Folklore as an Historical Science Part 17

Following up the clue supplied by folklore, we may see whether the pygmy people of anthropological observation answer in any way to those conjectural conditions.[332] I think they do. Thus, we find that the pygmy people are in all cases on the extreme confines of the world's occupation ground; that they occupy the territory to which they have been pushed, not that which they have chosen. As the most primitive representatives, they are the last outposts of the migratory movements. Dr. Beke has preserved an account of the pygmies which even in its terminology a.s.sists in their identification as a type of the remotest stages of social existence. Dr. Beke obtained certain information about the countries south-west of Abyssinia, from which Latham quotes the following:--

"The people of Doko, both men and women, are said to be no taller than boys nine or ten years old. They never exceed that height even in the most advanced age. They go quite naked; their princ.i.p.al foods are ants, snakes, mice, and other things which commonly are not used as food.... They also climb trees with great skill to fetch down the fruits, and in doing this they stretch their hands downwards and their legs upwards.... They live mixed together; men and women unite and separate as they please.... The mother suckles the child only as long as she is unable to find ants and snakes for its food; she abandons it as soon as it can get its food by itself. No rank or order exists among the Dokos. n.o.body orders, n.o.body obeys, n.o.body defends the country, n.o.body cares for the welfare of the nation."[333]

This evidence is confirmed in many directions. It coincides with the account by Herodotos of the expedition from Libya which met with a pygmy race,[334] and with a seventeenth-century account of a Dutch expedition to the north from the south, who "found a tribe of people very low in stature and very lean, entirely savage, without huts, cattle, or anything in the world except their lands and wild game."[335] Captain Burrows' account of the Congoland pygmies agrees in all essentials, and he particularly notes that they "have no ties of family affection such as those of mother to son or sister to brother, and seem to be wanting in all social qualities;" they have no religion and no fetich rites; no burial ceremony and no mourning for the dead; in short, he adds, "they are to my thinking the closest link with the original Darwinian anthropoid ape extant."[336] The evidence of the African pygmy people everywhere confirms these views, and differences of detail do not alter the general results.[337]

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHINESE REPRESENTATION OF PYGMIES GOING ABOUT ARM-IN-ARM FOR MUTUAL PROTECTION]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SEMANG OF KUALA KENERING, ULU PERAK]

[Ill.u.s.tration: NEGRITO TYPE: SEMANG OF PERAK]

Following this up we get the greatest a.s.sistance from Asia.[338] The Semang people of the Malay Peninsula are a short race, the male being four feet nine inches in height, with woolly and tufted hair, thick lips and flat nose, and their language is connected with the group of which the Khasi people is a member.[339] They subsist upon the birds and beasts of the forest, and roots, eating elephants, rhinoceros, monkeys, and rats. They are said to have chiefs among them, but all property is common. Their huts or temporary dwellings, for they have no fixed habitations but rove about like the beasts of the forest, consist of two posts stuck in the ground with a small cross-piece and a few leaves or branches of trees laid over to secure them from the weather, and their clothing consists chiefly of the inner bark of trees.[340] They use stone or slate implements. The authority for this information does not directly state their social formation, but in a footnote he compares them to the Negritos of the Philippine Islands, "who are divided into very small societies very little connected with each other." This is confirmed by Mr. Hugh Clifford, who relates a story told to him in the camp of the Semangs, which tells how these people were driven to their present resting-place, "not for love of these poor hunting grounds," but because they were thrust there by the Malays who stole their women.

