Aboriginal Australian Social Structures
It has been mentioned in the chapter on language that the tribal areas are small; they are, in fact, sometimes no more than thirty miles in diameter. By ‘tribe’ is…
Location: Australia
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From Natives of Australia by Northcote W. Thomas.
It has been mentioned in the chapter on language that the tribal areas are small; they are, in fact, sometimes no more than thirty miles in diameter. By ‘tribe’ is meant a number of people who occupy a definite tract of country, who recognise a common relationship—save where, as sometimes occurs, a man has joined a tribe by marrying a member of it or by simply transferring his residence—and speak a common language or dialects of it.
Among the natives themselves the tribe usually has a name; this is sometimes the word for ‘man,’ the neighbours being the ‘wild blacks,’ to whom cannibalism and other enormities are commonly imputed. Sometimes, especially in the east, the name of the tribe seems to have been taken from the word ‘yes’ or ‘no’; the well-known Kamilaroi tribe, for example, uses ‘kamil’ for ‘no,’ and Pikumbul says ‘pika’ for ‘yes.’ These names may, it is clear, have been imposed from without and probably were; the ‘man’ names, on the other hand, were adopted by the tribesmen themselves.
Above the tribe, but not recognised by the blacks with any specific name, comes what may conveniently be called the nation, that is to say, a group of tribes speaking, as a rule, allied languages, and banded together for the performance of initiation ceremonies and for other purposes.
The numbers of the different tribes naturally varied within very wide limits. The little Eucla tribe at the head of the Great Australian Bight could only muster between thirty and forty, all told, but elsewhere two hundred or two hundred and fifty was about the total. Where food was plentiful, as near Lake Alexandrina, five or six hundred natives would spend a great part of the year; but it does not appear how far they were all of the same tribe; in fact, the term is often loosely used, and the statements of many travellers as to tribes must be taken to refer to what are more properly termed local groups.
As to the total number of tribes, it is difficult to do more than give an approximation, based on the assumed size of the tribal area or other uncertain data; for within the tribe proper exist sometimes large local divisions, not real local groups, which often figure on maps and prevent any count of the tribes by simple reference to the map. If the tribal area is 1000 square miles, the total number would be between two hundred and fifty and three hundred. In the same way, if 150,000 may be taken as the number of the blacks at the time of the discovery of Australia, making allowance for the existence of some large tribes, we reach about the same result; but in either case it must be regarded as merely a rough estimate.
The tribe is organised in two distinct ways, which may coalesce under the influence of certain conditions, but are not necessarily connected in any way; these are the local and the social organisations. It has been mentioned above that each tribe lays claim to a certain area, inside which no stranger may hunt without permission. Encroachment of any sort is the signal for hostilities, and not only hunting rights but even property in water is claimed by the aboriginal sovereign owners of the soil.
Within the tribe are local groups, and below them again are practically family groups in our sense of the term, but including several generations; these occupied small areas of perhaps ten miles’ ‘radius’ according to Dr. Howitt; but as there were many in the tribal area, and the latter was only some fifty miles in radius, it is possible that there has been some error on the part of his informant. The family groups, as distinguished from the lesser local groups, do not always seem to lay claim to any special area, but hunt in common with other members of the same local group.
It must be understood that only in very rare cases was the local group sedentary. As a rule, the Australian native does not erect permanent huts, and his sojourn on any one spot is regulated by the available supply of food. When the bunya-bunya nuts were ripe hundreds congregated and remained in company, but this was only once in three years. At other times they may be pictured as roaming the country for food.
More important in many respects than the local organisation are the social regulations of the tribe. In practice they are of the utmost simplicity; but their explanation in words is a matter of some difficulty owing to their complexity, when we give a conspectus of the organisation of the tribe instead of approaching the question, as is the case in practical life, from the standpoint of the individual, for whom the whole matter in many cases simply resolves itself into the question ‘May I marry this woman?’
Each tribe, with few exceptions, is divided (1)into two great classes, here called phratries; (2)these are again subdivided over a large part of Australia—in New South Wales and Queensland into four subdivisions; in Northern Territory into eight subdivisions, here called classes. Forming subdivisions of the phratry and cross-divisions with the classes, we have (3)the totem-kins.
Before we proceed to explain the working of these organisations, it will be well to say something on the question of descent. It is naturally all-important to know how membership of a tribe, a phratry, a class, or a totem-kin are determined; not only so, but the different ways of reckoning descent, taken in conjunction with marriage customs, produce, as will be seen later, important modifications in fundamental matters.
Under ordinary circumstances the wife removes to the tribe of her husband and joins, in addition, his local group; of course she may belong to the same tribe as her husband, and usually does; in this case she simply removes to his local group. There is nothing in the marriage regulations of most tribes to prevent marriage within the local groups, and in this case no change of residence is effected; but the complexity of the regulations affecting the choice of wives must, in many, if not most tribes, make it extremely difficult to find a partner among the comparatively few unappropriated women of marriageable age who are to be found at any one time within its limits.
