Part 45 (2/2)
Since this chapter was written a new book on Australia has appeared which bears out the views here taken so admirably that I must insert a brief reference to its contents. It is Spencer and Gillen's _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_ (1899), and relates to nine tribes over whom Baldwin Spencer had been placed as special magistrate and sub-protector for some years, during which he had excellent opportunities to study their customs. The authors tell us (62, 63) that
”In the Urabunna tribe every woman is the special _Nupa_ of one particular man, but at the same time he has no exclusive right to her, as she is the _Piraungaru_ of certain other men who also have the right of access to her.... There is no such thing as one man having the exclusive right to one woman....
Individual marriage does not exist either in name or in practice in the Urabunna tribe.”
”Occasionally, but rarely, it happens that a man attempts to prevent his wife's _Piraungaru_ from having access to her, but this leads to a fight, and the husband is looked upon as churlish. When visiting distant groups where, in all likelihood, the husband has no _Piraungaru_, it is customary for other men of his own cla.s.s to offer him the loan of one or more of their _Nupa_ women, and a man, besides lending a woman over whom he has the first right, will also lend his _Piraungaru_.”
In the Arunta tribe there is a restriction of a particular woman to a particular man, ”or rather, a man has an exclusive right to one special woman, though he may of his own free will lend her to other men,” provided they stand in a certain artificial relation to her (74). However (92):
”Whilst under ordinary circ.u.mstances in the Arunta and other tribes one man is only allowed to have marital relations with women of a particular cla.s.s, there are customs which allow at certain times of a man having such relations with women to whom at other times he would not on any account be allowed to have access. We find, indeed, that this holds true in the case of all the nine different tribes with the marriage customs of which we are acquainted, and in which a woman becomes the private property of one man.”
In the southern Arunta, after a certain ceremony has been performed, the bride is brought back to camp and given to her special _Unawa_.
”That night he lends her to one or two men who are _unawa_ to her, and afterward she belongs to him exclusively.” At this time when a woman is being, so to speak, handed over to one particular individual, special individuals with whom at ordinary times she may have no intercourse, have the right of access to her. Such customs our authors interpret plausibly as partial promiscuity pointing to a time when still greater laxity prevailed--suggesting rudimentary organs in animals (96).
Among some tribes at corrobboree time, every day two or three women are told off and become the property of all the men on the corrobboree grounds, excepting fathers, brothers, or sons. Thus there are three stages of individual owners.h.i.+p in women: In the first, whilst the man has exclusive right to a woman, he can and does lend her to certain other men; in the second there is a wider relation in regard to particular men at the time of marriage; and in the third a still wider relation to all men except the nearest relatives, at corrobboree time.
Only in the first of these cases can we properly speak of wife ”lending”; in the other cases the individuals have no choice and cannot withhold their consent, the matter being of a public or tribal nature. As regards the corrobborees, it is supposed to be the duty of every man at different times to send his wife to the ground, and the most striking feature in regard to it is that the first man who has access to her is the very one to whom, under normal conditions, she is most strictly taboo, her _Mura_. [All women whose daughters are eligible as wives are _mura_ to a man.]
Old and young men alike must give up their wives on these occasions.
”It is a custom of ancient date which is sanctioned by public opinion, and to the performance of which neither men nor women concerned offer any opposition” (98).
ABORIGINAL DEPRAVITY
These revelations of Spencer and Gillen, taken in connection with the abundant evidence I have cited from the works of early explorers as to the utter depravity of the aboriginal Australian when first seen by white men, will make it impossible hereafter for anyone whose reasoning powers exceed a native Australian's to maintain that it was the whites who corrupted these savages. It takes an exceptionally shrewd white man even to unravel the customs of voluntary or obligatory wife sharing or lending which prevail in all parts of Australia, and which must have required not only hundreds but thousands of years to a.s.sume their present extraordinarily complex aspect; customs which form part and parcel of the very life of Australians and which represent the lowest depths of s.e.xual depravity, since they are utterly incompatible with chast.i.ty, fidelity, legitimacy, or anything else we understand by s.e.xual morality. In some cases, no doubt, contact with the low whites and their liquor aggravated these evils by fostering professional prost.i.tution and making men even more ready than before to treat their wives as merchandise. Lumholtz, who lived several years among these savages, makes this admission (345), but at the same time he is obliged to join all the other witnesses in declaring that apart from this ”there is not much to be said of the morals of the blacks, for I am sorry to say they have none.” On a previous page (42) I cited Sutherland's summary of a report of the House of Commons (1844, 350 pages), which shows that the Australian native, as found by the first white visitors, manifested ”an absolute incapacity to form even a rudimentary notion of chast.i.ty.” The same writer, who was born and brought up in Australia, says (I., 121):
”In almost every case the father or husband will dispose of the girl's virtue for a small price. When white men came they found these habits prevailing. The overwhelming testimony proves it absurd to say that they demoralized the unsophisticated savages.”
