Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Introduction
After Marx’s death, in rumaging through Marx’s manuscripts, Engels came upon Marx’s precis of Ancient Society – a book by progressive US scholar Lewis Henry Morgan and published in London 1877.
The precis was written between 1880-81 and contained Marx’s numerous remarks on Morgan as well as passages from other sources.
After reading the precis, Engels set out to write a special treatise – which he saw as fulfilling Marx’s will.
Working on the book, he used Marx’s precis, and some of Morgan’s factual material and conclusions.
He also made use of many and diverse data gleaned in his own studies of the history of Greece, Rome, Old Ireland, and the Ancient Germans.
It would, of course, become The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State – the first edition of which was published October 1884 in Hottingen-Zurich.
Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in just two months – beginning toward the end of March 1884 and completing it by the end of May.
It focuses on early human history, following the disintegration of the primitive community and the emergence of a class society based on private property.
Engels looks into the origin and essence of the state, and concludes it is bound to wither away leaving a classless society.
Engels: “Along with [the classes] the state will inevitably fall."
"Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquity, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.”
In 1890, having gathered new material on the history of primitive society, Engels set about preparing a new edition of his book.
He studied the latest books on the subject – including those of Russian historian Maxim Kovalevsky.
(The fourth edition, Stuttgart, 1892, was dedicated to Kovalevsky.)
As a result, he introduced a number of changes in his original text and also considerable insertions.
In 1894, Engels’s book appeared in Russian translation.
It was the first of Engels’s works published legally in Russia.
Lenin would later describe it as “one of the fundamental works of modern socialism.”
TO BE CONTINUED ...
ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Preface to the First Edition, 1884
The following chapters are, in a sense, the execution of a bequest.
No less a man than Karl Marx had made it one of his future tasks to present the results of Morgan’s researches in the light of the conclusions of his own — within certain limits, I may say our — materialistic examination of history, and thus to make clear their full significance.
For Morgan in his own way had discovered afresh in America the materialistic conception of history discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilization it had led him, in the main points, to the same conclusions as Marx.
And just as the professional economists in Germany were for years as busy in plagiarizing Capital as they were persistent in attempting to kill it by silence, so Morgan's Ancient Society [1] received precisely the same treatment from the spokesmen of “prehistoric” science in England.
My work can only provide a slight substitute for what my departed friend no longer had the time to do.
But I have the critical notes which he made to his extensive extracts from Morgan, and as far as possible I reproduce them here.
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.
This, again, is of a twofold character.
On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.
The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups.
However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval.
In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.
It is Morgan’s great merit that he has discovered and reconstructed in its main lines this prehistoric basis of our written history, and that in the kinship groups of the North American Indians he has found the key to the most important and hitherto insoluble riddles of earliest Greek, Roman and German history.
His book is not the work of a day.
For nearly forty years he wrestled with his material, until he was completely master of it.
But that also makes his book one of the few epoch-making works of our time.
In the following presentation, the reader will in general easily distinguish what comes from Morgan and what I have added.
In the historical sections on Greece and Rome I have not confined myself to Morgan’s evidence, but have added what was available to me.
The sections on the Celts and the Germans are in the main my work; Morgan had to rely here almost entirely on secondary sources, and for German conditions — apart from Tacitus — on the worthless and liberalistic falsifications of Mr. Freeman.
The treatment of the economic aspects, which in Morgan’s book was sufficient for his purpose but quite inadequate for mine, has been done afresh by myself.
And, finally, I am, of course, responsible for all the conclusions drawn, in so far as Morgan is not expressly cited.
Footnotes
[1] Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization, by Lewis H. Morgan, London, Macmillan & Co., 1877.
The book was printed in America and is peculiarly difficult to obtain in London.
The author died some years ago.
[For the purposes of this edition, all references to Ancient Society are from the Charles H. Kerr edition, Chicago. — Ed.]
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Preface to the First Edition, 1884
The following chapters are, in a sense, the execution of a bequest.
No less a man than Karl Marx had made it one of his future tasks to present the results of Morgan’s researches in the light of the conclusions of his own — within certain limits, I may say our — materialistic examination of history, and thus to make clear their full significance.
For Morgan in his own way had discovered afresh in America the materialistic conception of history discovered by Marx forty years ago, and in his comparison of barbarism and civilization it had led him, in the main points, to the same conclusions as Marx.
And just as the professional economists in Germany were for years as busy in plagiarizing Capital as they were persistent in attempting to kill it by silence, so Morgan's Ancient Society [1] received precisely the same treatment from the spokesmen of “prehistoric” science in England.
My work can only provide a slight substitute for what my departed friend no longer had the time to do.
But I have the critical notes which he made to his extensive extracts from Morgan, and as far as possible I reproduce them here.
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.
This, again, is of a twofold character.
On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.
The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups.
However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval.
In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.
It is Morgan’s great merit that he has discovered and reconstructed in its main lines this prehistoric basis of our written history, and that in the kinship groups of the North American Indians he has found the key to the most important and hitherto insoluble riddles of earliest Greek, Roman and German history.
His book is not the work of a day.
For nearly forty years he wrestled with his material, until he was completely master of it.
But that also makes his book one of the few epoch-making works of our time.
In the following presentation, the reader will in general easily distinguish what comes from Morgan and what I have added.
In the historical sections on Greece and Rome I have not confined myself to Morgan’s evidence, but have added what was available to me.
The sections on the Celts and the Germans are in the main my work; Morgan had to rely here almost entirely on secondary sources, and for German conditions — apart from Tacitus — on the worthless and liberalistic falsifications of Mr. Freeman.
The treatment of the economic aspects, which in Morgan’s book was sufficient for his purpose but quite inadequate for mine, has been done afresh by myself.
And, finally, I am, of course, responsible for all the conclusions drawn, in so far as Morgan is not expressly cited.
Footnotes
[1] Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization, by Lewis H. Morgan, London, Macmillan & Co., 1877.
The book was printed in America and is peculiarly difficult to obtain in London.
The author died some years ago.
[For the purposes of this edition, all references to Ancient Society are from the Charles H. Kerr edition, Chicago. — Ed.]
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Preface to the Fourth Edition, 1891
The earlier large editions of this work have been out of print now for almost half a year, and for some time the publisher has been asking me to prepare a new edition.
Until now, more urgent work kept me from doing so.
Since the appearance of the first edition seven years have elapsed, during which our knowledge of the primitive forms of the family has made important advances.
There was, therefore, plenty to do in the way of improvements and additions; all the more so as the proposed stereotyping of the present text will make any further alterations impossible for some time.
I have accordingly submitted the whole text to a careful revision and made a number of additions which, I hope, take due account of the present state of knowledge.
I also give in the course of this preface a short review of the development of the history of the family from Bachofen to Morgan; I do so chiefly because the chauvinistically inclined English anthropologists are still striving their utmost to kill by silence the revolution which Morgan’s discoveries have effected in our conception of primitive history, while they appropriate his results without the slightest compunction.
Elsewhere also the example of England is in some cases followed only too closely.
My work has been translated into a number of other languages.
First, Italian: L’origine delta famiglia, delta proprieta privata e dello stato, versions riveduta dall’autore, di Pasquale Martignetti, Benevento, 1885.
Then, Rumanian: Origina famdei, proprietatei private si a statului, traducere de Joan Nadeide, in the Yassy periodical Contemporanul, September, 1885, to May, 1886.
Further, Danish: Familjens, Privatejendommens og Statens Oprindelse, Dansk, af Forfattern gennemgaaet Udgave, besorget af Gerson Trier, Kobenhavn, 1888.
A French translation by Henri Rave, based on the present German edition, is on the press.
Before the beginning of the ’sixties, one cannot speak of a history of the family.
In this field, the science of history was still completely under the influence of the five books of Moses.
The patriarchal form of the family, which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified – minus its polygamy – with the bourgeois family of today, so that the family had really experienced no historical development at all; at most it was admitted that in primitive times there might have been a period of sexual promiscuity.
It is true that in addition to the monogamous form of the family, two other forms were known to exist – polygamy in the Orient and polyandry in India and Tibet; but these three forms could not be arranged in any historical order and merely appeared side by side without any connection.
That among some peoples of ancient history, as well as among some savages still alive today, descent was reckoned, not from the father, but from the mother, and that the female line was therefore regarded as alone valid; that among many peoples of the present day in every continent marriage is forbidden within certain large groups which at that time had not been closely studied – these facts were indeed known and fresh instances of them were continually being collected.
But nobody knew what to do with them, and even as late as E. B. Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind, etc. (1865) they are listed as mere “curious customs”, side by side with the prohibition among some savages against touching burning wood with an iron tool and similar religious mumbo-jumbo.
The history of the family dates from 1861, from the publication of Bachofen’s Mutterrecht. [Mother-right, matriarchate – Ed.]
In this work the author advances the following propositions:
(1) That originally man lived in a state of sexual promiscuity, to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term “hetaerism”;
(2) that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity;
(3) that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen’s conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy);
(4) that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period.
Bachofen finds the proofs of these assertions in innumerable passages of ancient classical literature, which he collected with immense industry.
According to him, the development from “hetaerism” to monogamy and from mother-right to father-right is accomplished, particularly among the Greeks, as the consequence of an advance in religious conceptions, introducing into the old hierarchy of the gods, representative of the old outlook, new divinities, representative of the new outlook, who push the former more and more into the background.
Thus, according to Bachofen, it is not the development of men’s actual conditions of life, but the religious reflection of these conditions inside their heads, which has brought about the historical changes in the social position of the sexes in relation to each other.
In accordance with this view, Bachofen interprets the Oresteia of Aschylus as the dramatic representation of the conflict between declining mother-right and the new father-right that arose and triumphed in the heroic age.
For the sake of her paramour, Ægisthus, Clytemnestra slays her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War; but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and herself, avenges his father’s murder by slaying his mother.
For this act he is pursued by the Furies, the demonic guardians of mother-right, according to which matricide is the gravest and most inexpiable crime.
But Apollo, who by the voice of his oracle had summoned Orestes to this deed, and Athena, who is called upon to give judgment – the two deities who here represent the new patriarchal order – take Orestes under their protection; Athena hears both sides.
The whole matter of the dispute is briefly summed up in the debate which now takes place between Orestes and the Furies.
Orestes contends that Clytemnestra has committed a double crime; she has slain her husband and thus she has also slain his father.
Why should the Furies pursue him, and not her, seeing that she is by far the more guilty?
The answer is striking: “She was not kin by blood to the man she slew.”
The murder of a man not related by blood, even if he be the husband of the murderess, is expiable and does not concern the Furies; their office is solely to punish murder between blood relations, and of such murders the most grave and the most inexpiable, according to mother-right, is matricide.
Apollo now comes forward in Orestes’ defense; Athena calls upon the Areopagites – the Athenian jurors – to vote; the votes for Orestes’ condemnation and for his acquittal are equal; Athena, as president, gives her vote for Orestes and acquits him.
Father-right has triumphed over mother-right, the “gods of young descent,” as the Furies themselves call them, have triumphed over the Furies; the latter then finally allow themselves to be persuaded to take up a new office in the service of the new order.
This new but undoubtedly correct interpretation of the Oresteia is one of the best and finest passages in the whole book, but it proves at the same time that Bachofen believes at least as much as Æschylus did in the Furies, Apollo, and Athena; for, at bottom, he believes that the overthrow of mother-right by father-right was a miracle wrought during the Greek heroic age by these divinities.
That such a conception, which makes religion the lever of world history, must finally end in pure mysticism, is clear.
It is therefore a tough and by no means always a grateful task to plow through Bachofen’s solid tome.
But all that does not lessen his importance as a pioneer.
He was the first to replace the vague phrases about some unknown primitive state of sexual promiscuity by proofs of the following facts: that abundant traces survive in old classical literature of a state prior to monogamy among the Greeks and Asiatics when not only did a man have sexual intercourse with several women, but a woman with several men, without offending against morality; that this custom did not disappear without leaving its traces in the limited surrender which was the price women had to pay for the right to monogamy; that therefore descent could originally be reckoned only in the female line, from mother to mother; that far into the period of monogamy, with its certain or at least acknowledged paternity, the female line was still alone recognized; and that the original position of the mothers, as the only certain parents of their children, secured for them, and thus for their whole sex, a higher social position than women have ever enjoyed since.
Bachofen did not put these statements as clearly as this, for he was hindered by his mysticism.
But he proved them; and in 1861 that was a real revolution.
Bachofen’s massive volume was written in German, the language of the nation which at that time interested itself less than any other in the prehistory of the modern family.
Consequently, he remained unknown.
His first successor in the same field appeared in 1865, without ever having heard of Bachofen.
This successor was J. F. McLennan, the exact opposite of his predecessor.
Instead of a mystic of genius, we have the dry-as-dust jurist; instead of the exuberant imagination of a poet, the plausible arguments of a barrister defending his brief.
McLennan finds among many savage, barbarian, and even civilized peoples of ancient and modern times a form of marriage in which the bridegroom, alone or with his friends, must carry off the bride from her relations by a show of force.
This custom must be the survival of an earlier custom when the men of one tribe did in fact carry off their wives by force from other tribes.
What was the origin of this “marriage by capture”?
So long as men could find enough women in their own tribe, there was no reason whatever for it.
We find, however, no less frequently that among undeveloped peoples there are certain groups (which in 1865 were still often identified with the tribes themselves) within which marriage is forbidden, so that the men are obliged to take their wives, and women their husbands, from outside the group; whereas among other peoples the custom is that the men of one group must take their wives only from within their own group.
McLennan calls the first peoples “exogamous” and the second “endogamous”; he then promptly proceeds to construct a rigid opposition between exogamous and endogamous “tribes.”
And although his own investigations into exogamy force the fact under his nose that in many, if not in most or even in all, cases, this opposition exists only in his own imagination, he nevertheless makes it the basis of his whole theory.
According to this theory, exogamous tribes can only obtain their wives from other tribes; and since in savagery there is a permanent state of war between tribe and tribe, these wives could only be obtained by capture.
McLennan then goes on to ask: Whence this custom of exogamy?
The conception of consanguinity and incest could not have anything to do with it, for these things only came much later.
But there was another common custom among savages – the custom of killing female children immediately after birth.
This would cause a surplus of men in each individual tribe, of which the inevitable and immediate consequence would be that several men possessed a wife in common: polyandry.
And this would have the further consequence that it would be known who was the mother of a child, but not who its father was: hence relationship only in the female line, with exclusion of the male line – mother-right.
And a second consequence of the scarcity of women within a tribe – a scarcity which polyandry mitigated, but did not remove – was precisely this systematic, forcible abduction of women from other tribes.
As exogamy and polyandry are referable to one and the same cause – a want of balance between the sexes – we are forced to regard all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous....
Therefore we must hold it to be beyond dispute that among exogamous races the first system of kinship was that which recognized blood-ties through mothers only.
(McLennan, Studies in Ancient History, 1886. Primitive Marriage, p. 124)
It is McLennan’s merit to have directed attention to the general occurrence and great importance of what he calls exogamy.
He did not by any means discover the existence of exogamous groups; still less did he understand them.
Besides the early, scattered notes of many observers (these were McLennan’s sources), Latham (Descriptive Ethnology, 1859) had given a detailed and accurate description of this institution among the Indian Magars, and had said that it was very widespread and occurred in all parts of the world – a passage which McLennan himself cites.
