ave the kinless totemic belief and
custom existing within a kinless society. In the case of the Arunta we
have the kinless totemism existing in a society based on a kinless
organisation still, but containing also full recognition of
motherhood,[377] and perhaps recognition of physical fatherhood.[378]
There is, therefore, an important distinction in the social position
of the two parallel systems. Among the Semang people, their totemic
belief and custom do not carry with them a superstructure of society.
They form the substantive cult of the scattered social groups, which
are kinless groups dependent upon ties local in character and derived
from the conscious use of the facts of nature surrounding them. Among
the Arunta people, on the contrary, the totem belief and custom are
contained within a social system of extraordinary dimensions and
proportions. Of course, the obvious questions to raise are--have the
Semang people lost a once existing social system connected with their
totemic cult? Have the Arunta people had imposed upon them a social
system which has not destroyed their primitive totemic cult?

To answer these questions I can only deal with the Semang evidence as
it appears in researches of great authority and weight, and there is
undoubtedly in all the evidence produced by Messrs. Skeat and
Blagden, and the authorities they use, nothing whatever to suggest
that Semang totemism once possessed above it an elaborate social
organisation of the usual totemic type. There is indeed, the myth
which points to a two-class exogamous division for marital
purposes,[379] but there is more than myth for the unrestricted
intercourse of the sexes both before and after marital rights.[380] In
every other direction we get simple groups fashioned on no larger
basis than nomadic roaming and journeying to fresh food grounds. On
the other hand, there is much to suggest that the Arunta have a dual
system of organisation; one, in which the primitive types are still
surviving, the second, a more advanced type which covers but does not
crush out the first. If this is so, it is clear that the parallel
between Semang and Arunta totemism is considerably closer than at
first appears.

It will be necessary, therefore, to deal with the two principal signs
of alleged Arunta progress, male descent and the exogamous classes. I
see no evidence whatever of male descent; male ascendancy, a very
different thing, appears, but there cannot strictly