One further point is interesting; they have a legend of a people in their old home, composed of women only. "These women know not men, but but when the moon is at the full, they dance naked in the gra.s.sy places near the salt-licks; the evening wind is their only spouse, and through him they conceive and bear children."[341] All this has been confirmed and more than confirmed by the important researches of Messrs. Skeat and Blagden in their recently published work on these people. There is no necessity to do more than refer to the princ.i.p.al features brought out by these authorities. In the valuable notes on environment, we have the actual facts of the migratory movement drawn clearly for us;[342] their nomadic habits, rude nature-derived clothing, forest habitations and natural sources of food are described;[343] the evolution of their habitations from the natural shelters, rock shelters, caves, tree b.u.t.tresses, branches, etc., is to be traced;[344] they belong to the old Stone Age, if not to a previous Wood and Bone Age;[345] they have no organised body of chiefs, and there is no formal recognition of kinship; marital relationship is preceded by great ante-nuptial freedom;[346] the name of every child is taken "from some tree which stands near the prospective birthplace of the child; as soon as the child is born, this name is shouted aloud by the _sage femme_, who then hands over the child to another woman, and buries the after-birth underneath the birth-tree or name-tree of the child; as soon as this has been done, the father cuts a series of notches in the tree, starting from the ground and terminating at the height of the breast;"[347] the child must not in later life injure any tree which belongs to the species of his birth-tree, and must not eat of its fruit. There is a theory to accompany this practice, for birds are believed to be vehicles for the introduction of the soul into the newborn child, and all human souls grow upon a soul-tree in the other world, whence they are fetched by a bird which is killed and eaten by the expectant mother;[348] but there seems to be no evidence of any religious cult or rite, and what there is of mythology or legend is probably borrowed.[349] The details in this case are of special importance, as they form a complete set of a.s.sociated culture elements, and I shall have to return to them later on.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SEMANG OF KEDAH HAVING A MEAL]

I shall not attempt to exhaust the evidence to be derived from the pygmy people. What has been said of the examples I have chosen may in all essentials be said of the remaining examples. But it is perhaps advisable to be a.s.sured that the evidence of kinless people is not confined to the stunted and dwarfed races, for it has been argued that the pygmies are nothing but the ne'er-do-wells of the stronger races, and may not therefore be taken as true racial types. This may be true, but it does not affect my case, because I am not depending so much upon the physical characteristics of these people as upon their culture characteristics. These are definite and conclusive, and they are repeated among people of higher physical type. Thus the Jolas of the Gambia district have practically no government and no law; every man does as he chooses, and the most successful thief is considered the greatest man. There is no recognised punishment for murder or any other crime. Individual settlement is the only remedy, and the fittest survives. There is no formality in regard to marriage, or what pa.s.ses for marriage, amongst them. Natural selection is observed on both sides, and the pair, after having ascertained a reciprocity of sentiment, at once cohabit. They do not intermarry with any other race.[350]

It is possible to proceed from this to other regions of man's occupation ground. In America, the evidence of the modern savage is preceded by most interesting facts. If we compare Dr. Brinton's conclusions as to the spread of the American Indians from the north to the south, and as to the development of culture in the favoured districts being of the same origin as the undeveloped culture of the less favoured and of absolutely sterile districts, with Mr. Curtin's altogether independent conclusions as to the growth of the American creation myth with its cycle of first people peaceful and migratory, and its cycle of second people "containing accounts of conflicts which are ever recurrent," we are conscious that mythic and material remains of great movements of people are in absolute accord,[351] an accord which leads us to expect that the peoples who were pushed ever forward into the most desolate and most sterile districts of southern America would be the most nearly savage of all the American peoples. This is in agreement with Darwin's estimate of the Fuegians who wander about in groups of kinless society,[352] and it is in accord with other evidence. Thus the Zaparos, belonging to the great division of unchristianised Indians of the oriental province of Ecuador, have the fame of being most expert woodsmen and hunters. To communicate with one another in the wood, they generally imitate the whistle of the toman or partridge. They believe that they partake of the nature of the animals they devour. They are very disunited, and wander about in separate hordes. The stealing of women is much carried on even amongst themselves. A man runs away with his neighbour's wife or one of them, and secretes himself in some out of the way spot until he gathers information that she is replaced, when he can again make his appearance, finding the whole difficulty smoothed over. In their matrimonial relations they are very loose--monogamy, polygamy, communism, and promiscuity all apparently existing amongst them. They allow the women great liberty and frequently change their mates or simply discard them when they are perhaps taken up by another. They believe in a devil or evil spirit which haunts the woods, and call him Zamaro.[353]

