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There is no known clan that includes all these elements in its organization, though in Central Australia there is an approach to complete inclusion; the features lacking are clan exogamy and absolute prohibition of eating the totem, but practically a clan does not eat its totem, and exogamy, for reasons given above, may be left out of consideration.
As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there must have been much transmission of myth. The migrations of peoples, the traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing alien women into the families all these things favoured the migration of myth.
There is the same tribal instinct in the aversion of Jews from exogamy, and it is this sort of scientific selection which is subconsciously going on when parents and guardians, sisters, cousins, and aunts, interfere with the "elective affinities." Money, too, is really a security for the due rearing of offspring.
Totemic clans are not exogamous in Central Australia, the Melanesian Banks Islands, among the Nandi of East Africa, and the Bakuana of South Africa. +437+. In all such cases, however, the absence of records makes the history of the organizations uncertain we do not know whether or not one of the elements, totemism or exogamy, formerly existed and has yielded to disintegrating influences.
There are no restrictions in the choice of a wife that might indicate a rule of endogamy or exogamy. There are no ceremonies to initiate youths into tribal mysteries; certain ceremonies in which the youths take a leading part are directed exclusively to training them for war and the taking of heads in battle.
The evidence from exogamy: the law which forbids marriage between persons of the same family name. The evidence from totemism that is, the derivation of the family name and crest or badge, from some natural object, plant or animal. Persons bearing the name may not intermarry, nor, as a rule, may they eat the object from which they derive their family name and from which they claim to be descended.
In the southwest not clans but families are the social units; these trace their descent from animals, and there are individual animal patrons. In the northwest no clan organization is reported; there is class exogamy, and in the magical ceremonies the performers are taken from the exogamous classes. +474+. Torres Straits Islands.
M'Lennan describes his own hypothesis as 'a suggestion thrown out at what it was worth. In his later years, as we have said, he developed a very subtle and ingenious theory of the origin of exogamy, still connecting it with scarcity of women, but making use of various supposed stages and processes in the development of the law. That speculation remains unpublished.
When, however, for some reason or other which anthropologists have still to discover, man takes to the institution of exogamy, the law of marrying-out, which forces men and women to unite who are members of more or less distinct food-groups, then, as we shall presently see, the matrimonial aspect of social organization tends to overshadow the politico-economic; if only because the latter can usually take care of itself, whereas to marry a perfect stranger is an embarrassing operation that might be expected to require a certain amount of arrangement on both sides.
If they were miserable they certainly did not show it, and the question came to him how just was the criticism of uninformed men? His judgment of Mormons had been established by what he had heard and read, rather than what he knew. He wanted now to have an open mind. He had studied the totemism and exogamy of the primitive races, and here was his opportunity to understand polygamy.
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