Folklore as an Historical Science

by George Laurence Gomme

It may be approached first from the conjectural basis. On this basis it may be asserted that the victorious male of the primary groups would remain victorious only just so long as he could continue to adjust the conditions on the primary basis, and preserve his females to himself. New conditions would arise whenever the limitation of the food lands produced a degree of localisation of the hitherto movable groups. There would then have crept into human experience the necessity for something of common action among a wider range than the simple group. This is a new force, and social evolution is henceforth going to operate in addition to, perhaps to a limited extent in substitution of, the constant movement towards new food lands. The single male would no longer be the victorious male by himself; and sharing his power with other males meant the reduction of his power in his own group. Called away for something more than the defence of his own primary group of females, he would leave the females with the practical governance of the primary groups. This tendency would develop. Wherever the constant movement outwards became stayed by geographical or other influences, the groups which experienced the shock of stoppage would undergo change. The female in the various primary groups would become a static element, and the male alone would follow out in the more restricted area the older force of movement which he had learned during the period of unrestricted scope.[355] He would have to find his mates during his roamings, instead of the former condition of fighting for them during the group movements; and his relationship to the primary groups would be therefore fundamentally changed. From being the central dominant head, he would become a constantly shifting unit. The female under these conditions would become the centre of the new social unit, and the male would become the hunter for food and the fighter against enemies. The new social forces would thus consist of local units commanded by the female, and revolving units composed of the males, and there would arise therefrom cleavage between the economic conditions of the two sexes.

That primitive economics bear the impress of sex cleavage is borne out by every class of evidence, and it is in this circumstance that we first come upon societies distinguished by containing two of the most important social elements, exogamy and totemism. Before, however, examining examples of societies containing the two elements of exogamy and totemism, it will be necessary to say something by way of preliminaries on these two elements themselves. They have rightly been made the subject of important special inquiry by anthropological scholars, as being in fact the key to the question of social evolution, and we shall clear the ground considerably by first of all turning to the principal authorities on the subject, and ascertaining the present position of the inquiry.

I must however note, in the first place, that as I have stated the case, exogamy and totemism appear as two separate and distinct elements, whereas it is usual to consider exogamy as an essential part of totemism. I cannot, however, see that this is so. In advanced totemism, it is true, they are found as inseparable parts of one system, but they may well have started separately and coalesced later. In point of fact, all the evidence points in this direction, and if we cease to consider exogamy as a necessary element of totemism, we can advance investigation more rapidly and with greater accuracy.

We come very quickly upon what may be termed natural exogamy. Male working with male outside the groups formed by women and the younger offspring would produce a natural exogamy, which would have followed upon the exogamy produced by hostile capture of women, and two streams of influence would thus tell in favour of the evolution of a system of formal exogamy, and Dr. Westermarck's theory of a natural avoidance of housemates, with all its wealth of evidence, helps us at this point.

The position is not so clear as to totemism. If we begin, however, with a clear understanding that it is not a part of the machinery of exogamous grouping, but an independent growth of its own, we shall have gained an important point, for the contrary opinion has very often obscured the issue and prevented research in the right direction.

It will be advisable to have before us the principal theories as to the origin of totemism. There are practically three—Mr. Frazer's, Mr. Lang's, and Mr. Baldwin Spencer's. Mr. Frazer considers totemism to be "in its essence nothing more or less than an early theory of conception, which presented itself to savage man at a time when he was still ignorant of the true cause of the propagation of the species." Mr. Frazer explains this theory further by saying that "naturally enough, when she is first aware of the mysterious movement within her, the mother fancies that something has that very moment passed into her body, and it is equally natural that in her attempt to ascertain what the thing is, she should fix upon some object that happened to be near her, or to engage her attention at the critical moment."[356]

Mr. Lang rejects Mr. Frazer's theory in toto, and propounds his own as due to the naming of savage societies, and to a sort of natural exogamy produced by practically the same set of conditions as I have already described. Mr. Lang's totemism began in the primary groups, and began with exogamy as a necessary part of it. "Unessential to my system," says Mr. Lang, "is the question how the groups got animal names, as long as they got them, and did not remember how they got them, and as long as the names according to their way of thinking indicated an essential and mystic rapport between each group and its name-giving animal. No more than these three things—a group animal name of unknown origin; belief in a transcendental connection between all bearers human and bestial of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions (the mystically sacred quality of the blood as life)—was needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices including exogamy," and further, "we guess that for the sake of distinction, groups gave each other animal and plant names. These became stereotyped we conjecture, and their origin was forgotten. The belief that there must necessarily be some connection between animals and men of the same names led to speculation about the nature of the connection. The usual reply to the question was that the men and animals of the same name were akin by blood. The kinship with animals being particularly mysterious was peculiarly sacred. From these ideas arose tabus, and among others that of totemic exogamy."[357]

Mr. Baldwin Spencer, and with him Dr. Haddon, consider totemism to have arisen from economic conditions. Primitive human groups, says Dr. Haddon, "could never have been large, and the individuals comprising each group must have been closely related. In favourable areas each group would have a tendency to occupy a restricted range, owing to the disagreeable results which arose from encroaching on the territory over which another group wandered. Thus, it would inevitably come about that a certain animal or plant, or group of animals or plants, would be more abundant in the territory of one group than in that of another."[358]

These theories are not necessarily mutually destructive, though they seem to me even collectively not to contain the full case for totemism. Mr. Frazer does not account for woman's isolation at the time of conceptual quickening, for the closeness of her observation of local phenomena, and for the separateness of her ideas from the actual facts of procreation. Mr. Lang overloads his case. He is accounting not for the origin of totemism, but for the origin of all, or almost all, that totemism contains in its most developed forms—"all the totemic creeds and practices including exogamy" as he says. He postulates a name-giving process by drawing upon the conceptions as to names by advanced savage thought, and he does not account for the fact that according to his theory, animals and plants must not only have been named, but named upon some sort of system known to a wide area of peoples, before totemistic names for the groups could have been given to them. Mr. Spencer's and Dr. Haddon's theory is perhaps open to the doubts caused by Mr. Lang's criticism of it that there is only one case of a known economic cause for totemism—an Australian case where two totem kins are said to have been so called "from having in former times principally subsisted on a small fish and a very small opossum;"[359] but on the other hand it does supply a vera causa, the actual evidence for which may well have passed away with the development of totemism, without leaving survivals.

All these theories, however, are the result of considerable research and experience, and it is more than probable that they may each contain fragments of the truth which need the touch of combination to show how they stand in relation to the problem which they are propounded to solve. There are features of totemism which are not noticed by any of these distinguished authorities. By using the hitherto unnoticed features, I think it possible to produce a theory as to the origin of totemism, which will contain the essential features of those theories now prominently before the world.