The Secret of the Totem

In this arrangement Mr. Howitt sees "a form of group marriage," while I see tribe-regulated license, certainly much less lawless than that of the more advanced Fijians or the Arunta. Mr. Howitt did not state that the Pirauru or Piraungaru unions are preceded (as marriage is) by any ceremony, unless the reading the banns, so to speak, by public proclamation among the Dieri is a ceremony.[51 - Howitt, J. A. I., August 1890, pp. 55-58.] Now he has discovered a ceremony as symbolic as our wedding ring (1904).

Little light, if any, is thrown on these customs of legalised license by philology. Mr. Howitt thought that Pirauru may be derived from Pira, "the moon," and Uru, "circular." The tribal feasts of license are held at the full moon, but I am not aware that, by the natives, people are deemed peculiarly "moonstruck," or lunatic, at that season. If Urabunna Piraungaru is linguistically connected with Dieri Pirauru, then both Piraungaru and Pirauru may mean "Full Mooners." "Thy full moons and thy festivals are an abomination to me!"[52 - What the Dieri call Pirauru (legalised paramour) the adjacent Kunan-daburi tribe call Dilpa Mali. In this tribe the individual husband or individual wife (that is, the real wife or husband) is styled Nubaia, in Dieri Noa, in Urabunna Nupa. Husband's brother, sister's husband, wife's sister, and brother's wife are all Nubaia Kodimali in Kunandabori, and are all Noa in Dieri. What Dilpa Mali (legalised paramour, or "accessory wife or husband") means in Kunandabori Mr. Howitt does not know. But he learns that Kodi Mali (applied to Pirauru) means "not Nubaia," that is, "not legal individual husband or wife." If we knew what Dilpa means in Dilpa Mali (legalised paramour of either sex), we should know more than we are apt to do in the present state of Australian philology.At Port Lincoln a man calls his own wife Yung Ara, that of his brother Karteti (Trans. Phil. Soc. Vic., v. 180). What do these words mean? —Report of Regents of Smithsonian Institute, 1883, pp. 804-806.]

Among the Dieri, "a woman becomes the Noa of a man most frequently by being betrothed to him when she is a mere infant… In certain cases she is given by the Great Council, as a reward for some meritorious act on his part." "None but the brave deserve the fair," and this is "individual marriage," though the woman who is wedded to one man may be legally allotted as Full Mooner, or Pirauru, to several. "The right of the Noa overrides that of the Pirauru. Thus a man cannot claim a woman who is Pirauru to him when her Noa is present in the camp, excepting by his consent." The husband generally yields, he shares equivalent privileges. "Such cases, however, are the frequent causes of jealousies and fights."[53 - Report of Regents of Smithsonian Institute, 1883, p. 807.]

This evidence does not seem, on the whole, to force upon us the conclusion that the Urabunna Piraungaru custom, or any of these customs, any more than the custom of polyandry, or of legalised incest in higher societies, is a survival of "group marriage" – all men of certain social grades being actual husbands of all women of the corresponding grades – while again that is a survival of gradeless promiscuity. We shall disprove that theory. Rather, the Piraungaru custom appears to be a limited concession to the taste, certainly a human taste, for partner-changing —which can only manifest itself where regular partnerships already exist. Jealousy among these tribes is in a state of modified abeyance: like nature herself, and second nature, where, among civilised peoples, things unnatural, or contrary to the horror of incest, have been systematically legalised.

I have so far given Mr. Howitt's account of Pirrauru (the name is now so written by him) among the Dieri, as it appeared in his works, prior to 1904. In that year he published his Native Tribes of South-East Australia, which contains additional details of essential importance (pp. 179-187). A woman becomes Tippa Malku,[54 - Tippa, in one tongue, Malku in another, denote the tassel which is a man's full dress suit.] or affianced,[55 - Mr. Howitt says that the pair are Tippa Malku "for the time being" (p. 179), though the association seems to be permanent. May girls Tippa Malku – "sealed" to a man – have relations with other men before their actual marriage, and with what men? We are not told, but a girl cannot be a Pirrauru before she is Tippa Malku. If Pirrauru "arises through the exchange by brothers of their wives" (p. 181), how can an unmarried man who has no wife become a Pirrauru? He does. When Pirrauru people are "re-allotted" (p. 182), does the old connection persist, or is it broken, or is it merely in being for the festive occasion? How does the jealousy of the Pirrauru, which is great, like the change? These questions, and many more, are asked by Mr. N. W. Thomas.] to one man only, before she becomes Pirrauru, or what Mr. Howitt calls a "group wife." A "group wife," I think, no woman becomes. She is never the Pirrauru of all the men who are Noa to her, that is, intermarriageable with her. She is merely later allotted, after a symbolic ceremony, as a Pirrauru to one or more men, who are Noa to her. At first, while a child, or at least while a maiden, she is betrothed (there are varieties of modes) to one individual male. She may ask her husband to let her take on another man as Pirrauru; "should he refuse to do this she must put up with it." If he consents, other men make two adjacent ridges of sand, and level them into one larger ridge, while a man, usually the selected lover, pours sand from the ridge over the upper part of his thighs, "buries the Pirrauru in the sand." (The phrase does not suggest that Pirrauru means "Full Mooners.") This is the Kandri ceremony, it is performed when men swop wives (exchange their Noa as Pirraurus), and also when "the whole of the marriageable or married people, even those who are already Pirrauru, are reallotted," a term which suggests the temporary character of the unions.

