ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONDITIONS
In dealing with the folklore of any country, it is important to note
the general bearing of anthropological conditions. The earliest
inhabitants, to whom part of the folklore belonged, and the later
peoples, to whom part belonged, have both arrived at their ultimate
point of settlement in the country where we discover their folklore
after being in touch with many points of the world's surface. They are
both world-people as well as national people--they belonged to
anthropology before they came under the dominion of history. This
important fact is often or nearly always neglected. We are apt to
treat of Greek and Roman and Briton, of Cretan, Scandinavian, and
Russian, as bounded by the few thousands of years of life which have
fixed them with their territorial names, and to ignore all that lies
behind this historic period. There is, as a matter of fact, an immense
period behind it, reckoned according to geological time in millions of
years, and this period, longer in duration, more strenuous in its
influences upon character and mind, containing more representatives in
peoples, societies, and races than the later period, has affected the
later period to a far greater extent than is generally conceded or
understood. We cannot understand the later period without knowing
something of the earlier period.
There is more than this; for the dominating political races occupying
European countries to-day were, in most cases, preceded by a
non-political people. Thus, if we turn to Britain for illustration, we
find evidence of a people physically allied with a race which cannot
be identified with Celt or Teuton,[284] philologically allied with a
people which spoke a non-Aryan language,[285] archaeologically allied
with the prehistoric stone-circle and monolith builders,[286] and we
find custom, belief, and myth in Britain retaining traces of a culture
which is not Celtic and not Teutonic, and which contains survivals of
the primitive system of totemism.[287] These four independent classes
of evidence have to be combined if we would ascertain the true
position they occupy in the history of Britain, and it is perfectly
clear that, apart from general considerations, a direct appeal to
anthropology is necessary to help out the deficiencies of both history
and folklore. The questions involved in totemism alone compel us to
this course. It is questionable whether there is any existing savage
or barbaric people who are non-totemic in the sense of either not
possessing the rudimentary beginnings of totemism, or not having once
possessed a full system of totemism. Totemism, at one stage or another
of its development, is, in fact, one of the universal elements of
man's life, and all consideration of its traces in civilised countries
must begin with some conception of its origin. Its origin must refer
back to conditions of human life which are also universal. Special
circumstances, special peoples, special areas could not have produced
totemism unless we proceed to the somewhat violent conclusion that
beginning in one area it has spread therefrom to all areas. I know of
no authority who advocates such a theory and no evidence in its
favour. We are left therefore with the proposition that the origin of
totemism must be sought for in some universal condition of human life
at one of its very early stages, which would have produced a state of
things from which would inevitably arise the beliefs, customs, and
social organisations which are included under the term totemism.
There is therefore ample ground for a consideration of anthropological
conditions as part of the necessary equipment of the study of folklore
as an historical science. Unfortunately, authorities are now greatly
divided on several important questions in anthropology, and it is not
possible to speak with even a reasonable degree of certainty on many
things. This compels further research than the mere statement of the
present position, and I find myself obliged even for my present
limited purpose to suggest many new points beyond the stage reached
by present research. There is one advantage in this. It allows of a
hypothesis by which to present the subject to the student, and a
working hypothesis is always a great advantage where research is not
founded entirely on actual observation by trained experts in the
field. Where, therefore, I depart from the guidance of conclusions
already arrived at by scholars in this department of research, it will
be in order to substitute an opinion of my own which I think it is
necessary to consider, and the whole study of the anthropological
problems in their relation to folklore will assume the shape of a
restatement of the entire case.
I am aware that a subject of this magnitude is too weighty and
far-reaching to be properly considered in a chapter of a book not
devoted to the single purpose, but it is necessary to attempt a rough
statement of the evidence, though it will take us somewhat beyond the
ordinary domain of folklore; but, while dealing with the
anthropological position at sufficient length to make a complicated
subject clear, if I can do so, I shall limit both my arguments and the
evidence in support of them to the narrowest limits.
I
Mr. Wallace, I think, supplies the dominant note of the
anthropological position when he suggests, though in a strangely
unsatisfactory terminology, that it is the conscious use by man of his
experience which causes his superior mental endowments, and his
superior range of development.[288] We must lay stress upon the
important qualification "conscious." It is conscious use of experience
which is the great factor in man's progress. It is the greatest
possession of man in his beginning, and has remained his greatest
possession ever since. His experience did not always lead him to the
best paths of progress, but it has led him to progress.
