Oceania: The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands—Volume 2 9780824893972

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Oceania

Oceania The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands VOLUME 2

D O U G L A S L. O L I V E R Illustrations by Lois Johnson

U N I V E R S I T Y OF HAWAII PRESS Honolulu

© 1 9 8 9 University of H a w a i i Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oliver, Douglas L. Oceania : the native cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands Douglas L. Oliver ; illustrations by Lois Johnson. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes indexes. ISBN 0 - 8 2 4 8 - 1 0 1 9 - 8 (set) 1 .Ethnology—Oceania. 2. Oceania—Social life and customs. I. Title. G N 6 6 2 . 0 4 6 1988 88-29551 306'.099—dcl9 CIP The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ANSI Z39.48-1984

Contents VOLUME 1

Preface ix Prologue xt Part I 1 2 3 4 5

1

The Natural Setting 3 Population and Physical Types Languages 66 Archaeology 78 Ethnology 104 Part II

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Background

Activities

27

123

Definitions, Religious Ideas, and Tools 125 Foods and Food Getting: Australia 157 Foods and Food Getting: The Islands 185 Domicile 321 Boats and Ocean Travel 361 Warfare and Killing 423 External Exchange 501 Sex and Reproduction 590 Infancy to Death—And Beyond 660 Notes 787 Maps 1. Australia 813 2. West-Central Oceania 814 3. Central Oceania 815 4. Eastern Oceania 816 5. Northwestern Oceania 817 Oceania front endpaper New Guinea back endpaper

v

PREFACE

VI

VOLUME 2

Part III 15 16 17 18 19 20

Social Relations

More Definitions 821 Australia 826 Polynesia 883 Micronesia 957 Melanesia 1026 Fiji 11 SO Finale 1182 Notes 1185 Bibliography 1201 Indexes Subject 1261 Peoples 1266 Authors Cited 1270

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Social Relations

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

More Definitions

THE next five chapters will be devoted to a closer examination of the institutionalized social relations of the peoples of Oceania—the social structural contexts of the activities described in Part 2. We shall be looking at the same peoples who were doing the things already described: hunting, gardening, fishing, traveling, trading, fighting, being born, growing up, marrying, aging, dying; this time, however, we shall be focusing more sharply on their social relationships than upon the material objectives they were aiming for and the technologies they employed. After considerable self-debate, I have decided to organize these sociological summaries on a geographic rather than a topical basis—that is, under the chapter headings Australia, Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Fiji rather than, say, kinship, male-female relations, and government. Treatment of this vast and culturally heterogeneous part of the world on a topical basis could undoubtedly be briefer and analytically sharper, but would result in erasing some of the regional boundaries that clearly existed, especially around Australia and Polynesia. Some of Fiji's social institutions overlapped with those of western Polynesia, but were in other respects distinctive enough and homogeneous enough to warrant separate treatment. Micronesia was more heterogeneous in its social institutions, and will be treated subregionally. While a subregional approach would be justified in some parts of Melanesia (e.g., New Guinea Highlands), the mosaic distribution of its heterogenous social institutions in other geographic subareas requires topical treatment. With the focus now on social relations, I will augment and amplify the definitions given earlier, in the introduction to Part 2 and elsewhere. However tedious and pedantic this may seem to be, it is indispensable for a book like the present one, which attempts to bring together accounts of many other writers, some of whom use different labels for the same thing and the same labels for different things.1 I do not propose that these terms are the best ones for universal application, but I shall attempt to

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render them unambiguous and to fit them together into a single semantic frame. I have already provided more or less precise and firm definitions for some types of social units (e.g., society and a people; social group versus social category; community; household) as well as for certain aspects of social relationships (e.g., marriage, pool-sharing, giftexchange). Also, I have had occasion to employ some other sociological terms (e.g., clan, lineage, family, rank, social class and caste) in ways less precise; these will require some sharper precision, forthwith or as the survey unfolds. First, a set of labels having to do with what English speakers call relationships based on "consanguinity" and/or "marriage." mother: the female from whose womb a person actually issued; "mother" (in quotes) being a female equated by a people with the person's mother (without quotes) in some socially important respect, including (in most Oceanian societies) application of the same vernacular term father: the male believed by the people in question to have contributed specifically and indispensably to a person's conception; "father" (in quotes) being the male counterpart of "mother" parent: a person's mother or father; "parent": a person's "mother" or "father" offspring: a woman's known progeny; a person popularly believed to be a man's progeny. When necessary to be more specific, daughter or son will be used—or son's son, son's daughter, etcetera (or more generally, grandchild or descendant), filiation: relationship between a person and his or her mother or father (or "mother" or "father"); matrilateral refers generally to those related to a person through his or her mother, patrilateral to those related through his or her father siblings: persons having the same mother and father are full siblings. Those having same mother but different fathers are usually called uterine siblings. As far as I can discover there is no word in English applicable to (half) siblings having the same father but different mothers, and I am reluctant to coin what would be a sure loser, like "paterine"! ancestor: a person's parent's parent, parent's parent's parent, and so on in ascending generations; "ancestor": someone equated with an ancestor in some socially important respect. If it is necessary to be more specific when referring to a person's ascendants such terms as mother's mother (or mother's parent or "parent"), father's mother, and so on, will be used. descent: the genealogical process whereby a person is related to an ancestor through his or her parent, his or her parent's parent, and so on in ascending generations

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cognates: persons claiming descent from a common ancestor. In cases where the descent is traced unilineally and through females exclusively it is called matrilineal descent; in those where it is traced through males exclusively, patrilineal descent; and in those where it is traced through either males or females, it will be called ambilineal descent. ("Utralineal" would, etymologically, be a better label for the latter, but "ambilineal" has come to be accepted so widely among anthropologists that I am reluctant to discard it.)2 descent unit: a social unit—either a group of interacting persons or a conceptualized category of persons (and ofttimes spirits)—formed exclusively, or mainly, through descent. Throughout this book the term lineage is used to refer to any descent unit—either matrilineal or patrilineal or ambilineal—whose older members can trace descent, from a common ancestor through specifically remembered (or postulated) individual genealogical links; a matrilineage in the case of exclusively female links, a patrilineage in the case of exclusively male links, and an ambilineal lineage in the case of either female or male links. Correspondingly, those social units made up of persons who believe themselves to be descended from a common ancestor, but who cannot trace all or most of the intervening links to her (or him) will henceforth be called a clan—either matriclan, or patrician, or ambilineal clan, as the case may be. In most Oceanian societies containing lineages the latter were also segments of clans; and in most societies containing clans these were segmented, sometimes into lineages, and sometimes into subclans (which were themselves segmented into lineages). In fact, in some societies there were levels of segmentation in addition to these, for example, sub-subclans, or sublineages (the latter composed of, e.g., a man and his offspring, or a set of fatherless siblings, with each such unit having, say, exclusive rights of a distinctive kind over specific tracts of land). For analytic purposes, the terms span and depth will be applied in some cases in order to differentiate the levels of segmentation in clans: span being used to refer to the range of kin included in the segment, and depth to its genealogical distance from the common ancestor. Thus, where such segmentation obtained, a clan may be said to have wider span and greater depth than a subclan and so on down to a sublineage, which in many cases may have been no wider than a set of full siblings and no more than one generation deep. As will be seen, some Oceanian societies contained both matrilineal and patrilineal descent units: for example, a person was a member of his father's patrilineage (and patrician) with respect to, say, land rights and vengeance obligations, and to his mother's matrilineage (and matriclan) with respect to, say, religious food prohibitions and choice of spouse.

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(Societies of this kind are often characterized as having double descent.) Also, a most important point to keep in mind about the unilineal descent units of many Oceanian societies was the flexibility of their criteria for membership. In many such cases, while their members pronounced the ideal of genealogical unilineality (either matri- or patrilineal, as the case may be), they sometimes allowed membership to other persons as well: for example, to the son of a man into the latter's matrilineage, to the son of a woman into her patrilineage. Another arrangement met with in many Oceanian societies (especially in Australia and Melanesia) was the existence in them of only two unilineal clans, either matrilineal or patrilineal, or of two sets of unilineal clans each set of which was believed to have shared some remote kind of linkage: for instance, an (unspecified but actual) ancestor, or "origin" at a single place. The technical label for such clans or sets of clans is moiety (i.e., half). Their functions were quite varied, except that they were in many societies exogamous—which meant that a member of moiety A was able to marry only some member of moiety B. (The question as to whether a society contained two unilineal clans, or two sets of unilineal clans, will have to be decided in each particular case and according to the kind of mythic event that constituted the link, and to the importance currently attached to it (e.g., in terms of property ownership and collective activity of each one's members). Two other sets of labels to be used in the following chapters of this book have to do with kinship (versus) affinity: kinship: This broad term is used to refer generally to any or all of the above relationships—filiation, siblingship, descent, and to collateral extensions of these; in other words, to what some writers call "genealogical" or "consanguineal" relationships. Based on this usage I refer to kinfolk, kinswoman, and kinship units (i.e., social units made up more or less exclusively of kinfolk). affine: a person's spouse and any of the latter's kinfolk; any affine of a person's kinsman or kinswoman. In many Oceanian societies, a person married a kinsman or kinswoman, so that the spouses and their kinfolk were both kinfolk and affines—but that complication need not concern us yet. affinity: relationship between a person and his or her affine(s). In addition, I shall use the term relative to refer to someone who is related to a person either by kinship or affinity (or both). The most common type of social unit made up of kinfolk and affines was of course the family. As later chapters will describe, there were several forms of family, the most common having been the nuclear one: a social unit consisting of a married couple and the offspring of one or both of them. Other forms

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of family units—extended, polygamous, and so forth—will be described later in ethnographic contexts. One other set of labels needed at the outset of our descriptions of social relations has to do with inequalities in social interaction; but let the reader beware, because this semantic terrain is even more brambly than those of kinship and affinity just mapped. I shall attempt to deal with its salient concepts with as few terms and as brief definitions as possible, in hopes that the following chapters will amplify them. The three attributes to be used in this exercise are prestige, influence, and authority; and the statuses corresponding to them are, respectively, paragon, leader, and head(man) or chief. Prestige comes from being or having something that other persons admire and praise: outstanding competency in some activity, wealth in objects, and the like. The person possessing prestige throughout a whole community will be labeled a paragon. Influence means ability to persuade, without physical coercion, other persons to do something they might otherwise not do. The person having unexcelled influence throughout a whole community will be called a leader. Authority means ability to force someone to do something, by threat or actual use of institutionalized sanctions. Persons having highest authority over whole communities (or larger autonomous units) will be called their chiefs. Those having highest authority over component social units of a community, such as households and lineages, will be called their headmen or heads. In many instances, there will be found persons who occupy any two of these statuses (counting chief and headman as one kind of status), or all three of them, but in other instances the statuses will be quite distinct. Still another concept having to do with social inequalities is given the label of rank, but instead of proposing a sharper definition for it here, in the abstract, I shall do so later, within an ethnographic context. Now, having been provided with some standard definitional measures, we can undertake our survey of Oceania's sociological heterogeneity, beginning with the profoundly old and perdurably insular societies of Australia.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Australia

MOST of the native societies of mainland Australia appear to have been organized on the basis of similar premises about relations among humans and between humans and nonhumans, and were structured along similar lines. To describe the most widespread of those similarities, and to point up some of their more salient features, I shall begin with a fairly detailed résumé of one society, and use that as a basis for generalizing about the others. The one chosen, the Murngin of northeast Arnhem Land, recommends itself for this treatment for two reasons: the anthropological literature on Murngin is exceedingly rich; and several aspects of Murngin culture have already been described in previous chapters. 1 And while Murngin society was perhaps no more typical of Australian societies than any other one, discussion about it among its several ethnographers, and among other anthropologists as well, provides insights into several continent-wide social institutions. For purposes of exploring sociological differences it would have been desirable to provide résumés of three or four other societies as well—say, of the desert-dwelling Aranda, or Walbiri; the semi-sedentary, densely populated Gurnai in the continent's southeastern corner; the people of Queensland's rainforest area—but that would require more space than this book will permit. 2 Murngin The 1,500-2,000 people called Murngin inhabited an area of 9,000 or so square miles in the northeast corner of Arnhem Land. They had no name for themselves as a unit, and as far as I know may not have thought of themselves as constituting a unit that differed from their neighbors; they did however speak a common language (although many dialects) and shared enough other cultural similarities, more or less distinctive of neighboring peoples, to warrant them being labeled a society, as I use the

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word. 3 (In most anthropological writings about Australia, the Murngin and similar units are labeled tribes. In this book I eschew use of the term tribe for reasons that will be set forth later on.) Details about some aspects of Murngin life have already been given: about their subsistence activities and subsistence-associated ceremonies (chapter 7); their warfare (chapter 11); their intercommunity exchange (chapter 12); their theories of conception (chapter 13); and their ways of ritualizing birth, maturation, marriage, and death (chapter 14). All the above involved persons doing things with, or with respect to, other persons—that is, the activities had their social-relational aspect; but my previous descriptions of them focused less on the latter than on the activities themselves, so it now remains to describe the kinds of social relationships involved in those activities.4 Social relationships among the Murngin, and indeed among the members of any human society, can be viewed in three different ways: normative, existential, and suppositional. Normative refers to the norms—the rules—enunciated by and generally subscribed to by the majority of adults in the society regarding how they and others ought or ought not to interact, based on similarities and differences among the interactors in sex, age, kinship, authority, and so forth. For many Murngin relationships there were ranges of Tightness (or wrongness) in such rules, stretching from the utopian-ideal (though usually acknowledgedly impractical), through the permissable, to the undeniably wrong. Existential refers to the ways persons actually interacted, as attested by credible observers. And suppositional refers to the non-authenticated beliefs held by persons about other persons' interactions, including their myths about interactions in the past. (Suppositions are to be distinguished from deliberate lies.) In many instances existential interactions conformed to the norms enunciated for them, and suppositions corresponded with existential facts; but such coincidences cannot be assumed. As noted previously, most descriptions of Oceanians' sociological "customs" are long on norms and suppositions and short on existential facts, a circumstance that, willy-nilly, is reflected in the present generalizations about those customs. Murngin society as a whole was not a unified group and all or most of its members never assembled together even occasionally; it may have been a category to other peoples but seems not to have been to the Murngin themselves. In fact, its members were divided into several kinds of groups and categories, all of them with cross-cutting memberships and some of them containing members of neighboring societies as well. Also, some of the Murngin's social units contained, suppositionally, nonhuman beings, along with aspects of humans not yet or no longer physiologically alive (i.e., the spirits of yet-to-be born and deceased persons who resided

Figure 16.1 Representations of the Wawilak sisters: a, carved wooden figures: left, younger sister, right, elder sister (after Berndt 1964b); b, bark painting (after Mountford 1956); c, carved wooden figures: left, younger sister, right, elder sister (ibid.)

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in clan waterholes, as described in chapters 13 and 14). Moreover, several of these nonhuman beings played such fundamental "social" roles that understanding of this society requires some familiarity with the myths (suppositions) about how some parts of it began. Murngin beliefs about human beginnings were enshrined in two great mythic cycles, Wawilak and Djunkgao. The former narrated the adventures of a pair of sisters during their travels toward the sea, the latter related how another pair of sisters landed on the eastern coast of Arnhem Land and traveled north and west. The Wawilak sisters were members of a cosmologic category that included one half of the whole universe— social, natural and artifactual—called Yiritja; the Djunkgao sisters were members of the other half—the other moiety—called Dua. The adventures undergone by the two pairs of sisters differed considerably in detail, but both pairs did essentially the same kinds of things in terms of their relevance for humans. Put briefly, as they traveled over the amorphous primeval landscape with its relatively undifferentiated animated inhabitants, they transformed that universe into its "present" (and ultimate) condition before returning "underground." They "created" many physiographic features, animals, plants, humans, and human spirit-children by various processes, including naming and childbearing. As the result of these happenings in the original Dreaming period the environment of the Murngin became a landscape containing noteworthy physical features; ordinary animals, plants and humans; and sacred places—mainly waterholes and other places of permanent water—in whose subterranean depths dwelt Dream-period creatures (including animal prototypes) and the spirits of humans both yet-to-be-born and previously born but now physiologically dead. The beliefs just outlined were directly and importantly relevant to the ways Murngins organized their social relations, as also of course were their ways of food getting and their natural environment (including particularly the seasonal variations affecting their food supplies). But there was still another factor that appears to have had an important bearing on the Murngins' social universe, and that was their penchant for classification—of humans, and of both natural and artifactual entities—a penchant that went beyond pragmatic necessities and included an element of cognitive play. Murngin society was composed of a number of cross-cutting social units of different kinds, the most highly-institutionalized having been: groups: households and communities dyads: including fifteen or so that were very explicitly identified categories: patricians, moieties, semi-moieties, and sub-sections gatherings: peaceful and more-or-less fortuitous assemblies for largely ceremonial purposes.

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There were some sixty or so patricians, the society's most firmly rooted and stable kind of social unit, distributed around Murngin territory, each containing an average of about three hundred living human members, plus an undisclosed number of spirits of yet-to-be born and of deceased human members, and one or more zoomorphic or anthropomorphic spirit tutelars. As I described in chapter 13, the Murngin viewed human reproduction as having been the result of two separate but equally essential events. The physical (mortal) aspect of a person was the product of sexual intercourse, the "flesh" of the fetus (and the eventual living person) having come from its mother's blood, and the "bone" from its father's semen. In due course, however, the fetus was made complete by addition of a warro, a "good" soul (in contrast to its mekoi, the "bad" soul that seems to have originated along with the fetus' "flesh" and "bone"). In Murngin theory the warro was a small fish-like spirit-child, one of the many that had been created by the Dreamtime Powers and deposited by them in the area's numerous sacred waterholes. Thereafter, when one of these spiritchildren decided to surface and enter upon the human phase of its existence, it appeared (usually in a dream) to some married man, its future father, and asked for its mother, whereupon the man directed the spirit to his wife, whose vagina the spirit then entered (W. Warner 1937: 21). From native recollections collected by Warner and other ethnographers it seems that such dreams (and other experiences of spirit "finding") were in most cases recalled by men months after they occurred, when their wives first became aware of being pregnant; in other words, men (fathers-tobe) were free to "recollect" which sacred site their offspring had come from. In some cases, when the parents resided far from the father's own sacred site the child became affiliated also with one nearby, but only with one identified with another patrician of his father's patri-moiety (see below). In Warner's words: "For a father to be Yiritja and the son Dua would be impossible. No man has ever dreamed such an unorthodox concept" (ibid. 69). Of the living human members of any patrician, some were only so by virtue of their good soul (warro) having emanated from its sacred water hole, some only by virtue of their fathers having been members of it, and some by virtue of both means of affiliation. There are indications that patrifiliation—membership based solely on one's father's membership— provided more membership rights than spirit affiliation alone, but how much more is not clear. In any case, most persons owed their membership in a patrician to both. And although membership included both males and females—all Murngin were members of at least one patrician —the most active members by far were post-childhood (i.e., initiated) males. Some anthropologists recommend that a distinction be made between

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Figure 16.2. Eastern Arnhem Land: a, front and side view of a mekoi (after Mountford 1956); b, painted canoe paddles showing mekoi design (ibid.) patrifiliation and descent, reserving the latter for situations in which a person holds membership in a social unit by virtue of two or more successive kinsmen: that is, not just through, say, a father (or mother) but through a parent and a parent's parent. While the stress (in Murngin patrician membership) was on the linkage through the father (i.e., patrifiliation), some concern was also shown for links with the paternal grandfather, and so on. Thus, "A man is expected to know, and on certain ceremonial occasions to call out, the sacred names of his father, FF [father's father], FFF, and FFFF" (Shapiro 1967a: 353-354). It is this concern with descent, and in this case unilineal descent (i.e., descent

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traced through either a male or a female, but not both, line of ascendants), that has led me to call these units, patricians, even though in some cases an individual obtained membership in one or other of them by means of spirit-affiliation alone—that is, by virtue of his warro having originated in its sacred water hole (when his parents were far away from that of his father's own patrician). (Perhaps it would be useful to label the latter kind of affiliation as secondary membership, although I do not know whether in fact the Murngin themselves made such a distinction, terminologically.) The Murngin label for such units was baparru (babaruf) and the principal activity of living baparru-mates was to engage periodically in religious rites vis-a-vis their spirit-mates of their own sacred places. Such activity has led some anthropologists to call these and analogous units cult-lodges. In fact, in most such rites only the initiated male members of the patrician participated directly, but they appear to have done so on behalf of their female and uninitiated male patrician mates as well. Some reports describe patricians as "common interest" groups, especially with respect to fighting (e.g., Berndt 1955: 97), but according to another report, Murngin patricians were "almost impotent when it comes to positive [nonreligious] action" (W. Warner 1937: 389). It is little wonder that patrician mates did not—indeed, could not—act collectively except on periodic ritual occasions, inasmuch as only a few of the members of any one of them tended to reside near one another for any length of time. Men, especially, displayed attitudes of sentimental attachment to their patrician's sacred centers, and endeavored to reside near them during their declining years, but for many younger men that was not feasible, because of ecologically-influenced subsistence pressures, and because of obligations to affines (see below, and Peterson 1972; Shapiro 1981). In addition to the common interactions that patrician mates were obligated (but in many instances unable) to undertake, there was one thing that they were strictly obligated not to do among themselves, and that was to engage in heterosexual relations of any kind, including marriage —of which more anon. The patrician was the society's most important type of corporate unit, the things owned by it having been one or more sacred centers (mainly water holes), along with paraphernalia and actions used in performing rituals focused on those centers, for example, totemic increase (i.e., fertility) rites, initiations, and mortuary rites. The paraphernalia included objects (such as wooden trumpets, the "voices" of a baparru1 s totem) that were buried at the sacred center between ceremonies; emblems representative of the sacred center and which were painted on ceremony participants or on objects used during the ceremonies; and stage settings for the ceremonies (e.g., replicas of the sacred water hole fashioned in sand).

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The actions included overall ritual scenarios, song lyrics, and dance movements imitative of totemic animals. The strength and corporate exclusiveness of such ownership is indicated by recorded reactions to infringements, that is, by the killing of men who looked at totemic emblems "under improper circumstances," of women discovered watching ceremonies or even approaching too close to a sacred site, and of persons unwittingly destroying a hidden totemic emblem when burning brush in search of small game. Because direct access to a clan's goods was limited to its initiated male members, it could be argued that ownership was not fully corporate; on the other hand, the use made of those goods was evidently for benefit of the membership as a whole. Also, inasmuch as a man's right to perform specific ritual dance movements was usually inherited directly from father to son (W. Warner 1937: 70), it could be argued that such rights were not corporate to the whole clan; but again, it may be countered that those rights were exercisable only within the context of clan events. There is general agreement among ethnographers writing on the Murngin that each sacred site was owned, more or less exclusively, by a particular patrician; yet there has been considerable disagreement among those same ethnographers over where the boundaries, if any, of such estates were traditionally drawn. Some writers define them as having extended no wider than the sacred site (water hole, etc.) itself, plus enough distance around it to ensure the secrecy of its features. At the other pole is the opinion that an estate's boundaries extended outward until they abutted those of similar estates—that is, that all Murngin territory was subdivided into patricians' estates. The question is complicated by the circumstance that all Murngin tended to forage for food over areas larger than any single estate, no matter how wide the boundaries of the latter may have been. 5 In the course of their normal, mainly seasonal, movements in search of food, each household or long-standing cluster of households appears to have kept more or less within the same range, which would have included the sacred sites of several distinct patricians. But there is no information that I know of to indicate that the site owners objected to such foraging—provided of course that it was not done by known enemies, or that it did not trespass the immediate precincts of sacred sites. Nor, except for these latter restrictions, do there seem to have been any limits placed on persons' movements when circumstances required them to forage beyond their normal range. On balance, it seems reasonable to conclude that the patrician estates did not abut one another except, perhaps, in a few of the more densely populated coastal and riverine areas, and that between them elsewhere were stretches of land subject to claim by no patrician nor, as we shall see, by any other kind of social unit. As mentioned earlier, the living human members of each patrician

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were for ritual purposes divided into three categories: females, uninitiated males (i.e., boys under ten to twelve) and initiated males (including in some cases those "secondary" members whose spirits had emanated from the clan's sacred water hole but whose fathers' primary clan ties were elsewhere). Among the "primary" initiated members there were also status differences depending upon one's penetration into a clan's cult mysteries, which usually deepened with increasing age. Moreover, each clan appears to have had a principal ceremonial leader, whose authority was however limited to that domain. And finally, one writer has reported that some clans were segmented into lineages: "Within the sib [patrician] ties are, ideally, especially close between generation-mates who have a common father's father. This is expressed by mild avoidance behavior and by the sharing of liyalili—sacred names of the paternal grandfather suffixed by a term meaning 'toward' " (Shapiro 1967a: 3 5 3 - 3 5 4 ) . 6 Turning now to relations between patricians, the most comprehensive form was that which associated all of them with one or the other of the two society-wide moieties, Dua or Yiritja. (In fact, this dichotomy encompassed patricians throughout nearly all Arnhem Land.) Such units were, however, categories, not groups (see chapter 6). Each moiety—that is, the set of all the patricians constituting each of them—shared mythical traditions concerning their origins in the Dreamtime past. Thus, the Wawilak myth outlined in chapter 14 was associated more specifically with Dua origins, and the human males borne by the two sisters featured in it were believed to be the ancestors of all Dua patricians. Moreover, the ceremonies based on that myth belonged to Dua patricians; members of clans of the opposite, Yiritja, moiety usually participated in those ceremonies but they were led by Dua men. More than that: all entities mentioned in the myth were associated with Dua, totemically, as were all other things identified one way or another with those entities. For example, all red parrots were Dua because of the association of the prototypic red parrot with the creator sisters; from that all red feathers were Dua, as were baskets decorated with red feathers, and so forth. By this logic, according to W. Warner, every individualized entity known by the Murngin was either Dua or Yiritja: "There is nothing in the whole universe—plant, animal, mineral, star, man or culture [i.e., artifacts, etc.] that has not a place in one of the two categories" (1937: 30). 7 Within each moiety there were also some smaller congeries of clans. Thus, in some cases, certain clans of a moiety were considered specially interrelated because their members spoke the same dialect (muta), or because of their common source in a particular episode of one or another of a moiety's myth. As Warner reports, however, such intramoiety and interclan unions were not solid enough to still the rivalry among their men for women of the other moiety (1937: 34). On the other hand, there was one kind of intramoiety, interclan linkage that functioned actively

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and more or less smoothly. Anthropologists have labeled this the semimoiety linkage, and since it had to do mainly with marriage, it will be discussed later on after more details regarding marriage have been given. In addition to the above links between patricians as corporate units, every Murngin had important individual rights in two clans other than his own—his mother's brothers' and his mother's mother's brothers'. In fact, so significant were such links that all of the "sisters' sons" of a man's patrician were categorized as a unit, as were all "sisters' daughters' sons" as well. 8 The nature of these relationships will be described below. The discussion so far has been about relations between patricians of the same moiety, either Dua or Yiritja. There were also occasions on which representatives of opposite-moiety patricians interacted. Those occasions were religious ceremonies, many of which actually required cooperation by members of both moieties, the one side performing the ritual actions (dances, etc.), the other stage-managing them. We must now retrace our steps somewhat and look more closely into the relationships among members of a patrician, as viewed by an individual member, to whom I shall give the time-honored genealogical label of Ego. Mention has already been made of such intraclan structural features as (ceremonial) leadership, lineage segmentation, and the division between initiated males on the one hand, and uninitiated males and females on the other, so I turn now to dyads, to the kinds of behaviors that Murngin rules prescribed for relations between Ego and his genealogically traced or reputed patrician kin. First, some words about kin classification in general. Looked at from a biologist's viewpoint, most every human has had, and eventually will have, a mother, a father (who is either his biological genitor, or mother's husband, etc.), a sister and a brother, a son and a daughter: a total of eight types of primary consanguineal kinfolk. Moreover, each such individual will have sixteen types of secondary consanguineal relatives (i.e., primary relatives of his primary relatives: father's father, father's mother, son's son, son's daughter, etc.); thirty-two types of tertiary consanguines; and so forth. Now, in every known human society relationships of parenthood and siblingship have been recognized and made the basis of labeling and of behavior norms. And in every one of them individuals have or have had relationships, however fleeting, with consanguines known by them to be genealogically removed at least to a tertiary degree. Thus, in the course of his or her life most persons will deal with other persons, believed to be consanguines, who, from a genealogical viewpoint, constitute some sixty or more kin-types; and in most known societies, there are labels for all of them and rules regarding how one ought to behave toward them. And in every known human society principles have been adopted for lumping certain kin-types into a smaller number of kin-classes.

