tution of society. Anthropologists have long had before them the problem of determining how far clan-exogamy may have been the origin of the prohibited degrees in matrimony so variously defined in the laws of nations. The yet larger problem has been opened, how far laws of permission and prohibition of marriage may have led nations to define relationships and give them names, distinguishing for instance uncles from fathers, and cousins from brothers. It may, I think, conduce to the solution of these problems to notice two ways in which the collation of the present tables bears on the meaning and origin of exogamy. There are conditions of society under which exogamy is found side by side with wife-capture, so that a barbaric marriage often involves both in one and the same act, as when a Tatar and a party of his friends, all armed to the teeth, ride off to the tents of a distant clan, and thence with simulated or even real violence carry off a bride. But on reckoning up the peoples among whom this combination of capture and exogamy is found, the number, though enough to show that they co-exist freely, falls short of what would justify the inference that they are cause and effect. Moreover, it appears that this co-existence belongs especially to the paternal stage of society, and to the maternal-paternal, in which paternal influence is partly established. This is intelligible enough from what has been already said as to the effect of capture in setting on foot paternal institutions, from its very outset, by bringing the wife into the husband's hands and home. We are thus led to a more fundamental test of the position of exogamy, by inquiring whether it existed in that earliest known stage of the maternal system of society, where the husband lives in the wife's family. The schedules show that there are in different parts of the world twelve or thirteen well-marked exogamous peoples whose habit of residence is for the husband to join the wife's family. This state of things seems to me to prevent our regarding exogamy as a result of capture, it being plain that the warrior who has carried a wife captive from a hostile tribe does not take up his abode in her family. If capture leads to any form of exogamy, this must, I think, be a paternal form, and if it be admitted that the maternal form is earlier, then it follows that capture is inadmissible as the primary cause of exogamy. More than twenty years ago, in compiling a list of nations practising this custom of marrying out of the tribe or kin, I noticed that in any full discussion of the subject would have to be considered the wish to bind different tribes together in friendship by intermarriage. Compiling the present tables has brought together observations to this effect. Morgan, describing how the alliance of the Iroquois tribes, made up of intermarrying clans, formed a bond of union throughout the national league, writes: "It was the boast of the Iroquois that the great object of their confederacy was peace; to break up the spirit of perpetual warfare, which has wasted the red race from age to age." Another group of North American tribes, the Tinneh, on the Arctic circle, are divided into three castes, their rule being that, for instance, a Chit-sangh may not marry a Chit-sangh. When this does take place, the persons are ridiculed and laughed at, the man is said to have married his sister, even though she may be from another tribe, and there be not the slightest connection by blood between them. Hardisty, who gives these details, remarks: "One good thing proceeded from the above arrangement, it prevented war between two tribes who were naturally hostile." The Bogos of Abyssinia are exogamous, and of them Munzinger reports that they are closely bound together by reciprocal marriages, "so that internal war is almost impossible. Blood-quarrels among the Bogos are always settled very quickly, whilst the smallest collision with the adjoining tribes leads to everlasting wars. Du Chaillu writes of Ashango-land, "tribes and clans intermarry with each other and this brings about a friendly feeling among the people. People of the same clan cannot intermarry with each other.'' Thus, it seems that when Plutarch asks in the "Roman Questions," "Why do they not marry women near of kin?" he has some reason in setting down as one possible answer, "whether from their wishing to increase friendships by marriages, and to acquire many kinsfolk, giving wives to others and receiving (wives) from them.' On looking at the distinction between endogamy and exogamy from this point of view, it will be seen that there is a period in the growth of society when it is a political question of the first importance. While the vast forest or prairie still affords abundant food for a scanty population, small hordes may wander, or groups of households may be set up, each little tribe or settlement cut off from the rest, and marrying within its own border. But when tribes begin to adjoin and press on one another and quarrel, then the difference between marrying-in and marrying-out becomes patent. Endogamy is a policy of isolation, cutting off a horde or village, even from the parent-stock whence it separated, if only a generation or two back. Among tribes of low culture there is but one means known of keeping up permanent alliance, and that means is intermarriage. Exogamy, enabling a growing tribe to keep itself compact by constant unions between its spreading clans, enables it to overmatch any number of small intermarrying groups, isolated and helpless. Again and again in the world's history, savage tribes must have had plainly before their minds the simple practical alternative between marrying-out and being killed out. Even far on in culture, the political value of intermarriage remains. "Matrimonial alliances increase friendship more than aught else," is a maxim of Mohammed. "Then will we give our daughters unto you, and we will take your daughters to us, and we will dwell with you, and we will become one people," is a well-known passage of Israelite history. Exogamy lies far back in the history of man, and perhaps no observer has ever seen it come into existence, nor have the precise conditions of its origin yet been clearly inferred. Even the historical relation between exogamy and the system of classes known as totemism is not fully cleared up; whether as Prof. Robertson Smith takes it, totemism supplied the necessary machinery for working a law of exogamy or whether exogamy itself led to totemism. But as to the law of exogamy itself, the evidence shows it in operation over a great part of the human race as a factor of political prosperity. It cannot be claimed as absolutely preventing strife and bloodshed, indeed, it has been remarked of some peoples, such as the Khonds and the Banks Islanders, that the intermarrying clans do nevertheless quarrel and fight. Still by binding together a whole community with