(_d_) But we need only a reminder to realize that the exogamy connected
with the totem accomplishes more; that is, aims at more than the
prevention of incest with the mother or the sisters. It also makes it
impossible for the man to have sexual union with all the women of his
own group, with a number of females, therefore, who are not
consanguineously related to him, by treating all these women like blood
relations. The psychological justification for this extraordinary
restriction, which far exceeds anything comparable to it among civilized
races, is not, at first, evident. All we seem to understand is that the
rôle of the totem (the animal) as ancestor is taken very seriously.
Everybody descended from the same totem is consanguineous; that is, of
one family; and in this family the most distant grades of relationship
are recognized as an absolute obstacle to sexual union.
Thus these savages reveal to us an unusually high grade of incest dread
or incest sensitiveness, combined with the peculiarity, which we do not
very well understand, of substituting the totem relationship for the
real blood relationship. But we must not exaggerate this contradiction
too much, and let us bear in mind that the totem prohibitions include
real incest as a special case.
In what manner the substitution of the totem group for the actual family
has come about remains a riddle, the solution of which is perhaps bound
up with the explanation of the totem itself. Of course it must be
remembered that with a certain freedom of sexual intercourse, extending
beyond the limitations of matrimony, the blood relationship, and with it
also the prevention of incest, becomes so uncertain that we cannot
dispense with some other basis for the prohibition. It is therefore not
superfluous to note that the customs of Australians recognize social
conditions and festive occasions at which the exclusive conjugal right
of a man to a woman is violated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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