CHAPTER XVI.
THE FAMILIAL CLAN IN AUSTRALIA AND AMERICA.
I. The Family.
II. The Family in Melanesia.—Melanesian rape—First formation of societies—Exogamy—The Australian clans—Native marriage state—Marriage of clans among the Kamilaroi—Their social incest—How a clan originates—Fictitious fraternity and the totem—How individual marriage is made among the Kurnai—Maternal filiation—Agnation tends to be constituted—Evolution of the family in Melanesia.
III. The Family in America.—The Redskin clans—Common dwellings—Rights and duties—Exogamy of the clan—Clans of the Pueblos—The family among the Indians of South America—Relationship among the Redskins—Communism—Maternal filiation—Distinction between the matriarchate and the maternal family—Origin of the ideas of relationship.
I shall now attempt to retrace as clearly as I can the history of the evolution of the family, first of all ascertaining the facts that have been observed, and then using these facts as a touchstone to try the solidity of the various sociological theories that have been put forth on the subject. Among these theories, there are some which have been very favourably received, and not without reason. Insufficient as they might be, they reduced a chaos of facts into order, and contained a certain amount of truth. All of them are open to criticism and contest, both because they are the fruit of a too hasty generalisation, and because their authors have claimed for them a certainty which sociological facts do not easily bear out. Human groups have always lived as they could, without caring about theories; their social conduct inevitably results from a sort of compromise in the conflict between their appetites, their aptitudes, and the necessities dictated by their physical environment.
Before hazarding any general conclusions, I shall be careful, as before, to refer to comparative ethnography, and to interrogate the various human races, from the lowest to the most elevated. This inquiry will enable us to form a rough idea, with a certain approximation to truth, in regard to the probable evolution of the family in humanity. But in order to approach this subject with sufficient impartiality, it is absolutely necessary to clear our minds from all the current theories in regard to the family. There is, in fact, no theme which has inspired more empty oratorical lucubrations. The doctrine has been firmly held that the family, as we have it instituted in Europe and in European colonies, is the beau idéal, the sacred and immutable sociological type. Ethnography, however, and even history, teach us that the present familial type of Europe has not always existed, and that it is the result, like everything else, of a slow evolution; from whence it is reasonable to infer that it will still continue to be modified. But facts are more eloquent than reflections; I will therefore approach them, beginning with the lowest human races, the Melanesians.
In my sketch of the family in the animal kingdom, I have already had occasion to remark that the family, such as we understand it, is not indispensable to the maintenance of societies, since the ants do without it in their republics, in which we find neither paternity nor maternity, in the sense we attach to them, but simply three classes of individuals, the breeders, the young, and the educators.
With these last, the working ants, by a paradoxical contradiction, maternal love has survived the atrophy of the generative function; it is even purified and widened, for it is lavished without partiality on all the young ones, which form the hope of the republic; and though thus diluted, it seems to have lost none of its energy.
Nothing at all similar is seen in inferior human societies, but the family is still, however, in a confused state; paternity, in the social sense of the word, does not exist; filiation is especially maternal, but the actual degrees of consanguinity are not well distinguished in detail; parenthood is not yet individual, but is constituted in groups.
In the present day we may still study this familial confusion in certain Australian tribes. We have seen that marriage, or what goes by that name, resulted in Tasmania, Australia, Bali, etc., from a violent and brutal rape, generally ratified by a compensation and a simulation of retaliation between the tribe of the woman and that of the ravisher.
