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There is no report of belief in descent from the totem. The hamlets tend to become family groups, but clan exogamy is observed. The system of "linked totems" seems to be designed to secure superhuman aid from all departments of the nonhuman world: ordinarily there will be a bird, a fish, a snake, and a plant the bird has come to be the most important of these.
Above all, the very nature of totemism shows that it took its present shape at a time when men, animals, and plants were conceived of as physically akin; when names were handed on through the female line; when exogamy was the rule of marriage, and when the family theoretically included all persons bearing the same family name, that is, all who claimed kindred with the same plant, animal, or object, whether the persons are really akin or not.
Where clan exogamy exists without phratries it is possible that these also formerly existed and have been dropped in the interests of freedom that is, they limited the choice of a wife to an extent that proved inconvenient. +425+. An almost universal feature of the marriage rules of low tribes is the classificatory system of relationship.
Where totemism is not accompanied by exogamy it is sometimes probable that the union of the two once existed, or that exogamy is excluded by the peculiar form of the totemism. Exogamy may thus be regarded as a natural and frequent accompaniment of totemism, but it is not a universal and necessary element of the totemic constitution. As a general rule the totemic clan bears the name of its totem.
Sir J. Lubbock accounts for the strange and widely-extended habit of exogamy that is, the men of one tribe taking wives from a distinct tribe, by communism having been the original form of intercourse; so that a man never obtained a wife for himself unless he captured her from a neighbouring and hostile tribe, and then she would naturally have become his sole and valuable property.
Atkinson’s view is that it takes us so much further back. By it exogamy as a custom must have been much earlier than totemism, as at this stage the different group-families would not be distinguished by totem names; but its action as a law would become much stronger when reinforced by the totem superstitions, and would become fixed in rigid sexual taboos.
After all, she found herself reflecting, behind her aunt's complacent visage there was a past as lurid as any one's not, of course, her aunt's own personal past, which was apparently just that curate and almost incredibly jejune, but an ancestral past with all sorts of scandalous things in it: fire and slaughterings, exogamy, marriage by capture, corroborees, cannibalism!
There is, however, no need whatever to abolish or to supplement the good old ancient word "morality," so long as we clearly realize that, on the practical side, it means essentially custom. Westermarck, op. cit., vol. i, p. 19. See, e.g., "Exogamy and the Mating of Cousins," in Essays Presented to E.B. Tylor, 1907, p. 53.
Exogamy or the rigid interdiction of marriage between clans and families nearly related; here again the Hindu and the Somal observe the custom rigidly, whilst the Jews and Arabs have ever taken to wife their first cousins. 4.
Yet in many cases, perhaps in the majority of cases, the two are found combined. Exogamy supposes a body of clans, and, given a group of totemic clans, it would naturally be attached to these, and so become an organic part of their social constitution. Where there is no totemism the question of union, of course, does not come up.
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