Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/336

298 more nearly resembling tribal unity. They are believed to be related, and legend attributes their present separation to a religious schism. In each case there is a common gennabura, or priest-chief, who exercises great but strictly constitutional authority in matters of ritual. Yet in matters of coiffure and costume there are tribal resemblances which, taken with linguistic identities, serve as tribal marks. To certain food tabus extending to members of tribes I shall recur presently. As a general rule it may be said that each village forms an independent, self-contained group. The natural environment makes for the multiplication of such small self-contained communities. Yet, where colonisation is recent, the colony,—if we may call it a colony,—preserves its connection with the mother village by regarding the same marriage regulations. A Nāga village consists of a number of clans, never less, as I found, than three, and sometimes as many as twelve or more. The usual story is that the village was founded by a band of brothers, who are often the eponyms of the clans. These clans each occupy a well-marked area or quarter of the village, and are not intermixed. Marriage is forbidden within the clan, so that the married women in any clan are always brought in from outside, from some other clan or from some other village. The tendency is for women to be taken from some clan in the same village rather than to introduce women from other villages, and they tell me that they would not marry women from a village whose dialect they do not understand, thus employing a rough linguistic test which in practice answers well enough. In one village I found that the four component clans were arranged in pairs. Each pair formed an exogamous whole, and the reason advanced for this was that they were related. Each clan is composed of a number of families, each owning a separate house. There yet remain villages where exist Bachelors* Halls, institutions which are, I fear, doomed