Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/418

 AUSTRALIAN MARRIAGE SYSTEMS.

By A. Lang.

(Abstract of Paper read at the Meeting of 25th October, 1902, in the Hall of Exeter College, Oxford.)

[This note briefly represents what I had to say at Oxford. Circumstances made it impossible to read out the large mass of facts and arguments. What is here said of Messrs. Fison, Howitt, Spencer, and Gillen is especially, and perhaps it may be thought unfairly, condensed, above all as the statements of these authors waver to some extent. They were fully stated in the original copy of a paper too long and complex for delivery to the Oxford audience, but later to appear in the book already mentioned. The ideas expressed, except where suggested by the MS. of Mr. Atkinson, are my own, but I find that Dr. Durkheim, the Rev. John Mathews (in Eagle-Hawk and Crow), Mr. Daniel McLennan, and Herr Cunow have, in different degrees and with modifications, anticipated some of them by undesigned coincidence.—A. L.]

A. The so-called "class system" in Australia presents many Various forms, and may occur where descent is reckoned either in the male or female line. But, speaking roughly, the following bars on marriage exist:—

1. Each man and woman in a tribe belonors to one of two divisions, or "phratries," within the tribe, say, Matthurie and Kirarawa; Kirarawa must never marry Kirarawa, but always Matthurie, and vice versa.

2. Each man and woman also belongs to a given totem. Under Matthurie, say, six totems are ranged, under Kirarawa six others (except among the Arunta). Persons of the same totem may never intermarry.