Among the least savage tribes of Melanesia, this rape is often fictitious, in which case it is no more than a survival; but sometimes it is still real, and it surely must always have been so at the origin of the Australian societies. But however gross these societies may be, they are none the less the result of a long evolution. In the interior of Borneo there are still existing human beings compared with whom the Australians are civilised people. These absolutely primitive savages of Borneo are probably the remains of negroïd peoples, who must formerly have been the first inhabitants of Malaya. They roam the forests in little hordes, like monkeys; the man, or rather the male, carries off the female and couples with her in the thickets. The family passes the night under a large tree; the children are suspended from the branches in a sort of net, and a great fire is lighted at the foot of the tree to keep off the wild beasts. As soon as the children are capable of taking care of themselves, the parents turn them adrift as animals do.[873]
It is doubtless thus, after the manner of the great monkeys, that primitive human societies have been formed. With the chimpanzees these hordes can never become very large, for the male progenitor will not endure rivals, and drives away the young males as long as he is the strongest. The first men were surely more sociable, because of their human nature. The young males of the human horde were able to remain, in greater or less number, within the association, but the jealousy of the progenitor-in-chief, the father of the family, must often have obliged them to procure one or several females by capturing them from neighbouring or rival hordes; they thus became more or less exogamous; and, in their embryo societies, marriage, or rather sexual union, ended by being prohibited between brothers and sisters, not because there was the least moral scruple about incest, but because, within the limit of the horde, the young women were claimed by the most robust males, who would not yield them up. We know that this is still the case in the Australian tribes.[874]
In this gross social state it is necessarily the mother who is the centre of the family, just as she is in the families of mammifers; it is, therefore, quite natural that the children should bear her name and not that of their father, which, for that matter, is not always easy to designate. When once the custom of exogamy was well established, what was at first a necessity ended by becoming an obligation, and men were forbidden to unite themselves with women of the group to which they belonged, and which bore the same name as their own. Such is still the general rule in Australia.[875] But in Australia this group is often only a sub-tribe, a gens or clan; for the hordes, becoming too numerous, are subdivided into factions or large families, who unite together for common defence or vengeance. The children of each group belong sometimes to the clan of the mother, and there is then no legal parenthood between them and their father;[876] also, in case of war, the son must join the maternal tribe.[877] But this is not a universal rule, and in many tribes the children now belong to the paternal clan.[878]
These are general cases, common to the greater part of the Australian tribes, but not to all. There are some who have organised their marriage and their family into classes, thus regulating, in a certain measure, the primitive confusion, and establishing by this very regulation a sort of limited promiscuity. The word “classes,” employed by travellers who have made us acquainted with these curious customs, is improper, for neither social classes nor castes exist in Australia. These so-called classes are simply sub-tribes or clans, analogous to the Roman gens.
In certain of these tribes a sort of categorical promiscuity is kept up. Thus, among the tribes of Mount Gambier, of the Darling River, and of Queensland, each tribe is divided into two sub-tribes, and within each of these clans all the men are reputed brothers, and all the women are sisters, and all marriage between these brothers and these sisters is strictly forbidden.[879] This is a primordial law; the violation of it is an act of the deepest guilt, which not only stains the individual, but the group to which he belongs; it is more than incest, and the Australians, who have a very lively sentiment of duty, feel intense horror of such an act. But if every man is brother to all the women in his clan, on the other hand he is husband to all the women of the other clan of his tribe. Consequently, all the men of one group are called husbands by all the women of the other, and inversely. Marriage with these Australians is not therefore an individual act, as with us; it is a social condition, resulting from the fact of birth.[880] However, the actual communal union is not obligatory in the least. A man or woman may stop at the nominal or reputed marriage; they may merely call each other husband and wife; but in principle, the right is admitted, and the men sometimes offer temporary wives of their own class to strangers who visit them.[881] Thus in the tribe of the Kamilaroi, near Sydney, every man of the Kubi clan has the right to call “my wife” every person of feminine sex belonging to the Ipai clan, and to treat her as such. There is no need of proposals, or of contract, or of ceremony; a man is a husband by right of birth, but the intimate union does not imply association by couples; the woman passes from one to the other, or even from several to several others. On the other hand, within the limit of the clan, all the men and all the women call each other brothers and sisters, and are bound to respect each other. In uniting with the men of the other sub-tribe having conjugal right over them, the women do not on that account cease to reside in their own clan, the sub-tribe of their “brothers.”