Morgan, in 1847, in his letters on the Iroquois (American Review) and in 1851 in The League of the Iroquois, had already demonstrated the existence of exogamous groups among this tribe and had given an accurate account of them; whereas McLennan, as we shall see, wrought greater confusion here with his legalistic mind than Bachofen wrought in the field of mother-right with his mystical fancies.
It is also a merit of McLennan that he recognized matrilineal descent as the earlier system, though he was here anticipated by Bachofen, as he later acknowledged.
But McLennan is not clear on this either; he always speaks of “kinship through females only,” and this term, which is correct for an earlier stage, he continually applies to later stages of development when descent and inheritance were indeed still traced exclusively through the female line, but when kinship on the male side was also recognized and expressed.
There you have the pedantic mind of the jurist, who fixes on a rigid legal term and goes on applying it unchanged when changed conditions have made it applicable no longer.
Apparently McLennan’s theory, plausible though it was, did not seem any too well established even to its author.
At any rate, he himself is struck by the fact that “it is observable that the form of capture is now most distinctly marked and impressive just among those races which have male kinship” (should be “descent in the male line”). (Ibid., p. 140)
And again: “It is a curious fact that nowhere now, that we are aware of, is infanticide a system where exogamy and the earliest form of kinship co-exist.” (Ibid., p. 146.)
Both these facts flatly contradict his method of explanation, and he can only meet them with new and still more complicated hypotheses.
Nevertheless, his theory found great applause and support in England.
McLennan was here generally regarded as the founder of the history of the family and the leading authority on the subject.
However many exceptions and variations might be found in individual cases, his opposition of exogamous and endogamous tribes continued to stand as the recognized foundation of the accepted view, and to act as blinders, obstructing any free survey of the field under investigation and so making any decisive advance impossible.
Against McLennan’s exaggerated reputation in England – and the English fashion is copied elsewhere – it becomes a duty to set down the fact that he has done more harm with his completely mistaken antithesis between exogamous and endogamous “tribes” than he has done good by his research.
Facts were now already coming to light in increasing number which did not fit into his neat framework.
McLennan knew only three forms of marriage: polygyny, polyandry and monogamy.
But once attention had been directed to the question, more and more proofs were found that there existed among undeveloped peoples forms of marriage in which a number of men possessed a number of women in common, and Lubbock (The Origin of Civilization, 1870) recognized this group marriage (“communal marriage”) as a historical fact.
Immediately afterwards, in 1871, Morgan came forward with new and in many ways decisive evidence.
He had convinced himself that the peculiar system of consanguinity in force among the Iroquois was common to all the aboriginal inhabitants of the United States and therefore extended over a whole continent, although it directly contradicted the degrees of relationship arising out of the system of marriage as actually practiced by these peoples.
He then induced the Federal government to collect information about the systems of consanguinity among the other peoples of the world and to send out for this purpose tables and lists of questions prepared by himself.
He discovered from the replies: (1) that the system of consanguinity of the American Indians was also in force among numerous peoples in Asia and, in a somewhat modified form, in Africa and Australia; (2) that its complete explanation was to be found in a form of group marriage which was just dying out in Hawaii and other Australasian islands; and (3) that side by side with this form of marriage a system of consanguinity was in force in the same islands which could only be explained through a still more primitive, now extinct, form of group marriage.
He published the collected evidence, together with the conclusions he drew from it, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity, 1871, and thus carried the debate on to an infinitely wider field.
By starting from the systems of consanguinity and reconstructing from them the corresponding forms of family, he opened a new line of research and extended our range of vision into the prehistory of man.
If this method proved to be sound, McLennan’s pretty theories would be completely demolished.
McLennan defended his theory in a new edition of Primitive Marriage (Studies in Ancient History, 1876).
Whilst he himself constructs a highly artificial history of the family out of pure hypotheses, he demands from Lubbock and Morgan not merely proofs for every one of their statements, but proofs as indisputably valid as if they were to be submitted in evidence in a Scottish court of law.
And this is the man who, from Tacitus’ report on the close relationship between maternal uncle and sister’s son among the Germans (Germania, Chap. 20), from Caesar’s report that the Britons in groups of ten or twelve possessed their wives in common, from all the other reports of classical authors on community of wives among barbarians, calmly draws the conclusion that all these peoples lived in a state of polyandry!
One might be listening to a prosecuting counsel who can allow himself every liberty in arguing his own case, but demands from defending counsel the most formal, legally valid proof for his every word.
He maintains that group marriage is pure imagination, and by so doing falls far behind Bachofen.
He declares that Morgan’s systems of consanguinity are mere codes of conventional politeness, the proof being that the Indians also address a stranger or a white man as brother or father.
One might as well say that the terms “father,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister” are mere meaningless forms of address because Catholic priests and abbesses are addressed as “father” and “mother,” and because monks and nuns, and even freemasons and members of English trade unions and associations at their full sessions are addressed as “brother” and “sister.”
In a word, McLennan’s defense was miserably feeble.
But on one point he had still not been assailed.
The opposition of exogamous and endogamous “tribes” on which his whole system rested not only remained unshaken, but was even universally acknowledged as the keystone of the whole history of the family.
McLennan’s attempt to explain this opposition might be inadequate and in contradiction with his own facts.
But the antithesis itself, the existence of two mutually exclusive types of self-sufficient and independent tribes, of which the one type took their wives from within the tribe, while the other type absolutely forbade it – that was sacred gospel.
Compare, for example, Giraud-Teulon’s Origines de la Famille (1874) and even Lubbock’s Origin of Civilization (fourth edition, 1882).
Here Morgan takes the field with his main work, Ancient Society (1877), the work that underlies the present study.
What Morgan had only dimly guessed in 1871 is now developed in full consciousness.
There is no antithesis between endogamy and exogamy; up to the present, the existence of exogamous “tribes” has not been demonstrated anywhere.
But at the time when group marriage still prevailed – and in all probability it prevailed everywhere at some time – the tribe was subdivided into a number of groups related by blood on the mother’s side, gentes, within which it was strictly forbidden to marry, so that the men of a gens, though they could take their wives from within the tribe and generally did so, were compelled to take them from outside their gens.
Thus while each gens was strictly exogamous, the tribe embracing all the gentes was no less endogamous.
Which finally disposed of the last remains of McLennan’s artificial constructions.
But Morgan did not rest here.
Through the gens of the American Indians, he was enabled to make his second great advance in his field of research.
In this gens, organized according to mother-right, he discovered the primitive form out of which had developed the later gens organized according to father-right, the gens as we find it among the ancient civilized peoples.
The Greek and Roman gens, the old riddle of all historians, now found its explanation in the Indian gens, and a new foundation was thus laid for the whole of primitive history.
This rediscovery of the primitive matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of the patriarchal gens of civilized peoples has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.
It enabled Morgan to outline for the first time a history of the family in which for the present, so far as the material now available permits, at least the classic stages of development in their main outlines are now determined.
That this opens a new epoch in the treatment of primitive history must be clear to everyone.
The matriarchal gens has become the pivot on which the whole science turns; since its discovery we know where to look and what to look for in our research, and how to arrange the results.
And, consequently, since Morgan’s book, progress in this field has been made at a far more rapid speed.
Anthropologists, even in England, now generally appreciate, or rather appropriate, Morgan’s discoveries.
But hardly one of them has the honesty to admit that it is to Morgan that we owe this revolution in our ideas.
In England they try to kill his book by silence, and dispose of its author with condescending praise for his earlier achievements; they niggle endlessly over details and remain obstinately silent about his really great discoveries.
The original edition of Ancient Society is out of print; in America there is no sale for such things; in England, it seems, the book was systematically suppressed, and the only edition of this epochmaking work still circulating in the book trade is – the German translation.
Why this reserve?
It is difficult not to see in it a conspiracy of silence; for politeness’ sake, our recognized anthropologists generally pack their writings with quotations and other tokens of camaraderie.
Is it, perhaps, because Morgan is an American, and for the English anthropologists it goes sorely against the grain that, despite their highly creditable industry in collecting material, they should be dependent for their general points of view in the arrangement and grouping of this material, for their ideas in fact, on two foreigners of genius, Bachofen and Morgan?
They might put up with the German – but the American?
Every Englishman turns patriotic when he comes up against an American, and of this I saw highly entertaining instances in the United States.
Moreover, McLennan was, so to speak, the officially appointed founder and leader of the English school of anthropology.
It was almost a principle of anthropological etiquette to speak of his artificially constructed historical series – child-murder, polygyny, marriage by capture, matriarchal family – in tones only of profoundest respect.
The slightest doubt in the existence of exogamous and endogamous “tribes” of absolute mutual exclusiveness was considered rank heresy.
Morgan had committed a kind of sacrilege in dissolving all these hallowed dogmas into thin air.
Into the bargain, he had done it in such a way that it only needed saying to carry immediate conviction; so that the McLennanites, who had hitherto been helplessly reeling to and fro between exogamy and endogamy, could only beat their brows and exclaim: “How could we be such fools as not to think of that for ourselves long ago?”
As if these crimes had not already left the official school with the option only of coldly ignoring him, Morgan filled the measure to overflowing by not merely criticizing civilization, the society of commodity production, the basic form of present-day society, in a manner reminiscent of Fourier, but also by speaking of a future transformation of this society in words which Karl Marx might have used.
He had therefore amply merited McLennan’s indignant reproach that “the historical method is antipathetical to Mr. Morgan’s mind,” and its echo as late as 1884 from Mr. Professor Giraud-Teulon of Geneva.
In 1874 (Origines de la Famille) this same gentleman was still groping helplessly in the maze of the McLennanite exogamy, from which Morgan had to come and rescue him!
Of the other advances which primitive anthropology owes to Morgan, I do not need to speak here; they are sufficiently discussed in the course of this study.
The fourteen years which have elapsed since the publication of his chief work have greatly enriched the material available for the study of the history of primitive human societies.
The anthropologists, travelers and primitive historians by profession have now been joined by the comparative jurists, who have contributed either new material or new points of view.
As a result, some of Morgan’s minor hypotheses have been shaken or even disproved.
But not one of the great leading ideas of his work has been ousted by this new material.
The order which he introduced into primitive history still holds in its main lines today.
It is, in fact, winning recognition to the same degree in which Morgan’s responsibility for the great advance is carefully concealed. [1]
Frederick Engels
London, June 16, 1891
Footnotes
[1] On the voyage back from New York in September, 1888, I met a former member of Congress for the district of Rochester, who had known Lewis Morgan.
Unfortunately, he could not tell me very much about him.
He said that Morgan had lived in Rochester as a private individual, occupied only with his studies.
His brother was a colonel, and had held a post in the War Department in Washington; it was through him that Morgan had managed to interest the Government in his researches and to get several of his works published at public expense.
While he was a member of Congress, my informant had also on more than one occasion used his influence on Morgan’s behalf.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
Preface to the Fourth Edition, 1891
The earlier large editions of this work have been out of print now for almost half a year, and for some time the publisher has been asking me to prepare a new edition.
Until now, more urgent work kept me from doing so.
Since the appearance of the first edition seven years have elapsed, during which our knowledge of the primitive forms of the family has made important advances.
There was, therefore, plenty to do in the way of improvements and additions; all the more so as the proposed stereotyping of the present text will make any further alterations impossible for some time.
I have accordingly submitted the whole text to a careful revision and made a number of additions which, I hope, take due account of the present state of knowledge.
I also give in the course of this preface a short review of the development of the history of the family from Bachofen to Morgan; I do so chiefly because the chauvinistically inclined English anthropologists are still striving their utmost to kill by silence the revolution which Morgan’s discoveries have effected in our conception of primitive history, while they appropriate his results without the slightest compunction.
Elsewhere also the example of England is in some cases followed only too closely.
My work has been translated into a number of other languages.
First, Italian: L’origine delta famiglia, delta proprieta privata e dello stato, versions riveduta dall’autore, di Pasquale Martignetti, Benevento, 1885.
Then, Rumanian: Origina famdei, proprietatei private si a statului, traducere de Joan Nadeide, in the Yassy periodical Contemporanul, September, 1885, to May, 1886.
Further, Danish: Familjens, Privatejendommens og Statens Oprindelse, Dansk, af Forfattern gennemgaaet Udgave, besorget af Gerson Trier, Kobenhavn, 1888.
A French translation by Henri Rave, based on the present German edition, is on the press.
Before the beginning of the ’sixties, one cannot speak of a history of the family.
In this field, the science of history was still completely under the influence of the five books of Moses.
The patriarchal form of the family, which was there described in greater detail than anywhere else, was not only assumed without question to be the oldest form, but it was also identified – minus its polygamy – with the bourgeois family of today, so that the family had really experienced no historical development at all; at most it was admitted that in primitive times there might have been a period of sexual promiscuity.
It is true that in addition to the monogamous form of the family, two other forms were known to exist – polygamy in the Orient and polyandry in India and Tibet; but these three forms could not be arranged in any historical order and merely appeared side by side without any connection.
That among some peoples of ancient history, as well as among some savages still alive today, descent was reckoned, not from the father, but from the mother, and that the female line was therefore regarded as alone valid; that among many peoples of the present day in every continent marriage is forbidden within certain large groups which at that time had not been closely studied – these facts were indeed known and fresh instances of them were continually being collected.
But nobody knew what to do with them, and even as late as E. B. Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind, etc. (1865) they are listed as mere “curious customs”, side by side with the prohibition among some savages against touching burning wood with an iron tool and similar religious mumbo-jumbo.
The history of the family dates from 1861, from the publication of Bachofen’s Mutterrecht. [Mother-right, matriarchate – Ed.]
In this work the author advances the following propositions:
(1) That originally man lived in a state of sexual promiscuity, to describe which Bachofen uses the mistaken term “hetaerism”;
(2) that such promiscuity excludes any certainty of paternity, and that descent could therefore be reckoned only in the female line, according to mother-right, and that this was originally the case amongst all the peoples of antiquity;
(3) that since women, as mothers, were the only parents of the younger generation that were known with certainty, they held a position of such high respect and honor that it became the foundation, in Bachofen’s conception, of a regular rule of women (gynaecocracy);
(4) that the transition to monogamy, where the woman belonged to one man exclusively, involved a violation of a primitive religious law (that is, actually a violation of the traditional right of the other men to this woman), and that in order to expiate this violation or to purchase indulgence for it the woman had to surrender herself for a limited period.
Bachofen finds the proofs of these assertions in innumerable passages of ancient classical literature, which he collected with immense industry.
According to him, the development from “hetaerism” to monogamy and from mother-right to father-right is accomplished, particularly among the Greeks, as the consequence of an advance in religious conceptions, introducing into the old hierarchy of the gods, representative of the old outlook, new divinities, representative of the new outlook, who push the former more and more into the background.
Thus, according to Bachofen, it is not the development of men’s actual conditions of life, but the religious reflection of these conditions inside their heads, which has brought about the historical changes in the social position of the sexes in relation to each other.
In accordance with this view, Bachofen interprets the Oresteia of Aschylus as the dramatic representation of the conflict between declining mother-right and the new father-right that arose and triumphed in the heroic age.
For the sake of her paramour, Ægisthus, Clytemnestra slays her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War; but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and herself, avenges his father’s murder by slaying his mother.