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In addition to labels and behavior rules for a person's (Ego's) kin-types recognized as his consanguines, all societies have rules regarding behavior between Ego and some of his affines, and most of them have distinctive labels for whole kin-classes of affines. Needless to say, societies differ widely with respect to which kin- and affine-types they class together. In English, for example, an individual has only one "father,"9 whereas in many other societies a single (kin-class) word is used not only for the kin-type signified by English "father" but for other kin-types as well: for example, for what in English would be "paternal uncles" (i.e., father's brothers and male first-cousins, etc.). Describing those differences and trying to account for them has been a central endeavor of anthropology. One of the major questions that continues to concern writers on this subject is, Why and by what historical processes have such-and-such a people come to class together kin- and affine-types who by many other peoples (including those of Englishspeaking societies) are classified in different ways. For example, in societies in which "father" includes a wide class of kin-types, did all such relatives, including the individual perceived to be one's own genitor, comprise one undifferentiated conceptual category? Or, was that category put together, conceptually and historically, by the process of beginning with one's own genitor and extending the word "father" to include all persons who were defined as being genitor-like in some respect—for example, to all of a "father's" male siblings, then to all of a father's samegeneration lineage mates. (This question is not to be confused with the one concerning the process whereby individuals born into a society actually learn the class "content" of such words. Perhaps the most usual process of this kind consists of extension: a child first learns to apply the term "father" to the man perceived to be his genitor—if the latter happens to be around!—and then is taught to extend it to whatever other father-like adult next appears, say, his genitor's brother, and so on.) A second major question addressed by many writers on this subject is, Do the "official" rules (norms) of a society actually regard all of the kinand affine-types classed together by their language to be entitled to the same kind of behavior? (For example, should a "son" behave the same way toward all his "fathers"?) Again, this question is not to be confused with how such-and-such an individual actually—existentially—behaves. (There is ample evidence, from Oceania at least, that individuals do not always abide by their society's verbalized rules in this respect, and that they often differ from one another in the ways in which they respect or violate such rules.) In this and subsequent chapters there will be little said about individuals' nonconformity with their society's kinship and affinity rules, and nothing about how individuals learned those rules; nor will much be said about the conceptual and historical bases for any particular kin-classifi-

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catory scheme. The focus in the following descriptions of kinship and affinity will be on a society's most "official" verbalized rules; to do more than that would be impractical in a survey as extensive as the one attempted in this book. Next, it should be noted that in this and subsequent listings of kin and affinal relationship terms, only referential ones will be given. In many cases some of a society's terms of reference will also be used for address— for example, an English-speaker may use father both for addressing his own genitor and for referring to him, or to the genitor of someone else (e.g., "Father, may I have the car tonight?" or "My father said such-andsuch," or "John's father said such-and-such"). But in a number of other cases different terms will be used for address and reference: an Englishspeaker will usually refer to a spouse as "my wife" or "John's wife," but will usually address his own spouse by a different term, such as "dear" or "honey," or by her personal name. In their studies of the terms used in various societies for kinsmen and affines, anthropologists have focused on referential ones, mainly because they are usually more unambiguously denotive than are terms of address. Finally, it is necessary to raise—but impossible to answer—the question as to whether the categories now under discussion (and their identifying labels) have to do with, and only with, relationships of what English-speakers usually mean by "consanguinity." Anthropologists have been debating this question for decades. Those on one side hold that such terms refer only or mainly to what the users view as genealogically related categories of persons: that when a term glossed as "father" is applied to a category that contains one's reputed genitor and certain other persons as well, the primary referent is the former, and that the term has been extended to such other persons whose genealogical relationships to Ego are perceived to be "genitor-like." On the other side in this debate are those writers who hold that such categories have little if anything to do with genealogy: that, say, a term glossed by their debateopponents as "father" should instead be glossed as "authority figure," one (but only one) exemplar of which is a person's reputed genitor (or, in some cases, the husband of a person's mother). From my position on the sidelines I suggest that the answer to this question lies not in scholarly debate but in more probing field research. I would not be surprised if such research turned up some cases in support of the "genealogists," some in support of their opponents, and many cases of mixture in between. Meanwhile, in the absence of such studies I shall continue to label such relationships kinship, with the caveat that they may not conform to common English usage of that word. 10 And to readers who may consider this matter too technical, or too trivial, let me add that technical it is but trivial it is not. Information on what a people mean by their various "kinship" terms constitutes a very important—in the case of Oceanian peo-

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pies perhaps the most important—part of what anthropologists call the structure of their societies. Even in the case of the well-studied Murngin such information, while much better than average, is not yet sufficient to reveal the full meanings of all their many "kinship" terms. Some things can however be said with a fair amount of credibility about Murngin kin terms in general: 1. They were without exception polysemic, that is, each one of them had at least two meanings, one "primary" (or "focal"), another "secondary" (or "nonfocal") (Scheffler 1978; Shapiro 1979: 5 5 - 5 6 ) . 2. In most if not all cases, one of their meanings denoted (or at least connoted) a relationship of (reputed) consanguinity and/or affinity (or at least potential affinity). 3. To the extent that their meanings had to do with relationships of (perceived) consanguinity, it was customary (when necessary) for a speaker to distinguish genealogical distance by use of adjectives meaning "close" and "distant." The Murngin kin-term system (see Fig. 16.3) consisted of twenty-four classes of kin-types each labeled by a separate term. 11 However, this relatively large number of terms can be reduced by recognizing that certain of them are grammatically related (e.g., mari and marikmo, mokul-bapa and mokul-rumeru, nati and natiwalker) and probably, it appears, semantically so as well. In other words, we have here "super-classes." Indeed, the whole array of terms has been further generalized by H. W. Scheffler into four so-called "super-classes," each of them composed around one basic type of dyad. 12 Some of Scheffler's penetrating analytic views will be mentioned later on, but rather than devote the many pages that would be required to do justice to his methods and findings, I shall describe Murngin kinship dyads mainly in terms of a hypothetical Ego's membership in or relations to certain social units.13 All the units in question are patricians, and the ones to be discussed are, from Ego's point of view, his own, that of his mother's brothers, and that of his mother's mother's brothers; and each unit played important parts in a Murngin's social life. From the viewpoint of our hypothetical Ego, his (or her) own patrician contained the following classes of kinsmen, more explicitly consanguine kin. And there can be no doubt that most clanmates 14 believed themselves to be interrelated by consanguineous ties: bapa:gatu (father¡child) This notation signifies that a child, male or female, refers to (or calls) his or her "father" bapa, and the latter refers to (or calls) his child, male or female, gatu. mokul bapa:gatu (father's sistenbrother's child)

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marikmo:maraitcha (father's parent:son's child) wawa:yukiyuko (older brother.-younger brother) yeppa:yeppa (sister:sister) yeppa:wawa (sister:older brother) yeppa:yukiyuko (sistenyounger brother) And now I will explicate these dyads. bapa:gatu (father:child). The Murngin distinguished several kinds of "father." In their order of importance to the "child" they were: (1) the child's reputed genitor and the person who had guided the child's unborn spirit to his mother's womb (that is, his father); (2) the same-genitor brothers of (1); (3) other male members of the child's patrician of the same generation as (l); 1 5 (4) "fathers" from nearby patricians; (5) "fathers" from remote patricians (W. Warner 1937: 67). It is not clear from Warner's account what the bases were for the relationships specified under (4) and (5). In any case, only "fathers" of the first three kinds seem to have been of much importance to a person, and of those the one whom the Murngin called "finder"—the one who "found" the person's spiritchild (Shapiro 1979: 57)—was especially so, not only in a spiritual sense but in mundane matters as well. It was a person's finder-father who supplied the bulk of the animal food eaten by a child during childhood. And while a Murngin possessed few material goods to pass on after death, some of a man's most valuable immaterial possessions usually went to his eldest son (e.g., his right to perform clan totemic dances, his office of leadership in clan ceremonies). Also, a finder-father made many of the important decisions affecting his children (e.g., deciding when a son was to be initiated); on the other hand he did not discipline them, having left that to other relatives. A child was no less important to its finder-father than the latter to the child. As mentioned earlier, marriage alone did not confer "adult" status on a man; that had to await the attainment of "fatherhood," which was signified by evidence of pregnancy of a man's wife. Until then a childless man was subject to several restrictive food taboos. In addition, by having a living child, a man reinforced his own social relationships with other kinsmen and affines: with his wife's brother (who became his son's potential father-in-law); with his own father-in-law (who became his son's potential mari, see below); with his sister's husband (who became his daughter's potential father-in-law); etcetera. In other words, ". . . instead of only one direct reciprocal relation, he now has an additional indirect reciprocation with each" (W. Warner 1937: 69). (In kin-based societies such as the Murngin—which is to say in most other Oceanian societies as well—the circumstance in which pairs of individuals were interrelated by more than one kind of kinship link, was very prevalent, and served either to "strengthen" or, in cases where the

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prescribed behaviors were conflicting, to "weaken" relationships. Having called attention to this circumstance here I will not do so again except for especially salient examples of it, but the reader should bear in mind that it was widespread.) Having a son was perhaps more useful to a man than having a daughter, but the advantages deriving from the latter were not small. First, in view of the high value attached by men to having as many wives as possible, a marriageable daughter was a socially useful resource. Although fathers had little ¿/«-based authority over the affiancing of their daughters (see below), they were often able to exert influence in such decisions. And no matter which individual became a man's actual son-in-law, the relationship between them was of such positive value to the former that he was at pains to preserve the marriage—for example, by sending his daughter back to her husband if she ran away (provided that the husband had not mistreated her too "harshly" even in terms of the Murngin's latitude in this regard). Death of a father meant less in practical terms to a child than the other way round. There were usually closely related siblings or "brothers" of the father to take over many of the latter's duties, including in most cases becoming the husband of the child's widowed mother. mokul bapa:gatu (father's sister:brother's child). The various types of mokul bapa corresponded to those of bapa. She was looked upon as a kind of female "father" (e.g., nurturer, helpful, etc.); but even in the case of the "closest" of such "female fathers" there may have been little everyday contact between them on account of their having resided, usually, in separate communities (except after death when, if they were patrician mates, their spirits occupied the same water hole). Because of their membership in the same moiety, sexual relations were forbidden between a male and his mokul bapa, however distant; otherwise relations between the two were subject to no restraints. marikmo:maraitcha (father's parents:son's child). When any genealogically close "grandchild" of this dyad was young, it is reasonable to assume that the pair enjoyed good and mutually helpful relations, but few marikmo would have lived long enough to interact with an adult true grandchild. In fact, the most important role played by a marikmo (in this case a grandfather) vis-a-vis his grandchild was after the death of both of them, at which time the soul of the former guided and protected the soul of the latter in its return to their common patrician sacred well. wawa:yukiyuko (older brothenyounger brother). The Murngin distinguished seven variants of this very important dyad, ranging from sons of the same mother and finder-father, to those described by Warner as "brothers from more remote clans and tribes" (ibid. 60). In general, "Own brothers through one father and one mother or father's brothers and mother's sisters are one's best friends and most like one socially"

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(ibid. 61). Such brothers often resided near one another and cooperated in hunting, in fabricating things, and so on. Although each one owned his own tools and weapons, they customarily shared in their use. "Brothers," however distant, were also expected to avoid fighting one another, and among those belonging to the same patrician peaceful relations did usually prevail. But fighting was not at all uncommon between "brothers" of different clans, usually over rivalry for women—a strain so powerful that it occasionally provoked fighting between patrician "brothers" as well. Thus far our emphasis has been on the social equivalence of "brothers"; in the case of own brothers or close "brothers" however, a distinction was made, both in terminology and in rights and duties, between the members of any pair of them on the basis of relative age. For example, a father's most valued goods, such as his title to leadership in patrician ceremonies, were usually inherited by his eldest son. But more important than these inheritances was the right of the eldest of a whole set of brothers to receive the daughters—all the daughters—of their common mokul rumeru, that is, their potential mother-in-law. In practice, the eldest brother accepted only the first two or so of that woman's daughters, and assigned any additional ones to his younger brother(s), but the decision to do so was his alone. Altruism, born of affection, doubtless motivated some of that generosity, but Murngin men evidently realized that a wifeless younger brother posed a threat not only to the fidelity of their own wives but to the wives of other clanmates as well, and hence a threat to community peace. In some cases (for motives such as those just mentioned) an elder brother with several wives gave one or two of them to a younger brother; this, in a sense, merely anticipated what would eventually take place. That is to say, in the event of a man's death, his widows became the wives of his surviving brother(s) (who in perhaps most cases would have been younger than the deceased). Thus younger brothers also had their rights in such matters, but rights that also constituted duties, especially in the case of a relatively young brother having to assume responsibility for supporting the elderly widow of an elder brother. yeppa.-yeppa (sister:sister). The Murngin distinguished six variants of this dyad: (1) sisters having the same father and mother as well as the same husband; (2) those having the same father and mother but different husbands; (3) those having the same husband but different parents; (4) wives of same-generation patrician mates; (5) "sisters" of "near-clans" (?); (6) "sisters" of "distant clans" (?). Here is Warner's description of such dyads: "There are no taboos between sisters. Younger sisters are disciplined and protected by the older ones. The older ones also teach the younger ones how to make baskets, earn a living, and do the things they should as members of Murngin culture" (ibid. 67). When one recalls

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what an important role women played in Murngin food economy, this statement seems altogether too perfunctory. While it is true that men played more important public roles in Murngin society, especially in religious matters, and that females were largely subjected to the authority of males, the short measure given to females' activities in this otherwise admirable account is regrettable—fortunately, however, it has been corrected somewhat by reports on the same or nearby peoples by R. M. and C. Berndt (1951), J. Goodale (1971), and F. McCarthy and M. McArthur (1960). yeppa:wawa and yukiyuko (sistenolder and younger brother). There were the same variants of yeppa as of wawa and yukiyuko, and except for the term used by the sister the prescribed behavior between her and her brothers was the same whether the latter were younger or older. In essence, the relationship was one of mutual affection and concern qualified by stringent taboos. Regarding the latter, after infancy they did not sleep in the same "house" nor speak directly to one another. Within one another's hearing they spoke in low voices and without obscenities. A man was permitted to utter obscenities before most other females (e.g., his mother, his father's mother), but was required to prevent even other persons from uttering obscenities within hearing of his sister when he was present. Hearing obscenities in front of a sister was called mirriri (ear-thing), and it usually provoked the brother to give vent to his annoyance and anger by throwing spears—not at the utterer but at the sister (and to all other "sisters" of his nearby)! (According to Warner, the Murngin acknowledged the unfairness of this, but to have thrown spears at the man who uttered the obscenity would have provoked a dangerous intracommunity fight—and brothers were privileged to abuse their sisters.) A brother was also expected to protect his sister and look out for her welfare, but he was her harshest chastiser if she committed adultery. Indeed, he was expected to beat her if he witnessed her copulating even with her own husband—which he was careful to avoid doing. Finally, since brothers looked to their sisters to supply them with sons for their own daughters to marry, they were expected to give their sisters presents from time to time. This leads us into a discussion of a Murngin male's relationship with members of the patrician of his mother (or, in Murngin terms, of the latter's brother), which members included the following dyads: arndi:waku, gawehwaku, nati:kaminer, momo-.kaminer, due{ma\t):galle(ma\c), due{iemale):galle{female). arndi:waku (mother:child). In the Murngin view the "closest" of such relationships was that between a woman and her own offspring. Next in "closeness" to a person were a mother's own sisters who were also her cowives, then the wives of the father's brothers, and after that other "mothers" from "nearby clans." Relationships between waku and "close" arndi

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were described as being mutually affectionate and helpful. In Warner's words, "There are no taboos between a mother and her children except sexual ones" (ibid. 96). In this case, however, the taboo was occasionally violated between a man and a "distant" mother; such an action was considered wrong but not perhaps as wrong as sex between moiety-mates (which, of course, mother and son never were). Figure 16.3 indicates that a male also called his son's wife (and the daughter of his wife's brother) arndi. These linked categories of persons occupied different positions in a person's kin-type network but, Warner added, ". . . the general behavior toward [them] would be the same as toward the true mother" (ibid. 98). The mention of this feature of Murngin kin classification necessitates some further discussion, which will be relevant to our portrayals of other Oceanian kin-classification systems as well; I refer to what some experts call "equivalence rules," namely, the principles according to which two or more different kintypes are merged into a single kin-class. Every known kin-classification system makes use of such principles, but there are some wide differences among them with respect to which kin-types are so merged. Thus, in the kin-classification system of English-speaking peoples, while a distinction is made between one's siblings (brother, sister) and one's same-generation collaterals, all types of the latter (male and female, matrilateral and patrilateral, first, second, third, etc.) are merged into the single category cousin. And while there may be a widespread attitude to the effect that "first" cousins require "different" behavior from "second" cousins, that "difference" remains largely uncodified. In contrast to English, many kin-classification systems distinguish between matrilateral and patrilateral "cousins" and merge one's siblings with one or the other of them, or, for example, some Polynesian systems merge siblings and all types of cousins together. But now back to the Murngin. The instance that led off this discussion, the use of the term arndi for both mother and son's wife, is an example of equating, quite common in the Murngin system and in most other Australian kin-classification systems as well. It can be called the principle of equivalence of alternate generations. In the Murngin system it serves to reduce the number of kin categories in all kin-lines (patricians) other than one's own, especially with respect to distant kin-types, toward whom finer nuances of behavior were not ordinarily required. Figure 16.3 reveals this and some other rules that operated in that system, either to equate or distinguish types of relationships, for example: (1) the (terminological) equivalence of all siblings—full, half and step—and of near patrilateral cousins; (2) application of the same term to both male and female kinfolk in several parts of the system; (3) application of the term spouse to the spouses of all siblings and patrilateral cousins. For further information on this aspect of Murngin and other Austra-

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lian kin-classification systems the reader is referred to H. Scheffler's tour de force, Australian Kin Classification (1978). The subject is too technical to condense in a form appropriate for the present book; my reason for mentioning it at all is to draw attention to one more way in which Oceanian societies resembled or differed from one another. As to the more important question, concerning the degree to which Oceanian peoples in general patterned their behavior toward relatives in keeping with the category labels applied to them, no comprehensive answer can be given. In the case of the Murngin it would appear that they did tend to suit their actions to their words in the case of near relatives (which they were also able to distinguish by qualifying words meaning "near"), but behavior vis a vis more distant relatives tended to become adjusted to expediency, especially in matters of sex and in situations of conflict. gawel:waku (mother's brother ¡sister's child). Among the several kintypes comprising this category of dyads the most salient was the relationship between a male and that brother of his own mother who was also his actual or prospective father-in-law. As noted in chapter 14, Murngin males obtained wives for themselves in a number of ways: capture, elopement, inheritance (of widows of deceased brothers), and contractual arrangement. With respect to the latter, the ideal and most usual method of arranging has come to be called "mother-in-law bestowal"—that is, a female was assigned to be a male's prospective mother-in-law (his mokuromeru), by which act she was obligated to betroth her daughters, all of them, to that male. The person prescribed to become a male's mother-inlaw was the daughter of his mother's mother's brother (his mari); she was also (ideally but not absolutely necessarily) the actual or prospective wife of his mother's brother (his gawel). In most instances the female bestowed as a mother-in-law was herself a young and unmarried girl when the arrangement was made, and although the contract was sanctioned by sentiments of social morality, there was enough leeway in it to provide the male relatives of the bestowed mother-in-law (especially her husband, who was the expectant son-in-law's gawel) with some influence over its execution. Thus it behooved a prospective son-in-law to maintain the goodwill of his future father-in-law, his gawel, and that he customarily did by means of a flow of presents—material objects and services throughout the period of "engagement," and afterwards as well. It is worthy of remark about this and other Australian societies, where there were few material goods available for extra-household exchange, that control over the bestowal of females as mothers-in-law and wives carried with it a large amount of economic and political power. Although females were ideally "distributed" according to norms of kinship, there was enough leeway in those norms to permit men to bargain and compete. 16 Unlike most other Murngin dyads, for which social significance

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tended to become attenuated with kinship "distance," the relationship between a male and his distant gawel—distant in both kinship and spatial senses—contained a potential of considerable social magnitude. As described in chapter 12, while the wide-ranging type of exchange-partnership known as kumuryanna marnda ("breast-to-breast those two") took place between several of dyadic pairs, persons in the gawel-waku relationship were especially prominent in that exchange. "All men try to have as many waku as they can. Presents are constantly being exchanged between the two, not to acquire material wealth so much as to extend a man's sphere of influence beyond the nearby clans . . . waku and gawel often visit each other and their behavior demonstrates real friendship when they meet" (W. Warner 1937: 95). nati:kaminer (mother's fathendaughter's child). In the case of a male, his close nati, more than most other kinsmen, had the right and duty to "correct his manners and regulate his conduct" (ibid. 99). Toward female kaminer, though, the nati of their own mother's patrician had to be more circumspect. Whereas more distantly related nati and female kaminer were in many instances lovers (having belonged to opposite moieties they were not prohibited from being so), it was considered improper for a man to engage in sex with a woman of his daughter's son's patrician, and thus he had to avoid even the appearance of intimacy with any of those kaminer. momo:kaminer. This dyadic terminology was evidently applied to two pairs of kin-types, to mother's father's sister:brother's daughter's child, and to father's mother:son's child. (In the case of consistently "correct" marriages, however, the persons in question would have been identical.) As with nati and female kaminer, sexual relations were considered improper between a momo and a male kaminer of her "son's" or brother's daughter's husband's patrician. Otherwise, this kind of relationship had little social significance. due(ma\e):galle(fema\e). The primary meaning of this kind of dyadic relationship was marriageability. As has been repeatedly remarked, the ideal wife for a man was a member of his mother's patrician: the daughter of his mother's brother or the daughter's daughter of her mother's brother; if, however, that were not possible or practicable, marriage to some other more distant galle would do. Having dealt at some length in chapter 14 with the Murngin husbandwife relationship, I will say no more about it here. Instead, I must recall that a male had many female galle (and a female many male due) other than his actual wife; and I can add that copulation between such pairs constituted the most usual and the least censured form of "illicit" sex. The only case of this kind that met with more than mild public reproof was an affair between a man and an older brother's wife—another instance of this society's bias in favor of the rights of "older" over "younger" when a comparison was made.

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Figure 16.4. Yirrkalla, bark painting: Dua journey of the dead (after Mountford 1956) due{male):galle{male) (father's sister's son:mother's brother's son). The closest of this kind of relationship was between the sons of own father's sister's and mother's brother's who were also actual brothers-inlaw. Though members of different patricians, males linked in this way engaged in many enterprises together. Next to brothers, theirs was the strongest kind of relationship between same-generation males. due(iema\e):galle(iema\e). Potentially the closest variant of this kind of relationship was between actual sisters-in-law, but whether that potential was realized depended upon the exigencies of residence. Little is recorded regarding the remaining dyads of this same-generation interclan set of links, except that they were unlikely to have had many direct interactions (ibid. 93). Turning now to relationships between Ego and members of the patrician of his mother's mother's brother, the relationship between a male (a kutara) and the patrician of his mother's mother and her brother (i.e., his mari, female and male) was focused upon the latter's obligation to provide him with a prospective mokul rumeru, a mother-in-law, and hence ultimately a wife. The fact that the two clans belonged to the same moiety meant that their members could not intermarry, which resulted in some competition between them for women from opposite-moiety clans. But it also fostered cooperation between them in religious ceremonies. In

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addition to those intergroup relations there were certain patterns of behavior that prevailed between individual kin-types. Of these the most important were mari:kutara, mokul rumeru :gurrong, and marelker:gurrong. mari:kutara (mother's mother, mother's mother's brother ¡woman's daughter's child, man's sister's daughter's child). Of this set of dyads, the links between female mari and their close female kutara were of some social significance on account of the older women's "grandmotherly" and generally affectionate relations with the younger. A male mari was also important to his kutara (his own sister's daughter's children), both male and female, because, for example, they received their personal names from him, and it was his "good" soul (along with that of their father's father) that helped theirs to return to their clan water hole. In addition, the relationships between living male mari and kutara were characterized by an exchange of services and valued objects. However, the most significant thing about this dyadic relationship was the fact that a man's (closest) mari was father of the man's potential mokul rumeru (mother-inlaw), and was himself gawel (father-in-law) of the man's potential gawel. Thus, the older man was in a position to exert pressure upon the latter to turn over their daughters to his kutara. As we have seen, the rules prescribed that they do so, but a girl's parents sometimes violated those rules for material or political advantage, so that it was crucial for a man that his mari be a sympathetic ally in the highly important Murngin social game of acquiring wives. In Warner's words: A man's whole position, security and well-being demand that he have a number of wives and children; he must look t o gawel and mokul [rumeru] for the fruition of his wishes; if his mari and he are on g o o d terms, which nearly always holds true, his mari will force those two to help him. In other words, the relations with w h o m ego is weakest are those with w h o m his mari is strongest, and the latter's position in both power and relationship is exactly the opposite of his kutara's. (ibid. 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 )

Put in other, more "structural," terms, the "strongest" relationships in Murngin society were those within patricians and the "weakest" were those between clans of opposite moieties that were dependent upon each other for wives (as exemplified in the potentially equivocal relationship between gawel and waku). Herein lay the structural importance of the mari:kutara relationship: if it were amicable and "strong" it served to keep opposite-moiety clans allied through stable affinal ties; if "weak," it permitted such units not merely to remain unallied but encouraged active hostility between them (i.e., sparked by a waku's being deprived of the wife owed him). In other words, the mari.-kutara relationship was fraught with political significance.

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mokul rumeru:gurrong (mother's mother's brother's daughter:(female speaking) father's sister's daughter's child). For both males and females, their mokul rumeru was a kind of father's sister, a member of their own (and their father's) moiety, and a female of their father's own generation (but not necessarily close to the latter's own chronological age). In behavioral terms the relationship between a mokul rumeru and her female gurrong had no social significance to speak of, but her relationship with her male gurrong was very important indeed, and had to do with marriage. A male's mokul rumeru were his potential (or prospective, or actual) mothers-in-law, a circumstance that was described in chapter 14. There were five types of relationships within this dyadic class. (1) The actual daughter of Ego's mother's mother's brother and mother of Ego's wife; (2) the mothers of Ego's wives from distant clans; (3) the daughters of actual man (mother's mother's brother) but not the mothers of Ego's wives; (4) the daughters of near mart; and (5) the daughters of mart from distant clans. Of these "The two most important [were] the first and second, the third having [had] a very strong emotional content; but as regards taboos the behavior toward all of them [was] more or less the same" (ibid. 101). In a word, all these relationships were characterized by total mutual avoidance: "He cannot speak to her; she cannot speak to him. He does not look at her; she does not look at him. They do not hand any article to each other or use each other's names. Should they meet on a path they each turn aside and walk past with their eyes averted . . ." (ibid. 102). Prior to a gurrong's circumcision, and after his mokul rumeru had become very elderly, these avoidance rules were relaxed; otherwise, "Should a mokul [rumeru] or gurrong disobey any of the taboos unwittingly (it would happen in no other way) a sore or large swelling would appear in the groin of the offender" (ibid. 102). However, avoidance did not signify animosity. On the contrary, their indirect relationship was described as having been most pleasant: "A man is proud of his mokul [rumeru], and boasts of her kindness to him. She always sends him food and her most prized possessions through her daughter, and he sends presents to her through his wife. She, too, is equally proud of her gurrong, and tells of his many kindnesses to her" (ibid.). More importantly, if a man's wife misbehaved, her mother (his mokul rumeru) would discipline her. On the other hand, if a man mistreated his wife, her mother would have taken her back home. Thus, a man was heavily dependent upon the goodwill of his mokul rumeru, not only for regulating and retaining his wife after marrying her but for obtaining her as a wife, for a man's gawel and his mokul rumeru (the gaweFs wife) were in a position to deny him their daughter if they so chose. marelker:gurrong (mother's mother's brother's son: father's sister's daughter's child). A person's marelker was described as a "kind of father":

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he was of the same generation as a bapa, his moiety was the same, and he was married to a woman labeled arndi ('mother'). However, the most important potential of this set of dyadic relationships occurred where a male's marelker was brother to his potential or prospective mother-in-law (mokul rumeru). As such, the marelker was in a position (like the gawel) to exercise influence over betrothal of his sister's daughter. With this we have completed the list of named categories of relatives who were members of patricians with which a Murngin had more or less direct relations: his own, that of his mother's brother, and that of his mother's mother's brother. In addition, however, the language provided labels for some other categories of relatives who belonged to opposite moiety clans and who were not linked to a person by direct affinal ties. These were momelker (applied to a female) and natiwalker (applied to a male), and their reciprocal dumungur. The perceived similarities of such clans to that of a person's mother's brother (or sister's son) were indicated not only by the use of gawel, arndi, and waku for some of their members but by the reported fact that the term momo was sometimes substituted for momelkar (momo-elker?), nati for natiwalker (natiwelker?), and kaminer for dumungur (due-mungur?) (Scheffler 1 9 7 8 : 2 9 3 - 2 9 4 ) . Earlier in this account of Murngin social organization I mentioned a kind of interclan relationship that anthropologists label semi-moiety. Whereas the terms and relationships just described had to do with those between individuals, the semi-moiety system concerned relations between entire clans. In this system, every clan was related to every other clan in one of four ways, signified by the terms mari (which for an individual also means mother's mother or mother's mother's brother), arndi (mother), yeppa (sister), and waku (sister's child). The most succinct description of this system was provided by Warren Shapiro: The semimoiety organization is essentially a formalization of the four socially recognized kinds of interclan relationship in a marriage network. The clans of my own semimoiety are [yeppa'mattji17] ("sisters") and have, ideally, no direct marriage relationship with each other. Those of the opposite semimoiety of my own moiety [yeppa'manji], among themselves, are mari'manji (in the mother's mother's brothensister's daughter's son relationship) to the clans of my own semimoiety; they supply us with mothers-in-law, and we do the same for them. They also give their women as wives to the semimoiety of the opposite moiety that gives us its women as wives; the sibs [i.e., clans] of this latter semimoiety [yeppa'manji], among themselves, are the [arndi] ("mother") [clans] of my own semimoiety. The final semimoiety consists of [clans] that are waku ("sister's sons") to my own unit. Our women go there as wives, and these [clans'] own women go as wives to the opposite semimoiety of my own moiety. These waku [clans] are, of course [yeppa'manji] among themselves. (1967b: 354)

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On the basis of the marital preferences just outlined, both interindividual and interclan, and reinforced by a disinclination by Murngin males to marry females of the clans into which their own sisters had married, the marital relation between specific clans tended to be asymmetric: in anthropological jargon, a clan "gave" wives to one clan, and "took" wives from a different one. There were however some exceptions to this tendency, wherein two neighboring clans (of opposite moieties, of course) both "took" from and "gave" wives to each other—in other words, their relations were symmetric in this respect. As to whether or not such transactions constituted "exchange," that would have depended upon the motives of the persons who arranged the marriages (including those who had "bestowed the mothers-in-law"); in any case, I know of no reported instances in Australia of the kind of explicit woman-forwoman (including sister-for-sister) exchange that is known to have occurred in some societies of Melanesia. According to Shapiro women usually "circulated" (as wives) among clans associated with territories that were nearby. "In some cases, the total marriage network is limited, consisting of four or six [clans] "marrying in a circle" and associated with territories covering only a small part of northeastern Arnhem Land. From another point of view, however, most of the [clans] in the entire Murngin area constitute a single large marriage network which may or may not be closed" (ibid. 354). 1 8 And now we must turn to another facet of Murngin social relations (and of many other Australian societies as well), one that has stimulated much scholarly discussion (including disagreement about what it actually "is" and "does"). I refer here to a way of categorizing kinsmen in addition to, but related to, those just discussed. Anthropologists have labeled such categories "sections" (or "subsections"). Not all Australian societies made use of this form of social classification, and there was some variation among those doing so with respect to, for example, the number of categories delimited (i.e., either four sections or eight subsections) and their functions. In the Murngin case there were eight; in view of that it will be more convenient to begin with a description of a simpler four-section system, that of the Nyul-Nyul people (Kimberley area of northwest Australia) wherein every person was at birth assigned to one or another of four named sections—Panaka, Burong, Karimba, or Paldjeri (note well that sections were categories of persons, not groups)—and the system operated according to the following scheme: ( = marriage; -*• filiation)