ties of kinship and affinity, and especially by the peacemaking of the women who hold to one clan as sisters and to another as wives, it tends to keep down feuds and to heal them when they arise, so as at critical moments to hold together a tribe which under endogamous conditions would have split up. Exogamy thus shows itself as an institution which resists the tendency of uncultured populations to disintegrate, cementing them into nations capable of living together in peace and holding together in war till they reach the period of higher military and political organization. Seen from this point of view, the remarkable fact is more easily understood that exogamy, passing on from the maternal to the paternal stage of society, shifts its prohibitions from the female to the male line of descent, now allowing marriages which it treated formerly as incestuous, while prohibiting others which it formerly allowed without scruple. This transformation has been taking place within recent times among Malay and American tribes, and seems to be even going on still, it making no difference politically whether kinship follows the female or male line, if only marrying-out causes the requisite intermixture of the clans. In this connection it is worth while to notice that there are a small number of peoples in different parts of the world, who have a rule of exogamy not depending on kinship at all. For instance, Piedrahita relates of the Panches of Bogota, that those of one town did not marry any woman thereof, as all held themselves brothers, and the impediment of kinship was sacred to them, but such was their ignorance that if a sister were born in a different town from her brother, he was not prevented from marrying her. An anthropologist, with the list before him of the peoples who prohibit a man from marrying in his own village, might explain this not as a result of ignorance, but as an extreme case of what may be called "local exogamy." The results here brought forward make no approach to exhausting the possible inferences to be drawn from the tables. These need not even be confined to working out the development of customs found in existence somewhere on the globe, but may in some measure restore knowledge of forms of society now extinct. Interesting, however, as these problems are, I am more anxious to bring under discussion the method by which they are here treated, how imperfectly I am well aware. The interpretations offered will have to be corrected, the tabulated material improved in quantity and quality and the principles it involves brought out more justly, yet at any rate it will remain clear that the rules of human conduct are amenable to classification in compact masses, so as to show by strict numerical treatment their relations to one another. It is only at this point that speculative explanation must begin, at once guided in its course and strictly limited in its range by well-marked lines of fact to which it must conform. The key of the position is, as that veteran anthropologist, Prof. Bastian, of the Berlin Museum, is never weary of repeating, that in statistical investigation the future of anthropology lies. As soon as this is systematically applied, principles of social development become visible. Even the diagrams of this paper may suffice to show that the institutions of man are as distinctly stratified as the earth on which he lives. They succeed each other in series substantially uniform over the globe, independent of what seem the comparatively superficial differences of race and language, but shaped by similar human nature acting through successively changed conditions in savage, barbaric, and civilized life. The treatment of social phenomena by numerical classification will, it must be added, react on the statistical material to which the method is applied. It is in classifying the records of tribes and nations that one becomes fully aware of their imperfect and even fragmentary state. The descriptions happily tend to correct one another's errors but the great difficulty is blank want of information. As for extinct tribes, and those whose native culture has been re-modelled, there is nothing to be done. But there are still a hundred or more peoples in the world, among whom a prompt and minute investigation would save some fast vanishing memory of their social laws and customs. The quest might be followed up internationally, each civilized nation taking in hand the barbaric tribes within its purview. The future will, doubtless, be able to take care of itself as to most branches of knowledge, but there is certain work which if it is to be done at all, must be done by the present. 32. ESKIMO SOCIETY1 By FRANZ BOAS TRAVEL AND VISITS In treating of the single tribes, the routes were mentioned which are followed by the natives as they travel from shore to shore and from settlement to settlement. These routes are established by tradition and the Eskimo never stray from them. In order to obtain a more thorough understanding of the migrations of single individuals and of families, the relations between the tribes and the settlements must be discussed. By the lively intercourse which is always kept up between the settlements, it cannot fail that marriages between members of different tribes should be of frequent occurrence and that many ties of affinity and consanguinity should thus be created. These relations, however, as distances increase, quickly become less common. For instance, in Cumberland Sound three people are found belonging to Tununirn, about ten belonging to Akudnirn, and quite a number coming from Padli. Also, two Sikosuilarmiut live there, a few natives of Akuliaq and Qaumauang, and very many Nugumiut. Hall's accounts concerning the Nugumiut and the Aivillirmiut prove a similar proportion of strange natives among these tribes. Every tribe may be said to bring together its immediate neighbors, as it is closely related to them, while those which are separated by the tribe itself are strangers to one another. The importance of this mediate position is regulated by the strength of the tribe, by the significance of the country in reference to its produce, and by the routes crossing it. . . . Between tribes that are strangers to one another ceremonies of greeting are customary which are not adapted to facilitate intercourse. The ceremonies will be described further on. . . . Among neighboring tribes these ceremonies are dispensed with, for instance, between the Padlimiut and Oqomiut, Padlimiut and Akudnirmiut, while a Nugumio or an Akudnirmio unknown in Oqo has there to go through the whole of the performance. The exception in favor of the former tribe is doubtless due to the frequent intermarriages with those tribes, whereby a constant acquaintance is kept up. 1 Selected from pages 462-466, 578-582, 609 of Franz Boas, "The Central Eskimo," Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, pages 399-669, 1888, |