Marriage within this sub-tribe is the abomination of desolation, the sin for which there is no forgiveness. Whoever commits it is outlawed from society, driven from the tribe, tracked through the woods like game, and put to death. He has dishonoured the association, and the children who are born of these social incests are exterminated.[882] Thus, all real consanguinity has been set aside, and a fictitious fraternity created between all the members of the same clan, similar to paternity by adoption. Is this artificial parenthood the result of practical exogamy, or has it, on the contrary, produced it? We cannot tell; but wherever it exists, its rule is absolutely inflexible. If, for example, as often happens in Australia, the important men, the chiefs, the sorcerers, or the strong adults, seize a certain number of women for their personal use, they only do it in conformity to the law of exogamy between the sub-tribes. If one of the women thus confiscated runs away and is re-taken, she is not restored to the man who had usurped possession of her, but belongs by right to those who have caught her.
Moreover, certain neighbouring tribes are subdivided into sub-tribes, or clans of the same name; they have probably sprung one from the other at some former period. If it happens that a man steals a woman from one of these tribes, the captured woman is immediately incorporated into the corresponding clan of the ravisher’s tribe, and she becomes the “sister” of all the women of this clan, to which will also belong her children. As for the ravisher, he is always a member of another gens, or clan, of the same tribe. If the tribes of the captured woman and of her captor are not symmetrical—that is to say, have not corresponding clans—then the woman may become the founder of a new clan belonging to the tribe of the man who has carried her off.[883]
If a woman is captured by a party of warriors, and not by one individual only, the first care of the captors is to inflict on her a collective violation, on the condition, however, that none of them belong to a clan homonymous with that of the ravished woman; if any one of their party is an exception to this, he must abstain from so doing.[884]
The sign of the fictitious fraternity of the Kamilaroi, and of all the Australian tribes organised in the same manner, is a common emblem, the totem. All the men bearing the same totem are united by the bond of a conventional fraternity, which is none the less strict for that reason. The totem has evidently been invented in a primitive epoch, when the different degrees of consanguinity were not easily distinguished, and were therefore replaced by an artificial union far wider than the limits of the natural family.
Whenever a single individual wished to escape from this tribal marriage, he was obliged to resort to various artifices. One of these transitional processes has remained in use in the Kurnai tribe, in Gippsland, Victoria.
The terms still in use with them to designate kinship recall the former existence of a fraternal marriage; but in practice they have none the less adopted individual marriage. The manner in which these individual marriages are contracted probably indicates what must have happened in primitive times, when some innovators attempted to escape from tribal marriage by carrying off the women they preferred, and were only re-admitted to their tribe after having obtained pardon and the ratification of their audacious enterprise. Among the Kurnai every marriage must be made by the capture of one of the women of their tribe, even when this rape has been preceded by a friendly exchange of sisters, which is usual enough. This simulated rape is punished by a simulation of vengeance. The fugitives are pursued; they are even ill-treated, but short of being actually killed. Their punishment is simply an act of obedience to ancestral customs. When all is concluded, and the fugitive couple reinstated among their people, the woman belongs to the man who has carried her off; he is no longer obliged to offer her to the visitors of his clan, as old Australian hospitality required;[885] she belongs to him alone. Sometimes the ravisher legalises his right of sole proprietor by first giving notice to his friends, and offering them the use of his wife, after which he can keep her to himself.[886]
In proportion as tribal marriage was being transformed, owing to the breaches made in it by individual instinct, the consanguineous family was gradually arising in place of the collective and fictitious family. It seems most likely that uterine filiation, or the maternal family, was first established. The Australian Motas still have filiation by the woman’s side, and among them the property of the uncle is transmitted to the uterine nephew; but already the paternal family is beginning to be constituted, and the relatives on the male side seek to redeem the heritage by means of an indemnity.[887] With other and more advanced Australian tribes, fanatical evolution is more complete; masculine filiation is already instituted, and agnation adopted; there is even a worship of the manes of male ancestors.[888] The Melanesians of Australia and Tasmania present, therefore, a tolerably complete picture of the evolution of marriage and of the family, from the primitive rape, followed by a tribal period in which marriage is merely a limited and regulated promiscuity, and in which real consanguinity is replaced by a fictitious fraternity, down to the régime of individual marriage and masculine filiation, previously passing through uterine filiation, or the maternal family. We shall find traces of this evolution among other races, but nowhere is the lower stage so well preserved as in Australia.
