[525] In the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain, a man applies the name of “mother” to his real mother and also to his maternal aunts, who accept the relationship and may assert: “We all three of us bore him” (Totemism and Exogamy, I. p. 305 note). Is this what they believe, or what (following their system of class-nomenclature) they are accustomed to say?
[526] Page 125.
[527] See above, [ch. ii. § 3].
[528] It is reasonable to suppose that a group named other groups to distinguish those around them, before needing to name itself. It follows that probably each group sometimes bore a different name when spoken of by each of several neighbours. How amidst such confusion could single names be fixed? Perhaps because the group designated adopted one of them; or by the elimination of the other names through many causes in course of time, in generations, in hundreds of years. The march of progress was leisurely in those days.
[529] Chs. iv., v., vi.
[530] Chs. xiv., xv., Prohibition of Marriage between Kindred.
[531] Ch. xl., Marriage.
[532] Langloh Parker, The Euahlayi Tribe, p. 21.
[533] Totemism and Exogamy, I. p. 489.
[534] Ibid., IV. p. 54.