[CHAPTER VII]
RISE OF PHRATRIES AND TOTEM KINS
How phratries and totem kins were developed—Local animal-named groups would be exogamous—Children in these will bear the group names of their mothers—Influence of tattooing—Emu local group thus full of persons who are Snipes, Lizards, &c—by maternal descent—Members are Emus by local group name: Snipes, Lizards, &c., by name of descent—No marriage, however, within local group—Reason, survival of old tabu—Reply to Dr. Durkheim—The names bring about peaceful relations between members of the different local groups—Tendency to peaceful betrothals between men and women of the various local groups—Probable leadership of two strong local groups in this arrangement—Say they are groups Eagle Hawk and Crow—More than two such groups sometimes prominent—Probable that the dual alliance was widely Imitated—The two chief allied local groups become the phratries—Tendency of phratries to die out—Often superseded by matrimonial classes—Meaning of surviving phratry names often lost, and why—Their meaning known in other tribes—Members, by descent, of various animal names, within the old local groups (now phratries), become the totem kins of to-day—Advantages of this theory—Difficulties which it avoids.
We have perhaps succeeded in showing how totemism my have become a belief and a source of institutions: we have shown, at least, that granting savage methods of thought, totemism might very naturally have come in this way.
Totemism certainly arose in an age when, if descent reckoned, and, if names were inherited, it was on the spindle side. "All abnormal instances," writes Mr. Howitt, "I have found to be connected with changes in the line of descent. The primitive and complete forms" (of totemism) "have uterine descent, and it is in cases where descent is counted in the male line that I find the most abnormal forms to occur."[1]
As few scholars seriously dispute this opinion of Mr. Howitt, based on a very wide experience, and fortified by the almost universal view that descent was reckoned, when totemism began, in the female line, and as the point is accepted by every author whose ideas I have been discussing, we need not criticise hypotheses which assume that totemism arose when descent was reckoned in the male line, or that totems arose out of personal manitus of males, transferred to the female line.
Now, granting that our system so far may afford a basis of argument, we have to show how the phratries and the totem kins within them might be logically and naturally developed.
If it be granted that exogamy existed in practice, on the lines of Mr. Darwin's theory, before the totem beliefs lent to the practice a sacred sanction, our task is relatively easy. The first practical rule would be that of the jealous Sire, "No males to touch the females in my camp," with expulsion of adolescent sons. In efflux of time that rule, become habitual, would be, "No marriage within the local group." Next, let the local groups receive names, such as Emus, Crows, Opossums, Snipes, and the rule becomes, "No marriage within the local group of animal name; no Snipe to marry a Snipe." But, if the primal groups were not exogamous, they would become so, as soon as totemic myths and tabus were developed out of the animal, vegetable, and other names of small local groups.