Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/784

 powei.l] SOCIOLOGY, OR THE SCIENCE OF INSTITUTIONS 7*3

to the crops during the season of irrigation as well as that of planting and harvesting. One clan on one little stream is sepa- rated from the other clans, who also have their streams during the entire season of growing crops, and the clan is thus segregated in a little summer village of its own, and in a distinct village from that occupied by the tribe during the remainder of the year.

Again, as animals are domesticated and flocks and herds are acquired, wives and children become still more essential to the prosperity of the men, for the women and children must take part in the care of the flocks. By all of these agencies the con- trol of women and children is taken from elder brothers and given to the husbands, and the practical accomplishment of this change results in a new theory of the fami 1 ^ — the children are no longer considered the children of the bearing mother, but of the generating father ; that is, the children belong to the father, not to the mother, for in tribal society there seems to be an inability to conceive of mutual parenthood and authority. In the clan the mother is the parent and owns the children, and the father is but temporarily the guest of the wife and children.

But when the elder-man has the authority of the shaman, he easily usurps the authority of the elder-man of his wife's clan, especially when such authority is conducive to his industrial interests ; for the same reason that impels the elder-man to this acquisition of authority impels the elder-man of his wife's clan to a corresponding assumption of authority, so the interest of the one is the interest of the other. There may be many clans in the tribe, and all the elder-men are interested in the like acquisi- tion of authority and are alike willing to give and take. When this transfer is made into what we now call the gens, and the elder-man or chief of the gens has authority over his wife and children, this authority waxes very great, for he has a double power — that of the elder-man and that of the shaman, and we have the same state of affairs among the barbaric tribes of America that is exhibited to us in the historic account of the

�� �