Primitive Marriage

Contents

1. Preface 4 min 4

   McLennan presents his “little book” as an exercise in scientific history. Investigating the origin of the mock capture of the bride, he finds the symbol among Indo-European, Turanian and Semitic peoples alike, which suggests a phase of society once almost universal and convinces him that the races of mankind differ only in their rate of development. He names chapters VIII and IX, on ancient kinship, caste and endogamy, as the most important part of the work, and explains his spelling of place-names and his omission of diacritics.

2. I Introductory: Legal Symbolism and Primitive Life 13 min 5

   McLennan sets out his method. Archaeology tells us only about tools and food, and philology reaches no further back than patriarchal, propertied Aryans. The real origins of society must be read from living “primitive” peoples, since “old” means old in structure, not in date. Symbolic forms in advanced law are survivals of former realities. Roman marriage is his example: usus and coemptio, popular and older, entered the written law only as the plebs gained rights, because early law was the law of a dominant class. Legal symbolism, read in the light of savage life, is the key to unwritten history.

3. II The Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies 19 min 30

   The chapter defines the symbol of capture, a feigned abduction of the bride after the marriage has been agreed, and dismisses the explanations of Festus (the Sabine rape) and Müller (maidenly modesty). It then gathers cases: Sparta (Herodotus, Plutarch), plebeian Rome (Apuleius), the Hindus and Khonds of Orissa, the Kalmucks, Tunguz, Bedouin, Circassians, the Welsh “bride chase” described by Kames, West Africa and the Fuegians. Like a fossil fish implying an ancient sea, McLennan argues, each instance implies a wide area where the custom once prevailed.

4. III The Origin of the Form of Capture 13 min 6

   Why would capture become a legal symbol? Occasional raids for women cannot explain it. McLennan argues that the symbol requires a time when capture was the system, the normal way of getting wives. Tribes that marry within themselves, which he names “endogamous”, have no need of force and develop betrothal, religious rites and, between allied tribes, marriage by purchase. Tribes forbidden to marry within the group, which he names “exogamous”, can get wives from hostile neighbours only by theft or force. When peace allows purchase, the old association survives as a ceremony. He sets out three points to prove.

5. IV On the Prevalence of the Practice of Capturing Wives, De Facto 28 min 44

   McLennan shows that wives are or were captured in fact in many places: among South American peoples from the Fuegians to the Caribs, whose women spoke a different language from their men; in Australia, after Sir George Grey’s account of women seized and scarred; in New Zealand, the Pacific, Afghanistan and the Deccan; and in northern Europe, from Olaus Magnus’s Muscovites to armed Swedish weddings. He cites the Rakshasa marriage of Manu and the Mosaic law of the captive wife, and reads Greek, Roman, Pictish and Hebrew legends of abduction as memories of a system of capture.

6. V Of the Rule against Marriage between Members of the Same Tribe; of the Coincidence of This Rule with the Practice of Capturing Wives, De Facto, and with the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies 30 min 30

   McLennan collects cases of exogamy, the rule against marriage within the tribe or stock, and shows it coinciding with capture. He cites the Khonds, the Kalmuck nobility, the Circassian “fraternities”, the Samoyeds, the Magars (with Latham’s remark that the rule is almost universal), Manu’s ban on marrying within the gotra, the clans of Manipur, the Australian and American Indian clans with descent through the mother, and Skene’s unpublished analysis of the Pictish kings. He concludes that exogamy and capture prevailed together over much of the world.

7. VI On the State of Hostility 3 min 1

   A short chapter on the third condition of the theory: early groups are normally at war. Petty but habitual feuds follow from small communities competing for subsistence, and among savages every stranger is an enemy. Kinsmen who separate soon become foreign to each other, like Lot and Abraham. McLennan treats war as the cradle of government and class.

8. VII Exogamy: Its Origin; Comparative Archaism of Exogamy and Endogamy 14 min 7

   McLennan concludes that wherever capture or its form is found, exogamy once prevailed, perhaps among every race. He traces exogamy to female infanticide: groups that valued sons as fighters and hunters killed daughters, became short of women, practised polyandry at home and capture abroad, and in time came to think marriage within the group improper. He then classifies tribes from “exogamy pure” to “endogamy pure” and caste, admits that the two may be equally old, and announces nine propositions on kinship, heterogeneity and caste for the next chapter.

9. VIII Ancient Systems of Kinship, and Their Influence on the Structure of Primitive Groups 1 h 32 min 90

   The longest chapter builds a history of kinship. Ideas of kinship grew slowly; promiscuity made fathers uncertain, so the first system counted kinship through mothers only. Scarcity of women produced polyandry, from the “ruder” Nair form to the Tibetan form in which brothers share a wife, which made the father’s blood certain. Its decay left the levirate. Exogamy with mother-kinship mixed stocks within groups, permitting betrothal. Male kinship, fed by property, re-created homogeneous groups, revived capture, and produced caste and endogamy. McLennan attacks Maine’s patriarchal theory and closes on blood-feud and infanticide.

10. IX The Decay of Exogamy in Advancing Communities 18 min 10

    McLennan explains why exogamy decayed in advancing communities, taking Greece and Rome as examples. He rejects the theory, held in its strongest form by Maine, that the state grew from the patriarchal family through house and tribe by adoption. Mother-kinship and exogamy, he argues, spread the same stocks through neighbouring local tribes, producing gentes that later combined into commonwealths. The order is tribe, gens, family. Property passing from tribe to clan to family and individual, the narrowing of kinship by inheritance law, and wills dissolved the old bonds and with them exogamy. Heiresses were the first exception.

11. X Conclusion 4 min 3

    McLennan sums up. He has solved the problem of the form of capture and opened others. He rejects a natural aversion to incest as the source of exogamy, since early exogamy allowed unions now thought incestuous, and repeats that scarcity of women, theft of wives and habit produced it. Kinship through mothers was the most archaic system, though its relation to exogamy and polyandry needs more research. He predicts that early history will look very different once freed from Dugald Stewart’s “indolent philosophy”.

12. Appendix, Note A: Additional Examples of the Form of Capture 13 min 2

    McLennan adds further examples of the form of capture, stressing that the reporters never connected them: Sir Henry Piers on darts thrown at Irish brides (1682), Huc on the feigned fight at Mongol weddings, the Turkmen elopement followed by the bride’s long return to her parents (compared with Spartan and Cretan custom), the Soligas of India, and Burckhardt’s Bedouin brides who fight their captors, including the Mezeyne bride who flees to the mountains and must be found by her husband.

13. Appendix, Note B: On the Practice of Capturing Wives 13 min 2

    This note adds three items. An 1864 Chambers’ Journal account describes Australian wife-capture with club and spear and the “trial of spears” that settles it, which McLennan compares with the Roman bride carried over the threshold and her hair parted with a spear. He surmises that Manu’s Rakshasa marriage took its name from the Rakshasas of the Ramayana, read as savage tribes hostile to the Aryans, and likens them to the wife-stealing giants of northern legend. Speke’s report from Uganda describes women distributed by the king.