But, if the Tlingit clans have not totemic names, then it would appear that, among a people of dwellers in towns, local names of local groups have succeeded to totemic names of totemic kins. This can only occur where people have settled habitations, towns or villages, or where totem kins have been localised by male descent.
We know that, even among some of the Australian tribes with male descent, totem kins become local groups, and thus the predominant totem of each such group becomes attached to a locality, as among the Narran-ga of Yorke Peninsula. They had two pairs of phratries of animal names:
| Emu. | Eagle Hawk. | |
| Red Kangaroo. | Shark. |
In each such phratry was a number of totem kins, the same totem never appearing in more than one phratry (or "class" in Mr. Howitt's term). Each class or phratry was limited to a certain territory: Emu to the north, Red Kangaroo to the east, Eagle Hawk to the west, and Shark to the extreme point of the peninsula (south). The totems, passing from father to son, were thus localised. They ceased to be exogamous—obviously because each man, to find a wife eligible on exogamous principles, had to travel to a place inconveniently remote. Thus the only restriction on marriage was "forbidden degrees" of consanguinity.[62]
All this is easily intelligible. Male descent fixed phratries and totems to localities. By the old rule, if Emu phratry had to marry into Shark phratry, the localities were at the extreme ends of the peninsula, north and south; the other two phratries were as far asunder as the cast of the peninsula is from the west. Consequently, though the old machinery of exogamy existed, the practice of exogamy was dropped: persons might marry within their own totem kins. But we are not told whether all four "classes" inter-married, or each "class" only with one other, because the old rule had fallen into disuse before the coming of Europeans.
Mr. Howitt gives a case of "the transfer of the prohibition of marriage within the totem, to the totem clan—that is, to the locality." In this case, that of the Narrinyeri, with male descent, most "clans" have a local name, or a nickname, and have totems. But three such units or "clans" out of twenty retain their totem names—Whale, Coot, Mullet—thus indicating that totemic preceded local names. A local "clan" may have as many as three totems, but in thirteen cases out of twenty each local clan had but one totem. Among nicknames are "Gone over there," and "Where shall we go?" These clans (thirteen out of twenty) having local names, were strictly exogamous. So also, of course, were the totems of the local clans; though, save in three cases, the name of the place of residence, or a nickname, had superseded the totem name as the title of the clan. It is as if, in place of speaking of the MacIans, we said "the Glencoe men"; instead of speaking of the Stewarts, said "the Appin men"; in place of speaking of the Camerons, said "the men of Lochaber."
Thus it by no means follows that if the exogamous "clans" of any tribe of the North-West Pacific have local names, therefore they never had totemic names, as many of them have to this day. The rise of settled towns or village communities yields a new set of conditions, and a new set of non-totemic names for the clans, in some cases; precisely as the localisation of a totem clan through the operation of male descent causes a local name to take the place, usually but not universally, of a totem clan name in Southern Victoria.
Consequently Mr. Goldenweizer can make no argumentative use of the alleged local names of the Tlingit clans. If the totemic names of exogamous units—showing connections with totemism in crests and totemic phratry names—be absent, that is because, under known conditions, they have been superseded by local names or nicknames. This process is a vera causa in totemic society.
[62] Howitt, N.T.S.E.A., pp. 124, 130, 258, 259.