For this act he is pursued by the Furies, the demonic guardians of mother-right, according to which matricide is the gravest and most inexpiable crime.
But Apollo, who by the voice of his oracle had summoned Orestes to this deed, and Athena, who is called upon to give judgment – the two deities who here represent the new patriarchal order – take Orestes under their protection; Athena hears both sides.
The whole matter of the dispute is briefly summed up in the debate which now takes place between Orestes and the Furies.
Orestes contends that Clytemnestra has committed a double crime; she has slain her husband and thus she has also slain his father.
Why should the Furies pursue him, and not her, seeing that she is by far the more guilty?
The answer is striking: “She was not kin by blood to the man she slew.”
The murder of a man not related by blood, even if he be the husband of the murderess, is expiable and does not concern the Furies; their office is solely to punish murder between blood relations, and of such murders the most grave and the most inexpiable, according to mother-right, is matricide.
Apollo now comes forward in Orestes’ defense; Athena calls upon the Areopagites – the Athenian jurors – to vote; the votes for Orestes’ condemnation and for his acquittal are equal; Athena, as president, gives her vote for Orestes and acquits him.
Father-right has triumphed over mother-right, the “gods of young descent,” as the Furies themselves call them, have triumphed over the Furies; the latter then finally allow themselves to be persuaded to take up a new office in the service of the new order.
This new but undoubtedly correct interpretation of the Oresteia is one of the best and finest passages in the whole book, but it proves at the same time that Bachofen believes at least as much as Æschylus did in the Furies, Apollo, and Athena; for, at bottom, he believes that the overthrow of mother-right by father-right was a miracle wrought during the Greek heroic age by these divinities.
That such a conception, which makes religion the lever of world history, must finally end in pure mysticism, is clear.
It is therefore a tough and by no means always a grateful task to plow through Bachofen’s solid tome.
But all that does not lessen his importance as a pioneer.
He was the first to replace the vague phrases about some unknown primitive state of sexual promiscuity by proofs of the following facts: that abundant traces survive in old classical literature of a state prior to monogamy among the Greeks and Asiatics when not only did a man have sexual intercourse with several women, but a woman with several men, without offending against morality; that this custom did not disappear without leaving its traces in the limited surrender which was the price women had to pay for the right to monogamy; that therefore descent could originally be reckoned only in the female line, from mother to mother; that far into the period of monogamy, with its certain or at least acknowledged paternity, the female line was still alone recognized; and that the original position of the mothers, as the only certain parents of their children, secured for them, and thus for their whole sex, a higher social position than women have ever enjoyed since.
Bachofen did not put these statements as clearly as this, for he was hindered by his mysticism.
But he proved them; and in 1861 that was a real revolution.
Bachofen’s massive volume was written in German, the language of the nation which at that time interested itself less than any other in the prehistory of the modern family.
Consequently, he remained unknown.
His first successor in the same field appeared in 1865, without ever having heard of Bachofen.
This successor was J. F. McLennan, the exact opposite of his predecessor.
Instead of a mystic of genius, we have the dry-as-dust jurist; instead of the exuberant imagination of a poet, the plausible arguments of a barrister defending his brief.
McLennan finds among many savage, barbarian, and even civilized peoples of ancient and modern times a form of marriage in which the bridegroom, alone or with his friends, must carry off the bride from her relations by a show of force.
This custom must be the survival of an earlier custom when the men of one tribe did in fact carry off their wives by force from other tribes.
What was the origin of this “marriage by capture”?
So long as men could find enough women in their own tribe, there was no reason whatever for it.
We find, however, no less frequently that among undeveloped peoples there are certain groups (which in 1865 were still often identified with the tribes themselves) within which marriage is forbidden, so that the men are obliged to take their wives, and women their husbands, from outside the group; whereas among other peoples the custom is that the men of one group must take their wives only from within their own group.
McLennan calls the first peoples “exogamous” and the second “endogamous”; he then promptly proceeds to construct a rigid opposition between exogamous and endogamous “tribes.”
And although his own investigations into exogamy force the fact under his nose that in many, if not in most or even in all, cases, this opposition exists only in his own imagination, he nevertheless makes it the basis of his whole theory.
According to this theory, exogamous tribes can only obtain their wives from other tribes; and since in savagery there is a permanent state of war between tribe and tribe, these wives could only be obtained by capture.
McLennan then goes on to ask: Whence this custom of exogamy?
The conception of consanguinity and incest could not have anything to do with it, for these things only came much later.
But there was another common custom among savages – the custom of killing female children immediately after birth.
This would cause a surplus of men in each individual tribe, of which the inevitable and immediate consequence would be that several men possessed a wife in common: polyandry.
And this would have the further consequence that it would be known who was the mother of a child, but not who its father was: hence relationship only in the female line, with exclusion of the male line – mother-right.
And a second consequence of the scarcity of women within a tribe – a scarcity which polyandry mitigated, but did not remove – was precisely this systematic, forcible abduction of women from other tribes.
As exogamy and polyandry are referable to one and the same cause – a want of balance between the sexes – we are forced to regard all the exogamous races as having originally been polyandrous....
Therefore we must hold it to be beyond dispute that among exogamous races the first system of kinship was that which recognized blood-ties through mothers only.
(McLennan, Studies in Ancient History, 1886. Primitive Marriage, p. 124)
It is McLennan’s merit to have directed attention to the general occurrence and great importance of what he calls exogamy.
He did not by any means discover the existence of exogamous groups; still less did he understand them.
Besides the early, scattered notes of many observers (these were McLennan’s sources), Latham (Descriptive Ethnology, 1859) had given a detailed and accurate description of this institution among the Indian Magars, and had said that it was very widespread and occurred in all parts of the world – a passage which McLennan himself cites.
Morgan, in 1847, in his letters on the Iroquois (American Review) and in 1851 in The League of the Iroquois, had already demonstrated the existence of exogamous groups among this tribe and had given an accurate account of them; whereas McLennan, as we shall see, wrought greater confusion here with his legalistic mind than Bachofen wrought in the field of mother-right with his mystical fancies.
It is also a merit of McLennan that he recognized matrilineal descent as the earlier system, though he was here anticipated by Bachofen, as he later acknowledged.
But McLennan is not clear on this either; he always speaks of “kinship through females only,” and this term, which is correct for an earlier stage, he continually applies to later stages of development when descent and inheritance were indeed still traced exclusively through the female line, but when kinship on the male side was also recognized and expressed.
There you have the pedantic mind of the jurist, who fixes on a rigid legal term and goes on applying it unchanged when changed conditions have made it applicable no longer.
Apparently McLennan’s theory, plausible though it was, did not seem any too well established even to its author.
At any rate, he himself is struck by the fact that “it is observable that the form of capture is now most distinctly marked and impressive just among those races which have male kinship” (should be “descent in the male line”). (Ibid., p. 140)
And again: “It is a curious fact that nowhere now, that we are aware of, is infanticide a system where exogamy and the earliest form of kinship co-exist.” (Ibid., p. 146.)
Both these facts flatly contradict his method of explanation, and he can only meet them with new and still more complicated hypotheses.
Nevertheless, his theory found great applause and support in England.
McLennan was here generally regarded as the founder of the history of the family and the leading authority on the subject.
However many exceptions and variations might be found in individual cases, his opposition of exogamous and endogamous tribes continued to stand as the recognized foundation of the accepted view, and to act as blinders, obstructing any free survey of the field under investigation and so making any decisive advance impossible.
Against McLennan’s exaggerated reputation in England – and the English fashion is copied elsewhere – it becomes a duty to set down the fact that he has done more harm with his completely mistaken antithesis between exogamous and endogamous “tribes” than he has done good by his research.
Facts were now already coming to light in increasing number which did not fit into his neat framework.
McLennan knew only three forms of marriage: polygyny, polyandry and monogamy.
But once attention had been directed to the question, more and more proofs were found that there existed among undeveloped peoples forms of marriage in which a number of men possessed a number of women in common, and Lubbock (The Origin of Civilization, 1870) recognized this group marriage (“communal marriage”) as a historical fact.
Immediately afterwards, in 1871, Morgan came forward with new and in many ways decisive evidence.
He had convinced himself that the peculiar system of consanguinity in force among the Iroquois was common to all the aboriginal inhabitants of the United States and therefore extended over a whole continent, although it directly contradicted the degrees of relationship arising out of the system of marriage as actually practiced by these peoples.
He then induced the Federal government to collect information about the systems of consanguinity among the other peoples of the world and to send out for this purpose tables and lists of questions prepared by himself.
He discovered from the replies: (1) that the system of consanguinity of the American Indians was also in force among numerous peoples in Asia and, in a somewhat modified form, in Africa and Australia; (2) that its complete explanation was to be found in a form of group marriage which was just dying out in Hawaii and other Australasian islands; and (3) that side by side with this form of marriage a system of consanguinity was in force in the same islands which could only be explained through a still more primitive, now extinct, form of group marriage.
He published the collected evidence, together with the conclusions he drew from it, in his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity, 1871, and thus carried the debate on to an infinitely wider field.
By starting from the systems of consanguinity and reconstructing from them the corresponding forms of family, he opened a new line of research and extended our range of vision into the prehistory of man.
If this method proved to be sound, McLennan’s pretty theories would be completely demolished.
McLennan defended his theory in a new edition of Primitive Marriage (Studies in Ancient History, 1876).
Whilst he himself constructs a highly artificial history of the family out of pure hypotheses, he demands from Lubbock and Morgan not merely proofs for every one of their statements, but proofs as indisputably valid as if they were to be submitted in evidence in a Scottish court of law.
And this is the man who, from Tacitus’ report on the close relationship between maternal uncle and sister’s son among the Germans (Germania, Chap. 20), from Caesar’s report that the Britons in groups of ten or twelve possessed their wives in common, from all the other reports of classical authors on community of wives among barbarians, calmly draws the conclusion that all these peoples lived in a state of polyandry!
One might be listening to a prosecuting counsel who can allow himself every liberty in arguing his own case, but demands from defending counsel the most formal, legally valid proof for his every word.
He maintains that group marriage is pure imagination, and by so doing falls far behind Bachofen.
He declares that Morgan’s systems of consanguinity are mere codes of conventional politeness, the proof being that the Indians also address a stranger or a white man as brother or father.
One might as well say that the terms “father,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister” are mere meaningless forms of address because Catholic priests and abbesses are addressed as “father” and “mother,” and because monks and nuns, and even freemasons and members of English trade unions and associations at their full sessions are addressed as “brother” and “sister.”
In a word, McLennan’s defense was miserably feeble.
But on one point he had still not been assailed.
The opposition of exogamous and endogamous “tribes” on which his whole system rested not only remained unshaken, but was even universally acknowledged as the keystone of the whole history of the family.
McLennan’s attempt to explain this opposition might be inadequate and in contradiction with his own facts.
But the antithesis itself, the existence of two mutually exclusive types of self-sufficient and independent tribes, of which the one type took their wives from within the tribe, while the other type absolutely forbade it – that was sacred gospel.
Compare, for example, Giraud-Teulon’s Origines de la Famille (1874) and even Lubbock’s Origin of Civilization (fourth edition, 1882).
Here Morgan takes the field with his main work, Ancient Society (1877), the work that underlies the present study.
What Morgan had only dimly guessed in 1871 is now developed in full consciousness.
There is no antithesis between endogamy and exogamy; up to the present, the existence of exogamous “tribes” has not been demonstrated anywhere.
But at the time when group marriage still prevailed – and in all probability it prevailed everywhere at some time – the tribe was subdivided into a number of groups related by blood on the mother’s side, gentes, within which it was strictly forbidden to marry, so that the men of a gens, though they could take their wives from within the tribe and generally did so, were compelled to take them from outside their gens.
Thus while each gens was strictly exogamous, the tribe embracing all the gentes was no less endogamous.
Which finally disposed of the last remains of McLennan’s artificial constructions.
But Morgan did not rest here.
Through the gens of the American Indians, he was enabled to make his second great advance in his field of research.
In this gens, organized according to mother-right, he discovered the primitive form out of which had developed the later gens organized according to father-right, the gens as we find it among the ancient civilized peoples.
The Greek and Roman gens, the old riddle of all historians, now found its explanation in the Indian gens, and a new foundation was thus laid for the whole of primitive history.
This rediscovery of the primitive matriarchal gens as the earlier stage of the patriarchal gens of civilized peoples has the same importance for anthropology as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.
It enabled Morgan to outline for the first time a history of the family in which for the present, so far as the material now available permits, at least the classic stages of development in their main outlines are now determined.
That this opens a new epoch in the treatment of primitive history must be clear to everyone.
The matriarchal gens has become the pivot on which the whole science turns; since its discovery we know where to look and what to look for in our research, and how to arrange the results.
And, consequently, since Morgan’s book, progress in this field has been made at a far more rapid speed.
Anthropologists, even in England, now generally appreciate, or rather appropriate, Morgan’s discoveries.
But hardly one of them has the honesty to admit that it is to Morgan that we owe this revolution in our ideas.
In England they try to kill his book by silence, and dispose of its author with condescending praise for his earlier achievements; they niggle endlessly over details and remain obstinately silent about his really great discoveries.
The original edition of Ancient Society is out of print; in America there is no sale for such things; in England, it seems, the book was systematically suppressed, and the only edition of this epochmaking work still circulating in the book trade is – the German translation.
Why this reserve?
It is difficult not to see in it a conspiracy of silence; for politeness’ sake, our recognized anthropologists generally pack their writings with quotations and other tokens of camaraderie.
Is it, perhaps, because Morgan is an American, and for the English anthropologists it goes sorely against the grain that, despite their highly creditable industry in collecting material, they should be dependent for their general points of view in the arrangement and grouping of this material, for their ideas in fact, on two foreigners of genius, Bachofen and Morgan?
They might put up with the German – but the American?
Every Englishman turns patriotic when he comes up against an American, and of this I saw highly entertaining instances in the United States.
Moreover, McLennan was, so to speak, the officially appointed founder and leader of the English school of anthropology.
It was almost a principle of anthropological etiquette to speak of his artificially constructed historical series – child-murder, polygyny, marriage by capture, matriarchal family – in tones only of profoundest respect.
The slightest doubt in the existence of exogamous and endogamous “tribes” of absolute mutual exclusiveness was considered rank heresy.
Morgan had committed a kind of sacrilege in dissolving all these hallowed dogmas into thin air.
Into the bargain, he had done it in such a way that it only needed saying to carry immediate conviction; so that the McLennanites, who had hitherto been helplessly reeling to and fro between exogamy and endogamy, could only beat their brows and exclaim: “How could we be such fools as not to think of that for ourselves long ago?”
As if these crimes had not already left the official school with the option only of coldly ignoring him, Morgan filled the measure to overflowing by not merely criticizing civilization, the society of commodity production, the basic form of present-day society, in a manner reminiscent of Fourier, but also by speaking of a future transformation of this society in words which Karl Marx might have used.
He had therefore amply merited McLennan’s indignant reproach that “the historical method is antipathetical to Mr. Morgan’s mind,” and its echo as late as 1884 from Mr. Professor Giraud-Teulon of Geneva.
In 1874 (Origines de la Famille) this same gentleman was still groping helplessly in the maze of the McLennanite exogamy, from which Morgan had to come and rescue him!
