The second department of Social Anthropology is folklore, or the study of savage survivals in civilization. If I am right in my definition of Social Anthropology, its province may be roughly divided into two departments, one of which embraces the customs and beliefs of savages, while the other includes such relics of these customs and beliefs as have survived in the thought and institutions of more cultured peoples. The one department may be called the study of savagery, the other the study of folklore. I have said something of savagery: I now turn to folklore, that is, to the survivals of more primitive ideas and practices among peoples who in other respects have risen to a higher plane of culture. That such survivals may be discovered in every civilized nation will hardly now be disputed by anybody. When we read, for example, of an Irishwoman roasted to death by her husband on a suspicion that she was not his wife but a fairy changeling,166.1 or again, of an Englishwoman dying of lockjaw because she had anointed the nail that wounded her instead of the wound,166.2 we may be sure that the beliefs to which these poor creatures fell victims were not learned by them in school or at church, but had been transmitted from truly savage ancestors through many generations of outwardly though not really civilized descendants. Beliefs and practices of this sort are therefore rightly called superstitions, which means literally survivals. It is with superstitions in the strict sense of the word that the second department of Social Anthropology is concerned.
Such survivals are due to the essential inequality of men, many of whom remain at heart savages under a civilized exterior. If we ask how it happens that superstitions linger among a people who in general have reached a higher level of culture, the answer is to be found in the natural, universal, and ineradicable inequality of men. Not only are different races differently endowed in respect of intelligence, courage, industry, and so forth, but within the same nation men of the same generation differ enormously in inborn capacity and worth. No abstract doctrine is more false and mischievous than that of the natural equality of men. It is true that the legislator must treat men as if they were equal, because laws of necessity are general and cannot be made so as to fit the infinite variety of individual cases. But we must not imagine that because men are equal before the law they are therefore intrinsically equal to each other. The experience of common life sufficiently contradicts such a vain imagination. At school and at the universities, at work and at play, in peace and in war, the mental and moral inequalities of human beings stand out too conspicuously to be ignored or disputed. On the whole the men of keenest intelligence and strongest characters lead the rest and shape the moulds into which, outwardly at least, society is cast. Mankind dominated by an enlightened minority. As such men are necessarily few by comparison with the multitude whom they lead, it follows that the community is really dominated by the will of an enlightened minority167.1 even in countries where the ruling power is nominally vested in the hands of the numerical majority. In fact, disguise it as we may, the government of mankind is always and everywhere essentially aristocratic. No juggling with political machinery can evade this law of nature. However it may seem to lead, the dull-witted majority in the end follows a keener-witted minority. That is its salvation and the secret of progress. The higher human intelligence sways the lower, just as the intelligence of man gives him the mastery over the brutes. I do not mean that the ultimate direction of society rests with its nominal governors, with its kings, its statesmen, its legislators. The uncrowned kings. The true rulers of men are the thinkers who advance knowledge; for just as it is through his superior knowledge, not through his superior strength, that man bears rule over the rest of the animal creation, so among men themselves it is knowledge which in the long run directs and controls the forces of society. Thus the discoverers of new truths are the real though uncrowned and unsceptred kings of mankind; monarchs, statesmen, and law-givers are but their ministers, who sooner or later do their bidding by carrying out the ideas of these master minds. The more we study the inward workings of society and the progress of civilization, the more clearly shall we perceive how both are governed by the influence of thoughts which, springing up at first we know not how or whence in a few superior minds, gradually spread till they have leavened the whole inert lump of a community or of mankind. The origin of such mental variations, with all their far-reaching train of social consequences, is just as obscure as is the origin of those physical variations on which, if biologists are right, depends the evolution of species, and with it the possibility of progress. Perhaps the same unknown cause which determines the one set of variations gives rise to the other also. We cannot tell. All we can say is that on the whole in the conflict of competing forces, whether physical or mental, the strongest at last prevails, the fittest survives. In the mental sphere the struggle for existence is not less fierce and internecine than in the physical, but in the end the better ideas, which we call the truth, carry the day. The clamorous opposition with which at their first appearance they are regularly greeted, whenever they conflict with old prejudices, may retard but cannot prevent their final victory. The tombs of the prophets. It is the practice of the mob first to stone and then to erect useless memorials to their greatest benefactors. All who set themselves to replace ancient error and superstition by truth and reason must lay their account with brickbats in their life and a marble monument after death.
