CHAPTER II

MARRIAGE

IF

F SOCIAL organization is but one phase of culture and can be understood solely in connection with other phases, a corresponding statement holds even more decidedly for any one of the aspects of social organization. We may begin by considering the primitive family, but very soon we find that in order to comprehend its phenomena we must consider what at first seem quite irrelevant series of facts. In parts of Oceania, where a man regularly eats and sleeps at his club, this type of unit affects family life so profoundly that the two cannot well be divorced in picturing either. If, on the other hand, we begin with clubs, we shall very soon be engaged in a discussion of property concepts because membership in these organizations is sometimes equivalent to the holding of a proprietary title. But any treatment of property involves the notions of kinship that determine inheritance of property. And so forth. In short. these several topics are so closely interrelated that none them can be treated as the basic one from which all e are logically deducible. However we commence, the be constant anticipation and constant cross-refer by the sheer necessities of exposition we are ine fragment after fragment of an orga

This being so, any starting-point wi family as the first social unit to b naturally begin by describing he the individual who desires

social prohibitions and pres

mit in the selection of a mate and the traditional means of acquiring one.

MARRIAGE PROHIBITIONS

In every part of the world there are restrictions on the choice of a mate based on propinquity of relationship. Those who transgress the rules are guilty of the dread crime of incest. Within the narrowest family circle sexual relations are universally tabooed. There are no tribes which countenance the mating of parent and child, and where brother-sister unions have been recorded they are not the result of primitiveness but of excessive sophistication. That is, in communities where pride of descent obtains in hypertrophied form, as in ancient Egypt and Peru, the sovereign may find no one of sufficiently high rank to become his mate except his nearest blood kin. Such instances are, however, decidedly rare and do not affect the practices of the common herd.

It is not the function of the ethnologist but of the biologist and psychologist to explain why man has so deep-rooted a horror of incest, though personally I accept Hobhouse's view that the sentiment is instinctive. The student of society merely has to reckon with the fact that the dread of incest limits the biologically possible number of unions. He must further register the different ways in which different communities conceive the incest rule. For while parent and child, brother and sister, are universally barred from mating, many tribes favor and all but prescribe marriages between certain more remote kindred. That is to say, while the aversion to marriage within the group of the closest relatives may be instinctive, the extension of that sentiment beyond that restricted circle is conventional, some tribes drawing the line far more rigorously than others. For example, the Blackfoot of Montana not only discountenance the marriage of cousins but look askance at any union

within the local band "because there is always a suspicion that some close blood relationship may have been overlooked." The Shuswap and Thompson River Indians of British Columbia deprecate unions of second cousins, the Nez Percé of Idaho even those of third cousins. According to an educated member of the Paviotso of Nevada the most remote cousins are still reckoned by her people as kindred, and consequently matrimony is barred.

This repugnance to in-breeding must be connected with a common primitive usage. A Paviotso, e.g., addresses all cousins, regardless of degree, as his brother or sister. Now among rude peoples there is a great deal in a name and from calling a girl sister to regarding her as a sister for matrimonial purposes is but a step owing to the superstitious identification of things bearing the same appellation. Hence, provided a tenth cousin be called by the same term as the first, the incest horror will be naturally extended to her as well.

There are, indeed, far more startling extensions of this sentiment. Frequently there is not merely a rule against the marriage of actual blood-kin but even of individuals between whom no relationship can be traced and who are regarded as kin simply through the legal fiction that fellowmembers of a certain social group are ultimately descendants of the same ancestor. The magical potency of the group name doubtless plays a large part here. Thus in Australia a man of, say, the Emu group in one tribe would not mate with an Emu woman of an alien tribe a hundred miles away, though blood-kinship is absolutely precluded by the conditions of the case.

The rule which prescribes that an individual must find a mate outside of his own group, whether that group be the family, the village, or some other social unit, is known as exogamy. The contrary rule which makes it compulsory for a man to mate within his group is labeled endogamy. Endogamy flourishes where social distinctions have come to

be matters of paramount importance. The Hindu caste system is the stock illustration, European aristocracy supplies another. At a lower level of civilization the Tsimshian of British Columbia frown upon the marriage of a chief's relatives with those of a chief's attendant or of an attendant's with commoners. It is only the notion of obligatory marriage within the social unit not the de facto occurrence of unions within the group that constitutes endogamy. For example, the young men of Kalamazoo naturally find their wives for the most part among their townswomen, but there is nothing to prevent them from seeking a bride in Ottumwa or Przemysl. It is only where there is lurking the notion of a prohibition that we can speak of an endogamous tendency,—say, in connection with the feeling that a Catholic ought not to marry a Protestant.

Exogamy and endogamy are not mutually exclusive except with regard to the same unit. The Toda of the Nilgiri Hills in Southern India are divided into two groups, the Tartharol and the Teivaliol, between which legal matrimony is prohibited. But each is subdivided into groups which are exogamous. A person of the Pan section of the Tartharol may not choose for his spouse a girl of Teivaliol affiliation, but must seek a Tartharol of some section other than his own.1

MEANS OF ACQUIRING A MATE

Generalizations about primitive tribes are dangerous, but few exceptions will be found to the statement that matrimony with them is not so much a sacramental as a civil institution. It differs, however, notably from modern arrangements in Caucasian civilization in that the contract often binds not individuals but families. This appears clearly in two forms of matrimony known as marriage by exchange and marriage by purchase. In both a girl is treated as an asset which her family will not surrender without receiving adequate compensation.

Among the Kariera of Western Australia the acquisition of a bride is complicated by certain rules of preferential mating. That is, a man is not only forbidden to marry his sister and certain other kinswomen, but is practically obliged to mate with a particular type of cousin or some more remote relative designated by the same term (see below, Preferential Mating). With this limitation exchange is commonly practised. A man, A, having one or more sisters finds a man, B, standing to him in the proper cousin relationship who also possesses a sister. These men each take a sister of the other as wife. This method seems to have a very definite distribution. It is common in Australia and the Torres Straits Islands but rare or absent even in the neighboring region of Melanesia.

Apart from such exchange of sisters, the Kariera elders arrange marriages of the orthodox type between juvenile cousins. The death of one of them may effect a change but the new arrangement will still conform to the matrimonial norm: the prospective spouses will be cousins of the prescribed type, though perhaps more remotely related. In the case of infant betrothals a boy grows up with the understanding that a certain man is his probable father-in-law and as such is entitled to occasional presents and services. But since his fiancée may die, there is a whole group of potential fathers-in-law who are entitled to similar consideration, though in lesser degree; these attentions may be conceived as a form of compensation equivalent to the purchase form of other areas. When a girl attains the proper age, she is simply handed over to the bridegroom. That we are verily dealing with a family compact appears clearly from certain additional elements of Kariera matrimonial life. "Where there are several sisters in a family they are all regarded as the wives of the man who marries the eldest of them." This is a widespread custom known as the sororate. On the other hand, a man's wives are automatically inherited by his younger brother or a kinsman ranking