Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/135

 BOAS] SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF THE KWAKIUTL 12$

must have been one and must have lived on the seacoast. All the Coast Salish tribes, with the exception of the Bellacoola, are or- ganized in simple village communities with preponderent patrilineal descent. Village communities may still be recognized as the fundamental divisions of the Bellacoola, but the organization is overlaid by the use of crests and privileges which are characteristic of the Tsimshian and of the northern Kwakiutl. The forms and names of privileges and the names of individuals using the privileges prove the most intimate association with the neighboring tribes. Similar conditions, only less developed, may be traced among the northern Coast Salish, who have adopted privileges for a few social units while other social units have no such privileges. On Fraser river these ideas have even penetrated to the Lower Thomp- son tribes and northward to the Lillooet. The Kwakiutl are so thoroughly saturated with the use of privileges that no essential differences can be discovered in ths various groups. Unfortunately, we do not know enough about the northern Kwakiutl tribes to state definitely the conditions prevailing among them. The observations among the southern tribes, however, make it clear that among the southern Kwakiutl, as well as among the Nootka and the Coast Salish, the village community is conceived as a closed group and forms the basis of modern social organization. The exogamous lines, which are superimposed upon the village communities and embrace all of them, and which are an essential feature of the social system of the northern tribes, do not occur. The fragmentary archaeological evidence which we possess from the Kwakiutl territory suggests that the whole elaborate artistic development of the crest is not very old. Even the remains from graves that belong approximately to the middle of the last century indicate that the complete crowding out of geometrical ornament by conventional animal representations occurred quite recently.

It appears to me largely as a psychological question how the highly specialized use of privileges may have been superimposed upon an older simple organization which has a rather wide distri- bution on the coast. There is nothing to indicate that the simpler form should have been developed from a totemic organization.

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