It is true that the family, which exists in the lower stages of culture,
though it is overshadowed by the other social phenomena, has persisted
through all the manifold revolutions of society; especially in the stage
of barbarism, its importance in some directions, such as the regulation
of marriage, often forbidden within limits of consanguinity much wider
than among ourselves, approaches the influence of the forms of natal
association which it had supplanted. In the present day, however, if we
set aside its economic and steadily diminishing ethical sides, it
cannot be compared in importance with the territorial groupings on which
state and municipal activities depend.

If the family is a persistent type the tribe may also be compared to the
modern state; it is, in most parts of the world, no less territorial in
its nature; membership of it does not depend among the Australians on
any supposed descent from a common ancestor; and though residence plus
possession of a common speech is mentioned by Howitt as the test of
tribe, it is possible in Australia, under certain conditions[1], to pass
from one tribe to another in such a way that we seem reduced to
residence as the test of membership. This change of tribe takes place
almost exclusively where tribes are friendly, so far as is known; and we
may doubt whether it would be possible for a stranger to settle, without
any rite of adoption, in the midst of a hostile or even of an unknown
tribe; but this is clearly a matter of minor importance, if adoption is
not, as in North America, an invariable element of the change of tribe.
Although membership of a tribe is thus loosely determined, tribesmen
feel themselves bound by ties of some kind to their fellow-tribesmen, as
we shall see below, but in this they do not differ from the members of
any modern state.

But in Australia the importance of the tribe, save from an economic
point of view, as joint owner of the tribal land, is small compared with
the part played in the lives of its members by the intratribal
associations, whose influence is recognised without, as within the
tribe. These associations are of two kinds in the lowest strata of human
society; in each case membership is determined by birth and they may
therefore be distinguished as _natal associations_. In the one case, the
_kinship groups_ such as totem kins, phratries, etc., an individual
remains permanently in the association into which he is born, special
case