by any ceremony, unless the reading the banns, so to speak, by public proclamation among the Dieri is a ceremony.51 Now he has discovered a ceremony as symbolic as our wedding ring (1904).

Little light, if any, is thrown on these customs of legalised license by philology. Mr. Howitt thought that Pirauru may be derived from Pira, "the moon," and Uru, "circular." The tribal feasts of license are held at the full moon, but I am not aware that, by the natives, people are deemed peculiarly "moonstruck," or lunatic, at that season. If Urabunna Piraungaru is linguistically connected with Dieri Pirauru, then both Piraungaru and Pirauru may mean "Full Mooners." "Thy full moons and thy festivals are an abomination to me!"52

Among the Dieri, "a woman becomes the Noa of a man most frequently by being betrothed to him when she is a mere infant… In certain cases she is given by the Great Council, as a reward for some meritorious act on his part." "None but the brave deserve the fair," and this is "individual marriage," though the woman who is wedded to one man may be legally allotted as Full Mooner, or Pirauru, to several. "The right of the Noa overrides that of the Pirauru. Thus a man cannot claim a woman who is Pirauru to him when her Noa is present in the camp, excepting by his consent." The husband generally yields, he shares equivalent privileges. "Such cases, however, are the frequent causes of jealousies and fights."53

This evidence does not seem, on the whole, to force upon us the conclusion that the Urabunna Piraungaru custom, or any of these customs, any more than the custom of polyandry, or of legalised incest in higher societies, is a survival of "group marriage" – all men of certain social grades being actual husbands of all women of the corresponding grades – while again that is a survival of gradeless promiscuity. We shall disprove that theory. Rather, the Piraungaru custom appears to be a limited concession to the taste, certainly a human taste, for partner-changing —which can only manifest itself where regular partnerships already exist. Jealousy among these tribes is in a state of modified abeyance: like nature herself, and second nature, where, among civilised peoples, things unnatural, or contrary to the horror of incest, have been systematically legalised.

I have so far given Mr. Howitt's account of Pirrauru (the name is now so written by him) among the Dieri, as it appeared in his works, prior to 1904. In that year he published his Native Tribes of South-East Australia, which contains additional details of essential importance (pp. 179-187). A woman becomes Tippa Malku,54 or affianced,55 to one man only, before she becomes Pirrauru, or what Mr. Howitt calls a "group wife." A "group wife," I think, no woman becomes. She is never the Pirrauru of all the men who are Noa to her, that is, intermarriageable with her. She is merely later allotted, after a symbolic ceremony, as a Pirrauru to one or more men, who are Noa to her. At first, while a child, or at least while a maiden, she is betrothed (there are varieties of modes) to one individual male. She may ask her husband to let her take on another man as Pirrauru; "should he refuse to do this she must put up with it." If he consents, other men make two adjacent ridges of sand, and level them into one larger ridge, while a man, usually the selected lover, pours sand from the ridge over the upper part of his thighs, "buries the Pirrauru in the sand." (The phrase does not suggest that Pirrauru means "Full Mooners.") This is the Kandri ceremony, it is performed when men swop wives (exchange their Noa as Pirraurus), and also when "the whole of the marriageable or married people, even those who are already Pirrauru, are reallotted," a term which suggests the temporary character of the unions.

I am ready to allow that the Kandri ceremony, a symbol of recognised union, like our wedding ring, or the exchanged garlands of the Indian Ghandarva rite, constitutes, in a sense, marriage, or a qualified union recognised by public opinion. But it is a form of union which is arranged subsequent to the Tippa Malku ceremony of permanent betrothal and wedlock. Moreover, it is, without a shadow of doubt, subsequent in time and in evolution to the "specialising" of one woman to one man in the Tippa Malku arrangement. That arrangement is demonstrably more primitive than Pirrauru, for Pirrauru is unthinkable, except as a later (and isolated) custom in modification of Tippa Malku.

This can easily be proved. On Mr. Howitt's theory, "group marriage" (I prefer to say "status marriage") came next after promiscuity. All persons legally intermarriageable (Noa), under phratry law, were originally, he holds, ipso facto, married. Consequently the Kandri custom could not make them more married than they then actually were. In no conceivable way could it widen the area of their matrimonial comforts, unless it enabled them to enjoy partners who were not Noa, not legally intermarriageable with them. But this the Kandri ceremony does not do. All that it does is to permit certain persons who are already Tippa Malku (wedded) to each other, to acquire legal paramours in certain other wedded or Tippa Malku women, and in men either married or bachelors. Thus, except as a legalised modification of individual Tippa Malku, Pirrauru is impossible, and its existence is unthinkable.56

Pirrauru is a modification of marriage (Tippa Malku), Tippa Malku is not a modification of "group marriage." If it were, a Tippa Malku husband, "specialising" (as Mr. Howitt says) a woman to himself, would need to ask the leave of his fellows, who are Noa to his intended fiancée.57 The reverse is the case. A man cannot take his Pirrauru woman away from her Tippa Malku husband "unless by his consent, excepting at certain ceremonial times" – feasts, in fact, of license. Pirrauru secures the domestic peace, more or less, of the seniors, by providing the young men (who otherwise would be wifeless and desperate) with legalised lemans. By giving these Pirrauru "in commendation" to the young men, older men increase their property and social influence. What do the Tippa Malku husbands say to this arrangement?

