Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/801

 SEX IN PRIMITIVE MORALITY 78 1

kill may be killed in turn, but by order of the council of the tribe, and one of his kinsmen may be appointed to execute him, as under that condition no feud can follow. But there is always a reluctance to banish or take the life of the member of the group, both because no definite machinery is developed for accomplishing either, and because the loss of an able-bodied member of a group is a loss to the group itself. The group does not seek, therefore, immediately to be rid of an offensive member, but to modifv his habits, to convert him. Jones says of the Ojibways that there were occasionally bad ones among them, "but the good council of the wise sachems and the mark of disgrace put upon unruly persons had a very desirable influence." ' The extreme form of punishment in the power of the folk-moot of the Tuschinen is to be excluded from the public feasts, and to be made a spectator while stoned in efifigy and cursed.' Sending a man to Coventry is in vogue among the Fejir Bedouins : one who kills a friend is so despised that he is never spoken to again, nor allowed to sit in the tent of any member of the tribe. 3 The formulation of sentiment about an act depends also on the repetition of the act. The act is more irritating, and the irritation more widespread, with each repetition, and there is an increase of the penalty for a second offense, and death for a slight offense when frequently repeated : in the Netherlands stealing of linen left in the fields to be bleached led to the death penalty for stealing a pocket handkerchief. And with increasing definiteness of authority there follows increasing definiteness of punishment, and when finally the habit becomes fixed, conformity with it becomes a paramount consideration, and a deed is no longer viewed with reference to its intrinsic import so much as to its conformity or noncon- formity with a standard in the law : siimmum jits, sumtna injuria. Morality, involving the modification of the conduct of the individual in view of the presence of others, is already highly

'Jones, History of the Ojibu-ay Indians, p. 57.

» VON Seidlitz, " Ethnog. Rundschau," Intern. Archiv, f. Ethnographie, l8go, p. 136.

3 UoUGHTY, Travels in Arabia Deserta, p. 360.