Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/336

 3i8 • Reviews.

M. Durkheim replies that the custom by which the wife goes to live with her husband produces inconvenience as long as mother-right is retained. In the principal circumstances of life son and father are separated. The father belongs to one phratry, the son to the other. When the people assemble, each phratry assembles by itself, its camp is placed at a distance from the other, and wherever possible a natural barrier, like a stream, is placed between them. Nor is the physical division all. Whenever any question in which the phratries were severally interested came up, father and son would be found to have different interests, whereas at other times they w^ould share a common life with its common burdens and ex- periences. This situation would be full of difficulty and contradic- tion. Yet it would not have become wholly intolerable, but for the existence of a more lively sense of solidarity among the Arunta than usually obtains among the Australian tribes. If Arunta society be one in which the sense of unity is strong and growing, it is easy to see that the change of filiation may have been a step deliberately taken for the purpose of promoting unification or at least of removing a hindrance to it.

From matrimonial M. Durkheim turns to alimentary prohibi- tions. If the foregoing reasoning be accepted, it follows that the present regulations concerning food are a relaxation of earlier restrictions. Just as the relaxation of the restrictions on marriage within the totem-clan would be a necessary, though perhaps gradual, consequence of the change of filiation, and the removal of part of the totem-clan to the complementary exogamous phratry, so the prohibition of the totem as food would gradually fail. It has not quite passed away. Members of the totem-group are expected to eat of the totem, but with moderation, and not to the extent to which they may indulge in other articles of food. It is easier to explain this partial restriction as a survival of a restriction total save for ritual purposes, than to believe that it has been subsequently imposed. I may perhaps reinforce the argu- ment here. If the partial prohibition had not been primary, if the restriction had been subsequently imposed, it is almost incon- ceivable that there would not have been some tradition to account for it. For it would be unnatural, and would call for explanation. On the other hand, a gradual relaxation of restrictions might attract no notice, it might be insensible. Now, although the ancestors in the Alcheringa are represented as feeding on the