C

Panaka = Burong Karimba = Paldjeri

^^

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"Correct" intermarriage took place only between Panaka and Burong, and between Karimba and Paldjeri. Note, however, that sectional organization did not regulate all marriages: for example, while Panaka contained the kin-class of females most appropriate for a Burong man to marry, there were other classes of kinsmen in Panaka whom a Burong man could not marry, and vice versa. Sections did however regulate matrifiliation, and hence descent, but only indirectly: the child of a female member of Burong always became a Paldjeri, and the child of a female member of Panaka, a Karimba. (And so on, vice versa.) In other words, descent (i.e., membership) in the section system was through the mother but not in the mother's direct line. (The fact that it was through the mother and not through the father is certified by the circumstance that if a child's father had married "incorrectly," say, a woman of the Paldjeri section rather than one of the Burong, the child would have been a Burong.) One function performed by the section system was to lump together into four named categories (or eight in the case of a subsection system, such as the Murngin's) the much larger number of kin-classes that composed any society's kinship array. Thus, among the Nyul-Nyul, if our hypothetical Ego had been a Panaka he would have shared membership with ten other kin-classes of kinsmen (e.g., mother, sister, mother's mother's brother, son's children, etc.), his wife's section (i.e., Burong) contained eleven kin-classes, and his mother's and father's sections (Karimba and Paldjeri) eight each. Ideally, our Ego was required to apply a different term toward each of those kinds (i.e., kin-classes) of kinsmen, and such would have been practicable (and necessary) within his own and neighboring communities, where faces were familiar. However, the task of distinguishing so many kin-classes of relatives was not practicable on those occasions when members of different societies (and speakers of different languages or dialects) met together to hold ceremonies or to conduct harvests of seasonal foods. In such cases one need know only another's section (or subsection) membership (section or subsection names having been uniform over areas comprising many societies and languages) in order to know what term to use. Thus, the section system was a useful kind of shorthand for simplifying identification among "kinsmen" within congeries of societies where kinship was the most definitive, indeed virtually the only, attribute available for identifying unfamiliar persons. To know another person's section (or subsection) was also to know whether he (or she) was marriageable. Thus, a Panaka man would have known that a woman from Burong might be so (as stated earlier, not all Burong women would have been so). Some writers have stated or implied that, in addition to the matter of marriageability, to know a person's section or subsection affiliation was to know how to behave toward him (or

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her) in other respects as well. 19 But I have been unable to discover (in my admittedly perfunctory search) any detailed examples of what such behavior would have been. (Thus, while a Nyul-Nyul member of Panaka married to a Burong woman would have known that his own children (by that woman) were Paldjeris, would he have behaved toward all Paldjeri as if they were his "children," even though Paldjeri contained some of his "fathers," "wife's mothers," etc.?) In some Australian societies sections figured in ceremonies, but it is not clear to me how they served to define correct "everyday behavior" except with respect to kinship terms and, to some extent, marriageability. In fact, in some societies it appears that the adoption of the section system by one people from another—in many known instances a quite recent event—was due in part to a desire for novelty, in the domain of what was a widespread Australian propensity for taxonomic intellectual "games." Or, as in the case of the Walbiri (Central Desert), who adopted the section system only during the last century and whose kin-classes and rules had already performed the functions reinforced by that system, "It is difficult to see what other motive than a desire to keep up with their neighbors could have impelled the Walbiri to adopt these new systems" (Meggitt 1962: 169). In any case, for whatever reasons Australians developed or borrowed the section system, and whatever functions the systems may have performed, they became in most cases "totemized," that is, the individual sections or subsections were associated with specific species of animals and plants, toward which the sections' human members assumed what one writer felicitously called a "ritual attitude." The Murngin sections were eight in number, each with its own names (i.e., one for its male and one for its female members) and associated totems (gray kangaroo, night heron, emu, etc.). Ideally, the system (this description of which is based on W. Warner 1937, supplemented by Berndt and Berndt 1964: 66-67) operated as follows: F ^ Al

D2

—I

Any child of an A1 woman became a C I , and any child of a B1 woman became a D2, as shown by the arrows. Ideally, an A1 man married a B1 woman (his galle, mother's brother's daughter) and her children became D2. It was however possible—not ideal, but a condoned alternative—for an A1 man to marry a B2 woman (or for a B1 man to marry an A2 woman, or for a CI man to marry a D2 woman, etc.), but in that case

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the children of the B2 wife would have been D1. In other words, regardless of what section a child's father may have belonged to, the child's assignment depended upon which section its mother belonged to. In the Australians' own words, for purposes of section membership a child's father was "thrown away." (In other words filiation was matrifilial, and ideally descent was "matrilineal," but only indirectly so.) The role of Murngin subsections was described by Warner as follows: The Murngin use their subsection much as they do their kinship system; a man or a woman is called by his subsection term almost as often as by his kin designation. Even the children use a subsection title, usually employing it more frequently than the kinship term. At large intertribal gatherings when the kinship term is difficult to obtain

Figure 16.5. Yirrkalla, bark painting: Yiritja journey of the dead (after Mountford 1956)

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because of the remoteness of the various relatives, the subsection terminology is used; this with slight variations is the same throughout northeast Arnhem Land. Some of the people come from hundreds of miles for these great ceremonies in the lower Goyder and Glyde River districts, and their kinship terminology is utterly different. Since the section terms are practically the same, and only eight in number, it is comparatively easy t o discover one's subsection relationship to an utter stranger. T h e subsections also play a prominent role in three of the main ceremonies. In the Djungguan ceremony they regulate the order of certain dances and also the time for calling out the sacred names of the men's dead ancestors. ( 1 9 3 7 : 1 2 2 )

Having described the various categories and labeled dyads according to which the Murngin viewed most of their social relations, we return to their two other kinds of social units, their households and communities. The core social unit of Murngin everyday life was the household, which most typically was composed of an adult male, his wife or wives, his unmarried daughters and his uninitiated sons—complemented in some cases by another relative or two. It was within this group that the Murngin pooled, cooked, and ate most of the food they obtained (the males by hunting and fishing, the females by gathering), and it was here that most of them rested and slept. During some parts of each year (i.e., at the height of flood times) most households moved about and camped entirely on their own, or in sets of no more than two or three, but with the return of the drier seasons, when game and fish concentrated around the contracting water places, households (but evidently not all of them) reassembled nearby, returning every year to the same place. It was multihousehold aggregations such as these that most writers refer to when describing Murngin communities, to which we now turn. According to some estimates, Murngin communities contained an average of forty or fifty persons, divided into five to ten households. Because of topographic differences there must have been a wide variation in spatial layout, but most of them seem to have contained the following divisions: 1 . a men's camp, where all neophytes and unmarried but initiated males resided most of the time and where married males also occasionally stayed; 2. a camp for elderly, fully initiated men, which was occupied by them only during periods of large-scale ceremonies; 3. a "general camp," where each household group had its own camp site, where all females and all uninitiated males slept and ate most of the time, and where married men stayed when not in 1 or 2. I have come across no maps of particular community layouts, and no suggestion that they conformed to any directional orientation, but they

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all appear to have been arranged so as to separate the men's camps from the general camp far enough, or concealed enough by landscape features, to screen the former from the view of females and uncircumcised boys. As for occupancy of the men's camp: A boy remains with his family of orientation [the family into which he was born] until he is six or eight years of age, when he is circumcised, leaves his family, and goes to live with the boys of his own age and those who are older in a male group presided over by an older man (or men) who does not possess a wife. This does not mean that he is not in constant contact with the members of his own family. It is felt to be wrong, however, for the young man to live in his parents' camp after he reaches this age because he will be aware of their sexual relations and will learn ways of behavior not proper for a boy who has not taken a wife. (W. Warner 1937: 127)

It seems likely that the married men who frequented the men's camp did so only occasionally, having slept and eaten mostly in their family households in the "general camp." Not so however with the circumcised but unmarried youths, who: . . . are supposed to eat in their [boys', unmarried men's] camp and sleep there, not going around with women. The boys' camp is the place for them to learn the proper etiquette in their conduct with men and women. A boy is not supposed to look "hard" at a woman. Whenever a man stares at a woman he is thought to have designs upon her. If a boy looks hard at that girl she says to herself, "What does he look at me for that way? I think he wants to play with me." She goes and talks then and makes trouble, (ibid.)

The "general camp" area of most communities seems to have been occupied by ten to fifteen households during the drier times of the year. We are not informed how the "houses" were distributed around the general camp area, but each house itself, and the area immediately around it, appears to have been restricted to members of its household group. Even in the driest months, when "houses" consisted of only a circle defined by an outline of paperbark and a border of sand, ". . . no one ever walks over or through another's camp circle" (ibid. 473). As in some other Australian societies, it is likely, but nowhere specifically reported, that Murngin communities also tended to be spatially divided into separate neighborhoods, on the basis of close kinship ties. One ethnographer has stated that each community spoke a distinctive dialect of the society's common language. That may indeed have been true of some of the more stable of them, but in many other cases the comings and goings would have been too frequent to sustain deep linguistic differences among neighboring communities over time. According to one older ethnographic conceptualization of Murngin

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residence patterns, each community consisted of a core of one or so patricians whose male members remained residentially united throughout their lives, women invariably having moved into the communities and households of their husbands upon marriage. Such may indeed have been men's preference but, as more recent studies have demonstrated, that preference often had to submit to opposing pulls, including especially a husband's duty to provide lifelong 'bride services' (mundurr) to some of his wife's relatives, which was best done by means of co-residence with one or more of them. 20 By virtue of this requirement, the communities whose residents were surveyed in this way revealed the presence in each of them of a large proportion of males from clans centered elsewhere. While those "outsiders" were found to have come from many different clans, there was also found to be a "clumping" in most communities of males from the same "outside" clan—a circumstance encouraged by operation of the semi-moiety system and by the more specific rule, that any one clan's marital affiliations should be concentrated in one other community rather than scattered about (i.e., that clan "brothers" should owe bride service to the same individuals) (W. Shapiro 1973: 3 6 6 ff). During their periodic aggregations the older males of each community sometimes engaged in collective hunting or fishing, and the females sometimes went out together to collect plant foods and small game; but cooking and eating appear to have been in the separate households and in the men's camp. In addition, at least one writer identified the community as having been the unit for engaging in this society's most lethal form of warfare (see chapter 11). However, the most salient of any community's collective activities were of a ceremonial nature, including especially the initiation of its young boys—which indicates that at least some male residents of any community were members of a clan located nearby. (Some earlier writers pictured Murngin communities as having been composed around a preponderantly large core of the male members of its adjacent clan sacred site, but [as indicated earlier] that was rarely if ever the actual case.) Collective activity ofttimes implies some form of governance: to what extent does that apply to Murngin communities? The nature of governance among the Murngin is not easy to specify. As was noted in previous chapters, some men were able to achieve prestige and social influence—that is, to become paragons and/or leaders— by excelling in one or more of several different ways: in hunting, in craftsmanship, in fighting, in participating in exchanges, in magic making, in ceremonial performance, and in knowledge of sacred matters (which derived from advanced position in the totemic mysteries). Clearly, most of these statuses required more than average amounts of strength or forcefulness or knowledge, and some of them, particularly the last named, required advanced age. The question, however, is, Which one or

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which combination of these statuses served to invest its incumbent with overall authority over other members of the groups to which he belonged? It seems quite clear that the principal decision-maker (and enforcer) of any household was its husband (and father). And in groups of hunters the most highly skilled practitioners were likely to lead. With fighting it is probable that both skill and aggressiveness were the qualities that put men in the lead. As for leadership in ritual activities, most of the important decisions were doubtless made by the most knowledgeable men, who were also of advanced age. On the other hand, none of these statuses, and no combination of them, seems to have given its incumbent(s) effective authority over any community as a whole beyond the sphere of the specific activities in which he led. In fact, the widest kind of group that had an overall institutionalized leader was the patrician, whose "head," it was reported, "makes decisions and maintains order within the several domestic circles [households] constituting the babaru [i.e., clan] and its adherents" (Berndt 1955: 101). One may infer from Warner that every clan had a "leader," but, he added: Politically the clan is almost impotent when it comes to positive action. It is impossible to obtain group action, even for the wergild, which will function to the extent that discipline can be enforced and individual action prohibited in a blood feud. The ceremonial leader is considered headman, and if physically able and of sufficient talent, he is also war leader, but his power is at an absolute minimum except as a ritual leader; it is in the field of ritual and not of government that he exercises his leadership. (W. Warner 1937: 389) Each clan has ceremonial leaders for one or all of the ceremonies it owns. The leadership is inherited by the oldest son if he is old enough. If not, the deceased father's next oldest brother inherits the right until the son is old enough; or at the death or senility of the second brother the son becomes leader. The course taken depends largely upon the personalities of the two men, but in all events the son is looked upon as the heir to these rights. Such ceremonial leadership makes of a person a kind of clan headman, (ibid. 70)

Warner did not specify how old "old enough" was, but it can only have been after a man had advanced far up the age-graded steps into the mysteries of totemic ritual (i.e., at least "middle age"), otherwise he would have lacked the necessary knowledge and experience with which to "lead" the ceremonies. This, however, is an inference on my part, which published reports on the Murngin neither support nor refute. 2 1 In any case, whoever the "ceremonial leaders" were, and however "elderly" they happened, on the average, to be, it is positively reported that the influence (the authority?) of some of them extended beyond their

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own clans and into clans based in other communities. But, it appears, their influence was only in matters ceremonial, that is, when members of two or more communities foregathered to initiate their boys and engage in totemic rituals. A final point about Murngin communities has to do with their corporate aspects. We saw above that each household within a community owned exclusive use-rights over the camp area occupied by its members for sleeping and cooking, and that the users of such areas would have established some more durable tenure rights over them had they returned to them year after year (which, however, was not always the case). The question is, Did communities as wholes, as distinctive social units, possess more or less exclusive rights over anything—either land or water or the animals or plants or other things found on them? 22 I have been unable to find a credible answer to this question in the published ethnographies on the Murngin. Most of the adult males of a community being members of a clan whose sacred sites were located nearby may have served to provide the community as a whole with special use-rights over the land, and so forth, within and near that estate, but that kind of situation seems to have been quite rare. Again, for communities with stable memberships—that is, those in which the same households reassembled every year—it is reasonable to suppose that the residents would have developed over time an attitude of some exclusiveness, not only over their residential camp sites but over the surrounding areas in which they regularly hunted and gathered. However, in the absence of documentation this must remain a guess. And in any case, what seems "reasonable" to a European may not have been so to the preEuropean Murngin, whose nomadic or semi-nomadic lives seem to have fostered attitudes about land tenure quite unlike our own concern with boundaries and exclusiveness. 23 In summary, Murngin society was divided into a number of discrete, and to some extent geographically localized, groups: households, communities, and patricians. Individual households were governed mainly by husband-fathers, and "ceremonial leaders" supervised at least the ritual aspects of clan affairs. Individual communities also had their more influential men (including the aforesaid ceremonial leaders, outstanding fighters and traders, etc.), but no overall leadership centered on any one office: the Murngin had no "chiefs." Moreover the wider society contained no political offices for uniting individual communities into larger territorial groupings. Instead, what customs there were for relating communities one to another (and for mitigating somewhat their endemic conflicts) were based on kinship, on trade, and on shared commitment to certain religious beliefs and practices. The latter was manifested in intercommunity ceremonies having to do with male rites of passage and with

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Figure 16.6. Yirrkalla, bark painting: Dua journey of the dead (after Mountford 1956) the maintenance of natural fertility (and hence of food supply). The role played by kinship in integrating the society as a whole operated in two ways: first, through activation of the intertwined kin networks of individuals—networks (but not groups) which could and in some cases did include all Murngin (and some members of neighboring societies as well); and second, through operation of the semi-moiety and subsection systems, which also included all Murngin in its membership along with neighboring peoples as well. Murngin society was only one of the scores that existed in Australia at the time of European contact. Neither it nor any other society on the continent can be said to be the "most typical" of all of them, but it shared enough social-relational features with most of them to enable us to use it as a basis for comparison and wider generalizations, which will now be undertaken. Note, however, that the following section concerns societies only on the Australian continent itself. What little is known about Tasmania's societies will be summarized in a subsequent section.

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Social Units in Other Societies in Mainland Australia Boundaries are convenient, and for many persons psychologically essential and aesthetically satisfying—lines with which to think and describe. For anthropologists especially there is something very appealing about studying an island like Tikopia, with its three-by-one-and-a-half mile size and its 1 , 5 0 0 or so residents, all speaking the same dialect, and all bounded by scores of miles of open sea, which few persons ever crossed. The island of Tasmania was even more effectively bounded; and while it is larger and its culture was less homogeneous than Tikopia's, ethnographers are in fair agreement about its cultural distinctiveness from continental Australia. In contrast, even after a century of attempts, anthropologists are still not in agreement about where to draw traditional cultural boundaries on Australia's continental landscape. Some of that disagreement has come from differences about what was being compared and contrasted, and some from the fact that most of the Aborigines had undergone radical changes in their customs, including their residential locations, by the time they were studied. But most of the difficulty of trying to draw cultural boundaries there derives from the ethnographic data themselves. One situation contributing to that vagueness was geographic. While Australia contained several different kinds of natural, inhabited regions —tropical forests, deserts, coastal, riverine, and so forth—the bounds between those regions were rarely very sharp. There were no ranges high or extensive enough nor rivers wide enough to preclude passage. While different aggregations of people did tend to remain in one or another of those regions and over time developed specialized economic adaptations to it (as shown in chapter 7), those adaptations were seldom distinctive enough to discourage neighbors from mastering them. In addition, as was described in chapter 12, objects and ideas moved very widely over the continent, in some cases for many hundreds of miles; and while their carriers did so mainly in relay, even that involved some very long travels, and the objects and ideas they carried served to render the regional boundaries even more vague. The continent's linguistic map bears witness to the above. As was described in chapter 3 , linguists have classified the Australians' speech forms into 228 discrete "languages," but these were divided into numerous "dialects," which in many instances merged with those of different "languages" to the extent that they were in fact mutually intelligible. Also, bi- and multi-lingualism was very common. Finally, attempts to draw boundaries on a cultural map of Australia have been complicated by the kind and amount of oscillation that characterized the composition of social groups and gatherings. It was nearly everywhere usual for communities to break up, seasonally, into smaller

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units. In perhaps most cases, the latter would then regroup as before, in much the same specific combination; but in some areas they congregated occasionally in different combinations. And on occasion, communities themselves, including some from different natural regions, congregated to harvest food abundancies or to carry out rituals, or both. Because of this variability it would be next to impossible to divide the continent as a whole into a fixed number of discrete societies, as earlier defined. (In fact, even my use of the term society for the people dubbed "Murngin" is not entirely consistent—the fate, alas, which lies in store for most anthropological definitions!) There were, it would appear, several social aggregations for which my usage of society is appropriate, but several others where some stretching of the term is required. In any case, I cannot bring myself to use the term tribe for this or any other kind of social or cultural unit found in Australia; it has been used by writers in so many different ways that use of it would serve only to add to the confusion that already exists. 24 Two kinds of social units the Murngin shared with all other Australians were households and multi-household communities. Many students of Australian societies use "hearth-groups" for the former, a better label descriptively because of the flimsiness, and sometimes complete absence of houses. However, household will be retained here because our interest is in the social, rather than architectural, aspects of such groups in comparison with domestic units elsewhere in Oceania (although there was undoubtedly some interplay between their architectural and social aspects). Households For an Australian female virtually all of her life was focused upon her household; she almost invariably slept within its bounds and devoted nearly all of her energies to gathering and preparing food for its members. For some periods of their lives, males, especially boys undergoing initiation, slept and ate in camps of their own; and initiated males spent some of their time engaged in religious and political matters not directly connected with domestic life. But even for neophytes and fully initiated men their households provided indispensable bases for the other things they did. That said, however, households varied widely in composition and in degree of separateness. Regarding the former, information on the traditional pre-European residence patterns are lacking for many areas, but it is reasonable to infer that they ranged from a monogamous married couple, with or without small children, to large polygynous families supplemented with one or more other relatives—for example, aged grandparents, unmarried affines. (While some men had no wife, and most only one, instances have been recorded, mostly in Arnhem Land, of some having had from fifteen to twenty.) There may have been some small households not centered on a married couple—say, a widowed woman and her older unmarried son—but it is difficult to imagine any

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Figure 16.7. a, Oenpelli, bark painting: the Rainbow-serpent Ngaloit (after Mountford 1956); b, Western Arnhem Land, wood carving: the Rainbow-serpent Unjaut (ibid.)

domestic unit not containing at least one still-active male and one stillactive female; the traditional sexual division of food-getting labor required at least that. Regarding household separateness, we saw with the Murngin how households seasonally separated from one another in units of one or two and foraged on their own for several months at a time. This appears to have been the case throughout most of the continent, especially in desert

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regions, where food resources were perennially scarce and thinly scattered. In the Western Desert area studied by Richard Gould, for example, thirteen persons lived for years at a time almost entirely on their own (chapter 7). In the chapters to follow it will be seen that while households were a basic kind of social unit in all Oceanian societies, they differed from area to area, sometimes very widely, in their composition. In this sense, perhaps the most distinctively different feature of Australian households as a whole was the inclusion in many of them of older unmarried males—typically, the brother of the married male householder or the brother of one or more of the latter's wives. In perhaps most such situations these men and their older nephews slept apart from the married couples and the latter's younger children, but they took part in the same food pooling-andsharing unit. The reason for their presence is not hard to find. Because of the near monopoly enjoyed by older men over the supply of marriageable females, many a younger man had to wait several years before obtaining a wife of his own; meanwhile, unless the natal household of such an adjunct were still viable his best option for eating a satisfying diet was to join forces with a married sibling—a choice that was reinforced by the ties of affection that evidently obtained among them. Final authority over household affairs clearly rested with the husbandfather so long as he remained nonsenile; but the key word in this statement is "final." For, in what descriptions there are available about this domain of Australians' interpersonal behavior, not much overt discipline was exercised by either father or mother over their children or other "dependents" in everyday matters, and for most of the time wives were anything but servile and submissive. If a wife flagrantly disregarded her marital or domestic duties, it was not unusual for her husband to chastise her physically, but there are many reports of wives fighting back to good effect. In the words of one ethnographer: Ultimately, the man's superior strength tells in such a struggle, but then m o s t probably she will p a c k up her g o o d s and chattels and move to the c a m p of a relative, perhaps even her sister-in-law, till the loss of an economic partner, someone to fetch f i r e w o o d and water, a n d carry his burdens, brings the m a n to his senses, and he attempts a reconciliation. . . . T h e point to stress is not only her great importance in economics, but also her power to use this to her o w n advantage in other spheres of marital life. If we are to speak of authority at all it must be defined not only in terms of his privileges on the one h a n d , but also by hers on the other—in short, by those reciprocal rights a n d duties that are recognized to be inherent in marriage. (Kaberry 1 9 3 9 : 1 4 3 )

As for the nature of everyday interpersonal relations among members of any household, it would be impracticable to attempt to generalize for

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the whole continent in a book of this kind, even if enough information were available for doing so. Suffice it to say that some of the same kinds of dyadic behaviors that were described for the Murngin obtained in many other Australian societies, including for example: between brothers and between sisters, an ideal of amity and mutuality; between brothers-in-law and between sisters-in-law, much the same; between brothers and sisters much the same as above, although constrained by avoidance of sexual familiarity; between mother and offspring, a relationship of affection; between male and mother-in-law (if she were there), a role of strict physical avoidance, usually tempered by amity. A

Figure 16.8. Yirrkalla, wooden coffin (after Mountford 1956)

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Communities This second kind of grouping—called bands by some writers—were as ubiquitous as households, of which they were mainly composed. In foregoing pages I have tended to emphasize the oscillation of Australian communities in terms of the number and to some extent even the identity of the households that composed them. As a correction I need to add that there were some areas with year-round concentrations of food resources (e.g., the Arafura swamp of north Arnhem Land, some of the estuaries of the continent's southeastern corner) where there were relatively few seasonal changes in community size. In many other areas the same households tended to reassemble after their seasonal dispersals in about the same location as before. There is however a problem in generalizing about such communities continent-wide. Several writers have numbered or listed the communities ("countries," "bands," "hordes") within the societies ("tribes") studied by them, but few have characterized them in any detail. 25 According to some such studies, they ranged in size between about thirty to four hundred members, and each was identified (though not always exclusively) with a fairly specific territory—a range. There is also common agreement that the households composing most communities dispersed for part of each year into single-or multi-household units (also labeled "bands" by some writers), but beyond these constants societies differed with respect to what their communities were like (i.e., what their ethnographers believed them to have been like!). Take, for example, the matter of the size of a community's range. In the case of the Central Desert Walbiri it is reported that each of the four communities (whose memberships were "relatively stable" and numbered 3 0 0 - 4 0 0 persons each) was located within a territory of several thousand square miles that had "more or less permanent" boundaries. Moreover, each community is reported to have possessed a "legitimate title" to its territory; in exceptionally bad times members of one community would cross over into that of another in search of food, but only after asking permission from and giving gifts to their hosts (Meggitt 1962:51-52). As we have seen, Murngin communities also had their customary ranges, but the nature of their title to them seems to have been less explicit and exclusive than the one Meggitt ascribes to the Walbiris' connection with theirs. Even less exclusive were some societies for which (or so has been reported) communities as such had no titles to their ranges in addition to those which some of their residents possessed in their patrician estates (mainly sacred sites) within those ranges (L. Hiatt 1962). However, it is much too late to learn where the communities of most other Australian societies may be placed along this land-tenure cline. As among the Murngin, the members of communities in Australian

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societies engaged collectively in some kinds of activities on occasion. While most food getting was a household affair, there are reports describing larger-scale hunting and fishing expeditions involving all or most of a community's older males. Women's gathering techniques seldom if ever required large-scale cooperation; even so, women sometimes went out in larger-than-household companies to forage for food—more for sociability, perhaps, than for technical efficiency. Also, as with the Murngin, certain kinds of warfare were in some other societies carried out by all of a community's men acting as a unit. But the kind of collective activity most characteristic of whole communities throughout Australia was ceremonial, especially ceremonies having to do with initiation. The ritual scenarios and paraphernalia of such events were those of "cult-lodges," either of patricians or of "conception cults" (see below), but the events themselves were usually sponsored and provisioned by a community as a whole, including its female members and despite the latters' peripheral roles in the rites themselves. In addition, in some societies a community's women engaged collectively in ceremonies of their own. (See chapter 13.) In the few reports that have been published on such matters, the spatial layouts of communities appear to have been quite similar everywhere. As was described for the Murngin (and for the Walbiri in chapter 9), most of them consisted of a "general camp" for households and a separate camp for initiated but unmarried males. In addition, during the sometimes quite lengthy periods devoted to ceremonies, other areas outside and screened from the camp were set aside for the neophytes, and so forth. Another kind of spatial layout has been described for the Walbiri (and may have existed elsewhere as well): The women in a Walbiri camp may be observed each day to set off in the same few directions on their search for food and firewood. The men do not go hunting in these directions, and, when they gather to discuss, rehearse, or enact ceremonies, they select sites on the opposite side of the camp from the areas visited by the women. The environs of the camp are thus divided into two main zones. (Meggitt 1962: 52)

Unlike communities in many societies of Island Oceania, there appear to have been no parts of Australian settlements set aside exclusively and "permanently" for menstruating females. Several reports record that girls were "secluded" during their first menses, in places apart from the main camp, but that was all. Attempts to generalize about the social structure of Australian communities are frustrated at the outset by the variations that existed in community size, oscillation, and kin-based composition. A small community composed around one numerically preponderant set of clanmates would have been one thing; a large community that included male members of

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several clans, quite another. Another factor contributing to wide variations in community social relations was the absence of any institutionalized offices of over-all community governance: a circumstance already described for the Murngin and which could be documented from reports on other societies as well. Nevertheless, social control appears to have been maintained, one way or another, within communities in larger measure than between them. In the view of one writer, this came about through the operation of three conventions: 1. the public airing of issues (in which older men were most active but in which young men, and even women, spoke their minds); 2. the authority which certain men exercised over religious matters (and religion occupied an important part in Australians' lives); 3. the relatively nonpartisan approach to the breaking of certain kinds of rules: " . . . a man who was clearly in breach of a norm could not count on people who would have supported him were it a doubtful or ambiguous case. To impart religious secrets to an unqualified person, for example a woman, or to cohabit with a woman in a forbidden kinship relation was to commit a wrong that no man was likely to condone" (Maddock 1974: 43-44). With respect to the last point, there are several reports on the breaking of these and other kinds of rules (including especially adultery), wherein the breakers had to flee from their own communities but were permitted refuge in communities elsewhere. In addition, several reports state or imply that some communities tended to protect their members from attacks by outsiders, which would indeed have constituted a mark of "political solidarity" if in fact it were based on "community sentiment" only and not on kinship as well. Some writers also report the exemplification of community ethnocentrism in the form of expressions such as the Walbiris' "my own countryman," that is, community-mate (versus members of other communities), or by ascribing to their own community some cultural superiority over others. And finally, some writers have characterized the communities in the societies studied by them as having been units with respect to marital alliances—that is, as having been largely either endogamous or exogamous. Such indeed was doubtless true in many cases, but many other cases probably could be found, by a systematic search of the literature, in which no such patterning obtained. Also, it is not clear from some of the accounts whether the "endogamy" or "exogamy" in question was consciously normative—or only the product of statistical tendencies. In any case, the decisive factor in choice of spouse throughout Australia was kinship rather than locale.

