A favorite device for perpetuating
institutions among the primitive peoples of many districts on different
continents is the taboo, or prohibition, which is commonly fiducial but is
often of general application. This device finds its best development in
the earlier stages in the development of belief, and is normally connected
with totemism. Another device, which is remarkably widespread, as shown by
Morgan, is kinship nomenclature. This device rests on a natural and easily
ascertained basis, though its applications are arbitrary and vary widely
from tribe to tribe and from culture-status to culture-status. A third
device, which found much favor among the American aborigines and among
some other primitive peoples, may be called _ordination_, or the
arrangement of individuals and groups classified from the prescriptorial
point of view of Self, Here, and Now, with respect to each other or to
some dominant personage or group. This device seems to have grown out of
the kin-name system, in which the Ego is the basis from which relation is
reckoned. It tends to develop into federate organization on the one hand
or into caste on the other hand, according to the attendant
conditions.(48) There are various other devices for fixing and
perpetuating institutions or for expressing the laws embodied therein.
Some of these are connected with thaumaturgy and shamanism, some are
connected with the powers of nature, and the several devices overlap and
interlace in puzzling fashion.
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