In all these cases, and I do not, of course, exhaust the evidence, there is enough to suggest that the social forms presented are of the most rudimentary kind. Conjecture has not and, I think, cannot get further back than such evidence as this. The social grouping is supported by outside influences rather than internal organisation; neither blood kinship nor marital kinship is recognised; hostility to all other groups and from other groups is the basis of inter-groupal life. To these significant characteristics has to be added the special birth custom and belief of the Semang pygmies. It is clear that the soul-bird belief and the tree-naming custom are different phases of one conception of social life, a conception definitely excluding recognition of blood kinship, and derived from the conscious adoption of an experience which has not reached the stage of blood kinship, but which includes a close a.s.sociation with natural objects. All this makes it advisable to take fuller count of pygmy culture than has. .h.i.therto been given to it. The pygmies have in truth always been a problem in man's history. From the time of Homer, Herodotos, and Aristotle, the pygmies have had their place among the observable types of man, or among the traditions to which observers have given credence. In modern times they have been accounted for either as peoples degraded from a higher level of culture, or as peoples who have never advanced. But whether we look upon these people as the last remnants of the primitive condition of hostility or whether they are reversions to that condition by reason of like causes, they bring before us what conjectural research has prepared us for. The first supposition is neither impossible nor incredible. The slow spreading-out in hostile regions would allow of the preservation of some examples of preference for unrestrained licence at the expense of constant hostility, in place of a modified peacefulness at the expense of restricted freedom in matters so dear to the human animal as s.e.xual choice and power. The second supposition contains an element of human history which must find a place in anthropological research. The possible phases of social formation are very limited. If any section of mankind cannot develop in one direction, they will stagnate at the stage they have reached, or they will retrograde to one of the stages from which in times past they have proceeded. There is no other course, and the very limitations of primitive life prevent us from considering the possibility of any other course. Either of these alternatives allows us to consider the examples of hostile inter-grouping as sufficient to supply us with the vantage ground for observation of man in his earliest stages of existence. Perhaps each of them may contain somewhat of the truth. But whatever may be considered as the true cause of the pygmy level of culture, there is an underlying factor which must count most strongly in its determination, namely, that these people are the people who in the process of migration have been pushed out to the last strongholds of man. Whether they could not or would not conform to the newer condition of stationary or comparatively stationary society is not much to the point in presence of the fact that nowhere have they conformed to this standard of existence. Moreover we are ent.i.tled to the argument, which has been the main point advanced in connection with the anthropological problems we are discussing, that the most primitive type of man must of necessity be sought for, and can only be found at the extremes of the migration movement wherever that is discernible.[354]

The question now becomes, can we by means of recognisable links proceed from the rudimentary kinless stage of society to the earliest stage of kinship society? This is a most difficult problem, but it must be solved. If the rudimentary kinless groups do indeed const.i.tute a factor in human evolution, they are a most important factor. If they do not const.i.tute such a factor, they can only be accidental productions, the sport of exceptional circ.u.mstances not in the line of evolution, and as such they are not of much use in anthropology. It will be seen, therefore, that the connection between rudimentary kinless society and the earliest, or representatives of the earliest, kinship society, is an essential part of an inquiry into origins.

It may be approached first from the conjectural basis. On this basis it may be a.s.serted that the victorious male of the primary groups would remain victorious only just so long as he could continue to adjust the conditions on the primary basis, and preserve his females to himself. New conditions would arise whenever the limitation of the food lands produced a degree of localisation of the hitherto movable groups. There would then have crept into human experience the necessity for something of common action among a wider range than the simple group. This is a new force, and social evolution is henceforth going to operate in addition to, perhaps to a limited extent in subst.i.tution of, the constant movement towards new food lands. The single male would no longer be the victorious male by himself; and sharing his power with other males meant the reduction of his power in his own group. Called away for something more than the defence of his own primary group of females, he would leave the females with the practical governance of the primary groups. This tendency would develop. Wherever the constant movement outwards became stayed by geographical or other influences, the groups which experienced the shock of stoppage would undergo change. The female in the various primary groups would become a static element, and the male alone would follow out in the more restricted area the older force of movement which he had learned during the period of unrestricted scope.[355] He would have to find his mates during his roamings, instead of the former condition of fighting for them during the group movements; and his relationship to the primary groups would be therefore fundamentally changed. From being the central dominant head, he would become a constantly shifting unit. The female under these conditions would become the centre of the new social unit, and the male would become the hunter for food and the fighter against enemies. The new social forces would thus consist of local units commanded by the female, and revolving units composed of the males, and there would arise therefrom cleavage between the economic conditions of the two s.e.xes.