Figure 16.9. Yirrkalla, bark painting: scenes from Djanggawul myth (after Berndt 1964b)

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Cult-lodges a n d patricians As in the case of the Murngin, it appears that all (adequately studied) Australians believed that conception came about in two, complementary, ways: the physical aspect of an individual by means of coitus (with each parent contributing something to the product); the principal spiritual aspect by entry of some spiritual entity into the woman's womb from some place outside. The "outside" places in question were specific (a particular water hole or some other noteworthy features of a landscape) and were believed to have been the scene of some activity by Powers during their wandering in the Dreamtime past, such as the naming (and hence "creating") of an animal species, the loss of some (Power-laden) possession, or the Powers' own metamorphosis into a tree or a rock. The various kinds of spiritual entities that emanated from those places and entered women's wombs, to become incorporated into the bodies of fetuses, served to link them, after their births, with those places and their Powers, including their animal totems—that is, the Dreamtime prototypes of animals believed to haunt the sacred places and all ordinary members of the animal species as well. (In some cases the link between a human and his conception-source totem was considered to be so close that he was addressed or referred to by the latter's name.) All humans whose spirits had emanated from the same sacred place were considered interrelated, by indissoluble ties, into a type of unit many writers call a "cult-lodge." In addition to the cooperation and mutual support expected among the members of each cult-lodge, they were on occasion required (privileged) to perform rites having to do mainly with the renewal of their common totemic species. (Such rites were carried out only by the initiated male members of these units, but it is reasonable to infer that they did so on behalf of their female and uninitiated male associates as well.) Cult-lodges were corporate in a number of respects, having owned more or less exclusively the actions (i.e., dances, songs), the paraphernalia (e.g., sound-making instruments, graphic designs) used by them in their rituals, and the sacred places described above (where their spirits had originated and, in most cases to which they would return after the body's death). As was mentioned in our discussion of the Murngin, writers differ concerning how much of the environs of a sacred place was believed by the Australians to be included in such estates. Some of that uncertainty may stem from differences in interpretation but it is also possible, and in fact likely, that the peoples themselves differed in this respect. The second way in which the members of many Australian societies became associated with cult-lodges was by patrifiliation: a person became a member of his father's (i.e., his presumed genitor's) cult-lodge

Figure 16.10. Yirrkalla, clan designs (after Mountford 1956)

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whether or not his spirit had come from the sacred place associated with that lodge. Units composed in this way were, of course, descent units—in this case patricians. There may have been societies in which cult-lodge membership depended entirely upon descent 26 —in which the source of an individual's spirit had no bearing upon lodge affiliation—but in all cases that I know of recruitment to lodges was by conception only, or, most usually, by a combination of conception and patrifiliation (and hence descent). The classic example of lodge recruitment by conception only was that of the Aranda, a people of the Central Desert. Here, a person's spirit was believed to have come from the sacred place nearest where his mother began to experience signs of pregnancy. Maddock described one incident of this kind:

Figure 16.11. Yirrkalla, bark painting: Dua conception beliefs (after Mountford 1956)

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Sometimes spiritual fecundation is prefigured in a dream or hallucination. In one instance a man dreamed of the power prototypical of yellow goannas. While hunting next day he was aided invisibly by the power; as he returned his wife saw that he was accompanied but the companion vanished before arriving at the camp. The meat, which was really a gift from the power, made the woman sick. The day after she noticed a man with a small bullroarer standing on a rock. He threw the bullroarer at her, she felt a pain as it entered above the hip, the man vanished and the bullroarer assumed human form within her. Her husband and her father deduced from these experiences that she had conceived a yellow goanna child. (Maddock 1974: 30-31)

It could happen that a child's spirit-species (i.e., his conception totem) was the same as his mother's, or his father's, or both; but it also sometimes happened that his differed from both of theirs. Such being the case, it is not surprising that persons interrelated by virtue of common conception totems only did not constitute an exogamous unit, as did those who were members of the same patrician. 27 Some writers (Elkin 1932: 130; Shapiro 1979: 17-19) have proposed that cult-lodge recruitment by conception totem only was at one time much more widespread, and that variation from that pattern like the Murngin's (in which the father "found" the spirit and directed it to his wife) exemplified efforts on the part of men to affiliate their children with their own cult-lodges. Needless to say, it would be impossible to either prove or disprove this reconstruction, but it does contain elements consistent with some other religious beliefs. And it is at least as persuasive as another widely held theory, (propounded most authoritatively by the famous English anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, 1930), which viewed "hordes" to be the most basic and ubiquitous social unit, one that was localized and politically autonomous. According to this view, a child became a member of his father's "horde" at birth, but only male members remained together and on their horde territory (with its associated sacred places) throughout life, female members having married and moved into hordes elsewhere. In fact, the nearest known equivalent to RadcliffeBrown's "horde" was the ubiquitous patrician, which, as with its Murngin specimen, was exogamous and patrilineal, and was associated with sacred places of its own. But there the resemblance ends. As was shown for the Murngin, and as has been documented for some other Australian societies as well, marital residence was quite often uxorilocal, and most Australian local groups (communities) consisted of males (and females) from two or more patricians, some of them far removed from their own sacred places. Such was the situation during the period of European contact in Australia, and such it may well have been for centuries before that. 28

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As noted earlier, one of the most important, if not the most important, functions of a cult-lodge was to perform rites that had to do mainly with sustaining its own totemic species. In a proprietary sense, each lodge may be said to have owned, corporately, those rites (including their dance movements, material paraphernalia, the actors' make-up designs, etc.). On the other hand, that ownership was not in all cases exclusive or evenly distributed among a lodge's membership. As I noted above, in lodges containing both descent-related and conception-totem-related members the tendency was for the descent-related ones to exercise stronger control over their jointly-owned rites. And regarding ritual, there were two kinds of arrangements that served to render rite ownership less exclusive and to create ties between cult-lodges. One such arrangement was exemplified by the Aranda. Although Aranda custom awarded stronger control over a cult-lodge's rites to its descent-affiliated members, the society's conventions required that when any lodge performed its rites it must invite participation by members of all other lodges affiliated with totems of the same species as its own. The rites were performed by members of the host lodge itself, but the guests served as censors, seeing to the correctness of the performance (Maddock 1974: 38). The second arrangement of this kind was exemplified by the Dalabon of Arnhem Land. There again it was the members of the lodge "owning" the rites (who were called gidgan) who actually performed them, but they could do so only by permission of and under supervision of the rites' djunggaitji, its "managers." These latter decided upon a site for the performance, selected the designs to be used and painted these upon the dancers' bodies, and chose the dances to be performed. The "owners" in such events were members of the lodge (and in this case also the patrician) possessing proprietary rights over the sacred place—the estate— associated with the rites. The "managers" were those men whose mothers or fathers' mothers were or had been members of the estate's proprietary patrician. (Because of the operation of patrician exogamy among the Dalabon, men could not have been managers and owners of the same cult-lodge rites.) As Maddock points out, while this kind of arrangement did serve to link Dalabon cult-lodges (and patricians) by ties of mutuality (at least in ritual matters), it did not lead to the development of hierarchy, inasmuch as any person—any lodge—was an owner on some occasions, a manager on others (ibid. 36). Matriclans In comparison with patricians, which were very widespread throughout the continent, exogamous matrilineal descent units—matriclans—existed in only a few societies, for example, in southwestern Queensland, west-

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Figure 1 6 . 1 2 . Milingimbi, bark paintings: a, rock pythons (after Berndt 1 9 6 4 b ) ; b, rock python coiled around eggs (ibid.) ern New South Wales and Victoria, eastern South Australia, and northwestern Arnham Land (including Bathurst and Melville Islands) (A. Elkin 1 9 6 4 : 9 2 ) . In the better-known instances of them, matriclans, like patricians, were totemic; but in a different way: In both cases the members were associated with some animal species, usually called by them its "flesh." (Even in societies whose members obtained their "souls" and their clan affiliation, through their fathers, they were often said to obtain their "flesh" from their mothers.) Also, as in the case of patricians, the members o f Australia's matriclans were required wholly to cooperate and give aid to fellow members. On the other hand, matriclans were not associated with sacred places, nor with any other kind of territorial estate. It should be noted that a few societies contained both matri- and patricians. In such cases a person belonged to the clan of his father for some purposes, that of his mother for others.

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Dual-division units Two-part divisions are of course found in societies everywhere (e.g., in distinctions made between male and female, old and young, upper and lower socioeconomic classes); in addition, some societies go beyond mere verbal labeling and ascribe other properties to the divisions. In Australia, while sharp distinctions were drawn in all of its societies between males and females with regard to subsistence work and access to sacred places and totemic rites, there were some societies in which that difference was also "totemized": In Central and south-eastern Australia there is another w a y in which the natural grouping of the two sexes is marked, namely, by sex totems; all the men of the tribe are symbolized by one bird or bush and all the women by another. This totem is usually thought of as the mate, or the brother (or sister in the case of the women) of the group. Moreover, to hurt or kill one another's totem is regarded as an insult or injury and is resented. Quarreling and fighting follow. Thus, the women as a group stand up to the men as a group. (Elkin 1964: 90)

A second way utilized in Australia for institutionalizing a two-part division was to classify together all persons into units (categories) of alternate generations. In this way all persons of an individual's own generation (i.e., own genealogical level) plus all those of his grandparents' generation belonged to one unit, and all those of his parents' and children's to the other. Moreover, most such arrangements were accompanied by the rule that marriage ought to take place within each unit—in other words, the units were endogamous. In some cases, such units were linked with totemic animals, and labels were used to distinguish one's own unit from the opposite one (e.g., among the Walbiri, members of one's own unit were labeled "equivalent status—belonging to"; those of the other, "flesh-having"). Otherwise, this type of institutionalized classification appears to have had little social importance. A third way in which some Australian societies institutionalized dual classification was to assign each person to the unit of his father or of his mother, and to prohibit marriage between unit mates—that is, in effect, to make the units exogamous. In addition, units of this type were usually not only "totemized," but the "totemization" was extended to embrace virtually all distinguishable entities in the universe, as exemplified by the Murngin's Dua-Yiritja division (which incidentally prevailed in some other Arnhem Land societies as well). In many instances the assignment of a nonhuman entity to one or another of a society's units seems to have been done on the basis of some "natural" characteristic of opposition: thus, Eaglehawk and Crow were assigned to opposite units because of

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their "natural" mutual antagonism. In some other instances, however, the assignments appear "arbitrary"—that is, arbirtary to Europeans who have not yet succeeded in penetrating the logical premises employed. Some writers label all three of the types of dual-division units just described "moieties," but the usage adopted in the present book is to limit the label "moiety" to those dual-division units whose members were recruited by filiation and which were exogamous. 29 In some cases moieties of the kind just described may have served only as means of classification (and perhaps of regulating choice of spouse); but in most known Australian cases moiety membership was manifested in social interaction as well, especially on ceremonial occasions, when some rites required participation by members of both moieties (this in addition to the cooperation between owners and managers, who would also have belonged to opposite moieties). As just noted membership in a moiety was based on filiation, either paternal or maternal. According to some writers, however, membership in both matri- and patri-moieties was in fact maternally determined. That is to say, in societies having matri-moieties a person belonged to the unit of his mother, but in societies having patri-moieties a person belonged to the moiety opposite his mother's (which in most cases happened also to be his father's). 30 Patri-moieties occurred in more Australian societies than did matrimoieties. 31 And there were a few societies where both types co-existed— that is, a person belonged to his matri-moiety for some purposes, to his patri-moiety for others—particularly for purposes having to do with religious rites which, however, were largely the concern of initiated males. Semi-moieties Moieties were kin-based schemes for dividing persons (and other entities in the universe) into two categories; they occurred in one form or another throughout Australia. In addition, some societies had schemes for dividing their members (and some other entities) into four or eight categories. One such scheme bears the anthropological label of "section system"; specimens of it were described earlier in our résumé of Murngin institutions, and it will be mentioned again momentarily. The other is called a semi-moiety system. It occurred mainly in societies around the Gulf of Carpenteria in a pattern that suggests diffusion (rather than multiple independent "invention") and may be another manifestation of Australians' fascination with "social algebra"—with what Shapiro and others call "cognitive play" (W. Shapiro 1979: 8 0 - 8 2 ) . One form of semi-moiety was described for the Murngin and it involved the kinds of relations that existed between patricians with respect to marriage. Thus, as set forth earlier in this chapter, every Murngin clan was related to every other in one of four ways. Arrange-

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Figure 16.13. Central Australia, Rainbow-serpent (after Stubbs 1974) ments similar to, but not identical with, this occurred in societies south and southeast of the Murngin (and on into central Australia). The units involved in many such arrangements were clans; those best documented were patricians, but a few societies are known to have had semi-moiety systems constructed with matriclans (Berndt and Berndt 1970). Sections and Subsections Unlike those of semi-moiety systems, the units involved in section (and subsection) systems were categories of individual persons, not whole clans. Having provided some background generalities about them earlier, I will not do so again. Suffice it to say that they were fairly widely distributed about the continent. For further discussions of sections the reader is referred to Elkin 1964, Berndt and Berndt 1964, Maddock 1974, and Shapiro 1979. And lest one despair of their complexities (not just apparent but real!), keep in mind that they were not only useful schemes for categorizing people and hence for relating to them, but they were in many instances manifestations of Australians' interest in algebra-like intellectual play. Kin classification Writers on Australian systems of kin classification differ among themselves on a number of general and technical points. As a total outsider to this arcane and extraordinarily complex subject matter—the only Aborigine I have ever conversed with was in a Sydney pub!—I can do little more than touch its edges. Some of the general propositions on which writers disagree are as follows: 1. that all of a society's relationships were conceptualized in terms of kinship; 2. that all of those relationship—that is, kinship—terms were based

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on, or were extensions of, actual (i.e., perceived) relations of consanguinity; that when Australians applied kin terms to distant relatives they did so on the basis of detailed genealogical reckoning; that kin terms served not only to classify persons but to define one's behavior toward them; that, through a combination of 1 and 4, all social relationships were governed by kinship norms; that kin terms were basically monosemic (e.g., that all kin-types included within the class glossed as 'father' were considered to have something father-like in their relationships to those they called 'son').

I am unable to take sides on points 1 and 2, but point 3 seems highly unlikely, and point 6 clearly unacceptable. I am also dubious about the validity of point 5, but believe point 4 to be valid up to a point. The technical points on which Australianists—also known as Abologists!—disagree are, in a word, very technical. The principal point of disagreement has to do with how many kin-term systems were there and in what ways they differed. According to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1930, 1951), the first anthropologist to carry out a comprehensive survey of the subject, there were five such systems, all of them varieties of one general type, and differing mainly with respect to rules about which kin-types could and could not intermarry. Many years later, and with the benefit of a larger number of more detailed and sophisticated field studies, H. W. Scheffler carried out another comprehensive review of the subject and came to some conclusions not entirely different from Radcliffe-Brown's concerning the similarities among all the kin-term systems he himself examined, but differing from Radcliffe-Brown concerning their points of dissimilarities: . . . much of the diversity among Australian systems may be accounted for as the product of various combinations of a fairly small stock of structural elements. These are, principally, half-a-dozen or so dimensions o f conceptual oppositions variously combined to yield a somewhat larger number of principal kin classes and subclasses and a few rules of structural equivalence. Because there is relatively little variation at the level of principal classes . . ., the structurally most distinctive differences a m o n g the systems are differences in their respective sets o f equivalence rules. (Scheffler 1 9 7 8 : 4 1 8 , italics added)

We met with Scheffler's ideas about what constituted principal classes and subclasses in our résumé of the Murngin terminology. And mention was made earlier of rules of "structural equivalence," some of which were

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exemplified in my description of the Murngin system. Since to describe the distinctive features of all these systems would be impractical in the present book, I will simply note that most of them were alike in their treatment of terms for siblings and in having "merging" terms for alternate generations. As for their differences, some of the more salient had to do with terms for grandparents (i.e., some systems differentiated between father's father and mother's father, and between father's mother and mother's mother, while others did not), for parents' siblings (e.g., some systems differentiated between, say, a father and his sister with regard to the terms applied to their children, while some did not), and in the identity of terms signifying potential in-law relationships. What of the social significance of the above, and of the Australian kinterm systems in general? Certainly, they provide information about the ways in which Australians classified their relatives—a valuable enough kind of cultural information in itself. They also, indubitably, indicate how Australians were expected to behave toward some of their relatives. (For example if a man applied a term signifying 'wife's mother' to any female, whether or not she happened to be the actual mother of his own wife, it signified in most Australian societies the necessity for some measure of avoidance behavior between the two.) But how faithfully all of the kin terms of any system reflected that society's behavior norms or, just as important, how faithfully individuals obeyed those norms are questions that only actual field studies can answer. (The numerous reports of "wrong" marriages contained in the literature indicate that Australians, like other humans, did not always act as they were supposed to!) In summary, while Australian societies were divided into numerous communities, most of them small and oscillatory in size, and all of them politically "autonomous" (but not necessarily politically cohesive), they were widely interconnected through several kinds of social ties, some of which were reinforced by shared loyalties to common supernatural powers, and some of which reached into neighboring societies. And while some of their communities may have been anarchies, not having been governed by institutionalized central authorities, they were for the most part orderly ones. Tasmania (This summary of Tasmanian social relations is based entirely on various publications of Rhys Jones.) As mentioned in chapter 7, Tasmania's aboriginal population, which numbered 3 , 0 0 0 - 5 , 0 0 0 just prior to intensive European contact, was divided into three levels of social units: households (Jones' "hearthgroups"), communities (Jones' "bands"), and societies (Jones' "tribes").

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A household consisted of a (usually monogamous) family, plus, in some instances, a grandparent and/or other relative. Each such group occupied a common and usually separate shelter, and shared in obtaining, preparing and consuming food. Occasionally some members of two or more households of the same community hunted and gathered together, but the most common practice was for each household to hunt and gather as a separate unit. A community consisted of several kin-related households and ranged in size from 30-80 members (average 40-50). The community was the principal landowning unit, each one having "owned" a contiguous estate of an average size of 200-300 square miles, which in the case of coastal communities included about 15-20 miles of coastline. (The exact form of that ownership is not specified; i.e., it is not clear whether community ownership was entirely undifferentiated.) Each community had a particular name, and some or all of its physically able members assembled on occasion to engage in joint hunts or ceremonies or war (the community having been the usual war-making unit). People usually hunted and gathered within the boundaries of their own community estate, but sometimes did so elsewhere, after securing permission from the owners. Each community had its own leader, typically a mature but not senile man who excelled in hunting and/or fishing. A man usually—but not invariably— secured his wife from another community, and wives usually resided in the husband's community. The largest type of Tasmanian social unit was a society (called by most writers a "tribe"). Such units consisted of five to fifteen contiguous communities (average nine) whose members shared (among other things) such things as distinctive myths, dances, songs, food taboos, and beard and hair style. Probably, all or some of the communities of any society would assemble on occasion—for example, to exploit a seasonal food resource. Also, it appears, communities of the same society were more generous in allowing one another use-rights in their respective estates. While a society was not a war-making unit, and had no centralized leadership, a society's communities were less likely to war against one another than against communities elsewhere. The members of any society spoke the same dialect or language, and there were cases in which those of two societies shared the same. According to Rhys Jones' reconstruction there were nine societies in Tasmania. They averaged about 400 members each and occupied territories ranging from 1,000 to 3,300 square miles—which works out to an overall island density of one person to every 8 square miles (or about one-third higher if one leaves out of account the large tracts of rainforest and other unoccupied lands). Some societies were almost wholly coastal (with only small territories inland); some almost wholly inland; and some about half and half. But even the most "inland" of the societies

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enjoyed some access to the coast, by agreement of coast dwellers, and usually to exploit seasonal resources of maritime foods. In fact, movement was a way of life for the Tasmanians, particularly on a seasonal basis, the maximum range of most households having been 100-300 miles. Beyond stating these few characteristics of Tasmanian social structure I cannot go, having been unable to discover any information relating to such matters as clanship, kin classification, and so forth. I cannot believe that social relationships were as bland and two-dimensional as has been stated, but by the time anthropologically informed observers arrived on the scene the aboriginal social structures had disappeared or become radically transformed.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Polynesia

THE fifty or more societies of peoples speaking Polynesian languages differed widely from one another in size, from the few hundreds in places such as Pukapuka, Anuta, and Manahiki-Rakahanga, to the 300,000 or so Hawaiians. There were also differences among them in their natural environments and, partly in consequence thereof, in their subsistence technologies. Nevertheless, they were all very much alike in some fundamental features of social structure, especially in those having to do with kinship. This is perhaps not surprising in view of their history, namely, their common derivation from a historically interrelated cluster of communities—on Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and other nearby islands—within a time frame of less than two millennia, and the subsequent isolation of most of them from cultural traditions markedly different from those they shared. Having said that, however, it is necessary to point out that over time there had developed many differences among Polynesian societies in domains of social relations, including even some facets of kinship. Several attempts have been made by scholars to account for those differences, but the aim of this chapter is descriptive and not explanatory; and this aim will be pursued, first, by depicting two societies, Tikopia and Tahiti, in some detail and then by adding some generalities about other Polynesian societies. As was said about our Australian exemplar, the Murngin, neither of these societies was more "typical" of Polynesian societies than others that could be portrayed—indeed, one of them, Tikopia, was quite atypical in one respect—but they will provide some indications of the kinds of differences that existed among them. We can begin with the Tikopians, whose society has been described more skillfully and in richer detail than any other in Polynesia, and at a time just before European influences had commenced to effect radical changes in it. 1

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Figure 17.1. Hawaii, wooden food bowl (after Linton, Wingert, and d'Harnoncourt 1946)

Tikopia Tikopia is an extinct volcanic crater some ninety miles distant from any other island. During Raymond Firth's 1928-1929 visit its 6 or so square miles of varied terrain supported a population of about 1,280. This is a relatively high density by Oceanian standards but the island's soil was fertile enough to provide a plentiful supply of vegetable foods—taro, breadfruit, bananas, yams, coconuts, sago. The Tikopians kept neither pigs nor chickens but the island's crater lake and encircling ocean supplied fish and mollusks throughout most the year. Settlements consisted of fifteen villages (kainanga)2 located on low ground and near the sea or lake. Each village was made up of a number of household units—one or more dwellings, a cookhouse and usually a canoe shed. Some villages also contained one or two uninhabited temples, the past residences of notable ancestors, but there were no separate buildings for village men. Most households were composed of nuclear families—a man and his wife and unmarried children, although a few contained a pair of married brothers and their wives and children, or an elderly couple and one of its married sons. (The spatial arrangements in a typical Tikopian dwelling were described in chapter 9.) In addition to sleeping and eating together under the same roof, the members of each household worked together to produce and prepare most of their own food, although there was a continuous exchange of food among households interrelated by close kinship ties. Each village had its name and its commonly acknowledged boundaries, and its residents often interacted as a unit: the women to harvest the reefs, the men to fish together as a fleet, young people to dance together in the evenings, and so on. While members of separate villages often assembled together for some purpose or other they did so with consciousness of their own village identities. The third kind of residential division on Tikopia consisted of the

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Figure 17.2. Tikopia, canoe ornament (after Firth 1967c) island's two districts (fasi, 'side'), which were separated in part by mountain ridges. In former times relations between the two districts—Faea and Ravenga—were bitterly warlike, and even under colonial peace the rivalry persisted in the form of mutual suspicion and disparagement. Cutting across both village and district boundaries, however, were descent units, called paito, each of which contained an average of 3 0 - 6 0 members,3 who were all of the living descendants in the male line of some genealogically traceable ancestor of a few generations remove. Typically, the members of a paito consisted of a set of elderly or middle-aged persons, males and females, interrelated by sibling or other close patrilateral ties (e.g., first and second cousins), plus all the sons and daughters of the males of the above, plus the sons and daughters of those sons. Any child of any of the above females would have belonged to the paito of its father, which in most but not all cases would have differed from that of his mother, not because of any explicit prohibition against marrying within the paito but because of a general prohibition against marrying a close consanguine, whether patrilateral or matrilateral. (Marriage with a first cousin either patri- or matrilateral was strongly and universally disapproved, and with a second cousin frowned upon.) In other words, the Tikopian paito conforms to my definition of a lineage—in this case a patrilineage—but it was not explicitly exogamous by rule. One rationale for the patrilineality of the paito was contained in the Tikopian theory of conception. To recall what was mentioned in chapter 13 about this theory, women were believed to serve only as receptacles for the conception of children. The basic physical material contained in a fetus was supplied by semen, injected into a woman by several acts of copulation on the part of the same man. In due course a female deity

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helped to shape the growing fetus, and a soul (ora, mauri) was implanted in it from outside, but the resulting child was considered to be mainly the product of its genitor. Moreover, membership in a Tikopian paito was strictly limited to individuals believed to have been conceived by a male member; unlike some other Polynesian descent units we shall examine, an individual could not be adopted into it. Also, unlike the Murngin's patrilineal descent units described earlier (the ones I call patricians), the adult members of a Tikopian paito were able to trace their descent to some named (and presumably historical) human ancestor through patrilines of actual and name-identified genealogical links. In the case of "chiefly" paito, such lines were traced back for ten or so generations, and even beyond that with respect to mythical and /or supernatural forebears. For most non-chiefly paito, however, the eponymous ancestor— the one credited with having founded it as a separate unit—went back no further than four generations or so. Each paito had its own proper name and a number of corporately owned tracts of land (i.e., estates), the whole island having been divided into estates identified generally with one or another paito. One or more of each paito's estates contained house sites, including temples containing the graves of former members. In addition, the estates of each paito included some areas planted in "permanent" crops and others given over to gardening. In most cases a paito's estates were distributed widely over the whole island, but its male members and its unmarried females tended to dwell in houses (also called paito) near one another and usually—but not necessarily—on their own estates. (Marital residence was in most cases virilocal, that is, women moved to their husband's residences upon marrying.) Among any set of siblings the eldest son (te urumatua) was accorded most authority and privilege. This principle, which prevailed in most but not all Polynesian societies, carried over into paito organization as well, the titular head of a paito having usually been the most direct descendant from the eponymous ancestor in the line of senior sons. As head he was titular controller over his paito's estates and sacred canoes, and represented its members vis-á-vis their ancestral ghost-guardians and gods. He also exercised some control over other aspects of his paito-mates' behavior, but that was limited both by their having been his close consanguines, and by the overarching powers held by the chief of whichever kainanga his paito was a part. Even in a society such as Tikopia, where population numbers tended to remain fairly constant over time despite occasional famines and wars, the sizes of individual paito varied as a result of uneven demographic events. Some paito became greatly reduced, or even died out altogether (i.e., their surviving male members produced no sons), while others increased enough to encourage branching into separate paito. In some

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cases the branching originated in strife among brothers but most typically it seems to have been a normal concomitant of numerical increase. Thus, in a hypothetical but historically plausible reconstruction, a father, as a senior titleholder of a portion of a paito's estates, assigned it to his own sons, who in the course of time became progenitors of enough descendants—say, forty or fifty—to develop into a separate branch, with a name of their own and with enough autonomy in economic and ritual matters to become generally recognized as separate, while continuing, however, to recognize the seniority, especially in ritual matters, of the main pat to "trunk" from which they had branched. There was no official enactment to transform a branch into a recognized paito; it was usually a very gradual process. Once established however, a paito continued to exist as a separate entity until every member expired, in which event its lands and other properties usually reverted to the paito from which it had branched. Every paito was included in one or another of Tikopia's four kainanga, which were (in order of ritual precedence): Kafika, Tafua, Taumako, and Fangarere. The kainanga derived their names from the "senior" one of its paito, whose head was also 'chief (te ariki) of the kainanga as a whole. Thus, a man named Kafika was head of both the paito and the kainanga of that name (and, as chief of the society's premier kainanga, he was also the premier island chief). Most paito owed their inclusion in their respective kainanga to patrifiliation; their (male) eponymous ancestors having been sons of former male members of the kainanga"s chiefly paito or of one of its branches. In other cases, however, a paito was included in a kainanga by incorporation, most usually through marriage—that is, some male immigrant having married a daughter or sister of his local (and usually chiefly) protector, thereby siring children who, for lack of alternative, became members of their mother's paito and whose own patrilineal descendants eventually became a separate paito. Thus, the Tikopian kainanga was a descent unit, more specifically a segmented clan. And while its lineage segments, the paito, were themselves strictly patrilineal in recruitment, the clan itself was only preponderantly so. Moreover, as in the case of its paito segments, marriage was not explicitly prohibited within the kainanga, and in fact several such marriages did take place. Even more than in the case of their constituent paito, the lands and members of each kainanga were scattered throughout the Island, hence kainanga mates were often divided by their different village and district loyalties. But their ultimate authorities in both secular and religious matters were the chiefs—the ariki—of their respective kainanga. In 1929 Kafika kainanga numbered 443 members, Taumako 385, Tofua 365, and Fangarere 89. Because of its small size and former kinship links, Fangarere was joined with Kafika kainanga on some occa-

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sions, such as inter-kainanga dance contests. In addition to dance contests, kainanga functioned as units in dart matches, in some kinds of feasting, in funeral rites (for chiefs), but mostly in seasonal religious rites having to do with food supplies and health. With regard to food, each kainanga was responsible for insuring, through rites directed to its particular deities, the growth of one of the four major crops: taro, yams, coconuts, or breadfruit. The particular 'deities' (atua) revered by each kainanga included the apotheosized spirits of some of its former notables and some spirits that had never been human. Like their human kainangamates these deities differed widely in social importance. Some of them manifested themselves occasionally in the form of certain animals, but not in the sense that characterized Australians' totemic beliefs. In its religious functions, the Tikopian kainanga resembled somewhat the Murngin patrician, but it differed widely from the latter with respect to the secular authority of its headmen: in Firth's words, "social life in Tikopia tends to pivot around the chiefs" (1967a: 23). Usually (and in some measure normatively) the office of ariki devolved upon the eldest son of the reigning officeholder, and immediately after the latter's death. However, if the dead ariki had no male issue or none of adult age, or if some influential kainanga-mates wished to return the office to the main line of descent after it had been held for a while in some collateral line, contention sometimes did occur. But after a candidate had been either proclaimed or selected, and then ritually installed, he usually held office for life—an office that invested him with far-reaching powers in both religious and secular domains. A chiefs secular authority applied most powerfully and directly to members of his own kainanga but extended over other persons as well. He is treated with respect in ordinary social intercourse, his opinion is received with deference, his wrath is feared. "If a chief is angry with a man, where shall he g o " say the natives, "has he a land to which he can retreat?" In extreme cases, where a man has committed some grave offence against the chiefs dignity or against custom, the chief says, "Go to your land the sea" ('Poi ki tou fenua te moana'). It is a sentence of death; the man launches his canoe and sets out on the face of the ocean to perish of thirst or be engulfed in a storm, or be devoured by man-eating sharks. Theoretically there is no escape. In practice, however, another chief may save the victim. He forbids him to leave and keeps him until the anger of the first chief has cooled. The man then takes presents of sinnet cord, mats, and a valuable bonito hook (pa) with bone or tortoiseshell barb, and wailing out his repentance in a formal dirge, crawls to the feet of the chief and makes his peace, (ibid. 2 4 )

A chiefs wishes were often executed, and on occasion mitigated, by officials known as maru. The latter, who also served in a general way to preserve public order, usually included one or two close patrilateral kins-

