[260] Perhaps the same explanation is applicable to certain other tribes of the South-East and the East where, if we are to believe the informers of Howitt, totems specially attached to each matrimonial class are to be found. This is the case among the Wiradjuri, the Wakelbura and the Bunta-Murra on the Bulloo River (Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 210, 221, 226). However, the evidence collected is suspect, according to his own admission. In fact, it appears from the lists which he has drawn up, that many totems are found equally in the two classes of the same phratry.
The explanation which we propose, after Frazer (Totemism and Exogamy, pp. 531 ff.), raises one difficulty. In principle, each clan and consequently each totem, is represented equally in the two classes of a single phratry, since one of the classes is that of the children and the other that of the parents from whom the former get their totems. So when the clans disappeared, the totemic interdictions which survived should have remained in both matrimonial classes, while in the actual cases cited, each class has its own. Whence comes this differentiation? The example of the Kaiabara (a tribe of southern Queensland) allows us to see how it may have come about. In this tribe, the children have the totem of their mother, but it is particularized by some distinctive mark. If the mother has the black eagle-hawk as totem, the child has the white eagle-hawk (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 229). This appears to be the beginning of a tendency for the totems to differentiate themselves according to the matrimonial classes.
[261] A tribe of only a few hundred members frequently has fifty or sixty clans, or even many more. On this point, see Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in the Année Sociologique, Vol. VI, p. 28, n. 1.
[262] Except among the Pueblo Indians of the South-West, where they are more numerous. See Hodge, Pueblo Indian Clans, in American Anthropologist, 1st series, Vol. IX, pp. 345 ff. It may always be asked whether the groups which have these totems are clans or sub-clans.
[263] See the tables arranged by Morgan, Ancient Society, pp. 153-185.
[264] Krause, Die Tlinkit-Indianer, p. 112; Swanton, Social Condition, Beliefs and Linguistic Relationship of the Tlingit Indians, in XXVIth Rep., p. 308.
[265] Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida, p. 62.
[266] "The distinction between the two clans is absolute in every respect," says Swanton, p. 68; he gives the name clan to what we call phratries. The two phratries, he says elsewhere, are like two foreign nations in their relations to each other.
[267] Among the Haida at least, the totem of the real clans is altered more than that of the phratries. In fact, usage permits a clan to sell or give away the right of bearing its totem, as a result of which each clan has a number of totems, some of which it has in common with other clans (see Swanton, pp. 107 and 268). Since Swanton calls the phratries clans, he is obliged to give the name of family to the real clans, and of household to the regular families. But the real sense of his terminology is not to be doubted.
[268] Journals of two Expeditions in N.W. and W. Australia, II, p. 228.