Folklore as an Historical ScienceGomme, George Laurence
History
Folklore as an Historical Science
Gomme, George Laurence
Folklore
It may be approached first from the conjectural basis. On this basis
it may be asserted 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
substitution 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
sexes.
That primitive economics bear the impress of sex cleavage is borne out
by every class of evidence, and it is in this circumstance 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 principal authorities on the subject, and ascertaining
the present position of the inquiry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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