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men of a chief, especially his brothers and eldest son (i.e., his natural heir). There was no fixed number of them, and personality had much to do with their influence. As stated above, native theory ascribed life and death powers to chiefs; this power was, however, usually constrained by an attitude of noblesse oblige, which was in fact expressed in varying degrees by all the chiefs. But if on occasion a chiefs anger led him to exert his authority beyond a point considered reasonable by the populace, a mam usually intervened, always respectfully, to soften the punishment and to save the chiefly dignity from making what might subsequently be regarded as a mistake. In household subsistence matters a chief depended mainly upon his own labor and that of his closest relatives; most of the goods he received from kainanga-mates (i.e., on ceremonial occasions) he redistributed or eventually reciprocated. In fact, in terms of material goods (e.g., bearing coconut palms and breadfruit trees, garden produce, etc.) there were some non-chiefs who owned as much or more than some chiefs. But in terms of land, the most important form of property, a chief had certain rights that superceded those of any of his kainatiga-max.es—a circumstance which calls for more systematic consideration of Tikopia land tenure. In discussing land ownership in Tikopia (or in any other Oceanian society) it is necessary to identify the aspects of it that were owned, the types of title held, and the social units holding them—all of which can be understood only in relation to the kinds of uses made of that land. Tikopians used the soil of their land for producing food and other products (e.g., kava, barkcloth, turmeric, areca nut, medicines). They used some of its natural vegetation for building materials, canoes, and fibers. They built their houses, dart throws, and canoe sheds on it, and buried their dead in it. Although they spent some time in their lake or on the ocean, fishing, most of their lives were spent on dry land. Moreover, in contrast to some other Oceanian peoples, who risked their lives when traveling beyond their particular community boundaries, Tikopians moved about freely all over the island except for a few places specifically (and usually temporarily) put off limits. Of most importance in the present context was the natural (and cultural) distinction between longterm and short-term food crops: between coconuts, breadfruit, bananas on the one hand, and garden crops such as taro and yams on the other. Another factor that had important bearing on Tikopians' attitudes and actions regarding land ownership was the overall plenitude of plant food. Except for occasional famines (caused mainly by hurricanes) there was usually enough fertile land to produce enough food to keep everyone well fed year round. There were times when food consumption had to be reduced or production increased in order to provide enough for feasts and large-scale exchanges, but in ordinary times a Tikopian need not and

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did not produce or otherwise acquire more food than was required for everyday consumption. (There was no Trobriand-like accumulation of food for purposes of prestige-making conspicuous display. And with no pigs on the island there were no reasons for growing the food required to keep those status-enhancing animals fed.) As noted earlier, the whole of the island was divided into named tracts of land, estates, all of them definitely bounded by natural or artificial markers—streams, ridge tops, trees, paths, stones, and so forth. No figures are given for their total number but there appear to have been about fifteen hundred in all, measuring on the average about one hectare each. 4 It was also stated earlier that every one of the island's estates was identified with one or another of the society's paito. In Firth's words, "In the broadest sense each orchard [estate] belongs to a paito, but investigation always shows that by arrangement one branch [of the paito] only, a single household or group of households, resorts to it" (1936: 389) (or, as the Tikopians phrased it, "goes to it"). This raises the question, What kinds of rights did this and other Tikopian connotations of the Englishlanguage word "ownership" imply? A distinction must first be made between types of "ownership." Thus, some entities (including land) are in some societies "owned by" some one or another social unit (an individual or a number of individuals owning it corporately) in undivided ownership, that is, that unit alone has total control over its use and disposition, including destruction or transfer. Even in a society like that of the United States, with its official commitment to "private" ownership, few important goods (least of all land) are owned in this way (even in cases of fee-simple land ownership, governments retain residual rights of eminent domain). In the United States as in most other societies (including those of pre-European Oceania) most socially important goods (including especially land) are at least subject to divided ownership. That is to say, one unit of the owners of a property will be found to have certain provisional use-rights in it (usually specified and often within limited periods of time), and another unit of owners will have residual rights in it—all use-rights in it will revert to this unit in the event the provisional owners die or reach the end of or otherwise forfeit their use-right contract. As was described above, the process of paito branching was accompanied by—was in fact realized by—the division of its lands. The process usually began when a paito's titular head apportioned its (i.e., "his," because he exercised most control over its use and disposition) estates among his sons for their more directly individual use and control. In some cases the process ended, generations later, with the respective descendants of those sons becoming separate paito, and their lands separate paito estates. When one branch of a paito died out, its lands reverted to the branch immediately senior to it, or to the senior paito, the "trunk," itself. Or, even in cases where a whole paito died out,

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there was usually some other paito that claimed and acquired its land— one within the same kainanga supposed (by actual or mythical pedigree) to be its immediate senior, genealogically. (This is not to say, however, that such transfers took place by universal consent; in many instances they were contested, sometimes violently.) The process of apportionment (and eventual detachment) was more consequential in the case of "orchards" than in the case of land given over to gardening. Unless its titular owner had placed a taboo sign upon it— for example, a branch across its access path—a person could plant a garden crop anywhere he wished, regardless of his relationship to the owner, and without prior permission from the latter. Convention required him to announce his action to the owner after he had done so, and to present him with a small portion of the harvest (i.e., rent)-, but convention also required the owner to acquiesce in good grace unless he had previously tabooed the land. (And even in the latter circumstances it was considered churlish for a man to deny a prior request for planting rights, or to make a frequent practice of tabooing his gardening land.) The rationale for this liberal attitude toward soil-lending (for such it was) was that the loan was only for the life of the crop, a matter of a year or less. In fact, in his survey of one large area of garden lands, Firth found that a large percentage of gardeners had planted crops on tracts whose residual owners were members neither of their own kainanga nor district. Orchards were another matter. Except as will be mentioned, only those persons (and their household-mates) to whom an orchard had been explicitly apportioned had unresticted access to its more durable products—its coconuts, almonds, bananas, areca nuts, barkcloth saplings. Non-owners were allowed to pick a ripened breadfruit (on account of its brief span of edibility), but only a small quantity of its more durable products (say, a green coconut to assuage thirst) and that only with prior permission from, or more usually by subsequent announcement to, the owner (who was expected to acquiesce). Even in the case of brothers, after their father had explicitly apportioned orchards to each of them they occasionally shared meals at each other's houses but did not "go to" —that is, harvest from—one another's orchards unrestrictedly. 5 In all the above, the emphasis has been upon the male members of landowning units; however, females also had their rights in land. Through her father a female shared use-rights in paito estates along with her brothers, and upon her marriage her father usually apportioned one or more of these estates to her for use of herself, her husband, and her offspring. Unlike her brothers, however, she could not pass on those rights to her offspring. Upon her death those rights reverted to her brothers and their progeny; her offspring having received their permanent land rights from their father, who, if still alive, no longer "went to" the orchards of his deceased wife.

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One of the powers of a kainanga's ariki ('clan chief) was his rights over land. T h e cardinal principle of Tikopia land tenure is that all the land held by any members of the clan is at the chiefs disposal. T h e reason for this is simple. T h e chief is the head of the clan, its representative with the gods, mediator for his people in regard to the fertility of their crops. Hence his control of supernatural forces in the interests of his people on the one hand should be matched by control of their material resources on the other. So w e get the proposition frequently expressed by chief and commoner alike that the orchards of the people are the orchards of their leader. A native expression is, " T h e y stand in the clan but they are the orchards of the chief." This is no idle statement. For not only in economic matters is the chief the ultimate authority. If a man insults or offends him, he must pay the penalty. Sooner or later to avoid exile on the face of the ocean and almost certain death, he must abase himself, and with food and gifts atone for his insubordination. A man cannot live without lands or without a chief. So in the last resort the p o w e r is in the chiefs hands. It must be said in justice to the chiefs of Tikopia that each as I knew him w a s fully cognisant of his duty to his people; though in theory and in fact their lands were under his jurisdiction, he regarded himself as the guardian of their c o m m o n interests and rarely attempted to misuse his undoubted authority.

1936:376)

(Firth

One expression of a chiefs overlordship was the "gifts" of food (tribute) made to him by kainanga-mates from time to time. A second expression of overlordship was a chiefs right to levy food and other products of the land (in addition to services) from kainanga members for religious ceremonies and other distributions sponsored by him. And a third, more direct, expression was a chiefs intervention in the quarrels between kainanga mates over contested estates; if they persisted in their contentions against his advice he could and sometimes did himself assume direct ownership over the estates. But a chiefs position vis-a-vis land and its products was not confined to his own kainanga's land. Wherever he went he was privileged to be given—or to take—choice articles of produce, such as green (drinking) coconuts and the best of an areca palm's nuts (i.e., for betel chewing). When he required food or goods for some occasion it was his right to levy them from all his neighbors, including members of other kainanga; such levies (which pro rata were usually quite small) were called "the thefts by the chiefs," but were acquiesced in by all. A chiefs powers over land outside his own kainanga's holdings were expressed most directly in his rights and duties regarding one of the major food crops. As noted earlier, each kainanga was associated with one or another of Tikopia's four major food crops: Kafika with yams, Tafua with coconuts, Taumako with taro, and Fangarere with breadfruit.

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T h e associations came about in consequence of the special relationship that obtained between the kainanga and the deity believed responsible for the thriving of the crop in question. It w a s in fact the duty of each chief to place a t a b o o on the harvest of that crop everywhere, and not only over the lands of his own kainanga, when, for example, he perceived an increasing scarcity of it, or when large supplies were needed for future feasts. J u s t as a c h i e f s secular authority was enforced (and sometimes mitigated) by the officials known as maru, he w a s assisted in his priestly duties by his kainanga's several pure ('elders'), w h o were the heads of the kainanga's more senior paito. Tikopia religion centres in the atua, spiritual beings, of whom each arikt and each pure has a set of his own. These include the line of his family ancestors, puna, who have held office, from his immediate predecessor back to the originator of the [clan] and in addition a number of atua last (great deities) sometimes termed tupua, who have never lived as men. These atua are of varying rank or degree of importance, and are so distributed that each chief has one of the principal ones as his main deity. The highest atua of all in point of power is a deity of the culture-hero type, who lived in Tikopia as a man and chief of surpassing size and strength, instituted a number of customs and performed some remarkable feats. After this he was killed by a mortal man, and going, without doing violence to his slayer, to the abode of the great atua, induced them thereby to hand over to him their mana, their supernatural power, by means of which he attained supremacy among them. As this atua was chief and ancestor of the Kafika clan, the Ariki Kafika in consequence holds the primacy among the chiefs. Each of the latter, however, counts this god as being in his pantheon, having a separate rau or name for him. But the control of the other

Figure 1 7 . 3 . T i k o p i a , kava bowl (after Firth 1 9 7 0 )

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chiefs over this atua is inferior to that of the Ariki Kafika, whose bond of relationship with him is so much more intimate. This usage of rau, of names, applies in other cases also, and enables several groups to have an interest in the same deity, though he is always primarily the atua of one of them. This interlocking system of gods obviously provides a very strong element in binding together the Tikopia community on its socio-religious side. (Firth 1967a: 2 5 26)

Tikopia's chiefs, for all their lofty powers, were above all kinsmen of their subjects, as well as o f one another, so let us focus on the principal kinds o f kin relationship in this society where everyone was akin. T h e T i k o p i a classified a person's consanguines by the terms of reference in Figure 1 7 . 4 . (Terms for affines will be listed separately, later o n . ) TUPUNA

A

O

A

O

MASIKITANGA

=

TAMANA

r

O

A

TUATINA

NANA

A

o

EGO

KAVE

A

A

O

TAMA

TAMAFINE

I A

A

O

IRAMUTU

1 O MAKOPUNA

Figure 1 7 . 4 . T i k o p i a n kinship system (after Firth 1 9 3 6 ) If the E g o (i.e., the person in question) were female the terminology was the same except for her siblings and her sibling's offspring. T h u s , her sister was her taina and her brother her kave; in other words, taina and kave did not mean " b r o t h e r " or "sister" but rather "sibling of opposite sex." N o r did a female differentiate terminologically between her own offspring (i.e., tama, tamafine) and that o f her brother. Like all terminological systems for classifying kin, this one tells some-

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thing about the ways in which Tikopians thought and acted regarding their relatives, but it does not tell very much. For example, the bare word tamana (which referred to one's own father and to the latter's brother and to his male "cousins" however distant genealogically) masks some important distinctions in the ways a person acted toward (and presumably thought about) the different kin-types labeled by that (kin-class) word. As did peoples elsewhere, the Tikopia had other verbal measures for differentiating kinship "distance";6 however, the fact that single kinclass labels were applied to that and other genealogically heterogeneous sets of kin-types cannot be ignored. But before characterizing the relationships expressed in these labels of consanguinity let us first look at those applied to affines, and then at the ways in which nuclear families, the hubs of the whole kinship system, became established, proliferated, and broke apart. Like a Murngin, a Tikopian married someone classified as a consanguine (in the sense that all Tikopians were through some connections or other identifiable as "consanguines"). But unlike a Murngin, there was for a Tikopian no specific kin-class of consanguines with whom marriage was prohibited or prescribed, the rule having been that one ought not to marry someone "closer" than a third cousin (or its equivalent in genealogical remove), whatever kin-type that person may have been. But when marriage did take place, the couple became known as matua (husband) and nofine (wife), which terms served for no other kin type. Moreover, unlike the Murngin practice, there were no categories of consanguines that were predetermined to be (or not to be) parents-in-law; when a marriage took place the couple's parents became, as in English, simply, 'father'- (tamana) or 'mother'- (nana) 'in-law' (fongova). (On the other hand, the spouse of a father's sister also became a "father," and that of a father's brother a "mother.") For affines of one's own genealogical level (e.g., for a brother's wife or a wife's brother) ma was the term applied to one of a person's own sex, taina to one of a person's opposite sex. And, for the spouse of one's child, whatever the sex, the term fongona served. Beyond these genealogical levels, however, affines were not identified as such—that is, tupuna ('grandparents') were tupuna, and makopuna ('grandchildren') were makopuna whether or not they were affines as well. In other words, it would appear that whatever conventions in behavior there may have been to distinguish grandparents-in-law from grandparents, they were not considered critical enough to require different labels. In some cases marriage took place between members of the same paito, and merely added another dimension to families already closely linked. More usually however a marriage served to create new and much closer ties between families, or whole paito, ties that persisted throughout the lifetimes not only of the spouses but of their children as well.

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The Tikopian ways for marrying were a far cry from those of the Murngin. Instead of long prearrangement and prescriptive choice of mates, marriages took place on the spur of the moment and usually without prior mutual consent of the families involved. Some of them resulted from "sweethearting": after a period of trysting the young man led his consenting mistress to the house of his parents, and, if the latter agreed (which they usually did) the union was thereby sealed. In some other cases marriage was more or less forced upon a reluctant groom by the relatives of a young woman allegedly made pregnant by him. And many other marriages were brought about by "capture," through more or less forceful abduction of the woman by relatives of the man, sometimes with and sometimes without the latter's consent. (Instances of the latter kind took place when the relatives of a high-ranking youth decided that it was time for him to settle down, or when they wished to prevent him marrying a "sweetheart" of whom they disapproved.) The abductions characteristic of marriage by capture were anything but staged. They took place without foreknowledge on the part of the woman and her relatives and always involved some struggle. If the abducting party kidnapped the woman out-of-doors, some of her relatives usually followed her captors and fought strenuously and sometimes bloodily, to recover her. (And if they failed to recover her, their pride was injured and a feud usually ensued.) The more orthodox and mutually acceptable way was for the abducting party to go to the house of the girl, and while some of them seized her the others engaged the girl's protectors in one-sided combat (i.e., by submitting without retaliation to the latter's blows). Such struggles seldom resulted in serious injury but they evidently served to salve the pride of the family whose daughter had been taken away. Back at the groom's house, where the abducted bride was held in more or less willing confinement, the marriage was physically consummated (sometimes forcibly, by means of her being held with legs apart by some companion of the groom). Meanwhile, the relatives of the groom assembled the large collection of food required for the wedding and its ensuing inter-familial exchanges. However a marriage had come about it had eventually to be accompanied by exchanges between relatives of bride and groom in order to be publicly acceptable and to secure for the union's offspring the kind of bilateral kinship ties necessary for its welfare. The rationale for the exchanges was that, by her marriage and move to her husband's house— which a bride invariably did—her own family had lost a cherished and economically valuable member and thus ought to be compensated. The first of the transfers was the "gift of atonement," which consisted mainly of a wooden bowl and a roll of sennit (coconut fiber cordage) presented by relatives of the groom to the family of the bride in the latter's house.

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This presentation was made with the standard acts of obeisance (i.e., crawling and knee kissing) and was accompanied by unresisted beatings delivered by relatives of the bride. The second transfer was also made by the party of the groom. It consisted of quantities of wooden bowls and sennit, presented not only to the bride's own family but to other influential relatives of hers (including her kainanga chief). The fact that it was called a koroa, the term applied also to ordinary barter, indicates that it was regarded as "payment" for something of value received but in no way suggests that the bride was a chattel, to be bartered like a material thing. The third and final major transfer was the menga, a large quantity of pandanus mats and barkcloth given to the groom's party by that of the bride—a clear indication that, even though the bride had been taken in a manner resembling robbery, the union was recognized as being acceptable to both parties. Following these major exchanges there were a number of lesser ones, including a visit by bride and groom to the bride's home; thereafter most marriages appear to have endured until the death of either spouse. Most widowers eventually remarried but widows tended not to do so, and if they had children to remain in their husband's place. (Tikopians did not practice the levirate.) Polygyny was much favored by Tikopian men (primarily, it was claimed, on account of men's large sexual appetites) and most men of the chiefly class had more than one wife. Polyandry, on the other hand, did not exist; and adultery was much more strongly censured for women than for men. Another circumstance worth noting was the large number of unmarried adults (i.e., relative to their numbers in perhaps most other Polynesian societies). There were both spinsters and bachelors, but the latter clearly outnumbered the former—mainly for economic reasons, it would appear.7 Having given some account of the social units of Tikopia society— households (including families), villages (i.e., communities), districts, paito and kainanga—we can now look closer at some of the structurally more important dyadic relationships that those units included or that linked them together. We consider first relations between a person and some of his patrilateral kinfolk, a category of primary importance in Tikopian society. Relations between a son and his own ("true") father were characterized both normatively and existentially by obedience and respect on the part of the former—the norm having been backed by moral sanction and, ultimately, by supernatural intervention. Even with adult sons, commands were often issued to them peremptorily and usually obeyed without demur. To raise a hand against one's father was not only criminal but sacrilegious. The element of respect was expressed in several conventional ways (which in most cases applied to daughters as well as sons), for example, a person was not allowed to use any articles owned by his

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father except by permission, nor to use obscene language or relate risque stories in his presence, nor (a taboo of great weight) to touch his head or anything ordinarily touched by his head (e.g., his wooden pillow and sleeping mat). Some of these constraints were Polynesia-wide, such as, for example, the sanctity of the head. Others however were weightily influenced by two local Tikopian circumstances: first, by the fact that the orchard lands that the sons "went to" as adults had been received by them from their father, and, second, by the belief that much of a person's welfare depended on his father's relations with supernatural powers (first, in the role of family "priest" and later as a spirit himself). This is not to say that relations between father and sons were governed altogether by these formal considerations: in fact, these and other kinds of interpersonal relations were influenced here as in other human societies by differences in personality and situational context. However, the fact that a Tikopian male was dependent mainly upon his own father for a large proportion of his material resources added a dimension to their interpersonal relations that was not present in father-son relations among, say, the Murngin. Still another dimension of Tikopian father-son relations that had structural significance (and weight in everyday interaction) was the special status of an eldest son, who by custom succeeded to the position of authority held by his father over family affairs. So long as a father remained alive his authority prevailed, but after the eldest son, te urumatua, reached adult years the two "listened to" each other—that is, the respect and deference became mutual. Not surprisingly, the formal requirements of this relationship led sometimes to friction between the two, and undoubtedly contributed to the common and widely recognized situation wherein fathers had to "listen to" their eldest sons but felt and expressed more affection and concern for their youngest. (Also, while the eldest was usually the first to marry and to move into a house of his own, the youngest tended to remain in his parental home even after he married, which in some cases he never did.) As to be expected, the special status enjoyed by an eldest son vis-a-vis his father was reflected in the influence and authority he was able to exert over his siblings in family affairs. Parallel to their relations with their youngest sons, most Tikopian fathers were especially affectionate to and indulgent of their daughters. In the words of Firth's informants, "In this land the man favors his female children" (1936: 167). Among other expressions of this relationship, it was claimed that a man would allow no one (but himself) to reprove her; and, often, it was said, a man apportioned larger shares of his paito lands to daughters than to sons. Apart from any Oedipal explanations that might be offered for this situation, it will be recalled that daughters were

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required to leave their parents' homes upon marriage, and to own only life-time rights in the land received (their children had no permanent rights in such lands). A Tikopian's everyday, "informal," relations with his father's sister, his masikitanga, was determined situationally to a considerable extent. While a niece and nephew were children or adolescent, and their aunt unmarried and residing nearby, the latter acted like an older sister or alternate "mother," toward them, that is, in a familiar and nurtural role. But there was a formal side to this relationship, which cast the aunt in the role of a "female-father": the nephew and niece were prohibited from using her personal name, from striking or cursing her, and from referring to sexual and scatalogical matters in her presence. Moreover, these restraints were by rule extended to children of the father's sister as well— to patrilateral cross-cousins. In the words of one of Firth's informants: M y cross-cousin is weighty indeed. I do not speak evilly t o him. H e also does not speak evilly t o me. Because he is the son of the father's sister. One does not strike the father's sister, one does not speak evilly t o her. G o o d speech only is made t o her. T h e basis of the father's sister is the father. I do not speak evilly to my father, nor do I speak evilly t o his sister, my aunt. I again do not speak evilly to the child of my father's sister. It is done in this fashion because she is of weight. Should I speak evilly t o my father and my father's sister, when my father's sister dies, and I have spoken evilly t o her, then it reacts and I become ill. T h a t is its basis. The oven is fired, and when her oven-firing (final rite for the dead) is finished, the father's sister goes then t o her ancestors and returns hither again t o bring sickness upon her child w h o spoke evilly. (Firth 1 9 3 6 :

220)

Except for the stronger authority that the eldest had over family affairs, the relations among brothers were characterized usually by cooperation, mutual support, and freedom of conversation: "Par excellence, they are the persons who may joke together and make obscene remarks to each other" (ibid. 189). This type of conversational familiarity, which anthropologists label a "joking relationship," was institutionalized in many Oceanian societies. In Tikopia it was culturally licensed not only between actual brothers, but between distant classificatory ones as well; it was permitted even between a chief and a commoner if they happened to be classed as "brothers" (taina). Continuing our survey of intrafamily relations, "the attitude of brothers to each other also applies very much in the case of sisters," namely, "In childhood and adolescence the elder is guide, guardian and censor to the younger, and there are no restraints on their conversations" (ibid. 191). Scant though this information is (a fact the ethnographer acknowledges), it nonetheless reflects the circumstance that in Tikopia at least, the sister-

900

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RELATIONS

sister relationship had little structural significance for the society as a whole. (A statement, as we shall see, that does not apply to many societies in Micronesia and Melanesia.) Relations between brother and sister were influenced weightily by the rule against sexual intercourse; instances of brother-sister copulation were reported but were rare and generally abhorred. (A marriage of this kind would have been impossible.) This rule was extended to the degree that brothers and sisters should not talk about or listen to matters of a sexual nature in one another's presence; beyond that, however, the constraints imposed upon their interaction were considerably milder than those between brother and sister in many other Oceanian societies. In Tikopia, for example, they continued past childhood and adolescence not only to occupy the same one-room house and to work and eat together, but even to sleep next to one another on the floor. (In the case of distant "brothers" and "sisters" such familiarity was disapproved, but that may have been due to the fact that since marriage between them was permissible and not uncommon, familiarity of that kind was indicative of an actual sexual connection between the two.) In later life, the relations between a brother and sister were complicated by those between the former and the latter's son—a matter that will be described presently. The dyadic relationships so far described concern actual, directly genealogical, pairs of kinsmen, for example, offspring or sisters of the same father. According to Tikopian kin classification, however, a person had, for example, many "fathers" (including especially his own father's own brothers); and ideally, a person ought to behave somewhat alike to all "fathers." But the important words in this statement are "ideally" and "somewhat." I cannot for reasons of space, reproduce Firth's meticulous description of the differences in normative and existential behavior that accompanied gradations in genealogical distance, but I ask the reader to accept that they did indeed exist, not only with respect to "fathers" but to all the other relationships that have been or remain to be described. Indeed, such was the nature of all the kinship systems of Oceania: while they classed together diverse kin-types of relatives under single kin-class labels, and in doing so implied or specifically prescribed that all those under the same label were to be treated somewhat alike, there was a general expectation everywhere that the rules regarding such treatment would vary with genealogical distance, and with the constitution of a society's social units. Thus, in the case of Tikopia's "fathers," "brothers," "sons," and "daughters," those who were members of one's own paito required stricter conformity to the rules of behavior than those who were members of other paito. And the same may be said about kin who were members of other paito of one's kainanga. But now let us turn to some of the more structurally important relationships a Tikopian had with his matrilateral kinsmen, beginning with

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POLYNESIA

Figure 1 7 . 5 . Tikopia, wooden bowl (after Firth 1 9 6 0 ) the mother-child relationship itself. For a succinct description of this I turn again to Firth. The behaviour of a person to his mother conforms to much the same rules as in the case of the father, though not with the same stringency. The tapu between them is less severe, and the assumption of authority in the household by the eldest son, when he is of mature years, makes the mother defer to him rather than he to her. While he is a child, for instance, she handles him freely, but once he is adult she does not do so, refraining especially from touching his head. Her daughter's head she may touch. Warmth of affection from the mother and authority on the part of the father are conventional norms of behaviour from parent to child, though as like as not they may be blended or reversed in any particular family. Consideration and respect for her opinion, small gifts of tobacco and betel, care to see that she gets her portion of food, usually mark the attitude of grown-up children to their mother. (1936: 185) While inheritance and succession were mainly patrifilial and while a Tikopian owed his primary loyalty to his own patrilineally recruited paito, including both its living and dead members, he (or she) maintained very close ties with the paito of his mother as well, especially with his tuatina, the brother (and "brothers") of his mother. To the tuatina he (or she) was iramutu, and to them and all other members of his mother's paito8 he was their tama tapu, their "sacred child." A paito's concern with its tama tapu (i.e., every child of every one of its female members) began before birth and continued after death. If a fetus happened to be incorrectly positioned in the womb, some of its mother's female paito mates corrected that by manipulation, and thereafter one or more representatives of that paito played an active role at

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RELATIONS

nearly every critical point in the tama tapu's life: at birth, at times of illness, and on the occasion of the latter's maturation rites. Thus, when a boy's "childhood" was terminated by the rite of penis incision, it was a tuatina who performed the operation; and when a tama tapu died, it was the duty of his or her mother's paito to attend to the burial (leaving the deceased's own paito mates free to indulge their grief). Moreover, in performing all these services for their tama tapu, the living members of the mother's paito were assisted by—made efficacious by—their associated spirits, who also concerned themselves with the welfare of their female members' offspring. After any of these services had been performed it was customary for a person's own paito mates to make a "gift" (mainly of food) to his tuatina. Although such "gifts" were usually followed by counter-gifts, the latter were in most cases smaller, indicating that the tuatina's services had been "equivalently" reciprocated. In cases where all of a woman's paito looked upon her offspring as their common tama tapu, it was usual for a person to have a more direct and personal tie with a particular one of his mother's own brothers or, if she had no male siblings, with one of her close "brothers." Between this pair the relationship was not limited to ritual occasions. In fact, it was claimed that in some cases a man had more "sympathy" for his tuatina than for his own father; this should occasion no great surprise in view of the easy familiarity of their interaction, which was in sharp contrast to the constraints, the verbal and physical taboos, a person was required to exercise vis-a-vis his father. Although speculation about such matters is easier to propose than to prove, it is reasonable to suggest that the emphasis placed by the Tikopians upon a paito's concern for the welfare of its tama tapu may be viewed as an effort to compensate the offspring of female members for their lack of rights in their mothers' own land. For, it will be recalled, whatever land a woman was apportioned at the time of her marriage reverted to her paito—to her brothers and their offspring—upon her death. A weighty reason behind this suggestion is that, compared to many other peoples in Oceania, the Polynesians were more bilateral in their attitudes toward kinship—that is, they tended more to acknowledge and institutionalize relations with both sides of a person's parentage. As already stated, when a Tikopian married he perforce married a "consanguine," and in perhaps most cases a marriage transformed "consanguinity" into "affinity" among only the closest of the kinsmen of the spouses involved—for example, their own parents and siblings. In fact, even in the case of brothers-in-law (e.g., a woman's husband and her own brother) the most important dimension of their new relationship appears to have been, not their relation with the wife-sister, but their connection with one another through the husband's offspring, who was the wife's brother's tama tapu.

