Neui fork HnU QJoUege of Agriculture At ajornell InmersitH Uibtarg HQ 504 ■r5""*"""'™«"y Library The primitive family as an educational i 3 1924 014 035 723" The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014035723 The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency By Arthur James Todd, Ph.D. Of the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois G. P. Putnam's Sons New York and London XTbe fmicRecbocftec ptees 1913 Copyright^ 1913 BY ARTHUR JAMES TODD (S /3070 TEbe ftnicfeerbociier |>rese, View JSotft M. G. T. WHOSE QUALITIES AS COMRADE AND HOME-MAKER HAVE MADE THIS STUDY POSSIBLE PREFACE IT is a truism that an institution can be understood only through its history. The notion of change and development in ideas and institutions is funda- mental to any sound science of society. Yet when we attempt to apply this principle to such concrete institu- tions as say, property, or the family, we are struck with the rigidity of the ideas and sentiments in which they are conceived. The popular mind accepts to a certain extent the general idea of progress and may not stop to bewail the death of the good old times which alone can usher in the new. But let the sociologist or the philosopher suggest that property and the family as we know them were not always so, but, since they are both largely social products, have varied enormously as social needs varied — ^and the popular mind becomes eminently reactionary. This cannot be, it says; mono- gamy and private property in lands and goods and women are innate characters of man, were always so, and always will be so. Unforttmately this attitude of mind is not confined to the obviously untrained but lingers with those who have had opportunities for knowing better. Growing discontent with such static conceptions of social processes prompted the study which follows. On the one hand, we are confronted by cries of alarm VI Preface at the imminent dissolution of society owing to the apparent "break-up of the family." On the other, with the demand for a more efficient type of education. The social aspect of the question may be formulated somewhat thus: Can the family change its form and function without permanent injury to social stability and welfare? The educational question takes this form: If the family has heretofore been the basic educational agency but is losing its educational effi- ciency, can we devise a more adequate type of educa- tion with other social institutions predominant in its foundations? Whatever the answers to these questions, it is evident that a sound notion of certain typical social institutions is essential to the educator who would make education a vital factor in a conscious program for further social development. It is equally evident that some acquaint- ance with the history of present institutions — and notably the family and the school — is necessary to illuminate the present crisis in family life. ^ review of the domestic life of our forbears really yields abundant cause for gratification at the enormous distance we have traveled and at the comparative stability and harmony of modern family life?^ Such phases of primitive domestic life as promiscuity, group-marriage, trial- marriage, the trifling grounds for divorce, absence of chastity, infanticide, and other forms of parental neglect and cruelty, lack of filial piety, hazy notions of kinship, etc., are milestones worth while recalling if for no other reason than to measure our progress. Hence in the general conclusion of our study we can face squarely and with the utmost optimism the fact Preface vii that the family has changed its form and ftmction many times in the course of its age-long evolution. The indications are that it is changing now and will continue to change in response to changes in general social needs and in the alignment of social institutions. Neither is there anything disconcerting in the fact that the family never has been the type and foundation of all education. If, owing to changes in the industrial and religious world, the family is losing much of its educa- tional significance, this simply means that we must find other sanctions and other bases in its place. From the very fact that the family in times past has shown itself so variable and flexible, are we not warranted in looking for such new adjustments in its form and content as to make it an increasingly valuable social institution? In the preparation of this work I have had constantly in mind two classes of students : those who were looking for an outline sketch of the early evolution of the family ; and those who, with myself, have felt the all too obvious lack of materials illustrating methods and organization of primitive education. Histories of education must fill up the gap now usually left, and pay more respectful attention to primitive education. Because a thing is primitive does not mean that it is to be overlooked or despised. Its sympathetic study may reveal unsus- pected treastu-e. Witness only the revival of dancing in our most modem schools: as I have herein shown, dancing was not only one of the chief subjects in the primitive curriculum, but was one of the most effective agencies for social control; the protagonists of dancing would greatly strengthen their arguments and their methods by a study of their savage predecessors. viii Preface Other elements in the modern euniculum might profit similarly. It would be impossible in this place to acknowledge fully my indebtedness to the many friends who have offered encouragement and help in the course of this work, and who have shared the drudgery of reading manuscript and proof. I must, however, offer a tribute to the memory of the late Professor Sumner, whose monumental collection of ethnographical notes has been made accessible through the courtesy of Professor A. G. Keller of Yale University. Thanks are due also to the authors and publishers who have courteously granted permission to quote freely from their books. My bibliography attests in part the indispensable aid which I have received from those "silent partners," whose works are enumerated. A. J. T. Urbana, November i8, 1912. CONTENTS PAGE Preface oo CHAPTER I Introductory i II Primitive Marital Relations . . .11 (i) Promiscuity and Group Marriage. III Primitive Marital Relations . . -33 (2) Trial Marriage, Divorce, Polygamy. IV Primitive Notions of Kinship and Relation- ship ... ■ • ■ 55 V Primitive Parental and Filial Relations . 91 VI Aims and Content of Primitive Education . 141 VII Methods and Organization of Primitive Education 181 VIII General Summary and Conclusion . . 226 Selected Bibliography 231 Index 243 u« The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY Forces in Education. — Education in its broadest and best sense is an organic process. At the same time it is also a result, the sum of an infinitely complex set of forces, many of which are controllable, some of which are not, at least not yet. But it is the manipu- lation of the controllable elements in man's environ- ment which has raised him out of beastdom and savagery to his present more promising level. If he shall continue to rise he must continue to manipulate. But just which of the forces and influences that make up the total of his education are the variables which he can and must control? There is the rub; there we get entangled in a mesh of diverse opinion. Yet there is the most vital and practical problem of human life which you and I as teacher, parent, statesman, philanthropist, must face and work out vigorously and in all honesty. Which are the supreme forces in a man's education? Experience? His own instincts? I 2 Primitive Family and Education His family? Religion? Life in society? Each and all of these have been urged. For the present we propose to consider the claims of the family as an element in education, though naturally enough it will be impossible to isolate it utterly from the others. The Family the Fundamental School? — In a protest formulated against the proposal of the Federation of Women's Associations in Germany (1900) that the government should undertake the systematic develop- ment of kindergartens and found training schools for kindergarten teachers, Herr Beetz of Gotha drew up a series of propositions which represented the attitude of the old conservative schoolmen. First on the list occur the following: "A — I. (a) The history of civilization proves the family to be the basis of all moral development. The family is the first, most natural, and most indispensable place of education — not only of the children, but also of the parents. (b) The kindergarten encroaches, without justifica- tion or understanding, on these inalienable rights and duties, and thus injures the moral training of individual children, and also hinders the progressive moral develop- ment of the parents. 2. (a) Sociology shows the family to be the founda- tion of the state. It is the first and most important source of national strength, physical, intellectual, and moral, in all its struggles— internal or external.'" At first sight we might have been inclined to let pass the first two of Herr Beetz's propositions; but the third, in spite of its axiomatic ring, tends to cast 'Educ. Rev., XX., 323-4. Introductory 3 suspicion on the validity of the others. For, as a matter of fact, sociology repudiates the conclusion which Herr Beetz imputes to it. If sociology has done nothing else, it has at least shown the enormous com- plexity of the social process and demonstrated that it lends itself to no such simpliste explanation as this gentleman oflfers. But this is simply a fair sample of the deliverances of that class of persons for whom the long and short of education is the maintenance of the present order; and should be taken not as educational nor social law and gospel but merely as a partisan program with all its limitations and half truths. But unforttmately for the free and honest study or dis- cussion of educational problems, this very conserva- tism and partisanship are all too common. Our own land is by no means free from them. It is not so much partisanship, however, as mere perftmctory "rounding- out" of the subject that has led certain writers of educational texts to generalize somewhat broadly and hastily on the subject of primitive education. Take, for example. Professor Monroe's dictum: "The fundamental social institution itself — the family — is in the earliest times the sole educational institution."" No less summary is this sentence from Professor Bagley's The Educative Process: "In the most primitive forms of human society, the home is the sole agency of formal education, involving, in addition to the fundamental functions just mentioned, conscious instruction in whatever crude arts of hunt- " Hist. 0/ Edw., 6; cf. Munroe, The Educational Ideal, 231. 4 Primitive Family and Education ing and warfare the adult members' of the family may practice."^ Other examples of what might almost be called the family superstition in education might easily be culled from pedagogical classics still in enormous vogue; for instance, this from Pestalozzi: "a man's domestic relations are the first and most important of, his nature"; "it is the domestic virtues which determine the happiness of a nation . . . the home is the true basis of the education of humanity. . . ."* The Problem. — Perhaps then it may not prove a gratuitous task, nor "barren scholarship," to under- take an investigation of the educational function of the family in ethnic society, to ascertain whether or not "the family is the first, most natural, most indis- pensable agency in education," etc. That this is not an idle question, or of purely scholastic interest, is abundantly proved by the experience of nearly every one who has to deal publicly with children. Every superintendent of schools called upon to discipline a child or administer compulsory attendance meets some irate parent who orders him to halt with the formula, "This is my child, I can do with him as I like." Every judge, probation officer, htmiane society agent or director of an institution for children has been confronted with the same indignant outburst. Even 'L. c, 26; cj. Laurie, Pre-Christian Educ., 7; Chamberiain, The Child and Childhood, etc., 234; T. Davidson, A History of Education. t Baron de Guimps, Pestalozzi, His Life and Works, N. Y., 1890, p. 77; Misawa, Modern Educators, 125; Barnard, Pestalozzi and His Educational System, 665-6, 716; cf. Herbart's Outlines of Educational Doctrine, il%ff. Introductory 5 more strikingly does it crop out in connection with child labor and factory inspection laws. In fact, wherever church, or industry, or other organizations are attempting to exploit the child and will brook no public interference, there one is sure to find the parent trotted out as the supreme and final source of all authority over the child. That the superintendent of a great city system of schools could say, "Parents are the child's worst enemies"; that HoUand could fight fifty years over the rights and place of the private school in the public system — a question almost whoUy of parental rights; that a church-directed assatilt is going stormily on now in France against the public school in the name of les droits du pere de famille: such facts signify that the family in education is not a dead issue. The assumption of the family's primacy in education is not infrequently based on just the argument that the savage gives for his customs: "We do not know why, but our fathers did so, and we can do no other. " The common run of mankind are quite willing to rest upon this form of reasoning and to believe in the divine institution of the family — if not in its daily working out ! — especially if sufiicient politi- cal or ecclesiastical pressure is applied. But even granting the validity of this appeal to the fathers — after all not an altogether displeasing form of ancestor worship — we should like to know what our fathers actually thought and did about the matters concerning which their authority is invoked. The parent appeals to history to justify his "right to his own child"; the church appeals to history in defense of family rights when it desires to impose its own exclusive will upon 6 Primitive Family and Education both child and parent (quite forgetting such texts as Matthew x., 35, 37 ; xxiii., 9 ; Mark iii., 31-5) ; the lawyer invokes the sacredness and antiquity of the family in his efforts to block the court's attempt to separate a child from a pestilential home and give it a chance for life in a decent environment. The only way to deal intelligently with such contentions is to meet them on their own ground, and to ascertain what actually has been the nature of the famiUal and parental relations, what actually has been the educational contribution of the family; whether it has any divinity other than that acquired in its evolution. Such are the questions this study tries to answer. The facts offered in good faith can only be used, however, by those who rest their judgment on evidence and not on dogma. Methodology. — In the working out of such a prob- lem much depends upon the methods employed. We might begin, it is true, with a deductive argument based on genetic psychology, and might draw vaHd conclusions as to primitive psychology without becom- ing committed absolutely to the recapitulation theory. A better method of procedtu-e, however, seems to be this: to reconstruct, if possible, a view of primitive society; and to examine the various forces, institutions, conditions, operating in that society, which could contribute to such a process. The problem of the present study is to determine what part the family played in this process of education. It will be our first business, then, to determine the relation of the family to society as a whole in primitive times. By deduction we ought to be able to estimate its power Introductory 7 as an educative instrument. This will constitute the first chapters of our study. Lest the results thus obtained should appear intangible and barren, it is proposed to attack the problem also inductively. Ethnography should yield materials for a comparative study of mind in the making. The relation of parent to child, parental affection, parental neglect and cruelty, filial respect, family teaching, tribal disci- pline, etc., — all these are vital matters bearing on the family as an educator. A conclusion drawn from such data should have great bearing on the deductions pre- viously made, and should knit up the whole argument into a reasonable affirmation. Perhaps a word should be added as to the methods pursued in the handling of ethnographic materials. While the prime purpose of this study is educational, much of its matter must be drawn from the stores of anthropology and ethnography. In drawing upon and using such stores, I have constantly been aware of the dangers involved and have endeavored to employ all due caution in interpreting the data. Reference will be made in the proper places to current criticisms upon the validity of certain data and methods. But at the outset it may be well to mention two or three general cautions against pitfalls likely to entrap the student. In the first place, the method of "survivals": while I have adopted the evolutionary theory in ethnology and believe that the "degeneration" theory of the modem savage is altogether unsound, yet it is by no means evident that every tribe of savages is a survival and to be taken as a fair sample of primitive man. There is much truth in Mr. Talcott Williams's criticism of this 8 Primitive Family and Education method and in his theory of "presstire" to account for certain low grade cultures. ^ Nor is Sir Henry Maine's caution against imputing antiquity and generality to certain modem savage practices, which are rather lapses than universal traits, lightly to be disregarded. Further, and this with particular reference to primitive "mental outfit," wemightrecord as sage advicearemark of Mr. Dudley Kidd in his charming book on savage childhood: "As a matter of fact, there is nothing savages — and even savages high in the scale — think less about than the topics which fill modem works on anthropology or ethnog- raphy. The Kafirs might talk for five consecutive days about a calf that had died, but they would not talk five consecutive minutes about evil spirits, nor for five seconds about that delight of some writers, the evil eye."