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+445+. In some cases clans and tribes have distinctive crests or badges, generally totemic figures or parts of such figures. These are carved on beams of houses and on house poles, or cut or drawn on men's persons, and are used as signs manual, serving thus to indicate to strangers a man's clan connections.
Was it not the refinement of irony that he should well nigh be deprived of the best part of a finger by a dead ray masquerading as a shark! Many blacks refuse to eat shark because of totemic restrictions; but where no tribal contrary law prevails, several of the species are cooked and eaten without ceremony, but with most objectionable after effects to those who are not partial to such fare.
In totemic organizations, when the totem is inherited, a division into two exogamous groups makes marriage of brother to sister impossible, since all the children of one mother are in the same group; and if there are four such groups and children are assigned to a group different from that of the father and that of the mother, marriage between parent and child is impossible.
Thus, the magical ceremony for procuring rain, properly the function of the Frog clan, is now in the hands of rain-priests; and the magical, dramatic performances for insuring a supply of food are conducted by nontotemic religious fraternities. The great Snake "dance" may have been originally a totemic ceremony intended to secure rain and corn.
There was a boulder of sandstone with nine cup marks, and there were more painted pebbles, the ornaments now resembling ordinary cup marks, now taking the shape of a cross, and now of lines and other patterns, one of which, on an Arunta rock, is of unknown meaning, among many of known totemic significance. Dr.
The indications of totemic organization in Borneo are slight: there are sacred animals that are not eaten, and there is a vague feeling of kinship with animals phenomena that are not necessarily totemic. The belief of the Sea Dyaks in individual guardians is to be distinguished from general respect for sacred animals. +487+. India.
You figure to yourself two small food-groups, whose respective beats are, let us say, on each side of a river. For some unknown reason they are totemic, one group calling itself Cockatoo, the other calling itself Crow, whilst each feels in consequence that its members are "all-one-flesh" in some mysterious and moving sense.
Now here we seem to find want of social structure and want of law going together as cause and effect. The "friends" of whom we hear need to be organized into a police force. If we now turn to totemic society, with its elaborate clan-system, it is quite another story. Blood-revenge ranks amongst the foremost of the clansman's social obligations.
Among the earliest of theories were those that explained the totemic constitution as due to a confusion in the minds of savages between names and things.
As descent was through the female, the chief's son never succeeded him, but the son of one of his sisters; and as she, by the usual totemic law, was forced to marry in another clan, that is, to marry a common mortal, her husband, though the destined father of a demi-god, was treated by her as little better than a slave.
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