Even Mr. Wallace did not appreciate the full significance of this
principle. The conscious adoption of a natural fact, of an observation
from nature, or an assumed observation from nature, for social
purposes, is an altogether different thing from the unconscious
knowledge which man might have been possessed of, but which he never
put to any use in his social development. Anthropologists must note
not the natural facts known to later man or known to science, but the
facts, or assumed facts, which early man consciously adopted for his
purpose during the long period of his development from savage to
civilised forms of life. The unconscious acts of mankind are of no
use, or of very little use. It is only the conscious acts that will
lead us along the lines of man's development. Man did not begin to
build up his social system with the scientific fact of blood kinship
through father and mother, but he evolved a theory of social
relationship which served his purpose until the fact of blood kinship
supplied a better basis. At almost the first point of origin in savage
society we see man acting consciously, and it is amongst his conscious
acts that we must place those traces of a sort of primitive
legislation which have been found.[289]
Now this being the basis of anthropological observation, we have to
apply it to the question of man's earliest progress. It is at its base
an economic question. Primitive economics dominated the movements and
condition of early man in a far more thorough manner than modern
economics affect civilisation, and between the two systems lies the
whole history of man. It reveals man adapting the social unit to the
productive powers of its food supply, and developing towards the
adaptation of the productive powers of food supply to the social unit.
In the various stages that accompany this great change, there is no
defined separation of peoples according to stages of culture, savage,
barbaric, or civilised. There is nothing to suggest that all peoples
do not come from one centre of human life. On the contrary, the
evidence is strong that the primal stages in human evolution are
traceable in all the culture stages, and, therefore, that they fit in
with the general conclusions of anthropologists and naturalists as to
man's origin in one definite centre, and his gradual spreading out
from that centre.
I will take the chief conclusions arrived at in respect of this
condition of birth at one centre and subsequent spreading out. Darwin
has summarised the problem between the monogenists and polygenists in
a manner which still ranks as a sufficient statement of the case, and
his conclusion that "all the races of man are descended from a single
primitive stock"[290] is accepted by the most prominent
naturalists,[291] and confirmed by recent discoveries, which go to
prove that this primitive stock began in miocene or pliocene times in
the Indo-Malaysian intertropical lands.[292]
Anthropologists, who have been deeply interested in the controversy
ranging round the origin of man, have in a remarkable manner neglected
to take into full account the most significant phenomenon of spreading
out.[293] They either neglect it altogether, or they relegate it to so
small a place in their argument as to become a practical neglect. They
treat of man as if he were always in a stationary condition, and
exclude the important condition of movement as an element in his
development. Mr. Spencer's general dictum that geological changes and
meteorological changes, as well as the consequent changes of flora and
fauna, must have been causing over all parts of the earth perpetual
emigrations and immigrations,[294] does not help much, because it
refers to special and cataclysmic events. Lord Avebury, though
stating the true case, unfortunately contents himself at the end of
his book on prehistoric man with a short summary of the evidence as to
the equipment of primitive man in mental and social qualities when he
began the great movement, and gives only a few lines to his conclusion
that "there can be no doubt that he originally crept over the earth's
surface little by little, year by year, just, for instance, as the
weeds of Europe are now gradually but surely creeping over the surface
of Australia."[295]
Mr. Keane is the first authority who thinks it appropriate to commence
his treatise on man with an examination of the facts which show that
"the world was peopled by migration from one centre by pleistocene
man ... who moved about like other migrating faunas, unconsciously,
everywhere following the lines of least resistance, advancing or
receding, and acting generally on blind impulse rather than of set
purpose;"[296] and it still remains with Dr. Latham to have formulated
some fixed principles of the migratory movement in his admirable
though, of course, wholly inadequate summary of man and his
migrations. I will quote the passage in full: "So long as any
continental extremities of the earth's surface remained
unoccupied--the stream (or rather the enlarging circle of migration)
not having yet reached them--the _primary_ migration is going on; and
when all have got their complement, the primary migration is over.
