Page:The American Indian.djvu/210

164 further complications, for the conception of a clan-gens ancestor and the group animal name will bring the totem into prominence when marriage systems are considered. To this association, we shall revert in a succeeding chapter. One of the important problems for us, here, is the place and manner of origin for the New World totemic complex. This, like many others of its kind, must rest with the future. So far, analytic studies have shown that the various systems of totemic practices growing up around these ancestral and other concepts have different historical origins and so are not to be explained as instinctive or as diffused from a common center; yet, it cannot be denied that the sameness of the underlying concepts throughout the New World must be accounted for by one or the other of these hypotheses. From its distribution, we have a strong presumption that the New World clan or gens system is a correlate of higher political and industrial organization, since it is among the loosely organized tribes that it does not occur, but just where the totemic factor enters the complex is not clear.

In closing this brief glance at the social grouping of aboriginal man in the New World, we may be impressed with the tendency for each social feature to localize. Thus, whether it be merely a matter of terminology for uncles and aunts, methods of regulating marriage, or what not, we find it not scattered up and down the Americas at random, but gathered into more or less distinct geographical areas. It is this observed geographical distribution of the several social groupings we have noted in the New World that suggests their historical origin in opposition to an innate one. It is now clear that we may have an evolution of society that is determined by the conditions of the time and place and not by the inborn traits of the people producing it. This seems to be the most satisfactory interpretation of the data on social grouping, for more complete knowledge makes it impossible to believe that the bands, clans, gentes, etc., have a definite place in the mere organic evolution of peoples in the New World.