ESOGAMIA. — The term e., introduced into sociology by Mc Lennan, signifies that rule, common to all peoples, according to which the wife must be chosen outside the group with which the young man is, or feels himself to be, closely related. Consequently, any sexual relationship occurring between persons belonging to the same group is regarded as incestuous. The limits of this rule vary among different cultures.
In the original cultures, e. is local, that is, the bride must be chosen in a village different from that in which the bridegroom lives; in many cases this rule corresponds to blood e., since the inhabitants of a single village are often related. In totemism, where the tribe is divided into different clans whose members believe themselves descended from a common ancestor, there is clan e. The earlier matriarchate has class e.: the tribe is divided into two marriage classes, in each of which e. applies. Pastoral nomads have preserved and extended to the large patriarchal family, which characterizes the sociology of these peoples, the e. of the original cultures founded on blood relationship. Clan and class e. are the product of a system of artificially constructed kinship and are therefore more recent than the system founded on consanguinity, which never disappears from any culture and consequently remains a feature common to all humanity.
The following are always consanguineous: parents and children, even when merely adoptive, and brothers and sisters; almost always cousins, sometimes on both the paternal and maternal lines, sometimes only on one of the two (first cousins are often regarded as siblings, although there are also populations with a strong preference for marriage between a sister’s son and a brother’s daughter). Often the prohibition of marriage has so broad a scope as to include persons whom we no longer consider relatives.
Exceptions to e. (v. ETNOLOGIA) are so rare and isolated, so truly felt as such and consequently so detested by the other members of the same tribe, that they confirm the universal character of this law, whose extremely interesting study still requires further investigation.
Evolutionist ethnologists, sociologists, and psychologists have offered various explanations of e., but all of them have fallen because they contradict the facts. For Morgan, it would be the result of successive restrictions following the phase he postulated of unlimited sexual promiscuity (ugamy).
Mc Lennan believes that savages generally practice infanticide, and that for this reason males would be forced to steal women from outside their own group. But these observations are entirely gratuitous, because infanticide and abduction are unknown in the original cultures: they appear in certain younger cultures and have never been general among humanity.
Spencer asserts that the savage steals women from outside his own group because in this way he has the advantage of possessing both slaves and trophies at the same time. But warfare in the original cultures is extremely rare, and slavery is entirely unknown. Lubbock and Wilken, like Mc Lennan, assume sexual promiscuity, whereby the women of a group would have belonged to all the men of that group. The first wives, therefore, could only have been women who were stolen: individual marriage would have begun with them. Everything already said concerning the thesis of Morgan and Mc Lennan (v. ETNOLOGIA) also serves to refute that of Lubbock and Wilken. Dukhoun bases his explanation on totemism, which he believes to be primordial: e. would have arisen from the feeling of fear caused in man by a woman’s blood, especially during menstruation. But this thesis too collapses when one recognizes that totemism does not belong to the original cultures and has never been general in the history of humanity.
Freud’s theory, founded on the erotic element, the basis of all psychoanalysis, is a mere romance. According to him, in the primitive horde the father would have kept all the women for himself, preventing his sons from approaching them; the sons would thus have hated, killed, and eaten him. But parricide would have resulted in antagonism among the brothers, because each was the other’s rival with regard to the women. In order to live together, the brothers had to introduce the prohibition of incest, all renouncing the women they desired, for whose sake they had in fact killed their father. The documentation concerning the family in the already archaic cultures accessible to us absolutely disproves the existence of the horde conceived by Freud. The treatment inculcated and practiced toward parents is precisely the opposite of parricide. Cannibalism, too, is alien to the original cultures.
Ethnologists have generally been very severe toward Freud: Revers, Bosa, Kroesber, Schmidt, and several others have easily demonstrated the complete lack of foundation of the Freudian theory concerning the origin of society and religion. Revers rightly wrote that Freud contributed more to pornography than to medicine. Darwin, Westermarck, Schmidt, and several others have made positive contributions to the study of the problem.
Schmidt’s observations are the best known, because they combine positive ethnological studies with psychology. According to this author, in the small groups that still represent the most archaic cultures accessible to us, the family is the center of ethical and social life; the state is only in its beginnings. The education received by young people is essentially directed toward forming them into good heads of families, according to the ideal of virtue held by these populations.
Generally, no attraction develops between young men and girls who have lived together since childhood that is strong enough to lead to marriage; this observation is perhaps even more evident in these small groups, since those who live in the same village are generally consanguineous. In childhood and during the first years of youth, sexual differentiation is still very weak and begins only with the onset of puberty; among persons living together, it develops very slowly (this fact had already been properly emphasized by Darwin, Westermarck, and others). Moreover, people who live in the same village know one another too well, including one another’s defects, and this is not conducive to marriage. Things are very different between young men and girls belonging to families from different villages, who come into contact without intermediaries during puberty: then all the aspirations, dreams, affections, and ideals that lead to marriage awaken. It is above all in this ideal of a female and male companion that the young man and girl have formed—an ideal comprising every quality: beauty, intelligence, character, will, and moral life—that the explanation of e. is to be sought. In these cultures, where offspring are greatly desired, the young man feels more than elsewhere the responsibility he assumes with marriage, because an economy based on hunting and gathering makes him dependent every day on his labor. He therefore desires a girl who will give him confidence that she will be a good wife and a good mother of a family; and, in order to find her, he leaves the circle of his village, because it is too restricted. This is e. Its opposite, “the union of one insufficient blood with another,” is “incest.” From this impulse outward there also arises the freedom of choice enjoyed by the young man and girl in these cultures. This ideal
is not an illusion, but a force that leads to strict duties toward the new family: latent in human beings are intellectual and moral energies and qualities that love, trust, and mutual esteem awaken and make active.
L'e. ha ancora bisogno di un ulteriore studio e forse è più compito della psicologia che dell'etnologia il trovare una soluzione che spieghi tutti i suoi aspetti. Non si stimeranno mai abbastanza i benefici che l'umanità ha avuto dall'e. in tutti i campi: biologico, economico, sociale e culturale. L'incesto avrebbe causato le più disastrose conseguenze fisiche e morali nella famiglia e distrutto il rispetto e l'autorità dei genitori. Questi effetti si sarebbero fatti sentire ancora più gravemente nei piccoli aggregati umani delle culture originarie, dove la sola autorità veramente sentita è quella dei genitori e l'unica organizzazione sociale salda è la famiglia.
E, finalmente, senza l'e. non sarebbe stata possibile la formazione di gruppi sociali numerosi che sono necessari al progresso, con conseguente involuzione e forse con la fine della stessa cultura.