Clannishness

“ The feudal lordship, in its genius and scope of operation, was diametrically opposed to the salient characteristics of the clan system. The distinctions need not be enlarged upon here, let it suffice to draw attention to the fact that clanship was a distinct form of government, under well recognized and applied principles. In modern literature we find the characteristic most emphasized to be the loyalty with which the clansman followed and served his chief, as in the words of the quotation on our toast list, "Master, go on and I will follow thee, to the last gasp, with truth and loyalty." ”

“ The clan, as such, knows nothing of personal responsibility in a future state, for its corporate view of life needs no such individual sanction for morality. The Hades of the clan, therefore, like that of the Odyssey or like the Hebrew She'ôl, is merely a subterranean gathering-place of buried kinsmen whose life is a pale reflection of their life on earth. Reward and punishment, the terrors or consolations of an individualism not yet developed, have here no place, and for a reason easy enough to understand. ”

“ The crofters of to-day have lost for the most part the traditions of the drawbacks and hardships of this ancient system, with its oppressive services, to which many of their ancestors were subject, and have commonly retained only the tradition of the right which every clansman had to some portion of the clan lands. ”

“ For other men may touch his hand,
But none the soul below.
SCORN
THEY roll, clan by clan, kin by kin, on wide orderly roads,
Burghers and citizens all, in a stately procession,
Driving before them the wealth of their worldly possession,
Cattle, and horses, and pack-mules with sumptuous loads. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The names of the clans are: In-e-chees-quah, or Bird Clan; In-egil-lohee, or Pretty-faced Clan; In-e-wo-tah, or Paint Clan; In-e-wah-he-yah, or Wolf Clan; In-e-se-ho-nih, or Blue Clan; In-e-co-wih, or Deer Clan; and In-e-eo-te-ca-wih, the meaning of which is not known. And among the customs which prevail among these clans is one which prevents their marrying among themselves, so that they have to select their wives from a neighboring fraternity. Formerly such marriages were prohibited by penalty of death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life. The clans retain little now of their original character, their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued, and the reverence for their chiefs abated. Of what they had before the late conquest of their country, there remain only their language and their poverty. Their language is attacked on every side. ”

“ As a pioneer he has reached "the ends of the earth," possessing the unoccupied parts of the world. As a patriot he has established not a few of his cherished customs in the land of his adoption. His love of kindred is probably his most notable characteristic; it found embodiment in the clan system, under which his race achieved its greatest triumphs and enjoyed its greatest glories, and the bond of clanship, with its inspiring memories, the true clansman will never disregard. ”

“ If a number of persons not demonstrably connected by blood believe themselves to be akin simply on account of their descent from a common ancestor, it can only be because they are an expanded family, either actually or by fiction, which really had or might have had a common ancestor. That is, the clan tracing its descent from a common ancestor, if this was the primary type of clan, must have been subsequent to the family as a social institution. ”

“ But it is possible that the story enshrines the remembrance of the more ordinary clan-sacrifice of the life of a clansman to procure them communion with the clan-god by the common partaking of his flesh: the kinsman is offered rather than the animal, not so much that the sacrificers may eat their god, but that the god by consuming their most valued life may be more closely incorporate with them. ”

“ Starting out with a single pair, when the [pg 195] family increases in size a separation is necessary; and clans are an outcome of the process of division and redivision, the bond between the clans and their union in a tribe resulting from their consciousness of kinship. Now, it is a well-known condition of exogamy that, while a man must marry without his clan, he must not marry without his tribe, and for the most part, in fact, the clan into which he shall marry is designated. In other words, allied clans gave their women in exchange mutually. ”

“ Rights or obligations of marriage within the clan everywhere attest the same communal exclusiveness; and some forms of clan life would even lead us to believe that the brotherhood once lived under a common roof, and shared not only their sacred festivals but even their ordinary meals. Conspicuous, however, among these signs of communal kinship is an economic feature of the settled clan which living scholars have investigated with equal patience and learning—the common ownership of land. ”

“ It was the gens or clan, as we find it exemplified in all stages from the middle period of savagery to the middle period of barbarism. The gens or clan was simply—to define it by a third synonym—the kin; it was originally a group of males and females who were traditionally aware of their common descent reckoned in the female line. "Exogamy." At this stage of development there was quite generally though not universally prevalent the custom of "exogamy," by which a man was forbidden to marry a woman of his own clan. ”

“ There the clansmen lie together — Men from many an outland skerry, Men from Athol and Glengarry, Camerons from wild Mamore, MacDonalds from the Irish Shore, Red MacGregors and McLeods With their tartans for their shrouds, Menzies, Malcolms from the islands, Frasers from the upper Highlands — Callous is the passer by Who can turn without a sigh From the tufts of heather deep Where the noble clansmen sleep. ”

“ In America, the custom of marrying out of the clan is frequent and well marked. More than twenty years ago, Sir George Grey called attention to the division of the Australians into families, each distinguished by the name of some animal or vegetable, which served as their crest or kobong; the practice of reckoning clanship from the mother; and the prohibition of marriage within the clan, as all bearing a striking resemblance to similar usages found among the natives of North America. ”

“ The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The accuracy of its form may not be exact—it may, indeed, be well-nigh indistinguishable in its outlines—but whenever it be raised aloft, the halo of patriotic meaning, with which memory has illumined it, is answered by the flutterings of the bearer's heart; self is lost in inspiring recollection; clanship, absorbing the individual, enfolds him as one of a mighty whole, and the race-blood that is deep within him springs quick into action, obedient to the stirring call. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from wrong-doing, and to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were done. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One clan may not eat the tiger, another the ape, another the crocodile, another the dog, another the cat, another the dove, another the white buffalo, and another the locust. The reason given by members of a clan for abstaining from the flesh of the particular animal is either that they are descended from animals of that species, and that their souls after death may transmigrate into the animals, or that they or their forefathers have been under certain obligations to the creatures. Sometimes, but not always, the clan bears the name of the animal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There seemed to be no doubt, however, that in connexion with marriage, a man always thought of these relatives as püliol, a term which denotes certain kin, to whatever clan they may belong. So far as I could ascertain, if a man thought of a given woman, he thought of her as one, or not one, of his püliol, and it seemed to me in several cases as if it came almost as a new idea to some of the Todas that his püliol included all the people of his own clan. ”