Of the other advances which primitive anthropology owes to Morgan, I do not need to speak here; they are sufficiently discussed in the course of this study.
The fourteen years which have elapsed since the publication of his chief work have greatly enriched the material available for the study of the history of primitive human societies.
The anthropologists, travelers and primitive historians by profession have now been joined by the comparative jurists, who have contributed either new material or new points of view.
As a result, some of Morgan’s minor hypotheses have been shaken or even disproved.
But not one of the great leading ideas of his work has been ousted by this new material.
The order which he introduced into primitive history still holds in its main lines today.
It is, in fact, winning recognition to the same degree in which Morgan’s responsibility for the great advance is carefully concealed. [1]
Frederick Engels
London, June 16, 1891
Footnotes
[1] On the voyage back from New York in September, 1888, I met a former member of Congress for the district of Rochester, who had known Lewis Morgan.
Unfortunately, he could not tell me very much about him.
He said that Morgan had lived in Rochester as a private individual, occupied only with his studies.
His brother was a colonel, and had held a post in the War Department in Washington; it was through him that Morgan had managed to interest the Government in his researches and to get several of his works published at public expense.
While he was a member of Congress, my informant had also on more than one occasion used his influence on Morgan’s behalf.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
I. Stages of Prehistoric Culture
MORGAN is the first man who, with expert knowledge, has attempted to introduce a definite order into the history of primitive man; so long as no important additional material makes changes necessary, his classification will undoubtedly remain in force.
Of the three main epochs – savagery, barbarism, and civilization – he is concerned, of course, only with the first two and the transition to the third.
He divides both savagery and barbarism into lower, middle, and upper stages according to the progress made in the production of food; for, he says:
Upon their skill in this direction, the whole question of human supremacy on the earth depended.
Mankind are the only beings who may be said to have gained an absolute control over the production of food....
It is accordingly probable that the great epochs of human progress have been identified, more or less directly, with the enlargement of the sources of subsistence. [Morgan, op. cit., p. 19. -Ed.]
The development of the family takes a parallel course, but here the periods have not such striking marks of differentiation.
I. Savagery
(a.) LOWER STAGE.
Childhood of the human race.
Man still lived in his original habitat, in tropical or subtropical forests, and was partially at least a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among huge beasts of prey cannot be explained.
Fruit, nuts and roots served him for food.
The development of articulate speech is the main result of this period.
Of all the peoples known to history none was still at this primitive level.
Though this period may have lasted thousands of years, we have no direct evidence to prove its existence; but once the evolution of man from the animal kingdom is admitted, such a transitional stage must necessarily be assumed.[A]
(b.) MIDDLE STAGE.
Begins with the utilization of fish for food (including crabs, mussels, and other aquatic animals), and with the use of fire.
The two are complementary, since fish becomes edible only by the use of fire.
With this new source of nourishment, men now became independent of climate and locality; even as savages, they could, by following the rivers and coasts, spread over most of the earth.
Proof of these migrations is the distribution over every continent of the crudely worked, unsharpened flint tools of the earlier Stone Age, known as “palaeoliths,” all or most of which date from this period.
New environments, ceaseless exercise of his inventive faculty, and the ability to produce fire by friction, led man to discover new kinds of food: farinaceous roots and tubers, for instance, were baked in hot ashes or in ground ovens.
With the invention of the first weapons, club and spear, game could sometimes be added to the fare.
But the tribes which figure in books as living entirely, that is, exclusively, by hunting never existed in reality; the yield of the hunt was far too precarious.
At this stage, owing to the continual uncertainty of food supplies, cannibalism seems to have arisen, and was practiced from now onwards for a long time.
The Australian aborigines and many of the Polynesians are still in this middle stage of savagery today.{B}
(c.) UPPER STAGE.
Begins with the invention of the bow and arrow, whereby game became a regular source of food, and hunting a normal form of work.
Bow, string, and arrow already constitute a very complex instrument, whose invention implies long, accumulated experience and sharpened intelligence, and therefore knowledge of many other inventions as well.
We find, in fact, that the peoples acquainted with the bow and arrow but not yet with pottery (from which Morgan dates the transition to barbarism) are already making some beginnings towards settlement in villages and have gained some control over the production of means of subsistence; we find wooden vessels and utensils, finger-weaving (without looms) with filaments of bark; plaited baskets of bast or osier; sharpened (neolithic) stone tools.
With the discovery of fire and the stone ax, dug-out canoes now become common; beams and planks are also sometimes used for building houses.
We find all these advances, for instance, among the Indians of northwest America, who are acquainted with the bow and arrow but not with pottery.
The bow and arrow was for savagery what the iron sword was for barbarism and fire-arms for civilization – the decisive weapon.[C]
2. Barbarism
(a.) LOWER STAGE.
Dates from the introduction of pottery.
In many cases it has been proved, and in all it is probable, that the first pots originated from the habit of covering baskets or wooden vessels with clay to make them fireproof; in this way it was soon discovered that the clay mold answered the purpose without any inner vessel.
Thus far we have been able to follow a general line of development applicable to all peoples at a given period without distinction of place.
With the beginning of barbarism, however, we have reached a stage when the difference in the natural endowments of the two hemispheres of the earth comes into play.
The characteristic feature of the period of barbarism is the domestication and breeding of animals and the cultivation of plants.
Now, the Eastern Hemisphere, the so-called Old World, possessed nearly all the animals adaptable to domestication, and all the varieties of cultivable cereals except one; the Western Hemisphere, America, had no mammals that could be domesticated except the llama, which, moreover, was only found in one part of South America, and of all the cultivable cereals only one, though that was the best, namely, maize.
Owing to these differences in natural conditions, the population of each hemisphere now goes on its own way, and different landmarks divide the particular stages in each of the two cases.
(b.) MIDDLE STAGE.
Begins in the Eastern Hemisphere with domestication of animals; in the Western, with the cultivation, by means of irrigation, of plants for food, and with the use of adobe (sun-dried) bricks and stone for building.
We will begin with the Western Hemisphere, as here this stage was never superseded before the European conquest.
At the time when they were discovered, the Indians at the lower stage of barbarism (comprising all the tribes living east of the Mississippi) were already practicing some horticulture of maize, and possibly also of gourds, melons, and other garden plants, from which they obtained a very considerable part of their food.
They lived in wooden houses in villages protected by palisades.
The tribes in the northwest, particularly those in the region of the Columbia River, were still at the upper stage of savagery and acquainted neither with pottery nor with any form of horticulture.
The so-called Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, however, and the Mexicans, Central Americans, and Peruvians at the time of their conquest were at the middle stage of barbarism.
They lived in houses like fortresses, made of adobe brick or of stone, and cultivated maize and other plants, varying according to locality and climate, in artificially irrigated plots of ground, which supplied their main source of food; some animals even had also been domesticated – the turkey and other birds by the Mexicans, the llama by the Peruvians.
They could also work metals, but not iron; hence they were still unable to dispense with stone weapons and tools.
The Spanish conquest then cut short any further independent development.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
I. Stages of Prehistoric Culture
MORGAN is the first man who, with expert knowledge, has attempted to introduce a definite order into the history of primitive man; so long as no important additional material makes changes necessary, his classification will undoubtedly remain in force.
Of the three main epochs – savagery, barbarism, and civilization – he is concerned, of course, only with the first two and the transition to the third.
He divides both savagery and barbarism into lower, middle, and upper stages according to the progress made in the production of food; for, he says:
Upon their skill in this direction, the whole question of human supremacy on the earth depended.
Mankind are the only beings who may be said to have gained an absolute control over the production of food....
It is accordingly probable that the great epochs of human progress have been identified, more or less directly, with the enlargement of the sources of subsistence. [Morgan, op. cit., p. 19. -Ed.]
The development of the family takes a parallel course, but here the periods have not such striking marks of differentiation.
I. Savagery
(a.) LOWER STAGE.
Childhood of the human race.
Man still lived in his original habitat, in tropical or subtropical forests, and was partially at least a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among huge beasts of prey cannot be explained.
Fruit, nuts and roots served him for food.
The development of articulate speech is the main result of this period.
Of all the peoples known to history none was still at this primitive level.
Though this period may have lasted thousands of years, we have no direct evidence to prove its existence; but once the evolution of man from the animal kingdom is admitted, such a transitional stage must necessarily be assumed.[A]
(b.) MIDDLE STAGE.
Begins with the utilization of fish for food (including crabs, mussels, and other aquatic animals), and with the use of fire.
The two are complementary, since fish becomes edible only by the use of fire.
With this new source of nourishment, men now became independent of climate and locality; even as savages, they could, by following the rivers and coasts, spread over most of the earth.
Proof of these migrations is the distribution over every continent of the crudely worked, unsharpened flint tools of the earlier Stone Age, known as “palaeoliths,” all or most of which date from this period.
New environments, ceaseless exercise of his inventive faculty, and the ability to produce fire by friction, led man to discover new kinds of food: farinaceous roots and tubers, for instance, were baked in hot ashes or in ground ovens.
With the invention of the first weapons, club and spear, game could sometimes be added to the fare.
But the tribes which figure in books as living entirely, that is, exclusively, by hunting never existed in reality; the yield of the hunt was far too precarious.
At this stage, owing to the continual uncertainty of food supplies, cannibalism seems to have arisen, and was practiced from now onwards for a long time.
The Australian aborigines and many of the Polynesians are still in this middle stage of savagery today.{B}
(c.) UPPER STAGE.
Begins with the invention of the bow and arrow, whereby game became a regular source of food, and hunting a normal form of work.
Bow, string, and arrow already constitute a very complex instrument, whose invention implies long, accumulated experience and sharpened intelligence, and therefore knowledge of many other inventions as well.
We find, in fact, that the peoples acquainted with the bow and arrow but not yet with pottery (from which Morgan dates the transition to barbarism) are already making some beginnings towards settlement in villages and have gained some control over the production of means of subsistence; we find wooden vessels and utensils, finger-weaving (without looms) with filaments of bark; plaited baskets of bast or osier; sharpened (neolithic) stone tools.
With the discovery of fire and the stone ax, dug-out canoes now become common; beams and planks are also sometimes used for building houses.
We find all these advances, for instance, among the Indians of northwest America, who are acquainted with the bow and arrow but not with pottery.
The bow and arrow was for savagery what the iron sword was for barbarism and fire-arms for civilization – the decisive weapon.[C]
2. Barbarism
(a.) LOWER STAGE.
Dates from the introduction of pottery.
In many cases it has been proved, and in all it is probable, that the first pots originated from the habit of covering baskets or wooden vessels with clay to make them fireproof; in this way it was soon discovered that the clay mold answered the purpose without any inner vessel.
Thus far we have been able to follow a general line of development applicable to all peoples at a given period without distinction of place.
With the beginning of barbarism, however, we have reached a stage when the difference in the natural endowments of the two hemispheres of the earth comes into play.
The characteristic feature of the period of barbarism is the domestication and breeding of animals and the cultivation of plants.
Now, the Eastern Hemisphere, the so-called Old World, possessed nearly all the animals adaptable to domestication, and all the varieties of cultivable cereals except one; the Western Hemisphere, America, had no mammals that could be domesticated except the llama, which, moreover, was only found in one part of South America, and of all the cultivable cereals only one, though that was the best, namely, maize.
Owing to these differences in natural conditions, the population of each hemisphere now goes on its own way, and different landmarks divide the particular stages in each of the two cases.
(b.) MIDDLE STAGE.
Begins in the Eastern Hemisphere with domestication of animals; in the Western, with the cultivation, by means of irrigation, of plants for food, and with the use of adobe (sun-dried) bricks and stone for building.
We will begin with the Western Hemisphere, as here this stage was never superseded before the European conquest.
At the time when they were discovered, the Indians at the lower stage of barbarism (comprising all the tribes living east of the Mississippi) were already practicing some horticulture of maize, and possibly also of gourds, melons, and other garden plants, from which they obtained a very considerable part of their food.
They lived in wooden houses in villages protected by palisades.
The tribes in the northwest, particularly those in the region of the Columbia River, were still at the upper stage of savagery and acquainted neither with pottery nor with any form of horticulture.
The so-called Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, however, and the Mexicans, Central Americans, and Peruvians at the time of their conquest were at the middle stage of barbarism.
They lived in houses like fortresses, made of adobe brick or of stone, and cultivated maize and other plants, varying according to locality and climate, in artificially irrigated plots of ground, which supplied their main source of food; some animals even had also been domesticated – the turkey and other birds by the Mexicans, the llama by the Peruvians.
They could also work metals, but not iron; hence they were still unable to dispense with stone weapons and tools.
The Spanish conquest then cut short any further independent development.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
I. Stages of Prehistoric Culture
2. Barbarism
(b.) MIDDLE STAGE., continued ...
In the Eastern Hemisphere the middle stage of barbarism began with the domestication of animals providing milk and meat, but horticulture seems to have remained unknown far into this period.[D]
It was, apparently, the domestication and breeding of animals and the formation of herds of considerable size that led to the differentiation of the Aryans and Semites from the mass of barbarians.
The European and Asiatic Aryans still have the same names for cattle, but those for most of the cultivated plants are already different.
In suitable localities, the keeping of herds led to a pastoral life: the Semites lived upon the grassy plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, and the Aryans upon those of India and of the Oxus and Jaxartes, of the Don and the Dnieper.
It must have been on the borders of such pasture lands that animals were first domesticated.
To later generations, consequently, the pastoral tribes appear to have come from regions which, so far from being the cradle of mankind, were almost uninhabitable for their savage ancestors and even for man at the lower stages of barbarism.
But having once accustomed themselves to pastoral life in the grassy plains of the rivers, these barbarians of the middle period would never have dreamed of returning willingly to the native forests of their ancestors.
Even when they were forced further to the north and west, the Semites and Aryans could not move into the forest regions of western Asia and of Europe until by cultivation of grain they had made it possible to pasture and especially to winter their herds on this less favorable land.
It is more than probable that among these tribes the cultivation of grain originated from the need for cattle fodder and only later became important as a human food supply.
The plentiful supply of milk and meat and especially the beneficial effect of these foods on the growth of the children account perhaps for the superior development of the Aryan and Semitic races.
It is a fact that the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, who are reduced to an almost entirely vegetarian diet, have a smaller brain than the Indians at the lower stage of barbarism, who eat more meat and fish.[E]
In any case, cannibalism now gradually dies out, surviving only as a religious act or as a means of working magic, which is here almost the same thing.
(c.) UPPER STAGE.
Begins with the smelting of iron ore, and passes into civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use for literary records.
This stage (as we have seen, only the Eastern Hemisphere passed through it independently) is richer in advances in production than all the preceding stages together.
To it belong the Greeks of the heroic age, the tribes of Italy shortly before the foundation of Rome, the Germans of Tacitus and the Norsemen of the Viking age.[F]
Above all, we now first meet the iron plowshare drawn by cattle, which made large-scale agriculture, the cultivation of fields, possible, and thus created a practically unrestricted food supply in comparison with previous conditions.
This led to the clearance of forest land for tillage and pasture, which in turn was impossible on a large scale without the iron ax and the iron spade.
Population rapidly increased in number, and in small areas became dense.
Prior to field agriculture, conditions must have been very exceptional if they allowed half a million people to be united under a central organization; probably such a thing never occurred.
We find the upper stage of barbarism at its highest in the Homeric poems, particularly in the Iliad.
