Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/785

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��714 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s. f I, 1899

tribes of the Greek and Roman peoples, and in fact of all of the Indo-European peoples. Under these conditions kinship is reckoned in the male line and the clan is transformed into the gens. The ruler of the gens is the patriarch who has a I right to control by reason of superior age ; for the law that the

■. elder rules is still supreme, but the elder rules with a rigor

\\ unknown in savage society.

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«! The phratry does not become the gens, though it is efficient

{,' in transforming the clan into the gens, and the phratry or

brotherhood becomes a fifth unit in the hierarchy of incorpora- tions which constitute a barbaric society. The family remains as

f' a more or less distinct unit of organization composed of the

father, mother, and children, or it may hold together as a group ruled by the grandfather. The gens still remains as a group con- trolled by the patriarch or chief who is in fact or by legal fiction the chief or ruler ; but there is a tendency in the gens to break

\; up into a number of households, each one ruled by a real or

conventional elder-man. Then comes the phratry, which is a group of gentes. To this group are relegated many functions.

We must now understand something more about the religion of gentile tribes. In this stage private and public religion are pretty clearly differentiated. The elder-man of the gens offici- ates as the priest in the domestic worship, but the public worship is conducted in the council chamber, or, as it is usually called in America, the kiva, which is the place of meeting of a brother- hood or phratry, and the ceremonial worship of the people is conducted in this place. Among the Greeks the kiva was called the prytaneum. Various names are used among the barbaric tribes of America, and various names were used among the bar- baric tribes of the Orient. In the upper stages of savagery there is developed a calendar system by which the kiva ceremonies are regulated. The various codices which have been discovered in Central, North, and South America are all of them calendars designed to regulate the ceremonies of the kiva. The kiva

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