IX.
I now give an American case, in which a tribe, the Mandans, exhibit female descent, exogamous clans, and a mixture of totemic clan names with local names or sobriquets. The people were settled, lived in villages or towns, "with houses very commodious, neat, and comfortable." The tribe was agricultural, growing maize, beans, pumpkins, and tobacco. Out of seven clan names four were totemic—Wolf, Bear, Prairie Chicken, Eagle; two—Flathead and Good Knife—look like nicknames; High Village is local.[63] Here we find other sorts of clan names encroaching on totem names.
Among the Crows, with exogamous clans and female descent, out of twelve clan names four are totemic—Prairie Dog, Skunk, Raven, Antelope; three are very unkind nicknames.[64]
The American tribes have been much disturbed by the whites, and many changes have occurred in their institutions. As Mr. Frazer points out, in a book of 1781 Captain Carver describes Siouan "bands" or "tribes" (really totem kins), each with a badge representing an animal, and named after the animals: Eagles, Panthers, Tigers, Buffaloes, Snakes, Tortoises, Squirrels, Wolves, etc. These people were Sioux or Dacotas; whether they were exogamous or not Carver does not say. But, in place of now bearing totemic names, the "gentes" of these people are at present distinguished by obvious and even odious nicknames, such as "Breakers of the Law," because members of this gens disregarded the marriage law by taking wives within the gens.
So says Mr. Dorsey. Mr. Frazer says the bands of this tribe are not exogamous. But they must have been exogamous when a gens received a nickname for breaking the law of exogamy. One "band" or gens "Eats no Geese"; it may have been a Goose clan. Other bands or gentes bear nicknames or local names.[65]
I need not give more examples. In America, as in Australia, various conditions, already mentioned, cause changes from totemic names of exogamous clans to local names and nicknames.
It has now been proved that though, in very rare cases, such as those of the Arunta and Narran-ga, sets of people may have totemic names, yet marry within the name; and that, though "clans" may be exogamous and yet bear names which are not totemic, nevertheless the co-existence of totemic names with exogamy prevails in the overwhelming majority of instances, while the exceptions, as they have been accounted for by their causes, prove the rule. Consequently I see no error of method in holding that the totemic name and exogamy are normal features of totemism, while totemism is "an integral phenomenon."
This is my answer to Mr. Goldenweizer's criticisms. Of course I do not say that totemism was the cause of exogamy; I hold that exogamy was prior to totemism, and think it perfectly possible that some exogamous peoples may never have been totemic.
In this discussion I have, not illogically I hope, taken into account relative conditions of advancement among the peoples studied. I have not here shown that reckoning descent in the male line is a social advance on reckoning in the female line, but I am able to prove that it is, at least in Australia. I have shown that wealth, rank, and settled habitations tend to modify totemism, for example, by introducing heraldry, and enabling non-totemic to supersede, now more now less, the totemic names of exogamous units.
Mr. Goldenweizer, as we saw, writes "that these conditions are due to the fact that the tribes of British Columbia are 'advanced' cannot be admitted."[66] I am sorry that he cannot admit what is true and obvious. The wealth, the art, the degrees of rank, the settled houses and towns of the British Columbian tribes have introduced the perplexities of their heraldry; as in other parts of America and in Australia other causes have brought in local names for exogamous kins.