Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/526

 REVIEWS.

L'AnnSe Sociologique, publiee sous la direction de Emile DuRKHEiM, Professeur de Sociologie a I'Universite de Bor- deaux. Huitieme Annee (1903-1904). Paris: Fe'lix Alcan. 1905.

The anthropological Mhnoire in this year's issue of V Annee Sociologique is by the Editor himself. Readers of Folk-Lore will remember that in the issue of L Annee Sociologique for 1902, Professor Durkheim considered in an elaborate essay the social organisation of the Arunta and neighbouring tribes as disclosed in the first volume published by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. Con- trary to the opinion of the distinguished explorers he argued that the original organisation was based, not as they thought upon what he called male filiation, or what is perhaps more usually called in this country Father-right, the reckoning of kinship through the father only, but upon female filiation, or Mother-right, the reckon- ing of kinship through the mother only. Further, he held that the two fundamental classes into which these tribes, as well as many others, are internally divided, and which he calls phratries, were originally totem-clans; and that the change from mother-right to father-right by the central tribes was deliberately effected by the transfer from each of the phratries to the other of one of the two sub-classes.^ Such a change, it may be observed, could only have been effected if the primitive character of the phratries as

1 1 am not quite sure whether this was in M. Durkheim's opinion a de- liberate arrangement, since he seems to protest, in words quoted by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, that " the phratries are too closely bound up with the whole moral organisation of these tribes to admit of being arranged or dis-