Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/128

 96 Reviews.

only. The district embraced in the settlement as thus defined has definite fi-ontiers, within which its members hunt, fish, and carry on their daily life. Moreover, the settlement has a linguistic and a moral and religious unity, founded on the taboo of the names of the dead and the behef in reincarnation of the departed members in the children subsequently born.

In summer the people live in tents, one family in the strictest sense — a man and his wife or wives with their children, own or adopted, and exceptionally an aged parent, or a widow who, for want of natural protectors, has been admitted to live with them — and no more occupying each tent. In winter, on the other hand, they live in houses of a larger description clustered closely together about a kasht?n, of which more presently. These houses take different forms in Greenland, in Hudson's Bay Territory, on the Mackenzie, and in Alaska. But they are all alike in providing accommodation for a number of families who live together, each in a special compartment, with sleeping bench, lamp, and so forth, thus retaining a certain amount of recognized unity amid the larger and more communal life of the winter. The kashim is a much larger house with one common lamp, but without separate compartments or sleeping benches. There the men sleep, apart from the women and children ; and there at other times the social life of the community is lived.

Thus the distinctive characteristic of the community is the expansion and scattering of the individuals and the families in summer, and their concentration in winter. This rhythm of concentration and dispersion, as M. Mauss calls it, synchronizes, it is true, with that of the external life from which the population has to provide the means of its own continued existence, and, to a certain extent, is necessitated by the industrial occupations of the settlement, and by the direct effect on the human organism of the changes of temperature. Anything, however, which brings the population together, such as the capture, dismemberment, and consumption of a whale, causes the communal life of the winter settlement to be resumed for the time being, even in summer. This communal or collective life is the remarkable feature of the winter settlement, and none of the external conditions, nor all of them together can, as M. Mauss contends, explain it.