Fully developed iron tools, the bellows, the hand-mill, the potter’s wheel, the making of oil and wine, metal work developing almost into a fine art, the wagon and the war-chariot, ship-building with beams and planks, the beginnings of architecture as art, walled cities with towers and battlements, the Homeric epic and a complete mythology – these are the chief legacy brought by the Greeks from barbarism into civilization.
When we compare the descriptions which Caesar and even Tacitus give of the Germans, who stood at the beginning of the cultural stage from which the Homeric Greeks were just preparing to make the next advance, we realize how rich was the development of production within the upper stage of barbarism.
The sketch which I have given here, following Morgan, of the development of mankind through savagery and barbarism to the beginnings of civilization, is already rich enough in new features; what is more, they cannot be disputed, since they are drawn directly from the process of production.
Yet my sketch will seem flat and feeble compared with the picture to be unrolled at the end of our travels; only then will the transition from barbarism to civilization stand out in full light and in all its striking contrasts.
For the time being, Morgan’s division may be summarized thus:
Savagery – the period in which man’s appropriation of products in their natural state predominates; the products of human art are chiefly instruments which assist this appropriation.
Barbarism – the period during which man learns to breed domestic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing the supply of natural products by human activity.
Civilization – the period in which man learns a more advanced application of work to the products of nature, the period of industry proper and of art.
Editorial Footnotes
The intent of these footnotes are both to help the modern reader critically assess this work in face of recent scientific evidence and to show how effective Engels' dialectical method was that many of his conclusions remain true to this day.
The following chapters do not have editorial footnotes because they are not needed as much as they are in this chapter (and this editor is not as knowledgable on those other subjects!).
It should be noted that Engels predominant focus on European cultures is due to his lack of data on other cultures.
These notes were written by MIA volunteer Brian Baggins (July, 2000).
A While written in the late nineteenth century, these characteristics are descriptive of the first hominin genus: australopithecus who came into existence ~ 4 million years ago on the continent of Africa, and became extinct ~ 2 million years ago.
They primarily were dependent on fruits, roots, etc. but likely supplemented this as scavengers.
B This stage is a reasonable facsimile of homo erectus.
Collection of their own food was predominant, the use of fire is likely, they hunted animals to some extent, and most importantly these practices allowed for the migration of humanity: settling much of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
There are however two significant mistakes.
Australian Aborigines and Polynesians were not in a "middle stage of savagery”.
This was a false characterization used by Europeans to justify the colonization of those people.
Similarly, cannibalism is an accusation often made to justify exploitation, and its existence is extremely rare.
C This stage is descriptive of homo sapiens, i.e. modern human beings, who first emerged ~ 200,000 years ago, and who originated in Africa.
At around the same time, homo erectus went extinct.
D Current estimates are that domestication of animals occurred in 11,000 BCE, while agriculture began around 9,500 BCE.
E The theory that brain size correlates to intelligence was discredited by the end of the 19th century.
This theory was used to justify both gender and race inequities for over a century.
Modern theories about intelligence relating to physical characteristics, including size, are highly nuanced.
F This is inaccurate.
The Mesopotamian (3500-1000 B.C.E.), Egyptian (3000-500 B.C.E.), Harrapan (2500-1000 B.C.E.), & Chinese (2000 B.C.E. – 1800 C.E.) civilizations long preceded the Europeans in this stage: the Greeks were the first in Europe at around 500 B.C.E.
Further, societies throughout the western hemisphere (Mesoamerica) developed their own writing and metallurgy.
Morgan and Engels failed to recognize that the majority of humans on earth reached this final stage before European colonization.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
I. Stages of Prehistoric Culture
2. Barbarism
(b.) MIDDLE STAGE., continued ...
In the Eastern Hemisphere the middle stage of barbarism began with the domestication of animals providing milk and meat, but horticulture seems to have remained unknown far into this period.[D]
It was, apparently, the domestication and breeding of animals and the formation of herds of considerable size that led to the differentiation of the Aryans and Semites from the mass of barbarians.
The European and Asiatic Aryans still have the same names for cattle, but those for most of the cultivated plants are already different.
In suitable localities, the keeping of herds led to a pastoral life: the Semites lived upon the grassy plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, and the Aryans upon those of India and of the Oxus and Jaxartes, of the Don and the Dnieper.
It must have been on the borders of such pasture lands that animals were first domesticated.
To later generations, consequently, the pastoral tribes appear to have come from regions which, so far from being the cradle of mankind, were almost uninhabitable for their savage ancestors and even for man at the lower stages of barbarism.
But having once accustomed themselves to pastoral life in the grassy plains of the rivers, these barbarians of the middle period would never have dreamed of returning willingly to the native forests of their ancestors.
Even when they were forced further to the north and west, the Semites and Aryans could not move into the forest regions of western Asia and of Europe until by cultivation of grain they had made it possible to pasture and especially to winter their herds on this less favorable land.
It is more than probable that among these tribes the cultivation of grain originated from the need for cattle fodder and only later became important as a human food supply.
The plentiful supply of milk and meat and especially the beneficial effect of these foods on the growth of the children account perhaps for the superior development of the Aryan and Semitic races.
It is a fact that the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, who are reduced to an almost entirely vegetarian diet, have a smaller brain than the Indians at the lower stage of barbarism, who eat more meat and fish.[E]
In any case, cannibalism now gradually dies out, surviving only as a religious act or as a means of working magic, which is here almost the same thing.
(c.) UPPER STAGE.
Begins with the smelting of iron ore, and passes into civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use for literary records.
This stage (as we have seen, only the Eastern Hemisphere passed through it independently) is richer in advances in production than all the preceding stages together.
To it belong the Greeks of the heroic age, the tribes of Italy shortly before the foundation of Rome, the Germans of Tacitus and the Norsemen of the Viking age.[F]
Above all, we now first meet the iron plowshare drawn by cattle, which made large-scale agriculture, the cultivation of fields, possible, and thus created a practically unrestricted food supply in comparison with previous conditions.
This led to the clearance of forest land for tillage and pasture, which in turn was impossible on a large scale without the iron ax and the iron spade.
Population rapidly increased in number, and in small areas became dense.
Prior to field agriculture, conditions must have been very exceptional if they allowed half a million people to be united under a central organization; probably such a thing never occurred.
We find the upper stage of barbarism at its highest in the Homeric poems, particularly in the Iliad.
Fully developed iron tools, the bellows, the hand-mill, the potter’s wheel, the making of oil and wine, metal work developing almost into a fine art, the wagon and the war-chariot, ship-building with beams and planks, the beginnings of architecture as art, walled cities with towers and battlements, the Homeric epic and a complete mythology – these are the chief legacy brought by the Greeks from barbarism into civilization.
When we compare the descriptions which Caesar and even Tacitus give of the Germans, who stood at the beginning of the cultural stage from which the Homeric Greeks were just preparing to make the next advance, we realize how rich was the development of production within the upper stage of barbarism.
The sketch which I have given here, following Morgan, of the development of mankind through savagery and barbarism to the beginnings of civilization, is already rich enough in new features; what is more, they cannot be disputed, since they are drawn directly from the process of production.
Yet my sketch will seem flat and feeble compared with the picture to be unrolled at the end of our travels; only then will the transition from barbarism to civilization stand out in full light and in all its striking contrasts.
For the time being, Morgan’s division may be summarized thus:
Savagery – the period in which man’s appropriation of products in their natural state predominates; the products of human art are chiefly instruments which assist this appropriation.
Barbarism – the period during which man learns to breed domestic animals and to practice agriculture, and acquires methods of increasing the supply of natural products by human activity.
Civilization – the period in which man learns a more advanced application of work to the products of nature, the period of industry proper and of art.
Editorial Footnotes
The intent of these footnotes are both to help the modern reader critically assess this work in face of recent scientific evidence and to show how effective Engels' dialectical method was that many of his conclusions remain true to this day.
The following chapters do not have editorial footnotes because they are not needed as much as they are in this chapter (and this editor is not as knowledgable on those other subjects!).
It should be noted that Engels predominant focus on European cultures is due to his lack of data on other cultures.
These notes were written by MIA volunteer Brian Baggins (July, 2000).
A While written in the late nineteenth century, these characteristics are descriptive of the first hominin genus: australopithecus who came into existence ~ 4 million years ago on the continent of Africa, and became extinct ~ 2 million years ago.
They primarily were dependent on fruits, roots, etc. but likely supplemented this as scavengers.
B This stage is a reasonable facsimile of homo erectus.
Collection of their own food was predominant, the use of fire is likely, they hunted animals to some extent, and most importantly these practices allowed for the migration of humanity: settling much of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
There are however two significant mistakes.
Australian Aborigines and Polynesians were not in a "middle stage of savagery”.
This was a false characterization used by Europeans to justify the colonization of those people.
Similarly, cannibalism is an accusation often made to justify exploitation, and its existence is extremely rare.
C This stage is descriptive of homo sapiens, i.e. modern human beings, who first emerged ~ 200,000 years ago, and who originated in Africa.
At around the same time, homo erectus went extinct.
D Current estimates are that domestication of animals occurred in 11,000 BCE, while agriculture began around 9,500 BCE.
E The theory that brain size correlates to intelligence was discredited by the end of the 19th century.
This theory was used to justify both gender and race inequities for over a century.
Modern theories about intelligence relating to physical characteristics, including size, are highly nuanced.
F This is inaccurate.
The Mesopotamian (3500-1000 B.C.E.), Egyptian (3000-500 B.C.E.), Harrapan (2500-1000 B.C.E.), & Chinese (2000 B.C.E. – 1800 C.E.) civilizations long preceded the Europeans in this stage: the Greeks were the first in Europe at around 500 B.C.E.
Further, societies throughout the western hemisphere (Mesoamerica) developed their own writing and metallurgy.
Morgan and Engels failed to recognize that the majority of humans on earth reached this final stage before European colonization.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family
MORGAN, who spent a great part of his life among the Iroquois Indians – settled to this day in New York State – and was adopted into one of their tribes (the Senecas), found in use among them a system of consanguinity which was in contradiction to their actual family relationships.
There prevailed among them a form of monogamy easily terminable on both sides, which Morgan calls the “pairing family.”
The issue of the married pair was therefore known and recognized by everybody: there could be no doubt about whom to call father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister.
But these names were actually used quite differently.
The Iroquois calls not only his own children his sons and daughters, but also the children of his brothers; and they call him father.
The children of his sisters, however, he calls his nephews and nieces, and they call him their uncle.
The Iroquois woman, on the other hand, calls her sisters’ children, as well as her own, her sons and daughters, and they call her mother.
But her brothers’ children she calls her nephews and nieces, and she is known as their aunt.
Similarly, the children of brothers call one another brother and sister, and so do the children of sisters.
A woman's own children and the children of her brother, on the other hand, call one another cousins.
And these are not mere empty names, but expressions of actual conceptions of nearness and remoteness, of equality and difference in the degrees of consanguinity: these conceptions serve as the foundation of a fully elaborated system of consanguinity through which several hundred different relationships of one individual can be expressed.
What is more, this system is not only in full force among all American Indians (no exception has been found up to the present), but also retains its validity almost unchanged among the aborigines of India, the Dravidian tribes in the Deccan and the Gaura tribes in Hindustan.
To this day the Tamils of southern India and the Iroquois Seneca Indians in New York State still express more than two hundred degrees of consanguinity in the same manner.
And among these tribes of India, as among all the American Indians, the actual relationships arising out of the existing form of the family contradict the system of consanguinity.
How is this to be explained?
In view of the decisive part played by consanguinity in the social structure of all savage and barbarian peoples, the importance of a system so widespread cannot be dismissed with phrases.
When a system is general throughout America and also exists in Asia among peoples of a quite different race, when numerous instances of it are found with greater or less variation in every part of Africa and Australia, then that system has to be historically explained, not talked out of existence, as McLennan, for example, tried to do.
The names of father, child, brother, sister are no mere complimentary forms of address; they involve quite definite and very serious mutual obligations which together make up an essential part of the social constitution of the peoples in question.
The explanation was found.
In the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) there still existed in the first half of the nineteenth century a form of family in which the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces were exactly what is required by the American and old Indian system of consanguinity.
But now comes a strange thing.
Once again, the system of consanguinity in force in Hawaii did not correspond to the actual form of the Hawaiian family.
For according to the Hawaiian system of consanguinity all children of brothers and sisters are without exception brothers and sisters of one another and are considered to be the common children not only of their mother and her sisters or of their father and his brothers, but of all the brothers and sisters of both their parents without distinction.
While, therefore, the American system of consanguinity presupposes a more primitive form of the family which has disappeared in America, but still actually exists in Hawaii, the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the other hand, points to a still earlier form of the family which, though we can nowhere prove it to be still in existence, nevertheless must have existed; for otherwise the corresponding system of consanguinity could never have arisen.
The family [says Morgan] represents an active principle.
It is never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition....
Systems of consanguinity, on the contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically changed. [Morgan, op. cit., p. 444. – Ed.]
“And,” adds Marx, “the same is true of the political, juridical, religious, and philosophical systems in general.”
While the family undergoes living changes, the system of consanguinity ossifies; while the system survives by force of custom, the family outgrows it.
But just as Cuvier could deduce from the marsupial bone of an animal skeleton found near Paris that it belonged to a marsupial animal and that extinct marsupial animals once lived there, so with the same certainty we can deduce from the historical survival of a system of consanguinity that an extinct form of family once existed which corresponded to it.
The systems of consanguinity and the forms of the family we have just mentioned differ from those of today in the fact that every child has more than one father and mother.
In the American system of consanguinity, to which the Hawaiian family corresponds, brother and sister cannot be the father and mother of the same child; but the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the contrary, presupposes a family in which this was the rule.
Here we find ourselves among forms of family which directly contradict those hitherto generally assumed to be alone valid.
The traditional view recognizes only monogamy, with, in addition, polygamy on the part of individual men, and at the very most polyandry on the part of individual women; being the view of moralizing philistines, it conceals the fact that in practice these barriers raised by official society are quietly and calmly ignored.
The study of primitive history, however, reveals conditions where the men live in polygamy and their wives in polyandry at the same time, and their common children are therefore considered common to them all – and these conditions in their turn undergo a long series of changes before they finally end in monogamy.
The trend of these changes is to narrow more and more the circle of people comprised within the common bond of marriage, which was originally very wide, until at last it includes only the single pair, the dominant form of marriage today.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family
MORGAN, who spent a great part of his life among the Iroquois Indians – settled to this day in New York State – and was adopted into one of their tribes (the Senecas), found in use among them a system of consanguinity which was in contradiction to their actual family relationships.
There prevailed among them a form of monogamy easily terminable on both sides, which Morgan calls the “pairing family.”
The issue of the married pair was therefore known and recognized by everybody: there could be no doubt about whom to call father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister.
But these names were actually used quite differently.
The Iroquois calls not only his own children his sons and daughters, but also the children of his brothers; and they call him father.
The children of his sisters, however, he calls his nephews and nieces, and they call him their uncle.
The Iroquois woman, on the other hand, calls her sisters’ children, as well as her own, her sons and daughters, and they call her mother.
But her brothers’ children she calls her nephews and nieces, and she is known as their aunt.
Similarly, the children of brothers call one another brother and sister, and so do the children of sisters.