Nothing similar to the gross tribal marriage of the Australian Kamilaroi is to be found among the American Indians, whose familial organisation, however, strikingly recalls that of the Melanesian clans, though already in a higher degree of evolution.
The tribes of the Redskins were, and are still, divided into phratries, which are again subdivided into clans. Now these clans are composed of real or fictitious relatives. In each phratry the corresponding clans have the same totem, and it is strictly forbidden to marry a woman belonging to the group bearing the same totem. This organisation is very ancient; it existed in Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest, and the French found it in the eighteenth century among the Redskins of Canada. The Hurons, Charlevoix tells us, were divided into three clans: the wolf, the tortoise, and the bear.[889] The totem, or emblem of the clan, served to sign treaties.[890] This is a general fact, and the subdivision of the tribe into clans or gentes is observed among the Tinneh Indians, the Choctaws, the Iroquois, the Omahas, the Indians of Columbia, etc., etc. Each clan forms one large family, inhabiting sometimes a common house, as do still the Indians of the Pueblos, as did the Iroquois at the time they were first discovered, and as did the Mexicans at the epoch of the Spanish conquest. The “long houses” of the Iroquois were buildings a hundred feet in length. A large corridor, closed at the two extremities by a door, traversed its entire length. To the right and left of this central corridor, and opening on it, were stalls, or niches, each serving as the apartment of a family. The number of these families varied from five to twenty.[891]
The members of a Redskin clan had common rights and duties. When a man died, any personal objects he might possess were deposited in his tomb, for they might be useful to him in the future life. The remaining property of the deceased belonged principally to the clan, or the gentiles; his near relatives, however, were considered first. Thus, among the Iroquois, the widow, the children, and the maternal uncles claimed the largest part, while a very small portion of the heritage came to the brothers. The general principle was that the property should remain in the clan. In the present day the old customs are modified, and with the Iroquois, the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Crows, etc., there is no longer any gentile heritage; all passes to the children.[892]
The political organisation was, or still is, republican. The members of a Redskin clan have the right to elect and to depose the chief of the community, and the liberty to adopt strangers. They are united by a strict solidarity, and have a mutual duty to help and to avenge each other. And lastly they have their council and their sepulture in common.[893]
But the most rigorous obligation for the members of the same clan is that of not marrying in it. To take a wife having the same totem is considered as a most culpable act; it is a crime sometimes punished by death.[894] The Iroquois law regulating marriages recalls, in a certain degree, that which takes place among the Kamilaroi of Australia. Thus an Iroquois of the Seneca tribe and of the Wolf clan must not marry a woman belonging, not only to his own clan, but to all the clans of the same name in the five other tribes of the Iroquois. On the other hand, he is perfectly free to marry in any of the seven other clans of his own Seneca tribe.[895] In short, an Iroquois may be endogamous in the tribe, but he must be exogamous from the point of view of the clan or clans.
The motive of the prohibition of marriage within the clan is always the supposed relationship. Thus the law of the Tinneh Indians forbids a man of the Chitsang clan to marry a woman of the same clan because that woman is his sister.[896]
The children always belong to the gens, or clan, of their mother.