I am ready to allow that the Kandri ceremony, a symbol of recognised union, like our wedding ring, or the exchanged garlands of the Indian Ghandarva rite, constitutes, in a sense, marriage, or a qualified union recognised by public opinion. But it is a form of union which is arranged subsequent to the Tippa Malku ceremony of permanent betrothal and wedlock. Moreover, it is, without a shadow of doubt, subsequent in time and in evolution to the "specialising" of one woman to one man in the Tippa Malku arrangement. That arrangement is demonstrably more primitive than Pirrauru, for Pirrauru is unthinkable, except as a later (and isolated) custom in modification of Tippa Malku.

This can easily be proved. On Mr. Howitt's theory, "group marriage" (I prefer to say "status marriage") came next after promiscuity. All persons legally intermarriageable (Noa), under phratry law, were originally, he holds, ipso facto, married. Consequently the Kandri custom could not make them more married than they then actually were. In no conceivable way could it widen the area of their matrimonial comforts, unless it enabled them to enjoy partners who were not Noa, not legally intermarriageable with them. But this the Kandri ceremony does not do. All that it does is to permit certain persons who are already Tippa Malku (wedded) to each other, to acquire legal paramours in certain other wedded or Tippa Malku women, and in men either married or bachelors. Thus, except as a legalised modification of individual Tippa Malku, Pirrauru is impossible, and its existence is unthinkable.[56 - Will any one say, originally all Noa people were actual husbands and wives to each other? Then the Kandri ceremony and Pirrauru were devised to limit Tom, Dick, and Harry, &c., to Jane, Mary, and Susan, &c., all these men being Pirrauru to all these women, and vice versa. Next, Tippa Malku was devised, limiting Jane to Tom, but Pirrauru was retained, to modify that limitation. Anybody is welcome to this mode of making Pirrauru logically thinkable, without prior Tippa Malku: if he thinks that the arrangement is logically thinkable, which I do not.]

Pirrauru is a modification of marriage (Tippa Malku), Tippa Malku is not a modification of "group marriage." If it were, a Tippa Malku husband, "specialising" (as Mr. Howitt says) a woman to himself, would need to ask the leave of his fellows, who are Noa to his intended fiancée.[57 - Or his seniors would hare to ask it. But his kin could not possess the tight to betroth him before kinship was recognised, which, before marriage existed, it could not be.] The reverse is the case. A man cannot take his Pirrauru woman away from her Tippa Malku husband "unless by his consent, excepting at certain ceremonial times" – feasts, in fact, of license. Pirrauru secures the domestic peace, more or less, of the seniors, by providing the young men (who otherwise would be wifeless and desperate) with legalised lemans. By giving these Pirrauru "in commendation" to the young men, older men increase their property and social influence. What do the Tippa Malku husbands say to this arrangement?

As for "group" marriage, there is nothing of the kind; no group marries another group, the Pirrauru literally heap hot coals on each other if they suspect that their mate is taking another of the "group" as Pirrauru. The jealous, at feasts of license, are strangled (Nulina). The Rev. Otto Siebert, a missionary among the Dieri, praises Pirrauru for "its earnestness in regard to morality." One does not quite see that hiring out one's paramours, who are other men's wives, to a third set of men is earnestly moral, or that jealousy, checked by strangling in public, by hot coals in private, is edifying, but Pirrauru is not "group marriage." No pre-existing group is involved. Pirrauru may (if they like jealousy and hot coals) live together in a group, or the men and women may often live far remote from each other, and meet only at bean-feasts.

You may call Pirrauru a form of "marriage," if you like, but, as a later modification of a prior Tippa Malku wedlock, it cannot be cited as a proof of a yet more pristine status-marriage of all male to all female intermarriageable persons, which supposed state of affairs is called "group marriage."[58 - I have here had the advantage of using a MS. note by Mr. N. W. Thomas.]

If Pirrauru were primitive, it might be looked for among these southern and eastern tribes which, with the pristine social organisation of the Urabunna and their congeners, lack the more recent institutions of circumcision, subincision, totemic magic, possess the All Father belief, but not the belief in prehuman predecessors, or, at least, in their constant reincarnation. (This last is not a Dieri belief.) But among these primitive south-east tribes, Pirrauru is no more found than subincision. Nor is it found among the Arunta and the northern tribes. It is an isolated "sport" among the Dieri, Urabunna, and their congeners. Being thus isolated, Pirrauru cannot claim to be a necessary step in evolution from "group marriage" to "individual marriage." It may, however, though the point is uncertain, prevail, or have prevailed, "among all the tribes between Port Lincoln and the Yerkla-mining at Eucla," that is, wherever the Dieri and Urabunna phratry names, Matteri and Kararu, exist.[59 - Native Tribes of South-East Australia, p. 191.] Having identical phratry names (or one phratry name identical, as among the Kunandaburi), whether by borrowing or by original community of language and institutions: all these tribes southward to the sea from Lake Eyre may possess, or may have possessed, Pirrauru.