The recent personal researches of Mr. Howitt and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen make it certain that tribal affairs, now, among many tribes at least, are discussed with the utmost deliberation, and that modifications of institutions may be canvassed, adopted, or rejected, on the initiative of seniors, local "Headmen," and medicine men.2 It is also certain that tribe borrows from tribe, in the matter of songs, dances, and institutions, while members of one tribe are permitted to be present at the sacred ceremonials of others, especially when these tribes are on intermarrying terms.3 In such cases, the ceremonials of one tribe may affect those of another, the Arunta may influence the Urabunna, who borrow their sacred objects or churinga for use in their own rites. We even hear of cases in which native religious ideas have been propagated by missionaries sent from tribe to tribe.4
Thus, conservative as is the savage by nature, he is distinctly capable of deliberate modification of his rites, ceremonies, and customary laws, and of interchanging ideas on these subjects with neighbouring tribes.
All this is true, to-day, and doubtless has long been true.
But at this point we must guard against what we consider a prevalent fallacy. The legislative action of the natives, the initiative of local Headmen, and Heads of Totems and of "Classes" (social divisions), and of medicine men inspired by "some supernatural being, such as Kutchi of the Dieri, Bunjil of the Wurunjerri, or Daramulun of the Coast Murring,"5 is only rendered possible by the existence, to-day, of social conditions which cannot be primitive. To-day the Tribe, with its innumerable rules, and its common faith in Kutchi or Daramulun, with its recognised local or social Headmen, with its regulations for dealing with other tribes, and with its heralds or messengers, is an institution "in being." But, necessarily, this was not always so; the Tribe itself is a great "conquest of culture," and that conquest must have been made very slowly.
The prevalent fallacy, then, is to take unconsciously for granted that the people was, from the beginning, regimented into tribes, or existed in "hordes" already as capable as actual tribes of deliberative assemblies and legislative action, and that, in these hordes, a certain law, "the universal basis of their social system, was brought about by intention," as Mr. Howitt believes.6
The law in question, "the universal basis of their social system," was nothing less than a rule compelling people who had hitherto been promiscuous in their unions, to array themselves into a pair of tribal divisions, in which no member might marry another member of the same division, but must marry a member of the opposite division. The mere idea of such an act of legislation, for which no motive is assigned (and no motive is conceivable) postulates the pre-existence of a community like the Tribe of to-day, with powers to legislate, and to secure obedience for its legislative acts. This postulate cannot be granted, it refracts the institutions of to-day on a past state of society which, in all probability, could possess no such institutions. The "chaotic horde" of the hypothesis could not allot to various human groups the duty of working magic (to take an instance) for the good of various articles of the common food supply, nor could it establish a new and drastic rule, suddenly regulating sexual unions which had previously been utterly unregulated.
Human history does not show us a relatively large mass segregating itself into smaller communities. It shows us small communities aggregating into larger combinations, the village into the city, the European tribes into the kingdom, the kingdoms into the nation, the nation into the empire. The Tribe itself, in savage society, is a combination of small kins, or sets of persons of various degrees of status; these kins have not been legislatively segregated out of a pre-existing horde having powers of legislation. The idea of such a legislative primeval horde has been unconsciously borrowed from the actual Tribe of experience to-day.
That tribe is not primitive, far from it, but is very old.
Tribal collective wisdom, when once the tribe was evolved, has probably been at work, in unrecorded ages, over all the world, and in most places seems, up to a certain point, to have followed much the same strange course. The path does not march straight to any point predetermined by man, but loops, and zigzags, and retreats, and returns on itself, like the course of a river beset by rocks and shoals, and parcelled into wandering streams, and lagging in morasses. Yet the river reaches the sea, and the loops and links of the path, frayed by innumerable generations of early men, led at last to the haven of the civilised Family, and the Family Peace.
The history of the progress must necessarily be written in the strange characters of savage institutions, and in these odd and elaborate regulations which alarm the incurious mind under the names of "Phratries," "Totems," "Matrimonial Classes," "Pirrauru," and "Piraungaru." In these, as in some Maya or Easter Island inscription, graven in bizarre signs, lies the early social history of Man. We pore over the characters, turning them this way and that, deciphering a mark here and there, but unable to agree on any coherent rendering of the whole, so that some scholars deem the problems insoluble – and most are at odds among themselves.
Possibly we can at last present a coherent translation of the record which lies half concealed and half revealed in the savage institutions with their uncouth names, and can trace the course of an evolution which, beginning in natural passions, emotions, and superstitions, reached a rudimentary social law. That law, again, from a period far behind our historical knowledge, has been deliberately modified by men, much as a Bill in Parliament is modified by amendments and compromises into an Act. The industry of students who examine the customs of the remotest races has accumulated a body of evidence in which the various ways out of early totemic society towards the civilised conception of the family may be distinctly traced.
Meanwhile we are concerned rather with the way into totemism out of a prior non-totemic social condition, and with the development of the various stages of totemic society in Australia. The natives of that country, when unspoiled by European influences, are almost on one level as to material culture. Some tribes have rather better and more permanent shelters than others; some have less inadequate canoes than the rest; some drape themselves against cold weather in the skins of beasts, while others go bare; but all are non-agricultural hunting wanderers, without domesticated animals, without priests, and without chiefs on the level of those of the old Highland clans. They are ignorant of pottery, a fact which marks the very lowest culture; they know not the bow and arrow; their implements of stone vary from the polished "neolithic" to the rough-hewn "palæolithic" type: a man will use either sort as occasion serves.
While everyday life and its implements are thus rude, there are great varieties of social organisation, of ceremonial institutions, and of what, among Europeans, would be called speculative and religious ideas, expressing themselves in myths and rites.
Taking social organisation first, we begin with what all inquirers (except one or two who wrote before the recent great contributions to knowledge appeared) acknowledge to be the most pristine type extant Each tribe of this type is in two intermarrying divisions (which we call "exogamous moieties," or "phratries"), and each phratry bears a name which, when it can be translated, is, as a rule, that of an animal.7 We shall show later why the meaning of the names has often been lost. Take the animal names of the phratries to be Emu and Kangaroo, no man of the Emu phratry may marry a woman of the same phratry, he must marry out of his phratry ("exogamy"); nor may a man of the Kangaroo phratry marry a woman of the same. Kangaroo phratry must marry into Emu, and Emu into Kangaroo. The phratry names in each case are, in the more primitive types of the organisation (which alone we are now considering) inherited from the mother.