That primitive economics bear the impress of s.e.x cleavage is borne out by every cla.s.s of evidence, and it is in this circ.u.mstance that we first come upon societies distinguished by containing two of the most important social elements, exogamy and totemism. Before, however, examining examples of societies containing the two elements of exogamy and totemism, it will be necessary to say something by way of preliminaries on these two elements themselves. They have rightly been made the subject of important special inquiry by anthropological scholars, as being in fact the key to the question of social evolution, and we shall clear the ground considerably by first of all turning to the princ.i.p.al authorities on the subject, and ascertaining the present position of the inquiry.

I must however note, in the first place, that as I have stated the case, exogamy and totemism appear as two separate and distinct elements, whereas it is usual to consider exogamy as an essential part of totemism. I cannot, however, see that this is so. In advanced totemism, it is true, they are found as inseparable parts of one system, but they may well have started separately and coalesced later.

In point of fact, all the evidence points in this direction, and if we cease to consider exogamy as a necessary element of totemism, we can advance investigation more rapidly and with greater accuracy.

We come very quickly upon what may be termed natural exogamy. Male working with male outside the groups formed by women and the younger offspring would produce a natural exogamy, which would have followed upon the exogamy produced by hostile capture of women, and two streams of influence would thus tell in favour of the evolution of a system of formal exogamy, and Dr. Westermarck's theory of a natural avoidance of housemates, with all its wealth of evidence, helps us at this point.

The position is not so clear as to totemism. If we begin, however, with a clear understanding that it is not a part of the machinery of exogamous grouping, but an independent growth of its own, we shall have gained an important point, for the contrary opinion has very often obscured the issue and prevented research in the right direction.

It will be advisable to have before us the princ.i.p.al theories as to the origin of totemism. There are practically three--Mr. Frazer's, Mr.

Lang's, and Mr. Baldwin Spencer's. Mr. Frazer considers totemism to be "in its essence nothing more or less than an early theory of conception, which presented itself to savage man at a time when he was still ignorant of the true cause of the propagation of the species."

Mr. Frazer explains this theory further by saying that "naturally enough, when she is first aware of the mysterious movement within her, the mother fancies that something has that very moment pa.s.sed into her body, and it is equally natural that in her attempt to ascertain what the thing is, she should fix upon some object that happened to be near her, or to engage her attention at the critical moment."[356]

Mr. Lang rejects Mr. Frazer's theory _in toto_, and propounds his own as due to the naming of savage societies, and to a sort of natural exogamy produced by practically the same set of conditions as I have already described. Mr. Lang's totemism began in the primary groups, and began with exogamy as a necessary part of it. "Unessential to my system," says Mr. Lang, "is the question how the groups got animal names, as long as they got them, and did not remember how they got them, and as long as the names according to their way of thinking indicated an essential and mystic rapport between each group and its name-giving animal. No more than these three things--a group animal name of unknown origin; belief in a transcendental connection between all bearers human and b.e.s.t.i.a.l of the same name; and belief in the blood superst.i.tions (the mystically sacred quality of the blood as life)--was needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices including exogamy," and further, "we guess that for the sake of distinction, groups gave each other animal and plant names. These became stereotyped we conjecture, and their origin was forgotten. The belief that there must necessarily be some connection between animals and men of the same names led to speculation about the nature of the connection. The usual reply to the question was that the men and animals of the same name were akin by blood. The kinship _with animals_ being particularly mysterious was peculiarly sacred. From these ideas arose tabus, and among others that of totemic exogamy."[357]

Mr. Baldwin Spencer, and with him Dr. Haddon, consider totemism to have arisen from economic conditions. Primitive human groups, says Dr.

