Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/191

 The Origin of Exogamy and TotcmisDi. i 7 5

"' Breakers (of the law)." the law broken being that of exogamy!-'® No community ever called itself "Incestuous," or " Bad Nation " ; these clan names are sobriquets.

Once more, the Crows have exogamous clans ; out of twelve four are totemic in name, Antelope, Raven, Prairie Dog, Skunk. I presume that these totem names were, in origin, sobriquets, just as some of the other clan names of the Crows, Bad Leggings, Treacherous Lodges, had Honours, are undeniably hostile yet accepted sobriquets.'-'

In Europe the sobriquets, animal or vegetable, of the villages are now resented, and one village is angry, in Cornwall, when another village hangs up its Mouse, or whatever its animal may be, dead, by way of a taunt. Mr. Frazer's readers cannot be aware (nor is he, I daresay) that in 1905 I defended my theory that savages can and do accept even injurious clan sobriquets from without by actual examples, and that I have shown how, the animal name once accepted, " a religion, or something like a religion " of it, was "actually developed." Mr. Frazer writes

" No single instance of such an adoption of nicknames from neighbours was known to Dr. Howitt, the most e.xperienced of Australian anthropologists, in the whole of Australia."^*'

I have quoted, above, my reply, given in TJie Secret of the Totem, to ]\Ir. Howitt.

Here may close my chapter of answers to objections against the possibility of complacent acceptance of sobri- quets. It occurs in savage as it does in civilised societies : many of the facts are recorded by Mr. Frazer himself, others he has overlooked ; and certainly my array of the facts in 1905 has escaped his vigilant industry in study, otherwise he would not have ignored what is essential.

My theory of the origin of the phratry system, as given

^^ Toteinism and Exogamy, vol. iii., pp. 86-7, n. 4. '^ Ibid., vol. iii., pp. 153-4.

^ Ibid., vol. iv., p. 52, n. 2; Howitt, The Native Tribes of Sotilh-East Australia, p. 154.