[2] I had no Toda with me when I visited the place, so cannot speak with absolute certainty on the point. [↑]
[3] I do not wish to lay any stress on this argument, for, as I have already indicated, it is possible that the eating of sambhar is a recent innovation, which has arisen since the advent of Europeans to the Nilgiris. Also I do not wish to indicate by the above that I commit myself to a belief in the universality of totemism as a stage in religious development. I only wish to point out that if this has been so, the Todas furnish a good case in which we might expect all traces of this descent to have disappeared or to have become so blurred and scanty as to be of little value. [↑]
[4] These were the names given to me by the Todas, and their spelling may not correspond with that in ordinary use. [↑]
CHAPTER XX
GENEALOGIES AND POPULATION
The preceding chapters have dealt with the ceremonies and religious aspect of the life of the Todas. This and succeeding chapters will deal with the social organisation and the more secular side of the life of the people.
The social organisation has been studied largely by means of the genealogical record which is given in [Appendix V]. Before going to India I had worked out the details of the system of kinship, of the regulation of marriage, and of the social organisation generally of two Papuan communities on the basis of the pedigrees preserved by those communities.
It is a familiar fact that, both in ancient writings and in the memories of peoples to whom writing is unknown, long lists of ancestors may be preserved, going back in some cases to mythical times. Among existing peoples good examples of such genealogies are found in Polynesia and Uganda, but such a genealogical record is of little value for the investigation of social organisation.
The records which I obtained in Torres Straits were of a different kind; they only extended back for three or four generations, but included all collateral lines, so that a man was able to tell me all the descendants of his great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather, and knew the descent of his mother, his father’s mother, his mother’s mother, and his wife as fully as that of his father. By this means I was able to collect[1] a record of the great majority of marriages which had taken place in the community for the last three or four [[462]]generations, was able to work out the laws which had regulated these marriages and to study in detail the system of kinship.