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The non-Aryan tribes of India have been so long in contact with Aryan civilization that in many cases, as it seems, their original customs have been obscured, but at present among such agricultural tribes as the Hos, the Santhals, and the Khonds of Bengal, and some others, totemic organizations are not prominent, and the Todas, with their buffalo-cult, show no signs of totemism.
Sitka Jack, and Kooska, and Hydah Jake, all fashioned bracelets, spoons, and other articles, carved with totemic designs of delicate beauty and line of proportion, made from silver coins which they melted down. Some of the shamans of the olden time acquired great influence and made life miserable for their fellow-citizens by the practice of witchcraft.
In general its prevalence appears to have been in inverse proportion to that of totemism it is lacking or feeble in the chief totemic centers, Australia and North America, and strongest in Polynesia, where totemism is hardly recognizable.
If, instead of consulting the evidence that is to hand about the savage world as it exists to-day, you read some book crammed full with theories about social origins, you probably come away with the impression that totemic society is entirely an affair of clans. Some such notion as the following is precipitated in your mind.
Deities proper came into existence as embodiments of the sense of an extrahuman government of the world by anthropomorphic beings; they are direct products of the constructive imagination. When the true gods appear the totemic and individual half-gods disappear.
+571+. Totemic clanship, however, differed from ordinary human clanship in that the nonhuman clan-brother was regarded as a specially powerful being, endowed with the superhuman qualities with which all animals and plants and certain other objects were credited.
Occasionally exemptions from the rule of abstention are procured, perhaps under Aryan influence; such influence has affected many of the tribes, but has not usually destroyed the old totemic customs. +457+. Among the native tribes of Africa there is special respect for the object with which the clan or tribe has particularly definite relations.
+454+. In Melanesia the food restrictions connected with animal patrons or friends of clans are less definite than in Australia. Here, also, there are local differences of usage. The Fijians refrain from eating their tribal sacred animals. The food restrictions in Borneo and Sumatra are not definitely totemic.
The hawks always appear to have occupied a prominent place in the interest of our North American Indians, especially in association with totemic ideas, and the number of sculptured representations of hawks among the mound relics would argue for them a similar position in the minds of the Mound-Builders. A word should be added as to the distribution of the paroquet.
+526+. In North America the variety of climatic and other economic conditions might lead us to expect clear testimony as to the relation between these conditions and totemic development; but the value of such testimony is impaired by the absence of information concerning early forms of organization.
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