A woman's own children and the children of her brother, on the other hand, call one another cousins.
And these are not mere empty names, but expressions of actual conceptions of nearness and remoteness, of equality and difference in the degrees of consanguinity: these conceptions serve as the foundation of a fully elaborated system of consanguinity through which several hundred different relationships of one individual can be expressed.
What is more, this system is not only in full force among all American Indians (no exception has been found up to the present), but also retains its validity almost unchanged among the aborigines of India, the Dravidian tribes in the Deccan and the Gaura tribes in Hindustan.
To this day the Tamils of southern India and the Iroquois Seneca Indians in New York State still express more than two hundred degrees of consanguinity in the same manner.
And among these tribes of India, as among all the American Indians, the actual relationships arising out of the existing form of the family contradict the system of consanguinity.
How is this to be explained?
In view of the decisive part played by consanguinity in the social structure of all savage and barbarian peoples, the importance of a system so widespread cannot be dismissed with phrases.
When a system is general throughout America and also exists in Asia among peoples of a quite different race, when numerous instances of it are found with greater or less variation in every part of Africa and Australia, then that system has to be historically explained, not talked out of existence, as McLennan, for example, tried to do.
The names of father, child, brother, sister are no mere complimentary forms of address; they involve quite definite and very serious mutual obligations which together make up an essential part of the social constitution of the peoples in question.
The explanation was found.
In the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) there still existed in the first half of the nineteenth century a form of family in which the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces were exactly what is required by the American and old Indian system of consanguinity.
But now comes a strange thing.
Once again, the system of consanguinity in force in Hawaii did not correspond to the actual form of the Hawaiian family.
For according to the Hawaiian system of consanguinity all children of brothers and sisters are without exception brothers and sisters of one another and are considered to be the common children not only of their mother and her sisters or of their father and his brothers, but of all the brothers and sisters of both their parents without distinction.
While, therefore, the American system of consanguinity presupposes a more primitive form of the family which has disappeared in America, but still actually exists in Hawaii, the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the other hand, points to a still earlier form of the family which, though we can nowhere prove it to be still in existence, nevertheless must have existed; for otherwise the corresponding system of consanguinity could never have arisen.
The family [says Morgan] represents an active principle.
It is never stationary, but advances from a lower to a higher form as society advances from a lower to a higher condition....
Systems of consanguinity, on the contrary, are passive; recording the progress made by the family at long intervals apart, and only changing radically when the family has radically changed. [Morgan, op. cit., p. 444. – Ed.]
“And,” adds Marx, “the same is true of the political, juridical, religious, and philosophical systems in general.”
While the family undergoes living changes, the system of consanguinity ossifies; while the system survives by force of custom, the family outgrows it.
But just as Cuvier could deduce from the marsupial bone of an animal skeleton found near Paris that it belonged to a marsupial animal and that extinct marsupial animals once lived there, so with the same certainty we can deduce from the historical survival of a system of consanguinity that an extinct form of family once existed which corresponded to it.
The systems of consanguinity and the forms of the family we have just mentioned differ from those of today in the fact that every child has more than one father and mother.
In the American system of consanguinity, to which the Hawaiian family corresponds, brother and sister cannot be the father and mother of the same child; but the Hawaiian system of consanguinity, on the contrary, presupposes a family in which this was the rule.
Here we find ourselves among forms of family which directly contradict those hitherto generally assumed to be alone valid.
The traditional view recognizes only monogamy, with, in addition, polygamy on the part of individual men, and at the very most polyandry on the part of individual women; being the view of moralizing philistines, it conceals the fact that in practice these barriers raised by official society are quietly and calmly ignored.
The study of primitive history, however, reveals conditions where the men live in polygamy and their wives in polyandry at the same time, and their common children are therefore considered common to them all – and these conditions in their turn undergo a long series of changes before they finally end in monogamy.
The trend of these changes is to narrow more and more the circle of people comprised within the common bond of marriage, which was originally very wide, until at last it includes only the single pair, the dominant form of marriage today.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family, continued ...
Reconstructing thus the past history of the family, Morgan, in agreement with most of his colleagues, arrives at a primitive stage when unrestricted sexual freedom prevailed within the tribe, every woman belonging equally to every man and every man to every woman.
Since the eighteenth century there had been talk of such a primitive state, but only in general phrases.
Bachofen – and this is one of his great merits – was the first to take the existence of such a state seriously and to search for its traces in historical and religious survivals.
Today we know that the traces he found do not lead back to a social stage of promiscuous sexual intercourse, but to a much later form – namely, group marriage.
The primitive social stage of promiscuity, if it ever existed, belongs to such a remote epoch that we can hardly expect to prove its existence directly by discovering its social fossils among backward savages.
Bachofen's merit consists in having brought this question to the forefront for examination. [1]
Lately it has become fashionable to deny the existence of this initial stage in human sexual life.
Humanity must be spared this “shame.”
It is pointed out that all direct proof of such a stage is lacking, and particular appeal is made to the evidence from the rest of the animal world; for, even among animals, according to the numerous facts collected by Letourneau (Evolution du manage et de la faults, 1888), complete promiscuity in sexual intercourse marks a low stage of development.
But the only conclusion I can draw from all these facts, so far as man and his primitive conditions of life are concerned, is that they prove nothing whatever.
That vertebrates mate together for a considerable period is sufficiently explained by physiological causes – in the case of birds, for example, by the female’s need of help during the brooding period; examples of faithful monogamy among birds prove nothing about man, for the simple reason that men are not descended from birds.
And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.
Confining ourselves to mammals, however, we find all forms of sexual life – promiscuity, indications of group marriage, polygyny, monogamy.
Polyandry alone is lacking – it took human beings to achieve that.
Even our nearest relations, the quadrumana, exhibit every possible variation in the grouping of males and females; and if we narrow it down still more and consider only the four anthropoid apes, all that Letourneau has to say about them is that they are sometimes monogamous, sometimes polygamous, while Saussure, quoted by Giraud-Teulon, maintains that they are monogamous.
The more recent assertions of the monogamous habits of the anthropoid apes which are cited by Westermarck (The History of Human Marriage, London 1891), are also very far from proving anything.
In short, our evidence is such that honest Letourneau admits: “Among mammals there is no strict relation between the degree of intellectual development and the form of sexual life.”
And Espinas (Des societes animates, 1877), says in so many words:
The herd is the highest social group which we can observe among animals.
It is composed, so it appears, of families, but from the start the family and the herd are in conflict with one another and develop in inverse proportion.
As the above shows, we know practically nothing definite about the family and other social groupings of the anthropoid apes; the evidence is flatly contradictory.
Which is not to be wondered at.
The evidence with regard to savage human tribes is contradictory enough, requiring very critical examination and sifting; and ape societies are far more difficult to observe than human.
For the present, therefore, we must reject any conclusion drawn from such completely unreliable reports.
The sentence quoted from Espinas, however, provides a better starting point.
Among the higher animals the herd and the family are not complementary to one another, but antagonistic.
Espinas shows very well how the jealousy of the males during the mating season loosens the ties of every social herd or temporarily breaks it up.
When the family bond is close and exclusive, herds form only in exceptional cases.
When on the other hand free sexual intercourse or polygamy prevails, the herd comes into being almost spontaneously....
Before a herd can be formed, family ties must be loosened and the individual must have become free again.
This is the reason why organized flocks are so rarely found among birds....
We find more or less organized societies among mammals, however, precisely because here the individual is not merged in the family....
In its first growth, therefore, the common feeling of the herd has no greater enemy than the common feeling of the family.
We state it without hesitation: only by absorbing families which had undergone a radical change could a social form higher than the family have developed; at the same time, these families were thereby enabled later to constitute themselves afresh under infinitely more favorable circumstances. [Espinas, op. cit., quoted by Giraud-Teulon, Origines du mariage et de la famille, 1884, pp. 518-20].
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family, continued ...
Reconstructing thus the past history of the family, Morgan, in agreement with most of his colleagues, arrives at a primitive stage when unrestricted sexual freedom prevailed within the tribe, every woman belonging equally to every man and every man to every woman.
Since the eighteenth century there had been talk of such a primitive state, but only in general phrases.
Bachofen – and this is one of his great merits – was the first to take the existence of such a state seriously and to search for its traces in historical and religious survivals.
Today we know that the traces he found do not lead back to a social stage of promiscuous sexual intercourse, but to a much later form – namely, group marriage.
The primitive social stage of promiscuity, if it ever existed, belongs to such a remote epoch that we can hardly expect to prove its existence directly by discovering its social fossils among backward savages.
Bachofen's merit consists in having brought this question to the forefront for examination. [1]
Lately it has become fashionable to deny the existence of this initial stage in human sexual life.
Humanity must be spared this “shame.”
It is pointed out that all direct proof of such a stage is lacking, and particular appeal is made to the evidence from the rest of the animal world; for, even among animals, according to the numerous facts collected by Letourneau (Evolution du manage et de la faults, 1888), complete promiscuity in sexual intercourse marks a low stage of development.
But the only conclusion I can draw from all these facts, so far as man and his primitive conditions of life are concerned, is that they prove nothing whatever.
That vertebrates mate together for a considerable period is sufficiently explained by physiological causes – in the case of birds, for example, by the female’s need of help during the brooding period; examples of faithful monogamy among birds prove nothing about man, for the simple reason that men are not descended from birds.
And if strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm must go to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottides, or sections, and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.
Confining ourselves to mammals, however, we find all forms of sexual life – promiscuity, indications of group marriage, polygyny, monogamy.
Polyandry alone is lacking – it took human beings to achieve that.
Even our nearest relations, the quadrumana, exhibit every possible variation in the grouping of males and females; and if we narrow it down still more and consider only the four anthropoid apes, all that Letourneau has to say about them is that they are sometimes monogamous, sometimes polygamous, while Saussure, quoted by Giraud-Teulon, maintains that they are monogamous.
The more recent assertions of the monogamous habits of the anthropoid apes which are cited by Westermarck (The History of Human Marriage, London 1891), are also very far from proving anything.
In short, our evidence is such that honest Letourneau admits: “Among mammals there is no strict relation between the degree of intellectual development and the form of sexual life.”
And Espinas (Des societes animates, 1877), says in so many words:
The herd is the highest social group which we can observe among animals.
It is composed, so it appears, of families, but from the start the family and the herd are in conflict with one another and develop in inverse proportion.
As the above shows, we know practically nothing definite about the family and other social groupings of the anthropoid apes; the evidence is flatly contradictory.
Which is not to be wondered at.
The evidence with regard to savage human tribes is contradictory enough, requiring very critical examination and sifting; and ape societies are far more difficult to observe than human.
For the present, therefore, we must reject any conclusion drawn from such completely unreliable reports.
The sentence quoted from Espinas, however, provides a better starting point.
Among the higher animals the herd and the family are not complementary to one another, but antagonistic.
Espinas shows very well how the jealousy of the males during the mating season loosens the ties of every social herd or temporarily breaks it up.
When the family bond is close and exclusive, herds form only in exceptional cases.
When on the other hand free sexual intercourse or polygamy prevails, the herd comes into being almost spontaneously....
Before a herd can be formed, family ties must be loosened and the individual must have become free again.
This is the reason why organized flocks are so rarely found among birds....
We find more or less organized societies among mammals, however, precisely because here the individual is not merged in the family....
In its first growth, therefore, the common feeling of the herd has no greater enemy than the common feeling of the family.
We state it without hesitation: only by absorbing families which had undergone a radical change could a social form higher than the family have developed; at the same time, these families were thereby enabled later to constitute themselves afresh under infinitely more favorable circumstances. [Espinas, op. cit., quoted by Giraud-Teulon, Origines du mariage et de la famille, 1884, pp. 518-20].
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family, continued ...
Here we see that animal societies are, after all, of some value for drawing conclusions about human societies; but the value is only negative.
So far as our evidence goes, the higher vertebrates know only two forms of family – polygyny or separate couples; each form allows only one adult male, only one husband.
The jealousy of the male, which both consolidates and isolates the family, sets the animal family in opposition to the herd.
The jealousy of the males prevents the herd, the higher social form, from coming into existence, or weakens its cohesion, or breaks it up during the mating period; at best, it attests its development.
This alone is sufficient proof that animal families and primitive human society are incompatible, and that when primitive men were working their way up from the animal creation, they either had no family at all or a form that does not occur among animals.
In small numbers, an animal so defenseless as evolving man might struggle along even in conditions of isolation, with no higher social grouping than the single male and female pair, such as Westermarck, following the reports of hunters, attributes to the gorillas and the chimpanzees.
For man's development beyond the level of the animals, for the achievement of the greatest advance nature can show, something more was needed: the power of defense lacking to the individual had to be made good by the united strength and co-operation of the herd.
To explain the transition to humanity from conditions such as those in which the anthropoid apes live today would be quite impossible; it looks much more as if these apes had strayed off the line of evolution and were gradually dying out or at least degenerating.
That alone is sufficient ground for rejecting all attempts based on parallels drawn between forms of family and those of primitive man.
Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was the first condition for the formation of those larger, permanent groups in which alone animals could become men.
And what, in fact, do we find to be the oldest and most primitive form of family whose historical existence we can indisputably prove and which in one or two parts of the world we can still study today?
Group marriage, the form of family in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women mutually possess one another, and which leaves little room for jealousy.
And at a later stage of development we find the exceptional form of polyandry, which positively revolts every jealous instinct and is therefore unknown among animals.
But as all known forms of group marriage are accompanied by such peculiarly complicated regulations that they necessarily point to earlier and simpler forms of sexual relations, and therefore in the last resort to a period of promiscuous intercourse corresponding to the transition from the animal to the human, the references to animal marriages only bring us back to the very point from which we were to be led away for good and all.
What, then, does promiscuous sexual intercourse really mean?
It means the absence of prohibitions and restrictions which are or have been in force.
We have already seen the barrier of jealousy go down.
If there is one thing certain, it is that the feeling of jealousy develops relatively late.
The same is true of the conception of incest.
Not only were brother and sister originally man and wife; sexual intercourse between parents and children is still permitted among many peoples today.
Bancroft (The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, 1875, Vol. I), testifies to it among the Kadiaks on the Behring Straits, the Kadiaks near Alaska, and the Tinneh in the interior of British North America; Letourneau compiled reports of it among the Chippewa Indians, the Cucus in Chile, the Caribs, the Karens in Burma; to say nothing of the stories told by the old Greeks and Romans about the Parthians, Persians, Scythians, Huns, and so on.
Before incest was invented – for incest is an invention, and a very valuable one, too – sexual intercourse between parents and children did not arouse any more repulsion than sexual intercourse between other persons of different generations, and that occurs today even in the most philistine countries without exciting any great horror; even “old maids” of over sixty, if they are rich enough, sometimes marry young men in their thirties.
But if we consider the most primitive known forms of family apart from their conceptions of incest – conceptions which are totally different from ours and frequently in direct contradiction to them - then the form of sexual intercourse can only be described as promiscuous – promiscuous in so far as the restrictions later established by custom did not yet exist.
But in everyday practice that by no means necessarily implies general mixed mating.
Temporary pairings of one man with one woman were not in any way excluded, just as in the cases of group marriages today the majority of relationships are of this character.
