Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/439

 Marriage, Totemisnty and Religion. 403

In criticising his views, I took them, in 1903, from the sixth edition of his Origin of Civilisation^ published in 1902.^ Lord Avebury's terms, in 1902, retained the per- plexing use of "tribe," "class," ''gens" and "sept," and the " tribe," as far as I could understand, seemed now to be envisaged as a fairly large, and again as a very small, com- munity. " Family names " appeared to be synonymous with names of totem-kins, and people of the same " family name " to " belong therefore to the same tribe." " Family," "■gens" "class," "clan," and "tribe" were, as far as I could perceive, sometimes used as equivalent terms. It would be easy for Lord Avebury to define his terms and use them consistently, but, in his new work, as we shall see, he retains the indefinite terms, which make it hard to interpret his meaning. It is certain that his views about a pristine kinless state of " communal marriage," (that is, of no marriage, of no "exclusive relations" of any man or men with any woman or women), are accepted by several of the leading modern explorers and theorists, such as Messrs. Howitt, Spencer, and Giilen, and, (if I succeed in understanding him), by Mr. Frazer. On the other hand, with Mr. Darwin, Mr. N. W. Thomas, Dr. Starcke, Mr. E. B. Tylor, and others, (I cite Mr. Tylor from his Anthropology, a work of 1881), I do not believe that, in a primal stage, men and women lived without " exclusive relations " between each other ; do not believe in a primal state of " communal marriage," or sexual promiscuity, in which no ideas of consanguineous or other kinship existed.

Yet, while differing from Lord Avebury on this point, I agree with him, as against Messrs. Spencer, Hov/itt, and Frazer, in holding that the common form of tribal exoga- mous division into two exogamous and intermarrying sets or phratries is not the result of a conscious human effort to improve morals, or to avert any form of supposed danger to the eugenics of the tribe. Lord Avebury and I are at

1 See Social Origins, pp. 122-130.