TOTEMISM — HOPKINS. 577 



cleavage between them, as is assumed in Durkheim's system, or shall 

 we say that, as among: the primitive Veddas, no such cleavage exists 

 originally, but it develops gradually in accordance with the part 

 played by religion in the social life? Conduct seems to have an 

 accidental connection with religious life ; not an intrinsic connection 

 sufficient to produce a system of religious ethics. Even in the same 

 race and clan totemic systems differ in regard to their social bear- 

 ings. 1 



Once it was supposed that totemism conditioned the bed and board 

 of the totemist; he must marry out of his totem group (his kin) and 

 he must not eat his totem except as a religious sacrament. On this 

 assumption all the old theories of totemism were based. Exogamy, 

 it was thought, arose from totemism. 2 



But as exogamy exists without totemism (e. g., in Assam and 

 Polynesia), so totemism has nothing to do fundamentally with 

 exogamy. " The Australian totemic clan is not as such exogamous." 3 

 Again, the totemist may or may not eat his totem. The totem also as 

 a " receptacle of life" of the totemist has been imagined to be exercis- 

 ing its primitive function; but this theory (of the origin of totemism) 

 has also been seen to be faulty. The personal totem has influenced 

 the aspect of totemism in America. Much of what is called totemism 

 in Africa originates in personal, not tribal totems, though it may 

 become tribal. In Coomassie, for example, vultures are sacred to 

 the royal family either through the caprice of a ruler or because 

 they are useful as scavengers. 4 This is the kind of " totem " one 

 finds as the totem of the royal house of Oudh in India, a fish that is 

 really the symbol of a water god who was once a Mohammedan 

 saint. 



The totemism of the name is the prevailing Polynesian and 

 Micronesian type and apparently it is there the earliest. Among 

 the most primitive Micronesians there is nothing religious in the 

 use of totem names or the plants and animals regarded as totems. 

 It is to be observed also that here plants are as natural as animals 

 in a totemic capacity. Since this is true also of primitive Australian 

 totemism, it is evidently a false assumption that blood kinship 

 underlies totemism, especially when the totem may be, e. g., light- 

 ning, as in Australia. In the Efatese (Micronesian) group, which 

 is regarded as extremely primitive, women names are usually those 

 of vegetables, and as the clan name is given by the ancestress there 

 is really more vegetal than animal totemism. 5 Both kinds are found, 



1 Compare B. Malinowski in Man, 1914, no. 89. 



2 J. F. McLennan, Primitive Marriage. A number of other works embody the same 

 theory. 



3 Goldenweiser, op. cit., p. 241. 



4 Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, p. 213. 



c Compare D. MacDonald, The Oceanic Languages, p. xii. 