Haddon, "could never have been large, and the individuals comprising each group must have been closely related. In favourable areas each group would have a tendency to occupy a restricted range, owing to the disagreeable results which arose from encroaching on the territory over which another group wandered. Thus, it would inevitably come about that a certain animal or plant, or group of animals or plants, would be more abundant in the territory of one group than in that of another."[358]

These theories are not necessarily mutually destructive, though they seem to me even collectively not to contain the full case for totemism. Mr. Frazer does not account for woman's isolation at the time of conceptual quickening, for the closeness of her observation of local phenomena, and for the separateness of her ideas from the actual facts of procreation. Mr. Lang overloads his case. He is accounting not for the origin of totemism, but for the origin of all, or almost all, that totemism contains in its most developed forms--"all the totemic creeds and practices including exogamy" as he says. He postulates a name-giving process by drawing upon the conceptions as to names by advanced savage thought, and he does not account for the fact that according to his theory, animals and plants must not only have been named, but named upon some sort of system known to a wide area of peoples, before totemistic names for the groups could have been given to them. Mr. Spencer's and Dr. Haddon's theory is perhaps open to the doubts caused by Mr. Lang's criticism of it that there is only one case of a known economic cause for totemism--an Australian case where two totem kins are said to have been so called "from having in former times princ.i.p.ally subsisted on a small fish and a very small opossum;"[359] but on the other hand it does supply a _vera causa_, the actual evidence for which may well have pa.s.sed away with the development of totemism, without leaving survivals.

All these theories, however, are the result of considerable research and experience, and it is more than probable that they may each contain fragments of the truth which need the touch of combination to show how they stand in relation to the problem which they are propounded to solve. There are features of totemism which are not noticed by any of these distinguished authorities. By using the hitherto unnoticed features, I think it possible to produce a theory as to the origin of totemism, which will contain the essential features of those theories now prominently before the world.

I will set down the order in which the problem can be approached from the standpoint already reached, and we may afterwards try to ascertain what proof is to be derived from totemic societies of the rudest type.

Now totemism is essentially a system of social grouping, whose chief characteristic is that it is kinless--that is to say, the tie of totemism is not the tie of blood kinship, but the artificially created a.s.sociation with natural objects or animals. It takes no count of fatherhood, and only reckons with the physical fact of motherhood. It is not the actual fatherhood or the actual motherhood which is the fundamental basis of totemism, but the a.s.sociation with animal, plant, or other natural object. This is evidently the fact, whatever view is taken of totemism, and that totemism is, in its origin and principle, a kinless, not a kinship system, is the first fact of importance to bear in mind throughout all inquiry. Thus Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say "the ident.i.ty of the human individual is often sunk in that of the animal or plant from which he is supposed to have originated."[360]

The next fact of importance is that as it commences at birth time, it must be closely a.s.sociated with the mother and her actions as mother.

This leads us to the observation that it is through the agency of the mother that the totem name is conferred upon their children, and to the necessary antecedent fact that women must have themselves possessed the name they conferred--possessed, that is, either the name as a personal attribute and valued as such, or else the power of evolving the name and the capacity of using it with totemic significance. I conclude from this, therefore, that the search for the origin of totemism must be made from the women's side of the social group. Such a search would lead straight to the industrialism of early woman, from which originated the domestication of animals, the cultivation of fruits and cereals, and the appropriation of such trees and shrubs as were necessary to primitive economics.[361] The close and intimate relationship with human life which such animals, plants, and trees would a.s.sume under the social conditions which have been postulated as belonging to this earliest stage of evolution, and the aid which these friendly and always present companions would render at all times and under most circ.u.mstances, would generate and develop many of those savage conceptions which have become known to research.

As human friends they would become part of humanity, just as Livingstone notes of an African people that they did not eat the beef which he offered to them because "they looked upon cattle as human and living at home like men,"[362] an idea which is also the basis of the custom in India not to taste fruit of a newly planted mangrove tree until it is formally "married" to some other tree.[363] These are but the fortunate instances where definite record in set terms has been made. At the back of them lies a whole collection of anthropomorphic conceptions, indulged in by man at all stages of his career.[364] As superhuman agencies for pregnancy and birth, they would do what the human father in the society we are contemplating could not be expected to do, for he would be seldom present during the long period of pregnancy; he would have shared with other males the privileges of s.e.xual intercourse, and he would therefore not be so closely in companionship with the women of the local groups as the friendly animal, plant, or tree who did so much for the mothers. There would thus be formed the groundwork for the fashioning of that most incredible of all beliefs, well founded, as Mr. Hartland has proved both from tradition and belief,[365] that the human father was not father, and that other agencies were responsible for the birth of children.

