Note 365.1 — Chapter XIV · MARRIAGE RITES.

If this conclusion be correct, the ancestors of the European nations must have passed through a stage of society wherein group-marriage was the rule, the groups on either side probably consisting of husbands reckoned, according to the standard of savage kinship, as brothers, and wives reckoned as sisters, among themselves. The limited promiscuity thus established would be entirely in harmony with—nay, it would be a consequence of—the conception of gentile solidarity which I have endeavoured to summarise in a previous chapter. This is what the late Mr. Lewis Morgan called the Punaluan Family. Starting from the kindred-names and customs of Hawaii, he traced it over a large part of the Old and New Worlds, and successfully vindicated its existence against the criticisms of Mr. MacLennan. The most striking piece of evidence in favour of Mr. Morgan’s theory that has come to light since he wrote is perhaps to be found among the inhabitants of the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides. Their rules of marriage and terms of relationship may be studied in detail in a paper by the Rev. William Gray, read at a meeting of the Australasian Association, held at Hobart in January 1892, and published in the report of the meeting. It will suffice here to say that in the laws and language of the Tannese no distinctions are drawn between a wife and a wife’s sister, between a husband and a husband’s brother; all a man’s brother’s children are his own; all his wife’s children and his wife’s sisters’ children are alike his; the relation of uncle or aunt and nephew or niece does not exist, for the person whom we should call uncle or aunt is recognised by a Tannese as his father or mother, or else the term is indistinguishable from those for wife’s or husband’s father or mother; in like manner the terms for nephew and niece are the same as those for son-in-law and daughter-in-law; and the children of a man’s father’s brothers, or of his mother’s sisters, are regarded as his brothers and sisters equally with the children of his own parents.365.1 For such a condition of society any explanation is impossible, unless it be that an entire band of brethren is—or was down to a recent period, yesterday if not to-day—actually or potentially married to an entire band of sisters. The Punaluan Family is thus Australian group-marriage surviving into a somewhat higher stage of culture, but surviving, of course, in a more restricted form. The sense of solidarity has become stronger, but more circumscribed.