* Yet these cautions are directed rather against the abuse than the careful use of current methods. A reading of the argument which follows should show whether these methods have been used with discretion or not. Finally, it has not been found practicable to use any close statistical method, from the difficulty in getting strictly comparable units. Primitive Mind. — For reasons of space we are compelled to omit from this study a detailed account of the more characteristic traits of primitive life. We must content ourselves, therefore, with the merest catalogue of those phases of primitive life and thought s "Was Primitive Man a Modem Savage?" in Smithson. Rep. 1896, i., 541-8. Cf. Mr. J. R. Swanton's vigorous criticism of current methods of determining what is and what is not "primitive "in anthropology. — Amer. Anthrop., x., n. s., 457-9. ' Savage Childhood, 146. Introductory 9 which bear upon the present topic. Among these must be noted the bareness and uncertainty of savage Hfe; for despite eighteenth-century philosophizing, the savage is neither free, nor "happy" in any adequate sense of the word. Perhaps the most striking char- acter of primitive life is the narrowness of its range of interests. Most of the savage's attention, hence his education, focused on his stomach; yet we must beware of censuring unduly his 'belly-philosophy ' or his indolence, for, as Professor Ward reminds us, the world has not yet reached a stage where the physical and temporary interests of mankind have not been in the ascendant. The "mind of primitive man" has been for' half a century the football of ethnographers and sociologists. Is his mind the same as, similar to, identical with, the equivalent of, or absolutely different from our own? Has he any mind to speak of, or are his mental powers reaUy superior to those of civilized men? A pretty insubstantial web of fallacy has been woven about these points. For my own part I hold the savage mind to differ quantitatively and quaHta- tively from our own. The differences are due, first, to different modes of conceiving experience (as MM. Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl have ably shown); and second, to differences in the cosmic and social envi- ronments. After all, these two differences reduce to one, since it is impossible to mark off man absolutely from his environment. But the quality of savage mind which perhaps most profoundly illuminates our sub- ject is its hazy sense of personality, the difficulty it experiences in marking off its "self" from other selves; in other words, the absence of sharp dualisms. This lo Primitive Family and Education is revealed in creation myths, in primitive notions of kinship and relationship, in the almost universal savage belief in metamorphosis, in the savage's identi- fication of "self" with the name, shadow, dream-self, "likeness," clothing and other property, feces, etc. It also comes out clearly in savage zoomorphism, which we consider more fundamental than anthro- pomorphism and animistic religion. Certain mimetic funeral rites once common and fotmd still in Russia offer interesting evidence of this dim sense of person- aUty. And the widespread belief in "possession" by good or evU spirits further confirms the principle. It must suffice, then, to posit the narrow range of primitive life interests, the inflexibility resultant from this circumscribing of interest, with its concomitant an apparent, though only apparent, indolence and inattention; the childlikeness of primitive mind, manifested, for example, in improvidence, volatility, feeble powers of memory in general, and lack of self- control; the "superstition" of savagery, which we might easily show to be but incomplete science; a general dullness of savage sensibilities ; a meager sensory, and therefore conceptual, range; finally, a very hazy notion of "self" or "personality." With these points in mind we pass now to the organization of the primitive family. CHAPTER II PRIMITIVE MARITAL RELATIONS I. Promiscuity and Group-Marriage , Economic and Biological Basis of the Family. — The family is a strictly pragmatic institution both in origin and development. It is rooted in physiology, economics, and the mores. The preponderance of one or other of these elements is determined largely by the culture status of the people in which the particular form obtains. It is divine only in the same sense that language, or art, or the human mind, or natural selection is divine. It is sacred for the reason that it is a form in which human activity has been moulded to the advantage of the race, and for no other. Its origin was prosaic enough. In the beginning it was not a refuge, an ark of peace and contentment, a shelter from the world, a center of sesthetic enjoyment, or even a sure recuperative arrangement. It was simply and solely an improved bread-winning and breeding device, whereby man might increase his brain capacity through economic leisure. Whatever of poetry and idealiza- tion attaches to the family nowadays has been won only through long cycles of experience, dtiring which the intelligence and feelings of men have developed to the 12 Primitive Family and Education point that they are able to read new meanings into old forms. This is only another example of the insti- tution evolving along with other institutions and reflecting their changes. For we are not to imagine that the family has persisted from the beginnings in its present apparently fixed form. On the con- trary, it has varied widely, and will probably con- tinue to vary. Morgan well said, "It must advance as society advances, and change as society changes even as it has done in the past."^ Much of the turgid eloquence which has been inflicted upon us in the name of discussion of the family would have been spared had the champions of one or another view based their arguments on a study of the entire social systems forming the matrix of the family institution, instead of resting upon a priori theories and an attempt to justify them by the analytic method. It is evident that the family in the course of its evolution has served a variety of human needs, according to special local requirements. It is also probable, if our estimate of primitive mind be correct, that the family was differ- ently regarded according to the different conceptual systems surrounding it. ' The Family the Social "Cell"?— The social service of the family in human evolution is indubitable, though I am inclined to suspect that the emphasis ^Ancient Society, 491. ' Caution must be observed in using anthropological data relating to the family, for, as Gomme points out, when we are dealing with savage society the terms family and tribe do not connote the same institution as with us {^Folklore as an Hist. Science, 236) ; cf. Schrader, Prekist. Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, 396: "It seems, therefore, almost impossible to establish a primeval term for the concept ' family.' " Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 13 laid upon it in Mr. Fiske's theory is excessive ; and that it is by no means so certain as he would have us believe that the family has been the motivating force in pro- longing human infancy or vice versa, and hence the motivating force in mental and social evolution. This brings up the> whole question of the relation of the family to society. Is it true, as it is currently asserted, that "the family is the most ancient and sacred of human institutions" ? Or is there any basis for the stock generalization that the family is the unit of societal life, and the parental relation the germ of organized society? Or are we any nearer the truth if we insist that social life is the source of the parental bond and of the fanuly? Dozens of citations bearing on both sides of this controversy might be adduced; we shall content ourselves, however, with only two typical statements. The first from Mr. Fiske: "But with our half -human forefathers it is not difficult to see how infancy extending over several years must have tended gradually to strengthen the relations of the children to the mother, and eventually to both parents, and thus give rise to the permanent organization of the family. When this step was accomplished we may say that the Creation of Man had been achieved. For through the organization of the family has arisen that of the clan or tribe, which has formed, as it were, the cellular tissue out of which the most complex human society has come to be constructed."' »''The Meaning of Infancy," Essay xii., in Excursions of an Evolu- tionist, 289; cf. id. "Outlines of Cosmic Philos.," chap, xvi., xxi., xxii.; Maine, Ancient Law, 3d. Am. ed., 121; Espinas, Les Societis Animales; Westermarck, Hist, of Human Marr., 50; Sutherland, Origin 14 Primitive Family and Education The second we choose from Bucher's Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft \- "Recent ethnographers have been at great pains to show that mother-love is a universal trait existing at every stage of culture. Indeed it goes hard against the grain to deny to our own kind a feeling which we see so charmingly expressed in many species of animals. Yet only too many records are at hand to prove that the psychic bond between parents and children is first and foremost a fruit of culture (eine Frucht der Kultur), and that among the lower peoples the barest care for self -existence outweighs all other mental operations; indeed nothing beside it exists {uberhaupt nichts vorhanden ist)." Before going farther we should raise a word of and Growth of the Moral Instinct; Lippert, Kulturgeschichte, i., 75; Groos, Play of Man, 334; Schrader, Prehist. Antiq., 393; Darwin, Desc. of Man, L, 77, says guardedly: "The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial afifections; and this extension may be in chief part attributed to natural selection, but perhaps in part to mere habit." See also Michelet's charming tri- bute to the family in his little book, Nos FUs; also the EncycUque "Reram Novarum" of Pope Leo XIII; Comte, Le Play, SchafSe {Bau u.Leben i., 66), L. Stein (Die Sociale Frage, etc.), Ren6 Worms {Organ- isme et Societe) all make the family the cell, or the seed, or the unit of Society. Spencer calls it the ancient social unit as opposed to the modem notion of the individual as the social unit; see also J. Decorse, in L' Anthropologic, xvi., 652. < 2 Aufl., 19. Other expressions, such as "grenzenlose Selbstsucht," and "Der Wilde denkt nur an sick," occur; Steinmetz attacks this view in his " Verhaltnis zwischen Eltem u. Kinder" (Ztscft.f. Socialwissen- schaft, {., 607-31); see also Giddings, Prin. of Social. (1896), 229; Lippert, i., 70; Gomme, /. c, 236-7; Jevons, Intro, to Hist, of Religion, 195; Solotaroff, in Am. Antkrap., xi., 231-2; Barth, Die Philosophie der Gesckichte, etc., 377-84; Cosentini, La Sociologie G&nitique, chap, viii.; Eleutheropulos, Soziologie, 38-53; Zenker, Die Gesellsckaft, ii., S3-8; Loria, La Sociologia, 90 Jf. Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 15 protest against the manifest exaggeration of self-in- terest ascribed by this writer to primitive men. Is it true that "all primitive men are egoists"?' No; if true at all it is only half true; for the moment one utters the word "men," he is committed to a belief in man as a societal product, and social life is only possible as some form of cooperation, however crude, tones down man's supposedly invincible egoism. No man can be a strict-construction individualist and remain man. He is inevitably a compotmd of self and other-self. And the instinct for service or sacrifice is just as funda- mental, just as "natural," as the instinct for self-pres- ervation. The needs of the developing organism and its milieu determiae when and how these tendencies or instincts shall appear. " Contact " Theory. — Such variances of opinion reveal the inherent weakness in the attempt to establish hard and fast causal relations between social phenomena. It is probably true that neither did the family grow out of society, nor is society a mere extension of the family relation ; but that both arose concurrently out of some primeval tropism. Physiologists describe the tendency of insects to burrow themselves into the soil for pro- tection, to get under a bit of stone or clod of earth ; the feeling of contact with the solid substance begets a sense of safety and well-being. It is not unlikely that such a procedure might develop into some such crude mani- festation of sociabihty as that of sheep or cattle which bunch themselves closely together in times of danger, or in times of pleasurable rest. Why should not this crude sociabihty have survived in human gregarious- 5 McGee in Rep. Bureau of Amer. Ethnology, xix., %y>ff. i6 Primitive Family and Education ness? Why should not the safety-contact and the pleasure-contact unite to produce such a social in- strument as the bond of mother and child, or of husband and wife? I am disposed to refer both the parental and the social bond to some remote manifestation of contact pleasiu:e, the more so from observation of the large part which this element plays still in human rela- tions. Mr. Stephen Phillips puts this exquisitely in his "Marpessa": "And I shall sleep beside him in the night And fearful from some dream shall touch his hand Secure; or at some festival we two Will wander through the lighted city streets; And in the crowd I '11 take his arm and feel The closer for the press. So shall we live. " Crawley bases his whole study of marriage on a theory of contact but works it out to conclusions which we cannot accept in their entirety. He says : "Ideas of contact are at the root of all conceptions of human relations at any stage of culture; contact is the one universal test, as it is the most elementary form, of mutual relations. Psychology bears this out, and the point is psy- chological rather than ethnological. . . . In this connection, we find that desire or willingness for physical contact is an animal emotion, more or less subconscious, which is character- istic of similarity, harmony, friendship, or love. Through- out the world, the greeting of a friend is expressed by contact, whether it be nose-rubbing, or the kiss, the em- brace, or the clasp of hands; so the ordinary expression of friendship by a boy, that eternal savage, is contact of arm and shoulder. More interesting still, for our purpose, is the Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 17 universal expression, by contact, of the emotion of love. . . . Again the pathology of the emotions supplies many curious cases, where the whole being seems concentrated upon the sense of touch, with abnormal desire or disgust for contact . . . contact not only plays an important part in the life of the soul, but must have had a profotmd influence on the development of ideas, and it may now be assumed that ideas of contact have been a universal and original constant factor in human relations and that they are so still."