It has been pointed out more than once that there are grave difficulties in the way of any hypothesis which assumes that terms of relationship, properly so called, were evolved in a state of pure promiscuity.  It has now been shown that no intelligible account of the meaning of such terms can be given, even if we dismiss the difficulties just mentioned and assume that terms were somehow or other evolved, and a transition effected to a state of regulated promiscuity.  If on the other hand we regard the “terms of relationship” as originally indicative of tribal status and suppose they have been transformed in the course of ages into “descriptive” terms such as we use in everyday life, the difficulties vanish.

For one proof of this hypothesis we need look no further than the terms of relationship applied by a mother to her own (and other) children, an illustration which has already done duty more than once.  It is abundantly clear that what this term expresses is not relationship but status, the relation of one generation to the next in the Malayan system, of the half of a generation to the next generation in the same moiety of the tribe among the Dieri, and so on.

It is admitted even by believers in group marriage that the terms of relationship do not correspond to anything actually existing; beyond the “survivals” which we shall consider below, they can produce no shadow of proof that the terms ever did correspond to actual relationships, as they understand 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.