And when Westermarck, the latest writer to deny the existence of such a primitive state, applies the term “marriage” to every relationship in which the two sexes remain mated until the birth of the offspring, we must point out that this kind of marriage can very well occur under the conditions of promiscuous intercourse without contradicting the principle of promiscuity – the absence of any restriction imposed by custom on sexual intercourse.
Westermarck, however, takes the standpoint that promiscuity “involves a suppression of individual inclinations,” and that therefore “the most genuine form of it is prostitution.”
In my opinion, any understanding of primitive society is impossible to people who only see it as a brothel.
We will return to this point when discussing group marriage.
According to Morgan, from this primitive state of promiscuous intercourse there developed, probably very early:
1. The Consanguine Family, The First Stage of the Family
Here the marriage groups are separated according to generations: all the grandfathers and grandmothers within the limits of the family are all husbands and wives of one another; so are also their children, the fathers and mothers; the latter’s children will form a third circle of common husbands and wives; and their children, the great-grandchildren of the first group, will form a fourth.
In this form of marriage, therefore, only ancestors and progeny, and parents and children, are excluded from the rights and duties (as we should say) of marriage with one another.
Brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the first, second, and more remote degrees, are all brothers and sisters of one another, and precisely for that reason they are all husbands and wives of one another.
At this stage the relationship of brother and sister also includes as a matter of course the practice of sexual intercourse with one another. [2]
In its typical form, such a family would consist of the descendants of a single pair, the descendants of these descendants in each generation being again brothers and sisters, and therefore husbands and wives, of one another. [3]
The consanguine family is extinct.
Even the most primitive peoples known to history provide no demonstrable instance of it.
But that it must have existed, we are compelled to admit: for the Hawaiian system of consanguinity still prevalent today throughout the whole of Polynesia expresses degrees of consanguinity which could only arise in this form of family; and the whole subsequent development of the family presupposes the existence of the consanguine family as a necessary preparatory stage.
Footnotes
[1] Bachofen proves how little he understood his own discovery, or rather his guess, by using the term "hetaerism" to describe this primitive state. For the Greeks, when they introduced the word, hetaerism meant intercourse of men, unmarried or living in monogamy, with unmarried women, it always presupposes a definite form of marriage outside which this intercourse takes place and includes at least the possibility of prostitution. The word was never used in any other sense, and it is in this sense that I use it with Morgan. Bachofen everywhere introduces into his extremely important discoveries the most incredible mystifications through his notion that in their historical development the relations between men and women had their origin in men's contemporary religious conceptions, not in their actual conditions of life.
[2] In a letter written in the spring of 1882, Marx expresses himself in the strongest terms about the complete misrepresentation of primitive times in Wagner's text to the Nibelangen: “Have such things been heard, that brother embraced sister as a bride?” To Wagner and his “lecherous gods” who, quite in the modern manner, spice their love affairs with a little incest, Marx replies: “ In primitive times the sister was the wife, and that was moral.”
[3] NOTE in Fourth edition: A French friend of mine who is an admirer of Wagner is not in agreement with this note. He observes that already in the Elder Edda, on which Wagner based his story, in the Œgisdrekka, Loki makes the reproach to Freya: In the sight of the gods thou didst embrace thine own brother." Marriage between brother and sister, he argues, was therefore forbidden already at that time. The OEgisdrekka is the expression of a time when belief in the old myths had completely broken down; it is purely a satire on the gods, in the style of Lucian. If Loki as Mephisto makes such a reproach to Freya, it tells rather against Wagner. Loki also says some lines later to Niordhr: “With thy sister didst thou breed son.” (vidh systur thinni gaztu slikan mog) Niordhr is not, indeed, an Asa, but a Vana, and says in the Ynglinga saga that marriages between brothers and sisters are usual in Vanaland, which was not the case among the Asas. This would seem to show that the Vanas were more ancient gods the Asas. At any rate, Niordhr lives among the OEgisdrekka is rather a proof that at the time when the Norse sagas of the gods arose, marriages between brothers and sisters, at any rate among the gods, did not yet excite any horror. If one wants to find excuses for Wagner, it would perhaps be better to cite Goethe instead of the Edda, for in his ballad of the God and the Bayadere Goethe commits a similar mistake in regard to the religious surrender of women, which he makes far too similar to modern prostitution.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family, continued ...
Here we see that animal societies are, after all, of some value for drawing conclusions about human societies; but the value is only negative.
So far as our evidence goes, the higher vertebrates know only two forms of family – polygyny or separate couples; each form allows only one adult male, only one husband.
The jealousy of the male, which both consolidates and isolates the family, sets the animal family in opposition to the herd.
The jealousy of the males prevents the herd, the higher social form, from coming into existence, or weakens its cohesion, or breaks it up during the mating period; at best, it attests its development.
This alone is sufficient proof that animal families and primitive human society are incompatible, and that when primitive men were working their way up from the animal creation, they either had no family at all or a form that does not occur among animals.
In small numbers, an animal so defenseless as evolving man might struggle along even in conditions of isolation, with no higher social grouping than the single male and female pair, such as Westermarck, following the reports of hunters, attributes to the gorillas and the chimpanzees.
For man's development beyond the level of the animals, for the achievement of the greatest advance nature can show, something more was needed: the power of defense lacking to the individual had to be made good by the united strength and co-operation of the herd.
To explain the transition to humanity from conditions such as those in which the anthropoid apes live today would be quite impossible; it looks much more as if these apes had strayed off the line of evolution and were gradually dying out or at least degenerating.
That alone is sufficient ground for rejecting all attempts based on parallels drawn between forms of family and those of primitive man.
Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was the first condition for the formation of those larger, permanent groups in which alone animals could become men.
And what, in fact, do we find to be the oldest and most primitive form of family whose historical existence we can indisputably prove and which in one or two parts of the world we can still study today?
Group marriage, the form of family in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women mutually possess one another, and which leaves little room for jealousy.
And at a later stage of development we find the exceptional form of polyandry, which positively revolts every jealous instinct and is therefore unknown among animals.
But as all known forms of group marriage are accompanied by such peculiarly complicated regulations that they necessarily point to earlier and simpler forms of sexual relations, and therefore in the last resort to a period of promiscuous intercourse corresponding to the transition from the animal to the human, the references to animal marriages only bring us back to the very point from which we were to be led away for good and all.
What, then, does promiscuous sexual intercourse really mean?
It means the absence of prohibitions and restrictions which are or have been in force.
We have already seen the barrier of jealousy go down.
If there is one thing certain, it is that the feeling of jealousy develops relatively late.
The same is true of the conception of incest.
Not only were brother and sister originally man and wife; sexual intercourse between parents and children is still permitted among many peoples today.
Bancroft (The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America, 1875, Vol. I), testifies to it among the Kadiaks on the Behring Straits, the Kadiaks near Alaska, and the Tinneh in the interior of British North America; Letourneau compiled reports of it among the Chippewa Indians, the Cucus in Chile, the Caribs, the Karens in Burma; to say nothing of the stories told by the old Greeks and Romans about the Parthians, Persians, Scythians, Huns, and so on.
Before incest was invented – for incest is an invention, and a very valuable one, too – sexual intercourse between parents and children did not arouse any more repulsion than sexual intercourse between other persons of different generations, and that occurs today even in the most philistine countries without exciting any great horror; even “old maids” of over sixty, if they are rich enough, sometimes marry young men in their thirties.
But if we consider the most primitive known forms of family apart from their conceptions of incest – conceptions which are totally different from ours and frequently in direct contradiction to them - then the form of sexual intercourse can only be described as promiscuous – promiscuous in so far as the restrictions later established by custom did not yet exist.
But in everyday practice that by no means necessarily implies general mixed mating.
Temporary pairings of one man with one woman were not in any way excluded, just as in the cases of group marriages today the majority of relationships are of this character.
And when Westermarck, the latest writer to deny the existence of such a primitive state, applies the term “marriage” to every relationship in which the two sexes remain mated until the birth of the offspring, we must point out that this kind of marriage can very well occur under the conditions of promiscuous intercourse without contradicting the principle of promiscuity – the absence of any restriction imposed by custom on sexual intercourse.
Westermarck, however, takes the standpoint that promiscuity “involves a suppression of individual inclinations,” and that therefore “the most genuine form of it is prostitution.”
In my opinion, any understanding of primitive society is impossible to people who only see it as a brothel.
We will return to this point when discussing group marriage.
According to Morgan, from this primitive state of promiscuous intercourse there developed, probably very early:
1. The Consanguine Family, The First Stage of the Family
Here the marriage groups are separated according to generations: all the grandfathers and grandmothers within the limits of the family are all husbands and wives of one another; so are also their children, the fathers and mothers; the latter’s children will form a third circle of common husbands and wives; and their children, the great-grandchildren of the first group, will form a fourth.
In this form of marriage, therefore, only ancestors and progeny, and parents and children, are excluded from the rights and duties (as we should say) of marriage with one another.
Brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the first, second, and more remote degrees, are all brothers and sisters of one another, and precisely for that reason they are all husbands and wives of one another.
At this stage the relationship of brother and sister also includes as a matter of course the practice of sexual intercourse with one another. [2]
In its typical form, such a family would consist of the descendants of a single pair, the descendants of these descendants in each generation being again brothers and sisters, and therefore husbands and wives, of one another. [3]
The consanguine family is extinct.
Even the most primitive peoples known to history provide no demonstrable instance of it.
But that it must have existed, we are compelled to admit: for the Hawaiian system of consanguinity still prevalent today throughout the whole of Polynesia expresses degrees of consanguinity which could only arise in this form of family; and the whole subsequent development of the family presupposes the existence of the consanguine family as a necessary preparatory stage.
Footnotes
[1] Bachofen proves how little he understood his own discovery, or rather his guess, by using the term "hetaerism" to describe this primitive state. For the Greeks, when they introduced the word, hetaerism meant intercourse of men, unmarried or living in monogamy, with unmarried women, it always presupposes a definite form of marriage outside which this intercourse takes place and includes at least the possibility of prostitution. The word was never used in any other sense, and it is in this sense that I use it with Morgan. Bachofen everywhere introduces into his extremely important discoveries the most incredible mystifications through his notion that in their historical development the relations between men and women had their origin in men's contemporary religious conceptions, not in their actual conditions of life.
[2] In a letter written in the spring of 1882, Marx expresses himself in the strongest terms about the complete misrepresentation of primitive times in Wagner's text to the Nibelangen: “Have such things been heard, that brother embraced sister as a bride?” To Wagner and his “lecherous gods” who, quite in the modern manner, spice their love affairs with a little incest, Marx replies: “ In primitive times the sister was the wife, and that was moral.”
[3] NOTE in Fourth edition: A French friend of mine who is an admirer of Wagner is not in agreement with this note. He observes that already in the Elder Edda, on which Wagner based his story, in the Œgisdrekka, Loki makes the reproach to Freya: In the sight of the gods thou didst embrace thine own brother." Marriage between brother and sister, he argues, was therefore forbidden already at that time. The OEgisdrekka is the expression of a time when belief in the old myths had completely broken down; it is purely a satire on the gods, in the style of Lucian. If Loki as Mephisto makes such a reproach to Freya, it tells rather against Wagner. Loki also says some lines later to Niordhr: “With thy sister didst thou breed son.” (vidh systur thinni gaztu slikan mog) Niordhr is not, indeed, an Asa, but a Vana, and says in the Ynglinga saga that marriages between brothers and sisters are usual in Vanaland, which was not the case among the Asas. This would seem to show that the Vanas were more ancient gods the Asas. At any rate, Niordhr lives among the OEgisdrekka is rather a proof that at the time when the Norse sagas of the gods arose, marriages between brothers and sisters, at any rate among the gods, did not yet excite any horror. If one wants to find excuses for Wagner, it would perhaps be better to cite Goethe instead of the Edda, for in his ballad of the God and the Bayadere Goethe commits a similar mistake in regard to the religious surrender of women, which he makes far too similar to modern prostitution.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family, continued ...
The Punaluan Family
If the first advance in organization consisted in the exclusion of parents and children from sexual intercourse with one another, the second was the exclusion of sister and brother.
On account of the greater nearness in age, this second advance was infinitely more important, but also more difficult, than the first.
It was effected gradually, beginning probably with the exclusion from sexual intercourse of own brothers and sisters (children of, the same mother) first in isolated cases and then by degrees as a general rule (even in this century exceptions were found in Hawaii), and ending with the prohibition of marriage even between collateral brothers and sisters, or, as we should say, between first, second, and third cousins.
It affords, says Morgan, “a good illustration of the operation of the principle of natural selection.”
There can be no question that the tribes among whom inbreeding was restricted by this advance were bound to develop more quickly and more fully than those among whom marriage between brothers and sisters remained the rule and the law.
How powerfully the influence of this advance made itself felt is seen in the institution which arose directly out of it and went far beyond it -- the gens, which forms the basis of the social order of most, if not all, barbarian peoples of the earth and from which in Greece and Rome we step directly into civilization.
After a few generations at most, every original family was bound to split up.
The practice of living together in a primitive communistic household, which prevailed without exception till late in the middle stage of barbarism, set a limit, varying with the conditions but fairly definite in each locality, to the maximum size of the family community.
As soon as the conception arose that sexual intercourse between children of the same mother was wrong, it was bound to exert its influence when the old households split up and new ones were founded (though these did not necessarily coincide with the family group).
One or more lines of sisters would form the nucleus of the one household and their own brothers the nucleus of the other.
It must have been in some such manner as this that the form which Morgan calls the punaluan family originated out of the consanguine family.
According to the Hawaiian custom, a number of sisters, own or collateral (first, second or more remote cousins) were the common wives of their common husbands, from among whom, however, their own brothers were excluded; these husbands now no longer called themselves brothers, for they were no longer necessarily brothers, but punalua – that is, intimate companion, or partner.
Similarly, a line of own or collateral brothers had a number of women, not their sisters, as common wives, and these wives called one another punalua.
This was the classic form of a type of family, in which later a number of variations was possible, but whose essential feature was: mutually common possession of husbands and wives within a definite family circle, from which, however, the brothers of the wives, first own and later also collateral, and conversely also the sisters of the husbands, were excluded.
This form of the family provides with the most complete exactness the degrees of consanguinity expressed in the American system.
The children of my mother’s sisters are still her children, just as the children of my father’s brothers are also his children; and they are all my brothers and sisters.
But the children of my mother’s brothers are now her nephews and nieces, the children of my father's sisters are his nephews and nieces, and they are all my male and female cousins.
For while the husbands of my mother’s sisters are still her husbands, and the wives of my father&rquo;s brothers are still his wives (in right, if not always in fact), the social ban on sexual intercourse between brothers and sisters has now divided the children of brothers and sisters, who had hitherto been treated as own brothers and sisters, into two classes: those in the one class remain brothers and sisters as before (collateral, according to our system); those in the other class, the children of my mother’s brother in the one case and of my father’s sister in the other, cannot be brothers and sisters any longer, they can no longer have common parents, neither father nor mother nor both, and therefore now for the first time the class of nephews and nieces, male and female cousins becomes necessary, which in the earlier composition of the family would have been senseless.
The American system of consanguinity, which appears purely nonsensical in any form of family based on any variety of monogamy, finds, down to the smallest details, its rational explanation and its natural foundation in the punaluan family.
The punaluan family or a form similar to it must have been at the very least as widespread as this system of consanguinity.
