Man, Past and Present - Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (most popular novels txt) 📗

about father-right, abandonment of class system and totemism, individual marriage, and higher ethical and religious ideas. On the contrary it would appear that the centre of the continent is the great channel in which movements are still taking place; the older peoples are driven out towards the margin and there preserve the old sociological, ethical and religious conditions. In fact, the older the people, judging from their linguistic stratum, the less one finds among them what has been assumed to be the initial stage for Central Australia[977]. These are Schmidt's views and they confirm the cultural results established by Graebner. But as the whole question of the culture layers in the Pacific is still under discussion it is inadvisable at this stage of our knowledge to make any definite statements. It is worth noting, however, that[978] the distribution of simple burial of the dead coincides in the main with Schmidt's South Australian language area, and the area roughly enclosed on the east by long. 140 deg. E. and the north by lat. 20 deg. S. appears to form a technological province distinct from the rest of Australia[979].

Rarely can the Australian depend on regular supplies of food. He feeds on flesh, fish, grubs and insects, and wild vegetable food; probably everything that is edible is eaten. Cannibalism is widely spread, but human flesh is nowhere a regular article of food. Clothing, apart from ornament, is rarely worn, but in the south, skin cloaks and fur aprons are fairly common. Scarification of the body is frequent and conspicuous. The men usually let their hair grow long, and the women keep theirs short. Dwellings are of the simplest character, usually merely breakwinds or slight huts, but where there is a large supply of vegetable food, huts are made of boughs covered with bark or grass and are sometimes coated with clay. Implements are made of shell, bone, wood and stone. Baldwin Spencer remarks "It is not too much to say that at the present time we can parallel amongst Australian stone weapons all the types known in Europe under the names Chellean, Mousterian, Aurignacian etc.... The terms Eolithic, Palaeolithic, and Neolithic do not apply in Australia as indicating either time periods or levels of culture[980]." Spears and wooden clubs are universal, and the use of the spear-thrower is generally distributed. The boomerang is found almost throughout Australia; the variety that returns when it is thrown is as a rule only a plaything or for throwing at birds. The forms of the various implements vary in different parts of the country and in some districts certain implements may be entirely absent. For example the boomerang is not found in the northern parts of Cape York peninsula or of the Northern Territory, and the spear-thrower is absent from south-east Queensland. Bows and arrows are unknown and pottery making does not occur. Rafts are made of one or more logs, and the commonest form of canoe is that made of a single sheet of bark. Dug-outs occur in a few places, and both single and double outriggers are found only on the Queensland coast. These sporadic occurrences give additional support to the modern view that the racial and cultural history of Australia is by no means so simple as has till lately been assumed[981].

Students of Australian sociology have been so much impressed with certain prominent features of social organisation that they have paid insufficient attention to kinship and the family; the former has however recently been investigated by A. R. Brown[982], while information concerning the latter has been carefully sifted by B. Malinowski[983]. The main features of social groupings are the tribe, the local groups, the classes, the totemic clans and the families. A tribe is composed of a number of local groups and these are perpetuated in the same tracts by the sons, who hunt over the grounds of their fathers; this is the "local organisation." The local group is the only political unit, and intra-group justice has been extended to inter-group justice, where the units of reference are not based on kinship; this may be regarded as the earliest stage of what is known as International Law[984]. In the so-called "social organisation," the tribe as a community is divided into two parts (moieties or phratries), which are quite distinct from the local groups, though rarely they may be coincident. Each moiety may be subdivided into two or four exogamous sections which are generally called "classes" and are peculiar to Australia. Descent in the classes is as a rule indirect matrilineal or indirect patrilineal, that is to say, while the child still belongs to its mother's or father's moiety (as the case may be) it is assigned to the class to which the mother or the father does not belong; but the grandchildren belong to the class of a grandmother or grandfather. In diagram I (below) A and C are classes of one moiety, #B# and D those of the other. Thus when A man marries B woman the children are D. B man marries A woman and the children are C and so on. When there are four classes in each moiety the diagram works out as follows (II)[985]:

[Illustration]

Very important in social life are the initiation ceremonies by means of which a youth is admitted to the status of tribal manhood. These ceremonies vary greatly from tribe to tribe but they agree in certain fundamental points. "(1) They begin at the age of puberty. (2) During the initiation ceremonies the women play an important part. (3) At the close of the first part of the ceremonies, such as that of tooth knocking out or circumcision, a definite performance is enacted emblematic of the fact that the youths have passed out of the control of the women. (4) During the essential parts the women are typically absent and the youths are shown the bull-roarer, have the secret beliefs explained to them and are instructed in the moral precepts and customs, including food restrictions, that they must henceforth observe under severe penalties. (5) The last grade is not passed through until a man is quite mature[986]."