Gathering up the several threads of this argument, it seems to me that there is within this sphere of primitive thought and within these conditions of primitive life, ample room for the growth of all the main conceptions belonging to totemism; and it will be seen how necessary it is to separate totemism at its beginning from totemism in its most advanced stages. Totemism has not come to man fully equipped in all its parts. It is like every other human inst.i.tution, the result of a long process of development, and the various stages of development are important parts of the evidence as to origins. At the beginning, it was clearly not connected with blood kinship and descent; it was as clearly not connected with any cla.s.s system of marriage. But its beginnings would allow of these later growths, would perhaps almost engender these later growths.

Thus, the primary notion of the totem birth of children would, when blood kinship and descent became a consciously accepted element in social development, easily slide into the belief of a totemic ancestor and kinship with the totem; the protection and a.s.sistance afforded by the totem to the women of the primary groups who became the mothers of new generations, would easily grow into a sort of worship of the totem; the adoption of the totem name from the circ.u.mstances of birth implying the origin of the name from within the group and not from without would, as aggregation took the place of segregation, give way before the a.s.sociation of groups of persons with common interests; the aggregate totem name would come to the separate local totems as soon as, but not before, aggregation had taken the place of segregation in the formation of the social system, and this was not at the earliest stage; the close a.s.sociation of the totems with groups of mothers who always took the fathers of their children from without the mother group, would readily develop into differentiating the mother totems within the group from the totems of the fathers without the group, and this differentiation would produce a special relationship between the s.e.xes based upon the difference of totems instead of upon the sameness of them; and finally there would be produced first a two-cla.s.s division founded on s.e.x--all the mothers and all the fathers--and, only in a developed form, a two-cla.s.s division founded on the accepted totem name.

If this is a probable view of the course of totemic evolution, we may more confidently refer to its final stages for further evidence.

Advanced totemic society shows a constant tendency to subst.i.tute blood kinship for the a.s.sociation with natural objects: first, blood kinship with the mother, then with the mother and the father, finally recognised through the father only. At this last stage, blood kinship has practically succeeded in expelling totemic a.s.sociation altogether in favour of tribal kinship by blood descent, for totemism with male descent as the basis of the social group is totemism in name only; the names of totemism remain but they are applied to kinship tribes or sections of tribes, and they do duty therefore as a convenient name-system without reference to their origin in definite a.s.sociation with the naming animal or plant; and it is already in position to surrender also the names and outward signs. Blood kinship is therefore the destroyer, not the generator, of totemism, and we are therefore compelled to get at the back of blood kinship if we want to find totem beginnings.

This is an important aspect of the case, and it is one which, I think, cannot be ignored. We have found that rudimentary totemism was the basis of a social system founded on artificial a.s.sociations with animal or plant, was therefore kinless in character; and we have found that when totemism has been carried on into a society developed upon the recognition of blood kinship, blood kinship became antagonistic to totemism, and ultimately displaced it. These two facts point to the rudimentary kinless system as the true origin of totemism.

III

Now we may test these conclusions by applying the theory they contain to an actual case of totemic society. It would be well to choose for this purpose a people who had specialised their totemic organisation, and there are only two supreme instances of this among the races of the world--the North American Indians and the Australians. Everywhere else, where totemism exists, it is not the dominant feature of the social organisation. In Asia and in Africa totemism is subordinate to, or at all events in close or equal a.s.sociation with, other elements, and we cannot be quite sure that we have in these cases pure totemism.

North American totemism is in the most advanced stage. Australian totemism is to a very considerable degree less advanced, and it is therefore to Australian totemism I shall turn for evidence.

But even here it is necessary to bear in mind that primitive as the Australians are, they are not so primitive as to be in the primary stages of totemic society. They have developed, and developed strongly along totemic lines, and we know that such development once started has the capacity to proceed far. What we have to do, therefore, is to attempt to penetrate beneath the range of development, to search for the social group at the farthest from the centre point from which migration started, to discover, if we can, relics of group hostility, hostile capture of women and of kinless society, all of which belong to the primary stage from which totemic development has taken place.

If we can do this, we may hope to arrive at the origin of totemism, and we are more likely to accomplish it in the case of the Australians than with any other people. If we cannot, as Mr. Lang alleges, anywhere see "absolutely primitive man and a totemic system in the making,"[366] we may go back along the lines from which totemism has developed in Australian society and see somewhat of the process of the making.