* Interrelation of Family and Society. — We may as- sume, then, that the most inevitable social relation in the beginning must have been that simple form of mother and child. The Pithecanthropos or some still more remote ancestor was member of his mother before becoming that of any horde or group whatsoever. Man may or may not have lived in hordes; that is a matter for speculation; but he was mothered, at least before birth. As often remarked, maternity was a fact, paternity a presumption. Civilization is cer- tainly not based on "family-sense" or "family instinct," but rather on the biological relations between mother and child. Yet having said this much what have we said? It would be completely begging the question to go on to assert that from the fact of maternity springs the whole crop of social relations with their infinite variety and complexity. To insist on the fact of maternity is by no means to insist on its unique im- portance, either genetically or universally. It is an idle question after all — the priority of any one social relation. We know that the family, at least in this rudimentary form, was inevitable in the scheme of 'Crawley, Mystic Rose, 76, 77, 78. 1 8 Primitive Family and Education things. We also know that the larger group life existed and was perhaps equally inevitable. Experience justi- fies the induction that without either the race must have perished.' With children as with republics it is vastly easier to beget them than to maintain them. It is easy to see what would have happened to the be- getting or parental fimctionwithoutthe maintaining and sustaining aid of the group life. Further, we know that often the group interest prevailed over the family inter- est and that children were sacrificed for "the advantage of the whole." How much sense of tragedy was mixed with this grim practical logic we do not know. Even when the family took on a more fixed and enduring form by including the father, stiU the physical bond of mother and child was invaded and overridden by the group bond and infanticide was commonly practiced. The two instincts of self-maintenance and self-per- petuation were in constant conflict, and remain so to this present day. The family represents a variable compromise between the two. * The Family a Social Institution. — We saw a little while ago that the family is rooted in physiology, economics, and the mores. Its origin is to be found in the necessities of infancy and the food-quest rather ' 'On the independent, or interdependent, growth of family and tribe in primitive society, see Morgan, Anc. Soc, 227; Starcke, The Primitive Family, 276; Helen Bosanquet, The Family, 336; also Howard's summary of Hellwald's views in his Hist, of Matrimonial Institutions, etc., i., 59; Posada, Thiories Modernes sur les Origines de la Famille, etc., 91, 99, 119, etc. ' Professor Sumner held that interests of parents and children are antagonistic, just as the dead were and are still antagonistic to the living. Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 19 than in the pleasures of marital comradeship. Love played little or no part in it.» Its forms and above all its duration are to be ascribed to other contin- gencies, notably property, or force on the part of the male. Before going farther we should sound a word of caution: the "pairing instinct" {i.e., an instinct for monogamous pairing) is a flimsy and dangerous foimdation for a serious argument for marriage and the family. Pairing instinct there may have been, and in the sense indicated, but Uke most other htunan instincts it was only vague and more or less unformu- lated until eked out by a long process of education through other social forces and institutions; in other words, the pairing instinct would have come to naught had it not been aided by organic selection. Hence we are no better off than if we merely say man has ac- quired the habit of sexual pairing and developed a system of permanent marriage based upon the family. The almost universal practice of polygamy (including prostitution) indicates that man has by no means yet attained perfect pairing. Nor would he ever reach it save by aid of social heredity. The family, then, is a social not a natural institution, for the primary impulses of both man and woman are against it, in the sense that their satisfactions do not require it, nay, are even repugnant to it. On the other hand, it was not a con- tract any more than primitive society was contractual ' Indeed not infrequently love was regarded with suspicion as an element in matrimony. The ancient Finns, e.g., chose Lempo, the "Son of Evil" to look after the feelings of the heart, "because they regarded love as an insufferable passion, or frenzy, that bordered on insanity, and incited in some mysterious manner by an evil enchanter. " (Crawford's transl. of the Kalevala, Preface, p. xxiii.) 20 Primitive Family and Education in origin. It was simply a more or less unconscious attempt to solve that group of life problems connected with seH-maintenance and the perpetuation of the species. "" Definition of Family. — Some one may be wondering why we have so far avoided defining the family. The reason is fairly obvious. The family, like society, is a variable relation not a fixed thing, and can only he defined in terms of genesis and function. Its genetic side has already been touched upon; the remainder of this study is an attempt to set forth certain of its functional phases. In passing we might remark that Aristotle's definition is of Uttle assistance. When he tells us that "The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man's everyday wants," we might justly reply, so is society in general, so is the state, so is the industrial organization. And other formal defi- nitions are open to similar objections. It is no less difficult to say what is the "normal" or "average" family. We are constantly warned against attempting to deduce the normal from the abnormal or aberrant. But as Lippert justly remarks, men have always held their own to be the normal human familial organiza- tion." We must be more catholic and sympathetic if we wotild understand social evolution. We must be prepared to deal fairly even with "absurdities" and "abominations." '° Fustel de Coulanges makes religion the constructive principle of the ancient family. "La famille antique est une association reli- gieuse plus encore qu' une association de nature. " This side of family organization we include under the mores. "Aristotle, Politics, i., 2 Qowett); Lippert, Geschichte der Familie p. iv. Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 21 Family Precedes Marriage. — Most writers on primi- tive society head their discussion of self-perpetuation, ' ' Marriage and the Family. ' ' This is more euphonious, no doubt, but less logical, for in the order of develop- ment the family comes first. Some form of sex- pairing and the maternal relation existed long before the marriage institution was consummated. Pairing was inevitable from the moment that nature's division of labor required the commerce of two sexes for the getting of offspring ; and maternity arose when a crude budding or fission no longer sufficed for reproduction. Hence Sumner could say: "Although we speak of mar- riage as an institution, it is only an imperfect one. It has no structure. The family is the institution, and it was antecedent to marriage. " ''^ Lippert sharply dis- tinguishes between sex-pairing, which he traces to an "impulse of a most primary instinct very closely re- lated to the group of reflex phenomena"; and marriage, of which he says: "Marriage is a subject not of Natu- ral but of Culture History. "'' We concur, at least in the second part of Westermarck's conclusion, that "it is for the benefit of the young that male and female continue to live together. Marriage is therefore rooted in the family, rather than the family in marriage.""" His derivation of marriage from the family is roughly correct; but the "benefit of the young" was not, nor never has been, the sole motive for the continued liv- ing together of man and woman. Keller's suggestion that "marriage in its origin was a combination for the purposes of better prosecuting the struggle for self- " Folkways, 348. '3 Ktdturgesckichte, i., 70, 72. '^ Hist, of Human Marriage, 22. 22 Primitive Family and Education maintenance "='s is more general, and better in that it includes the economic and social elements together with the procreative. Man in all his institutions contrives to include an element of present satisfaction as well as the deferred or projective well-being. The procreation and nurture of children is too largely a projective satis- faction to offer an unique motive for enduring mar- riage. In fact it is probably not too much to say that the stability of the family, hence of marriage, came as much through the attempt to care for ancestors as through common care for common offspring, and that the parent's desire for attention when he should join his ancestors stimulated him to beget offspring and bring them up in the way they should go. But once established, the form of marriage became the index of family organization. We shall therefore proceed to a sketch of the development of marriage as a guide to the proper reconstruction of the primitive family, accepting Westermarck's definition of marriage in its lowest terms as "nothing else than a more or less durable connection between male and female, lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring."^* 's Homeric Society, 201; cf. Lippert, ii., 27, 81; Ling Roth (Natives of Sarawak, etc., i., 127) says marriage among the Dyaks "is a business of partnership for the purpose of having children, dividing labor, and by means of their oflEspring providing for their old age. It is, therefore, entered into and dissolved almost at pleasure." Marriage among our Anglo-Saxon forefathers was an eminently practical, eco- nomic arrangement. The young man chose his bride not from some high eugenic ideal of offspring, but to enchance his own wealth, and good name. " Dinge die er am meisten schatzt, sind Reichtum und vomehmes Geschlecht" (Roeder, Die Familie bei den Angelsachsen, 16.) »'£. c 19; cf. Parsons, The Family, 115. Lujo Brentano follows Westermarck in the main; he defines marriage as "eine Verbindung Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 23 Sub-human Promiscuity.— In the first place, was the original sex relation promiscuous, communistic, un- regulated? In other words, was there ever a time when marriage in some form or other did not exist? We are now in a storm center and must proceed judiciously. It will be impossible to give here an adequate resume of the half-century of polemic which has raged over this particular question. The opponents of the promis- cuity theory cany their arguments back to the sub- human animals. With what result? The barnyard, pigsty, or pasture fails to yield any evidence of strict pairing; the facts point in the other direction. Some few wild birds are cited as beautiful examples of pure monogamy and family affection, but they are for the most part fanciful and inconclusive; and it is notorious that some of these same birds will desert their spouses and their nestlings at the call of the southward-flying group. The higher monkeys are held up to our admira- tion as models of marital constancy; yet I fail to find that any observer has been able to watch any group of monkeys in their wild state long enough to determine authoritatively their domestic arrangements. It is obviously unfair and misleading to judge the free by the captive animal in so delicate a matter. We should in justice, however, cite Howard's conservative conclusion, based upon studies of Brehm, du Chaillu, Westermarck, and others, that "promiscuity is far from universal zwischen einem Manne und einem Weibe, die mehr oder minder lang, aber jedenfalls uber den Zeugungakt hinaus bis nach Geburt des Erzeugten dauert. " In supporting the monogamic character of the primitive family he rejects promiscuity and group-marriage. ("Die Volkswirtschaft u. ihre konkreten Grundbedingungen" in Ztscft. f. Social u. Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Bd. i., pp. 77-148). 24 Primitive Family and Education in the pre-human stage. " '^ Of actual prehistoric man we can only conjecture. Myth and legend give us little help. Bachofen attempted to interpret them, but, as his critics justly reniark, succeeded in making poetry rather than science. We are left only the "survivals" of primitive mankind on which to base a judgment as to the beginnings of human marriage; and even here the most divergent conclusions have been worked out, and espoused with unseemly acrimony. Human Promiscuity. — Bachofen in 1861 promul- gated his theory of original hetairism. ' ' It was taken up by McLennan, who held to a theory of original sex promiscuity of which polyandry was the first gen- eral modification of promise.^' Paul Gide, the emin- ent French legal scholar, followed Bachofen in the main; he says: "Ainsi, tous nos documents sent d'accord, et void en r&um6 ce qu'ils nous d^clarent : c'est, qu'il y a eu, du moins pour une partie considerable da I'humanit^, una premiere periode da ddsordra, et pour ainsi dire, de chaos moral, oil las saintas lois de la famiUe dtaiant inconnues et oil la femme, libra de tout lien, sa trouvait livr^a en mSme temps k la plus complete independence et k la plus honteuse abjection."" Morgan required an assumption of primitive promis- ''H. of M. I., {., 97. Lubbock, Marriage, Totemism, and Religion, 17, denies permanent unions among the social monkeys. ^'Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1861. ^^ Studies in Ancient History (1886), pp. 89-107; 5. in A. H., 2d series (1896), pp. 50-5. =" Etvde sur la condition de la femme dans le droit ancien et moderne, etc., 2e ed. (Paris, 1885), p. 20. Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 25 cuity to round out his theory of the consanguine family; consequently he heads his list "Sequence of Institutions Connected with the Family," with "Promiscuous Intercourse. " Yet he held only a modified view of this promiscuity. He says, for instance : "... the state of society indicated by the consanguine family points with logical directness to an anterior condition of promiscuous intercourse. There seems to be no escape from this conclusion, although questioned by so eminent a writer as Mr. Darwin. It is not probable that promis- cuity in the primitive period was long continued even in the horde; because the latter would break up into smaller groups for subsistence, and faU into consanguine families." He later confesses: "Promiscuity may be deduced theo- retically as a necessary antecedent to the consanguine family; but it lies concealed in the misty antiquity of mankind beyond the reach of positive knowledge."