220 SWANTOX: institutional marriage 



Where the aversion to close marriages obtains we should 

 expect the exogamous group to consist of the blood relations of 

 each individual, the number of such individuals within the 

 tabooed class being determined either by the intensity of the 

 opposition to intermarriage of blood kin or the abihty of the 

 people to trace relationship. Such a condition is found in mod- 

 ern white society, though it is not pressed to the extreme limit. 

 Among the primitive races of North America, to which I shall 

 particularly devote my attention, it is present among the Eskimo 

 of the Arctic shores and islands, among the northern Indians 

 in contact with them, among most of the Athapascan, Salishan, 

 and Shoshonean peoples from the ^Mackenzie and Yukon rivers 

 on the north to the borders of Alexico, and among most of the 

 tribes of Cahfornia. Here we may say that exogamy is con- 

 sciously, and to a certain degree intelligenth' applied to indi- 

 viduals related by blood. Exceptions may occur in cases of 

 adoption, and no doubt there are other exceptions, but they do 

 not modify the truth of this statement to any appreciable extent. 



When we turn to the other portions of North America north 

 of ^Mexico, however, to the tribes of the North Pacific coast, 

 to the Pueblo Indians of New ^Mexico and Arizona, to the occu- 

 pants of the eastern and southeastern woodlands, some of the 

 peoples of the Plains, and one or two in Cahfornia, we find a 

 very different social condition. There the exogamous group, 

 instead of being determined almost uniformly by blood, is found 

 to be a conventional body which includes persons related by 

 blood and persons not related by blood and excludes persons 

 related bj' blood and persons not related by blood. Numerous 

 theories have been suggested to account for this apparently 

 anomalous state of affairs, some of which explain it as an insti- 

 tution or condition more primitive than that of the exogamous 

 group founded on blood and would derive the latter from it. 

 One who has carried on investigations among tribes of this class 

 with an unbiased mind, however, can hardly fail to come to 

 the conclusion that the recognition of consanguinity is an original 

 element, and that where an entire class of persons is called by 

 the same term as the true father, mother, uncle, aunt, brother, 



