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Updated: May 4, 2025
The first and chief division in our tribe, as regards customary marriage law, is the partition of all tribes-folk into these 'phratries, or 'exogamous moieties. While in most Australian tribes the meanings of the names of phratries are lost, where the meanings are known they are usually names of animals Eagle, Hawk, and Crow, White Cockatoo and Black Cockatoo, and so forth.
They preserve strict maternal descent, and like the Khasis, the deities of all the clans are goddesses. The life and social habits of the people have been described by Kubary, a careful and sympathetic observer, for long resident in the island. The tribes are divided into exogamous clans, and intermarriage between any relations on the mother’s side is unlawful.
As the clans are strictly exogamous, a Khasi cannot take a wife from his own clan; to do this would entail the most disastrous religious, as well as social consequences.
His own theory, or rather his theory as understood by the present writer, may be stated thus. In the earliest times there were homogeneous groups, which became, totem kin. Let us say that, in a certain district, there were groups called woodpeckers, wolves, bears, suns, swine, each with its own little territory. These groups were exogamous, and derived the name through the mother.
The lowest tribes have produced languages of wonderfully intricate and delicate construction, and, supposing the process of constructing marriage regulations to have gone on during a very long period, modifications introduced from time to time, to meet conditions felt to be important, might conceivably result in such exogamous systems as are now found.
Totemic clans are not exogamous in Central Australia, the Melanesian Banks Islands, among the Nandi of East Africa, and the Bakuana of South Africa. +437+. In all such cases, however, the absence of records makes the history of the organizations uncertain we do not know whether or not one of the elements, totemism or exogamy, formerly existed and has yielded to disintegrating influences.
The choice of a wife is not restricted by the existence of any law or custom prescribing marriage without or within any defined group; that is to say, exogamous and endogamous groups do not exist. Incest is regarded very seriously, and the forbidden degrees of kinship are clearly defined. They are very similar to those recognised among ourselves.
Will anyone assert, then, that people among whom the exogamous prohibition arose were organised on the system of the patriarchal family, which permits the nature of kinship to be readily understood at a glance? It is even possible, as Mr.
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