Endogamy

“ It must be said, however, that exogamy is as often met in the individual form of marriage, and that sometimes endogamy, interdicted within the limits of a clan, is, on the contrary, practised within the limits of the tribe of which these clans are the components. ”

“ Exogamy is, or has been, as widely spread as the opposed rule of endogamy just described. It is the duty enforced by custom, religion, and law, of marrying outside one’s own clan, and is usually in force amongst small and barbarous communities. Its 50former distribution is attested by the survival in nearly all countries, of ceremonies based on “marriage by capture.” ”

“ Thus the conclusion is inevitable that endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to Caste, and if we succeed in showing how endogamy is maintained, we shall practically have proved the genesis and also the mechanism of Caste. ”

“ If endogamy is used in the sense of prohibition to marry outside of a certain kinship group, whether that group be exclusive of, inclusive of, or identical with the man's own group, then marriage among the totem societies of Australia, America, and India is both exogamous and endogamous; a man is forbidden to marry either within his own clan or outside of a certain kinship group. ”

“ Endogamy, or the custom of marrying exclusively within one’s own tribe or caste, has been sanctioned by religion and enforced by law, in all parts of the world, but chiefly in long settled nations where there is wealth to bequeath and where neighbouring communities profess different creeds. ”

“ Evidently endogamy, which at the outset must have characterized the more peaceful groups, and which has prevailed as societies have become less hostile, is a concomitant of the higher forms of the family. ”

“ In other words, if endogamy is to be preserved conjugal rights from within have to be provided for, otherwise members of the group will be driven out of the circle to take care of themselves in any way they can. ”

“ Some races which are endogamous as regards the tribe are exogamous as regards the gens. Thus the Abors, Kochs, Hos and other peoples of India, are forbidden to marry out of the tribe; but the tribe itself is divided into “keelis” or clans, and no man is allowed to take as wife a girl of his own “keeli.” Endogamy must have in most cases arisen from racial pride, and a contempt, either well or ill founded, for the surrounding peoples. ”

“ Incipient varieties are thus thrown off from the parent stock by means of peculiarities of sexual instinct which prompt what anthropologists call endogamy, and check exogamy or marriage without the tribe or caste. ”

“ Let us take an imaginary group that desires to make itself into a Caste and analyse what means it will have to adopt to make itself endogamous. If a group desires to make itself endogamous a formal injunction against intermarriage with outside groups will be of no avail, especially if prior to the introduction of endogamy, exogamy had been the rule in all matrimonial relations. Again, there is a tendency in all groups lying in close contact with one another to assimilate and amalgamate, and thus consolidate into a homogenous society. ”

“ In some cases social laws have had the indirect effect of perpetuating distinctions between separate parts of a population, or at least of retarding their complete amalgamation. This is the case where laws of endogamy relate to groups of distinct descent, and may be observed, for instance, among the castes of Bengal, where the low castes are of the characteristic South Indian type, while the highest castes preserve the type of the tribes of northwestern India (Risley and Gait) . ”

“ The Kalangs of Java are endogamous, and every man must first prove his common descent before he can enter a family. The Manchu Tatars prohibit those who have the same family names from marrying. Among the Bedouins “a man has an exclusive right to the hand of his cousin.” Hottentots seldom marry out of their own kraal, and David Livingstone quotes other examples. Endogamy seems to have existed in the Sandwich Islands and in New Zealand. ”

“ Nothing is therefore more important for you to remember than the fact that endogamy is foreign to the people of India. The various Gotras of India are and have been exogamous: so are the other groups with totemic organization. It is no exaggeration to say that with the people of India exogamy is a creed and none dare infringe it, so much so that, in spite of the endogamy of the Castes within them, exogamy is strictly observed and that there are more rigorous penalties for violating exogamy than there are for violating endogamy. ”

“ Homologies have a high development in the organization of demotic bodies discovered in the animals, especially as they are represented among the higher insects, but more fully illustrated in the organization of human society. The forms of organization are various. In the tribes of the world families are organized into clans, and clans into phratries, and phratries into tribes, and tribes into confederacies. In passing from savagery to barbarism, the clan becomes the gens. In all the multitudinous forms of tribal society, homologies have been discovered. ”

“ It is sufficient to state the words gens, and phratry simply denote subdivisions of a tribe.6 This is the ancient system of government, and goes very far back in the history of the race. It is that state of society which everywhere preceded history and civilization. When we go back to the first beginning of history in Europe, we find the Grecian, Roman, and Germanic tribes in the act of substituting the modern system of government for the tribal state, under which they had passed from savagism into and through the various stages of barbarism, and entered the confines of civilization. ”

“ We will begin with the gens, or the lowest division of the tribe. We must understand its organization before we can understand that of a tribe, and we must master the tribal organization before attempting to learn the workings of the confederacy. To neglect this order, and commence at the top of the series, is to make the same mistake that the older writers did in their studies into this culture. A gens has certain rights, duties, and privileges which belong to the whole gens, and we will consider some of the more important in their proper place. ”

“ The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. ”

“ But the whole process of social evolution is one of very gradual assimilation, and neither in the world as a whole, in the nation or race, or in the tribe, clan, family, locality, or class, is it one of equal advance on all sides. The coöperation adopted may be, at different points, that of individuals against individuals, of tribes against tribes, of nations against nations, or of classes against classes. ”

