Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia | Page 9

not, it may be noted, imply any predominance
of the mother.[11]
We may suppose that the idea of kinship or the recognition of
consanguinity, whichever be the more correct term to apply to these
far-off developments of the factors of human society, extended only by
degrees beyond the limits of the group. First, perhaps, came the naming
of the group, already, it may be, exogamous; then came the recognition
of the fact that those members of it, viz. the women, who passed to
community B after being born and having resided for years in
community A, were in reality, in spite of their change of residence, still
in fact the kin of community A; finally came the step of assigning to
their children the group names which were retained by their mothers
from the original natal groups. This brings us face to face with the first
of the fundamental questions of descent, to which allusion has been
made.
It is commonly assumed by students of primitive social organisation
that matrilineal descent is the earlier and that it has everywhere
preceded patrilineal descent; but the questions involved are highly
complicated and it can hardly be said that the subject has been fully
discussed.
Much of what has been said on the point has been vitiated by the
introduction of foreign factors. Thus, the child belongs to the tribe of
the father where the wife removes to the husband's local group or tribe.
But though it may be taken as a mark of matrilineal institutions, often
associated with matria potestas or its analogue the rule of the mother's
brother, that the husband should remove and live with the wife, we are

by no means entitled to say that the removal of the wife to the husband
implies a different state of things. Customs of residence are no guide to
the principles on which descent is regulated. Consequently it is entirely
erroneous to import into the discussion with which we are concerned,
viz. the rules by which kinship is determined, any considerations based
on the rules by which membership of a tribe is settled.
Similarly, no proof of the existence of paternal authority in the family
throws any light on the question of whether the children belong to the
kin of the father rather than of the mother. Where the mother or
mother's brother is the guardian, we are usually safe in assuming that
descent is or has been until recently matrilineal. But from the
undisputed existence of patria potestas no similar inference can be
drawn.
Again, as will be shown below, not even the tie of blood between
parent and child, confined though it may be in the opinion of the people
whose institutions are in question, to a single parent, is an index to the
way in which is determined the kinship organisation to which the child
belongs.
It is therefore clear that the utmost discrimination is necessary in
dealing with these questions; rules of descent must be kept apart from
matters which indeed influence the evolution of the rules but are in no
way decisive as to their form at any given moment.
Returning now to the alleged priority of matrilineal descent in
determining the kinship organisation into which a child passes, it may
be said that whereas evidences of the passage from female to male
reckoning may be observed,[12] there is virtually none of a change in
the opposite direction. In other words, where kinship is reckoned in the
female line, there is no ground for supposing that it was ever hereditary
in any other way. On the other hand, where kinship is reckoned in the
male line, it is frequently not only legitimate but necessary to conclude
that it has succeeded a system of female kinship. But this clearly does
not mean that female descent has in all cases preceded the reckoning of
kinship through males. Patrilineal descent may have been directly
evolved without the intermediate stage of reckoning through females.

The problem is probably insoluble. No decisive data are available, for
the mere absence of traces of matrilineal descent does not necessarily
prove more than that it had long been superseded by reckoning of
kinship through males. All that can be said is that in the kinship
organisations known to us female descent seems to have prevailed in
the vast majority of cases and probably existed in the residual class of
indeterminable examples.
With patria potestas it is, of course, different. There can be little doubt
that it might and probably did develop in the absence of kinship
organisations and in a state of society where consanguinity is no real
bond after the children have reached puberty. If therefore under such
circumstances a kinship organisation were to come into existence,
either independently or by transmission, it might well be