During this primary migration, the relations of man, thus placed in
movement and in the full, early and guiltless exercise of his high
function of subduing the earth, are in conflict with physical
obstacles and with the resistance of the lower animals only. Unless,
like Lot's wife, he turn back upon the peopled parts behind him, he
has no relations with his fellow-men--at least none arising out of the
claim of previous occupancy. In other words, during the primary
migration, the world that lay before our progenitors was either brute
or inanimate. But before many generations have passed away, all
becomes full to overflowing, so that men must enlarge their boundaries
at the expense of their fellows. The migrations that now take place
are _secondary_. They differ from the primary in many respects. They
are slower, because the resistance is that of humanity to humanity,
and they are violent, because dispossession is the object. They are
partial, abortive, followed by the fusion of different populations, or
followed by their extermination as the case may be."[297] This
passage, written so long ago as 1841, is still applicable to the facts
of modern science, and there is only to add to it that the migration
of man from a common centre, where life was easy, to all parts of the
world, where life has been difficult, must have been undertaken in
order to meet some great necessity, and must have become possible by
reason of some great force which man alone possessed. The necessity
was economic; the force was social development. If the movement has
not been geographically ever forward, it has been ethnographically
constant.[298] Movement always; sometimes the pressure has come from
one direction, sometimes from another; sometimes it has caused
compression and at other times expansion; sometimes it has sent
humanity to inhabit regions that required generations of victims
before it could hold its own. At all times the essential condition of
life has been that of constant movement in face of antagonistic
forces.[299] In whatever form the movement has come about, movement of
a very definite character has taken place over an immense period of
time, and sufficient to cover practically the whole earth with
descendants from the original human stock. This conclusion is
enormously strengthened by the accumulating evidence for the
world-wide area covered by the remains of man's earliest weapon, the
worked stone implement. It is everywhere. It is practically
co-extensive with man's wanderings, and the greatness of the territory
it covers marks it off as another of the universal relics of man's
primitive life. Of no other weapon or instrument or associated object
can this be said. The bow and arrow are unknown to the Australians and
other peoples; pottery is unknown to the Bushmen and other peoples;
the use of fire in cookery is not found among the South Sea Islanders,
and is not claimed for other peoples.[300] We can get behind the
development of these and other arts and come upon the ruder people who
had not arrived at the stage they represent. But we cannot get behind
the worked flint. It must have been the chief material cause of man's
success in the migratory movement, and with the social development
accompanying it must have made migration not only possible, but the
only true method of meeting the earliest economic difficulties. It
also provides us with the elements of a chronological basis. Behind
palaeolithic times there is an immensity of time when man struggled
with his economic difficulties and spread out slowly and painfully.
During palaeolithic times the movement was more rapid and more general.
Obstacles were overcome by palaeolithic man becoming superior to his
enemies by the use of weapons, and use of weapons caused, or at all
events aided, the development of social institutions capable of
bearing the new force of movement.
These two factors of economic necessity and social development are of
equal importance in man's history, and they interlace at all points.
They lead straight to the necessity for always taking count of the
fact that man is primarily a migratory being, and that he has spread
over the earth. Everywhere we find man. There is no habitable part of
the world where he has not found a home. But we do not find him under
equal conditions everywhere, and the different conditions afford
evidence of the main lines of development. Roughly speaking, it may be
put in this way. In the savage world the people appear as aborigines,
that is to say, the first and only occupiers of the territory where
they are located. In the barbaric world the condition of aboriginal
settlement is tinged with the result of conquest, namely, the pushing
out or absorption of the aboriginal folk in favour of a more powerful
and conquering folk. In the political world, and in the political
world only, there is not only the element of conquest, but the
definite aim of conquest, which is to retain the aboriginal or
conquered people as part of the political fabric necessary to the
settlement of the conqueror, and at the same time to keep intact the
superior position of the conqueror. In the savage world, society and
religion are based upon locality; in the barbaric world there is the
first sign of the element of kinship consciously used in the effort of
conquest, which dies away gradually as successful settlement, by which
conqueror and conquered become merged in one people, follows conquest;
in the political world, and in the political world only, kinship is
elevated into a necessary institution, is made sacred to the minds of
tribesmen, and becomes an essential part of the religion of the tribe
in order to keep the organisation of the tribal conquerors intact and
free from the perils of dissolution when conquerors and conquered
become members of one political unit. The savage and barbaric worlds
are the homes of the backward peoples, the non-advanced or fossilised
types of early humanity. The political world is the domain for the
most part of the Aryan-speaking people, and of the Semitic people, and
of those people who in Egypt within the Mediterranean area, and in
China in the eastern Asian area, have built up civilisations which
have only recently come under scientific observation.
These distinctions are not made by anthropologists as a rule, yet I
cannot but think they are in the main the true distinctions which must
be made if we are to arrive at any general conception of the progress
of man from savagery to civilisation. The distinctions which seem to
hold the field against those I have suggested, are those of hunter,
pastoral, and agricultural. I say seem to hold the field, because they
have never been scientifically worked out. They are stated in
textbooks and research work almost as an axiom of anthropology, but
their claim to this position is singularly weak and unsatisfactory,
and has never been scientifically established. They are only
economical distinctions, not social, and they do not properly express
related stages. Hunting, cattle keeping, and agriculture are found in
almost all stages of social evolution, and I, for one, deny that in
the order they are generally given, they express anything approaching
to accurate indication of the line of human progress. The
distinctions I have suggested do not, of course, contain everything
indicative of human progress. They are the first broad outlines to be
filled up by the details of special peoples, special areas, and
special ages. They involve many sub-stages which need to be properly
worked out, and for which a satisfactory terminology is required. In
the meantime, as measuring-posts of man's line of progress, they
express the most important fact about man, namely, that his present
enforced stationary condition has followed upon an enormous period of
enforced movement. That movement has finally resulted in the presence
of man everywhere on the earth's surface. This has been followed by
the continued moving of savage man within the limited areas to which
he has been finally pushed; by the movement of barbaric man from one
place of settlement to another place of settlement, again within
limited areas; and by the movement of political man through countries
and continents of vast extent, and the final overlordship of political
man over savage and barbaric man whom he has subjected and used for
his purpose of final settlement in the civilised form of settlement.