We may commence with evidence of the survival of the most primitive human trait, the condition of hostility among the local groups produced by the struggle for women. "The possession of a girl appears to be connected with all their ideas of fighting ... after a battle the girls do not always follow their fugitive husbands from the field, but frequently go over as a matter of course to the victors, even with young children on their backs."[367] Mr. Curr puts the evidence even more definitely in a primitive setting when he informs us of "the young bachelors of the tribe carrying off some of the girl wives of the grey-beards," leaving the old territory and settling at the first convenient place within thirty or forty miles of the old territory. I call this state of things "survival,"[368] because it is the existence in totemic society of the fundamental basis of pre-totemic society. It is checked in Australian totemic society by rules which show a strong development from the primitive. Thus the successful warrior may not take any of his captives to himself; "if a warrior took to himself a captive who belonged to a forbidden cla.s.s, he would be hunted down like a wild beast," is the evidence of Mr. Fison, who allows it to be "a strong statement, but it rests upon strong evidence."[369] This is the exogamous cla.s.s system operating even in the case of conflict, when men have resorted to their primitive instincts and their primitive methods.

This discovery of primitive hostility accompanying the obtaining of wives leads us to look for other survivals of the earliest conditions, and we come upon mother-right groups in which the females in each local group are the s.e.xual companions of males from outside their own social group. This is shown by the Kamilaroi organisation, where "a woman is married to a thousand miles of husbands."[370] This phrase may be textually an exaggeration of actual fact, but it undoubtedly expresses a condition of things which actually existed. Women in Australian society must look outside their cla.s.s, and in general outside their totem, for their s.e.xual mates, and they must expect to be claimed as rightful s.e.xual mates by men whom they have never seen and who live at great distances. Carry this state of things but a few steps back, and we must come to a condition of localised female groups with males moving from group to group. Surely there is something more here than savage organisation. The something more is the development into a system of one of the results of the enforced migratory conditions of early man, namely, the migratory instincts of the males moving outside the female local groups and thus producing natural exogamy. This is what appears to me to be clearly a distinct element in the Australian system. But there is a new element in juxtaposition with it. The new element is the organisation into marriage cla.s.ses--not every man from without, but only special men from without, are allowed the s.e.xual companionship.

Now in both these cases, where we have apparently penetrated to the most primitive conditions, we are also brought up abruptly against conditions which are not primitive, namely, the exogamous cla.s.s system, and we are bound to conclude that this cla.s.s system thus shows itself to be an intruding force which has not, however, been strong enough to quite obliterate the older forces of hostile marriage-capture and mother-right society.

Our next quest is therefore to find out, if we can, an explanation of these two contrasted elements in Australian totemic society, and for this purpose it is advisable to still further narrow down the range of inquiry to one special section of the Australian peoples. For this purpose I shall take the Arunta. There has been much controversy about this people. Mr. Lang argues that the presence of exogamous cla.s.ses and male descent shows the Arunta to be more advanced than other Australian peoples;[371] Messrs. Spencer and Gillen that the survival of totem beliefs, which are local and unconnected with the cla.s.s system, proves them to be the least advanced. In this country Mr.

Hartland and Mr. Thomas side with Mr. Lang; Mr. Frazer with Messrs.

Spencer and Gillen.

The first point of importance to note about the Arunta people is that they occupy the least favourable districts for food supply.[372] This means that they have been pushed there. They did not choose such a location--in other words, they are among the last units of the migration movements which peopled Australia; they are among the last people to have become stationary as a group, and to have been compelled to resort to the development of social organisation in lieu of constantly swarming off from the centre or from the last stopping place to the ends. This tells for primitive, not advanced, conditions.

