Page 61 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1838 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great
powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.You
may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a
perfectly cultivated writer. • William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

evidence that the members of a clan consider themselves ation by a more spiritual principle. Finally, both cases
not linked by reason of the relationship through their show a decidedly hostile attitude to history.
mother or father, as the case may be, but by reason of
their relationship to a clan bundle or fetish . . .” (Tooker Totemism and History
1971, 360). Note the minimization of kinship and the Like everything else, totemism has a history: Witness the
emphasis on “relationship to a clan bundle”—compara- depopulation of Bororo clans and the employment of the
ble to an Aboriginal Australian totem, although perhaps mast of an Indonesian ship in Australian Aboriginal
without the emphasis on landscape and SOST. totemism. However, totemism denies the significance of
Some materials from the southern half of the Western history: Extinct Bororo clans are reconstituted, and
Hemisphere are even more intriguing.The Bororo natives Indonesian contact in northern Australia, begun around
of Brazil divide each of their villages into eight clans, each 1500 and ended in 1906, is treated as an eternal event.
one located in a predetermined position in the village cir- A logical connection exists between totemism’s antihis-
cle and associated with several totems.The emphasis on torical attitude and its antisex stance because sex gener-
eight clans—no more and no less—is so strong that, ates kinship, and kinship, like history, does not endure.
should the human membership of a clan die out in any Totemism makes use of the flotsam and jetsam of history,
village, people may change clans so as to reconstitute the only to cast it in an ahistorical mode.
extinct unit. Otherwise, a person belongs to the clan of
his or her mother, although the Bororo themselves vehe- Implications
mently reject this formulation. Instead, they insist that the Thus, clan totemism is a far cry from donkeys and ele-
name that a person is given in childhood determines spir- phants and even further from the textbook renditions
itual identity and clan affiliation and that name just hap- “assumed descent,” “descent from animals,” and “kinship
pens to be one associated with the mother’s clan. with animals.” Clan totemism is, in fact, the very antithe-
Moreover, a person takes the name of a certain kinsper- sis of these latter, the denial of the significance of kinship.
son, and on the day of the naming ceremony this person However, other forms of totemism exist in the “tribal”
is expected to refrain from sexual intercourse. world, and many of these do seem to have the strictly
Differences exist between Australian Aboriginal people emblematic significance of donkeys/elephants. For exam-
and the Bororo. Among the latter the number of clans is ple, in Aboriginal Australia four- and eight-part systems
fixed, and the clans are—or seem to be—matrilineal of categories cross-cut the clans and can operate inde-
(tracing descent through the maternal line). However, pendently of them, and these have only emblematic
striking parallels exist. Especially important is the body- totems.Yet, a marked historical tendency exists for these
spirit distinction in both cases, particularly the resistance systems to be subsumed under the four-part divisions of
to mixing the two discourses.Also, in both cases spiritual clans noted earlier and to take on the important charac-
generation is accomplished by emanation from the body teristic of consubstantiality.We can see something com-
—naming among the Bororo, naming in conjunction parable closer to home. Consider, for example, North
with other modes among Australian Aboriginal people. American baseball teams. Some have animal names
(Compare biblical emanation: God created the world by (Tigers, Blue Jays), others not (Dodgers, Mets), but all
naming; Jesus is often referred to as “The Word.”) Even have an emblematic relationship to their names. But is it
the differences can be overstated: Among Australian Abo- strictly emblematic? Probably no fan of the Detroit Tigers
riginal people the clans are often clustered into a fixed would ever explicitly claim consubstantiality with some
number of sets (four, not eight), and researchers have sug- primeval (relating to the original model of which all
gested that the bodily principle of affiliation to clans—the things of the same type are representations) feline.Then
father-child tie—is largely a historical derivative of affili- what sense can we make of the marked tendency for such