3. THE PAIRING FAMILY.
A certain pairing for a longer or shorter term took place even during the group marriage or still earlier. A man had his principal wife (one can hardly call it favorite wife as yet) among many women, and he was to her the principal husband among others. This fact in no small degree contributed to the confusion among missionaries, who regarded group marriage now as a disorderly community of women, now as an arbitrary adultery. Such a habitual pairing would gain ground the more the gens developed and the more numerous the classes of "brothers" and "sisters" became who were not permitted to marry one another. The impulse to prevent marriage of consanguineous relatives started by the gens went still further. Thus we find that among the Iroquois and
with a few exceptions, first because I do not wish to write a general history of the primitive family, and, secondly, because I consider all references of this kind as very doubtful testimony, unless they are accompanied by an analysis of the entire organization. We frequently find analogies to the institutions of a lower stage in a high stage, and yet they are founded on radically different premises and causes. The evolution of the Australian aborigines shows that. Among the Australians of the lower stage, e.g., the hordes are endogamous, among those of the middle stage they are exogamous, and in the higher stage they are again endogamous. But while in the one instance the marriage in the horde is conditioned on the fact that the more remote relatives are not yet excluded from sexual intercourse, it is founded in the other case on the difference between local and sexual organization. Furthermore, the marriage between daughter and father is permitted in the lower stage, and again in that higher stage, where the class organization of the Kamilaroi is on the verge of dissolution, put in both cases the circle of those who are regarded as fibers is entirely different. The character of an institution can only be perfectly understood, if we examine its connection with the entire organization, and, if possible, trace Its metamorphoses in the preceding stages.…
The characteristic feature of the class system is that by the side of the gentile order, such as is found among the North American Indians, there is always another system of four marriage classes for the purpose of limiting sexual intercourse between certain groups of relatives. Neither the phratry nor the gens of the Kamilaroi forms a distinct
