ABSTRACT
J. G. Frazer in the second part of his classical studies entitled 'The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism Among the Australian Aborigines'! presented a clearly reasoned interpretation of the significance of the available data relating to totemism in Australia. He argued that the evidence suggested that group marriage and maternal descent of the totem preceded the establishment of individual marriage and the paternal descent of the totem, and that group marriage had in turn been preceded by 'a still wider sexual communism',2 while maternal descent had likewise been preceded by 'an even older mode of transmitting the totem which still survives among the Arunta and Kaitish',3 that is, local totemism, in which the totem of the child is determined by the local origin of the spirit which has incarnated itself or undergone incarnation in the mother, 'without any regard to the totem either of the father or of the mother'.4 This form or manner of acquiring the totem Frazer regarded as probably the most primitive, 'For it ignores altogether the intercourse of the sexes as the cause of offspring and, further, it ignores the tie of blood on the maternal as well as the paternal side, substituting for it a purely local bond, since the members of a totem stock are merely those who gave the first sign of life in the womb at one or other of certain definite spotS.'5 Local totemism, according to Frazer, with its implied ignorance of paternity, could hardly have arisen from hereditary totemism, but it is easy to see, argues Frazer, how the former could have given rise to the latter-a spirit of the father's totem simply incarnates itself in the mother, wherever she may be and however distant from the spirit-child's totem centre.