Superstition the creed of the laggards in the march of intellect. I have been led into making these remarks by the wish to explain why it is that superstitions of all sorts, political, moral, and religious, survive among peoples who have the opportunity of knowing better. The reason is that the better ideas, which are constantly forming in the upper stratum, have not yet filtered through from the highest to the lowest minds. Such a filtration is generally slow, and by the time that the new notions have penetrated to the bottom, if indeed they ever get there, they are often already obsolete and superseded by others at the top. Hence it is that if we could open the heads and read the thoughts of two men of the same generation and country but at opposite ends of the intellectual scale, we should probably find their minds as different as if the two belonged to different species. Mankind, as it has been well said, advances in échelons; that is, the columns march not abreast of each other but in a straggling line, all lagging in various degrees behind the leader. The image well describes the difference not only between peoples, but between individuals of the same people and the same generation. Just as one nation is continually outstripping some of its contemporaries, so within the same nation some men are constantly outpacing their fellows, and the foremost in the race are those who have thrown off the load of superstition which still burdens the backs and clogs the footsteps of the laggards. To drop metaphor, superstitions survive because, while they shock the views of enlightened members of the community, they are still in harmony with the thoughts and feelings of others who, though they are drilled by their betters into an appearance of civilization, remain barbarians or savages at heart. That is why, for example, the barbarous punishments for high treason and witchcraft and the enormities of slavery were tolerated and defended in this country down to modern times. Superstitions either public or private. Such survivals may be divided into two sorts, according as they are public or private; in other words, according as they are embodied in the law of the land or are practised with or without the connivance of the law in holes and corners. Examples of public superstitions. The examples I have just cited belong to the former of these two classes. Witches were publicly burned and traitors were publicly disembowelled in England not so long ago, and slavery survived as a legal institution still later. The true nature of such public superstitions is apt, through their very publicity, to escape detection, because until they are finally swept away by the rising tide of progress, there are always plenty of people to defend them as institutions essential to the public welfare and sanctioned by the laws of God and man.
The wide prevalence of private superstitions constitutes a standing menace to civilization. It is otherwise with those private superstitions to which the name of folklore is usually confined. In civilized society most educated people are not even aware of the extent to which these relics of savage ignorance survive at their doors. The discovery of their wide prevalence was indeed only made last century, chiefly through the researches of the brothers Grimm in Germany. Since their day systematic enquiries carried on among the less educated classes, and especially among the peasantry, of Europe have revealed the astonishing, nay, alarming truth that a mass, if not the majority, of people in every civilized country is still living in a state of intellectual savagery, that, in fact, the smooth surface of cultured society is sapped and mined by superstition. Only those whose studies have led them to investigate the subject are aware of the depth to which the ground beneath our feet is thus, as it were, honeycombed by unseen forces. We appear to be standing on a volcano which may at any moment break out in smoke and fire to spread ruin and devastation among the gardens and palaces of ancient culture wrought so laboriously by the hands of many generations. After looking on the ruined Greek temples of Paestum and contrasting them with the squalor and savagery of the Italian peasantry, Renan said, “I trembled for civilization, seeing it so limited, built on so weak a foundation, resting on so few individuals even in the country where it is dominant.”170.1