Practically universal is the existence of a grouping of individuals under the names of plants, animals or various objects; these are termed totems and the human groups are termed totem clans. The members of a totem clan commonly believe themselves to be actually descended from or related to their totem, and all members of a clan, whatever tribe they may belong to, are regarded as brethren, who have mutual duties, prohibitions and privileges. Thus a member of a totem clan must help and never injure any fellow member. "Speaking generally it may be said that every totemic group has certain ceremonies associated with it and that these refer to old totemic ancestors. In all tribes they form part of a secret ritual in which only the initiated may take part. In most tribes a certain number are shown to the youths during the early stages of initiation, but at a later period he sees many more[987]."

In several tribes, and probably it was very general, certain magical ceremonies were performed to render the totem abundant or efficacious. The sex patron ("sex totem"), when the women have one animal, such as the owlet night-jar associated with them, and the men another, such as the bat; and the guardian genius (mis-called "individual totem"), acquired by dreaming of some animal, are of rare occurrence.

The individual family has been shown by Malinowski[988] to be "a unit playing an important part in the social life of the natives and well defined by a number of moral, customary and legal norms; it is further determined by the sexual division of labour, the aboriginal mode of living, and especially by the intimate relation between the parents and children. The individual relation between husband and wife (marriage) is rooted in the unity of the family ... and in the well-defined, though not always exclusive, sexual right the husband acquires over his wife." All sexual licence is regulated by and subject to strict rules. The Pirrauru custom, by which individuals are allocated accessory spouses, "proves that the relationship involved does not possess the character of marriage. For it completely differs from marriage in nearly all the essential points by which marriage in Australia is defined. And above all the Pirrauru relation does not seem to involve the facts of family life in its true sense" (p. 298).

R. Brown[989] asserts that so far as our information goes, the only method of regulating marriage is by means of the relationship system. In every tribe there is a law to the effect that a man may only marry women who stand to him in a certain relationship, and there is no evidence that there is any other method of regulating marriage. The so-called class rule by which a man of a special division or group is required to marry a woman of another division is merely the law of relationship stated in a less exact form. It is the fact that a man may only marry a relative of a certain kind that necessitates the marrying into a particular relationship division. The rule of totemic exogamy, according to A. R. Brown, is equally seen to have no existence apart from the relationship rule. Where a totemic group is a clan and consists of relations all of one line of descent, a man is prohibited from marrying a woman of his own group by the ordinary rule of relationship. On the other hand, where the totemic group is not a clan, but is a local group (as in the Burduna tribe) or a cult society (as in the Arunta tribe) there is no rule prohibiting a man from marrying a woman of the same totemic group as himself. The so-called rule of local exogamy in some tribes (perhaps in all) is merely a result of the fact that the local group is a clan, i.e. a group of persons related in one line of descent only. Only two methods of regulating marriage are known to exist in the greater part of Australia[990]: Type I. A man marries the daughter of one of the men he denotes by the same term as his mother's brother. Type II. A man marries a woman who is the daughter's daughter of some man whom he denotes by the same term as his mother's mother's brother. In either case he may not marry any other kind of relative. The existence of two phratries or moieties or four named divisions ("classes") in a tribe conveys no information whatever as to the marriage rule of the tribe. The term "class" and "sub-class," according to A. R. Brown, had better be discarded as writers use them to denote several totally distinct kinds of divisions.

The tribe has collecting and hunting rights over an area with recognised limits, smaller communities down to the family unit having similar rights within the tribal boundaries. In some cases a tribe which had no stone suitable for making stone implements within its own boundaries was allowed to send tribal messengers to a quarry to procure what was needed without molestation, though Howitt speaks of family ownership of quarries[991]. Implements are personal property. An extensive system of intertribal communication and exchange is carried on, apparently by recognised middlemen, and tribes meet on certain occasions at established trade centres for a regulated barter.

Beneficent and malevolent magic are universally practised and totemism possesses a religious besides a social aspect. An emotional relation often exists between the members of a totem clan and their totem, and the latter are believed at times to warn or protect their human kinsmen. It may be noted that the widely spread and elaborate ceremonies designed to render the totem prolific or to ensure its abundance, though performed solely by members of the totem clan concerned, are less for their own benefit than for that of the community[992]. Owing perhaps to the difficulty of distinguishing between the