Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
The method of capture which has so frequently been described
as characteristic of Australian tribes, is the very rarest way
in which the Central Australian secures a wife. It does not
often happen that a man forcibly takes a woman from someone
else within his own group, but it does sometimes happen, and
especially when the man from whom the woman is taken has
not shown his respect for his actual or tribal _Ikuntera_
(father-in-law) by cutting himself on the occasion of the
death of one or the other of the latter's relations. In this
case the aggressor will be aided by the members of his local
group, but in other cases of capture he will have to fight
for himself. At times, however, a woman may be captured from
another group, though this again is of rare occurrence, and is
usually associated with an avenging party, the women captured
by which, who are almost sure to be the wives of men killed,
are allotted to certain members of the avenging party.[227]
Curr reports to the same effect:
On rare occasions a wife is captured from a neighboring tribe
and carried off.... At present, as the stealing of a woman
from a neighboring tribe would involve the whole tribe in war
for his sole benefit, and as the possession of the woman would
lead to constant attacks, tribes set themselves generally
against the practice.[228]
It is, of course, not to be denied that the sexual impulse of the male
was sometimes strong enough to lead him to seize a woman wherever
he found her, if he could not get a wife otherwise, but there is no
evidence that capture ever formed a regular or important means of
getting wives.[229]
On the contrary, the evidence points to the view that as soon as for
any reason men ceased to marry with the women of their own blood and
went outside of their immediate families for women, they ordinarily
secured them in a social, not a hostile, way, and from a different
branch of their own group, not, as a rule, from a strange group. In
fact, the regular means of securing a wife other than a woman of one's
own family seems to have been to exchange a woman of one's family for
a woman of a different family.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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