It is the earliest and crudest superstitions that survive longest, because they answer to the calibre of the lowest minds. Hence while the surface of society is constantly changing, its depths, like those of the ocean, remain almost motionless. If we examine the superstitious beliefs which are tacitly but firmly held by many of our fellow-countrymen, we shall find, perhaps to our surprise, that it is precisely the oldest and crudest superstitions which are most tenacious of life, while views which, though also erroneous, are more modern and refined, soon fade from the popular memory. For example, the high gods of Egypt and Babylon, of Greece and Rome, have for ages been totally forgotten by the people and survive only in the books of the learned; yet the peasants, who never even heard of Isis and Osiris, of Apollo and Artemis, of Jupiter and Juno, retain to this day a firm belief in witches and fairies, in ghosts and hobgoblins, those lesser creatures of the mythical fancy in which their fathers believed long before the great deities of the ancient world were ever thought of, and in which, to all appearance, their descendants will continue to believe long after the great deities of the present day shall have gone the way of all their predecessors. The reason why the higher forms of superstition or religion (for the religion of one generation is apt to become the superstition of the next) are less permanent than the lower is simply that the higher beliefs, being a creation of superior intelligence, have little hold on the minds of the vulgar, who nominally profess them for a time in conformity with the will of their betters, but readily shed and forget them as soon as these beliefs have gone out of fashion with the educated classes. But while they dismiss without a pang or an effort articles of faith which were only superficially imprinted on their minds by the weight of cultured opinion, the ignorant and foolish multitude cling with a sullen determination to far grosser beliefs which really answer to the coarser texture of their undeveloped intellect. Thus while the avowed creed of the enlightened minority is constantly changing under the influence of reflection and enquiry, the real, though unavowed, creed of the mass of mankind appears to be almost stationary, and the reason why it alters so little is that in the majority of men, whether they are savages or outwardly civilized beings, intellectual progress is so slow as to be hardly perceptible. The surface of society, like that of the sea, is in perpetual motion; its depths, like those of the ocean, remain almost unmoved.
The early history of mankind, reconstructed from the joint testimony of savagery and folklore, is full of gaps, which can only be imperfectly bridged by the Comparative Method. Thus from an examination, first, of savagery and, second, of its survivals in civilization, the study of Social Anthropology attempts to trace the early history of human thought and institutions. The history can never be complete, unless science should discover some mode of reading the faded record of the past of which we in this generation can hardly dream. We know indeed that every event, however insignificant, implies a change, however slight, in the material constitution of the universe, so that the whole history of the world is, in a sense, engraved upon its face, though our eyes are too dim to read the scroll. It may be that in the future some wondrous reagent, some magic chemical, may yet be found to bring out the whole of nature’s secret handwriting for a greater than Daniel to interpret to his fellows. That will hardly be in our time. With the resources at present at our command we must be content with a very brief, imperfect, and in large measure conjectural account of man’s mental and social development in prehistoric ages. As I have already pointed out, the evidence, fragmentary and dubious as it is, only runs back a very little way into the measureless past of human life on earth; we soon lose the thread, the faintly glimmering thread, in the thick darkness of the absolutely unknown. Even in the comparatively short space of time, a few thousand years at most, which falls more or less within our ken, there are many deep and wide chasms which can only be bridged by hypotheses, if the story of evolution is to run continuously. The legitimacy of the Comparative Method in social anthropology rests on the similarity of the human mind in all races. Such bridges are built in anthropology as in biology by the Comparative Method, which enables us to borrow the links of one chain of evidence to supply the gaps in another. For us who deal, not with the various forms of animal life, but with the various products of human intelligence, the legitimacy of the Comparative Method rests on the well-ascertained similarity of the working of the human mind in all races of men. I have laid stress on the great inequalities which exist not only between the various races, but between men of the same race and generation; but it should be clearly understood and remembered that these divergencies are quantitative rather than qualitative, they consist in differences of degree rather than of kind. The savage is not a different sort of being from his civilized brother: he has the same capacities, mental and moral, but they are less fully developed: his evolution has been arrested, or rather retarded, at a lower level. And as savage races are not all on the same plane, but have stopped or tarried at different points of the upward path, we can to a certain extent, by comparing them with each other, construct a scale of social progression and mark out roughly some of the stages on the long road that leads from savagery to civilization. In the kingdom of mind such a scale of mental evolution answers to the scale of morphological evolution in the animal kingdom.
