Revieivs. 131
remains valid. Nor is it by any means without its application to the more recent speculations of Dr. Graebner's school.
M. van Gennep takes up his parable on totemism again in the fourth series of Essays. Reviewing Dr. Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy, he regrets, as others do, that Strehlow's accounts of the Arunta organization and beliefs were entirely ignored in that wide survey. But amid much appreciation of the patient and minute research displayed, his chief complaint is the difficulty of forming a notion of what totemism is in itself, and the extreme vagueness of Dr. Frazer's definition when at last he ventures on giving one. The difficulty of defining totemism in a manner acceptable to anthropologists has been exemplified in the controversy in which the late Andrew Lang took part just before his lamented death. The very existence of totemism as an institution has indeed been denied by those for whom British archaeology is effete, and by whom scientific comparisons between the beliefs, customs, and institutions of different nations are relegated to the Crack of Doom, if that will not be really a little premature. In the mean- time for students the question of definition presses ; for in the present state of things the most absurd blunders are made for want of proper definition. The author, therefore, comes back to an old proposition of his, — namely, to forbear speaking of tote- mism, at all events in a general way, and to give to each form of what we now usually and loosely include under the name of tote- mism its own particular name. Thus he would speak of the sibokism of the Eastern Bantu ; the system of guardian spirits especially developed in British Columbia he would call suliaism ; the institution he finds in West Africa he would call tenne'ism or iafidism, and so on. This might be feasible; it would at least provisionally get over the difficulty. He has a further quarrel with Dr. Frazer over the latter's refusal of all religious signifi- cance to totemism ; and, while he agrees with him in denying exogamy to be a fundamental characteristic of totemism, he insists on knowing among which of the tribes of Australia "pure totemism " is to be found, since the divergencies of form there are to be reckoned by the number of " nations" (in Howitt's sense of the word), if not of tribes, and until the question is answered an exact idea of "pure totemism" cannot be framed.