^' Professor Sumner, too, was inclined toward the notion of original promiscuity. It must be admitted frankly, however, that there is no irrefragable evidence for any state of primitive promiscuity; yet sufficient "indica- tions " exist to cast doubt on the alternative usually offered, viz., strict monogamous pairing. For example, an Australian husband assumes that his wife has been unfaithful to him if she has had opporttmity.^' WiUiams and Calvert say of the Fiji women, "fear prevents unfaithfulness more than affection.' ' * * Crantz "Ancient Society, 498-9, 417-8, 502; cf. Post, Die Geschlechtsgenos- senschafl der Urzeit, etc., chap, ii.; L. Stein, Die Sociale Frage im Ldchte der Philosophie, 568, etc. "" Sumner, Folkways, 421. •J Fiji, 135. The English is the authors' ! 26 Primitive Family and Education found that single women among the Greenlanders rarely broke their chastity and were seldom pros- titutes by profession; " but as for the married people, they are so shameless that, if they can, they break the matrimonial obligation on both sides with- out a blush. "^'' D'Orbigny noted of the Botocudos: "Les Botocudos connaissent et respectent le lien de famille; ils ne sont pas aussi scrupuleux sur la fidelite conjugale. Rien de plus commun parmi eux que I'adul- tere. "^s Landor writes of the Abyssinians: "Owing to the singular state of affairs in Abyssinian marital relations — the men and their wives indulging in pro- miscuous love — it is sometimes difficult to trace the exact parentage of children. . . .No faithfulness exists in marital relations. "^^ The California In- dians were notoriously unchaste, especially before marriage. Young women were the common possession of the tribe. The Karoks had no word for sex virtue. == ^ Darwin himself admits "that almost promiscuous or very loose intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world."'* And many other facts will appear in subsequent paragraphs to bear up this theory. Denials of Promiscuity. — The opponents of the »4 David Crantz, The History 0/ Greenland, etc., i., 191. (Eng. transl. 2 vols., London, 1767.) »s Voyage dans les deux Amerigues, 157. "^Across Widest Africa, i., iio-ii; cf. for other Africans, Jour. 0} the Anthropol. Institute of Gt. Britain, etc. (hereafter abbreviated as J. A. I.), xxxiv., 137; xxxvj., 288. '^ Powers, " Tribes of Cal.," Contrih. to N. A. Ethnol., Ill, 157, 22, etc.; cf. Gatschet, Contrib. to N. A. Ethnol., II, xl.; Thomas, Indians of N. A. inH. T., 373. '* Descent of Man. (Merrill & Baker rev. Am. ed.), 674; cf. Post, Eniwicklungsgeschichte des FamiUenrechts, 541-5. Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 27 promiscuity theory were not slow to point out its weaknesses. Darwin was inclined to doubt an original universal promiscuity, because of male jealousy and the observed monogamous habits of anthropoid apes.""' But Simmer declares, "Beasts do not manifest an emotion of jealousy so tmlform or imiversal as Darwin assumes in his argument, nor any sentiment like that of a half-civiUzed man."^" And as we have already hinted, testimony based on the anthropoid apes is dubious. Westermarck rejects utterly the whole hypothesis of promiscuity, grounding his argument largely upon his theory of the natural repugnance of housemates to sexual relations. ^^ Wake used a similar argument before him.'^ Peschel cites the mo- nogamy of the Veddahs to disprove promiscuity. ^J Deniker believes nearly all the evidence to be against primitive hetairism.^" Starcke holds primitive sex re- lations to have been monogamous, and bases mar- riage on economic motives instead of the sex impulse. ' ' Crawley is very positive in his conclusion: "All the facts are distinctly opposed to any probability that incest or promiscuity was ever really practiced at all;" '' Desc. of M. (Standard ed.), ii., 318, etc. 3° Folkways, 358. i^L.c. in various places. Mr. Andrew Lang, in his Preface to Ling Roth's Natives of Sarawak, effectively disposes of Westermarck's theory and indicates the futility of basing arguments for or against promiscuity, etc., on "instinct." A recent example of this error occurs in Prof. Ellwood's Sociology and Modern Social Problems, pp. 74-5. C. D. Whyte {Man, x., 98-9) offers evidence to disprove this theory of "natural repugnance." '2 The Development of Marriage and Kinship, 55. " The Races of Man, 228-9. " The Races of Man, 231. 3s The Primitive Family, 254-61. 28 Primitive Family and Education and again: "It may be confidently assumed that indi- vidual marriage has been, as far as we can trace it back, the regular type of union of man and woman. The Promis- cuity theory really belongs to the mythological stage of human intelligence, and is on a par with many savage myths concerning the origin of marriage and the like. These are interesting but of no scientific value." ^* Group-Marriage. — The existence of so-called Group- Marriage has been treated as evidence of at least a modified promiscuity. Howitt found traces of it amongst the Australian tribes." Spencer and Gillen go so far as to say of the Urabunnas : " 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."'' Mor- gan makes Punaluan or group-marriage the second type in his "Sequence," and claims to find extensive evi- dence of such group communism among the Indian 5" The Mystic Rose, 444, 483. These statements are too strong by far, for considerable evidence of incest, both present and past, exists. The Golds of the Amoor region still occasionally practice incest between brother and sister and among other relatives. The Nighubutu of northeastern Asia have a tradition that the first living man had forty-seven sons and forty-seven daughters who married each other (Laufer, in Am. Anthrop., ii., n. s., 318-9, 316.). Certain New Guinea tribes have a similar legend; see Guise, in xviii. 7. /4. J., 205-6. Incest causes rather laughter than horror among Yakuts; cases of brothers and sisters, and even of mother and son living in incest are known (Sieroshevsky-Sumner, The Yakuts, 89, reprinted from xxxi. J. A. I). Nearly every worker for the protection of children has encountered cases of incest in our own society. See, e.g., Rep. of Chicago Vice Commission, pp. 174-5. 37 Native Tribes of S. E. Australia, 281; of. R. Semon, In the Austral. Bush, 232-3; Howitt, xxxvii. J. A. I., 268 ff. 3' Native Tribes of South Australia, 63. Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 29 tribes of North America." Post distinguishes be- tween group-nlaxriage or "exogamous promiscuity" and endogamous or general promiscuity ; he finds evidence of the former (e. g., among ancient Britons), but con- siders the latter purely hypothetical. '•'' Kohler makes totemism lead directly to group-marriage and derives individual marriage from group-marriage.^' Rivers maintains the existence of "collective marriage" but rejects primitive promiscuity.*^ Wake is inclined to accept provisionally Fison and Howitt's observations of group-marriage among the KamUaroi and Kunjai., Bachofen (and more recently Max Thai) finds in "temple prostitution" and jus primae noctis survivals of a transition period from group- to pair-marriage. "' So much for the pros. Westermarck heads the contras by rejecting in toto group-marriage. Thomas con- cludes: "The survey of Australian customs and terms of rela- tionship leads us to the conclusion that the former, so far from proving the present or even the former existence of group-marriage in that continent, do not even render it probable; on the latter no argument of any sort can be founded which assumes them to refer to consanguinity, kinship or affinity. It Is therefore not rash to say that the case for group-marriage, so far as Australia is concerned, falls to the ground . . . the theory of primitive promis- 3' Anc. Soo. 399; cf. iasHouses and House Life of the Am. Aborigines, vi, 200, 275, etc. *" " Hausgenossenschaften und Gruppenehe," in Ausland, for 1891, 842; id., " Entwickluagsgeschichte des Familienrechts," 54-6, 57, note. ■•' "Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe," in Ztscft.f. vergleichende Rechtswiss, xii., 250, 326. 4» In L' Annie Sociologigue (1906-9), 357. *^ L. c, gSff. 30 Primitive Family and Education cuity and group-marriage as stages in the general history of mankind remain mere baseless guesses until we have a systematic account both of the causes which led to the various steps, and of the processes by which the various stages were reached."'"'' But the majority of opponents to the theory content themselves with limiting its operation. Kalischer con- fines group promiscuity to times when sex intercourse was seasonal (rutting periods). '•^ Crawley rejects uni- versal group-marriage and limits it to periods of sex license, and insists that it was never more widespread. He says: "It is a perversion of history, and of psychology as well, to make man more communistic the more primitive he is. There may be a few isolated cases in peoples whose tribal «N. W. Thomas, Kinship Organizations and Group-Marriage in Australia, 147-9; cf. Curr, The Australian Race, i., 119 Jf. 45 "Die Geschlechtliche ZuchtwaM bei den Menschen in der Urzeit,'' in Ztscft. f. Ethnologie, viii., 140-75. A good example of this periodic sex license occurs in the ingoma of the Mabasa tribe, "an all-night orgy, to which all young people of other clans are invited" (Purvis, Uganda to Mt. Elgon, 338). Among the Tangkhuls of Manipur also occur periodic festivals marked by sex license; they are usually connected with the crops; "the severity of their ordinary morality is broken by a night of unbridled license" (Hodson, in xxxi. J. A. I., 307). Of the natives of Kiwai Island, British New Guinea, Rev. Jas. Chalmers writes: "The Moguru time (the initiation ceremony) is a period of general license, and in some respects very much resembles that at Maipua and the neighboring district" (xxxiii. J. A. I., 124). A survival of what appears to have been periodic license occurs among the Bororos of Brazil, where at a certain time of the year the young men give a feast at their Bahilo and steal away the virgins and keep them in the Bahito. The Bororos claim that this only happens to girls without parents, other- wise fathers would be angry. But no doubt the practice was once more extensive. (See Fric and Radin, in xxxvi. / A I., 390.) Promiscuity and Group-Marriage 31 solidarity has become pronounced. . . . Nor did any man ever yet marry a tribe."''* Andrew Lang is of similar opinion: "It is an isolated •sport' among the Dieri, Urabunna, and their con- geners. Being thus isolated, Pirrauru cannot claim to be a necessary step in evolution from 'group-marriage' to 'individual marriage.'""' He further attempts to show that even in such temporary sex communism as the Pirrauru, sex jealousy crops out, at least afterwards. On the whole the evidence is inconclusive for the former universality of group-marriage. I do not con- sider it necessary to assume that the race passed through this stage in the evolution of familial forms. Our own conclusion is that group-marriage has not yet been sufficiently established to build extensively upon. Yet even its limited existence, together with those common manifestations of periodic sex license, serves to show that the primitive marriage bond is by no means so straight and enduring as we are urged to believe. This point stands out even more clearly in the phenomena of ex- change marriage, trial marriage, temporary marriage, divorce, etc. Furthermore, the subordination of the individual to the group is a salient characteristic not only in cases where group-marriage is avowedly the custom, but also elsewhere. In fact we might gener- alize and extend pretty widely through savage life Fison and Howitt's statement regarding the Kamilaroi: "... it is the group alone that is regarded; the individual is ignored ; he is not looked upon as a perfect entity. He has no existence save as a part of a group, which in its 4« Mystic Rose, 320-1. <' Secret of the Totem, 43, 49, 55- 32 Primitive Family and Education entirety is the perfect entity." And elsewhere: "The idea of marriage under the classificatory system of kinship is founded on the rights neither of the woman nor of the man. It is founded on the rights of the tribe, or rather of the classes into which the tribe is divided. Class marriage is not a contract entered into by two parties It is a natural state into which both parties are born."^' This point will be considered more fully in a subse- quent paragraph, where the effect of such subordination on family life and the rearing of children will be shown. ■I' Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 57. Further evidences of group-marriage may be found in Lubbock, Marriage, Totemism, and Religion, 19, etc.; also in Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, ii., 348-50; Wundt, Archivf. Rechts- und Wirtschafts-philosophie, v., 538-42. CHAPTER III PiaMITIVE MARITAL RELATIONS 2. Trial Marriage, Divorce, Polygamy Primitive Sex Relations Not of One Type Only.— What with the doubts cast upon original universal promis- cuity and upon universal group communism as a second stage in the progress toward an enduring monogamic marriage bond, are we left no tolerably sure evidence as to primitive marriage conditions? It seems likely that we may approximate nearer the truth by eliminating the qualification "tmiversal" from the generalizations on this subject. The " tmiversal ' ' savors too strongly of pure logic, and human institutions are notoriously in- different to logic, save that experimental pragmatic logic involved in reacting upon life problems. Now life problems vary both in space and time ; hence spon- taneous variations in these reactions are to be expected ; and the only "universal " is the adapting of some means to some end. That is to say, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that mankind, given time enough, will by some hook or crook squirm out of the difficulty. But this is far from saying that the same hooks or crooks will everywhere be used in the face of similar 3 33 34 Primitive Family and Education difficulties. Applying this dictum to the evolution of marriage, instead of a universal series of forms or stages through which mankind has passed, we should find that there has been only a general trend, and that the series is not at all uniform, but broken into and disturbed at many points. Hence we are prepared to find a per- fect sequence of forms existing alongside of survivals, an- ticipations, and distorted forms. For example, France in our own day is presumed to have attained the mono- gamous stage, yet fifty thousand of Paris prostitutes indicate a survival of promiscuity. And such overlap- ping of sex relations may be observed in most modern lands. ' The inference is obvious, viz. , that monogamy is not an innate instinct; it is rather, as Morgan once wrote, "a growth through experience, Hke all the great passions and powers of the mind. "^ It is therefore an acquired characteristic, and as such only transmissible through social heredity.^ Certain individuals and certain groups learn faster or slower than others; that is, they ' Cf. Parsons, The Family, 115: "There is no known human society in which marriage as we have defined it does not exist, but forms of sexual promiscuity occur in many societies together with marriage." It was only the other day that Mr. George Moore, a notable English writer, announced that all women are by nature polyandrous! ' Anc. 5oc., 460. 