As for "group" marriage, there is nothing of the kind; no group marries another group, the Pirrauru literally heap hot coals on each other if they suspect that their mate is taking another of the "group" as Pirrauru. The jealous, at feasts of license, are strangled (Nulina). The Rev. Otto Siebert, a missionary among the Dieri, praises Pirrauru for "its earnestness in regard to morality." One does not quite see that hiring out one's paramours, who are other men's wives, to a third set of men is earnestly moral, or that jealousy, checked by strangling in public, by hot coals in private, is edifying, but Pirrauru is not "group marriage." No pre-existing group is involved. Pirrauru may (if they like jealousy and hot coals) live together in a group, or the men and women may often live far remote from each other, and meet only at bean-feasts.

You may call Pirrauru a form of "marriage," if you like, but, as a later modification of a prior Tippa Malku wedlock, it cannot be cited as a proof of a yet more pristine status-marriage of all male to all female intermarriageable persons, which supposed state of affairs is called "group marriage."58

If Pirrauru were primitive, it might be looked for among these southern and eastern tribes which, with the pristine social organisation of the Urabunna and their congeners, lack the more recent institutions of circumcision, subincision, totemic magic, possess the All Father belief, but not the belief in prehuman predecessors, or, at least, in their constant reincarnation. (This last is not a Dieri belief.) But among these primitive south-east tribes, Pirrauru is no more found than subincision. Nor is it found among the Arunta and the northern tribes. It is an isolated "sport" among the Dieri, Urabunna, and their congeners. Being thus isolated, Pirrauru cannot claim to be a necessary step in evolution from "group marriage" to "individual marriage." It may, however, though the point is uncertain, prevail, or have prevailed, "among all the tribes between Port Lincoln and the Yerkla-mining at Eucla," that is, wherever the Dieri and Urabunna phratry names, Matteri and Kararu, exist.59 Having identical phratry names (or one phratry name identical, as among the Kunandaburi), whether by borrowing or by original community of language and institutions: all these tribes southward to the sea from Lake Eyre may possess, or may have possessed, Pirrauru.

Among the most pristine of all tribes, in the south by east, however, Pirrauru is not found. When we reach the Wiimbaio, the Geawe-gal, the Kuinmarbura, the Wakelbura, and the Narrang-ga, we find no Pirrauru. But Mr. Howitt notes other practices which are taken by him to be mere rudimentary survivals of "group marriage." They are (i.) exchange of wives at feasts of marriage, or in view of impending misfortune, as when shipwrecked mariners break into the stores, and are "working at the rum and the gin." These are feasts of license, not survivals of "group marriage" nor of Pirrauru. (ii.) The jus primae noctis, enjoyed by men of the bridegroom's totem. This is not marriage at all, nor is it a survival of Pirrauru. (iii.) Very rare "saturnalia," "almost promiscuous." This is neither "group marriage" (being almost promiscuous and very rare) nor Pirrauru. (iv.) Seven brothers have one wife. This is adelphic polyandry, Mr. Howitt calls it "group marriage." (v.) "A man had the right to exchange his wife for the wife of another man, but the practice was not looked upon favourably by the clan." If this is "group marriage" (there is no "group" concerned) there was group marriage in ancient Rome.60 This, I think, is all that Mr. Howitt has to show for "group marriage" and Pirrauru among the tribes most retentive of primitive usages.

The manner in which Tippa Malku betrothals are arranged deserves attention. They who "give this woman away," and they who give away her bride-groom also, are the brothers of the mothers of the pair, or the mothers themselves may arrange the matter.61

Mr. Howitt, on this point, observes that, if the past can be judged of by the present, "I should say that the practice of betrothal, which is universal in Australia, must have produced a feeling of individual proprietary right over the women so promised." Manifestly Mr. Howitt is putting the plough before the oxen. It is because certain kinsfolk have an acknowledged "proprietary right" over the woman that they can betroth her to a man: it is not because they can betroth her to a man that they have "a feeling of individual proprietary right over her." I give my coppers away to a crossing-sweeper, or exchange them for commodities, because I have an individual proprietary right over these coins. I have not acquired the feeling of individual proprietary right over the pence by dint of observing that I do give them away or buy things with them.