The marriageable group is termed nupa by both men and women; in addition to the nupa relationship and the unnamed individual marriage, into which a man enters with one or more of his nupa, there is the piraungaru relationship, corresponding to the pirrauru of the Dieri.  In each case the elder brothers of the woman decide who are to have the primary and who the secondary right to the female.  In the case of the piraungaru however the matter requires confirmation by the old men of the tribe.  The circumstances under which the piraungaru claims take the first rank are not stated by Messrs Spencer and Gillen; the statement that a man lends his piraungaru need not, of course, refer to times at which he himself cannot claim the right of access[174].

We may now turn to a discussion of the bearing of the facts just cited on the question of “group marriage.”  The first point is naturally that of nomenclature, and we at once recognise that among the Dieri the relations of the pirrauru are not marriage, either on the definition suggested by Dr Westermarck or on that given in Chapter XI of the present work.  If two tippa-malku pairs are reciprocally in pirrauru, the only relations between them, unless the tippa-malku husbands absent themselves or are complaisant, are, strictly speaking, those of temporary regulated polygamy or promiscuity, and rather a restriction than an extension of similar customs in other tribes, as I shall show below.

A second point of a similar nature is that the parties to a pirrauru union are in no sense a group[175].  They are not united by any bond, local, totemistic, tribal, or otherwise.  The theoretical “group marriage”—­the union of all the noa—­does, in a sense, refer to a group, though this term properly refers rather to a body of people distinguished by residence or some other local differentia from other persons or groups.  But no distinction of this kind can in any sense be affirmed of the pirrauru spouses; it cannot be said of them that they are in any way distinguished from the remainder of their tribe, phratry, class or totem-kin.  From this it follows that the term class-marriage cannot be applied to the relation between the pirrauru, nor yet class promiscuity; the pirrauru, though members of a certain class, do not include all members of that class.

Turning now to the custom itself, let us examine how far it presents any marks of being a survival of a previous state of class promiscuity. Pirrauru relations are regarded by Dr Howitt and others as survivals from a previous stage of “group,” by which we must, presumably, understand class or status marriage, or promiscuity.  So far as they are evidence of this, the pirrauru customs are certainly important.  If however it cannot be shown that they probably point to some form of promiscuity, they have but little importance except as a freak or exceptional development of polyandry and polygyny.