It is only of late years that the importance of savagery as a document of human history has been understood. From what I have said I hope you have formed some idea of the extreme importance which the study of savage life possesses for a proper understanding of the early history of mankind. The savage is a human document, a record of man’s efforts to raise himself above the level of the beast. It is only of late years that the full value of the document has been appreciated; indeed, many people are probably still of Dr. Johnson’s opinion, who, pointing to the three large volumes of Voyages to the South Seas which had just come out, said: “Who will read them through? A man had better work his way before the mast than read them through; they will be eaten by rats and mice before they are read through. There can be little entertainment in such books; one set of savages is like another.”173.1 But the world has learned a good deal since Dr. Johnson’s day; and the records of savage life, which the sage of Bolt Court consigned without scruple to the rats and mice, have now their place among the most precious archives of humanity. Their fate has been like that of the Sibylline Books. They were neglected and despised when they might have been obtained complete; and now wise men would give more than a king’s ransom for their miserably mutilated and imperfect remains. It is true that before our time civilized men often viewed savages with interest and described them intelligently, and some of their descriptions are still of great scientific value. Great impulse given to the study of savagery by the discovery of America and of the Pacific. For example, the discovery of America naturally excited in the minds of the European peoples an eager curiosity as to the inhabitants of the new world, which had burst upon their gaze, as if at the waving of a wizard’s wand the curtain of the western sky had suddenly rolled up and disclosed scenes of glamour and enchantment. Accordingly some of the Spaniards who explored and conquered these realms of wonder have bequeathed to us accounts of the manners and customs of the Indians, which for accuracy and fulness of detail probably surpass any former records of an alien race. Such, for instance, is the great work of the Franciscan friar Sahagun on the natives of Mexico, and such the work of Garcilasso de la Vega, himself half an Inca, on the Incas of Peru. Again, the exploration of the Pacific in the eighteenth century, with its revelation of fairy-like islands scattered in profusion over a sea of eternal summer, drew the eyes and stirred the imagination of Europe; and to the curiosity thus raised in many minds, though not in Dr. Johnson’s, we owe some precious descriptions of the islanders, who, in those days of sailing ships, appeared to dwell so remote from us that the poet Cowper fancied their seas might never again be ploughed by English keels.174.1
The passing of the savage. These and many other old accounts of savages must always retain their interest and value for the study of Social Anthropology, all the more because they set before us the natives in their natural unsophisticated state, before their primitive manners and customs had been altered or destroyed by European influence. Yet in the light of subsequent research these early records are often seen to be very defective, because the authors, unaware of the scientific importance of facts which to the ordinary observer might appear trifling or disgusting, have either passed over many things of the highest interest in total silence or dismissed them with a brief and tantalizing allusion. It is accordingly necessary to supplement the reports of former writers by a minute and painstaking investigation of the living savages in order to fill up, if possible, the many yawning gaps in our knowledge. Unfortunately this cannot always be done, since many savages have either been totally exterminated or so changed by contact with Europeans that it is no longer possible to obtain trustworthy information as to their old habits and traditions. But whenever the ancient customs and beliefs of a primitive race have passed away unrecorded, a document of human history has perished beyond recall. Unhappily this destruction of the archives, as we may call it, is going on apace. In some places, for example, in Tasmania, the savage is already extinct; in others, as in Australia, he is dying. In others again, for instance in Central and Southern Africa, where the numbers and inborn vigour of the race shew little or no sign of succumbing in the struggle for existence, the influence of traders, officials, and missionaries is so rapidly disintegrating and effacing the native customs, that with the passing of the older generation even the memory of them will soon in many places be gone. It is therefore a matter of the most urgent scientific importance to secure without delay full and accurate reports of these perishing or changing peoples, to take permanent copies, so to say, of these precious monuments before they are destroyed. It is not yet too late. Much may still be learned, for example, in West Australia, in New Guinea, in Melanesia, in Central Africa, among the hill tribes of India and the forest Indians of the Amazons. There is still time to send expeditions to these regions, to subsidize men on the spot, who are conversant with the languages and enjoy the confidence of the natives; for there are such men who possess or can obtain the very knowledge we require, yet who, unaware or careless of its inestimable value for science, make no effort to preserve the treasure for posterity, and, if we do not speedily come to the rescue, will suffer it to perish with them. In the whole range of human knowledge at the present moment there is no more pressing need than that of recording this priceless evidence of man’s early history before it is too late. For soon, very soon, the opportunities which we still enjoy will be gone for ever. In another quarter of a century probably there will be little or nothing of the old savage life left to record. The savage, such as we may still see him, will then be as extinct as the dodo. The sands are fast running out: the hour will soon strike: the record will be closed: the book will be sealed. The duty of our generation to posterity. And how shall we of this generation look when we stand at the bar of posterity arraigned on a charge of high treason to our race, we who neglected to study our perishing fellow-men, but who sent out costly expeditions to observe the stars and to explore the barren ice-bound regions of the poles, as if the polar ice would melt and the stars would cease to shine when we are gone? Let us awake from our slumber, let us light our lamps, let us gird up our loins. The Universities exist for the advancement of knowledge. It is their duty to add this new province to the ancient departments of learning which they cultivate so diligently. Cambridge, to its honour, has led the way in equipping and despatching anthropological expeditions; it is for Oxford, it is for Liverpool, it is for every University in the land to join in the work.