These rules vary more or less from tribe to tribe, except the prohibition of marriage within the clan, which is strict and general. Thus, among the Omahas, a man may take a wife in another tribe, even if this woman belongs to a clan of the same name as his own; but he cannot marry within his own clan, because all the women of this clan are reputed to be his relations—sisters, aunts, nieces, daughters, etc. We shall see presently to what women these various appellations, which among the Redskins have a much wider sense than with us, are applied.[897]
These customs, or very analogous ones, were in force with a great number of American tribes. At the present day the Indians of the Moqui Pueblos still live in their common habitations, as at the time of the conquest, and they are divided into nine clans.[898]
In the Pueblo of Orayba the relatives of a married woman who dies take her property and her children, only leaving to the husband his horse, his clothes, and his weapons;[899] for by marrying the woman does not cease to belong to her original clan. Among the Pipiles of Salvador a genealogical tree with seven branches was painted on the wall of the common house, and save in the case of a great service rendered to the clan, a man could not intermarry with any persons related up to the degree indicated by the genealogical tree.[900] In reality, this people had got beyond familial confusion, or of purely totemic relationship, but the principle regulating conjugal unions had not yet changed. In Yucatan marriage between persons of the same name—that is to say, of the same clan—entailed the penalty of being considered as a renegade.[901] The savage Abipones were also exogamous, according to Dobritzhoffer. This rule naturally gives way in proportion as civilisation develops. The Nahuas still prohibited marriage between consanguineous relatives; but at Nicaragua the prohibition only applied to relatives of the first degree.[902]
We have previously seen, in describing the family amongst the animals, that it is habitually maternal; it is around the female that the young group themselves. As for the male, if he does not abandon the family, he exercises no other function but that of chief of the band. It must surely have been thus that the first human hordes were formed, and when man became intelligent enough to take note of filiation, it was uterine parenthood alone that he considered worthy of account. The primitive family was maternal, for in the confusion of sexual unions paternal filiation would have been difficult to determine; no importance was therefore attached to it in early times, and the father was not looked upon as the parent of his children.
We shall find the maternal family, or at least traces of it, in many countries, but it is especially among the Indians of North America that it has been the best preserved and the best studied. In the eighteenth century it was already remarked by Charlevoix, Lafitau, and Lahontan,[903] that the Redskins always bear the name of their mother, and that it is through a man’s sister that his name is transmitted to descendants. The American clan is based on uterine filiation; it comprehends all the descendants, in the female line of an ancestral mother, real or hypothetical. It is therefore exactly the contrary of the agnatic gens of the Greco-Roman world.
The Redskin clan is composed of all the families reputed to be related to each other; it is a little republic having the right to the service of all the women for the cultivation of the soil, and of all the men for the chase, war, and vendettas. It is to the woman that the wigwam or family dwelling belongs, as well as all the objects possessed by the family, and the whole is transmitted by heritage, not to the son, but to the eldest daughter or to the nearest maternal relative,[904] sometimes to the brother of the deceased woman. Nevertheless, this heritage must be understood in the sense of a simple usufruct. It was the maternal clan in reality who was the proprietor, and none of the members of the community could seriously alienate the social property. The husband alone, in most of the tribes, had no right over the goods or over the children; they all remained in the maternal clan;[905] it was maternal filiation which regulated the name, the rank, and the hereditary rights in the clan.[906] A sort of communism reigned there. All the provisions, whether they were the produce of the soil, of the chase, or of fishing, were placed in public storehouses, under the control of an aged matron; and if it ever happened that a family had exhausted its provisions, another family immediately came to its aid.[907]
But maternal filiation was, or is, in force even where the clans did not live in common houses, as we find it still among the Mohicans, the Delawares, the Narrangasetts, the Pequots, the Wyandots, the Missouris, the Minnitaris, the Crows, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees, etc.
