Chapter VII: Rise of Phratries and Totem Kins

How phratries and totem kins were developed--Local
animal-named groups would be exogamous--Children in these
will bear the group names of their mothers--Influence of
tattooing--Emu _local_ group thus full of persons who
are Snipes, Lizards, &c--_by maternal descent_--Members
are Emus _by local group name_: Snipes, Lizards, &c,
by _name of descent_--No marriage, however, within
local group--Reason, survival of old tabu--Reply to
Dr. Durkheim--The names bring about peaceful relations
between members of the different local groups--Tendency
to peaceful betrothals between men and women of the
various local groups--Probable leadership of two strong
local groups in this arrangement--Say they are groups
Eagle Hawk and Crow--More than two such groups sometimes
prominent--Probable that the dual alliance was widely
Imitated--The two chief allied local groups become the
phratries--Tendency of phratries to die out--Often
superseded by matrimonial classes--Meaning of surviving
phratry names often lost, and why--Their meaning known
in other tribes--Members, _by descent_, of various animal
names, within the old local groups (now phratries),
become the totem kins of to-day--Advantages of this
theory--Difficulties which it avoids.

We have perhaps succeeded in showing how totemism my have become a belief and a source of institutions: we have shown, at least, that granting savage methods of thought, totemism might very naturally have come in this way.

Totemism certainly arose in an age when, if descent reckoned, and, if names were inherited, it was on the spindle side. "_All abnormal instances,_" writes Mr. Howitt, "_I have found to be connected with changes in the line of descent_. The primitive and complete forms" (of totemism) "have uterine descent, and it is in cases where descent is counted in the male line that I find the most abnormal forms to occur."[1]

As few scholars seriously dispute this opinion of Mr. Howitt, based on a very wide experience, and fortified by the almost universal view that descent was reckoned, when totemism began, in the female line, and as the point is accepted by every author whose ideas I have been discussing, we need not criticise hypotheses which assume that totemism arose when descent was reckoned in the male line, or that totems arose out of personal manitus of males, transferred to the female line.

Now, granting that our system so far may afford a basis of argument, we have to show how the phratries and the totem kins within them might be logically and naturally developed.

If it be granted that exogamy existed in practice, on the lines of Mr. Darwin's theory, before the totem beliefs lent to the practice a _sacred_ sanction, our task is relatively easy. The first practical rule would be that of the jealous Sire, "No males to touch the females in my camp," with expulsion of adolescent sons. In efflux of time that rule, become habitual, would be, "No marriage within the local group." Next, let the local groups receive names, such as Emus, Crows, Opossums, Snipes, and the rule becomes, "No marriage within the local group of animal name; no Snipe to marry a Snipe." But, if the primal groups were not exogamous, they would become so, as soon as totemic myths and tabus were developed out of the animal, vegetable, and other names of small local groups.

The natural result will be that all the wives among the _local_ groups called Snipes will come to bear names other than Snipe, will come to be known by the names of the _local_ groups from which they have been acquired. These names they will retain, I suggest, in local group Snipe, by way of distinction--as the Emu woman, the Opossum woman, and so forth. The Emus know the names of the groups from which they have taken women, and it seems probable enough that the women may even have borne tattoo marks denoting their original groups, as is now in some places the Australian practice. "It probably has been universal," says Mr. Haddon.[2]

If, then, the stranger women among the Emus are known, in that local group, as the Opossum woman, the Snipe woman, the Lizard woman; their children in the group might very naturally speak of each other as "the Snipe woman's, the Lizard woman's children," or more briefly as "the little Snipes," "the young Lizards," and so on. I say "might speak," for though totem names have the advantage of being easily indicated, and in practice are often indicated by gesture language, I take it that by this time man had evolved language.[3]

In course of time, by this process (which certainly did occur, though at how early a stage it came first into being we cannot say), each _local_ group becomes heterogeneous. Emu _local_ group is now full of members of Snipe, Lizard, and other animal-named members _by maternal descent_. There are thus what Mr. Howitt has called "Major totems" (name-giving animals of local groups), and "Minor totems" (various animal names of male and female members within, for example, _local_ group Emu, these various animal names being acquired _by female descent_). Each member of a local Emu group is now Emu by local group; but is Snipe, Lizard, Opossum, Kangaroo, or what not, by _name of maternal descent_.