3 1 am unable to agree with Sutherland {Orig. and Gr. of the Moral Inst., i., 185) that there is a " natural tendency" leading savages in gen- eral to "drift into the comfort and peace of monogamous union," unless he means to include all the forces, natural, social, etc., which have co- operated to bring monogamy to pass. Post {Familienrechts, 73-4) says, "Meistens ist es nur die Armuth, welche den Mann hindert, sich mehr als eine Frau zu halten. " Compare in this connection the theory of the old German statistician Suessmilch that the approximate equi- librium between the numbers of the sexes proves that monogamy was written by Divinity into the order of things. Trial Marriage and Divorce 35 acquire this or that characteristic at a varying rate. Conditions permitting, we should expect certain members of a group to lag behind or advance over others in the lesson of domestic stability and happiness. We are assured that any sort of sex conduct was allowable among primitive men provided it did not infringe on the rights of others. Hence we should be prepared to find in primitive society a varying condition of promiscuity and fixity in the marriage relation, which we might briefly term intermittent promiscuity. The majority of facts seems to bear out such a view. Adopting Sir John Lubbock's excellent distinction, we should say that in the earliest times marriage was "brittle"; later periods extending to the present day developed the " lax " type. Brittle is tantamount to intermittent. " Intermittent Promiscuity." — Even Crawley admits that the theoretical form of the primitive family in its bisexual character involved "separation of man and wife except when the needs of love require satisfac- tion." ^ And Wake also yields a point in favor of inter- mittency: "That the union between man and woman was not that of individual marriage is probable, and possibly it may not have endtu"ed for life. Much would depend on whether it bore fruit. "^ Sterility has al- ways been a more or less potent bar to stable marriage. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that child- bearing has been a hindrance to stable marriage, and that women have resorted to infanticide to preserve the sexual union. But the separation of man and wife must still more effectively have militated against an < L. c, 408; cj. Post, Entuiicklungsgeschichte des FamiUenrechts, 87, 98-9. , s L. c, 52. 36 Primitive Family and Education enduring bond. During this separation propinquity to other females could not fail of effect. Lang thinks that even granting group communism, " the intercourse of the sexes even in that group must have been restrained by jealousy, based on the asserted exist- ence of individual ' Ukes ' and ' dislikes. ' These restrictions, again must have led to some idea that the man usually associated with, and responsible for feeding, protecting, and correcting the woman and her children, was just the man who 'liked' her, the man whom she 'hked, ' and the man who 'disliked' other men if they wooed her".* Against this we might object that, at least until the discovery of fire and other arts, and until man had attained a fairly sedentary life, the woman was to a large extent self-subsistent ; and at an extremely early age her children were, too. Only with a pretty well developed division of labor could such a system of "hkes" and "dislikes" obtain. Furthermore, we must always bear in mind the distinction between sex-satisfaction and refined "likes" which would be so strongly marked as to sanction strict ties of marriage or parenthood. The persistence of prostitution among married men and the common phenomenon of the omni-amorous man are indications that we must not emphasize too strongly likes and dislikes. ^ It is unlikely that propinquity failed to operate among savages any less than it does nowadays at the hands of ' Lang, Secret of the Totem, 6i. ' I have known several estimable gentlemen who voiced their love for all women. One particularly cultured man "liked" any one of half a dozen or so women well enough to marry her. I fancy it was something more than mere "liking" that decided his final choice! Trial Marriage and Divorce 37 "designing parents." Rather would its operation have been the stronger in the absence of those checks which society has devised in the progress of acquiring its monogamic characteristic. Indeed this was precisely the situation among the Waicuri described by Baegert: "They do not seem to marry exactly for the same reasons that induce civilized people to enter into that state; they simply want to have a partner, and the husband besides, a servant whom he can command, although his authority in that respect is rather limited, for the women are somewhat independent, and not much inclined to obey their lords. Although they are now duly married according to the rites of the Catholic Church, nothing is done on their part to solemnize the act, i.e., no feasts, etc. ... As soon as the ceremony is over, the new married couple start off in different directions in search of food just as if they were not more to each other to-day than they were yesterday; and in the same manner they act in the future, providing separately for their support, sometimes without living together for weeks, and without knowing anjrthing of their partner's abiding place. . . . They lived in fact, before the establishment of the missions in their country, in utter licentiousness, and adultery was daily committed by every one without shame and without any fear, the feeling of jealousy being unknown to them.^ Trial Marriage. — Trial marriages are only one step removed from bare promiscuity. And primitive di- vorce is so simple and informal as to amount to the same thing. Peary says of his Eskimo friends that trial marriage "is an ineradicable custom. ... If a 'Baegert, I. c, 367-8; lack of jealousy contradicted in another place. 38 Primitive Family and Education young man and woman are not suited with each other they try again, and sometimes several times; but when they find mates to whom they are adapted the arrange- ment is generally permanent." » Rasmussen ob- served among the Greenlanders the custom of ex- changing wives, and also notes that the practice is not always agreeable to the women concerned. " Of the Nicobar Islanders, Man writes: "The weakness or 'brittleness' of the marriage tie and the facility of divorce have been described as a 'feature common to the delineations of most of the tribes of Indo- China and the Indian Archipelago,' and as presenting a striking contrast to the respect for the marriage bond shown by natives of India. Among the Nicobarese, as among the Dyaks of Borneo, many husbands have changed their wives three or more times before they find a partner with whom they are willing to. pass the remainder of their days." Among Bontoc Igorots: "There are no women in Bontoc pueblo who have not entered into the trial tuiion, though all have not succeeded in reaching the ceremony of permanent marriage." Indeed with this tribe the oteg, or girls' dormitory institution, deliberately fosters the practice of trial marriage by inviting and even coercing young men to visit its inhabitants. With the exception of the rich, marriage never takes place 9 The North Pole, 59. " People of the Polar North, 132; cf. the Wagogo of Germ. E. Africa, xxxii. J. A. I., 312; also West Australians, Clement, in Int. Archivf. Ethnogr., xvi., 13. "E. H. Man, "The Nicobar Islanders," xviii. /. A. /., 367-8; c/. Post, FamiUenrechts, 73-4. Trial Marriage and Divorce 39 prior to sexual intimacy, and rarely prior to pregnancy. The marriage bond is easily broken; if either party desires the break, the other rarely objects." This opens up the subject of divorce. Divorce. — If we are looking for some standard by which to measure the enormous progress humanity has made with regard to stable marriage and family life, I doubt if we can find anything better than a comparison between primitive and advanced peoples in the matter of divorce. For, barring certain exceptions, divorce is extraordinarily prevalent among savage peoples. And it is usually informal and easy to consummate. Among Point Barrow Eskimos marriage is easily dissolved for incompatibility or even on account of tempor- ary disagreements. *' With the Central Eskimo the slightest pretext suffices for separation. '* Among the Melanesians Codrington found divorce easy and common. " Captain Burrows observes of the pigmies: "There is no divorce among the Mang-bettou. A man simply takes another wife when he is tired of the first. "^* The Doko people, southwest of Abyssinia, are said to "live mixed together; men and women unite and separate as they please."'^ Of the Zaparos of Ecuador we are told: "A. E. Jenks, "The Bontoc Igorot,'' U. S. Dept. Inter. Ethnol. Survey Publ., i., 69, 66, 33; similar custom in island of Guam: cf. Safford, Am. Anthrop., iv., n. s., 715. " Murdoch, in gth Bur, Ethn., 411-12. '■• Boas, in 6th Bur. Ethn., 579. 's Melanesians, 244-6; similarly in parts of New Guinea, see Guise, in xviii J. A. I., 209-10; cf. Capt. Cook, Voyage to Pacific Ocean, ii., 156; aUsoid., First Voyage, 88; Rivet, ia L'Anthropologie, xviii., 608. ^^Land of the Pigmies., 86. '» Latham, Man and his Migrations, 64. 40 Primitive Family and Education " In their matrimonial relations they are very loose — ■ monogamy, communism, and promiscuity all apparently existing among them. They allow the women great liberty and frequently change their mates or simply discard them, when they are perhaps taken up by another.'"* Reclus says of the Badagas of India: " For any sort of cause the husband enjoys the prerogative of sending away even a fruitful partner who has ceased to please him, and is free to marry again as often as he likes. He rarely uses this right, and if the first alliance has resulted in offspring, he will consider himself satisfied. On the whole, household bonds do not seriously hamper the move- ments of either man or woman. If the bride dislikes her home she can leave it, provided she deserts her children. The husband will restore whatever little things she may have brought ; she quietly returns to her father and awaits the proposals of fresh admirers.'"' One of the earlier Victorian writers on India recorded that among the Booteahs, ' ' the marriage tie is so loose that chastity is quite unknown among them. . . Polyandry prevails among them . . . but even the very slight restriction implied by that institu- tion is not observed. The intercourse between the sexes is, in fact, promiscuous."^" Loskiel found the marriage tie scarcely less brittle among several tribes of North American Indians: ''Gomme, Folklore as an Hist. Set., 247. ^^ Primitive Folk, 195. "Rowney, The Wild Tribes of India, 142 (Wake). Further examples of easy divorce in Eastern lands: Cummins, xxxiv./.il./., 151; Johnstone, xxxii. J. A. I., 267; Rivers, xxx. /. A. I., 81 ; Ling Roth, Nat. of Sarawak, etc., i., 126-33; '^olz, ArcUv f. Anthropologic, xxxv., 104; Shakespear, Man, May, 1912, p. 69. Trial Marriage and Divorce 41 The young people among the Delawares, Iroquois, and other nations connected with them, have seldom marriages of long continuance, especially if they have not children soon. Sometimes an Indian forsakes his wife because she has a child to suckle, and marries another, whom he forsakes in her turn for the same reason. The women also forsake the men after having received many presents, and knowing that they have no more to expect. Then they marry another from whom they expect more. . . . The Indians therefore consider their wives as strangers. It is a common saying among them, ' My wife is not my friend,' that is, she is not related to me and I need not care for her." Yet he goes on to say that many Indians "live very sociably in the married state and keep to one wife. These regular families have the most children. Some indeed live peaceably with their wives merely that they may not be separated from their children." But he finally concludes: "There is no very strong tie between the married people in general, not even between the oldest. A very little trifle, or one bad word, furnishes ground for divorce."** The lack of marital confidence and understanding illustrated by the Indian proverb just quoted is fre- quently encountered in every quarter of the world. Among the Puegians, for instance, "the family feeling is very weak, also between married people."''* "The joint houses of the Pelew and Caroline Islands are un- "L. c, 57-8; Lawson, History of Carolina, Lond., 1714 (reprint of i860), p. 304; Bancroft, Hist, of U. S. (Centenary ed.) ii., 419; Nelson, Indians of New Jersey, p. 40, cites further references; Hennepin, Description de la Louisiane, Les Mceurs des Sauvages, 30-5; Gibbs, Contrih. toN.A. EthnoL, i., 198-9. "Ratzel, History of Mankind, ii., 677; cf. Bulletins de la Soc. d'Anthropol. de Paris, vii., 172; x., 338. 42 Primitive Family and Education favorable to family life. It is regarded as shameful that a woman should be in confidential relations with her husband. " = 5 Loose Sex Relations in Modem Mexico. — Accounts of domestic relations in present-day Mexico accord thoroughly with facts recorded in the preceding para- graph. Mr. Flandrau, a keen and thoroughly posted student of Mexican life despite his irrepressible whimsi- cality, presents a picture which seems to me to tjrpify general primitive conditions, and to show conclusively the weakness of considering enduring monogamy as an innate characteristic. The overwhelming influence of the mores is also notable. "Among the lower classes in Mexico 'free love' is not the sociological experiment it sometimes tries to be in more civilized communities. It is a convention, an institution, and, in the existing condition of affairs, a necessity. Let me explain. The Mexicans are an excessively passionate people and their passions develop at an early age (I employ the words in a specific sense), not only because nature has so ordered it, but because, owing to the way in which they live — whole families, not to mention animals, in a small one-roomed house — ^the elemental facts of life are known to them from the time they can see with their eyes and hear with their ears. For a Mexican child of seven or eight among the lower classes, there are no mysteries. Boys of fifteen have had their affairs with older women; boys of seventeen are usually strongly attracted by some one person whom they would like to marry. ... On my ranch, for instance, very few of the 'married' people are married. Almost every grown man lives with a woman who makes »3Ratzel, ii., 187; cf. Fynn, The American Indian, 124. Further evidence will appear in Chapter IV. Trial Marriage and Divorce 43 his tortillas and bears him children, and about some of these households there is an air of permanence and content. But with the death of mutual desire there is nothing that tends to turn the scale in favor of permanence; no sense of obligation, no respect for a vague authority higher and better than oneself, no adverse pubhc opinion. Half an hour of ennui, or some one seen for a moment from a new point of view — ^and all is over. The man goes his way, the woman hers. The children, retaining their father's name, remain as a rule, with the mother. And soon there is a new set of combinations. One woman who worked here had three small children — every one with a different surname: the name of its father. While here she kept house with the mayor-domo, who for no reason in particular had wearied of the wife he had married in church. No one thought it odd that she should have three children by different men, or that she should live with the mayor-domo, or that the mayor-domo should tire of his wife and live with her. As a matter of fact there was nothing odd about it. No one was doing wrong, no one was 'flying in the face of public opinion. ' She and the three men who had successively deserted her, the mayor-domo who found it convenient to form an alliance with her, and his wife who betook herself to a neighboring ranch and annexed a boy of sixteen, were all simply living their lives in accordance with the promptings they had never been taught to resist. It is not unusual to hear a mother, in a moment of irritation, exclaim as she gives her child a slap, 'Hijo de quien sabe quien!' (Child of who knows whom!) "^* '* Viva Mexico! 90-1, 92, 93. Mr. Flandrau is inclined to lay this loose condition of sex mores at the door of the Catholic Church.