Man, Past and Present - Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (most popular novels txt) 📗

the community into two exogamous groups) with matrilineal descent, and he is driven to assume that in early times there was a state of society in which the elders had acquired so predominant a position that they were able to monopolise all the young women. Some of the relationship systems are of great antiquity, and it is evident that changes have taken place due to cultural influences coming in from without.

The distribution of kava-drinking and betel-chewing is of great interest. The former occurs all over Polynesia (except Easter Island and New Zealand) and throughout southern Melanesia, including certain Santa Cruz Islands, where it is limited to religious ceremonial. Betel-chewing begins at these islands and extends northwards through New Guinea and Indonesia to India. Kava and betel were introduced into Melanesia by different cultural migrations.

The introduction of betel-chewing was relatively late and restricted and may have taken place from Indonesia after the invasion by the Hindus. With it were associated strongly established patrilineal institutions, marriage with a wife of a father's brother, the special sanctity of the skull and the plank-built canoe. The use of pile dwellings is a more constant element of the betel-culture than of the kava-culture. The religious ritual centres round the skulls of ancestors and relatives, and the cult of the skull has taken a direction which gives the heads of enemies an importance equal to that of relatives, hence head-hunting has become the chief object of warfare. The skull of a relative is the symbol--if not the actual abiding place--of the dead, to be honoured and propitiated, while the skulls of enemies act as the means whereby this honour and propitiation are effected.

The influence of the kava-using peoples was more extensive in time and space than that of the betel-chewing people. Rivers supposes that they had neither clan organisation nor exogamy. Some of them preserved the body after death and respect was paid to the head or skull. It is possible that the custom of payment for a wife came into existence in Melanesia as the result of the need of the immigrant men for women of the indigenous people owing to their bringing few women with them, and the great development of shell money may be due in part to those payments. Contact with the earlier populations also resulted in the development of secret societies. The immigrants introduced the cult of the dead and the institutions of taboo, totemism and chieftainship. They brought with them the form of outrigger canoe and the knowledge of plank-building for canoes (which however was only partially adopted), the rectangular house, and may have known the art of making pile dwellings. They introduced various forms of currency made of shells, teeth, feathers, mats, etc., the drill, the slit drum, or gong, the conch trumpet, the fowl, pig, dog, and megalithic monuments.

There may have been two immigrations of peoples who made monuments of stone: 1. Those who erected the more dolmen-like structures, probably had aquatic totems, and interred their dead in the extended position.

A later movement of people whose stone structures tended to take the form of pyramids, who had bird totems, practised a cult of the sun and cremated their dead.

When the kava-using people came into Melanesia they found it already inhabited. The earliest form of social organisation of which we have evidence was on the dual basis, associated with matrilineal descent, the dominance of the old men (gerontocracy) and certain peculiar forms of marriage. These people interred their dead in the contracted or sitting position, which also was employed in most parts of Polynesia. Evidently they feared the ghosts and removed their dead as completely as possible from the living. These people--whom we may speak of as the "dual-people"--were communistic in property and probably practised sexual communism; the change towards the institution of individual property and individual marriage were assisted by, if not entirely due to, the influence of the kava-people. They practised circumcision. Magic was an indigenous institution. Characteristic is the cult of vui, unnamed local spirits with definite haunts or abiding places whose rites are performed in definite localities. In the Northern New Hebrides the offerings connected with vui are not made to the vui themselves but to the man who owns the place connected with the vui. It would seem as if ownership of a locality carried with it ownership of the vuiconnected with the locality. Thus vui are local spirits belonging to the indigenous owners of the soil, and there seems no reason to believe that they were ever ghosts of dead men. As totemism occurs among the dual-people of the Bismarck Archipelago (who live in parts of New Britain and New Ireland and Duke of York Island) it is possible that the kava-people were not the sole introducers of totemism into Melanesia. The dual-people were probably acquainted with the bow, which they may have called busur, and the dug-out canoe which was used either lashed together in pairs or singly with an outrigger.

The origin of a dual organisation is generally believed to be due to fission, but it is more reasonable to regard it as due to fusion, as hostility is so frequently manifest between the two groups despite the fact that spouses are always obtained from the other moiety. In New Ireland (and elsewhere) each moiety is associated with a hero; one acts wisely but unscrupulously, the other is a fool who is always falling an easy victim to the first. Each moiety has a totem bird: one is a fisher, clever and capable, while the second obtains its food by stealing from the other and does not go to sea. One represents the immigrants of superior culture who came by sea, the other the first people, aborigines, of lowly culture who were quite unable to cope with the wiles and stratagems of the people who had settled among them. In the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain, the dual groups are associated with light and dark coconuts; affiliated with the former are male objects and the clever bird, which is universally called taragau, or a variant of that term. The bird of the other moiety is named malaba or manigulai, and is associated with female objects. The dark coconuts, the dark colour and flattened noses of the women who were produced by their transformation, and the projecting eyebrows of the malaba bird and its human adherents seem to be records in the mythology of the Bismarck Archipelago of the negroid (or, Rivers suggests, an Australoid) character of the aboriginal population. The light coconut which was changed into a light-coloured woman seems to have preserved a tradition of the light colour of the immigrants.