“ To illustrate the pre-exogamic stage of human society is not so easy as it may seem; for, though it is possible to find examples, especially amongst Negritos such as the Andamanese or Bushmen, of peoples of the rudest culture, and living in very small communities, who apparently know neither exogamy nor what so often accompanies it, namely, totemism, we can never be certain whether we are dealing in such a case with the genuinely primitive, or merely with the degenerate. ”

“ Are the groups and kindreds commonly styled 'totemic' earlier or later than the division into a pair of moieties or 'phratries'? Do the totem-kins represent the results of an early form of exogamous custom, or are they additions to or consciously arranged subdivisions of the two exogamous moieties? Is a past of 'group marriage' or 'communal marriage' proved by the terms for human relationships employed by many backward races, and by survivals in manner and custom? ”

“ This shows the connection to be contrary to the normal state of the races, as it is contrary to the preservation of species in the animal kingdom. . .Far from presenting to me a natural solution of our difficulties, the idea of amalgamation is most repugnant to my feelings. It is now the foundation of some of the most ill-advised schemes. But wherever it is practiced, amalgamation among different races produces shades of population, the social position of which can never be regular and settled. ”

“ As the various tribes and races of mankind have probably sprung from a common progenitor, and as the “nerve cells in the brain of all classes and orders have had the same origin,” their development, although not identical as to time and manner of detail, has been similar in outline and in general results; so it is thought that a correct knowledge of the development of any tribe or race from savagery to civilization must necessarily involve the general history of all the tribes and races of mankind. ”

“ Throughout the whole history of men stretches a continuous process of amalgamation which, beginning with the smallest primitive synthetic groups and following a race-building law to us unknown, binds together and amalgamates small, heterogenous groups into even larger unities, into peoples, races, and nations, perpetually bringing them into conflict against other similarly constituted and amalgamated peoples, nations, and races, and through this conflict into ever new fields of conquest and culture, which again consolidates and amalgamates the heterogenous elements. ”

“ The most strenuous advocates of sameness of species, use it to designate well-defined groups, as the white and black. If we consider ourselves warranted by the language of the Bible, to believe in separate origins of the human family, then, indeed, it may be considered as similar in meaning to species; otherwise, it must signify but subdivisions of one. We may therefore speak of ten or a hundred races of man, without impugning their being descended from the same stock. ”

“ May it not be more perfective of the system to say, that human nature is a class, comprehending an order of beings, of which man is the genus, divided into distinct and separate species of men? All other species of the animal kingdom have their marks of distinction: why should man be universally indiscriminate one to the other? ”

“ The unity of the human genus is a conception developed in the course of ages through historical activity, and not an original, natural idea, inherent in the human soul. It is not an immediate datum of organic life, but a product of the social historical development process. It has the variety of the primitive racial tribes as its antecedent, their struggle as its conditions, and their final harmonious cooperation as its aim. ”

“ In the organic world, each field requires a new creation; each change in circumstances going beyond the constitution of a plant or animal, is met by a new adaptation, until the whole universe is full; while, among the immense variety of created beings, two kinds are hardly found fulfilling the same precise purpose. Some analogy may possibly exist in the human family; and it may even be questioned, whether any one of the races existing singly would, up to the present day, have extended itself over the whole surface of the globe."—The Races of Man, and their Geographical Distribution. ”

“ Verily, if we compare those two series of development with one another, and ask ourselves which of the two is the more wonderful, it must be confessed that ontogeny, or the short and quick history of development of the individual, is much more mysterious than phylogeny, or the long and slow history of development of the tribe. ”

“ But, in the midst of the confused indecision in which we are left, where would be the unreasonableness of taking the subdivisions of these divisions and asking why we may not look on these as distinct species also—why, in fact, should there not have been creations equal in number to the twenty-four subdivisions? If these philosophers go on, making distinctions, (in which no two of them will be found to agree with the others,) where are they to stop? There are varieties enough in the osteology and general appearance of the races to warrant a hundred distinctions—therefore, a hundred creations. ”

“ Subdivisions of Races.—The further subdivisions of ethnography follow to some extent the important doctrine of the “areas of characterization,” that is, they are geographical; but as the classification of men advances in minuteness, other considerations become paramount, notably, language and government. These elements allow us to subdivide a race into its branches; a branch into its stocks; a stock into its groups, and these again into tribes, peoples, or nations. ”

“ It may be that the unity of the human race is a fact so profound that all attempts at a fundamental classification to be used in all the departments of anthropology will fail, and that there will remain multifarious groupings for the multifarious purposes of the science; or, otherwise expressed, that languages, arts, customs, institutions, and traditions may be classified, and that the human family will be considered as one race. ”

“ Species developed from a common genus will show some common traits and some rules of mutual observance, savage peoples which have divided into tribes being an exception to the latter part of the statement, for the reason that lower societies have very little moral cohesion; they may be compared to lower organisms which reproduce themselves by fission, or to homogeneous colonies of animals, like sponges. Under the generic institutions we must not include those which arise merely as the result of similar circumstances. ”

“ We must first discuss the word race in its physiological sense.
A good many observers, who judge by first impressions and so take extreme views, assert that there are such radical and essential differences between human families that one must refuse them any identity of origin. [48] The writers who adhere to such a notion assume many other genealogies by the side of that from Adam. To them there is no original unity in the species, or rather there is no single species; there are three or four, or even more, which produce perfectly distinct types, and these again have united to form hybrids. ”