It will be apparent from the terms I have used to express the three
chief stages in man's progress, that I give a special significance to
the use of blood kinship as a social force, and in the sequel I think
this special significance will be justified.[301]
No one can properly estimate the tremendous amount of movement which
preceded these later limitations to movement. Savage and barbaric
races are now hemmed in by the forces of modern civilisation. This was
not the case even a few hundred years ago, and though we cannot say
when constant movement all over the world was stayed, we can form some
idea of the comparatively late period when this took place by a
contemplation of the very recent growth of the political civilisations
known to history. At the most, this can only be reckoned at some ten
thousand years. At the back of this short stretch of time, or of the
successive periods at which the new civilisations have arisen, there
are recollections of great movements and great migrations. Egypt,
Babylonia, India, Persia, Greece, and Rome have preserved these
recollections by tradition, and tradition has been largely confirmed
by archaeology. Celts and Teutons have preserved parallel traditions
which are confirmed by history observed from without. These traditions
and memorials of the migration period have not been scientifically
examined in each case, but where scholars have touched upon them,
great and unexpected results have been produced.[302]
There was time enough, before these late and special movements which
led to civilisation, for man, in the course of peopling the earth, to
be brought at various stages to a standstill, and such a change in his
life-history would have its own special results. One of the most
momentous of these results is the fossilisation of social and mental
conditions. Man stationary, or movable by custom within restricted
areas, would live under conditions which must have produced forms of
culture different from those under which man lived when he was always
able to penetrate, not by custom but by the force of circumstances,
into the unknown domain of unoccupied territory; and the fossilisation
of his culture at various stages of development, in accord with the
various periods of his being brought to a standstill, would be the
most important result.[303] Whenever man was compelled to move onward
the social forces which were demanded of him, as he proceeded from
point to point, must have been quite different from those which he
could have adopted if he had been allowed to stay in areas which
suited him, if he could have selected his settlement grounds and
awaited events. The calmness of the latter methods would perhaps have
led to the unconscious development of social forms; the roughness of
the actual method of constant movement led to the conscious adoption
of social forms which has altered man's history. These considerations
bring us to the conclusion that it is during the period of migratory
movement that man has developed the social and religious elements with
which the anthropologist finds him endowed, when at last in modern
days he has been brought within the ken of scientific observation, and
that therefore it is as a migratory not a stationary organism that the
evolution of human society has to be studied, aided by the fact that
enforced stationary conditions have produced in the savage world
examples of perhaps the most remote as well as the more recent types
of primitive humanity.
This last possibility, however, is not admitted by the best
authorities. They endeavour to use biological methods in order to get
behind existing savagery for the earliest period of human savagery.
Darwin is not satisfied with the evidence as to promiscuity, strong as
it appeared to him to be, and he pronounced it to be "extremely
improbable" in a state of nature, and falls back upon the evidence of
the rudimentary stages of human existence, there being, as among the
gorillas, but one adult male in the band, and "when the young male
grows up, a contest takes place for the mastery, and the strongest, by
killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of
the community."[304] Mr. McLennan nowhere states the evidence for his
first stage of human society--the primitive horde without any ideas of
kinship, and based upon a fellowship of common interests and
dangers[305]--but arrives at it by argument deduced from the
conditions of later stages of development, and from the necessary
suppositions as to the pre-existing stage which must have led to the
later. Mr. Westermarck leads us straight to the evidence of the lower
animals, from which he arrives at the small groups of humans headed by
the male, and provides us with the theory of a human pairing
season.[306] Mr. Morgan claims that no exemplification of mankind in
his assumed lower status of savagery remained to the historical
period,[307] presumably meaning the anthropo-historical period. And
finally, Mr. Lang definitely claims that conjecture, and conjecture
alone, remains as the means of getting back to the earliest human
origins.[308]
There is great danger in relying too closely upon conjecture. We shall
be repeating in anthropology what the analytical jurists accomplished
in law and jurisprudence, and it will then soon become necessary to do
for anthropology what Sir Henry Maine did for comparative
jurisprudence, namely, demonstrate that the analytical method does not
take us back to human origins, but to highly developed systems of
society. Law, in the hands of the analytical jurists, is merely one
part of the machinery of modern government. Social beginnings in the
hands of conjectural anthropologists are merely abstractions with the
whole history of man put on one side. Mr. Lang in leading the way
towards the analytical method in anthropology has avoided many of its
pitfalls, but his disciples are not so successful. Thus, when Mr.
