Читать книгу Social Origins and Primal Law - Lang Andrew - Страница 27

On my system, as has been already stated, the origin of exogamy may have been sexual jealousy, in small primitive groups, perhaps aided by 'sexual tabu,' with the strange superstitions on which it is based, and these causes would be strengthened enormously by the totem superstition, later. The totem name would now be the exogamous limit. The 'phratries' might result, quite naturally, and even gradually, now in one region, now in another, from the interlocking and alliance, with connubium, of two large friendly local totem groups, an arrangement of which the advantages are so obvious that it might spread by way of imitation and accretion.

This view of the possible origin of what is usually called the 'bisection' of 'the undivided commune' had already been suggested by the late Mr. Daniel McLennan.100 Writing before our information was so full as it now is, he says, as to the two 'phratries' Kumite and Kroki (answering to Matthurie and Kirarawa), 'were it worth while to make surmises, it would not be unreasonable to surmise that at Mount Gambier two separate local tribes101 containing different totem kindreds had, through the operation of exogamy and female kinship, become welded into one community.' Mr. Daniel McLennan, unluckily, inherited his brother's feud against Mr. Fison, and he opposed all that gentleman's doings. Later research has corroborated many of Mr. Fison's facts, and extended the range of their influence. On this point, however – namely, that the 'phratries' are not the result of a bisection, but of an amalgamation – Mr. Daniel McLennan appears to have had a good case. He illustrates his theory, and mine, by remarks on a tradition of the tribes of Northern Victoria.102

The exogamous 'phratries' of these tribes are Eagle-Hawk and Crow. The tradition represents these birds as hostile creative powers. They made peace on the terms 'that the Murray blacks should be divided into two classes' ('phratries'), 'the Makquarra, or Eagle-Hawk, and the Kilparra, or Crow… Out of the enmities' (of the original Crow and Eagle-Hawk) 'arose the two classes, and thence a law governing marriage among these classes.' This tradition, it will be observed, espouses the theory of a bisection, deliberately made of 'the Murray blacks,' into two intermarrying and exogamous classes. Mr. McLennan writes, 'But what the tradition suggests is, not that the Crow and Eagle agreed to divide one tribe into two, with a view to the better regulation of marriage, but that Crow and Eagle or Eagle-Hawk were tribes (and they might have been constituted in the ordinary Australian way) which long waged war against each other, and that at length there came peace, and then their complete interfusion by means of friendly marriages.' The tradition asserts the reverse; it adopts, or rather it forestalls, the scientific theory of a 'bisection' of the Murray blacks, not the amalgamation of two tribes (or large local totem groups). But I agree with Mr. McLennan in prefering, for the reasons given, the theory of an amalgamation. It is rather curious and interesting to observe that almost every scientific hypothesis about totems and 'classes,' which I am obliged to reject, has, in fact, been forestalled by the theories which the natives themselves express in their explanatory myths. Myths, I fear, are never in the right. 'The aborigines themselves,' says Mr. Howitt, 'recognise the former existence of the undivided commune in their legends, but,' he judiciously adds, 'I do not rely upon this as having the force of evidence.'103

We shall presently see that other distinguished anthropologists do, to some extent, rely on Arunta myths, as 'bearing the stamp of authenticity.' The truth is that the native thinkers have hit on the same hypothesis as their European critics, the hypothesis of something like deliberate primeval legislation to a given end, the regulation of marriage. Far from accepting any such native myths, I am rather inclined to hold that, whatever theory be correct, the theory of the savage myth-makers must be wrong. It ought to be said that Mr. Fison, at least, knows what his own theory involves, and once even frankly accepted the possibility that the Dieri myth (the foundation of exogamy by divine decree) may be historically true. 'All I contend for is,' he says, 'that if the former existence of the undivided commune be taken for granted' (and Mr. Fison, unlike Mr. Howitt, regards the undivided commune as a mere unproved hypothesis), 'its division into exogamous clans must have had precisely the effect' (a consciously reformatory effect) 'which Mr. Morgan's theory requires. If such a community ever existed, I do not hesitate to say that Mr. Morgan's "reformatory movement" appears to me the most likely method by which it would begin its advance to a better system of marriage' than 'communal marriage.'