This theory is no original idea, it is Mr. McLennan's mode of accounting for the heterogeneity of the local group. They are not all Wolves, for example, where descent is reckoned in the female line, and exogamy is the rule. In the local group Wolf are Ravens, Doves, Dogs, Cats, what you will, names derived by the children from mothers of these names. I do not pretend that I can demonstrate the existence of the process, but it accounts for the facts and is not out of harmony with human nature. Can any other hypothesis be suggested?

When things have reached this pitch, each local group, _if it understood the situation as it is now understood among most savages_, might find wives peacefully in its own circle. Lizard man, in _local_ group Emu, might marry Snipe woman also in _local_ group Emu, _as far as extant totem law now goes_. They were both, in fact, members of a small local _tribe_ of animal name, with many kins of animal names, by female descent, within that tribe. Why then might not Snipe (by descent) in Emu _local_ group marry a woman, by descent Lizard, in the same Emu _local_ group? Many critics have asked this question, including Dr. Durkheim.[4] I had given my answer to the question before it was asked,[5] backing my opinion by a statement of Dr. Durkheim himself. People of different totems in the same _local_ group (say Emu) _might_ have married; but then, as Dr. Durkheim remarks in another case, "the old prohibition, deeply rooted in manners and customs, survives."[6] "Now the old prohibition in this case was that a man of the Emu (_local_) group was not to marry a woman of the Emu (_local_) group. That rule endures, even though the Emu group now contains men and women of several distinct and different totem kins," that is to say, of different animal-named kins _by descent_.

I may add that, as soon as speculation about the animal names led to the belief in the mystic _rapport_ between the animals and their human namesakes, and so led to tabu on the intermarriage of persons of the same animal name, the tabu would attach as much to the name-giving animal of the _local_ group as to the animals of the kins _by descent_ within that _local_ group.

Thus Lizard man, in Emu local group, cannot marry Snipe woman in the same. Both are also, by _local_ group name, Emus. He is Emu-Lizard, she is Emu-Snipe.

If it be replied that now no regard is paid by the members of a phratry to their phratriac animal (where it is known), I answer that the necessary _poojah_ is done, by the members of the totem kin of that animal, within his phratry, while all do him the grace of not marrying within his name.[7] A Lizard man and a Snipe woman in Emu _local_ group could not, therefore, yet marry. The members of the local group, though of different animal names _of descent_, had still to ravish brides from other hostile _local_ groups.

Each _local_ group was now full of men and women who, _by maternal descent_, bore the same animal names as many members of the other _local_ groups. A belief in a mystic _rapport_ between the bearers of the animal names and the animals themselves now being developed, Snipe and Lizard and Opossum _by descent_, in Emu _local_ group, must already have felt that they were not really strangers and enemies to men of the same names _by descent_, Snipe, Lizard, and Opossum, and of the same connection with the same name-giving animals, in Kangaroo _local_ group, or any other adjacent _local_ group.

This obvious idea--human beings who are somehow connected with the same animals are also connected with each other--was necessarily an influence in favour of peace between the local groups. In whatever _local_ group a Snipe by descent might be, he would come to notice a connection between himself and Snipes _by descent_ in all other _local_ groups. Consequently men at last arranged, I take it, to exchange brides on amicable terms, instead of Snipe _by descent_ risking the shedding of kindred blood, that of another Snipe _by descent_, in the mellay of a raid to lift women from another _local_ group.

If two strong local groups, say Emu and Kangaroo, or Eagle Hawk and Crow, took the lead in this treaty of alliance and _connubium_, and if the other local groups gradually came into it under their leadership (for union would make Eagle Hawk and Crow powerful), or if several local groups chose two such groups to head them in a peaceful exchange of brides, we have, in these two now united and intermarrying local groups of animal name, say Eagle Hawk and Crow, the primal forms of the actual phratries of to-day.