Thomas declares that "custom which has among them [primitive peoples]
far more power than law among us, determines whether a man is of kin
to his mother and her relatives alone, or to his father and father's
relatives, or whether both sets of relatives are alike of kin to
them,"[309] he is neglecting the whole significance and range of
custom. His statement is true analytically, but it is not true
anthropologically until we have ascertained what this custom to which
he refers really is, whence it is derived, how it has obtained its
force, what is its range of action, how it operates in differentiating
among the various groups of mankind--in a word, what is the human
history associated with this custom.
We must, however, at certain points in anthropological inquiry have
recourse to the conjectural method. Its value lies in the fact that it
states, and states clearly, the issue which is before us, and it is
always possible to take up the conjectural position and endeavour to
ascertain whether the neglected facts of human history which it
expresses can be recovered. Its danger lies in the neglect of certain
anthropological principles which can only be noted from definite
examples, and the significance of which can only be discovered by the
handling of definite examples. I will refer to one or two of the
principles which I have in mind. Thus, it is necessary to distinguish
between what is a practice and what is a rule. A practice precedes a
rule. A practice incidental to one stage of society must not be
confused with a rule, similar to the practice, obtaining in a
different stage of society. Again, it must be borne in mind that
identity of practice is no certain evidence of parallel stages of
culture, and already it has been pointed out that identical practices
do not always come from the same causes. Thirdly, it has to be borne
in mind that primitive peoples specialise in certain directions to an
extreme extent, and correspondingly cause neglect in other directions.
The normal, therefore, has to give way to the special, and it is the
degree of specialisation and the degree of neglect which are measuring
factors of progress; in other words, it is the conscious adoption of
certain rules of life with which we alone have to do.
These principles are apt to be wholly neglected, and, indeed, the
last-mentioned element in the evolution of human society does not
enter into the calculations of analytical anthropologists. They
provide for the normal according to scientific ideas of what the
normal is. They either neglect or openly reject what cannot be called
abnormal, because it appears everywhere, but which they are inclined
to treat as abnormal because it does not fit into their accepted lines
of development. That which I have ventured to term specialisation and
neglect is a great and important feature in anthropology. It obtains
everywhere in more or less degree, and accounts for some of the
apparently unaccountable facts in savage society, where we are
frequently encountered by a comparatively high degree of culture
associated with a cruel and debasing system of rites and practices
which belong to the lowest savagery. Dr. Haddon has usefully suggested
the term "differential evolution" for this phenomenon in the culture
history of man,[310] and as I find myself in entire agreement with
this distinguished anthropologist as to the facts[311] which call for
a special terminology, I gladly adopt his valuable suggestion.
It is advisable to explain this phenomenon by reference to examples, and
I will take the point of specialisation first. Even where industrial
arts have advanced far beyond the primitive stage we are considering, we
have the case of the Ahts, with whom "though living only a few miles
apart, the tribes practise different arts and have apparently distinct
tribal characteristics. One tribe is skilful in shaping canoes, another
in painting boards for ornamental work, or making ornaments for the
person, or instruments for hunting and fishing. Individuals as a rule
keep to the arts for which their tribe has some repute, and do not care
to acquire those arts in which other tribes excel. There seems to be
among all the tribes in the island a sort of recognised tribal monopoly
in certain articles produced, or that have been long manufactured in
their own district. For instance, a tribe that does not grow potatoes,
or make a particular kind of mat, will go a long way year after year to
barter for those articles, which if they liked they themselves could
easily produce or manufacture."[312] The remarkable case of the Todas
specialising in cattle rearing and dairy farming is another example.