The duty of the State. More than that, it is the public duty of every civilized state actively to co-operate. In this respect the United States of America, by instituting a bureau for the study of the aborigines within its dominions, has set an example which every enlightened nation that rules over lower races ought to imitate. The duty of England. On none does that duty, that responsibility, lie more clearly and more heavily than on our own, for to none in the whole course of human history has the sceptre been given over so many and so diverse races of men. We have made ourselves our brother’s keepers. Woe to us if we neglect our duty to our brother! It is not enough for us to rule in justice the peoples we have subjugated by the sword. We owe it to them, we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to posterity, who will require it at our hands, that we should describe them as they were before we found them, before they ever saw the English flag and heard, for good or evil, the English tongue. The voice of England speaks to her subject peoples in other accents than in the thunder of her guns. Peace has its triumphs as well as war: there are nobler trophies than captured flags and cannons. Monumentum aere perennius. There are monuments, airy monuments, monuments of words, which seem so fleeting and evanescent, that will yet last when your cannons have crumbled and your flags have mouldered into dust. When the Roman poet wished to present an image of perpetuity, he said that he would be remembered so long as the Roman Empire endured, so long as the white-robed procession of the Vestals and Pontiffs should ascend the Capitol to pray in the temple of Jupiter. That solemn procession has long ceased to climb the slope of the Capitol, the Roman Empire itself has long passed away, like the empire of Alexander, like the empire of Charlemagne, like the empire of Spain, yet still amid the wreck of kingdoms the poet’s monument stands firm, for still his verses are read and remembered. I appeal to the Universities, I appeal to the Government of this country to unite in building a monument, a beneficent monument, of the British Empire, a monument
“Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
Annorum series, et fuga temporum.”
[The End]
INDEX
Aborigines of Australia, the severity with which they punish sexual offences, 71 sqq.
Abraham and Sarah, 60 sq.
Action and opinion, their relative values for society, 155
Adulterer and injured husband, physical relationship supposed to exist between, 104 sq.
Adultery, expiation for, 44 sq.; disastrous effects supposed to flow from, 44 sqq., 60 sq.; punishment of, 46, 50 sq., 63 sqq.; supposed to be dangerous to the culprits, their spouses, and their offspring, 102 sqq. See also Infidelity.
Africa, superstitious veneration for kings in, 12 sqq.; superstition as a support of property in, 38 sqq.; disastrous effects supposed to flow from sexual immorality in, 54 sqq.; British Central, 66, 79, 105; British East, 77, 81, 92, 105, 115, 123; German East, 92, 105, 106; North, 119
Akamba, the, of British East Africa, 77 sq., 105
Akikuyu, the, of British East Africa, 92, 105, 115, 128
Aleutian hunters, 106
Algonquin Indians, their modes of keeping off ghosts, 139
Amboyna, taboo in, 27 sq.
