120 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920
has the free disposal of names given to him personally is brought out clearly by the fact that he can transmit them even after a divorce and a new marriage to the descendants of relatives of his new wife, or that he may bestow names received from his second wife to descendants or relatives of his former wife. It is also interesting to note that in some cases names and privileges received in marriage are split and become the property of different individuals.
The most common arrangement is that a man places his daugh- ter's husband in one of the positions at his disposal, either his own or one belonging to him in some other way. The positions acquired by marriage are retransmitted in the same way, so that the holders will always be the husbands of a succession of daughters. The names and privileges are held by the men, although they descend throughout through the line of daughters. In the genealogies at my disposal I have not found cases of such continued transmission, neither do I find a continued transmission from maternal grand- father to grandson. There is rather a tendency for the lines transmitted through marriage to disappear. It is not safe, how- ever, to infer from this that continued transmission through mar- riage does not occur, because the genealogies are naturally so ar- ranged that the privileges of a certain noble person now living are accounted for. Owing to the fact that all the younger lines, in which privileges and position obtained by marriage are transmitted, have not been recorded and that the positions accounted for are generally in the line of primo-geniture, the disappearance of privi- leges obtained by marriage may be rather apparent than real. Transmission through the mother, i.e., from the maternal grand- father to the grandson is found very frequently in the genealogies at my disposal, but it is not as frequent as direct transmission from father to son. In one genealogy, transmission from maternal grandfather to child appears fourteen times, from father to child, twenty-nine times.
Evidently the individual wish of a dying person regarding the disposition of his name, position, and privileges is one of the decisive elements in the assignment of social position. As long as any right can be construed that justifies the desired transfer, the numaym
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