Thus A. C. Haddon has assumed that every primitive tribe originally lived on a particular plant or animal species and perhaps also traded with this food and exchanged it with other tribes. It then was inevitable that a tribe should become known to other tribes by the name of the animal which played such weighty role with it. At the same time this tribe would develop a special familiarity with this animal, and a kind of interest for it which, however, was based upon the psychic motive of man’s most elementary and pressing need, namely, hunger.[1]
The objections against this most rational of all the totem theories are that such a state of the food supply is never found among primitive men and probably never existed. Savages are the more omnivorous the lower they stand in the social scale. Besides, it is incomprehensible how such an exclusive diet could have developed an almost religious relation to the totem, culminating in an absolute abstention from the preferred food.
The first of the three theories about the origin of totemism which Frazer stated was a psychological one. We shall report it elsewhere.
Frazer’s second theory, which we will discuss here, originated under the influence of an im-
- ↑ Address to the Anthropological Section, British Association, Belfast, 1902. According to Frazer, 1. c., Vol. IV, p. 50.