The autochthones of Melanesia were a dark-skinned and ulotrichous people, who had neither a fear of the ghosts of their dead nor a manes cult, but had a cult of local spirits. The Baining of the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain may be representatives of a stage of Melanesian history earlier than the dual system; if so, they probably represent in a modified form, the aboriginal element. They are said to be completely devoid of any fear of the dead.

The immigrants whose arrival caused the institution of the dual system were a relatively fair people of superior culture who interred their dead in a sitting position and feared their ghosts. They first introduced the Austronesian language.

All subsequent migrations were of Austronesian-speaking peoples from Indonesia. First came the kava-peoples in various swarms, and more recently the betel-people.

Possibly New Caledonia shows the effects of relative isolation more than other parts of Melanesia, but, except for Polynesian influence (most directly recognisable in Fiji and southern Melanesia), Melanesia may be regarded as possessing a general culture with certain characteristic features which may be thus summarised[335]. The Melanesians are a noisy, excitable, demonstrative, affectionate, cheery, passionate people. They could not be hunters everywhere, as in most of the islands there is no game, nor could they be pastors anywhere, as there are no cattle; the only resources are fishing and agriculture. In the larger islands there is usually a sharp distinction between the coast people, who are mainly fishers, and the inlanders who are agriculturalists; the latter are always by far the more primitive, and in many cases are subservient to the former. Both sexes work in the plantations. In parts of New Guinea and the Western Solomons the sago palm is of great importance; coconut palms grow on the shores of most islands, and bananas, yams, bread-fruit, taro and sweet potatoes supply abundant food. As for dress, the men occasionally wear none, but usually have belts or bands, of bark-cloth, plaits, or strings, and the women almost everywhere have petticoats of finely shredded leaves. The skin is decorated with scars in various patterns, and tattooing is occasionally seen, the former being naturally characteristic of the darker skinned people, and the latter of the lighter. Every portion of the body is decorated in innumerable ways with shells, teeth, feathers, leaves, flowers, and other objects, and plaited bands encircle the neck, body, and limbs. Shell necklaces, which constitute a kind of currency, and artificially deformed boars' tusks are especially characteristic, though each group usually has its peculiar ornaments, distinguishing it from any other group. There is a great variety of houses. The typical Melanesian house has a gable roof, the ridge pole is supported by two main posts, side walls are very low, and the ends are filled in with bamboo screens. Pile dwellings are found in the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, and some New Guinea villages extend out into the sea.

The weapons typical of Melanesia are the club and the spear (though the latter is not found in the Banks Islands), each group and often each island possessing its own distinctive pattern. Stone headed clubs are found in New Guinea, New Britain and the New Hebrides. The spears of the Solomon Islands are finely decorated and have bone barbs; those of New Caledonia are pointed with a sting-ray spine; those of the Admiralty Islands have obsidian heads; and those of New Britain have a human armbone at the butt end. The bow, the chief weapon of the Papuans, occurs over the greater part of Melanesia, though it is absent in S.E. New Guinea, and is only used for hunting in the Admiralty Islands.

The hollowed out tree trunk with or without a plank gunwale is general, usually with a single outrigger, though plank-built canoes occur in the Solomons, characteristically ornamented with shell inlay. Pottery is an important industry in parts of New Guinea and in Fiji; it occurs also in New Caledonia, Espiritu Santo (New Hebrides) and the Admiralty Islands. Bark-cloth is made in most islands, but a loom for weaving leaf strips is now found only in Santa Cruz.

A division of the community into two exogamous groups is very widely spread, no intermarriage being permitted within the group. Mother-right is prevalent, descent and inheritance being counted on the mother's side, while a man's property descends to his sister's children. At the same time the mother is in no sense the head of the family; the house is the father's, the garden may be his, the rule and government are his, though the maternal uncle sometimes has more authority than the father. The transition to father-right has definitely occurred in various places, and is taking place elsewhere; thus, in some of the New Hebrides, the father has to buy off the rights of his wife's relations or his sister's children.

Chiefs exist everywhere, being endowed with religious sanctity in Fiji, where they are regarded as the direct descendants of the tribal ancestors. More often, a chief holds his position solely owing to the fact that he has inherited the cult of some powerful spirit, and his influence is not very extensive. Probably everywhere public affairs are regulated by discussion among the old or important men, and the more primitive the society, the more power they possess. But the most powerful institutions of all