Page:Native Tribes of South-East Australia.djvu/308

282 have not been accompanied by much, if any, advance in culture, but they mark collectively a really great advance from the status of group-marriage in the Lake Eyre tribes to more than incipient individual marriage in such tribes as the Kurnai.

It may be well to summarise briefly the limitations which affect marriage in the series of tribes spoken of in this chapter.

There is first of all the segmentation of a whole community into two exogamous intermarrying moieties, thus limiting the choice of a wife to one-half of the women in a tribe. The broad principle of intermarriage between the two exogamous moieties is controlled by a prohibition of marriage between parents and children, brother and sister. Next we find a further limitation by which the choice is again restricted to a certain group of those women; for instance, the Noa group of the Dieri tribe.

While in some tribes, such as the Urabunna, the marriage of the children of a man and those of his sister is permitted, in others, such as the Dieri, it is forbidden on the ground that they are "too near in flesh." In other tribes, for instance, the Bangerang, the children of such persons are also forbidden to marry on the same grounds, and so also are their descendants as far as they can be traced.

In the tribes with four sub-classes, the choice of a wife is restricted to one sub-class, much in the same manner as it is done in the two-class tribes. In eight sub-class tribes this choice is again lessened by the segmentation of the sub-class.

When we turn to the totems, we find that there also this system of limitation obtains, for in some tribes marriage is only permitted between certain totems on either side, and not, as for instance in the Dieri, between any of the totems on one side and any of the totems on the other. This again lessens the number of women otherwise available.

So much, briefly, as to the limitations provided for by the social organisation. But the local organisation in some