America, Indians of North, 130 sq.; the discovery of, 173
Amulets for the protection of fruit-trees, 29 sqq.
Analogy between the reproduction of men, animals, and plants, 99 sqq.
Ancestor-worship, 7
Anger of gods or spirits at sexual offences, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 54, 55 sq., 57, 61, 63, 107
Angoni, the, of British Central Africa, 79, 132
Annam, savages of, 46
Annamites, the, 33
Anne, Queen, 18
Anointing the nail instead of the wound, 166
Antambahoaka, the, of Madagascar, 59
Anthropology, social, the scope of, 157 sqq.
Anyanja, the, of British Central Africa, 66, 79, 105
Arab merchant in Darfur, 39
Araucanians of Chili, 84
Arawaks of British Guiana, 83
Areopagus, trials for murder before the, 156
Argos, massacre at, 115
Aricara Indians, 118
Armenians, their mutilation of the dead, 133
Assam, tribes of, 45
Attic law as to homicides, 114
Atua, guardian spirit, 118
Atua tonga, divinity, 8
Australia, aborigines of, the severity with which they punish sexual offences, 71 sqq.
——, Western, 74
Australian aborigines, their precautions against ghosts, 137
Avebury, Lord, 159
Avoidance, ceremonial, of relations by marriage, 75 sqq.; a precaution against incest, 75, 84 sqq., 93; of wife’s mother, 75 sqq., 86 sq., 90 sq.; between father-in-law and daughter-in-law, 76; between various relations, 76 sq.; between father and daughter, 78, 85, 87; between father-in-law and son-in-law, 79 sq.; of wife of wife’s brother, 80; of brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, 81; of future parents-in-law, 81, 83; between woman and her father-in-law, 82; between a man and his father-in-law, 82, 83; of blood relations, 84 sqq.; between brother and sister, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90; between mother and son, 85, 86, 87
Awemba, the, of Northern Rhodesia, 66, 79, 103 sq., 120
Babylonian code of Hammurabi, 64
—— kings, their curses, 37 sq.
Baddat Dyaks of Borneo, 48
Baganda, punishment of sexual offences among the, 64 sq.; rules of ceremonial avoidance among the, 90 sq.; their ideas as to adultery, 102 sq.; their ideas as to effect of wife’s infidelity on absent husband, 106 sq.
Bakerewe, a Bantu people, 78
Bali, punishment of incest and adultery in, 68
Balkan peninsula, the Slavs of the, 97
Balonda, the, 38
Bangala, the, of the Upper Congo, 107
Banggai Archipelago, 54
Banishment of homicides, 113 sqq.
Banner, a fairy, 17
Bantu tribes, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 103, 123
Bantus, the, of South Africa, their customs as to the marriage of cousins, 91
Barea, the, tribe on the borders of Abyssinia, 66
Barring the road from the grave against the ghost, 138 sq.
Basis of morality shifted from supernatural to natural, 153
Basoga, the, of Central Africa, 65
Basutos, the, 56; purification for homicide among the, 120 sq.
Batamba, the, of Busoga, 76
Batang Lupar river in Borneo, 48
Battas, or Bataks, of Sumatra, their ideas as to sexual immorality, 46; their punishment of adultery, 69; their rules of ceremonial avoidance, 85
Bavili, the, of Loango, 55
Ba-Yaka, the, of the Congo Free State, 124
Beech, M. W. H., 129 n. 1
Belief in immortality a fruitful source of war, 129 sq.; waste of life and property entailed by the, 111 sq.
Bella Coola Indians, mourning customs of the, 144
Beni Amer, tribe on the borders of Abyssinia, 66
Bering Strait, 132
Besisi, the, of the Malay Peninsula, 137
Bhotias, the, of the Himalayas, 141
Bilaspore in India, 133
Bismarck Archipelago, 131
Black and white Furies, 117
Blood of pigs used in expiatory ceremonies, 44 sqq.; of incestuous persons not to be shed on the ground, 52, 53, 68; of pigs used in ceremonies of purification, 116 sq.; of the slain drunk by the slayers, 118 sq.