Other people, both higher and lower in civilisation than the Todas, keep
cattle and know the value of milk, but it is reserved for the Todas
alone to have used this particular economic basis of their existence as
the basis also of their social formation and their religious life.[313]
The result is that they neglect other forms of social existence. They
are not totemists, though perhaps they have the undeveloped germs of
totemistic beliefs.[314] Their classificatory system of relationship
makes their actual kinship scarcely recognisable; they "have very
definite restrictions on the freedom of individuals to marry," and have
a two-class endogamous division, but their marriage rite is merely the
selection of nominal fathers for their children.[315] Throughout the
careful study which we now possess, thanks to Dr. Rivers, of this
people, there is the dominant note of dairy economy superimposing itself
upon all else, and even religion seems to be in a state of
decadence.[316] I do not know that anywhere else could be found a
stronger example of the results of extreme specialisation upon the
social and mental condition of a people. As a rule such specialisation
does not extend to a whole people, but rather to sections, as, for
instance, among the Gold Coast tribes of Africa who "transmit the secret
of their skill from father to son and keep the corporation to which they
belong up to a due degree of closeness by avoiding intermarriage with
any of the more unskilled labourers,"[317] and Dr. Bucher, who has
worked out many of the earliest conditions of primitive economics,
concludes that it may be safely claimed that every "tribe displays some
favourite form of industrial activity in which its members surpass the
other tribes."[318] This rule extends to the lowest type of man, as, for
instance, among the Australians. Each tribe of the Narrinyeri, says
Taplin, have been accustomed to make those articles which their tract of
country enabled them to produce most easily; one tribe will make
weapons, another mats, and a third nets, and then they barter them one
with another.[319]
The evidence for industrial evolution is full of cases such as these,
and they are extremely important to note, because it is not the mere
existence of particular customs or particular beliefs among different
peoples which is the factor to take into account, but the use or
non-use, and the extent of the use or non-use, to which the particular
customs or beliefs are put in each case.[320] Let me turn from the
phenomenon of over-specialisation to that of neglect, and for this
purpose I will take the simple fact of blood kinship. Existing
obviously everywhere through the mother, and not obviously but
admittedly through the father among most primitive peoples, there are
examples where both maternal kinship and paternal kinship are
neglected factors in the construction of the social group. The Nahals
of Khandesh, for instance, neglect kinship altogether, and exist
perfectly wild among the mountains, subsisting chiefly on roots,
fruits, and berries, though the children during infancy accompany the
mother in her unattached freedom from male control,[321] just as
Herodotos describes the condition of the Auseans "before the Hellenes
were settled near them."[322] Similarly, among many primitive peoples,
kinship with the mother is recognised while kinship with the father is
purposely neglected as a social factor. Thus, among the Khasia Hill
people, the husband visits his wife occasionally in her own home,
where "he seems merely entertained to continue the family to which his
wife belongs."[323] This statement, so peculiarly appropriate to my
purpose, is not merely an accident of language. With the people allied
to the Khasis, namely, the Syntengs and the people of Maoshai, "the
husband does not go and live in his mother-in-law's house; he only
visits her there. In Jowai, the husband came to his mother-in-law's
house only after dark," and the explanation of the latest authority
is that among these people "the man is nobody ... if he be a husband
he is looked upon merely as _u shong kha_, a begetter."[324]
The neglect of maternal and paternal kinship respectively in these two
cases is obvious. They are recognised physically. But they are not
used as part of the fabric of social institutions. Physical motherhood
or fatherhood is nothing to these people, and one must learn to
understand that there is wide difference between the mere physical
fact of having a mother and father, and the political fact of using
this kinship for social organisation. Savages who have not learnt the
political significance have but the scantiest appreciation of the
physical fact. The Australians, for instance, have no term to express
the relationship between mother and child. This is because the
physical fact is of no significance, and not as Mr. Thomas thinks
because of the meagreness of the language.[325] Our field
anthropologists do not quite understand the savage in this respect. It
is of no use preparing a genealogical tree on the basis of civilised
knowledge of genealogy if such a document is beyond the ken of the
people to whom it relates. The information for it may be correctly
collected, but if the whole structure is not within the compass of
savage thought it is a misleading anthropological document. It is of
no use translating a native term as "father," if father did not mean
to the savage what it means to us. It might mean something so very
different. With us, fatherhood connotes a definite individual with all
sorts of social, economical, and political associations, but what
does it mean to the savage? It may mean physical fatherhood and
nothing more, and physical fatherhood may be a fact of the veriest
insignificance. It may mean social fatherhood, where all men of a
certain status are fathers to all children of the complementary
status, and social fatherhood thus becomes much more than we can
understand by the term father.
We cannot ignore the evidence which over-specialisation in one
direction and neglect in other directions supply to anthropology. It
shows us that human societies cannot always be measured in the scale
of culture by the most apparent of the social elements contained in
them. The cannibalism of the Fijians, the art products of the Maori,
the totemism of the Australian blacks, do not express all that makes
up the culture of these people, although it too often happens that
they are made to do duty for the several estimates of culture
progress. It follows that a survey of the different human societies
might reveal examples of the possible lowest in the scale as well as
various advances from the lowest; or in lieu of whole societies in the
lowest scale, there might be revealed unexceptional examples of the
possible lowest elements of culture within societies not wholly in the
lowest scale. It will be seen how valuable an asset this must be in
anthropological research. It justifies those who assert that existing
savagery or existing survival will supply evidence of man at the very
earliest stages of existence. It is the root idea of Dr. Tylor's
method of research, and it is an essential feature in the science of
folklore.
