[Anthropology by Robert Marett]@TWC D-Link bookAnthropology CHAPTER VI 15/32
When the matrilineal, matrilocal and matripotestal conditions are found together, we have mother-right at its fullest and strongest.
Where we get only two out of the three, or merely the first by itself, most authorities would still speak of mother-right; though it may be questioned how far the word mother-right, or the corresponding, now almost discarded, expression, "the matriarchate," can be safely used without further explanation, since it tends to imply a right (in the legal sense) and an authority, which in these circumstances is often no more than nominal. Totemism, in the specific form that has to do with kinship, means that a social group depends for its identity on a certain intimate and exclusive relation in which it stands towards an animal-kind, or a plant-kind, or, more rarely, a class of inanimate objects, or, very rarely, something that is individual and not a kind or class at all. Such a totem, in the first place, normally provides the social group with its name.
(The Boy Scouts, who call themselves Foxes, Peewits, and so on, according to their different patrols, have thus reverted to a very ancient usage.) In the second place, this name tends to be the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace that, somehow flowing from the totem to the totemites, sanctifies their communion.
They are "all-one-flesh" with one another, as certain of the Australians phrase it, because they are "all-one-flesh" with the totem.
Or, again, a man whose totem was _ngaui_, the sun, said that his name was _ngaui_ and he "was" _ngaui_; though he was equally ready to put it in another way, explaining that _ngaui_ "owned" him.
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