POLYNESIA

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There was however one kind of direct affinal relationship that was more highly institutionalized. I refer here to the role of husbands as soko, 'cooks'. "On the husband's side an obligation of special weight is to come and assist his wife's relatives when, as a group, they have to provide food for some ceremonial occasion. Every man who has married a woman of the family should come along with his bundle of firewood on his shoulder and his bunch of coconuts, while his contribution of taro, breadfruit or bananas is carried by his wife, following behind. If the man cannot come in person he sends as substitute his brother or his son" (Firth 1936: 305). Thus, whenever a household or a whole paito sponsored an event requiring large amounts of cooked food, it was customary for the husbands of its female members to contribute food and to carry out the onerous work of baking it in earth ovens. These services were reciprocated in part by subsequent "gifts" of food, and so forth, but they were viewed, in the first place, as installments owed by the husbands for the wives earlier received. There is little to be said about relations between individuals and their grandparents except to observe that they were usually characterized by mutual affection and by fewer formal constraints than prevailed between parents and child. The fact that there was only one (kin-class) term for both paternal and maternal grandparents, and one for all kin-types of grandchildren, suggests—what the ethnographic reports appear to confirm—that there were also no important social distinctions involved, such as there were, for example, between the Murngin's marikmo (father's father) and nati (mother's father), or maraitcha (son's son) and kaminer (daughter's son). Finally, something more must be said about the hierarchical aspect of Tikopian kin relations—a feature common to all other Polynesian societies and one that served to distinguish them, as a whole, from the (ascriptive) egalitarianism that characterized most of Australian kin relationships. All human societies are socially hierarchical in some respects. In all of them some persons have, or come to have, command over the services and/or goods of some others—that is to say, rights of command that are legitimate and instititionalized, and not just authority secured and maintained by coercive powers alone (although the latter often help to maintain legitimate authority as well). Thus, in all human societies some legitimate statuses of authority and influence are reserved for persons who demonstrate superiority in the exercise of some activity or other: leadership and effectiveness in battle, orating, gift giving, earning wealth, craftsmanship, virtuosity in dancing, and so on. And in all human societies, including the most egalitarian Australian ones, some legitimate kinds of authority are ascribed to at least a few kinship statuses: to parents over their children, to one spouse over the other, and (very widely)

SOCIAL RELATIONS

to older over younger siblings. In addition, there were many societies in Polynesia in which the legitimate authorities ascribed to, say, parents or older siblings within individual family units were extended to relationships between families and larger kin units as well. Thus, in Tikopia the head of a paito was usually the eldest male of the family descended from the eldest son of the paito's founder. A similar kind of arrangement prevailed among the several paito making up a kainanga, one having been considered senior to all others by virtue of descent, through a line of eldest sons, from the kainanga's putative founder. Moreover, it was the ideal (though not always the practice) for kainanga chieftainship to remain within that senior paito—specifically, for the previous chief to be succeeded by his eldest son. (By contrast, in Murngin society, an older sibling's authority over his juniors, such as it was, did not carry over into relations among their respective families; nor were any of the various kinds of descent units of Murngin society interrelated in a hierarchical manner.) Tikopia's four kainanga were also interrelated hierarchically, but not in a thoroughgoing genealogical way. Although the chieftainship of the one called Kafika had some rights (and duties) superior to those of the other three, these had to do mainly with religious worship, and were accounted for only partly in terms of genealogical seniority. On the other hand, while the principle of social hierarchy did not differentiate kainanga as whole units, it did serve to separate all of the society's paito units into two major social strata, or classes: 'chiefly' (paito ariki) and 'commoner' (paito fakaarota). Differences between the two classes were based on seniority and had mainly to do with authority. Both commoner and chiefly paito owned estates, and their members intermarried, but, in Firth's words, "A person of a chiefly family, particularly if closely related to the chief himself, is more apt to give than to receive orders." And, " . . . if a commoner strikes a member of a chiefly family, he will probably have to expiate his offence by going off to sea; the reverse can occur with impunity" (1957: 358). As we shall see, this is far shallower than the gulfs that separated similarly based social strata in some other Polynesian societies; but it is totally different from any kind of social distinction that prevailed in Australian societies. Society

Islands

For another exemplar of Polynesian societies we turn to that of the Society Islands some 2,800 miles southeast of Tikopia and structurally dissimilar from the latter's society not only in scale and complexity but in descent-unit composition as well. Tahiti is the largest of the chain of islands that Europeans have named the Society Islands and that are spread out for about 770 miles along a

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Figure 17.6. Tahiti, fly whisk handle (after Wardwell 1967) northwest to southeast axis. At the time of their discovery by Europeans, in 1767, the 45,000 or so inhabitants of the archipelago spoke the same language and resembled one another closely in most other cultural respects as well.9 While the inhabitants were separated into a number of distinct (and sometimes interwarring) political units there was much coming and going among these islands, and, in the case of some upperclass families, ties of kinship extended from one end of the chain to the other. In keeping with current practice I shall refer to all the Society Islanders (and to their language and traditional culture) as Tahitian, but reserve the word Tahiti for the one island of that name. The households (utuafare) of the Tahitians were typically large (in comparison, say, with those of Tikopia). In most cases a household's buildings included a sleeping house (where all members slept), a cookhouse, a small temple (marae), and in some cases a canoe shed. Most such homesteads were surrounded by groves and small gardens, and were separated from each other by 50 yards or more—in many cases,

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much more. In a few places of unusual topography (e.g., around Huahine Island's landlocked northern lagoon, into which tides carried scores of fish) the homesteads were closer together, but nowhere was there anything resembling a nucleated village. Nevertheless, homesteads were clustered into residential (and social) neighborhoods, consisting of from two to twenty and more homesteads each, and neighborhoods into larger districts, which were separated from similar aggregates geographically (e.g., by mountain ridges) and socially (by boundaries that will be later on defined). Finally, in the case of some islands, all of its neighborhoods (and constituent households) composed a single social (i.e., political) unit; but the larger islands (Tahiti, Mo'orea, Ra'iatea) were not thus unified. The Tahitians' homesteads and other buildings were located mainly on the coastal plains and on the floors of the larger valleys. This was also true of most of their orchards (breadfruit, coconuts, etc.) and gardens (taro, yams, plantains, sweet potatoes, arrowroot, kava, etc.). In addition, they obtained much of their food by harvesting their reefs and by fishing inside and outside their extensive and in most places well-sheltered lagoons. They also raised pigs, dogs, and chickens. Nearly every household had entitled access to every kind of utilizable resource area and provided for its own subsistence needs, although there was a small amount of productive specialization—more individual than regional— that was attended by some exchange (e.g., vegetables for fish). All in all, the Tahitians were able to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves (with what they regarded as adequacy) with less time and effort than was required of many other Oceanian peoples. Except in the case of some upper-class families, most Tahitian households were composed of extended families, and in line with the preference for—though not, as in Tikopia, the prescriptive rule of—virilocal residence, the core of most of them probably consisted of a grandparental couple and their sons along with the latters' wives and children, plus, in a very large number of instances, one or more relatives by adoption. (Adoption was widely practiced, and conferred entitlements almost as full and binding as birth.) All household members ordinarily slept together in the same unpartitioned room, and all but the very young children helped in some way to obtain food; however, there was some segregation along sexual lines in food preparation and eating. There was in fact a general rule that females ought not to eat food touched by men or cooked in the same container or oven as food for men; the reverse did not apply. This rule derived not from any underlying concept about sexuallybased pollution but from the proposition that males, through their relatively safe interaction with spirits, would have imparted residual spiritdanger to the more vulnerable females. 10 As was noted in our earlier account of their conception theories (chap-

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ter 13), the Tahitians acknowledged and attached almost equal social importance to ties with and through both father and mother. And more so than Tikopians they recognized consanguineal ties comprehensively— not just with the patrilateral kinsmen of their fathers and mothers but with all other close kinsmen of both parents as well. There was even a label applied to all such kinsmen of a person, namely, te feti'i; and although the categories referred to by that label were not social units in any other respect, some of a person's feti'i, from both father's and mother's sides, could be counted on to provide support whenever needed, especially on occasions of sickness and death. Tahitians also gave labels to categories of kinsmen sharing ties of common descent. One such was the prefix 'ati, which served to identify all persons descended from a particular individual (human or spirit)—for example, 'ati Omai, the descendants of Omai—in other words, what anthropologists call a cognatic stock. Moreover, there were specific labels applicable to branches of common-descent categories, and words for senior (matahiapo, firstborn, male or female) and cadet (teina, laterborn) branches of a cognatic stock. The Tahitian language also contained labels applied to lines of descent (e.g.,firi'a feti'i), but such lines (which were largely but not entirely patrilineal) were relevant only to upper-class persons and figured mostly in genealogical evaluations of an individual's social rank. While all of the above categories were doubtless important, conceptually, there were no actual groups, such as the Tikopians' paito and kainanga, denoted by them. The idea of cognatic stock did however figure in the composition of the upper level of the upper class (as will be described later), and it was the central frame in the composition of the actual groupings that I call kin-congregations, and which I will now describe. In listing the kinds of buildings occupied by a household, mention was made of its marae ('temple'). Tahitians were in many respects as religious as the Australians. Nearly every particular grouping of them—kin, occupational, political—had its own more or less distinctive set of spirit tutelars, and a specific place, a marae, for interacting with them. In the case of households the marae usually consisted of a small cleared space and a stone upright where the principal tutelar (say, the ghost of a recent ancestor) abided while some individual household member petitioned it for some reason or another having to do with his (or her) own affairs, or where the household's "priest" (usually its senior male, its secular headman) petitioned it on behalf of the group as a whole. It should be noted that the tutelars of a household were concerned with all its members— male and female, young and old, members by birth and by adoption, and any other persons (in most cases, kinsmen) who happened to be residing more or less permanently there. As I mentioned earlier, although homesteads were in most cases

9o8

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RELATIONS

located at a considerable distance from each other they were nevertheless clustered, geographically and socially, into neighborhoods, of from two to about twenty households each. The composition of neighborhoods varied fairly widely in terms of the kinds of kinship and other social ties among its residents. They also varied in terms of their residents' secular collective activities—some having fished or gardened or built things as a whole neighborhood unit, others having done such things as separate households. But whatever else their residents did or did not do together, each neighborhood appears to have had its own marae, where certain of its members interacted with tutelar spirits on behalf of the neighborhood as a whole. Associated with each neighborhood marae was a bounded territory that was usable by any and all full members of the neighborhood. "Full" membership in a neighborhood could be obtained by birth from or marriage to or formal adoption by a full member, male or female. Moreover, there are grounds for believing that persons could become members even without prior kin ties or formal adoption, provided that they were personally acceptable to a neighborhood's leaders and had indicated the intention of remaining there a long time. There is some evidence for concluding that membership was even registered symbolically, by bestowal upon each newly joined member (whether by birth or marriage or adoption) a special marae-name (of which each neighborhood marae had a large collection), which served thereafter as proof of membership, and which conferred entitlement to use of the territory associated with the marae. However, along with these fairly flexible criteria of membership, each neighborhood seems to have been composed around a nucleus of persons who shared common descent. Perhaps the clearest way to epitomize Tahitian neighborhoods would be to present a hypothetical (but plausible) reconstruction of the developmental history of an imaginary (but credible) example of them. For our example let us consider a small and politically autonomous neighborhood consisting of an elderly man (and his wife and unmarried children) residing in one household and his two married sons and one married daughter, each residing in his (or her) own household with his (or her) spouse and children. (As noted earlier, there was a preference for virilocality but not a hard and fast rule.) Nearby their residences would have been their common marae, and surrounding all these would have been a tract of land (and probably the lagoon fronting it) identified exclusively with the neighborhood as a whole and exploited by all its households without regard to internal boundaries. The marae of this whole neighborhood may have been an enlargement of the one originally associated with the household of the elder paterfamilias, or a new one constructed to accommodate the larger congregation it must now serve. In either case its architecture would have become

POLYNESIA

more complex than the single-household one mentioned earlier. The stone upright that served as a station for visiting spirits would have been expanded to become a small stone platform, an ahu, and a separate altar would have been added for food offerings to the spirits. In front of the ahu would have been implanted one or more stone pillars next to which the neighborhood's priestly officiant(s) stood while they conversed with the visiting spirits. In back of these there would have been a large cleared space where other members of the neighborhood sat during religious services. Some neighborhood marae were also circumscribed by stone walls, and/or paved throughout with flagstones or rubble, but these were merely supplementary to the ubiquitous functional features—an ahu, offerings' altar, priests' pillars, and ordinary members' space. The principal officiant in a congregation of this nature would have doubtless been the aforesaid paterfamilias, whose role would have included not only authority over the secular affairs of the neighborhood, especially in matters concerning the distribution of land-use-rights among the separate households, but the right (and duty) to represent the neighborhood vis-a-vis their tutelar spirits. (This right would have been his by virtue of his seniority of birth; that is, he would have been most closely akin to the congregation's tutelar ancestral spirits in terms of primogenitural filiation and descent.) When such an official become too decrepit to carry out his priestly duties single-handedly, or when a neighborhood congregation increased considerably in numbers, it was common practice for one or more other men—typically, the elder sons or younger brothers of the headman-priest—to be appointed to assist in clerical duties, and for each of these assistants there would have been added a station in the form of an additional stone upright. The other neighborhood members attending services in a neighborhood marae would have included any and all post-childhood males. Unlike household marae, which were accessible to all members of the proprietary household, females and younger males were denied entry into the more "public" neighborhood marae—except perhaps on occasions of marriage. (As noted earlier, females and very young males were believed to be dangerously vulnerable to the influences emitted by spirits not of their own household circle, and men's communications with the more powerful, and hence more dangerous, spirits were rendered ineffective by the presence of females.) Regarding the stone uprights just mentioned, in the marae of smaller neighborhoods there were only a few of them and they served mainly as backrests or leaning posts for the congregations' principal officials while actively engaged in their clerical duties. But in the marae of large neighborhoods there were often to be found stone uprights for other persons as well, for example, for men of social importance other than clerical, and for the ghosts of former neighborhood headmen.

SOCIAL

RELATIONS

As mentioned earlier neighborhood units seem to have differed widely in the kinds and amounts of the energies devoted to secular activities, but they were alike in their members' concepts and practices regarding the ownership of land. Each neighborhood unit, it will be recalled, had proprietary rights to some bounded tract of territory (land only or land and lagoon), and all full members had use-rights to any part of that territory, subject only to its temporary pre-emptive use by another member, or to some temporary prohibition on use imposed by the neighborhood's headman. 1 1 With regard to the latter, it was not only the right but the duty of a neighborhood's headman to impose a rahui ('taboo') on any part of its territory when in his judgment that was required for the welfare of the unit as a whole—to prohibit the harvesting of unripe (i.e., drinking) coconuts in anticipation of a food shortage or of a neighborhood-sponsored feast, to forbid fishing for fingerlings, and so forth. (Such was the ideal; it is not unlikely that neighborhood headmen occasionally used these powers for their narrowly individual interests as well.) A neighborhood headman's authority over use of the unit's territory was also manifested in the custom of first-fruit offerings. Thus, it was required of each household head to deliver to the headman, a portion of the first food harvested from his gardens, and of fishermen to do the same with the first of their seasonal catch. Such portions were ideally only token amounts and were intended mainly as offerings through the headman, as neighborhood priest, to the unit's tutelar spirits. (Again, however, it is likely that some neighborhood headmen occasionally abused this custom for selfish purposes.) In addition it was a headman's prerogative to levy other goods and services from his neighborhood mates for purposes deemed beneficial to the unit as a whole, for example, to build a large guest house, to repair the marae, or to fete a visiting headman or chief. And it was within the powers ascribed to a headman that he could inflict punishment upon individuals who disobeyed his orders or who disturbed neighborhood peace. However, in exercising these and other powers it seems to have been generally expected that a headman of a neighborhood should do so with moderation. Unlike the heads or chiefs of larger political units, who were quite often despotic in their rule, those of neighborhoods were expected to treat their subjects in the manner of kinsmen (which to most of their subjects they usually were). In many neighborhoods there were other officials to assist the headman in his secular and religious duties. In some cases these were appointed by the latter from among his close kinsmen, typically his own sons or brothers or nephews. As neighborhoods increased in size, however, some of these offices became identified with—that is, the prerogative of—family lines other than the headman's. Mention of "offices" leads us to examine the subject of Titleholding, an important structural feature of the society as a whole.

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The Tahitian language contained generic words for certain kinds of offices—for example, fight-leaders, official-messengers, and several kinds of religious practitioners (see below). Also, some of the larger and socially more important neighborhoods contained—owned—one or more particular offices identified by a particular proper-name label, which I shall call a kin-Title. (The word Title is capitalized because of its particularity; kin is affixed to it because such offices were usually associated with particular family lines and because they normally passed from parent to child.) In the case of some neighborhoods certain of the "generic" offices just mentioned also passed from parent to child, and in some instances the "generic" office of a whole neighborhood—say, that of official-messenger—came to be also known by a particular kin-Title, say, "Swift-imparter-of profound-words." Moreover, all kin-Titles seem to have carried specific privileges, and many of them specific duties as well; but it is important to keep in mind that each kin-Title was associated with a particular family line in a particular neighborhood and not with neighborhoods as wholes. Now, having listed the most salient social-structural features of neighborhoods, we can return to our hypothetical example of one of them and trace how it might have changed over time. Our model neighborhood, consisting of only four households (of father, two married sons, and one married daughter) would have been small and homogeneous in comparison with most others, but will suit our present purposes. In this, its early stage of development, its several households would have gardened and fished together and perhaps gathered breadfruit and coconuts from the same orchards. After a few generations, however, the descendants of each of the four original core families would themselves have proliferated into two or more separate households, with each of the four branches residing in and exploiting separate parts of their common territory. It would have been at about this stage of development that the neighborhood as a unit would have come to be known by a distinctive name (say, Verdant-Valley-People), and the head (or chief) of the whole neighborhood—ideally, the firstborn son of a line of firstborns leading back to the first-stage paterfamilias headman (or chief)—would have become notable enough to adjacent neighborhoods to attain a kin-Title (say, The-deep-thinker-of-Verdant-Valley). If our Verdant-Valley-People had continued to proliferate, the likely next stage in their structural differentiation would have occurred when the residents of each of the separate "filial" multi-household branches built a marae of their own (in addition to each household's "domestic" one). In doing so, if the headman of a filial branch had "occupied" a subsidiary stone upright in what had now become the "ancestral" marae (marae tupuna) he likely implanted it in the new branch marae, where it became the backrest of himself and succeeding officiants there. But this did not sever relations between ancestral and branch marae; far from it.

912.

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To symbolize their continuing relationship, it was customary for a stone to be removed from the wall of the former and built into the latter. Moreover, the head of the branch (and perhaps other members as well) continued to attend some services at the ancestral marae—and to deliver food and other offerings for presenting, by the priest of the latter, to their common tutelar spirits. In addition the headman of the parental—ancestral, senior—branch of the whole expanded neighborhood unit continued to be secular headman (or chief, if the unit were autonomous) of the whole, although his authority over the filial branches was less absolute and direct. Thus, he maintained his power to taboo resources throughout the whole neighborhood territory, provided his actions served the interests of the neighborhood as a whole. And, within similar constraints and acting through "channels," he continued to levy goods and services from all neighborhood residents and may even have intervened occasionally in interbranch conflicts. An even more significant indication of continuing unity of the whole neighborhood (at this hypothetical stage of its evolution) had to do with its territory. The longer the members of a branch continued to exploit, more or less exclusively, the land nearer their own residences, the stronger became their pre-emptive rights to its use—especially after establishment of their own marae. Nevertheless, some of that area's firstfruit harvest continued to be delivered to the ancestral marae on occasion. More revealingly, if all the members of a branch were to die out or depart, their portion of land would revert to the neighborhood as a whole and be allocated (by its headman or chief) for use by other branches. While the developmental model just outlined was posited mainly on relationships of common (though not necessarily unilineal) descent, it must not be imagined that all Tahitian neighborhoods had developed in exactly that way. For example, some of them are likely to have done so by amalgamation of two or more households, or sets of households, that had previously shared few or no common consanguineal ties. Over the course of time, however, such ties would have been certain to arise and increase among them; and in every known case neighborhood units were composed around a core of persons of common descent. In addition to the process of internal differentiation outlined above, some neighborhoods underwent dispersion and differentiation through "colonial" expansion. That is to say, sometimes one or more members left the home territory permanently and established a new settlement elsewhere, say, by migration into an uninhabited and unclaimed area or by successful conquest. When that occurred and if communication with the homeland could be maintained, the "colonials" typically would have continued to acknowledge their ties with the homeland by occasionally rendering first fruits to the ancestral marae. And when possible their der-

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ivation from and allegiance to the larger unit were concretely symbolized in their own marae by means of a "cornerstone" taken from the ancestral one. As the result of the kinds of processes just described, all of the Society Islands came to be subdivided into a large number of kin-based or kincentered residential units, large and small, tightly unified or highly differentiated, spatially concentrated or widely dispersed. The Tahitians themselves had no single word for this type of social unit, so I have invented one. 1 2 I call them congregations in acknowledgment of their religious characteristics: whatever else their members did with or to one another, they at least shared certain particular religious allegiances. And I call them kin-congregations in order to distinguish them from the society's other types of congregations—occupational, cult, and so forth. It goes without saying that the degree of social coherence in each of the distinct kin-congregations into which Tahitian society was divided varied greatly, according to the size and scatter of each one's subunits, the personality of each one's current senior headman, and other factors. Some of them were solidly unified, others were divided into feuding factions or were parts of larger and antagonistic political units. But before turning to the latter we must take a closer look at one of the special features of several kin-congregations whose members came to dominate the political life of the Society Islands during the era when Europeans arrived there. A kin-Title was a highly valued social asset, conferring prestige and privilege upon its incumbent and, by extension, honor upon the kin-congregation which "contained" it. Some kin-congregations had none, others one or two, still others more. The size of a kin-congregation (and hence its resources, fighting strength, level of internal organization) undoubtedly influenced the number and relative social value of its kinTitles. Another factor was a kin-congregation's history. Thus, when Europeans first visited Tahiti they came across one kin-congregation there whose membership had nearly died out but whose several kinTitles, and their associated marae (which dated from an illustrious past) were treated with immense social and ritual respect but possessed little or no political significance. Still another factor in the genesis of kin-Titles was more narrowly individual: legends contain several accounts of individuals having been singled out with kin-Titles (which eventually passed to their descendants) by virtue of outstanding qualities of their own, such as warriors, explorers, or benevolent kinsmen. A kin-Title, once created and bestowed, ordinarily devolved upon the incumbent's firstborn—and usually but not always firstborn male— child. In instances where husband and wife each held a kin-Title (the latter as result, say, of having been an only surviving child), their firstborn would have received both of them. In other words, some individuals came to hold two or more kin-Titles, associated with either the kin-con-

914

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RELATIONS

gregation of father, or mother, or both. (Since kin-congregations were not exogamous, it could happen that an individual's kin-Titles from both father and mother could be associated with the same kin-congregation.) Another feature of kin-Titles was their social importance relative to each other. All of those within each kin-congregation were ranked with each other in terms of ritual rights and duties; and the highest-ranking kin-Titles of any one kin-congregation were also ranked vis-a-vis the highest-ranking ones of all others. The ranking within a kin-congregation tended to be agreed upon and fixed, but, needless to say, ranking of them among separate kin-congregations was subject to disagreement, even to the point of large-scale warfare. What intrigued Europeans most about Tahitian kin-Titles was the timing of their devolution. Unlike most other Polynesian societies with offices of this kind, those of Tahitian society were ceremoniously transferred to their incumbents shortly after the latters' birth—but here a word of caution is required. While the ritual rights and duties associated with a kin-Title were indeed passed on at that early time, the command rights associated with some of the highest-ranking of them continued to be exercised by the prior incumbent until the successor approached physical maturity. In some cases, the transfer was done so tardily and reluctantly that it led to enmity and warfare between parent and child. It was noted earlier that some individuals came to have kin-Titles associated with more than one kin-congregation. When that occurred the incumbent would usually reside most of the time in the place where his highest-ranking kin-Title was based, but he paid visits from time to time to the loci of his other kin-Titles as well (where, among other things, his office entitled him to an exclusive stone upright in the local marae). Even non-titled individuals were in numerous cases members, by right of birth, in two or more unrelated kin-congregations. Like their titled counterparts they usually resided in only one of them, and if they visited another of them and could prove their membership (say, by citing uncontested genealogical evidence) they would doubtless have been welcomed and permitted use-rights in the local territory. On the other hand, the rights of such individuals were of such little social or economic value that they were probably not often exercised. And now we will consider another noteworthy feature of Tahitian society related to kin-Titles (and the lack of them) and to other aspects of filiation and descent. I refer here to the society's stratification into social classes, the highest of which was exclusive to the point of being a caste. Tahitians categorized persons into three social classes: ari'i, ra'atira, and manahune. These words have been translated by many writers in many different ways (e.g., nobility, yeomen, and vassals; chiefs, gentry, and tenants), but to avoid the inappropriate connotations suggested by such words it will be safer to gloss them in more neutral, layer-like terms,

POLYNESIA

Figure 17.7. Tahiti, wood carving (after Wardwell 1967) such as 'upper', 'middle', and 'lower' (or perhaps better, to use them as is). Whether Tahitian ideas about social classes developed out of the people's theories of conception, or vice versa, is of course no longer knowable, but the two kinds of ideas were complementary. The ideas about class held that individuals differed in social value by reason of their birth, and the theory about conception provided a biological-cum-spiritual basis for such a view. That theory, it will be recalled, proposed that one element in a human embryo was a portion of divinity, something that had devolved from its "original" ancestral-spirit parents through all the intermediate ancestral links. The amount (or intensity?) of that divinity diminished somewhat with every successive generation, and in order of birth—that is, a man's (or woman's) first child received more of it than

9i6

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RELATIONS

did subsequent offspring. Moreover, these theories led (not entirely logically, by European modes of reasoning) to two eugenical concepts of considerable social import: first, that in the case of parents of different amounts—intensity—of divinity, the offspring of their mating would contain an amount somewhere in between; and second, that in the case of parents of equal amounts, the first (at least) of their offspring would contain not necessarily the sum of the parents' respective divinity but somewhat more than that of either. However, it should be added that these two corollaries of the more basic conception theory were thought about and acted upon only in the case of individuals believed to contain a relatively large amount of divinity. As with Europeans in their concern over the breeding of animals, the Tahitians showed no interest in this aspect of matings between persons with little demonstrable divinity, which of course included most of the populace. But among those with lots of divinity great pains were taken to maintain or increase it: negatively, by interdicting copulation between persons of widely different amounts or by destroying (by abortion or infanticide) the products of such matings; and positively, by encouraging marriages between persons possessing much of it. As just noted, the Tahitians categorized persons in three (major) social levels. And their enunciated rules for social interaction included many concerning how the members of one class should or could act toward members of the others. Regrettably (for the tidy-minded ethnographer!), individuals did not always follow those rules, and in many reported instances represented themselves to be higher in class-level than some of their contemporaries would concede. But there was one criterion of level that was operationally precise—at least for the higher levels—and that was, who could marry whom. Unlike Tikopians, whose upper (of two)level individuals could and often did marry below themselves (although legend had it that that was not always so), stringent measures were taken in the Society Islands to insure that no upper-class individual would marry someone of a lower class. While most Tahitians were "married" at some time in their lives such unions tended to be formalized, by nuptial ceremonies, only in the case of upper- (and possibly middle-)class persons. In such cases the ceremonies served not only to link the bride and groom together but, perhaps more importantly, to announce acceptance by the families of both of them of the legitimacy of their subsequent offspring. There are indications that ra'atira (i.e., middle-class) parents prohibited or discouraged their offspring, especially their daughters, from marrying manahune (i.e., lower-class) persons, but the incidence of such interclass marriages was not reported by the early European visitors (who for the most part focused their interests on persons of "the better class"!). Indeed, it is most likely that any contemporary effort to draw a

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sharp line between middle and lower levels of the society, by marriage or any other criteria, would have failed. Some writers, including some fairly recent ones, have characterized the manahune as having been landless, in contrast to the ra'atira, and of course, the ari'i; but in my opinion that view is based on an incomplete understanding of Tahitian land tenure. There may have been some families who, as the result of forced expulsion from their own kin-congregation territory and before adoption or marriage into a new one, possesed no effective claims in any land, but that must have been an unusual and in any case temporary state of affairs. I postpone treatment of the complex and ambiguous topic of other attributes of class status and return for a moment to kinship. First, a look at the way Tahitians categorized consanguines (Fig. 17.8)—in comparison with that of the Tikopians (Fig. 17.4). Like the Tikopians, the Tahitians used one word (tupuna) for all 'grandparents', male and female, lineal and collateral, and one word (mo'otua) for all 'grandchildren'. However, unlike the Tikopians, who had separate words for 'father's sister' (masikitanga) and for 'mother's brother' (tuatina), the Tahitians used only metua tane ('parent male') for father and all male consanguines of his genealogical level, and only metua vahine ('parent female') for mother and all female consanguines of her genealogical level. The difference reflects the absence in Tahiti of any TUPUNA

METUA tane A

=

O

METUA vahine

J

TAMAITI

TAMAHINE

J MO'OTUA

HINA

Figure 17.8. Tahitian kinship system

TEINA

5>I8

SOCIAL RELATIONS

noteworthy distinction between father's and mother's consanguines— including the absence of any corporate unilineal descent unit (such as the Tikopian's paito), and the absence of any singling out for special treatment of 'father's sister' and 'mother's brother.' The Tahitians did in fact evince a bias for male succession to kin-congregation offices (including kin-Titles), but that did not lead to the formation of patrilineal descent units. In line with this difference, the Tahitians did not (as did the Tikopians) distinguish between a male's own 'children,' including all consanguines of that genealogical level (tamaiti, 'son'; tamahine, 'daughter'), and those of his 'sisters'. There were, however, differences between Tahitians and Tikopians with respect to one important aspect of the father-son relationship that were not reflected in terminology. In Tikopia, it will be recalled, the relationship between a man and his eldest son was somewhat formal and constrained and the father retained his authority over the son until death. In Tahiti, as I mentioned earlier, if a man held a kin-Title it devolved upon his successor (usually his eldest son) soon after the latter's birth, a transfer that typically created tensions between the two, and sometimes deadly conflict. Relatively few Tahitians held kin-Titles, hence instances of this kind of succession conflict cannot have been numerous; however, the kind of behavior pattern that it betokened was reportedly characteristic of many other parent-child relationships as well. In fact, one of the several features of Tahitian society that scandalized European observers was the disrespectful attitudes of children toward older persons in general and their own parents in particular. As for 'siblings' (including own and all collaterals), the Tahitian terminology was somewhat more complex. Both Tahitians and Tikopians had a word for 'male's sister' and for 'female's brother'; in addition, the Tahitians, unlike the Tikopians, distinguished between older (tua'ana) and younger (teina) siblings of same sex. In Tikopia a brother and sister did indeed have different kinds of rights in their common paito estates, which may possibly account for their terminological usage. But since birth order was an important feature of both societies with respect to rights, and so forth, I am at a loss to account for Tahitians' (but not Tikopians') terminological expression of it. Some of the ways in which Tahitians differed from Tikopians in relationships of affinity have already been mentioned: for example, the informality with which many if not most unions were entered into (in contrast to the formal interfamilial exchanges that characterized most Tikopian marriages); the bilateral aspect of Tahitian nuptial rites (when they took place), in contrast to the unilateral coercion manifested in Tikopian bride capture; the mere preference for virilocal residence in Tahiti, in comparison with the firm rule for it in Tikopia; the more or less symmetrical exchange relationship between in-law families in Tahiti, in contrast to the

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asymmetrical one of Tikopia. In addition, while polygyny was favored and sometimes practiced in both societies, there appear to have been no instances in Tikopia of the "semi-polyandry" practiced by some upperclass Tahitian women (see chapter 14). One other facet of Tahitian kinship worth mention is adoption—that is, the verbal distinction made between relationships by 'blood' (toto) and those by 'adoption' (fa'atavai). In Tikopia it was fairly common practice for a child to live some of his or her life in a household other than his parents'; it was spoken of there as an 'adhering child' (tama fakapiki), and the circumstances of the arrangement varied widely: to comfort a couple after the loss of their own child, to assist a childless couple in need of extra household services, and so on. The duration of the arrangement also varied considerably, as did the degree of "adherence" in terms of the sentiments of the persons involved, but the arrangement never entailed a change in the adheree's paito status—he (or she) did not relinquish rights in his own (his actual father's) paito territory or acquire heritable rights in that of his adoptive father. Young Tahitians also spent parts of their lives in households other than their parents' (probably in relatively larger numbers than did the Tikopians), and the degrees of their adherence also varied considerably. But unlike Tikopians, some Tahitian adoptions were accompanied by the acquisition of heritable rights in the kin-congregation of the adoptive parents, including, in a few reported cases, rights of succession to important kin-Titles. Whereas Tikopian "adherence" and Tahitian "adoption" had to do mainly with parent-child relations, they were not limited to them. Thus, in Tikopia, some children came to "adhere" to a grandparent, and some pairs of older persons adhered to one another as 'brother' and 'sister.' But, again, the Tahitians carried the practice of adoptive consanguinity to much further ends; for example, not only did males make themselves 'brothers' (by means of a rite very much like nuptials), but a man could become the adoptive member of the family of someone killed by him in warfare, a recognized practice of making and keeping peace. We now put aside discussion of kinship for a while and focus on the second important kind of relationship that obtained among Tahitians, the one comprising membership in political units. At times in the past, when the population of these islands was smaller, it is likely that some of the social units I have labeled kin-congregations were autonomous political units as well, that is, in the case of some of them, the senior kinsman, who was also the unit's secular chief and priest, neither ruled over nor was ruled by the chief of any other kin-congregation. By the time of European contact no one kin-congregation, geographically concentrated or "colonially" dispersed, was politically separate in this way. In fact, even the smallest and most homogeneous

