The background of totemism / by E. Washburn Hopkins.

  • Edward Washburn Hopkins
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The background of totemism / by E. Washburn Hopkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/30 page 575
    from the personal totem.' In South America (n’en Dr. Frazer ad¬ mits that totemism and exogamy exist in only two tribes (the Goa- jiros and Arawaks, withal “almost surely,” not quite), and the motlier sea” and “mother maize” of Peru were only anceslial food-o-ivers (not totems). Moreover the admitted fact that the slcin of the “lion ancestor” worn at festivals by the Chanchas is no evi¬ dence of totemism reacts on the explanation of such skin-clad revelers elsewhere, as in Greece and Eoine.- Put by dint of calling almost anything totemism, totemism has been found almost everywhere. It really does exist in many difl'erent parts of the world. North America, Africa, Polynesia, Australia, etc. AVe will take it as we find it in some of its most primitive forms, where it has nothing to do necessarily with religion or with marriage. In Australia, where we have been assured that there is no religion, only magic (but this is a fallacy), and where at any rate we find totemism without religious implication, there are two things to be considered. First, is this Australian culture unique or is it only part of a greater comiilex, taking in the Melanesians? Indications point to a common substratum rather than to isolation. How the connec¬ tion arose is not difficult to imagine; why it stopped is harder to guess. At any rate there is the possibility that Australian savages represent not the most primitive stage but a decadent form of an earlier stage of culture, when, for example, these savages could sail the sea. Then, secondly, there is to be considered the complex of totemic groups. For the purpose of this paper I have stressed the kind of totemism in which the totem is eaten and exogamy is not considered. But no one kind of totemism can be posited for Australia. If totemism imply a relation (magical or religious) be¬ tween a clan and a class of animals or plants, Australian totemism may be either in the female line (the child then belongs to the class of the mother), or in the male line (the child then belongs to the father’s class of animals), the former sort being found more in the eastern part of the country, the latter in other parts. But the Australian group may be merely a fortuitous class of collective own¬ ers of a certain territory, and in this case the child belongs to its father’s totemic class, but the group is not exogamous (a western sort of totemism). Besides these sorts there is the totemism of the cult society, in which all are totem members; the diiided society, in which each half of the tribe has a different totem; and that of the four or eight divisions of relationship; while, in addition, sex-totem- ism again divides the tribe into two totemic parts. Moreover, per- ‘ See, for example, Ellis, The Tshi-speakins Peoples, etc., p. 205 f. ; Nassau, Fetlchism In West Africa, p. 210. Bantu totemism is usually of this sort. There is here no venera¬ tion for the totem. = See Frazer, Totemism, p. 95 ; The Golden Bough, 2. 293 ; Totemism and Exogamy, 2 230; 3. 571, 579.
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