nderstand them. They can give no proof whatever that they did not
express status.

It is therefore a fair hypothesis that _unawa_ (_noa_) and similar terms
express status and not relationship. From the example of mother and son
we see that the Australian does not select for distinction by a special
term that bond which is most obvious both to him and us. It is therefore
by no means surprising that by _unawa_ he should mean, not the existence
of marital relations, but their possibility, from a 'legal' point of
view. Just as he is struck, not by the genetic relation between mother
and son, but by the fact that they belong to different generations, so
in the case of husband and wife the _existence_ of marital relations
between them is neglected, and the point selected for emphasis is the
_legality_ of such marital relations, whether existent or not.

It is singular that anyone should regard this savage view of life as
anything but natural. For the Australian the due observance of the
marriage regulations is a tribal matter; their breach, whether the
connection be by marriage or free love, is a matter of more than private
concern. The relations of a man with his legal wife however concern
other members of the tribe but little. Public opinion among the Dieri,
it is true, condemns the unfaithful wife, but her punishment is left to
the husband; among the Kamilaroi the tribe indeed takes the matter up
but only on the complaint of the husband; and generally speaking it is
the husband who, possibly with his totemic brethren, pursues the
abductor. We have therefore in this insistence on the legal status of
the couple and the comparative indifference to the husband's rights a
sufficiently exact parallel to the insistence on status and not marital
relations in the use of the term _unawa_.

The course of evolution has been, not, as group-marriagers contend, from
group to individual terms of relationship but from terms descriptive of
status to terms descriptive of relationship.

It is, in fact, on any hypothesis, impossible to deny this. Whatever
terms of relationship may have meant in the past, no believer in group
marriage contends that they represent anything actually existing. But
this is equivalent to admitting that they express status and not
relationship, and no proof has ever been given that they were ever
anything else.

FOOTNOTES:

[151] p. 163.

CHAPTER XIII.

PIRRAURU.

Theories of group marriage. Meanin