Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 11, 2025
Both these groups are in part agricultural, and it does not appear how they have come to differ from their neighbors in this regard. Food restrictions are reported for the Northwest region. +459+. There is no clear report of totemic food restrictions in Central America or in South America; but these regions have as yet not been thoroughly examined for clan usages.
On the high ground across the stream is a cemetery containing a number of curious totemic carvings, hung with offerings to departed spirits. It would cost a white man his life to disturb any of them.
They arise from various local and personal peculiarities that, as a rule, have nothing to do with totemism, and they become more prominent and important as the latter declines. +448+. The origin of clan totemic names is closely connected with the origin of the totemic organization, and will be more conveniently considered in connection with this point.
Similar totemic clan functions appear in the islands of Torres Straits, the Turtle and Dugong clans performing ceremonies to increase the supply of turtles and to attract dugongs. The tribes just mentioned are those in which the social organization is definitely totemistic. In New Guinea the totemic character of the performances appears to be doubtful.
To do justice, however, to the facts about totemic society, as known to us by actual observation, it remains to note that the clan is by no means the only form of social organization that it displays. The clan, it is true, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, tends at the totemic level of society to eclipse the family.
But in point of fact it has so far been found, in full form, only in a small region in Melanesia, and its history in this region is not known; back of it may lie some other system of organization. And in this region clan totemism is lacking or faint. Further testimony is needed before it can be accepted as the solution of the problem of totemic origins.
There are many examples among the animal shapes that possess peculiarities affording no hint of animals living or extinct, but which are strongly suggestive of the play of mythologic fancy or of conventional methods of representing totemic ideas. As in the case of the animal carvings, the latter suggestion is perhaps the one that best corresponds with their general character.
No doubt the reader's head is already in a whirl, though I have perpetrated endless sins of omission and, I doubt not, of commission as well, in order to simplify the glorious confusion of the subject of the social organization prevailing in what is conveniently but loosely lumped together as totemic society.
+575+. Secret societies sometimes perform magical ceremonies; but such societies are not totemic either they have risen above the totemic point of view, or they have sprung from ideas and usages that are independent of totemism proper. +576+. It is difficult to find a clear case of the offering of religious worship to a totem as totem.
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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking