Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/736

 /l6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

I conceive, with Mr. Darwin, that men then lived in small knots, probably under one polygamous male. He would drive away his sons as they approached puberty, and all the females, including his daughters, would be his harem. All such male heads of groups would resent poaching on their game, the area of their food-supply, and their female mates.

Here we have a rude exogamy. No young male may marry in the group. But suppose that senescent or good-humored patriarchs allowed, here and there, young males to bring in female mates captured from without, probably going shares in them at first. Groups in which this was done would extend their area, being stronger, through the young males in war. Such groups would increase in size and in area of food-supply, while the combined young males would confirm their several rights to their captured females. Such groups would need names for all other groups in their radius, and these names would probably be the names of plants and animals. Such names would naturally give rise to speculation, as : " Why are we here Emus, Crows, Hawks, Frogs ?" Myths would be invented: "Emu, Crow, Hawk, or Frog is our ancester, or ancestral friend, or we are evolved out of him. Being our friend and more or less sacred, we must not eat him nor touch a woman also of his blood."

Here, under a taboo, are involved exophagy and exogamy, each with a supersti- tious sanction. Now we have two marriage prohibitions, if we suppose that children of the Hawk or Crow group keep her group name when she is brought into the Emu group. As daughter ot that local group, the Hawk woman's daughter is an Emu, and may not marry an Emu man. But as, by female descent, she is a Hawk, the girl may not marry a man of the local group Emu, who is also a Hawk, as son of a Hawk woman in the Emu group. A man, Emu by local group, Hawk by female descent, must catch a woman, Frog, for example, by female descent, Kangaroo by local group. But to get her while local groups are hostile may imply shedding kindred totem blood in battle. In these circumstances two local groups, Emu and Hawk, may make alli- ance and connubium. If they do, each local totem-group now becomes a primary division or phratry, each phratry containing different totem-kins by female descent, as in fact the two-linked intermarrying phratries always do (except among the Amuta). The local totem-taboo, and the taboo of totems by female descent, are both now respected, and a tribe with lawful brides accessible within itself is evolved. There has been no motiveless bisection, no equally motiveless segmentation into new totem-groups, no legislation enforcing exogamy on totem-groups not previously exogamous.

There remain for explanation the classes whose names are not apparently totemic, and whose members do not bequeath the class-name, either on the male or female side, to their children, who revert to grand-maternal or grand-paternal class- names. Of this arrangement, peculiar to Australia, Herr Cunow offers an explana- tion which seems to have plausible elements. These classes originally conveyed, in a rough way, a prohibition on marriages within the generation. Each name denoted coevals; "the old ones," "the young ones," their names often mean (Cunow). In Australia the young and the old are marked out by degrees of initiation, by duties and services, and by taboos on certain sorts of food. These taboos also applied to mar- riage. The strong point of Cunow's theory is that the names for the classes do, in many cases, mean " big " and " little," or " young " and " old," a point omitted by Durkheim in criticising the hypothesis. Meanwhile, by this time the tribes perfectly understand and can express real relationships by blood, as understood among them- selves, and also, as a rule, object, as we do, to too near consanguineous marriages. This is the result of training in the rules, and of reflection on them. A. LANG, "Australian Marriage Systems," in Folk-Lore, December, 1902.

E. M.

The Sociological Meaning of Alcoholism. In order to give a correct answer to this problem, it is necessary that there should be agreement as to the method of investigation. I must refer to what Dr. Wlassak has said against the subjective method. I recognize the importance of the objective method, but I believe that introspection can give exact data, although they are not subject to such exact psycho-physiological measurement as Professor Krapelin's method affords. From the memory the facts can be verified well enough, and where we are dealing with complicated phenomena,