But why do we find in a tribe only two phratries? I have asked myself and been asked by others. In the first place, in America, we note examples of three or more phratries in the same tribe. Again, in Australia, we seem to myself to find probable traces of more than two phratries in a tribe, traces of what Mr. Frazer styles "sub-phratries," what one may call "submerged phratries" (see Chapter X.). Further, dual alliances are the most usual form of such combinations: two strong groups, allied and setting the example, would attract the neighbouring groups into their circle. Finally, if I am right in thinking that the phratriac arrangement arose in a given centre, and was propagated by emigrants, and was borrowed by distant tribes (which is a point elsewhere discussed), the original model of a dual alliance would spread almost universally, while, as has been said, traces of more numerous combinations appear to occur.

Except as parties of old to a peaceful arrangement, the phratries, as they at present exist (where they exist), have often now no reason for existence. Where totems are exogamous, or where totems and matrimonial classes exist, the phratry is now an empty survival; having done its work it does no more work, and often vanishes. If members of _local_ animal-named groups, become fully totemic, had at once understood their own position as under the now existing totem law, they could have taken wives of different totems _of descent_ each in their own group, without any phratries at all. People manage their affairs thus in all totemic parts of the world where there are no phratries, though, for what we know, phratries may have existed, and vanished, in these places, when their task was ended.

Again, phratries die out, we repeat, even in America and Australia. In some regions of Australia their place has been taken by the opposed matrimonial classes, prohibiting marriage between mothers' and sons', fathers' and daughters' generations. That arrangement, as it is not found in the most primitive Australian tribes, which have only phratries and totems, must be later than phratries and totems. It was a later enactment, within the phratry, and, as among the Arunta and Wiraidjuri, it has now superseded the phratry. The matrimonial classes, originally introduced within each pre-existing phratry, now regulate marriage, among Arunta and Wiraidjuri, and the phratry has dropped off, its name being unknown, like the flower which has borne its fruit.

Again, in Australia, as has been said, we shall try to show that phratries, in many tribes, are perhaps a _borrowed_ institution, not an institution independently evolved everywhere. That is rendered probable because, among many tribes, the phratry names survive but are now meaningless, yet these same phratry names possess, or have recently possessed, a meaning in the language of other tribes, from whom the institution may apparently (though not necessarily) have been borrowed with the foreign names of each phratry.

For all these reasons, phratries seem, in some regions, to be a device adopted, by some tribe, or tribes, at a given moment, for a given purpose (peace), and borrowed from them by some other tribes, or propagated by emigrants into new lands. Men might borrow the _names_ of the phratries, or might use other names which were already current designations of their own local groups. The purpose of the phratry organisation, I argue, may have been the securing of peace and alliance, and the movement may have been originated, somewhere in Australia, by two powerful local groups of animal name; in one vast region known as Eagle Hawk and Crow, Mukwara and Kilpara, and by other names of the same meaning. Such I take to have been the mode in which phratries arose, out of the alliance and _connubium_ of two local groups, say Eagle Hawk and Crow; or of more than two groups. Mr. Frazer says that the Moquis of Arizona have ten phratries (quoting Bourke, _Snake Dance_, p. 336) and the Wyandots have four; the Mohegans have three.[8] These, or other groups, took the lead in recognising the situation, namely, that brides might be peacefully exchanged among _local_ groups becoming conscious of common kinship in their totems _by descent_.

Meanwhile, in the various otherwise animal-named members of _local_ groups Eagle Hawk and Crow--in the men and women within _local_ groups Eagle Hawk and Crow who were Snipes, Lizards, Opossums, and so on, _by maternal descent_--we have the forerunners of the totem kins within the phratries of to-day. In the same way, members of all other adjacent _local_ groups could also come into Eagle Hawk and Crow phratries by merely dropping their _local_ group-names, keeping their names by _descent_.

