Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 11, 2025
The history of the dog in North America, however, is suggestive: it has been domesticated by totemic Redmen for hunting purposes and by nontotemic Eskimo for drawing sledges that is, its economic use seems to be independent of totemic considerations.
Thus there arise frequently secret associations of males, who conduct tribal affairs. But these associations are not voluntary all initiated men belong to them perforce and they are not divorced from totemic relations. The real voluntary society is of a quite different character. In general, in its most developed form, it ignores differences of age, sex, and clan.
The power of a savage man of genius may be admitted, but to account for the known totemic communities we should have to suppose a vast number of such men, in different parts of the world, all working in the same direction and reaching substantially the same results.
These were rude representations of events, the symbols being chiefly the totemic devices of the tribes. A few general signs for war, death, travel, or other common incidents, and strokes for numerals, represented days or events as they were perpendicular or horizontal.
The Chasas of Orissa believe that if they were to injure their totemic animal they would be attacked by leprosy and their line would die out.
They have no distinctive symbolism, however, and are destitute of the characteristic spots which members of the Rabbit clan now invariably place on their totemic signatures. The animal design on the bowl illustrated in plate CXXX, c, probably represents a rabbit or hare, quite well drawn in profile, with a feathered appendage from the head. Behind it is the ordinary symbol of the dragon-fly.
An edible totem is only a peculiar sort of sacred animal or plant, and respect for such objects often leads to refusal to kill or eat them an interdiction of this sort does not in itself show whether or not the object in question is a totem. But within totemic areas the usage varies in a remarkable manner, as, for example, in Australia.
I have, again, refrained from pointing out that sometimes there are exogamous divisions some would call them moieties to distinguish them from phratries which have no clans grouped under them, and, on the other hand, have themselves little or no resemblance to totemic clans. These, and ever so many other exceptional cases, I have simply passed by.
In the first place, the conditions under which reverence for a totemic animal may make it tame do not appear to have existed in totemic society. For such taming it is necessary that the animal be perfectly safe within a considerable area.
It appears, then, that not one of the points just mentioned is found invariably in the systems of organization commonly called totemic. Exogamy is an independent phenomenon; the clan does not always bear the name of the totem, and is not always held to have descended from it; usages in regard to eating it vary greatly; magical economic ceremonies are performed by other than totemic bodies.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking