To produce the new condition of affairs, two factors were necessary:
first, a means of distinguishing the captured women within every group
from each other, and from the group into which they were brought by
capture. This means of distinction was afforded by the totem names.
Next, a recognition of kinship was needed, and this was supplied, let
us conjecture, by naming the children of each of the captive women
after the totem name of the group from which she was captured. If all
the children indiscriminately were called by the totem name (say Emu)
of the local group into which their mothers had been brought--that is,
by the totem name of their fathers--there would be no recognisable
heterogeneity within that group, and so there would be, within the
local group, no possible wives, under the exogamous rule. Whether
polyandry then existed, or not, still all the fathers were of one
local totem name, say Emu, and children could only be differentiated
by styling them after the totem names of their alien mothers. This
is usually done among the savages who are least advanced, but not
among the Arunta, whose totem names, as we shall see, by a curious
divergence, do not indicate stock, but are derived from a singular
superstition about ancestral spirits, of various totems, incarnating
themselves in each new-born child.
Mr. McLennan, in _Primitive Marriage_ (1865), had arrived at
conclusions very like these. The primitive groups ‘were assumed to
be homogeneous.... While as yet there was no system of kinship, the
presence of captive women in a horde’ (group), ‘in whatever numbers,
could not introduce a system of betrothals’--the women and their
children not yet being differentiated from each other, and from the
group in which they lived. Mr. McLennan, in 1865, did not ask how
these women ever came to be distinctly differentiated, each from
each, and from the group which held them, though that differentiation
was a necessary prelude to the recognition of kindred through these
women. But presently, in his _Studies of Totemism_ (1869), he found,
whether he observed the fact or not, the means of differentiation.
Differentiation became possible after, and not before, each primitive
group received a totem name, retained by its captive women within each
group to which they were carried, a name to be inherited by their
children in each case.
He says, ‘heterogeneity as a statical force can only have come into
play when a system of kinship led the hordes to look on the children of
their foreign women as belonging to the stocks of their mothers.’ That
was impossible, before the totem or some equivalent system of naming
foreign groups arose, a circumstance not easily observed till Mr.
McLennan himself opened the way to the study of Totemism.[51]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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