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 palæontological 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. 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.

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 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. 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."

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, 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." 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." The evidence of the African pygmy people everywhere confirms these views, and differences of detail do not alter the general results.

Following this up we get the greatest assistance from Asia. 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. 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. 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." 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; their nomadic habits, rude nature-derived clothing, forest habitations and natural sources of food are described; the evolution of their habitations from the natural shelters, rock shelters, caves, tree buttresses, branches, etc., is to be traced; they belong to the old Stone Age, if not to a previous Wood and Bone Age; they have no organised body of chiefs, and there is no formal recognition of kinship; marital relationship is preceded by great ante-nuptial freedom; 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;" 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; but there seems to be no evidence of any religious cult or rite, and what there is of mythology or legend is probably borrowed. 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.

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.

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, 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, 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 Zamáro.

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.

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. 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."

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."

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."

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;" 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."

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. 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," 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. 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. 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, 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.