^ The people, from having been so long under the undivided domination of the Church, have come to regard religious marriage as alone valid, though since the disestablishment of the Church in 1859 only the civil ceremony is legal. The high fees exacted by the Church effectively 44 Primitive Family and Education Absence of Domestic Happiness.— It is fairly well established, then, that promiscuity mixed with apathetic monogamous pairing was the original sex relation, and that such a condition still prevails to a no small degree. ^ s It also appears that the mere having of offspring was never the sole marital link. The looseness of primitive marriage was probably due to the exigencies of the struggle for subsistence, self-maintenance being more fundamental than the impulse to project or per- petuate oneself . ^ * There is little evidence of anything approaching a sense of vital relationship between mar- riage mates, nor. of what we shotdd call a sympathetic bond. The relation of man and wife too often corre- sponds to that marked in Indo-European language as "master" and "bearer of children. "^^ It is true that occasionally one comes across a picture of domestic hap- piness in classical antiquity^'; but certainly the empha- sis is laid upon marriage as a business arrangement. No more does happiness appear as an ideal in the familial prevent the religious ceremony, with the restdt that the marriageable couple usually dispenses with all formalities. But even in cases where a church ceremony has been performed, the tie is scarcely better than a rope of sand. ^5 This is also substantially Spencer's view {Prin. of Social., i., 619, 644, 647, etc.). It is of course in contradiction to Starcke's conclusion as to primitive enduring monogamy (c/. his Prim. Fam., 258; yet in a later work. La famille dans les diffSrenies Societis, Starcke somewhat contradicts this view and derives monogamy from juristic and economic necessities and especially from the demand of one wife to be "first" in her husband's household and to relegate his other "wives" to inferior rank as concubines). I am indebted for the excellent adjective "apa- thetic" to Mr. McGee's article, " Beginning of Marriage," in Am. AnthropoL, ix., 382. "' Cf. ante, pp. 18-9. »' Schrader, Prehis. Antiq., 385-7. '' E.g., Odyssey, vi., 182; lUad, bk. vi. Trial Marriage and Divorce 45 life of modem savagery. Among the Polsmesians, for example, the men are said to be very sociable with each other, "but there is nothing which could be called domestic happiness. ' ' And Curr says of the Australian wife, "She is not the relative, but the property, of her husband. "^9 It is not surprising, indeed, that the relation between a man and his "erstes HaustMer" (as Wuttke calls the primitive wife) should be lacking in lively affection or joy. Absence of Moral Element in Marriage. — Only with the rise of moral sentiment and intelligence does mar- riage begin to emerge from a pure physiological and economic order. Permanent marriage, we repeat, grew, at least in part, out of economic necessity, from eco- nomic egoism, from the male's desire to possess the labor power of the female. It was therefore at first a more or less forced relation between unequals. Out of this en- forced association seem to have developed the higher marital ties — family sense, love of home, etc. And these added values in time supersede the others, and even sustain the marriage relation when the old eco- nomic necessity has weakened or disappeared. Here, as in other social relations, progress is a barbed hook, which once swallowed cannot be disengaged. Man- kind like the mouse enters by a little hole but grows and cannot get out again. Conscience is the protest against trying to get out by the little hole, to reject the hook. It is organized resistance to the diminution of acquired power and well-being. Now this organized resistance »9Ratzel, ii., 183 (for somewhat contrary view, see R. Semon, In the Austral. Bush, 331); Curr, Australian Race,!., 106; Thomas, Indians of North America, 373; Burton, Lake Regions oj Central Africa, A9i-A- 46 Primitive Family and Education to the relinquishing of an advantage once won, call it conscience, or what you will, lies mainly in the group conscience; or, perhaps better, in that reservoir of group experience denoted by the term "social heredity." Hence tradition, custom, the mores, play a most im- portant r61e, not only in determining the stability of the marriage bond, but also in investing it with those ideal and transcendent characteristics which more and more come to mark and glorify it. The evolution of chastity offers an excellent example of how the mores operate to change the content of meaning in marriage. Premarital chastity is practi- cally imknown, nor even conceived, among lower peoples. There is almost universal promiscuity among savage youth both before and after initiation. This continues up to the time of parental maturity, after which pairing of various degrees and types of fixity is usual, as we have already seen. Even then marriage is anything but strictly chaste. The adult savage often makes use of the girls of his tribe to gratify his sex desire while they are still at a very tender age. Several writers acquainted with the Austra- lians say that girls of only nine or ten years old were thus taken for promiscuous intercourse. 3° Lawson says that the Indians of the Carolinas were given to this sort of promiscuity ; that young girls who changed mates often were sought after as "capable of managing domestic affairs," etc.; "the more whorrish, the more honorable," he adds.'' Among the Nandi of the Uganda Protectorate, the "im- »° Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i., 319; Sutherland, /. c, i., 113; Torday and Joyce., xxxvi. /. A. I., 288. 5" Hist, of Carolina, 62-3. Trial Marriage and Divorce 47 mature girls live with the young fighting men until they reach womanhood. If by chance one of these unmarried girls has a child by a warrior during this intercourse, she strangles it as soon as it is bom."*' Among the Maraba people illegitimate sex-commerce involves no shame to the girl, but only lowers her "marketable value"; so that she fetches only two to four head of cattle instead of four to ten.** On the other hand if an Akamba girl is pregnant by another lover at the time of her marriage, so much the better thinks her new husband, for he is siire of at least one child.*'' Of marital adultery it is impossible to universalize, except to say that it is very widespread, and that prob- ably the more subordinate the position of the wife, the more she becomes the "thing" of the man, the stricter is the feeling against adultery. In such cases it is not, however, a question of sentiment, but of masculine pique and violation of property rights. The custom of offering the wife to one's friend or guest (as observed, e.g., among the North American Indians, the Fijians, ancient Arabs, Nandis, Guanaches) depends similarly 5' Sir Harry Johnston, Uganda Protectorate, ii., 878, 553, 642, 778, 882-5; Granville and Roth, xxviii. /. A. I., 107; Burrows, xxviii. J. A. I., 46. 53 Purvis, Uganda to Mt. Elgon, 281, 74; Crooke, xxviii. /. A. I. 237. 34 Tate, xxxiv. J. A. I., 137; Bagge, xxxiv. /. A. I., 169; Bennett, xix. /. A. I., 70; Thomson, xxxi. J. A. I., 145; C. N. BeU, Tangawara (The Mosquito Indians of South Amer.), reviewed in xxix. J. A. I., 339; A. D. Smith, Through Unknown African Countries, 276; Ellis, Yoruba-Speaking Peoples, 154, 185; Man, xii. J. A. I., 135; Lewin, Wild Races of S. E. India, 121, 193, 201, 233, 245, 254; Ling Roth, Nat. of Sarawak, i., 116; Fumess, The Island of Stone Money; Pector, Intern. Archivf. Ethnogr., v., 219; Chevrier, L' Anthropologic, xvii., 370; Leprince, L' Anthropologic, xvi., 59-60; Rivet, L' Anthropologic, xviii., 605-6; Gibbs, /. c, 199-200; Powers, I. c, 157, 22. 48 Primitive Family and Education upon the notion of husband's right to use his property as he chooses. 3 s It is evident from such customs that chastity was not observed, to say nothing of being held as a desirable ideal of morality and beauty. In fact as already suggested, marital infidelity is often taken for granted. Tylor tells of a savage who explained that if anybody took away his wife, that would be bad, but if he himself took some one's else, that would be good!'* Mythology and folklore yield abundant evidence of this attitude; to such an extent, indeed, that in read- ing these old tales one must rub his eyes sometimes to dispel the illusion that he is in the midst of Jacobean or modem French comedy. Polygamy. — Perhaps a few words should be given to polygamous marriage forms. Space requirements ne- cessitate rather a summary and dogmatic treatment of what is reaUy a most important problem. Polyandry we are inclined to regard as unfavorable to the child's education and training, partly owing to its form, and partly to the conditions which produce it. In the first case, there must almost of necessity be an air of un- certainty about the male parent; and consequently divided authority and friction in the care of offspring. In the second case, since it springs from poverty and population pressure (at least largely so), it is not likely that the child should receive a very fuU share of care and "Schrader, /. c, 338; Lewis and Clarke, Travels, i., 144; ii., 165; Williams, Fiji, 135; Johnston, /. c, ii., 882, etc.; Miss Cook, Amer. Anthrop., ii., n. s., 479-80. 3' Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii., 318. In many cases where adultery is nominally punishable, it is not difficult to secure a proper judgment of innocence; see, e.g., Girard on certain Congo tribes, in L'Anthropologie, xii., 85. Polygamy 49 training. However, I do not lay this down as law or gospel; for it may be that the child's interests wotild be better cared for by a jury of fathers than by a single sire. As for polygyny, it is difficult to see why, theoreti- cally, it should be inferior to strict monogamy, from the viewpoint of the child's advantage. It is an index of comparative material well-being; so that the child shotdd not fail of proper nourishment. It affords the child a larger share of maternal attention than is possi- ble under polyandry or a starveling monogamy that forces the woman to grub incessantly for her own living, and mayhap that of her children as well. The objection that under such a system the child loses the paternal influence is not insuperable; for if paternity stands for strength and discipline, the polygynous father must possess these quahties to an unusual degree in order to have attained to his material prosperity, and to cope with his plurality of female partners. There is no good reason why he shotild not stand for authority and discipline to a hundred children as to half a dozen, if he sets himself that job ; and he is quite as likely to do so as the modem monogamous father, who, involved in business and social cares, sees his children only of a Sunday. " Yet there do seem to be certain grave educational objections to polygamous marriage. If education be conceived as a life process, and if honorable, above- board relations between the sexes be a vital part of that 3' A little girl living in a New York suburb is reported recently to have asked, " Mother, who is that strange man? I don't like him, I wish he would go away!" — "Why, my child, that is your father!" etc. It is doubtful if the hundredth child of a polygamous father would be more in the darki 4 50 Primitive Family and Education education, then anything which hinders the easy nattiral play of such relations limits and obstructs education. Consider, for example, the conditions surrounding the young men of such a tribe as the Mang- bettou. Captain Burrows says that morality is practi- cally non-existent among them, "the reason being that the chiefs have so many wives (sometimes up to five hundred) that there are no women left for the young men of the village to many. "3* Such a condition represents not only a moral but also an educational crisis. Again, the ranking of the polygamous household is usually hierarchic not democratic; there is usually one chief "wife" and a number of subordinates; hence internal dissensions and jealousies are sure to arise and to react upon the status and well-being of the several ranks of children. Presumably for this reason, Mrs. Parsons guardedly concludes: "Although polygamy is undoubtedly more advantageous to offspring than re- stricted, i.e., very unstable, monogamy, yet it probably secures less parental care for offspring than developed or enduring monogamy. "^9 The Greenlanders, ac- cording to Crantz,-"" did not always practice polyg- amy from love of children, nor merely to secure a "stay" in their old age, "but mostly from lust" — never a healthy condition for rearing man or beast. Parenthetically let it be noted that marital happiness or content is not in any way identical with the welfare of offspring. It is one thing to say, e.g., that a Mabuche woman likes polygamy and welcomes each new wife because it divides her own work, and quite another to say that the Mabuche child profits in any 3' /. 4. /., xxviii., 46. ^' The Family, 1^. . <°£. c.,!., 191. Polygamy 51 way by the arrangement. Among the Mandingo ne- groes an old voyager fotmd that polygamy seemed largely to have obliterated the paternal influence, but to have strengthened the maternal relation. *' Here is a source of weakness, for however wise the maternal teaching, it cannot fail to be unbalanced unless com- plemented by ma;sculine influence, either from a parent or from social regimenting. I shall not attempt to pronounce an ipse dixit on this matter; however, a final citation from two noted observers of the Fijians should show at least that there is a serious question and matter for grave educational doubt. "Another and most heavy curse of polygamy falls on the children, since it is an institution which virtually dissolves the ties of relationship, and makes optional the dis- charge of duties which nature, reason, and religion render imperative. Hence there are multitudes of children in Fiji who are wholly uncared for by their parents; and I have noticed cases beyond number where natural affec- tion was wanting on both sides. The Fijian child is utterly deprived of that wholesome and necessary discipline which consists of regular and ever repeated acts of correction and teaching. Fitful attempts to gain the mastery are made by the parent, coming in the form of a furious outburst of passion, to which the child opposes a due proportion of obstinacy, and in the end is triumphant. Thus the children grow up without knowledge, without good morals or habits, without amiability or worth, fitted, by the way in which they are reared, to develop the worst features of heathen life. And this hapless condition they owe to polygamy, which robs the parent of the comforts and <" Park, in Pinkerton, Voyages, etc., xvi., 872. 