Evidence of this nature, however, needs to be exhaustively collected,
and to be subjected to the most careful examination, as otherwise it
may be used for the merest _a priori_ argument of the most mischievous
and inconclusive description. It involves consideration of whole human
groups rather than of particular sections of each human group, of the
whole corpus of social, religious, and economical elements residing in
each human group rather than of the separated items. Each human group,
having its specialised and dormant elements, must be treated as an
organism and not as a bundle of separable items, each one of which the
student may use or let alone as he desires. That which is
anthropological evidence is the indivisible organism, and whenever,
for convenience of treatment and considerations of space, particular
elements only are used in evidence, they must be qualified, and the
use to which they are provisionally put for scientific purposes must
be checked, by the associated elements with which the particular
elements are connected.
The human groups thus called upon to surrender their contributions to
the history of man are of various formations, and consist of various
kinds of social units. There is no one term which can properly be
applied to all, and it will have been noted that I have carefully
avoided giving the human groups hitherto dealt with any particular
name, and only under protest have I admitted the terms used by the
authorities I have quoted. I think the term "tribe" is not applicable
to savage society, for it is used to denote peoples in all degrees of
social evolution, and merely stands for the group which is known by a
given name, or roams over a given district. But the use of this term
is not so productive of harm as the use of the term "family," because
of the universal application of this term to the smallest social unit
of the civilised world, and because of the fundamental difference of
structure of the units which roughly answer to the definition of
family in various parts of the world. It is no use in scientific
matters to use terms of inexact reference. As much as almost anything
else it has led to false conclusions as to the evolution of the
family, conclusions which seem to entangle even the best authorities
in a mass of contradictions. I cannot think of a family group in
savagery with father, mother, sons, and daughters, all delightfully
known to each other, in terms which also belong to the civilised
family, and still less can I think of these terms being used to take
in the extended grouping of local kinships. One of our greatest
difficulties, indeed, is the indiscriminate use of kinship terms by
our descriptive authorities. We are never quite sure whether the
physical relationships included in them convey anything whatever to
the savage. If he knows of the physical fact, he does not use it
politically, for blood kinship as a political force is late, not
early, and the early tie was dependent upon quite other circumstances.
Over and over again it will be found stated by established authorities
that the family was the primal unit, the grouped families forming the
larger clan, the grouped clans forming the larger tribe. This is Sir
Henry Maine's famous formula, and it is the basis of his investigation
into early law and custom.[326] It is founded upon the false
conception of the family in early history, and upon a too narrow
interpretation of the stages of evolution. When we are dealing with
savage society, the terms family and tribe do not connote the same
institution as when we are dealing with higher forms of civilisation.
There is something roughly corresponding to these groupings in both
systems, but they do not actually equate. When we pass to the Semitic
and the Aryan-speaking peoples, both the family and tribe have assumed
a definite place in the polity of the races which is not to be found
outside these peoples.
So strongly has the family impressed itself upon the thought of the
age that students of man in his earliest ages are found stating that
"the family is the most ancient and the most sacred of human
institutions."[327] This proposition, however, is not only denied by
other authorities, as, for instance, Mr. Jevons, who affirms that "the
family is a comparatively late institution in the history of
society,"[328] but it rests upon the merely analytical basis of
research, separated entirely from those facts of man's history which
are discoverable by the means just now suggested. One is, of course,
quite prepared to find the family among civilisations older than the
Indo-European, and yet to find that it is a comparatively late
institution among Indo-European peoples. As a matter of fact, this is
the case; for the two kinds of family, the family as seen in savage
society and the family as it appears among the antiquities of the
Indo-European people, are totally distinct in origin, in compass, and
in force; while welded between the two kinds of family is the whole
institution of the tribe. It is no use introducing the theory adopted
by Grote, Niebuhr, Mommsen, Thirlwall, Maine, and other authorities
who have studied the legal antiquities of classical times, that the
tribe is the aggregate of original family units. Later on I shall show
that this cannot be the case. The larger kinship of the tribe is a
primary unit of ancient society, which thrusts itself between the
savage family and the civilised family, showing that the two types are
separated by a long period of history during which the family did not
exist.
It has taken me some time to explain these points in anthropological
science, which appear to me not to have received proper consideration
at the hands of the masters of the science, but which are essential
factors in the history of man and are necessary to a due consideration
of the position occupied by folklore. The chief results obtained
are:--
(1) Migratory man would deposit his most rudimentary
social type not at the point of starting his
migration, but at the furthest point therefrom.
(2) Custom due to the migratory period would continue
after real migratory movement had ceased, and from
this body of custom would be derived all later forms
of social custom.
(3) Non-kinship groups are more rudimentary than
kinship groups, and are still observable in savage
anthropology.
(4) Anthropological evidence must be based upon the
whole of the characteristics of human groups, not upon
special characteristics singled out for the purpose of
research.
It is with these results we have to work. They will help us to see how
far the facts of anthropology, which begin far behind the historical
world, have to do with the problems presented by folklore as a science
having to deal with the historical world.
