GROUP MARRIAGE, the marriage of several men with several women. It has been found among various peoples who practise polyandry (q.v.)—in Tibet, India and Ceylon. In many of these cases we are told that if one of the brothers who have a wife in common brings a new wife, he shares, or has to share, her with his brothers. And that in the other cases, also, the group marriage has arisen as a combination of polygyny with polyandry may be inferred from the facts that both in Tibet and India polyandry is much more prevalent than group marriage ; that the latter occurs there nowhere except side by side with poly andry ; and that the occasional combination of polygyny with polyandry, when the circumstances permit it, is easy to explain, whereas no satisfactory reason has been given for the opinion held by some sociologists that polyandry has developed out of an earlier stage of group marriage. It is possible that Caesar's well-known statement about the marriages of the ancient Britons, if correct, likewise refers to a combination of polygyny with polyandry. He says : "In their domestic life they practise a form of community of wives, ten or twelve combining in a group, especially brothers with brothers and fathers with sons." While genuine group marriage has been found only side by side with polyandry, there are peoples—such as the Chukchee, the Herero in South-West Africa, the Masai and Akamba in East Africa, certain communities in New Guinea, and some Australian tribes—who have a kind of sex communism, in which several men have the right of access to several women, although none of the women is properly married to more than one of the men. Thus the pirrauru relation among the Central Australian Dieri and the piraungaru relation among their neighbours, the Urabunna, almost exclusively imply sexual licence. Yet these relations have been considered to give support to the hypothesis of ancient group marriage in Australia, according to which the men of one divi sion or class had as wives the women of another division or class. Marriages of this sort do not exist anywhere in Australia at the present time ; and no person becomes a pirrauru or piraungaru as a matter of course on account of his or her status. An agree ment must be made with the husband, the pirrauru may have to pay for it, and the relation may even be of very short duration (in the case of a visitor) ; while the piraungaru requires the con sent of the woman's elder brothers. These institutions may, partly at least, owe their origin to circumstances not unlike those which have led to more or less similar customs in other parts of the world. From various parts of Australia we hear of the difficulty the young native has in getting a wife on attaining manhood, and the pirrauru or piraungaru custom may serve as a substitute for regular marriage in the case of young men who have to remain unmarried or who have only got old women as wives. But it is also evident that the old and influential men largely make use of that custom to their own advantage. And we must also remember another fact, which is elsewhere found in connection with poly andry, namely, the necessity of a married woman to have a pro tector and guardian during the temporary absence of her husband. A man has sexual rights over a woman who is pirrauru or piraungaru to him chiefly, if not exclusively, while her husband is away, and on such occasions only does she live with him, enjoy ing his protection.
The existence of an early state of group marriage has been assumed from a variety of other customs, such as the lending or exchange of wives, the sexual intercourse to which a girl is sub ject before her marriage, the licence allowed at the performance of certain ceremonies when the ordinary rules of morality are more or less suspended, the levirate, and the use of classificatory terms of relationship which group together under single designa tions many distinct degrees and kinds of relationship. There seem, however, to be much more satisfactory explanations of these customs than to regard them as survivals of earlier group mar riage; and the theory set forth by certain writers, that group marriage is the earliest form of marriage out of which the others have gradually developed seems to be in no way justified.
(E. W.)