52 Primitive Family and Education endearments of married life, and gives the child but a slight advantage over the whelp of the brute. ""^ Summary. — The foregoing paragraphs make no pre- tense to an exhaustive discussion of primitive marriage conditions. It will be impossible to go into details of the profound social changes which have brought about the sequence of marriage and familial types. Suffice it to say that there has been no universal and uniform sequence, that the patriarchal family is not the ideal nor primeval type despite the theological and legal sanctions for belief in it as such. Perhaps the following rough sequence '•^ indicates as well as may be the historic progress of the family: (i) Father- Family with monandry, communism of women, or apathetic and intermittent monogamy; (2) Mother- Family with the influence of the mother's clan pre- dominating; (3) Transition to the Father-Family in the form of the Patriarchate with its successive toning- downs and modifications. Concurrent with these changes in marriage and family forms must be noted the growing sense of property and of kinship. In fact, so far as we may state social changes in strict "causal" terms, we might say that the transition from (i) to (2) was caused by a gradual division of occupation and development of sense of relationship between mother and child as well as close kinship in the clan; the transition from (2) to (3) by a further differentiation by occupation, a further refining and precision in notions of relationship, a loss of the sense of clan solidarity and <" Williams and Calvert, Fiji, 141-2. The reader will make such allowance as he chooses for European missionary bias in this excerpt. <' Adapted from a suggestion of Professor Sumner. Summary 53 its predominance as a social unit, and growth of a sense of property, with the desire to amass and transmit it. But all that is necessary to our present purpose is to have established the original brittle, intermittent, shifting bond which preceded the modem relatively stricter marriage tie. One question only concerns us: What was the effect of this shifting, unstable arrange- ment upon the care and ntirture of children: in other words, upon their education? With education as with any other force, continuity in effort is requisite to produce adequate results. // is obvious that with a continual shifting and disturbing of domestic relations there could have been no continuity in any policy of parental education had the times permitted or required it. Conceive, if you can, a condition in the present whereby a child's parents or guardians are constantly shifting; where the children become as Jules Simon said, "Or- phelins dont les parents sont vivants. " Is it not clear, then, that such a slack marriage relation, instead of whole- somely educating the child, must have left him without edu- cation, or what is worse, with an education in rebellion, looseness, and egoism? In other words, must have fos- tered in him qualities and habits whichother social agencies were burdened with checking or weeding out? This de- duction is based wholly upon a study of the marital relation. The subsequent discussion of the relation of parents to children will aid in justifying or disproving this conclusion. Furthermore, in that large group of cases where the marriage relation was stable enough, yet based not on understanding or good will but rather on male force and female subordination (physical and economic), the mere fact of such gross marital in- 54 Primitive Family and Education equality must efiEectually have checked any serious domestic education. The teachings of a slave, chattel, or erstes Hausthier could scarcely match those of a lord and master. But the very essence of domestic teaching is supposed to be its rather egalitarian mixture of masculine and feminine. Any domestic system that marks off sharply the two must result in sex antago- nisms and social discord. This is precisely what we shall find cropping out in sex taboos. Finally, there is the question whether with more excellent marital arrangements the child's education could be con- summated within the family circle. To this we can only reply that common sense, sociology, and genetic psychology unite in insisting that for the development of a well-rounded personality the child needs the widest possible area of social contact. But does the family afford a sufficiently wide pasture ground for the raising of such a rotmded personaUty? We are rather of the opinion that even the most excellent family relations are likely to do actual educational harm if the develop- ment of the child's "self" and his education be re- stricted too closely within the family. It conduces to inbreeding, to what might be called educational incest. A narrow family feeling breeds selfishness, and a self- ishness peculiarly repellent and difficult to extirpate; for as Professor Mackenzie observes, "the evil spirit is there masquerading as an angel of light. " ** ** Introduction to Social Philosophy, p. 364. CHAPTER IV PRIMITIVE NOTIONS OF KINSHIP AND RELATIONSHIP Distinction between Kinship and I^elationship. — To gain any adequate idea of primitive parental and filial relations, one must understand something of primitive principles of kinship. These notions are complex and by no means always clear. They are inseparable from the whole web of savage tribal organization and phi- losophy of life. The exact form of most primitive social organization, whether an amorphous consanguineous horde, a system of gentes and clans, or some more com- plex tribal form, is perhaps indeterminable. Speculation is rife, but no absolute conclusions have been established. This much is pretty certain, however, that neither the family as we know it nowadays, nor the individual was the tmit; but rather the clan, whether based on totemism or otherwise ; and that in consequence, the in- dividual was subordinate to the clan group. Further- more, the immediate result of such a system — or shall we say the cause of it? — was the distinction between kinship and relationship. It would hardly be exact to say that primitive peoples made a hard and fast distinction between the two ; yet in practice there does seem to have been some such distinction. Kinship was 55 56 Primitive Family and Education the more essential fact, and relationship secondary. In modem terminology, kinship was conventional, relationship natural. Yet we must not make the mis- take of supposing that primitive minds thus considered the facts ; to the contrary, what we should call conven- tional was to them not only natural, but even more natu- ral than nature itself. This wiU serve to explain or at least illustrate why the group tie so often took prece- dence ovex what seems to us the far more obvious narrow tie of blood, why the group bond was closer than that of family. The whole matter might perhaps be reduced to terms of blood relationship; in that case we should have to say that it was rather a general, superficial, more extensive blood-sense than our modem, nari^ower, more intensive view; that it was rather a mystic, speculative view than a rigid scientific, physiologic view; and that the idea of strict consanguinity developed out of an earlier, more general notion of affinity.' On this point Crawley remarks: " Primitive relationship, it is clear, is at once stronger and weaker than the civilized tie; weaker, because the bond of blood has not assumed a superiority over other relations, close contact being the test; stronger, because the ideas ' Mr. Thomas in his Kinship Organizations and Group Marriage in Australia (p. 4) thus happily phrases this distinction: "Kinship is sociological, consanguinity physiological." See also M. Giraud- Teulon's Origines du Mariage, etc., 132-4; Post, Die Geschlechts- genossenschaft der Urzeit, chap, i.; Ellis, Yoruba-Speaking Peoples, 299; Lippert, ii., 333, etc.; Sumner, Folkways, 4^4.-5; Wake, I. c. 254,267, 363, 387. Crawley considers that relation and relationship are not diflEerentiated in primitive thought (M. R., 468). For familial blood- revenge as an index of primitive family feeling, see Steinmetz, Ethn. Studien, etc., i., 368^. Kinship and Relationship 57 of contact which characterize these relations have so in- tense a religious meaning and enforce duty so stringently. "* Subordination of Family to Group Ties. — Primitive kinship rested, so it appears, on common work, common ownership, common eating 3; also, no doubt, on com- mon connection with some eponymous ancestor, though it is not clear whether such a common tracing of de- scent grew out of the common activities, or vice versa. I am inclined to the former view as the more naturai» For the connection between food and kinship and between common use of fire and kinship is very clear in primitive thought, and naturally so; the inference being that food produces flesh, and identity of food produces identity of flesh.'' However that may be, there is abundant evidence to show the sense of group solidarity, as distinguished from a lax familial sense. Totemism, with its corollary marriage regulations, is a case in point. But even where the family, as in ancient Arabia, was fairly well established, the parental relation 'Crawley, /. c. 460; also, Gomme, /. c. 231, 268; McLennan, Studies in Anc. Hist. 121. 3 Major Powell wrote ( Bur. Ethnol., xx., p. ex): "Tribal life is chiefly public life. There is little domestic seclusion; often the house is a communal house for the entire clan or gens. Nearly all hunting is public hunting; nearly all fishing is public fishing; nearly all gather- ing of seeds is public gathering of seeds; nearly all gathering of roots is public gathering of roots; all agriculture is public agriculture, and all herds are public herds." And he might have added, nearly all sex relations were in common at the beginning, as we have already seen. < Crawley, /. c. 456; cf. Lippert, ii., 336-7; Starcke, La famille dans les differentes societes, 202. For relation of fire to kinship, see Lippert, Kgschte., i., 265; Weeks, xxxix. J. A. I., 416 ff., Fritsch, Die Eingeborenen, etc., 232. 58 Primitive Family and Education was defined not in physiological but in social terms.* Marital relationship, it may be affirmed in general of lower peoples, was subsidiary to group kinship. Suggestions of this appeared in the preceding chapter. Studies of the American Indian bring it out still more clearly. Fynn, speaking particularly of the Pueblos, says : " There was nowhere such a family bond as we find in civiHzation. Marriage among members of the same gens was prohibited; therefore-, since the ties of clanship were very strong and the links of matrimony very weak, there was no harmonious, firmly united family, but rather a loosely constructed household. Since the children be- longed to the mother, and the mother was a member of a gens different from that of the father, there was always a wide gulf separating the individuals of the domicile. The husband was isolated, perhaps simply tolerated. Plans and secrets existed among the members of the gens rather than between husband and wife."* Bandelier corroborates this statement: "Since it was the custom for women to raise the walls of buildings, and to finish their house inside and outside, they owned it also. The man was only tolerated. His home was properly with his clan, whither he must return in case his spouse departed this life before him." And again: "The affairs of the father's clan did not concern his wife or his children, whereas a neighbor might be his confidant on such matters. The mother, son, and daughter spoke among themselves of matters of which the father was not entitled to know, and about which he scarcely ever felt enough curiosity to inquire." s William Roberston Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, 119. ' The American Indian, 124; cf. Lummis, Land of Poco Tiempo, 43. Kinship and Relationship 59 Frazer finds this subordination of the family tie to the group or clan bond in general wherever the totemic clan prevails; "in totem tribes every local group being necessarily composed (owing to exogamy) of members of at least two totem clans, is liable to be dissolved at any moment into its totem elements by the outbreak of a blood feud, in which the husband and wife must always (if the feud is between their clans) be arrayed on opposite sides, and in which the children will be arrayed against either their father or their mother, according as descent is traced through the mother, or through the father. . . . Mem- bers of the same clan are buried together and apart from those of other clans, hence the remains of husband and wife, belonging as they do to separate clans, do not rest together." ^ The Indian proverb cited from Loskiel in a preceding paragraph also sustains this notion. Major Gurdin observes that among the Jowai " the man is nobody . . . if he be a husband he is looked upon merely as u shong kha, a begetter."* Another writer notes of the Khasi Hill people that the husband visits his wife occasionally in her own home, where "he seems merely entertained to continue the family to which his wife belongs."' Among the Chukchi of northeastern Asia it is said that the family ' Bandelier, The Delight Makers, 27, 14; Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, i., 53, 75; cf. Morgan, Anc. Soc, 83 Jf.; id.. Houses and House Life, etc., pp. vi., 200, 275; Post, Familienrechts, 87, 99; Gibbs, in Contrib. to N. A. Ethnol, i., 198; McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, 425; Gushing, Primitive Motherhood, 24-5; Barbeau, Man, June, I 12, p. 85. 8 The Khasis, 76, 82, cited by Gomme. ^ Jour. Asiat. Soc. Bengal, xii., 625; see also Graham, Bheel Tribes of Kandish, 3, cited by Gomme; Hartland, Rise of Fatherhood, cited by Lubbock, Marriage, Totemism and Religion, 22. 6o Primitive Family and Education tie is the strongest social relation "but it is so broad as to include the clan. "'"' Another group of facts indicates the subordination of marital relationship to group kinship, viz., the power of the maternal uncle ; he often has more authority than the father in the care and discipline of the father's own children ; he is also often the sole or chief heir where the maternal family system prevails." t'urthermore, though the case is not universal, theories of the soul play a part in this subordination. For example, every true Kafir has two personalities: his idhlozi or individual, personal, inalienable spirit; and his itongo or ancestral spirit, which is not personal but tribal, and comes not by birth but by initiatory rites. To be without this clan or tribal spirit is the greatest calamity a Kafir can '"Bogoras, in Am. Anthrop., iii., n. s., loi. As an example of the feeling of insufficiency with which primitive men regard the family might be cited the Indian's aversion for farm life. This does not proceed from a disregard for property, nor a distaste for agriculture or work in general, but rather from the hatred of isolation and restriction to the narrow limits of familial life. Mr. Hailmann says: "The isolation of farm life is distasteful to them. They prefer, therefore, to lease their lands to white farmers and to enjoy the meager income from this source and from certain government annuities in tribal bands and villages as heretofore" (Education of the Indian, p. 26). " But even where descent is strictly paternal, as in Torres Straits, the authority of the maternal uncle is maintained, and his relationship is considered nearer than that between father and son. Among the Ba-yaka of the Congo, a child belongs to the village of the maternal uncle. Among certain Gold Coast natives a father cannot pawn his child without the uncle's consent., etc. See J. A. I., X3jxvi.,45, 186; xxxi.. Appendix, 171 ; Lippert, i., 125. Among the Ba-Kwese of southwestern Congo Free State, "inheritance is uncertain, but it appears that a man's heir is his brother" (Torday and Joyce, xxxvii. J. A. I., 149). For an example of the paternal aunt playing the r61e customarily occupied by the maternal uncle, see Rivers, Folklore, xxi., 42-59. Kinship and Relationship 6i conceive. Such a man, says Kidd, "goes through life unprotected"; that is, his ancestral guardian angel is lacking." Sex Taboos. — Furthermore, sex taboos and their concomitant sex solidarity are an important factor in that lack of close family life which marks primitive so- ciety. The widespread institution of the Men's House (also Women's House, Club House, etc.) was probably, an outgrowth of sex solidarity, and strongly affected not only the marital but also the parental relation. Ellis found, for example, that in the Society and Sandwich Islands, as soon as a boy was able to eat, his food was kept distinct from that of his mother, and brothers and sisters might not eat together from the earliest age. ' ^ In Fiji, although some degree of domesticity is main- tained, yet "there is too much reserve to allow the social element full influence. A general kindness of manner is prevalent, but the high attachments which constitute friendship are known to very few. A free flow of affections between members of the same family is further prevented by the strict observance of national or religious customs imposing a most unnatural restraint. Brothers and sisters, first cousins, fathers and sons-in-law, mothers and daughters- in-law, and brothers and sisters-in-law, are thus severally forbidden to speak to each other or to eat from the same dish. The latter embargo extends to husbands and wives — an arrangement not likely to foster domestic joy. Hus- bands are as frequently away from their wives as with "Savage Childhood, 15. 