With the Iroquois and the Hurons, the father, says Charlevoix, was almost a stranger to his children. “Among the Hurons,” continues the same observer, “dignity and succession are inherited through the women. It is the son of the sister who succeeds, and in default of him the next relative in the female line.”[908]
“With these peoples,” says Lafitau, “marriages are arranged in such a way that the husband and wife do not leave their own family to establish a family and a cabin independently. Each one remains at home, and the children born of these marriages belong to the families that have produced them, and are counted as members of the family and cabin of the mother, and not at all as belonging to those of the father. The possessions of the husband do not go to his wife’s cabin, to which he is himself a stranger; and in his wife’s cabin the daughters are heirs in preference to the males, who have nothing there but mere subsistence.”[909]
“Besides this,” continues Lafitau, “the wife’s cabin has rights over the product of the husband’s, hunting; all of this must be contributed during the first year, and a half only afterwards.”[910]
The mothers negotiated the marriages, and naturally did so without consulting the interested parties. When the affair was once settled, presents had to be made to the gentile relatives of the bride. It was the care of these relatives, in case of conjugal dissensions between the married pair, to attempt a reconciliation and to prevent a divorce.[911] At the present time, among the Santi-Dakotas, if a wife is ill-treated by her husband, the mother-in-law has the right to take back her daughter; the husband’s power must yield to hers.[912] Does the institution of filiation by women, or the maternal family, entail, as some have pretended, the régime of the matriarchate? North America being par excellence the country of exogamy and of the maternal family, the theorists of the primitive matriarchate have often drawn arguments from thence which it is interesting to weigh.
At the epoch during which the Seneca-Iroquois still lived in their “long houses,” it seems that the influence of the women in the community was very great. The missionary, Arthur Wright, wrote in 1873:—“It was the custom for the women to govern the house. The provisions were in common; but woe to the unfortunate husband or lover too idle or clumsy to bring home from the chase a sufficient booty. Whatever the number of his children or the value of the goods he possessed in the house, he might be ordered at any moment to take up his blanket and pack off.” After that, unless he obtained the intercession of some aunt or grandmother, he was forced to obey, return to his own clan, or contract an alliance elsewhere. “The women were the chief power in the clans, and they did not hesitate, when necessary, to depose a chief, and make him re-enter the ranks of simple warriors. The election of the chiefs always depended on them.”[913]
Among the Wyandots there is in every clan a council composed of four women elected by the female chiefs of the family. These four women choose a chief of the clan from among the men; then the totem of the clan is painted on the face of this chief. The council of the tribe is formed by an assemblage of the clan councils; four-fifths of it, therefore, consist of women. The sachem, or chief of the tribe, is chosen by the chiefs of the clans.[914]
Charlevoix relates that in 1721 the Natchez Indians were governed by a very despotic chief, the Sun, who was succeeded by the son of his nearest of kin. This was the female chief, and she had, like the Sun, the power of life and death over the people. At the death of the female chief in 1721, her husband, not belonging to the family of the Sun, was strangled by her son, according to custom, and that without prejudice to other human sacrifices.[915] The ancient Spanish chroniclers also speak of the submission of the husbands to their wives in Nicaragua; they seem to have been treated as servants (Herrera, Audogoya).
Lastly, among the Redskins the matrons had the right to baptise the children—that is to say, to make them enter either the maternal or the paternal clan.[916]
These facts are curious. They prove, indeed, that with the Redskins the women enjoyed a notable influence, especially in ancient times. With the Seneca-Iroquois they could expel the incapable hunter; but this was evidently by their title of housekeepers of the clan. Among the Wyandots, they figured numerously in the council; but nevertheless, the supreme chief was a man. As for the woman-chief of the Natchez Indians, we find an equivalent of it in certain little despotic monarchies of black Africa. Among the Ashantees, and in Darfour, etc., the princesses dominate their husbands or their lovers by the prestige of royalty. Nothing is more natural than that a plebeian husband should be strangled on the tomb of his wife with other human victims, when we consider the prevailing ideas of future life and the absolute servility of the subject in primitive monarchical states. In fact, the power of women among the Redskins was more apparent than real. Charlevoix himself declares that their domination is fictitious,[917] “that they are, in domestic life, the slaves of their husband,” that the men hold them in profound contempt, and that, amongst themselves, the epithet of “woman” is a cutting insult.
Important affairs were kept secret from them;[918] polygamy was habitually permitted to the men, but polyandry was nearly always prohibited to the women. In fact, among the Redskins the woman is the slave of her husband, and the latter thinks so slightly of her, that frequently the men live conjugally for years without communicating with their wives otherwise than by signs, as owing to exogamous marriage they speak different languages.[919] The authority that the husbands concede to their wives in certain tribes is entirely domestic; it is a household royalty.
