Addendum: A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage¶
Core Argument¶
This addendum presents a recently discovered case of group marriage among the Gilyak people of Sakhalin Island, directly countering the fashionable denial of group marriage’s existence by rationalistic ethnographers. The core argument is that the Gilyak practice constitutes a form of punaluan marriage, the most developed phase of group marriage, closely analogous to the classic Hawaiian model. In the typical punaluan family, a number of brothers are married to a number of sisters; among the Gilyaks, a man is married to all the wives of his brothers and all the sisters of his wife, the only difference being that the brothers of the husband and the husbands of the sisters are not necessarily identical persons. This report thus confirms Engels’s earlier contention in The Origin of the Family that group marriage is not the lascivious public debauchery imagined by the brothel-obsessed philistine, but rather a customary permission for sexual intercourse in certain cases where otherwise it would be severely punished. The gradual dying out of the actual exercise of these rights only proves the form’s own destined extinction.
The chapter draws heavily on the ethnographic communication of Mr Sternberg, read by N. A. Yanchuk to the Anthropological Section of the Society of the Friends of Natural Science. The Gilyaks are described as being at the cultural level of savagery, acquainted neither with agriculture nor pottery, procuring food by hunting and fishing. Their kinship system is detailed: a Gilyak addresses all brothers of his father as “father,” all wives of these brothers and all sisters of his mother as “mothers,” and the children of these as “brothers” and “sisters.” This system of address, known among the Iroquois and Indian tribes, among the Gilyaks still corresponds to actual conditions. The gens is constituted by all brothers of the father, their fathers and mothers, the children of his brothers, and his own children. Marriage within the gens is unconditionally prohibited. Upon a man’s death, his wife passes by decision of the gens to one of his brothers. The gens provides for all members unable to work, maintains common sacrificial ceremonies and burial places, and guarantees life and security through blood revenge, from which women are excepted. Property may not pass out of the gens, a provision literally mirroring the Twelve Tables: si suos heredes non habet, gentiles familiam habento.
The polemical thrust is directed against rationalistic ethnographers who deny group marriage’s existence, and against the philistine imagination that equates it with lasciviousness. The chapter further argues for the similarity, even identity, of social institutions among primitive peoples at the same stage of development, noting that most of what is stated about these Mongoloids on Sakhalin also holds for Dravidian tribes of India, South Sea Islanders, and American Indians. The Gilyaks are noted for their honesty, hospitality, and absence of crimes from personal gain, keeping valuables in unlocked storehouses. However, the chapter ends with a lament: the corrupting influence of Russian settlement and the town’s chances and changes of fortune are destroying the primitive equality of their artlessly simple economic life, with one or two more generations seeing the Gilyaks completely Russianised, acquiring the benefits of culture alongside its defects.