—— relations, ceremonial avoidance of, 84 sqq.
Blu-u Kayans, the, of Borneo, 51
Boas, Franz, quoted, 126 sq., 146 sq.
Bogos, tribe on borders of Abyssinia, 81
Bolivia, 106
Boloki, the, of the Congo, 39, 75, 107, 128
Borneo, the Sea Dyaks of, 34, 47 sq., 51, 136; pagan tribes of, 49 sq.; tribes of Dutch, 50 sq.
Brazil, Indians of, 96
British Columbia, mourning customs among the tribes of, 142 sqq.
Brooke, Charles, quoted, 50
Brooke, Rajah, 12
Brother and sister, ceremonial avoidance between, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90; incest of, 51, 54, 59, 60 n. 1, 62, 67, 68
Brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, mutual avoidance of, 81
Buduma, the, of Lake Chad, 109
Bugineese, the, of Celebes, 51
Bukaua, tribe of German New Guinea, 82, 131
Bureau of Ethnology in the U.S. America, 175
Burgundians, the, 16
Burma, 119, 130, 134, 135, 138; the Karens of, 44 sq.
Burning as punishment of sexual crime, 63, 64, 68
Buru, an East Indian island, 109 n. 3
Burying alive as punishment, 46, 68, 69
Busoga, 76
Cairbre Musc, Irish legend of, 62
Calabria, superstition as to murderers in, 119
Californian Indians, 83
Cambridge in relation to anthropology, 175
Cameroon negroes, 116
Car Nicobar, rite of purification in, 116 sq.
Caribs, the, 83
Caroline Islands, rules of ceremonial avoidance in the, 87 sq.
Cazembes of Angola, 11
Celebes, 68
—— Central, 12, 29, 30, 52, 53, 122
—— Southern, 51
Celts of Ireland and Scotland, 17
Central Provinces of India, 33
Ceram, island of, 51; taboo in, 28
—— Laut Islands, taboo in, 28 sq.
Ceylon, modes of protecting property in, 33
Chad, Lake, 109
Charms to protect property, 25 sqq., 38 sq., 41 sqq.; for the protection of fruit-trees, 29 sqq.
Chastity required of those who handle corn or enter a granary, 56 sq.
Chiefs, supernatural powers attributed to, 6 sqq.
Children supposed to suffer for the adultery of their father or mother, 102 sqq.
Chili, 84
Chinese, their faith in ghosts, 149 sqq.
Chinook Indians, their purification of homicides, 126 sq.
Chins of Burma, their burial customs, 138 sq.
Chitomé, the sacred pontiff of Congo, 108
Circumcision, orgies at, in Fiji, 60 n. 1
Civilization evolved from savagery, 162; endangered by superstition, 170
Clan, marriage within the, forbidden, 45, 65, 71; marriage within mother’s clan forbidden, 55
Claudius, the emperor, 61
Clytemnestra, ghost of, 118
Codrington, Dr. R. H., 6, 85 n. 1, 86
Communism, era of sexual, 164 sq.
Comparative Method in anthropology, legitimacy of the, 172
Condon, Father M. A., quoted, 76 sq.
Confession of sin, 45, 57, 61, 62, 64 sq., 103, 104, 107, 109
Congo, the, 39, 75, 107, 108, 124
Consanguineous marriages, question as to the results of, 95 sq.
Continence required at certain times, 106 sq., 108
Corc and Cormac, Irish legend of, 62 sq.
Corn, chastity required of persons who handle, 56 sq.
Corpses mutilated in order to disable the ghosts, 132 sq., 134, 136, 137
Cousins, marriage of, 88 sq., 91; expiation for, 47 sq., 92 sq.; forbidden, 47, 48, 53, 67, 72, 89, 90, 91, 92; punished, 67; supposed to be unfruitful, 92
——, mutual avoidance between male and female, 88 sqq.
Cow’s dung as a detergent of ghosts, 123
Cowper, the poet, 174
Crawford, Raymond, 17 n. 5
Criminals, precautions against the ghosts of executed, 132