Thus, with the Selisches, the cabins containing the provisions are confided to the women, and the husband himself can take nothing without their permission.[920] The husband or the son commands in the woods and on the prairie; but in the interior of the wigwam it is the most aged woman or the mother who governs and assigns to each one his place.[921]
These customs and the marriages by servitude have led several observers to attribute to the women a considerable authority which they do not really possess. In fact, they are nearly always purchased, and are very submissive. The maternal family and the matriarchate are very different things. The first is common; the second is very rare, if indeed it has ever existed. The Australians, who have the maternal family, none the less treat their wives as we should not dare to treat our domestic animals. And again, in order that filiation by the female side should give women a notable social influence, it is necessary that society should be very civilised, that there should be exchangeable values, and that women should become rich by inheritance. Then they are in a position to exercise the power that fortune gives in every country. But among the Redskins private property as yet hardly existed; the clans preserved the prior claim; personal property had not a great value; there were no domestic animals; it was difficult for any individual, man or woman, to become rich. Lastly, the chief occupations, those which were reputed noble, those also on which the existence of the tribes depended, were the chase and war; now the women took no part in these. They have not therefore been able to exercise a dominant influence, even in the tribes where they were treated with relative mildness. Among the Redskins in general, all the painful labours fall to the women, except the fabrication of arms. It is she who takes care of the home, who cooks, prepares the skins and the furs, gathers the wild rice, digs, sows and reaps the maize and the vegetables, dries the meat and the roots for the winter-provision, makes the clothes and the necklaces, etc. She even works at the construction of bark canoes, but in this, man comes to her aid. With that exception, he confines himself to hunting and fighting, smoking, eating, drinking, and sleeping. In his eyes work is a disgrace.[922] Such are the customs of living Redskins. Were they different last century? Not at all, if we may believe the authorities even who are invoked by the modern theorists of the American matriarchate. Charlevoix tells us that the Huron husbands prostituted their daughters and their wives for money,[923] that the Sioux cut off the noses of their unfaithful wives and scalped them,[924] and that all the hard work was left to the women, the men glorying in their idleness.[925] Lafitau enumerates, with still greater detail, the many and painful occupations of the women,[926] and he narrates the story of a husband who burnt his adulterous wife at a slow fire.[927] It is not then amongst the Redskins that we can find the matriarchate. Their familial system is none the less very curious, especially if we compare it with that of the Australians.
The familial clan of the Australians and of the Redskins enables us to retrace the origin of the ideas of kinship. Nothing similar seems to exist among the animals. In the best endowed species, the parents, especially the females, have an instinctive love of their young, but only as long as they are young. After that period they no longer recognise them, and often even drive them away.
Man, who has certainly begun his existence in the same way as the animals, has early attained, not to ideas of precise filiation, but to a vague idea of consanguinity between all the members of his horde. In these little primitive groups, no distinction has at first been made between real and fictitious kinship. All the men of the same clan have been brothers, all the women have been sisters, and by the help of an inveterate habit of exogamy, a gross morality has been formed, which condemned social incest. But as the life of the clan was, before all things, communal, while marriages within the clan were prohibited, it was decided that the clans of the same name—that is, those who had sprung one from the other—should be united by a sort of social marriage, all the women of the one being common to all the men of the other. Then, in the course of time, the instinct of individual appropriation having undermined the primitive community, the women were distributed amongst the men; they formed families which were often singular ones, and of which I shall have to speak again. There was no longer promiscuity from clan to clan, but the wife was to be taken from an allied clan. The first filiation which was established was surely maternal filiation: primitive conjugal confusion would not permit of any other. But at length, when the family became more or less instituted, the relations could be classified, and the degrees of consanguinity distinguished.
It was not without difficulty that man succeeded so far. A long period of time was required to disentangle the skein of family relationships; and fictitious kinship continued to be confounded with real kinship for many ages. Change came only by a slow evolution, which we will now proceed to study.