Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/342

320 Further, in a rude state of culture, the fundamental social relations are even less obtrusive than in civilised communities. Among ourselves there has come to be a more or less sharp line of distinction between relatives and friends, and it is at important moments of life, such as birth, marriage, and death, that such distinctions are brought more obtrusively than usual to our notice. Even then, however, our imaginations are not excited by the fact, and, if we are led to indulge in speculation at all, these social relations are not their most probable subject. Still less are they likely to become the subject of speculation at ruder levels of culture, where the distinction between relative and friend can hardly be said to exist.

I shall have later to consider an important exception to the rule I am now formulating, but for the present I conclude that of all aspects of human life those of purely social character are the least likely to awaken speculative interest and become the subject of myth.

We should thus expect that myths having social organisation as their subject should be absent or very rare. It is only among people of advanced culture that we should expect to find a speculative interest in the origin and development of social institutions, and then we might expect that the speculations would be clothed, not in the form we know as myth, but in that different though allied form of expression we call science. It is therefore a remarkable and startling fact that there are few peoples of the earth whose myths deal more definitely and explicitly with social conditions than the Australians, who, while far more advanced than was once supposed, yet undoubtedly occupy a very lowly place in the scale of human culture. It is this paradox which will occupy our attention for the remainder of this paper.

The narratives with which I propose especially to deal are those of the Arunta, Dieri, and other tribes of central Australia. These people narrate long and complex