II
We may now inquire where anthropology and folklore meet. It is
significant in this connection that in order to reach back to the
earliest ages of man, our first appeal seems to be to folklore. The
appeal at present does not lead us far perhaps, but it certainly acts
as a finger post in the inquiry, for Dr. Kollmann, rejecting the
evidence of the Java _Pithecanthropus erectus_ as the earliest
palaeontological evidence of man, advances the opinion that the direct
antecedents of man should not be sought among the species of
anthropoid apes of great height and with flat skulls, but much further
back in the zoological scale, in the small monkeys with pointed
skulls; from which, he believes, were developed the human pygmy races
of prehistoric ages with pointed skulls, and from these pygmy races
finally developed the human race of historic times. And he relies upon
folklore for one part of his evidence, for it is this descent of man,
he thinks, which explains the persistency with which mythology and
folklore allude to the subject of pygmy people, as well as the
relative frequency with which recently the fossils of small human
beings belonging to prehistoric times have been discovered.[329] It
must not be forgotten, too, that this remote period is found in
another class of tradition, namely, that to which Dr. Tylor refers as
containing the memory of the huge animals of the quaternary
period.[330]
It must be confessed that we do not get far with this evidence alone.
If it proves that the true starting point is to be found in folklore,
it also proves that folklore alone is not capable of working through
the problem. Anthropology must aid here, and I will suggest the lines
on which it appears to me it does this.
Our first effort must be made by the evidence suggested by the
conjectural method. This leads us to small human groups, each headed
by a male who drives out all other males and himself remains with his
females and his children. Sexual selection thus acts with primitive
economics[331] in keeping the earliest groups small in numbers, and
creating a spreading out from these groups of the males cast out. We
have male supremacy in its crudest form accompanied by an enforced
male celibacy, so far as the group in which the males are born is
concerned, on the part of those who survive the struggle for supremacy
and wander forth on their own account. Marking the stages from point
to point, in order to arrive at a systematic method of stating the
complex problem presented by the subject we are investigating, we can
project from this earliest condition of man's life two important
elements of social evolution, namely--
(a) Younger men are celibate within the natural
groups of human society, or are driven out therefrom.
(b) Men thus driven out will seek mates on their own
account, and will secure them partly from the original
group as far as they are permitted or are successful
in their attempts, and partly by capture from other
local groups.
The first of these elements strongly emphasises the migratory
character of the earliest human groups. The second shows how each
group is relieved of the incubus of too great a number for the
economic conditions by the double process of sending forth its young
males, and of its younger females being captured by successful
marauders.
Let us take a fuller note of what the conditions of such a life might
be. There is no tie of kinship operating as a social force within the
groups; there is the unquestioned condition of hostility surrounding
each group, and there is the enforced practice of providing mates by
capture. Of these three conditions the most significant is undoubtedly
the absence of the kinship tie. If then we use this as the basis for
grouping the earliest examples of social organisation, we proceed to
inquire whether there are any examples of kinless society in
anthropological evidence.
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 assists 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 principal 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. Nobody orders, nobody
obeys, nobody defends the country, nobody 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]
[Illustration: CHINESE REPRESENTATION OF PYGMIES GOING ABOUT
ARM-IN-ARM FOR MUTUAL PROTECTION]
[Illustration: SEMANG OF KUALA KENERING, ULU PERAK]
[Illustration: NEGRITO TYPE: SEMANG OF PERAK]
Following this up we get the greatest assistance 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 grassy
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 principal
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 buttresses, 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 associated culture
elements, and I shall have to return to them later on.
[Illustration: 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 assured 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 passes
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 association with natural objects. All this
makes it advisable to take fuller count of pygmy culture than has
hitherto 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 sexual
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 entitled 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 constitute
a factor in human evolution, they are a most important factor. If they
do not constitute such a factor, they can only be accidental
productions, the sport of exceptional circumstances 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 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.
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 principal 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 passed 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 bestial of the same name; and belief in the
blood superstitions (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 principally 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 passed 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
association 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 association 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 identity 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 associated 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 assume 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 circumstances, 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
sexual 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 institution, 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 class 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 assistance 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 circumstances 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 association 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 association 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
sexes based upon the difference of totems instead of upon the sameness
of them; and finally there would be produced first a two-class
division founded on sex--all the mothers and all the fathers--and,
only in a developed form, a two-class 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 substitute
blood kinship for the association 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 association 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 association
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 associations 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 association 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 class, 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 class 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 sexual 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 class, and in general
outside their totem, for their sexual mates, and they must expect to
be claimed as rightful sexual 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
classes--not every man from without, but only special men from
without, are allowed the sexual 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 class system,
and we are bound to conclude that this class 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 classes
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 class
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, associated with natural features, rocks and trees, and showing
in a special way a curious system of sex 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]