'i Polynesian Researches, i., 263."' 62 Primitive Family and Education them, since it is thought not well for a man to sleep regularly at home.'"" Among the Ja-luo of the Uganda Protectorate, " Father and son eat together in a little separate hut which has open sides. Women eat separately from the men inside their own houses. '"' Among the Kavirondo, "A father does not eat with his sons, nor do brothers eat together; women invariably partake of their food after the men have done."^* The aborigines of Santa Maria (Colombia) did not live together as man and wife in the night be- cause of a belief that a child conceived in the night will be bom blind; nor did they live together at any time, but occupied separate huts with a great stone between them to which the woman brought her husband's food.'^ Crawley cites a long list of ethnologic observations on the separation of men and women as in the examples just given; they include tribes from every quarter of the globe, Kafirs, Zulus, American Indians, New Guineans, Marquesans, Coreans, Senegambians, etc., etc.; and many others might be added to his list. Indeed his particular remark concerning the Pelew Islanders might almost be erected into a generalization:" . . . men and women hardly live together, and family life is impossible.'"' '■•Williams and Calvert, Fiji, 107; cf. Ratzel (2d Genn. ed.), ii., 276; cf. the Mosquito Indians, among whom it was "improper" for women to display emotion over their husbands, xxix. /. A. I., 339. 's Johnston, Uganda, ii., 787. ^^Ibid., ii., 735; cf. J. A. I., xxix., 82; xxx., 27-8; Captain Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, ii., 156. ■' Nicholas in Am. Anthrop., iii., n. s., 617, translating from an eighteenth century Spanish friar. "Crawley, I. c. 37-50; p. 40 he says, "Family life as we know it is utterly unknown in Corea. " See, also, Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, 1; Jenks, Bontoc Igorot, 58; Werner, British Central Africa, 148; Bennett, xxix. J. A. I., 70-1 ; Rivet, in L' Anthropologic, xviii., 608. Kinship and Relationship 63 Sex taboos were no doubt based on primitive theories of contact, of communication. Hence it is not sur- prising that all children during their premier enfance are relegated to the mother, while the later care and training of male children are assumed by the men . This notion perhaps cuts some figure also in such divorce customs as that of the Botocudos, where in the event of a separation the children stay with their mother during their early years, but later rejoin their father. '» For in primitive thought the woman is usually re- garded literally as a weaker vessel, whose weakness is transmissible. Hence in many tribes man and wife seldom share the same bed. The reason the Bareas give is that "the breath of the wife weakens the husband."'" EflEeminacy is construed into something tangible and "catching." Among the Omahas, if a boy played with girls he was dubbed "hermaphrodite" ; and in the Wiraijuri tribe "boys are reproved for play- ing with girls — the culprit is taken aside by an old man, who solemnly extracts from his legs 'some strands of the woman's apron' which have got in."'* Family Bond Weak. — It is evident, then, that group soUdarity , whether based on sex or other circumstances, tended to subordinate and weaken the marital relation- ship. This must have had enormous significance in every aspect and function of the family. And the " D'Orbigny, /. c, 157. '»A survival of this idea of communicating weakness appears in the objection to children's sleeping with older people; the negative hygienic reasons are known only by their apparent efifects which are lumped together under a positive heading "contamination." " Crawley, /. c, 93; for examples from modem Europe, see ibid., 203-4. 64 Primitive Family and Education weakness of the family bond appears even more strik- ingly when we come to consider primitive notions of the parental relations. Sir John Lubbock summarizes the progress of these notions, thus: "Children were not in the earliest times regarded as re- lated equally to their father arid mother . . . the natural progress of ideas is, first, that a child is related to his tribe generally; secondly, to his mother, and not to his father; lastly, and lastly only, that he is related to both."^^ This seems a fair resumS of the case, though, as in the attempt to set down the sequence of familial forms, there can be no pretense to a universal rule. The familiar statement that in primitive times maternity was a matter of fact, paternity one of presumption, has been hotly disputed; largely, I believe, because of the supposed implication of promiscuity. ^^ But even supposing that the promiscuity theory must go by the board, that in itself is no sufficient reason for rejecting the dictum as to presumptive paternity. For evidence abounds on the hazy ideas of primitive men as to the nature of reproduction, the connection of sex relations with conception; in fact, to them the whole process of self -perpetuation is more or less of a blur. This is not strange if we stop to consider the savage's general misty notions of nature-processes, and of the limits of his own personality. Procreation in Primitive Myth. — Where do babies " Origin of Civilization, 3d. ed., 149. Wake in quoting the passage criticizes this view as being an incorrect use of "tribe," and offers "clan " as the proper term. »3 For denials of uncertainty of paternity as the reason for fixing descent in the maternal line, see Wake, /. c, 343; Crawley, I. c, 461. Kinship and Relationship 65 come from, and how do they get here? are two of the child's earliest questions. They must have suggested themselves also to primitive men. Mythology and folklore, as weU as ethnography, contain frequent references to the subject. Totemism, classification of relationships, systems of descent, and other practices are based on attempts to work out the problem by rule of thumb. The institution of "maternal descent" is one of the most obvious and natural solutions thus attained. The connection of mother and child must by the nature of things have been unescapable to beings having the slightest powers of observation and ratio- cination. Yet its full significance was never fully grasped. In fact we are still grappling with the prob- lem and are yet far from its final solution. Primitive man seized upon the general idea of physical maternity, the creating of new life; but he did not confine this power to the human female, nor the females of his animal familiars. In accordance with his animistic philosophy he endowed inanimate nature with the same faculty, or at least conceived that the human and the not-human worked along somewhat parallel Unes. Hence the Kafir calls Httle stones the children of big ones, and villages the children of towns. But this is not all: animals may bear human children, and stocks and stones conceive and bring forth, but not necessarily according to their kind. Creation myths are full of these ideas. An Iroquois legend, for ex- ample, relates that the first of men were formed of the flour of maize. The oldest name for the Allegheny Mountains is said to be Paemotinck or Pemolnick, an Algonkin word probably meaning "the origin of the 66 Primitive Family and Education Indians." A Wichita tradition holds that their an- cestors issued from the rocks about their homes. Other tribes have the same idea, e.g., the Tahkalis, Navajos, Coyoteras. The Kenai, Kolushes, and Atnai claim descent from a raven, really the Creator Raven. The Dogribs, Chippeways, and Hare Indians, as well as the west coast Esldmos and Aleuts all beUeve they have sprung from a dog. The California Diggers claim the humble coyote, the Lenni Lenape the wolf, for ancestor. Osage Indian tradition makes a snail the founder of their nation. The Mewan Indians of California ascribe their origin to feathers of the turkey-buzzard, raven, and crow, stuck in the ground by two animal culture heroes.*^ A Greenland creation myth as related to Rasmussen runs thus: "When the world was made, people came. They say that they came out of the earth. Babies came out of the earth, "^s etc_ Certain tribes of New Guinea make a dog and a python the original inhabitants of the earth ; they met one day, were very lonely, and suggested mar- riage; the suggestion was quickly carried out; the python produced three human children, two male and one female who married one another and produced children, who in their turn married one another, and so on.'* The list of such tales might be prolonged. Other myths or legends not distinctly of the Creation Cycle contribute similar facts. The Papuan folk tale of Dabedabe the Good relates how "a certain man had a pig which left him and gave birth to »*Brinton, Myths of the New World, 84, 166-7, 181, 223-32; Lewis and Clarke, Travels, i., 12; Merriam, The Dawn of the World, 83-7, 67-8, 115; Matthews, "Myths of Gestation and Parturition," ia Am. Anthrop., iv., n. s., 731-42; see also Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, i., 5-10. '5 Rasmussen, People of the Polar North, 100. »' Guise, in xxviii. J. A. J., 205-6. Kinship and Relationship 67 her young in the bush. Now five of them were pigs like their mother, but the sixth was a man child, and him his mother loved best of all." ^^ I am quite willing to see in most of these cases evi- dences of totemism. But I am not prepared to accept Mr. Brinton's generalization to the effect that not a "single example could be found where an Indian tribe had a tradition whose real purport was that man came by natural process of descent from an ancestor, a brute. " It is qiiite probable, as Mr. Hill Tout suggests, ==* that these animal ancestors are not now considered to have been "just common animals and nothing else" but are held to have been persons as well; but this appears as a rationalization of a still more primitive belief. I cannot stop here to discuss the whole question in its details; but I believe this inference to be just, viz., that primitive myths and legends manifest gross uncer- tainty regarding not only the original creation of man, but also the share of parents in procreation. Sex Relations between Men and Animals. — We may be sure it was not mere courtesy or fantasy which ruled that if rocks and trees and animals could bear human children, likewise hiiman mothers might bring forth animal offspring. It is not surprising, therefore, to find an Eskimo legend which relates how originally all men were Eskimos; but that one of the girls being tm- wilUng to marry, she was forced by her father to wed a dog; she gave birth to ten children: two dogs, two erqigdlit (dogs with men's heads), two Eskimos, two "' Annie Ker, Papuan Fairy Tales, 13. "'/. A. I., xxxiv., 325-6. 68 Primitive Family and Education qavdlundt (white men), and two gavdlundtsait (white men of warlike disposition).'' In one of the Japanese Shinto myths an ancient culture pair are represented as giving birth first to a child, then to the island of Aha. '" A Naga creation legend runs thus: "The world was populated by the offspring of one mother, who emerged from the ground and at one time gave birth to a man, a bear, a deer, a tiger, an elephant, a rat, and a mouse. These multiplied and filled the world. " ^^ Into a simi- lar category of facts should be placed those myths of marriages or love relations between human beings and animals, e.g., Leda and the swan, the ladies of the fairy tales who marry frog princes, etc., the Kafir le- gends of Dtimaiigashe who married the crocodile, and Mpunzanyana who became the bride of a five-headed snake; and similar Hindu legends. Here, too, perhaps belong the middle age superstitions of incubus and succubus. It would of course be absurd to claim li- teral belief for these and similar tales. But at some time or other more or less belief was accorded them. Imagination does not work in vacuo, nor make bricks without straw. This much is evident :■ that in primitive minds there are no high fences between the kingdoms of nature; and nowhere does this cosmic democracy reveal itself better than in notions of procreation. •9 Rasmussen, I. c, 194-S; cf. Boas, "Sagen der Indianer in Nord- west-America,"2■• I am quite aware that several writers, among them Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. Howitt, take but little stock in the supposed ignorance of some of the peoples mentioned. See, e. g., Lang, Secret of the Totem, 81, 124, 191; Howitt, in xii./.^./., 502. The r61e of the Sky-Father and Kinship and Relationship 75 Couvade. — ^The widespread custom of the Couvade may be interpreted as an attempt artificially to es- tablish the father's connection with his offspring. If we bear in mind that it obtains almost exclusively under the father-family system, and also recall the literal power of the "word" and the "symbol" in Earth-Mother in Creation myths reveals a general notion of sex func- tions. Yet they are evidently products of later anthropomorphism. On the other hand, Mr. E. S. Hartland in his Study of Primitive Paternity (Lond., 1910) attributes the general belief in supernatural birth to ignorance of the physical relation of father to child. To the same source must be attributed also the mjrths surrounding the birth of Buddha, Christ, and other religion-heroes. See, e. g., L. de Milloni's article on resemblances between Buddhism and Christianity in Musie Guimet Confirences, vol. xxx. The existence of Phallic cults might be offered as an argument against the position here assumed. It is true that Phallicism formed an integral part generally of Oriental religion (India, Greece, Rome, ancient Egypt, but not the Parsees); in the Japanese cult of InyOsaki; the Teutonic Fricco; the ancient Mexican corn-festival ochpaniztli. But it is doubtful if PhaUicism in Japan was specially ancient; the myths describing it were not reduced to writing till the 8th century A. D. It is therefore impossible to say how much of the myth is genuinely ancient and how much is redacteur. I have been able to find only scanty traces of Phallicism in savagery. An unimpor- tant reference occurs in Johnston's Uganda., ii., 868. Ellis finds phallic fertility-divinities among Yorubas and Ewes (Y.-S. P., 78, E.-S. P., 41-2). See also Bastian, Afrikanische Reisen, 228; Hopkins, Religions of India, 413-4, 453; Bent, xxii. J. A. I., 124-6; Rossbach, Romische Ehe, 371; Buckley, Phallicism in Japan; Gushing, Primitive Motherhood, 41 ; Preuss, " PhaUische Fruchtbarkeits-Damonen," Archivf. Anthropol., xxix., 129 ff.; Maurer, "Der Phallusdienst bei den Israeliten," 92 Globus, 257; Nadaillac, Prehistoric America, 159, 338. It is certain that Phallicism does not exist among tribes manifesting gross ignorance of sex matters. Certainly it is to be found, if at all, only rarely below the barbaric stage in human development. Neither should circumcision be taken as prima-facie evidence of sex understanding; for it frequently is purely a tribal mark, without the slightest reference to the pro- creative process. 76 Primitive Family and Education primitive philosophy, we may explain the Couvade as a symbolic act whereby the father recognizes his relationship to the child, expresses his interest in it, and attempts to render its entry into the world as safe and auspicious as possible. This solicitude commonly expresses itself in a system of taboos, usually on food and labor of certain kinds. A Panguan blacksmith of Borneo said "that he could not touch any ironwork without the body of his infant son turning the color of fire; and on his lifting the hammer while engaged at his forge, the child instantly commenced screeching and crying. "