Whether the wife can properly be said to join the husband’s tribe or not is unimportant; probably she does. The important point is that the children of a marriage belong to the tribe in which the parents reside, however descent be reckoned for other purposes. The result of this is that the hunting-grounds of a tribe descend from generation to generation in the male line; and all the males resident within the tribal area are interested in protecting the tribal rights.
When we turn to the descent of the phratry, the class, and the totem-kinship, the regulations are much more variable. The first more often ‘follows the distaff,’ that is, the son takes the phratry name of his mother, but in a considerable proportion of tribes he takes the phratry name of his father. Thus a man of the phratry Eagle-hawk has a wife of the phratry Crow; if male descent is the rule in that tribe, their children are Eagle-hawks; if, on the other hand, they have female descent, the children are all Crows.
For the classes a more complicated rule exists. Whether descent be reckoned in the female or the male line, the children do not take the same class name as the parent, whose phratry name they bear, if there is one, but they take a class name from the same phratry—the other one, where there are only four classes in all.
When we come to the totem-kins, we find that if there is a third possibility; not only may the child follow the father or the mother, according as male or female descent prevails, but he may also take his totem name from neither of them in a certain number of tribes in Central Australia, among all of which male kinship is, so far as phratry or class names go, the rule.
The question of whether female or male descent is the more primitive way of reckoning descent has been fiercely debated, and Dr. Frazer has recently broken out in a new line by maintaining that neither is primitive, inasmuch as the totem name was originally not hereditary at all. The majority of competent authorities, however, are of the opinion that female descent preceded male descent, and Dr. Frazer stands alone in regarding non-hereditary totemism as the original stuff from which all tribes in the world, a few in North Australia excepted, have developed hereditary totemism. It may be remarked in passing that this view of Dr. Frazer’s hangs together with his belief in the primitive character of the Arunta institutions, in which he is again almost without adherents in the learned world.
It is a curious fact that whereas many arguments have been advanced by those who disbelieve in the primitiveness of the Arunta, none of them have been controverted by the other side. On the other hand, no proofs of the Arunta primitiveness have been advanced by Dr. Frazer and his single supporter; consequently the debate, up to the present, has been a trifle one-sided; none the less the believers in Arunta primitiveness adhere stoutly to their view.
We may now return to the phratries and see how the system works. With the exception of a few tribes on the seacoast, who have no class divisions, all Australian tribes are divided into the above-mentioned classes, or into phratries, or into both. A study of the arrangement of the classes makes it clear that they originated later than the phratries; and though in some tribes with classes no phratry names can now be found, it is clear that they have been lost, rather than that they have never existed.
There is in the northern part of Central Australia a large group of tribes with male descent; the classes in these tribes are arranged in two groups; in some cases there are phratry names; in some only the phratry organisation has survived; but it is a legitimate inference that where it has not survived, it once existed. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that phratries were created in the other cases; and there could be no object whatever in creating them, for the classes alone, where they exist, perform exactly the same functions as the phratry-cum-class organisation. It is abundantly clear, in fact, from a careful examination of the material, that the class organisation has been superposed on the phratry organisation, and really supersedes it.
Where they can be translated, the phratry names are found to be those of animals, very often of birds. Over a large part of Victoria and New South Wales, as I show in another work, the names in use are Eagle-hawk and Crow. Another common name for a phratry is cockatoo; but in the majority of cases we are unable to translate the names, partly, no doubt, because these names are to some extent sacred names, which have either never belonged to the common vocabulary of the tribe, or have long ceased to belong to it. Another reason is that it seems certain that both phratry names and organisation were borrowed; but if the names were borrowed, it is clear that our search for the meaning of the name is hopeless unless we can hit upon the tribe in which it originally had a meaning; and it is quite possible that that tribe has ceased to exist, even if it has not begun to use another word for the quadruped or bird originally designated by the phratry name.
The origin of the phratry names is still an unsolved problem; in fact the only attempt that seems to come near the mark is that recently made by Mr. Andrew Lang, and even his theory is far from accounting for the peculiarities of distribution and nomenclature. Mr. Lang’s theory is that men originally lived in isolated groups, ruled over by an old male, exactly as a herd of cattle is ruled. This involved the exclusion of the young males, for the whole of the adult female population of the group formed the harem of the old male. Then in process of time it became possible for the young males to remain within the group, which was thus immensely strengthened for offence or defence, but only on condition that they went abroad for their wives.
As time went on, this rule, imposed by the old male, crystallised into an instinct, and, the rights of the old male falling into decay at the same time, there arose the law that no one might marry within the group in which he was born. Now, if it was the custom for all the women of a group to be carried off by its neighbours, and for women of neighbouring groups to be introduced in their place, feelings of friendship, or at any rate amicable exchange of women rather than robbery, could not fail to spring up somewhere or other. When two or more groups were thus formally or informally allied, they naturally found themselves in a much better position than their neighbours, much of whose energy was expended in wife hunting; not only so, but this alliance ensured to the men in either connubial group the pick of the women in the other. Altogether it was a very convenient arrangement, and other neighbouring groups could hardly fail to follow the example once set.
Thomas, Northcote W. Natives of Australia. Archibald Constable and Company, 1906.
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