by one individual only, the first care of the captors is to inflict on her a collective violation, on the condition, however, that none of them belong to a clan homonymous with that of the ravished woman; if any one of their party is an exception to this, he must abstain from so doing.[1]
The sign of the fictitious fraternity of the Kamilaroi, and of all the Australian tribes organised in the same manner, is a common emblem, the totem. All the men bearing the same totem are united by the bond of a conventional fraternity, which is none the less strict for that reason. The totem has evidently been invented in a primitive epoch, when the different degrees of consanguinity were not easily distinguished, and were therefore replaced by an artificial union far wider than the limits of the natural family.
Whenever a single individual wished to escape from this tribal marriage, he was obliged to resort to various artifices. One of these transitional processes has remained in use in the Kurnai tribe, in Gippsland, Victoria.
The terms still in use with them to designate kinship recall the former existence of a fraternal marriage; but in practice they have none the less adopted individual marriage. The manner in which these individual marriages are contracted probably indicates what must have happened in primitive times, when some innovators attempted to escape from tribal marriage by carrying off the women they preferred, and were only re-admitted to their tribe after having obtained pardon and the ratification of their audacious enterprise. Among the Kurnai every marriage must be made by the capture of one of the women of their tribe, even when this rape has been preceded by a friendly exchange of sisters, which is usual enough. This simulated rape is punished by a simulation of vengeance. The fugitives are pursued; they are even ill-treated, but short of being actually killed. Their punishment is simply an act of obedience to ancestral customs. When all is concluded, and the fugitive couple reinstated among their people, the woman belongs to the man who has carried her off; he is no longer obliged to offer her to the visitors of his clan, as old Australian hospitality
- ↑ Fison and Howitt, quoted by Giraud-Teulon, fils, in Origines du Mariage et de la Famille, pp. 86-88.