We have not, on this system, to imagine that there were but two totem groups in each district, at the beginning (a thing unlikely to happen anywhere, still less always and everywhere), and that many of their members, hiving off, took new totem names. Our scheme gives us, naturally, and on Mr. Darwin's lines, first, many small local groups, perhaps in practice exogamous; then these local groups invested with animal names; then, the animals become totems, sanctioning exogamy; then by exogamy and female descent, each animal-named _local_ group becomes full of members of other animal names _by descent_; then an approach to peace among all the groups naturally arises; then pacific _connubium_ between them all, at first captained by two leading local groups, say Crow and Eagle Hawk (though there is no reason why there should not have been more of such alliances in a tribe, and there are traces of them),[9] and, lastly, the allies prevailing, the inhabitants of a district became an harmonious tribe, with two phratries (late _local_ groups), say Eagle Hawk and Crow, and with the other old local group-names represented in what are now the totem kins within the phratries. This arrangement, in course of time, is perhaps even borrowed, foreign phratry names and all, by distant groups hitherto not thus organised.

This scheme, it will be observed, is in harmony with what Mr. Howitt's knowledge of native life shows him to have occurred. From the beginning, in the physical conditions of Australia, no horde or communal mob could keep together, for lack of supplies. No assemblage "could assume dimensions more than that of a few members," before it was broken up by economic causes.[10] There were thus, in a district, many small groups, not, as on Dr. Durkheim's theory, just two groups, broken out of a larger horde by their unexplained religious devotion each to its own god, an animal, say Eagle Hawk for one group, Crow for the other. On the other hand, there was now an indefinite number of small _local_ groups, each of animal name, each containing members of as many names _of descent_ as the local groups from which each local group had taken wives. Such groups would now be larger than mere hearth-circles, in proportion as improved skill in fishing, net-making, spearing, and trapping animals, and in selecting and cooking edible vegetables and roots, with improved implements, enabled larger groups to subsist in their territorial area. This scheme is manifestly consistent with the probable economic and social conditions, while the animal group-names are explained by the necessity under which the groups lay to differentiate each other by names. The regard later paid to the name-giving animals as totems is explained, on the ground of the savage theory of the mystical quality of names of unknown origin, names also borne by animals, powerful, wise, mysterious creatures.

These processes must have occupied long ages in evolution.

This hypothesis escapes the difficulty as to how an incestuous horde, guided by an inspired medicine man, could ever come to see that there was such a thing as incest, and that such a thing ought not to be tolerated. We also escape Dr. Durkheim's difficulty--How did two hostile sects of animal worshippers arise in the "compact mass" of the horde; and how could they, though of one blood, claim separate origins? We also see how totem kins could occur within the phratries, without needing to urge alternately that such kins both do and do not possess a territorial basis. Again, we have not to decide, what we can never know, whether man was _originally_ gregarious and promiscuous or not. We see that circumstances forced him to live in groups so small that the jealous will of the Sire or Sires could enforce exogamy on the young members of the camp, a prohibition which the natural conservatism of the savage might later extend to the members of the animal-named local group, even when heterogeneous. However heterogeneous by descent, all members of the local group were, by habitat, of one animal name, and when tabus arose in deference to the sacred animal, these tabus forbade marriage whether in the animal-named local group, or in the animal name of descent.

So far, the theory "marches," and meets all facts known to us, in pristine tribes with female descent, phratries, and totem kins, but without "matrimonial classes," four or eight. The theory also meets facts which have not, till now, been recognised in Australia, and which we proceed to state.

[1] _Rep. Reg. Smithsonian Institute_, p. 801, 1883.

[2] _Evolution in Art_, pp. 252-257.

[3] "This question, Minna Murdu?" ("What totem?") "can be put by gesture language, to which, in the same way, a suitable reply can be made." (Mr. Howitt, on the Dieri. _Rep. Reg. Smith. Institute_, p. 804, Note I, 1883.)

[4] _Folk Lore_, December 1903.

[5] _Social Origins_, p. 56, Note 1.

[6] _L'Année Sociologique_, v. p. 106, Note I.

[7] The Kamilaroi are said to offer exceptions to this rule.

[8] _Totemism_, pp. 60-62. We must remember that American writers use the word "phratry" in several quite different senses; we cannot always tell what they mean when they use it.

[9] If the Urabunna rules are correctly reported on, they may have several "sub-phratries."

[10] _J. A. I._, xii. p. 497.