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political unit contained about a thousand persons divided into two or more distinct and otherwise autonomous kin-congregations or parts of kin-congregations. (It was not unusual for the various parts of a single kin-congregation to be included within separate, and sometimes warring, political units—a circumstance that gave rise to divided loyalties, to say the least!) Just before European influences (diseases, firearms, "advisors") reduced the population and assisted one particular political unit to extend its sway, these islands contained about eighteen more or less durable and autonomous political units, which varied in size from about one thousand to fifteen thousand subjects. Such units also varied widely in internal structure. The simplest of them consisted of a relatively small number of neighborhood-size kin-congregations united under an unchallenged line of chiefs; the most complex consisted of two or more such units whose respective leaders occasionally (and successfully) challenged the authority of the overall chief, but tended in the long run to fall into line. In addition to that kind of durable coalition of "equals," several of the autonomous units engaged in temporary military pacts with (or against) each other. The cohesion of most of the eighteenth-century political units was based mainly on the exercise of coercive physical force by their chiefs and the latter's kinsmen. Residential proximity—or rather physical accessibility—was of course a factor in influencing which neighborhoods were brought and kept together, but not the determining factor. There were also legendary accounts of separate political units having been unified by marriage between members of their respective chiefly families; more usually however such a marriage took place after the military defeat of one of them by the other and as a deliberate measure to preserve the new unity, partly by virtue of the marriage itself but mainly through devolution of both parents' kin-Titles and subject-fealties upon their common heir. As we saw in earlier chapters (especially in chapter 11) Oceania's political units were motivated to fight and overcome each other in different ways: for example, to capture wives or slaves or victims for sacrifice, to exact revenge, to achieve "manhood" or prestige as warriors, even (perhaps) in some cases to acquire needed land. Up to now, however, we have considered few instances in which one political unit—more specifically its chief—waged war against another not only to defeat it for some reason or another, but to maintain durable command over its members. That, however, seems to have occurred quite typically among the Tahitians. Economic reasons may have been influential in some such wars— for example, in the campaigns of the residents of arid Borabora against more fertile Ra'iatea and Taha'a—but more usually the victors left most of their adversaries' territory empty or allowed the vanquished to remain

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on or eventually return to their lands. Nor were conquered territories retained mainly in order to increase, by taxation, the victors' stores of wealth. Tribute was levied regularly, in the form of food, mats, and other goods, but it served only in small degree to enhance the victorious chiefs' material well-being. In fact, one is led to conclude that the primary motive which led many Tahitian chiefs to extend and maintain their domains was a desire for power over as many persons as possible. As we saw in the case of ambitious men in some societies of Melanesia, they went to great lengths to extend their good name and influence beyond their own communities, but their institutions did not permit them to convert such attributes into authority to command the services of the people they bested in those exchanges. Ambitious Tahitian chiefs doubtless also derived satisfaction from extending their influence and heightening their prestige, but in addition many of them evidently obtained even more satisfaction from being able to control the lives of large numbers of persons. Moreover, their institutions (including the society's acceptance of and even admiration for social hierarchy) permitted them to satisfy those goals, up to the point where they were blocked by individuals of similar ambitions and of equal or greater military strength. Like their individual kin-congregations, the Tahitians' political units also had individual names, but, as there are no unambiguous native terms for the kind of unit I am now describing, I will continue to label them "political units" and proceed to list some of their more salient characteristics. Every eighteenth-century political unit that I know about had its own marae. In some cases such a marae was that of its chiefs own kin-congregation. In other cases it was a new one built by the chiefs subjects to celebrate his rule—say, the extension of his control over another political unit. And in still other cases a new marae was built by a chiefly couple on behalf of their firstborn heir, in whom were united the kin-Titles of both of them (see chapter 11). The existence of political-unit marae meant that a Tahitian owed homage to two sets of spirits, one of his own kincongregation and the other of his chiefs. In connection with the latter all of the members of a political unit were required periodically to provide objects and services to maintain the unit's marae and the goodwill of its spirits—less however on behalf of the welfare of the ordinary members (as was the theory, at least, with kin-congregation offerings) than in support of some project of the chief. The other principal things people did as members of a political unit were: to make war on another political unit; to build things (mainly for their chief, e.g., marae, dwellings, canoes); to provide food for distinguished persons on a visit to their chief; and to celebrate (with food, textiles, entertainment, etc.) the rites of passage of their chief and of his close relatives. One important question about the food and other objects

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that went from subject to chief concerns their end-use: did they remain at the "top" for use only or mainly of the chief (e.g., for consumption by him and his family and staff, or for politically useful gifts to his allies), or was a large proportion of them "redistributed"—that is, were most of them transferred back to the subjects for their own use? The sources do not provide a clear-cut answer. The amount redistributed—from nil to most—varied not only with occasion, but also with the character of the individual chief. Some chiefs acted benevolently, as kin-congregation headmen were supposed to act and evidently often did, as kinsmen. A few others were consistently selfish in this regard. One thing that does however emerge from a study of actual events is that even in the case of the most selfish (and also despotic) chiefs, none of them relied entirely upon tribute—taxation—to supply all of the food needed for daily use by their own chiefly establishments, most of that having been provided by their own retainers on land owned solely by the chief and his close relatives. Still, even in the domains of the least selfish, most "redistributive" chiefs, more food and other tangible objects, and more man-hours of services, seem to have gone "up" than came "down." This raises a second question, What other kinds of goods, if any, were contributed by chiefs that might be seen to balance the flows? One such good was (or could have been) the priestly service performed by a chief on behalf of his subjects—for, in the case of most political units the chief was ex officio its premier priest (just as was the headman of his own kin-congregation). In many cases some person other than the chief himself (say, a brother, or uncle) actually performed the religious duties of head priest, but only as a delegated office. (Although, in some political units, the office of head priest became so firmly vested in certain upperclass families that the chief himself did not have free hand in the appointment.) In any case, since a political unit's most powerful tutelar spirits could be approached only through the chief, or someone serving as his delegate, a chiefs representative may be viewed as of crucial importance in this society, where humans depended so heavily upon the good will of their more powerful spirits. While there were occasions on which a unit's priest acted on behalf of the members as a whole (e.g., the great annual harvest ceremonies, and rites performed to cure the unit of the "sickness" manifested by, say, defeat in battle or storm-caused famines), most of the services conducted at political-unit marae seem to have been in the narrower interests of the chiefs themselves. Chiefs of large political units, like kin-congregation headmen, had the power to impose taboos (rahui) on the harvest of food, including fish, and while this may have served generally useful for conservation, and may in fact on occasion have been imposed for that public purpose, there seem to have been more occasions on which a chief exercised this power

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for purposes of his own—say, to accumulate food for a politically useful gift or feast. But what about the role played by chiefs in maintaining order among their subjects and in championing social justice? Surely, an official who rendered those services effectively and even-handedly would be deserving of the "taxes" he received. To put it briefly, from the few records available on such matters, it appears that the chiefs of these islands were much more concerned with how their subjects behaved toward themselves than with how the subjects behaved toward one another. Misdeeds among their subjects were generally left to the principals themselves to handle, or to their kin-congregation headmen. In contrast, acts of lese majesty were usually punished by chiefs with ferocity—including confiscation, exile, and death. (In this respect Tahitian chiefs tended to resemble their deities, who were also much more concerned with humans' behavior toward themselves than toward one another.) There are accounts of chiefs waging war against other political units to avenge wrongs done by members of the latter to some of their own subjects, but I suspect that in most instances of this kind the chief acted in order to defend his own chiefly pride or to bind those subjects closer to himself, or that he used the incident as an excuse for a previously intended war. (This is not to suggest that Tahitian chiefs always needed publicly acceptable excuses for their wars!) In a word, the chiefs of Tahitian political units were inclined to be selfcentered and despotic, and the social ideology of their society facilitated their having been so. Throughout the society there seems to have been not just an acceptance of but a basic belief in the Tightness of inequality among humans (an inequality that had its rationale in a theory of conception). Among kinsmen, and especially among members of single-neighborhood kin-congregations, the principle of social hierarchy was tempered by another principle, one that required kinsmen to behave benevolently toward one another (which in the case of the senior members was expressed as noblesse oblige). Some of that sentiment seems to have characterized some political units and their chiefs as well, but in many cases the units were too large and heterogeneous and the chiefs too far removed from most of their subjects, in terms of interests and social distance, to be swayed by the ideal. Nonetheless, there were constraints on chiefly authority that served in some well-known cases to prevent the authority having become as absolute as the chiefs may have desired. The most powerful of those constraints was inherent in the structure of all of the larger political units, which were composed of subunits whose own headmen ('iatoaiJ13 were like Europe's medieval barons in their relationship to their overall chief— that is, some of them were more powerful in their own subunits than was the chief over the whole. In some such circumstances the latter used

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assassination and political marriage to keep their realms intact. And in other cases, the chief was a mere figurehead while the unit's cohesion was maintained by some other individual possessing more military courage and skill. Every political unit (and perhaps most large subunits) had a number of officers to assist the chief (or subunit headman). Some of them, who may be called line officers, were the aforementioned heads of the subunits of which the larger units were composed; others, who had specific labels describing their duties and who may be called staff officers, included administrators, messengers (both diplomats and mere message-bearers), spokesmen, war leaders, sages (i.e., repositories of "deep" knowledge, including chiefly pedigrees), executives, and of course several types of religious officials attached to the units' marae. In some cases persons occupying staff positions were appointed to their offices by the current chief (typically, from among his close relatives); in other cases the offices were the inalienable prerogatives of particular families. (However, the units were not all alike in which offices were filled by appointment or birthright.) An issue, which had an important bearing on the historical problem of how political systems in general have evolved, was the focus of loyalty of the staff officers: Were they concerned primarily with the welfare of the unit as a whole? Or mainly with that of its chief, and with the rest of the unit only insofar as that related to the chief s own welfare? From the available data it appears that Tahitian staff officeholders differed in this respect, from individual to individual and from unit to unit. In other words, the data on this society, such as it is, provides no unmistakable proof of how it was evolving in this regard: either in the direction of constitutional bureaucracy, or of stronger (and more arbitrary) personal regimes. However, I have the impression that the latter course was prevailing at the time when Europeans arrived to complicate the process. Wherever staff officers may have focused their loyalties, there was another set of functionaries who were devoted deliberately and explicitly to the chiefs own personal welfare (and of course to the advantages that brought to themselves). These included domestic servants, bodyguards, stewards (of chiefs' own family estates), magicians (mainly sorcerers), sex partners, and in some cases mere hangers-on. Among the domestic servants were some males whose job it was to perform the heavier work required to produce and prepare food for female members of the chiefs family. (As mentioned earlier only males in a more or less permanently "profane" state were employed in that job.) Among those serving as sex partners were the homosexual mahu mentioned in chapter 13. As for those I call hangers-on, it appears that in some of the larger political units there were usually to be found a number of otherwise unemployed men who ate off the chief s provisions in return for keeping him entertained and flattered, and for carrying out small jobs for him. For most other

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Tahitians such men were a scourge; because of their close connections with their chiefs, many of them appear to have led lives of unbridled depredation. Especially when accompanying their chiefs on tour, they often engaged in plunder and rape. Another common feature of political-unit governance were the councils, which differed (from unit to unit and in each unit from time to time) in composition, in jurisdiction, and in power. In units made up of large multi-neighborhood subunits their own headmen would be sure to be included, along with some staff officers (plus some other members of the chiefly family not occupying staff positions). A council's jurisdiction depended in large part on the political strength of its members vis-a-vis their overall chief. In some cases a council served little more than a ritual role, to approve—and praise—actions already taken by the chief. In contrast, some councils proved strong enough to decide all important issues affecting their units (especially the questions of peace and war), to the point of overruling and even discharging and expelling the chief—which, however, was a measure Tahitians seldom resorted to. Most members of this society held the office of chieftainship in reverential respect and much of the same respect was extended to its incumbents and their close relatives, whatever their personal shortcomings and inequities, but only up to a point. They were praised to the skies on every public occasion, their persons and residences bowed down to, their commands obeyed— until, that is, their despotic excesses provoked universal rebellion. Something has already been said about the most usual ways in which the Tahitians' small political units were constructed out of kin-congregations, and large political units out of small ones—mainly by coercive physical force (legitimized in some cases by marriage). In any case, once an office of chieftainship had become established, the most usual person to occupy it was the past incumbent's eldest son. There were, however, several recorded instances, legendary and historical, in which a unit's council, especially its sub-chiefs, passed over an eldest son for a younger brother, or even an uncle or cousin. (Some rejections were based on objective evaluation of the heir's shortcomings, others on personal desires for a more compliant sovereign chief.) There are also recorded instances of individuals having attained chieftainship by means of "selfelection," for example, by force of arms, assassination, political maneuver, or some combination of these. Nevertheless, despite the public acceptance of these alternative ways of attaining chieftainship, there was universal agreement that the incumbent be the holder of a kin-Title of high rank. In fact, when Europeans first arrived on the scene the sine qua non of most of the more powerful chieftainships was possession of a kinTitle from a single (but widely ramified) kin-congregation. During the era of Tahitian history under study—the second half of the eighteenth century—traditions about the founding of specific kin-congre-

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gation marae were limited mainly to those identified with a few families who enjoyed highly privileged social positions (and who thereby came to the attention of the Europeans). By that time most of these marae had become associated with political units. As for most of the hundreds of other kin-congregation marae whether actively utilized or abandoned, traditions about their origins had been forgotten—either through extinction or dispersal of their congregations, or political eclipse of their associated kin-Titles. In any case, by the time of European contact there had crystallized a body of tradition that attributed social preeminence and high antiquity to a number of kin-Titles associated with a set of kin-congregation marae first established on Ra'iatea and with branches on nearly every island in the archipelago. As with most oral history the several versions of this one differed because of selective recall and subsequent embellishment, but the central theme of its versions was that the original marae was established (or consecrated) by the high god Ta'aroa and/or his son 'Oro. Subsequently, the marae was moved and enlarged to become, first Vaiotaha, and eventually Taputapuatea (all on Ra'iatea), where worship centered on 'Oro, the most powerful of all gods of war and one of the few Tahitian spirits requiring human offerings. In addition to the right to perform this privileged duty, a special kind of insignia became attached to the higher-graded kin-Titles of this congregation, namely, girdles (maro) decorated with hundreds of red feathers ('ura) of a very rare kind. (Red feathers were used as powerful means of attracting the attention of spirits; girdles were associated with the genitals—that is, the procreative function of the wearer.) In due course offshoots of this marae became established throughout the archipelago and with them some of its kin-Titles of feather-girdle grade. In the case of one offshoot, on Borabora, its founder used yellow instead of red feathers for his girdle, to signalize his conflict with and independence from the Ra'iatean home congregation; subsequently offshoots from this marae, and hence yellow-girdle kin-Titles, became established elsewhere. However, all persons belonging to families having either red or yellow feather-girdled kin-Titles (i.e., all of the more senior-line descendants of the original kin-congregation) became known as Hui Ari'i (The Ari'i People). (The title ari'i had three separate—but to some extent interconnected—meanings: Hui Ari'i as just specified; Te Ari'i, The Paramount Chief of a political unit, whether or not he was of the Hui Ari'i; and ari'i [used as noun or adjective], any member of the upper-class, which included all Hui Ari'i but contained other persons as well.) My guess is that there were only a dozen or so feather-girdled kin-Titles in existence during the latter half of the eighteenth century, but by including the persons whose families "owned" them, there were perhaps a hundred or so persons acknowledgedly Hui Ari'i. In addition, there must have been hundreds more

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Figure 17.9. Tahiti, representation of the god 'Oro. British Museum

who were descended from members of the original Ra'iatean kin-congregation, but whose lines back to them were too "junior" to warrant mention or commitment to memory. As mentioned earlier, by European times kin-Titles of the feather-girdle type were ranked above all others—and not only by the families owning them but (wondrous to report!) by everyone else. (The owners of them did not all agree about their grading one with another but that was a particular situation of family pride and interfamily conflict, which space does not permit me to describe.) In some cases their incumbents were members (usually but not always chiefs) of small and militarily

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weak political units, and in some other cases the chiefs of powerful political units were not themselves entitled to feather-girdle Titles. But in every ceremonial situation where precedence and other privileges were involved, prime honor was accorded the feather-girdle Titleholders present. And if non-feather-girdle leaders wished to increase or consolidate their military or political conquests, they sought to do so by adopting a young feather-girdle incumbent for an heir, or by marrying one (whose child and heir would inherit his mother's Title). A major question is, How did it come about that the members of a single kin-congregation achieved the social preeminence they were enjoying during the eighteenth century? Some writers have proposed that the Hui Ari'i had been a "wave" of newcomers, who had arrived at these islands from the west and by means of their superiority—in military prowess or organization or whatever—had conquered the earlier settlers (i.e., the manahune, 'commoners', according to this interpretation), imposed their rule over them, and kept themselves strong and pure by intermarriage only with the chiefs of the conquered manahune. Victory in warfare might indeed have accounted for some of the early successes of the Ra'iateans in extending their political domains and in enhancing their social prestige elsewhere. However, migrations and military conquests are not the only processes of history. Nor, in the case of Tahitian history, is it reasonable to explain new events in terms of technological changes. In fact, in the case of a people as religious as the Tahitians, much weight must be given to inventions in religious beliefs and practices when trying to account for changes in social (including political) relationships. In the case of the Hui Ari'i it is not unreasonable to propose that their military and social successes were linked, in mutual "feedback" manner, with their tutelary cult. Ta'aroa was credited with their founding, but Ta'aroa served as a High God for Tahitians in general and during the eighteenth century was the focus of no particular cult. Ta'aroa's son 'Oro, however, specialized in war making and was associated in a special way with the Hui Ari'i. For example, while anyone could petition 'Oro for support in warfare, the surest way to obtain it was by sacrifice of a human to him, which was the prerogative, reportedly exclusive, of the incumbents of certain feather-girdle Titles. (Thus, on one recorded occasion a powerful but nongirdled chief was obliged to obtain the ritual assistance of a hated but girdled rival to supplicate 'Oro for support in a military campaign.) As the social prestige of the Hui Ari'i increased, so did belief in the power of their tutelar, 'Oro. The myths current in the eighteenth century ascribed great antiquity to the social preeminence of the Hui Ari'i and to the supernatural predominance of their tutelar, 'Oro, but that was not necessarily historically true. There may have been similar occurrences in the past, involving other social units and spirits. But in societies without writing history can be

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preserved only orally, and oral history (even more than written history) tends to select and preserve only what seems to fit current facts and wishes. In any case, however deep or shallow its antiquity, the Hui Ari'i'Oro movement received strong support from another one which resembled it in its wide dispersion but which, unlike the kin-based composition of the Hui Ari'i, was less exclusive in membership. I refer here to the well-known Arioi Cult: a "Satanic machine" to the early Protestant missionaries, but an intriguing step toward internationalism for the student of social evolution. It was a characteristic feature of Tahitian society that nearly every social group of any type—kin-based, territorial, or occupational—was at the same time a religious congregation. But there were some social units made up of persons whose only, or most notable, common attribute was their homage to a particular spirit. One such cult (whose members were called Arioi) was divided into sects that were distributed throughout the archipelago, one to almost every political unit or large subunit. The principal activity of the Arioi was worship of the god 'Oro. As we have seen, 'Oro was also the primary tutelary of the Hui Ari'i, and because of his proven (?) efficacy in warfare, the focus of widespread supplication by non-Hui Ari'i chiefs as well. In fact, reverence for 'Oro became so paramount and extensive that it attained the character of monolatry—that is, belief in the existence of several gods but worship mainly of one of them. (Marae dedicated to 'Oro—those in which human sacrifice was chartered —were located on several islands and shared the name of Taputapuatea.) For its leaders the Arioi Cult was a full-time and in some cases a lifelong vocation; the facts are not clear in this matter but it seems that most other members spent several weeks of each year in cult activities and the rest of their time at home in their ordinary pursuits. Cult activities consisted mostly in traveling about from place to place (including island to island), performing ceremonies and entertainments in exchange for lavish hospitality and within the context, mainly, of 'Oro worship. In some cases a single sect—a political unit's "chapter" of the cult—went on tour by itself; more usually the sects of several neighboring units assembled and traveled together. Before arriving at some place, usually at the host chiefs residence, they dressed in their lavish cult costumes and approached their destination (most often in canoes) with great clamor, proceeded to the marae (one dedicated to 'Oro if nearby), paid their respects to their tutelary, and then settled down to a few days of dancing, theater-performance, feasting, and—according to some European observers—sampling the sexual wares of their hostesses and hosts (there having been female Arioi as well as male). While most types of dancing and theatrics of the Tahitians contained sexual allusion, those performed by the Arioi seem to have been especially explicit. In addition some of their plays were farcical satires containing biting social critique,

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including mockery of the characters of their principal hosts (a remarkable license in this society where acts of lese majesty were at other times sternly punished). A week-long visit by a troupe of Arioi clearly was a drain on the host community's food supplies, and perhaps a strain on many marital relationships as well, but at the same time it seems to have been regarded by many in the host communities as a pleasurable break in ordinary routines. Because of the emphasis upon sexuality in many of their performances, the general sexual license that attended their tours, and the promiscuous sexuality that obtained among them, the Arioi have been characterized by some writers as a fertility cult—a grandiose rite of sympathetic magic designed to encourage natural fertility, of humans and of supplies of food. Be that as it may, the cult did serve to curb warfare somewhat—fighting having been interdicted at any place where performances were taking place—and when on tour the Arioi themselves were immune to attack. While the cult's principal tutelary was the war-god 'Oro, the aspect of the latter specifically worshipped by Arioi was 'Oroof-the-laid-down-spear: in other words, the war-ending, peace-making side of 'Oro. (In Tahitian as in most other Polynesian societies, every high-god spirit had several, functionally different, personalities.) There are no credible counts of Arioi members, but during the 1770s there were certainly hundreds of them and possibly thousands, and males outnumbered females by about five to one. Nearly every political unit had its own named chapter, headed by a master, whose office was also distinctively named. Three types of members were distinguished: active, "parentaged," and "retired," along with two or three categories of persons who regularly assisted Arioi in their activities. The distinction between active and other members was based on the fundamental requirement that full participation in cult activities was dependent upon a person's not having offspring. Constraints were not placed on copulation—far from it; active Arioi were notoriously avid and promiscuous among themselves and with others. The cult's rule was against allowing a member's progeny to survive, which was accomplished by abortion and infanticide. (Whatever may have been the basic reason, or the rationale, for this rule, it had the practical effect of enabling members to carry out their cult activities free of domestic responsibilities.) If, then, an active member bore or sired a child that for some reason or other happened to survive, the guilty parent (now called "parentaged") was thereby disgraced and thenceforth forbidden full partricipation in cult activities. The status of "retiree" was, however, entirely honorable; it was reserved for members who had spent years in active membership and then, upon reaching middle age, had deliberately dropped out of touring, and so forth, and had married and settled down to domesticity. Active members of the cult were divided into seven or eight grades

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(observers differed concerning the number), from Novice (po'o) to Blackleg (avae parai). In most cases an individual became a Novice by "application": he or she attended a cult performance, and in a state of nevaneva (spirit-possession, presumably by 'Oro himself, who thereby selected the applicant for membership), proceeded to dance and sing along with the performing members. If the applicant's dancing and actions revealed sufficient talent, and—most crucial—if he or she was physically well-formed and unblemished, he was invited by the group's master Arioi to join. (Physical perfection was a hallmark of Arioi membership, along with such other aspects of youthfulness as skill and ardor in dancing, singing, active sex, and of course freedom from the burdens of parenthood.) At the end of the period of novitiate (how long it lasted is not specifically stated) the Novices were tested by full members (in dancing and other required skills) and either accepted or rejected by them. After that, members were promoted to higher grades according to progress revealed in Arioi skills (including, according to some sources, deepening knowledge of unspecified cult "secrets"). Advance up the grades was marked by changes in costume and by different designs and locations of body tatoos. Thus, the lowest-grade member wore a headdress of colored leaves, while the highest-grade member (the Black-leg, a status achieved by only a few) wore a red-dyed barkcloth loin-girdle and was tatooed solidly from foot to groin (in addition to all of the other torso and arm tatoo marks acquired in the intervening grades). As is to be expected, rise in grade-level was accompanied by increases in privileges, including command over the services of lower-grade members. As previously mentioned, each local chapter of Arioi was headed by a master—and in many cases by a mistress as well, both of these having been appointed to their offices by the local chief and both having been from the chapter's membership. Moreover, the offices of Master of the separate chapters were ranked in terms of ceremonial precedence (for those not infrequent occasions on which two or more chapters were joined on tour), the highest office having been that of the Ra'iatean chapter at Opoa. As for the general membership, when they were not busy trying to kill one another as citizens of separate and frequently warring political units, all Arioi were supposed to behave toward one another amicably and hospitably. To behave otherwise was grounds for expulsion. In addition to the paradox of Arioi universality and political unit separateness, there were connections between cult membership and the society's class hierarchy in general and with the Hui Ari'i in particular. Regarding the former, while membership in the cult was not limited to persons of upper-class status (even manahunes were admitted if they were otherwise acceptable—a remarkable sign of flexibility in this society), when young members of upper-class status joined, which many of

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them did, they were excused from the novitiate and admitted directly into a higher grade. The cult's connection with Hui Ari'i, as already mentioned, was signified by its devotion to 'Oro, the Hui Ari'i's own tutelar; by the prominence among the chapters of the Master's office of Opoa (the ancestral marae of the Hui Ari'i); and by the loin-girdle worn by the Black-legs (although made of barkcloth and not of feathers, it was nevertheless dyed red). Tahitian society also contained a number of other kinds of social units and specialized statuses—fishermen's guilds, boat builders, house builders, marae architects, tatoo artists, embalmers, entertainers, more or less full-time warriors, teacher-sages, shamans, and so on, and of course various types of clerics. Limitations of space prohibit description of these, but perhaps enough has already been said to indicate that, while the Tahitians resembled their Tikopian cultural "cousins" in several socialrelational fundamentals, they differed markedly from them in terms of the scale, complexity, and emphasis of their social institutions. Similar sketches of other Polynesian societies would serve to reinforce the impression that, for all their basic resemblances, they also differed in several noteworthy ways. However, instead of undertaking that lengthy exercise, the rest of this chapter will be devoted to describing some differences among them with respect to only three aspects of social organization: common descent units, political units, and social class. (I say "only" but in fact a survey of these three can reveal more about intersocietal similarities and differences than treatment of a host of other aspects could do.) Other Polynesian

Societies

Descent Units Polynesia's descent units were continually changing, sometimes branching and segmenting, sometimes fusing, and sometimes dying out. Some changes resulted from numerical increase, or decrease, in whole populations or in parts of them. Others were the direct result of particular events—for example, geographic expansion and conflict between and within the units. In no two societies, perhaps, were the changes wholly alike in manner or in rate. Also, there were differences among societies with respect to the points at which segmentation became institutionalized —that is, at which people in general recognized a branch as having a separate collective and corporate existence of its own. Size (i.e., number of members) may have been a criterion in some societies, as may have been genealogical depth (i.e., generational remoteness of a common ancestor) and span (range of collaterals), but self-achieved autonomy was perhaps the most common threshold for such recognition, along with establishment of separate religious worship. However, in some societies—and in

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different parts of the same society—the process appears to have been so gradual and uneventful as to create ambiguities even for the participants themselves. In speaking of levels of descent-unit segmentation I do not include the smallest segment of all—the unit made up of those members of a single household who were interrelated by ties of common descent. Nearly every household in Polynesia contained at least one such unit, a man and his children and ofttimes the children of the latter, or a (widowed) woman and the same. It was however unusual for such units to function (or be labeled, etc.) separately from the household unit as a whole. Thus, while acknowledging the ubiquity of this unit, I do not include it as a distinct level in the following survey. As we saw, the segmentation process of Tikopian descent units was, while gradual, fairly definite and explicit, resulting in two institutionalized levels, there having been four maximal-unit kainanga and numerous minimal-unit paito. (Maximal signifies that the descent unit in question was not a segment of a larger one; minimal signifies that it was the lowest-order segment recognized by the society as having a separate existence of its own.) The segmentation process of Tahitian descent units seems to have been even more clear-cut, having been explicitly signaled by the consecration of a new temple. However, little is known about the number and size of Tahitian maximal descent units or about the number of their levels of segmentation, except that there were more of the latter than in Tikopia. Also, despite a number of candidates, it is not clear what labels were applied to each level, nor whether in fact they had different labels. Other Polynesian societies differed widely in number of maximal descent units and in degree of segmentation. In Mangareva, for example, all of the descent units were held to be segments of a single unit, the descendants of an "original" ancestral settler (which, however, did not restrain the segments from warring against each other, sometimes murderously). A similar myth obtained in Easter Island, and may have been current in other societies as well (as, e.g., in the Tongan archipelago, where one, but only one, of the society's nine major descent unit segments claimed descent from an immigrant i.e., one from Fiji). In some other places, such as Mangaia, the myths regarding descent-unit beginnings posited two sets of ultimate ancestors, one indigenous and the other alien-immigrant. (In some mythical versions of this view of history, the former were identified with the land and activities associated with it, the immigrants with the sea. See, for example, Sahlins 1981.) Perhaps the best known of all such native reconstructions of descent-unit beginnings—and hence interrelationships—was that of the New Zealand Maori. According to these myths (which were accepted by most European scholars to be historically authentic until archaeology and a better understanding of mythical "explanations" belied them) the Maoris' maxi-

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mal descent units (iwi) were united into several larger units (waka, 'canoe') by reason of their respective ancestors having traveled on one or another of the canoes that allegedly had pioneered settlement on New Zealand, during the eleventh century A.D. Throughout Polynesia descent-unit structure was pyramidal in shape,

Figure 17.10. a, Mangareva, wood carving (after Wardwell 1967); b, Austral Islands, wood and shell figure (ibid.)

