Clan

“ Gradually, the family widened into the clan, the clan into the city, the city into the nation, the nation into the larger unit embracing men of the same colour, and it will ultimately widen, one hopes, into the human race. ”

“ The clan consider the chief as their father, they bear his name, they believe themselves descended from his family, and they obey him as their lord, with all the ardour of filial love and veneration; while he, on his part, exerts a paternal authority, commanding, chastising, rewarding, protecting, and maintaining them as his own children. ”

“ Among peoples which wander about, supporting themselves either by hunting, or at a somewhat more advanced stage of development by the rearing of flocks and herds, a group of men, thus permanently associated through ties of blood-relationship, is what we call a clan. When by the development of agricultural pursuits the nomadic mode of life is brought to an end, when the clan remains stationary upon some piece of territory surrounded by a strip of forest-land, or other boundaries natural or artificial, then the clan becomes a mark-community. ”

“ The outsiders, the men who lived with the clan but were not of the clan, were no part of the folk, and had no share in the folkland. No services rendered, no participation in the common danger, no endurance of the burden and heat of the day, could create in an outsider any colour of right. Nothing short of admission to the clan, and of initiation in its worship, could enable him to demand as of right the grass of a single cow or the wood for a single fire.”56 ”

“ The members of a clan have many common rights and privileges which bind them together, so that the clan-tie has a very real meaning. Property, however, as we shall see shortly, is largely centred in the family or the individual, and the Todas are in a state of social evolution in which the common bond constituted by membership of the clan has been largely replaced by the bond constituted by the family. They are in an intermediate condition between the state of society in which the clan is the social unit and that in which the family has taken this position. ”

“ We see thus that the clan organization grows naturally out of the drawing together of men to strengthen themselves in the fierce struggle of savage life. The clan is simply an extension of the family. The family idea still runs through it, and kinship is the bond that holds together all the members. ”

“ It is when the head men of the clan have assumed the privileges of hereditary chiefs, and come to stand alone in the golden sunset of a divine ancestry once common to the entire group, when the mass of clansmen have sunk into simple freemen or even serfs, and the chief's men stand apart from the common folk as their lord's comitatus, that both the choral and the personal poetry of the clan give way to the songs of the chief's hall. ”

“ Every male of a man’s own clan is either his pian; his in; his an, egal, or nòdrved; his mokh, or his mokh pedvai mokh. In most cases a clan consists of several families, and these families may be unrelated to one another so far as the evidence from the genealogical record goes. Nevertheless, every Toda knows exactly the proper kinship terms to apply to all the members of his clan. I inquired in detail into the basis of this knowledge in the case of the Taradrol, consisting of six pòlm or divisions. ”

“ Note, I am not speaking of rebel to rebel, or loyalist to loyalist, or comrade to comrade, or clansman to clansman in trouble—that goes without saying—but of man and woman to man and woman in trouble, the highest form of clannishness, the clannishness that embraces the whole of this wicked world—the Clan of Mankind! ”

“ The word Clan signifies simply children or descendants, and the clan name thus implies that the members of it are or were supposed to be descended from a common ancestor or eponymus, and they were distinguished from each other by their patronymics, the use of surnames in the proper sense being unknown among them. [See GENS, ROMAN.] ... In considering the genealogies of the Highland clans we must bear in mind that in the early state of the tribal organisation the pedigree of the sept or clan, and of each member of the tribe, had a very important meaning. ”

“ They came fearlessly, trusting, not only in the barriers which Nature had given them in their rocks and fastnesses, but in the unanimity of their purpose. Each clan had its stated place of meeting, and when it was summoned upon any emergency, the fiery cross, one end burning, the other wrapt in a piece of linen stained with blood, was sent among the aroused clansmen, traversing those wild moors, and penetrating into the secluded glens of those sublime regions. ”

“ But first we have something to say about the practical and theoretic conditions which have turned men's attention to the clan organisation.
The importance which the clan has assumed in recent speculation is due to a variety of associations, partly incidental to the ordinary activities of our nineteenth-century life, partly peculiar to the character of our modern thought. The everyday life of Europe in general and of England in particular is now habituated to social contrasts greater than ever before fell within the positive range of human knowledge. ”

“ Throughout all the earlier stages of culture, and even into the civilized period, we find society organized with the clan for its ultimate unit, although in course of time its character becomes greatly altered by the substitution of kinship in the paternal, for that in the maternal line. By (p. 061) long-continued growth and repeated segmentation the primitive clan was developed into a more complex structure, in which a group of clans constituted a Phratry and tribe. phratry or brotherhood, and a group of phratries constituted a tribe. ”

“ When all military character, all feudal subordination, all heritable jurisdiction, all independent authority of chiefs, are extracted from what used to be called a clan, nothing remains of its essential and peculiar features. ”

“ I think, therefore, that I am justified in regarding these internal sections of a community as clans.
Chiefs, Sub-Chiefs and Notables and Their Emone
At the head of each clan is the amidi, or chief of the clan. He is, and is recognised as being, the only true chief.
He is the most important personage of his clan, and is treated with the respect due to his office; but, though he takes a leading part in all matters affecting the clan, he is not a person with any administrative or judicial functions, and he has no power of punishment or control over the members of the clan. ”