The next point is the totem system. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, describing one special case as an example of the rest, give us the following particulars. The Arunta believe that the most marked features of the district they inhabit, the gaps and the gorges, were formed by their Alcheringa ancestors. These Alcheringa are represented as collected together in companies, each of which consisted of a certain number of individuals belonging to one particular totem. Each of these Alcheringa ancestors carried about with him or her one or more of the sacred stones called churinga. These are the general traditions related by the Arunta of to-day to explain their own customs, and let it be noted that the explanation does not necessarily lead us to the primitive conceptions of the Arunta people, but to their present conceptions as to unknown facts. The local example is found close to Alice Springs, where there are deposited a large number of churinga carried by the witchetty grub men and women. A large number of prominent rocks and boulders, and certain ancient gum trees, are the nanja trees and rocks of these spirits. If a woman conceives a child after having been near to this gap, it is one of these spirit individuals which has entered her body, and when born must of necessity be of the witchetty grub totem; "it is, in fact, nothing else but the reincarnation of one of the witchetty grub people of the Alcheringa;" the nanja tree, or stone, ever afterwards is the nanja of the child, and there is special connection between it and the child, injury to the nanja object meaning injury to the nanja man.[373] There is evidence that the reincarnation theory is not admissible,[374] and, indeed, it does not seem warranted on the facts presented by the authors. With this unnecessary element out of the way, then, there is left a system of local totemism, arising at birth and depending upon the mother, without reference in any way to the father, a.s.sociated with natural features, rocks and trees, and showing in a special way a curious system of s.e.x cleavage by the men of the group being the exclusive guardians of the sacred churinga, and the women the active power by which the churinga becomes connected with the newly-born member of the totem group.[375]

Now at this point we may surely refer back to the custom and belief of the Semang people of the Malay Peninsula, and I suggest that we have the closest parallel between Semang belief and custom and Arunta totemism, not quite the same formula perhaps, but a.s.suredly the same fundamental conception of every child at birth being in intimate a.s.sociation with objects of nature, and this a.s.sociation being the determining force of the newly-born man's social status and cla.s.s, lasting all through life. In each case the kinless basis of totemism is thus fully shown. The totem names given by women, or a.s.sumed on account of the conditions attachable to women as mothers, did not extend to the human fathers. The fathers may be known or unknown to the mothers, but they did not become a.s.sociated with the totems which the mothers a.s.sociated with their children. To the extent of fatherhood, therefore, totemism of this type was clearly not based upon the natural fact of blood kinship, but upon the conscious adoption of a non-kinship form of society. To the extent of motherhood also it was not based upon blood kinship, for it was the local totem, not the mother's totem, which became the totem of the newly-born member of the group. We thus have an entirely non-kinship form of society to deal with, a kinless society, "where there is no necessary relationship of any kind between that of children and parents."[376]

Primitive man consciously adapted certain of his observations of nature to his social needs, and among these observations the fact of actual blood kinship with father and mother played no part. It would appear therefore that totemism at its foundation was based upon a theoretical conception of relationship between man and animal or plant. Place of birth, a.s.sociation with natural objects, not motherhood and not fatherhood, are the determining factors.

We may proceed to inquire as to the social form which has become evolved from this kinless system.

In the case of the Semangs we have the kinless totemic belief and custom existing within a kinless society. In the case of the Arunta we have the kinless totemism existing in a society based on a kinless organisation still, but containing also full recognition of motherhood,[377] and perhaps recognition of physical fatherhood.[378]

There is, therefore, an important distinction in the social position of the two parallel systems. Among the Semang people, their totemic belief and custom do not carry with them a superstructure of society.

They form the substantive cult of the scattered social groups, which are kinless groups dependent upon ties local in character and derived from the conscious use of the facts of nature surrounding them. Among the Arunta people, on the contrary, the totem belief and custom are contained within a social system of extraordinary dimensions and proportions. Of course, the obvious questions to raise are--have the Semang people lost a once existing social system connected with their totemic cult? Have the Arunta people had imposed upon them a social system which has not destroyed their primitive totemic cult?

To answer these questions I can only deal with the Semang evidence as it appears in researches of great authority and weight, and there is undoubtedly in all the evidence produced by Messrs. Skeat and Blagden, and the authorities they use, nothing whatever to suggest that Semang totemism once possessed above it an elaborate social organisation of the usual totemic type. There is indeed, the myth which points to a two-cla.s.s exogamous division for marital purposes,[379] but there is more than myth for the unrestricted intercourse of the s.e.xes both before and after marital rights.[380] In every other direction we get simple groups fashioned on no larger basis than nomadic roaming and journeying to fresh food grounds. On the other hand, there is much to suggest that the Arunta have a dual system of organisation; one, in which the primitive types are still surviving, the second, a more advanced type which covers but does not crush out the first. If this is so, it is clear that the parallel between Semang and Arunta totemism is considerably closer than at first appears.