Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/70

56 member of a group of more or less hostile people to act in the closest relationship to a child. The special function of the father's sister, which may supply the answer to the question posed above, is her place as custodian of the fragment of umbilical cord and nail-parings of her brother's child. These, and notoriously the latter, are objects by means of which injury may be inflicted if they come into the hands of a stranger, and the hypothesis I should like to suggest is that the umbilical cord and nail-parings are given to the aunt as the representative of the more or less hostile body formed by the other social group of the community. It is, I believe, consistent with savage modes of thought and action that, if it were known that these objects were in the hands of one prominent among themselves, it would act as a hindrance to the action of others, and I would suggest that, when relationship with the father begins to be recognised, his sister is chosen as the receptacle of those objects by means of which the members of her division might injure the child, and she thus by their possession obtains a power over the child which makes her the most honoured relative, and then this place of honour becomes the cause of the special place she is called upon to fill in the ceremonial connected with her brother's child. According to this view the special place of the father's sister would be one of the many actions of magic or the belief in magic on features of social organisation. This hypothesis involves much that is doubtful, but, though the actual form in which I have put it may turn out to be wrong, it is highly probable that it is some such belief involved in the relations between the different social divisions which lies at the bottom of these functions assigned to a member of a hostile social group.

A fourth possibility, suggested to me by Mr. T. C. Hodson, is that the special position of the father's sister is one of the signs of increasing recognition of the kinship of the father, who deputes his sister to perform certain acts as