Evidence of this form of family, whose existence has actually been proved in Hawaii, would probably have been received from all over Polynesia if the pious missionaries, like the Spanish monks of former days in America, had been able to see in such unchristian conditions anything more than a sheer “abomination.” [1]
Caesar’s report of the Britons, who were at that time in the middle stage of barbarism, “every ten or twelve have wives in common, especially brothers with brothers and parents with children,” is best explained as group marriage.
Barbarian mothers do not have ten or twelve sons of their own old enough to keep wives in common, but the American system of consanguinity, which corresponds to the punaluan family, provides numerous brothers, because all a man’s cousins, near and distant, are his brothers.
Caesar’s mention of “parents with children” may be due to misunderstanding on his part; it is not, however, absolutely impossible under this system that father and son or mother and daughter should be included in the same marriage group, though not father and daughter or mother and son.
This or a similar form of group marriage also provides the simplest explanation of the accounts in Herodotus and other ancient writers about community of wives among savages and barbarian peoples.
The same applies also to the reports of Watson and Kaye in their book, The People of India, about the Teehurs in Oudh (north of the Ganges): “Both sexes have but a nominal tie on each other, and they change connection without compunction; living together, almost indiscriminately, in many large families.”
In the very great majority of cases the institution of the gens seems to have originated directly out of the punaluan family.
It is true that the Australian classificatory system also provides an origin for it: the Australians have gentes, but not yet the punaluan family; instead, they have a cruder form of group marriage.
In all forms of group family it is uncertain who is the father of a child; but it is certain who its mother is.
Though she calls all the children of the whole family her children and has a mother’s duties towards them, she nevertheless knows her own children from the others.
It is therefore clear that in so far as group marriage prevails, descent can only be proved on the mother’s side and that therefore only the female line is recognized.
And this is in fact the case among all peoples in the period of savagery or in the lower stage of barbarism.
It is the second great merit of Bachofen that he was the first to make this discovery.
To denote this exclusive recognition of descent through the mother and the relations of inheritance which in time resulted from it, he uses the term “mother-right,” which for the sake of brevity I retain.
The term is, however, ill-chosen, since at this stage of society there cannot yet be any talk of “right” in the legal sense.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family, continued ...
The Punaluan Family
If the first advance in organization consisted in the exclusion of parents and children from sexual intercourse with one another, the second was the exclusion of sister and brother.
On account of the greater nearness in age, this second advance was infinitely more important, but also more difficult, than the first.
It was effected gradually, beginning probably with the exclusion from sexual intercourse of own brothers and sisters (children of, the same mother) first in isolated cases and then by degrees as a general rule (even in this century exceptions were found in Hawaii), and ending with the prohibition of marriage even between collateral brothers and sisters, or, as we should say, between first, second, and third cousins.
It affords, says Morgan, “a good illustration of the operation of the principle of natural selection.”
There can be no question that the tribes among whom inbreeding was restricted by this advance were bound to develop more quickly and more fully than those among whom marriage between brothers and sisters remained the rule and the law.
How powerfully the influence of this advance made itself felt is seen in the institution which arose directly out of it and went far beyond it -- the gens, which forms the basis of the social order of most, if not all, barbarian peoples of the earth and from which in Greece and Rome we step directly into civilization.
After a few generations at most, every original family was bound to split up.
The practice of living together in a primitive communistic household, which prevailed without exception till late in the middle stage of barbarism, set a limit, varying with the conditions but fairly definite in each locality, to the maximum size of the family community.
As soon as the conception arose that sexual intercourse between children of the same mother was wrong, it was bound to exert its influence when the old households split up and new ones were founded (though these did not necessarily coincide with the family group).
One or more lines of sisters would form the nucleus of the one household and their own brothers the nucleus of the other.
It must have been in some such manner as this that the form which Morgan calls the punaluan family originated out of the consanguine family.
According to the Hawaiian custom, a number of sisters, own or collateral (first, second or more remote cousins) were the common wives of their common husbands, from among whom, however, their own brothers were excluded; these husbands now no longer called themselves brothers, for they were no longer necessarily brothers, but punalua – that is, intimate companion, or partner.
Similarly, a line of own or collateral brothers had a number of women, not their sisters, as common wives, and these wives called one another punalua.
This was the classic form of a type of family, in which later a number of variations was possible, but whose essential feature was: mutually common possession of husbands and wives within a definite family circle, from which, however, the brothers of the wives, first own and later also collateral, and conversely also the sisters of the husbands, were excluded.
This form of the family provides with the most complete exactness the degrees of consanguinity expressed in the American system.
The children of my mother’s sisters are still her children, just as the children of my father’s brothers are also his children; and they are all my brothers and sisters.
But the children of my mother’s brothers are now her nephews and nieces, the children of my father's sisters are his nephews and nieces, and they are all my male and female cousins.
For while the husbands of my mother’s sisters are still her husbands, and the wives of my father&rquo;s brothers are still his wives (in right, if not always in fact), the social ban on sexual intercourse between brothers and sisters has now divided the children of brothers and sisters, who had hitherto been treated as own brothers and sisters, into two classes: those in the one class remain brothers and sisters as before (collateral, according to our system); those in the other class, the children of my mother’s brother in the one case and of my father’s sister in the other, cannot be brothers and sisters any longer, they can no longer have common parents, neither father nor mother nor both, and therefore now for the first time the class of nephews and nieces, male and female cousins becomes necessary, which in the earlier composition of the family would have been senseless.
The American system of consanguinity, which appears purely nonsensical in any form of family based on any variety of monogamy, finds, down to the smallest details, its rational explanation and its natural foundation in the punaluan family.
The punaluan family or a form similar to it must have been at the very least as widespread as this system of consanguinity.
Evidence of this form of family, whose existence has actually been proved in Hawaii, would probably have been received from all over Polynesia if the pious missionaries, like the Spanish monks of former days in America, had been able to see in such unchristian conditions anything more than a sheer “abomination.” [1]
Caesar’s report of the Britons, who were at that time in the middle stage of barbarism, “every ten or twelve have wives in common, especially brothers with brothers and parents with children,” is best explained as group marriage.
Barbarian mothers do not have ten or twelve sons of their own old enough to keep wives in common, but the American system of consanguinity, which corresponds to the punaluan family, provides numerous brothers, because all a man’s cousins, near and distant, are his brothers.
Caesar’s mention of “parents with children” may be due to misunderstanding on his part; it is not, however, absolutely impossible under this system that father and son or mother and daughter should be included in the same marriage group, though not father and daughter or mother and son.
This or a similar form of group marriage also provides the simplest explanation of the accounts in Herodotus and other ancient writers about community of wives among savages and barbarian peoples.
The same applies also to the reports of Watson and Kaye in their book, The People of India, about the Teehurs in Oudh (north of the Ganges): “Both sexes have but a nominal tie on each other, and they change connection without compunction; living together, almost indiscriminately, in many large families.”
In the very great majority of cases the institution of the gens seems to have originated directly out of the punaluan family.
It is true that the Australian classificatory system also provides an origin for it: the Australians have gentes, but not yet the punaluan family; instead, they have a cruder form of group marriage.
In all forms of group family it is uncertain who is the father of a child; but it is certain who its mother is.
Though she calls all the children of the whole family her children and has a mother’s duties towards them, she nevertheless knows her own children from the others.
It is therefore clear that in so far as group marriage prevails, descent can only be proved on the mother’s side and that therefore only the female line is recognized.
And this is in fact the case among all peoples in the period of savagery or in the lower stage of barbarism.
It is the second great merit of Bachofen that he was the first to make this discovery.
To denote this exclusive recognition of descent through the mother and the relations of inheritance which in time resulted from it, he uses the term “mother-right,” which for the sake of brevity I retain.
The term is, however, ill-chosen, since at this stage of society there cannot yet be any talk of “right” in the legal sense.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: ENGEL - ORIGINS OF FAMILY
Frederick Engels
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family, continued ...
The Punaluan Family, continued ...
If we now take one of the two standard groups of the punaluan family, namely a line of own and collateral sisters (that is, own sisters’ children in the first, second or third degree), together with their children and their own collateral brothers on the mother’s side (who, according to our assumption, are not their husbands), we have the exact circle of persons whom we later find as members of a gens, in the original form of that institution.
They all have a common ancestral mother, by virtue of their descent from whom the female offspring in each generation are sisters.
The husbands of these sisters, however, can no longer be their brothers and therefore cannot be descended from the same ancestral mother; consequently, they do not belong to the same consanguine group, the later gens.
The children of these sisters, however, do belong to this group, because descent on the mother’s side alone counts, since it alone is certain.
As soon as the ban had been established on sexual intercourse between all brothers and sisters, including the most remote collateral relatives on the mother’s side, this group transformed itself into a gens – that is, it constituted itself a firm circle of blood relations in the female line, between whom marriage was prohibited; and henceforward by other common institutions of a social and religious character it increasingly consolidated and differentiated itself from the other gentes of the same tribe.
More of this later.
When we see, then, that the development of the gens follows, not only necessarily, but also perfectly naturally from the punaluan family, we may reasonably infer that at one time this form of family almost certainly existed among all peoples among whom the presence of gentile institutions can be proved – that is, practically all barbarians and civilized peoples.
At the time Morgan wrote his book, our knowledge of group marriage was still very limited.
A little information was available about the group marriages of the Australians, who were organized in classes, and Morgan had already, in 1871, published the reports he had received concerning the punaluan family in Hawaii.
The punaluan family provided, on the one hand, the complete explanation of the system of consanguinity in force among the American Indians, which had been the starting point of all Morgan’s researches; on the other hand, the origin of the matriarchal gens could be derived directly from the punaluan family; further, the punaluan family represented a much higher stage of development than the Australian classificatory system.
It is therefore comprehensible that Morgan should have regarded it as the necessary stage of development before pairing marriage and should believe it to have been general in earlier times.
Since then we have become acquainted with a number of other forms of group marriage, and we now know that Morgan here went too far.
However, in his punaluan family he had had the good fortune to strike the highest, the classic form of group marriage, from which the transition to a higher stage can be explained most simply.
For the most important additions to our knowledge of group marriage we are indebted to the English missionary, Lorimer Fison, who for years studied this form of the family in its classic home, Australia.
He found the lowest stage of development among the Australian aborigines of Mount Gambier in South Australia.
Here the whole tribe is divided into two great exogamous classes or moieties, Kroki and Kumite.
Sexual intercourse within each of these moieties is strictly forbidden; on the other hand, every man in the one moiety is the husband by birth of every woman in the other moiety and she is by birth his wife.
Not the individuals, but the entire groups are married, moiety with moiety.
And observe that there is no exclusion on the ground of difference in age or particular degrees of affinity, except such as is entailed by the division of the tribe into two exogamous classes.
A Kroki has every Kumite woman lawfully to wife; but, as his own daughter according to mother-right is also a Kumite, being the daughter of a Kumite woman, she is by birth the wife of every Kroki, including, therefore, her father.
At any rate, there is no bar against this in the organization into moieties as we know it.
Either, then, this organization arose at a time when, in spite of the obscure impulse towards the restriction of inbreeding, sexual intercourse between parents and children was still not felt to be particularly horrible – in which case the moiety system must have originated directly out of a state of sexual promiscuity; or else intercourse between parents and children was already forbidden by custom when the moieties arose, and in that case the present conditions point back to the consanguine family and are the first step beyond it.
The latter is more probable.
There are not, to my knowledge, any instances from Australia of sexual cohabitation between parents and children, and as a rule the later form of exogamy, the matriarchal gens, also tacitly presupposes the prohibition of this relationship as already in force when the gens came into being.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State
II. The Family, continued ...
The Punaluan Family, continued ...
If we now take one of the two standard groups of the punaluan family, namely a line of own and collateral sisters (that is, own sisters’ children in the first, second or third degree), together with their children and their own collateral brothers on the mother’s side (who, according to our assumption, are not their husbands), we have the exact circle of persons whom we later find as members of a gens, in the original form of that institution.
They all have a common ancestral mother, by virtue of their descent from whom the female offspring in each generation are sisters.
The husbands of these sisters, however, can no longer be their brothers and therefore cannot be descended from the same ancestral mother; consequently, they do not belong to the same consanguine group, the later gens.
The children of these sisters, however, do belong to this group, because descent on the mother’s side alone counts, since it alone is certain.
As soon as the ban had been established on sexual intercourse between all brothers and sisters, including the most remote collateral relatives on the mother’s side, this group transformed itself into a gens – that is, it constituted itself a firm circle of blood relations in the female line, between whom marriage was prohibited; and henceforward by other common institutions of a social and religious character it increasingly consolidated and differentiated itself from the other gentes of the same tribe.
More of this later.
When we see, then, that the development of the gens follows, not only necessarily, but also perfectly naturally from the punaluan family, we may reasonably infer that at one time this form of family almost certainly existed among all peoples among whom the presence of gentile institutions can be proved – that is, practically all barbarians and civilized peoples.
At the time Morgan wrote his book, our knowledge of group marriage was still very limited.
A little information was available about the group marriages of the Australians, who were organized in classes, and Morgan had already, in 1871, published the reports he had received concerning the punaluan family in Hawaii.
The punaluan family provided, on the one hand, the complete explanation of the system of consanguinity in force among the American Indians, which had been the starting point of all Morgan’s researches; on the other hand, the origin of the matriarchal gens could be derived directly from the punaluan family; further, the punaluan family represented a much higher stage of development than the Australian classificatory system.
It is therefore comprehensible that Morgan should have regarded it as the necessary stage of development before pairing marriage and should believe it to have been general in earlier times.
Since then we have become acquainted with a number of other forms of group marriage, and we now know that Morgan here went too far.
However, in his punaluan family he had had the good fortune to strike the highest, the classic form of group marriage, from which the transition to a higher stage can be explained most simply.
For the most important additions to our knowledge of group marriage we are indebted to the English missionary, Lorimer Fison, who for years studied this form of the family in its classic home, Australia.
He found the lowest stage of development among the Australian aborigines of Mount Gambier in South Australia.
Here the whole tribe is divided into two great exogamous classes or moieties, Kroki and Kumite.
Sexual intercourse within each of these moieties is strictly forbidden; on the other hand, every man in the one moiety is the husband by birth of every woman in the other moiety and she is by birth his wife.
Not the individuals, but the entire groups are married, moiety with moiety.
And observe that there is no exclusion on the ground of difference in age or particular degrees of affinity, except such as is entailed by the division of the tribe into two exogamous classes.
A Kroki has every Kumite woman lawfully to wife; but, as his own daughter according to mother-right is also a Kumite, being the daughter of a Kumite woman, she is by birth the wife of every Kroki, including, therefore, her father.
At any rate, there is no bar against this in the organization into moieties as we know it.
Either, then, this organization arose at a time when, in spite of the obscure impulse towards the restriction of inbreeding, sexual intercourse between parents and children was still not felt to be particularly horrible – in which case the moiety system must have originated directly out of a state of sexual promiscuity; or else intercourse between parents and children was already forbidden by custom when the moieties arose, and in that case the present conditions point back to the consanguine family and are the first step beyond it.
The latter is more probable.
There are not, to my knowledge, any instances from Australia of sexual cohabitation between parents and children, and as a rule the later form of exogamy, the matriarchal gens, also tacitly presupposes the prohibition of this relationship as already in force when the gens came into being.
TO BE CONTINUED ...