Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/421

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Australian Marriage Systems.
401

are evolved out of him. He (the type) is our friend, and is more or less sacred. We must not eat him, nor touch a woman also of his blood."

Here, under a taboo, are evolved exophagy and exogamy, each with a superstitious sanction. Now we have two marriage prohibitions, if we suppose that children of a woman of the Hawk or Crow group keeps her group-name when she is brought into the Emu group. As daughter of that local group, the Hawk woman's daughter is an Emu, and may not marry an Emu man. But as, by female descent, she is a Hawk, the girl may not marry a man of the local group Emu, who is also a Hawk, as son of a Hawk woman in the Emu group. A man, Emu by local group, Hawk by female descent, must catch a woman, Frog (say) by female descent, Kangaroo by local group. But to get her while local groups are hostile may imply shedding kindred totem blood in battle.

In these circumstances two local groups. Emu and Hawk, may make alliance and connubium. If they do, each local totem-group now becomes a "primary division" or "phratry," each phratry containing different totem-kins by female descent, as, in fact, the two-linked intermarrying phratries always do (except among the Arunta). The local totem-taboo, and the taboo of totems by female descent, are both now respected, and a tribe with lawful brides accessible within itself is evolved. There has been no motiveless bisection, no equally motiveless segmentation into new totem-groups, no legislation enforcing exogamy on totem-groups not previously exogamous.

3. There remain the "classes," whose names are not apparently totemic, and whose members do not bequeath the class-name, either on the male or female side, to their children, who revert to grandmaternal or grandpaternal class-names. Of this arrangement, peculiar to Australia, Herr Cunow (1894) offers an explanation which seems to have plausible elements. These "classes" originally conveyed,