R. H. Mathews - Contribution To Anthropology - Kinship and Marriage Rules

Kinship and Marriage Rules

Of Mathews’ 171 publications, 71 are to do with Aboriginal kinship, totems or the rules of marriage. His first publication on kinship was read before the Queensland branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia in 1894. It concerns the Kamilaroi people of New South Wales whose country he knew from his surveying. Mathews noted that the Kamiliaroi community was divided into two cardinal groups, these days known as moieties (although Mathews more often called them ‘phratries’ or less often ‘cycles’). Each moiety was divided into a further two sections. Particular sections (from opposite moieties) were expected to intermarry. The community was also divided into totems, which were also taken into consideration when marriages were being arranged. Particular totemic groups were expected to intermarry.

Mathews noted that marriage rules similar to those of the Kamilaroi occurred across much of Australia. Some communities had intermarrying moieties without further divisions within the moiety groups. Others had moieties divided into four sections (now known as sub-sections). He plotted the distribution of marriage rules and other cultural traits in his ‘Map Showing Boundaries of the Several Nations of Australia’, published by the American Philosophical Society in 1900.

Throughout his studies of Aboriginal kinship, Mathews claimed that some marriages occurred that were outside the standard marriage rules as generally understood by the community, although they were nonetheless accepted. He called them ‘irregular’ marriages and argued that a further set of rules governed these relationships. Despite these departures from the standard rules, it remained a highly ordered social system. Mathews pointed out that in Kamilaroi society there were some marriages, such as those between people of the same totem, that were never deemed acceptable. Mathews’ rival Howitt denounced these findings, arguing that this information was imparted by ‘degraded’ tribes, corrupted by European influence. However, later anthropologists, including Adolphus Peter Elkin, endorsed Mathews’ interpretation.

Mathews’ approach to kinship was very different to that of Howitt who, as John Mulvaney has written, sought ‘to lay bare the essentials of primeval society, on the assumption that Australia was a storehouse of fossil customs.’ Mathews reacted against this approach, which was based on the social evolutionary ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, a patron of both Howitt and his collaborator Fison. Howitt and Fison argued that the vestiges of a primitive form of social organisation, called ‘group marriage’, were evident in Aboriginal marriage rules. Group marriage, as defined by Morgan, presupposed that groups of men who called each other ‘brother’ had collective conjugal rights over groups of women who called each other ‘sister’. Thomas argues that Mathews found the idea of group marriage in Aboriginal society ‘counterintuitive’ because ‘the requirements of totems and sections made marriage a highly restrictive business.’ The idea that group marriage exists in Aboriginal Australia is now dismissed by anthropological authorities as ‘one of the most notable fantasies in the history of anthropology.’