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Updated: May 4, 2025
When it is found that any two people have made an incestuous marriage, that is to say a marriage within the exogamous group of the kur, or clan, the parties at fault are taken before the lyngdoh by their clansmen, who request him to sacrifice in order to ward off the injurious effects of the sang, or taboo, of such a connection from the kinsfolk.
But at this point historical science tails off into mere guesswork. We reach relatively firm ground, on the other hand, when we pass on to consider the social organization of such exogamous and totemic peoples as the natives of Australia. The only trouble here is that the subject is too vast and complicated to permit of a handling at once summary and simple.
Each section or tribe is divided into clans and sub-clans; these are strictly exogamous. To marry within the clan is the greatest sin a Khasi can commit. This would explain the strict reckoning of descent through the mothers. The Khasi clan grew from the family.
The northeastern tribes have many food taboos, which, however, relate not to the totemic clans but to the exogamous subclasses. +453+. Abstention from killing and eating the totem holds, as a rule, in the Torres Straits islands, while in New Guinea the custom varies the totem is eaten by some tribes, not eaten by others.
In totemic organizations, when the totem is inherited, a division into two exogamous groups makes marriage of brother to sister impossible, since all the children of one mother are in the same group; and if there are four such groups and children are assigned to a group different from that of the father and that of the mother, marriage between parent and child is impossible.
Some adjacent tribes eat them only at a pinch, others refrain from them. The clans of the Narrinyeri are mostly localized, and the clan-names are not now those of the totems; the totems are eaten. The Kurnai show the greatest divergence from the ordinary type they have neither totemic clans nor exogamous classes; their rule of exogamy relates to districts.
I have, again, refrained from pointing out that sometimes there are exogamous divisions some would call them moieties to distinguish them from phratries which have no clans grouped under them, and, on the other hand, have themselves little or no resemblance to totemic clans. These, and ever so many other exceptional cases, I have simply passed by.
Seeing what a miserable remnant the Veddas are, I cannot but believe that we have here the case of a formerly exogamous people, groups of which have been forced to marry-in, simply because the alternative was not to marry at all. Of course, it is possible to argue that in so doing they merely reverted to what was once everywhere the primeval condition of man.
Suppose there were a village composed entirely of McIntyres and McIntoshes, and suppose that fashion compelled every McIntyre to marry a McIntosh, and every McIntosh a McIntyre, whilst to marry an outsider, say a McBean, was bad form for McIntyres and McIntoshes alike; then the two clans would be exogamous in respect to each other, whereas the village as a whole would be endogamous.
Again, for some unknown reason each is exogamous, so that matrimonial alliances are bound to take place across the river. Lastly, each has mother-right of the full-blown kind.
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