“ By Garry of John Stewart of the white steed, No antlers are seen without the head, While ’mongst the rocky rugged woods, Are seen the grey-skinned pack of hounds. Bless. [96]
The author of this is Gilliecallum Mac an Olla. [158]
There is no joy without the clan Donald, No battle when they are awanting; First of the clans in all the earth, Each man of them is a hundred. The noblest clan which you can find, A race as brave as they are peaceful; The clan whose praise does fill the lands, Famed for their faith and godliness. ”

“ The ancient superstition concerning the foster son of the white doe was counterbalanced by a new and later prejudice, and the father took the opportunity of presenting to the clan his long hidden son, whose youthful, but handsome and animated, countenance, haughty carriage, and active limbs excited the admiration of the clansmen, who joyfully received him as the heir and descendant of their chief, notwithstanding the ominous presage attending his birth and nurture. ”

“ The whole body of the clan were summoned to decide upon the question of war or peace. Every petty chieftain of every minor tribe, if not every individual clansman, had a voice not only in this primary question, but also, when the war was declared, in the questions arising upon subsequent military operations... The kings or chieftains were themselves chosen by the clan, although the choice was limited to those who possessed a sort of hereditary right, often complicated by a comparison of the personal merits of the rival claimants. ”

“ Thus, at the price of much confusion in language and thought, the interlacing of national histories reproduces on an enlarged scale the interlacing of clan traditions which has everywhere accompanied the fusion of clans into larger social groups. ”

“ The predominance will probably, unless there be a great disparity in the actual size or importance of the clans, and perhaps even to a certain extent notwithstanding such a disparity, fall to the clan whose chief by his superior ability or courage or force of character, or perhaps capacity for palavering, has succeeded in securing for himself a predominating influence in the community. ”

“ Every clan or family lived by itself and formed a guild for mutual protection, each kinsman being his brother's keeper, and bound to avenge his death by feud with the tribe or clan which had killed him. ”

“ A clan is a body of kindred in which kinship is established by laws now long disused, and so strange to our present ideas as to be comprehended with difficulty. Some of the more salient features of the system appear in the division of the people into tribes which are interpermeated by clans, with special rules of government, adoption, punishment, protection, property, and marriage. ”

“ Such family groups were what we call clans, and so far as is known they were the earliest form in which civil society appeared on the earth. Among all wandering or partially settled tribes the clan is to be found, and there are ample opportunities for studying it among our Indians in North America. The clan usually has a chief or head-man, useful mainly as a leader in wartime; its civil government, crude and disorderly enough, is in principle a pure democracy. ”

“ The old clan-system, with the idea which it nourished of the close relation between the various grades of the clan, of the duty of the chief to support his people, and of the people to do the will of the chief, must be abolished, and the Highlander must be taught, each man to depend entirely upon himself and his own exertions, and to expect nothing from any man but what he could pay for in labour or money. ”

“ The clan,—recognised at first by the captain, whom they followed in war, and obeyed for their common advantage, as his friends and relations, then as his soldiers, then as his vassals, then as his farmers,—he has come finally to regard as hired labourers, whom he may perchance allow to remain on the soil of their common country for his own advantage, but whom he has the power to expel so soon as he no longer finds it for his interest to keep them. ”

“ In these communities where the men must wive themselves from another clan, the women, if married, are ex hypothesi daughters of another clan, and, if unmarried, are at least prospectively associates of some other clan. ”

“ The most instructive application of the doctrine that the kin is, in much more than a metaphorical sense, one body, is to be found in the collective responsibility of the clan. Illustrations might be cited from every corner of the known world. ”

“ We cannot deny the existence of clan associations in days when the leading features of clan life have been obliterated—nay, it is often only because such survivals have taken place, owing to the progress of different parts of society at different rates, that we can recover the past at all. ”

“ When, therefore, we say that the "clan" is a social classification, we need not be ashamed to admit the ideal character of our abstract term, or our inability to state precisely the points at which its communal career begins and ends. But we must know the leading facts which this abstract term idealises, the wide domain of human history which clan life has dominated, the significant truth that this form of social organisation, under a great variety of names and a considerable variety of features, is the most archaic to which historical science enables us to ascend with confidence. ”

“ These relatives are, however, of the same clan as the deceased, owing to the fact that a woman becomes a member of the same clan as her husband; and I am therefore doubtful how far these relatives perform the duties in question as members of the same clan, and how far as relatives by marriage. Some of the duties, such as lighting the funeral fires, are done by men of the same clan at the funeral of men ”

“ I place in the midst of your clan, the Bear, a majestic pine tree, which is ever green, and as the top reaches above all other trees, so will your clan be. Wherever the nation will be driven to, your clan will multiply above all others, and be the ruler of the nation. ”

“ Two centuries hence, it will be their own fault, if, instead of the family being really only one man, they have not become a clan in the valley: a clan possessed of more social importance, and of more political influence, than could attach to a family represented by a single member. ”

“ The early organization of society into clans made the communal sacrifice the more prominent1867—the clan was the social unit, the interests of the individual were identical with those of the clan, and there was rarely occasion for a man to make a special demand on the deity for his individual benefit. ”

“ Such a group of families as has been supposed is called a clan, or in Roman history a gens. It may be small, or it may be very numerous. The essential feature is that it is a body of people united by the tie of common blood. It may have existed for hundreds of years and have grown to thousands of persons. Some of the clans of the Scotch Highlands were quite large, and it would often have been a hopeless puzzle to trace a relationship running back through many generations. ”