[CHAPTER IX]
TOTEMIC REDISTRIBUTION
The totemic redistribution—The same totem is never in both phratries—This cannot be the result of accident—Yet, originally, the same totems must have existed in both phratries, on any theory of the origin of phratries—The present state of affairs is the result of legislation—To avoid clash of phratry law and totem law, the totems were redistributed—No totem in both phratries—Recapitulation—Whole course of totemic evolution has been surveyed—Our theory colligates every known fact—Absence of conjecture in our theory—All the causes are veræ causæ—Protest against use of such terms as "sex totems," "individual totems," "mortuary totems," "sub-totems"—The true totem is hereditary, and marks the exogamous limit—No other is genuine.
That the process of changing phratries was possible when it was necessary to meet, on the lines of least resistance, a matrimonial problem (there must always be some friction in law, under changed conditions) may be demonstrated as matter of fact. We are aware of an arrangement which cannot have been accidental, which evaded a clash of laws, and involved the changing of their phratries by certain members of totem kins.
That, at some early moment, the name-giving animals of descent had become full-blown totems, is plain from this fact, which occurs in all the primitive types of tribal organisation: The same totem never exists in both phratries.[1] This in no way increases, as things stand, the stringency of phratry law, of the old law, "No marriage in the local group," now a phratry. But it imposes a law perhaps more recent, "No marriage within the totem name by descent, and the totem kin." The distribution of totem kins, so that the same totem is never in both phratries, cannot, I repeat, be the result of accident.[2] Necessarily, at first, the same totem must have occurred, sometimes, in both of the local groups which, on our theory, became phratries. Thus if Eagle Hawk local group and Crow local group had both taken wives from Lizard, Wallaby, Cat, Grub, and Duck local groups, these women would bring Wallaby, Cat, Grub, Lizard, Duck names into both the Eagle Hawk and the Crow local groups. Yet Eagle Hawk and Crow phratries, representing Eagle Hawk and Crow local groups, never now contain, both of them, Snipe, Duck, Grub, Wallaby, Cat, and Emu totem kins. Snipe, Duck, and Wallaby are in one phratry; Cat, Grub, and Emu are in the other.
This is certainly the result of deliberate legislation, whether at the first establishment of phratry law, or later.
If the theory of Mr. Frazer and Dr. Durkheim, the theory that the two primal groups threw off totem colonies, be preferred to mine, it remains very improbable that colonies, swarming off the hostile Crow group, never once took the same new animal-names as those chosen by Eagle Hawk colonies: that the Eagle Hawk colonies, again, always chose new totems which were always avoided by the Crow colonies.