But what gave the impulse to the hypothetical moral reformation? Contact with a more advanced tribe is reckoned improbable by Mr. Fison (for how came the other tribe to be more advanced?), and so the moral impulse 'must have been derived from a higher power,' from the Good Spirit, or from ancestral spirits, as in the myths of the Dieri, the Woeworung, also of the Menomini Redmen of North America, a branch of the Algonquins; and the Euahlayi tribe.

According to the Menomini, there is, or was, a Being who 'made the earth.'104 His name being interpreted means 'The Great Unknown,' but only extreme believers in the theory of religious borrowing will say that he was Sir Walter Scott, Bart. He (The Great Unknown) created 'manidos or spirits,' in the shape of animals, or birds. The chief birds (as often in Australia) were Eagles and Hawks. The Bear 'came out of the ground,' and was turned into an Indian, by the Great Unknown, alias 'The Good Mystery.' He and the Beaver headed totem kins now in 'The Big Thunder phratry.' Other animals came in; there are now Bear, Eagle, Crane, and Moose 'phratries,' each containing a number of totems. All the people of a totem name in the Menomini tribe are akin to persons of the same totem in other tribes, say of the Sioux.105

These myths favourably illustrate the piety of the Dieri, Woeworung, Euahlayi men, and Menomini. Like Mr. Fison (at one time, and 'under all reserves') these tribes leaned to the hypothesis of divine or supernormal intervention in matters totemic. The Dieri may be right, but a less difficult hypothesis is that there was never 'an undivided commune,' in the sense of Mr. Morgan and Mr. Fison, and that, consequently, it never was 'divided into exogamous clans.' If so, no miracle is needed: Nec Deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus. My own scheme needs no divine aid, nor deliberate legislation, 'in the beginning.' But that such legislation has intervened later, I think probable, or certain.

Messrs. Spencer and Gillen write: 'Rigidly conservative as the native is, it is yet possible for changes to be introduced… There are certain men who are respected for their ability, and, after watching large numbers of the tribe, at a time when they were assembled together for months to perform certain of their most sacred ceremonies, we have come to the conclusion that, at a time such as this, when the older and more powerful men from various groups are met together, and when day by day, and night by night around their camp fires, they discuss matters of tribal interest, it is quite possible for changes of custom to be introduced.'106 The Arunta traditions allege that such changes introduced by men of weight, and accepted after discussion, have been not unusual.107 This is highly probable, now, but not in the beginning.

The Arunta historical traditions are of little value as to historical facts,108 but the consciousness of the Central Australian tribes accepts the possibility that new customs may now be proposed, debated, and adopted. If no such thing ever occurred, the belief in its possibility could scarcely have arisen among the Arunta. But the possibility has its limits, and one of these is the deliberate primeval introduction of exogamy, for no conceivable reason, and its imposition on a society already totemic but not yet exogamous. Perhaps few critics will frankly say that exogamy was thus imposed; they will try to qualify or evade so improbable and antiquated a theory. Yet they cannot but slip back into it, while they believe in 'segmentations' of 'an undivided commune,' and of later totemic 'subdivisions' of the 'segmentations.'

In any case these Arunta and cognate tribes of similar usages, so recently discovered, so anomalous, so odd, are 'the only begetters' of the latest hypotheses of Mr. Frazer and Mr. Spencer – namely, that totems, originally, were co-operative industrial groups with no influence on marriage rules. Do the Arunta, then, present a surviving model of primitive Totemism, in other regions modified and contaminated; or is their Totemism not, like their metaphysics and psychology, a 'freak,' an unique divergence from the normal development, as I have from the first maintained?109 All these difficulties and confusions, as to 'phratries' and totems, inevitably arise from the doctrine that the original totem groups were not at first exogamous, and only became exogamous when separate sets of them were scheduled under the two more recent exogamous primary divisions, or were segmented out of them. In that case it is not easy to see how we can escape from the impossible theory that exogamy, and the primary divisions, were the result, of direct legislative enactment. Even if we could believe this, we see no conceivable motive, except Mr. Fison's divine intervention, an idea which, it appears, he put forward quite provisionally in an argument with Lord Avebury.110