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The title of this paper reflects a study that I have now been engaged on for many years, that of the organization of primitive society as an externalized form of what we think of as the self. In this paper I will deal with its homo-erotic aspect, but I must first give a few general explanations.
What is here meant by primitive society is primitive kinship, for as the reader doubtless knows the terms “society” and “kinship” are synonymous in primitive life, as they are still today in the infant's life. In primitive society, however, this is a fact of adult life as well as of infantile life. Though on a broader scale than that of the nuclear family, it remains true of the most primitive communities that there are no “people” who are not kinsmen. In an aboriginal Australian community, for instance, or what is called a “horde”, which is an entirely self-sufficient community of between 40 and 200 men, women, and children living in a pre-agricultural state and depending on food-gathering and a little hunting for its very subsistence, those who belong to this community are thought of as human beings, but those outside it, whom they occasionally meet, are not. They are “not men”, unless they can be recognized as some kind of putative distant or “totemic” kinsmen. The words for “human being” and “kinsman” are the same. Those who are not kinsmen are “outside the pale”, that is to say outside the invisible fence that surrounds, or the living mandala of the kinship system that includes, all relatives and keeps out all those who are not relatives.
Just as we so quickly lose sight of our own personal origins, so also such primitive communities are on the point of disappearing altogether. We are, therefore, extremely fortunate in that, through the devoted labours of a certain school of anthropologists, we have succeeded in obtaining before