And again (I., 186),
”It is untrue that in s.e.xual license the savage has ever anything to learn. In almost every tribe there are pollutions deeper than any I have thought it necessary to mention, and all that the lower fringe of civilized men can do to harm the uncivilized is to stoop to the level of the latter, instead of teaching them a better way.”[165]
THE QUESTION OF PROMISCUITY
As regards the promiscuity question, Spencer and Gillen's observations go far to confirm some of the seemingly fantastic speculations regarding ”a thousand miles of wives,” and so on, contained in the volume of Fison and Howitt[166] and to make it probable that unregulated intercourse was the state of primitive man at a stage of evolution earlier than any known to us now. Since the appearance of Westermarck's _History of Human Marriage_ it has become the fas.h.i.+on to regard the theory of promiscuity as disproved. Alfred Russell Wallace, in his preface to this book, expresses his opinion that ”independent thinkers” will agree with its author on most of the points wherein he takes issue with his famous predecessors, including Spencer, Morgan, Lubbock, and others. Ernst Grosse, in a volume which the president of the German Anthropological Society p.r.o.nounced ”epoch-making”--_Die Formen der Familie_--refers (43) to Westermarck's ”very thorough refutation” of this theory, which he stigmatizes as one of the blunders of the unfledged science of sociology which it will be best to forget as soon as possible; adding that ”Westermarck's best weapons were, however, forged by Starcke.”
In a question like this, however, two independent observers are worth more than two hundred ”independent thinkers.” Spencer and Gillen are eye-witnesses, and they inform us repeatedly (100, 105, 108, 111) that Westermarck's objections to the theory of promiscuity do not stand the test of facts and that none of his hypotheses explains away the customs which point to a former prevalence of promiscuity. They have absolutely disproved his a.s.sertion (539) that ”it is certainly not among the lowest peoples that s.e.xual relations most nearly approach promiscuity.” Cunow, who, as Grosse admits (50), has written the most thorough and authentic monograph on the complicated family relations.h.i.+p of Australia, devotes two pages (122-23) to exposing some of Westermarck's arguments, which, as he shows, ”border on the comic.”
I myself have in this chapter, as well as in those on Africans, American Indians, South Sea Islanders, etc., revealed the comicality of the a.s.sertion that there is in a savage condition of life ”comparatively little reason for illegitimate relations,” which forms one of the main props of Westermarck's anti-promiscuity theory; and I have also reduced _ad absurdum_ his systematic overrating of savages in the matter of liberty of choice, esthetic taste and capacity for affection which resulted from his pet theory and marred his whole book.[167]
It is interesting to note that Darwin (_D.M._, Ch. XX.) concluded from the facts known to him that ”_almost_ promiscuous intercourse or very loose intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world:” and the only thing that seemed to deter him from believing in _absolutely_ promiscuous intercourse was the ”strength of the feeling of jealousy.”
Had he lived to understand the true nature of savage jealousy explained in this volume and to read the revelations of Spencer and Gillen, that difficulty would have vanished. On this point, too, their remarks are of great importance, fully bearing out the view set forth in my chapter on jealousy. They declare (99) that they did not find s.e.xual jealousy specially developed:
”For a man to have unlawful intercourse with any woman arouses a feeling which is due not so much to jealousy as to the fact that the delinquent has infringed a tribal custom. If the intercourse has been with a woman who belongs to the cla.s.s from which his wife comes, then he is called _atna nylkna_ (which, literally translated, is v.u.l.v.a thief); if with one with whom it is unlawful for him to have intercourse, then he is called _iturka_, the most opprobrious term in the Arunta language. In the one case he has merely stolen property, in the other he has offended against tribal law.”
Jealousy, they sum up, ”is indeed a factor which need not be taken into serious account in regard to the question of s.e.xual relations amongst the Central Australian tribes.”
The customs described by these authors show, moreover, that these savages _do not allow jealousy to stand in the way of s.e.xual communism_, a man who refuses to share his wife being considered churlish, in one cla.s.s of cases, while in another no choice is allowed him, the matter being arranged by the tribe. This point has not heretofore been sufficiently emphasized. It knocks away one of the strongest props of the anti-promiscuity theory, and it is supported by the remarks of Howitt,[168] who, after explaining how, among the Dieri, couples are chosen by headmen without consulting their wishes,--new allotments being made at each circ.u.mcision ceremony--and how the dance is followed by a general license, goes on to relate that all these matters are carefully arranged _so as to prevent jealousy_.
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