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so that the whole population of any society was divided into one or more maximal units each of which contained two or more levels of segments. In some societies (e.g., Hawaiian) the all-encompassing nature of these relationships was obscured somewhat by the fortunes of war and the submersion of lower-level descent units (ohana) into larger bureaucratically organized political units that were more strictly territorial in nature. Thus, according to the leading authority on this society, "because of the large populations involved and the flexibility of the [ramified descent unit] structure, genealogical connections may have slipped into the back-

Figure 17.11. Wood carvings: a, probably Samoa. British Museum; b, New Zealand (after Wardwell 1967)

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ground." Nevertheless, ". . . the ramified structure could in some cases encompass the entire sociopolitical unit" (Sahlins 1958: 162). The descent-unit system of Samoa presents an obscurity of another kind. Two students of this society have asserted that none of its innumerable small descent units was related to any other outside the village in which it was located—that is, that there were no larger ramified units linking localized segments into wider genealogical pyramids (Sahlins 1958: 251; Ember 1962: 968). These views have been refuted (in my opinion, successfully) by J. Derek Freeman, who while asserting that Samoa's lower-level, village-specific descent units were not all interrelated in "an overarching, genealogical hierarchy" (i.e., into a single, society-wide maximal unit), they were nevertheless segments of larger units, including some that had branches in many villages (1964). 1 4 In both Tikopian and Tahitian society the ideal concerning relations among the segments of any maximal descent unit seems to have been hierarchic according to a genealogical model in several respects: with respect to land tenure a senior, "parental" segment possessed residual rights over the land of its junior branches; and with respect to religion, the head of the senior segment represented the junior segments vis-a-vis their common tutelars, and was empowered to declare taboos over their harvests, to receive first fruits from them, and of course to be shown the deference due senior consanguines from junior ones. Notwithstanding all these and other signs of hierarchy—of inequality—there seems to have prevailed a more inchoate ideal of underlying amity and supportiveness among all members of any maximal descent unit. Thus, while the heads of senior segments were expected to behave with superiority to members of junior segments, they were expected to do so with the noblesse oblige of senior consanguines rather than as wielders of superior physical force. Needless to say, neither of these ideals was always conformed to. Even within Tikopia's smaller maximal descent units, there were intersegment conflicts along with instances of lese majesty and despotic oppression. And in Tahiti's much larger maximal units intersegment conflicts sometimes ripened into fierce wars, and rebellion and oppression were not uncommon. This was in addition to the conflicts between whole maximal units and between segments of different maximal units. Situations like the above seem to have prevailed in most other Polynesian societies as well. That is to say, while the ideal of descent-unit cohesiveness and esprit de corps was subscribed to nearly everywhere, it was often bent or entirely broken in practice. And while unit heads were everywhere expected, even obligated, to exercise leadership over unit affairs, there were numerous instances in which incumbents misused their office, sometimes despotically, for individual ends. Another structural feature of Polynesia's descent units had to do with internal relations among their segments. In most societies all members of

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a unit's senior segment were entitled to some privileges not extended to members of the other segments. (A good example of this kind of situation was cited earlier in the case of Tikopia.) In some other societies, mainly the larger ones, the senior segments of certain maximal units became so distinct from their junior segments—in privileges, mental attitudes, and so forth—that their genealogical connections with them were ignored or (selectively) forgotten. (A case in point was the Society Islands Hui Ari'i, as described earlier.) Polynesia's descent units differed so widely from society to society in size and span that it is not possible to generalize about their collective activities. The smaller and narrowly localized ones, either maximal units or segments, constituted occasional production units, especially in the production of goods given as "rent" to a descent-unit superior or for offerings to tutelars or for "taxation" to chiefs; but most subsistence goods were produced by and for households. Descent units also on occasion opposed one another in physical conflict, but mainly in short-term brawling and long-term feuding; large-scale warfare was more typically an affair of political units. In fact, the collective activity engaged in most widely by descent units as such was religious—that is, offerings, supplication, and other acts directed to their respective tutelars. In several societies their descent units, entire maximal ones or segments, owned corporately such things as religious items (e.g., temples, shrines, images, relics, specific invocations, ancestral pedigrees, magical formulae); ritual prerogatives (e.g., the right to lead the whole encompassing political unit in war, or to play particular roles in political-unit religious rites); and monopoly of particular political-unit councillory or administrative posts. But the item most widely identified with descent units, corporately, was land. In fact, in most Polynesian societies, all land was owned in this way, and even in the exceptional cases (where political unit—as opposed to descent unit—heads had the ultimate authority over land distribution), rights over the day-to-day use of most land reposed in descent units. As for the internal arrangements by which descent-unit lands were managed (e.g., the division of rights between senior and junior segments), the ideals respecting such arrangements in Tikopia and the Society Islands seem to have prevailed very widely—although conformance to those ideals also varied widely from place to place and in consequence of such differing circumstances as descent-unit dispersion and the relative strength of poltical (versus kinship) ties. As mentioned earlier, the descent units of most Polynesian societies were neither exogamous nor endogamous, and choice of spouse was regulated for most persons by degree of consanguinity, with the rules in most places having prohibited marriage with anyone closer than second or third cousin. 15 Note well however, the clause "for most persons." In Hawaii, for

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example, while marriage within two or three degrees of consanguinity was prohibited for most people, for those with high-ranking kin-Titles, close-in marriage was not only permitted but promoted (including in some instances marriage between full brother and sister), and not only to preserve the quality of their own "godliness" but to enhance that of their progeny. And now we turn to a most important aspect of Polynesian descent units, namely, to similarities and differences in the ways in which individuals acquired (and maintained) membership in them. In some Polynesian societies it occasionally happened that an individual was adopted into a descent unit to which he had no previous connection, but the overwhelming majority of people acquired memberships in them by birth, through one or the other, or through both, of the persons socially recognized as their parents. In only three Polynesian societies was descent-unit affiliation normatively unilateral. In Tikopia (as we saw) a person belonged to only one paito, that of his father. On the atoll of Pukapuka there were both patrilineal and matrilineal descent units, the former similar to those of Tikopia in functions, the latter having had mainly to do with the management of taro beds. (In addition, the minimal segments of the Pukapukan matrilineal units were exogamous—the only clear-cut case of descent-unit exogamy in Polynesia that I know of.) The third example of definitive unilateral descent-unit affiliation occurred in Ontong Java, where units that were mainly but not exclusively patrilateral existed side by side with others that were normatively matrilateral. (In the case of both Pukapuka and Ontong Java, of course, every individual belonged to both kinds.)16 In all other societies of Polynesia a person was entitled to affiliate with the descent unit of either parent, or of both. In most societies the cultural bias, along with such factors as patterns of marital residence (i.e., predominantly virilocal) and rules of succession (i.e., mainly male), led most persons to affiliate more closely with their father's unit (which in many cases, however, was the unit of their mother as well). But primary affiliation with the mother's unit remained a possibility, and often took place, especially when more material benefits (e.g., more land) or more social advantages (e.g., succession to some official position) were obtainable that way. Again, individuals in some societies were at pains to obtain their entitlements in the units of both parents, realized mainly by moving their residence back and forth. In most cases, however, one or the other of a person's descent units became the primary affiliation, and after a while—say, three or four generations—the only one. (For example, in the case of the New Zealand Maori, one's rights in a geographically distant unit, especially when it was the mother's, became "cold" after a couple of generations unless they were periodically revived by use of the unit's land.) It remains now to summarize the internal organization of Polynesia's

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descent units, first, within each segment of a unit, and then among them the various segments of any unit. The nucleus of any descent-unit segment consisted of a parent and his or her children, and the norms for relationships in these small groups epitomized quite typically those of larger segments, and even of whole descent units. One or more of three premises underlay those norms: a parent had more social "value" than its child, a male more than a female, and an older sibling more than a younger one. Different Polynesian societies gave different weight to these value judgments. Thus, in both Tikopia and the Society Islands great weight was given to birth-order among siblings, but Tikopians attributed more value than Tahitians did to males (vis-a-vis females) and to parents (vis-a-vis children). For another example consider the Samoans; their views regarding males versus females and parents versus their children were intermediate between those of the Tikopians and Tahitians, but they gave little weight to birthorder among siblings as a principle for allocating social worth. To translate premises about social value into norms for familial and descent-unit relations, most Polynesian societies placed greater authority (over descent unit actions and property) in the hands of male parents. The most notable exception was the Tahitians, who transferred both parents' kin-Titles to their heir at the time of the latter's birth. Also, with the possible exception of Samoa, and with other things equal, most Polynesian societies favored the firstborn son when distributing authority among siblings over unit affairs; but "other things equal" is a necessary caveat. As in other social hierarchies based on heredity, the difficulties and rivalries of life sometimes required abilities greater than those possessed at the time by the firstborn. Thus, even in the most birth-ordered of Polynesian societies junior members of descent units sometimes displaced their seniors in positions of authority, either by vote of their peers or by social maneuver or physical force. In some cases the displaced senior was killed or exiled; in others he was simply relieved of his secular powers and relegated to purely priestly or ceremonious chores; and in still others descent-unit affairs were for long periods rendered unstable through continual rivalry between priestly senior and executive junior headmen. But descent-unit seniors did not invariably, nor perhaps even commonly, prove unfit for their offices. In probably most instances they fulfilled their responsibilities by delegating some of their duties—priestly, administrative, military, and other—to aides. Indeed, in many societies such duties were institutionalized in the form of hereditary offices owned by junior segments of the maximal descent unit or by junior lines of the chiefs own segment. Another way in which views about social value became institutionalized within descent units had to do with relations between male and

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female. As we saw in the case of Tikopia, females were not excluded from membership in paito, but they were not allowed to pass on their own land-property entitlements to their offspring—that is, the latter's demand-rights on their mothers' descent-unit land ceased upon their mothers' deaths. Similar arrangements also occurred in many other regions of Oceania, but in Polynesia the Tikopian "bias" represents an extreme. (The services rendered by Tikopian men to their sister's children—their tama tapu—were doubtless valuable, but perhaps not valuable enough to compensate those children for their loss of rights in their mother's descent-unit land.) At the other extreme in Polynesia were societies such as that of the Tahitians, where females' rights in descentunit goods were in no way restricted, and where nothing like the tama tapu custom was to be found. Samoa and Tonga present interesting kinds of arrangements in between those extremes. The male-oriented bias of the Samoans showed up clearly in their emphasis on genealogical reckoning through males, not necessarily firstborn males, but not females at all. This bias was institutionalized in the distinction made between the children of male members (tama tane) and those of female members (tama fafine). The property of each descentunit segment (its house sites, groves, garden land, etc.) was controlled by the tama tane as a group, and ordinarily only they could hold the unit's kin-Titles—a disposition that was facilitated by (and possibly promoted by?) the Samoans' preference for virilocal residence. The tama fafine, however, did not form a residential group, the mothers of most of them having moved elsewhere at marriage. Although a Samoan as an individual possessed use-rights in his mother's descent-unit lands, living elsewhere, as most of them did, he seldom had occasion to exercise those rights. Some tama fafine did reside on and make constant use of their mother's descent-unit lands, but in the case of most of them their ties with the mother's descent unit were forgotten after a few generations. Nonetheless, as with the Tikopian tama tapu custom, there was for the Samoans a kind of compensating mechanism. While a tama fafine seldom if ever succeeded to kin-Titles in his mother's descent unit, and while he received few material benefits from its land, he and his fellow tama fafine, male and female, did possess the right to exercise some control over that unit's affairs. This consisted of their power to direct magical harm onto the descent unit's tama tane, by means of a "sister's curse," in the event the tama tane did something contrary to their wishes. (Also, it should not be forgotten that persons who were tama fafine in one descent unit were tama tane in another.) The Tongans were no less male-oriented than the Samoans in their conduct of descent-unit affairs, including succession to descent-unit Titles, but here the relationship between the children (and subsequent descendants) of brother and sister was institutionalized in a different

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way. To begin with, those relations were characterized by a marked degree of avoidance and mutual respect; and while a brother had more control over the affairs of their descent unit than did his sister, the latter was superior to him in terms of respectful behavior. For example, however much formalized deference a male may have been owed by others, in this finely stratified and punctiliously ceremonious society, he owed more to his sister than she to him. Moreover, this deference was extended as well to a male's sister's children, his fahu, who in addition were allowed to appropriate their uncle's goods at will. And as in Samoa this arrangement also extended to descendants of the two principals, thereby perpetuating what might appear to have been a very one-sided relationship. Again, however, it should be noted that a person who was an unconscionable fahu in some relationships (for that they often were) was himself an abused "mother's brother" in others. Relations among the segments of maximal descent units were of several kinds, some of which I have already mentioned. In the hypothetical model that was posited for the Society Islands the maximal unit was pictured as being like a growing tree, with a central trunk (the "senior" segment) and several branches ("junior" segments), each with smaller

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branches ("more junior" segments) from them. Viewed as a corporate landowning unit (which descent units usually were), a segment was represented as having residual rights in the lands held (provisionally) by the ones immediately junior to it, and so on down the line. Or viewed as an authority structure, the lines were represented as flowing in the same directions. The model is doubtless a useful one; for some maximal descent units in some societies it might actually have prevailed. But in many other cases the orderliness assumed for it was deranged in one or more ways. Innumerable remains throughout Polynesia of abandoned settlements, and especially of abandoned religious buildings, suggest that many descent-unit segments, and even whole descent units, simply died out, or were killed out, in the course of time. In many other cases, including some well-documented ones, separate segments of the same or even of different maximal units became fused into one (most usually, perhaps, by marriage, or by a small remnant of one joining forces with a larger one, for defense or other purposes). Another way in which the model's orderliness was disturbed, and that not infrequently, was by disjunction, that is, either involuntarily, by a colonial branch having been too remote to maintain contact with the trunk; or deliberately, by a branch having broken off rebelliously from the trunk; or by the division, voluntary or involuntary, of previously united branches into separate and sometimes hostile political units. Still another process by which maximal descent units lost their postulated intersegmental structure was truncation, whereby their senior segments were disarranged into larger political units, leaving their junior ones as disconnected fragments. And finally, the orderly evolution postulated in the model was in many cases upset by variations in the growth and political power of a maximal descent unit's segments. It would have been unusual, to say the least, if all segments of a maximal descent unit increased in size at the same rate, or contained the same number of highly talented and strongly motivated individuals. Thus, in several well-documented instances, a junior segment outgrew the one senior to it—in numbers, in military strength, and in qualities of leadership. While Polynesians were in general committed to the ideology of aristocracy, based on birth, there remained enough latitude in their social values to encourage attempts by some of them to achieve positions of political power. And so it not infrequently happened that a junior segment wrested authority over descent-unit affairs from its seniors—at least temporarily. In fact, in the legendary histories of some descent units, the struggle among their segments for superiority became the normal pattern of their relationships—a situation which provides a useful bridge to discussion of Polynesians' systems of government. Fortunately, it is a discussion that need not be lengthy, since much concerning it has already been presented under other headings.

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Political Units Innumerable books and articles (including some by the present author) have been written in attempts to give more operational precision to such vague concepts as power, authority, govern, government, political, state (versus stateless), and that lexical museum of ambiguity, the tribe.17 Rather than add my voice again to the endless argument I will continue in this book to let the facts speak for themselves and keep definitions about this domain of behavior to a minimum. In this spirit, I have applied the term "political unit" to any territorially bounded social group under the overall authority of some individual (a chief or combination of chiefs), who was himself under the authority of no one else. (As we have seen, in many cases a single community, kin-based or otherwise, was at the same time a "political unit," but since there were many other cases in which that was not so, it is desirable to maintain the terminological distinction.) As for "authority," I mean the prerogative to make final decisions concerning certain of the actions and goods of other members of the group in question—which actions and goods having differed from one unit to another. Now, every kind of social group met with thus far in this book had one or more individuals exercising some kind of authority over other members: husband-fathers over households (in both Australia and Polynesia), ceremonial leaders over patricians (Murngin), ariki over kainanga (in Tikopia), senior Titleholders over kin-congregatons (in Tahiti), and so forth. None of the above, however, constituted an autonomous political unit as defined above. The membership of a Murngin patrician tended to be widely scattered, as did that of any Tikopian kainanga; and by European times no single Tahitian kin-congregation was politically independent. In fact, in Australia there were found to be no stable and autonomous territorial units larger than (multi-household) communities, and little or no centralization of authority in these except in religious matters: in other words, no overall chiefs. Such was not however the case in Polynesia, and so let us see how its societies fit into our labeling scheme. To apply this nomenclature to Tikopia, I would propose that the populace as a whole constituted a single and (in several respects) unified political unit, and its four kainanga ariki, a more or less unified body of chiefs. (There appear to have been periods in the past when each kainanga was a separate political unit, but by the time of Firth's visit, in 1929, that was no longer the case.) In the Society Islands, there were at the time of first European contact several distinct political units; and while some of them banded together from time to time (usually to war against other, albeit shifting, confederations), they were fully autonomous in most respects. I write "most" instead of "all" because of the dependence manifested by some political-

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unit chiefs for occasional help by an outsider religious official to preside over a political-unit ceremony—for example, for a red-girdled Hui Ari'i Titleholder to sanctify human sacrifices to the war god 'Oro (a situation not unlike that of a medieval king's dependence upon the Papacy for confirming the bishops in his realm). The complexity of the Tahitian political landscape (i.e., a number of separate political units each of which contained two or more distinct maximal descent units, along with segments of other maximal descent units centered elsewhere) obtained fairly widely in Polynesia, as did the variable nature of Tahitian chieftainship. In contrast to Tikopia, where each of the four co-chiefs of the single political unit was the senior Titleholder of his respective maximal descent unit (and hence its religious as well as secular headman), there were some Tahitian political units headed by chiefs whose kin-Titles—whose prerogatives in this society's allimportant religious events—were ranked below those of some of their political-unit mates. And there were other Tahitian political units in which the highest-ranking kin-Titleholder was also titular political-unit chief, but only in name, the unit's affairs having been directed by a council of subchiefs, or by some individual of outstanding military and executive ability (who was usually but not always a close relative of the titular chief). However, high rank based on the hierarchic positioning of kinTitles figured so weightily in Tahitians' scale of social values, that a political-unit chief of lower rank (e.g., one who had won his office by military ability) was at pains to solidify his authority by marriage with a highranking woman holding a higher-ranking kin-Title than his own, thereby securing a more fitting rank for his heirs. And, of course, chiefs already holding high-rank Titles were at pains to marry women of similar or higher rank in order to perpetuate that advantage. No two societies of Polynesia were organized, politically, in exactly the same way, but they can be classified into a few broad types. Some of them, such as that of the Marquesas, had two or more political units each of which was composed largely of a single maximal descent unit. A somewhat similar arrangement prevailed in New Zealand, although on a much larger scale. Another pattern prevailed on Mangareva in the eighteenth century, when the island's one political unit was coterminous with its single maximal descent unit, which, however, did not prevent the waging of numerous intersegment battles and back-and-forth rebellions. A somewhat similar pattern was to be found during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Tonga, though again on a larger scale. A noteworthy feature of the Tongan situation was the usurpation on two occasions of chieftainship by a junior segment of Tonga's huge (and at least mythically united) maximal descent unit, including relegation of the deposed chief to a position of ceremonial superiority but political impotence.

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Figure 1 7 . 1 3 . Marquesas, stone figure (after Wardwell 1967) A somewhat distinctive pattern prevailed on Mangaia during the eighteenth century. The Island contained two types of single (maximal) descent-based political units, some of them of (mythically) indigenous origins, some the descendants of immigrants. As was usual in Polynesia, warfare was common on Mangaia, and in some of this warfare the stakes were very high, namely, possession of the islands' principal taro-growing areas (a swampy flatland between the infertile mountainous core and the equally infertile broad band of elevated coral between the swampy flatland and the narrow beaches). Usually one political unit at a time occupied the prized area, but only for a generation or so, before being conquered and dispossessed by another. Moreover, in recognition of his proven military strength, the chief of the conquering unit was known as Mangaia, which may be translated as 'Temporal Lord-of-the-Island', although, in fact, his authority extended only over his own political-unit mates and over those members of the conquered unit who had not taken refuge elsewhere.

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Polynesia's most unusual pattern for dividing and allocating authority, both secular and religious, prevailed on Easter Island. There, although the populace was divided into a number of political units (mata), they all claimed descent from the island's first settler-chief (hence, in our terms, were segments of a single maximal descent unit). And although the mata were in most respects autonomous, and given to fighting one another, they acknowledged the supremacy, in certain religious and ceremonious affairs, of the ariki mau, the senior member of the senior-line mata—all of which is reminiscent of, say, Tonga, but to which the Easter Islanders added a twist of their own. I refer to the Birdman Cult, which was described in chapter 8, and which in the words of Marshall Sahlins involved, annually, "an institutional scramble among the leaders of the [currently] military ascendant tribe [political unit] for the egg of a certain bird." Sahlins' succinct summary of this intriguing institution continues: "The finding of this egg by one of these men or his 'servant' meant that the man became birdman for a year, the incarnation of the god Makemake, and the holder of many economic and social privileges. The ariki

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mau, head of the geneological hierarchy of the island, did not participate in the egg hunt. The position of birdman, therefore, was one of co-existing supremacy with the ariki mau" ( 1 9 5 8 : 1 6 9 - 1 7 0 ) . Two other Polynesian polities require mention, the one for its politicization of large-scale descent-based hierarchies, the other for the extent to which even larger-scale political units had truncated and in some respects replaced what in all likelihood had once been corporately functional descent units of much wider span. As described earlier, the most palpable kind of descent units in Samoa was the localized ainga, to one or another of which most of Samoa's land parcels corporately belonged, and whose male members tended to reside near one another in the same nucleated village along with members of one or more other ainga. However, the localized ainga was not, as some writers have claimed, a small and genealogically unattached unit, but rather a part of some wider genealogical hierarchy—that is, a segment of a (typically Polynesian) maximal descent unit many of which had segments localized in two or more villages. Another typically Polynesian feature of the localized Samoan ainga was its association with one or more named Titles, the "higher" of which was assumed by the unit's headman when he was elected to office by the ainga's leading men. (As mentioned earlier, Samoa differed from most other Polynesian societies in having placed little importance on primogeniture; and while the son of a previous headman may have been favored to succeed him, that did not always eventuate.) Possession of a Title not only empowered the holder to exercise control of his ainga's affairs, but also entitled him to a voice in the village council, its fono, where all matters concerning the village as a whole were discussed and decided with exquisite punctilio. As the village engaged in much collective activity—land clearing, fishing, visiting other villages, being visited, maintaining order and amity among its constituent ainga, war making, and so forth—the fono was a very active and important group. In some villages the constituent ainga were all interrelated by ties of common descent; other villages were composed of segments of separate maximal descent units. But however constituted, the Titles "contained" in each village fono were ranked vis-à-vis one another in terms of seat position and ceremonial precedence (for example, in order of kava drinking), as well as (in some measure) authority over village affairs. To preserve this ranking over time, each fono had its heraldic formula that was solemnly intoned before each meeting and that listed all of its constituent Titles in proper order o f rank. O f all the Titles constituting a village fono one was unambiguously highest, and the incumbent of that Title was the village headman. With every headman or chief were associated three other offices: a taupou, a manaia, and a tulafale. The role of the taupou—the village's "sacred

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maiden," its "ornament"—was described in chapter 14. The manaia was the headman's heir apparent, usually but not always one of his sons; his role was to lead the aumanga, the group of young untitled men who constituted the village's labor force. The tulafale was the headman's spokesman—his "orator" as many writers label him. Several of each village's ainga Titles were of the tulafale type, in contrast to the ali'i type of Title held by, among others, the village's head or chief. (Some writers have proposed that the label tulafale once applied only to "aides" of titled persons—that is, ali'i—but came in time, as such aides themselves achieved social prominence and their own Titles, to stand for a whole category of Titles.) Some of Samoa's many villages may have been autonomous polities, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century all of them were parts of larger territorial units: of political units and subdivisions thereof (called districts and subdistricts in the literature), which seem to have functioned mainly as war-making units and whose borders undoubtedly changed position from time to time. To complicate Samoa's social landscape even further, in the case of several maximal descent units, their smallest segments, the localized ainga described above, were localized in villages that were not all within the same political unit. Of particular interest was the way Samoa's political and descent units were (or were not) tied together hierarchically. Just as every village had its fono, so did every larger political unit and subunit. And while most ainga Titles entitled the incumbent to sit only in his own village fono, some of the higher-ranking ones, of both ali'i and tulafale type, entitled him to sit in the sub-political-unit (or sub-political-unit and politicalunit) fono as well. These higher-level fono met only occasionally, mainly on matters of war and peace, but needless to say the Titles associated with them provided their incumbents with even greater prestige and influence (and rendered rivalry for them very intense). As in a village fono, the Titles "seated" in political-unit and political-subunit fono were also ranked. Superimposed upon all the above fono was one encompassing the highest-ranking Titles of all Samoa. Although it is not known to have met in historic times, and may have never done so, the incumbents of these Titles, the ali'i pai'a, or sacred ali'i, were not only the titular chiefs of their respective political units but were the recipients of universal and reverential respect. As to be expected in a society ingrained with the values of social hierarchy, the sacred ali'i Titles were themselves ranked with one another—although the rank-order varied from time to time, due to changing fortunes of war. Moreover, since we are discussing here offices and not individuals, it could and did happen that a person became the incumbent of more than one sacred ali'i Title, thereby enhancing his individual prestige and authority. The culmination of this process was

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reached when a person came to possess all of the highest-ranking Titles of the most powerful political units of the time. When that was accomplished, by war and diplomacy, the incumbent became known as Tupu, and although the coercive authority of that office was limited, both functionally and geographically, the influence and ceremonial preeminence associated with it made it a prize valuable enough to keep the Samoan Islands in a continual state of political maneuvering and war. Several features of the above system invite comparison with the corresponding ones of the Society Islands, but they differed in two important respects. The first of these lies in the fact (or myth?) that all of the Tahitians' highest-ranking Titles, those comprising the Hui Ari'i, were derived from a single descent unit, which had its (mythical?) source in Opoa on the island of Ra'iatea. As far as I can discover the ali'i pa'ia Titles of Samoa were not thought to be derived from a common social unit, either descent-type or political. The second difference between Samoans and Tahitians had to do with the way Titles in general, and high-ranking ones in particular, were acquired. Among the Tahitians they were acquired only by birth, and preferentially by primogenitural birth order; if an individual wished to acquire any additional Titles, he or she had to do so by marrying another Titleholder, thereby acquiring the new Title not for himself but for his heir. In Samoa it was not so. An individual—always male—could acquire a Title only through election or through wresting one from a holder by war. While a politically judicious marriage may have helped a man to win "votes" from the bride's kinfolk and/or compatriots, she herself did not hold a Title to transfer to him or to pass on to their son. Finally, there were the Hawaiian Islands, where, to repeat an earlier statement, the evolution of large-scale political units had the effect of truncating, and in some cases entirely replacing, what in all likelihood had once been corporately and collectively functional descent units of much wider span and importance. By the time of Cook's visits, in 1778, the 3 0 0 , 0 0 0 or so Hawaiians were distributed, although very unevenly, over the eight main islands of the chain, and were divided into political units that tended to stabilize at a scale of one to each of the larger islands and its nearby satellites. During this stage of the society's history some political units extended their boundaries by military conquest into neighboring islands, but over the long run, such extensions did not persist. 18 Each political unit was divided into a number of administrative divisions, subdivided according to the scheme shown below. As shown, moku were divided into ahupua'a ('altar pig') and the latter into 'ili ('strip'). Not shown is the fact that each 'ili contained a number of unconnected tracts of cultivated land. Each ahupua'a (hence each moku) extended from sea to mountain crest, and usually included the full range

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Figure 17.15. Hawaii, 'aumakua image (after Cox and Davenport 1974) of resource zones existing on the island: inshore fishing, lowland and upland garden lands, forest, and so on. To provide some idea of size, Oahu contained six moku, Kauai five. It has been claimed, not implausibly, that each moku was at one time autonomous, but by the late eighteenth century they had all become parts of larger political units. It is perhaps no more unreasonable to suppose that each ahupua'a was at an earlier period the domain of a single maximal descent unit, but by the time of Cook's visit it had become a unit from which taxes were regularly collected for its md'i, or paramount chief. The most distinctive feature of this whole arrangement lay in the way land rights were acquired. Upon

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the accession of each new mo'i (either by conquest or successful rebellion or normal succession) he replaced (or reappointed?) the heads of the various moku with appointees of his own, whose prerogatives included receipt of those portions of moku taxes not reserved for himself—in other words, a system of political spoils. It is not clear how far down the line this personnel replacement went, but it must have stopped short of the gardeners and pig raisers upon whose produce the taxes were levied.

In addition to its moku headman (subchief) and other political appointees, and in addition to the large household staff of its md'i, 1 9 each of the enlarged political units (which averaged about 3 0 , 0 0 0 members) had a large staff of bureaucrats, headed by a kalaimoku, to supervise the many activities directly administered by the political-unit government: collecting taxes, waging wars, conducting religious services, constructing buildings and irrigation systems, and more. In other words, Hawaiian society had "evolved" politically into a number of territorially defined, bureaucratically administered ministates (some of them not so "mini") far beyond the stage reached in any other Polynesian (or Oceanian) society. 20 Nevertheless, one feature of common Polynesian kinship structure not only survived that transformation, but hypertrophied. Elsewhere in Polynesia (e.g., Tonga, New Zealand) the development of large-scale political units took place largely within the framework of descent-unit structure: political-unit chiefs were at the same time heads of large maximal descent units. This was not so in the Hawaiian Islands, where the development of large-scale political units served to fragment maximal descent units, as corporate and collective action units, mainly by "decapitation." Despite this, however, that aspect of descent-unit ideology having to do with the nature and ranking of Titles not only persisted in Hawaii, but effloresced to an extraordinary degree, as will be described later on.

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Figure 1 7 . 1 6 . New Zealand, jade breast ornament (after Linton, Wingert, and d'Harnoncourt 1946)

Social Class The preceding pages should have made amply clear the honor that Polynesians in general attached to high office in descent units. And (with the possible and partial exception of Samoa) there was an accompanying belief that the main basis for that honor was the relatively large amount of "godliness" contained within the rightful incumbents of such offices, a quality inherited by those incumbents through ancestral lines reaching back to the gods. In most Polynesian societies there was a belief corollary to this belief that the amounts of "godliness" in individuals differed positively according to the directness of their descent in terms of seniority of birth-order among siblings. Another belief, held in some Polynesian societies, was that while the "godliness" in an individual tended to decrease with the passing of generations even in those in the most direct lines of descent (and of course at an even greater rate in cadet lines), the process could be reversed, at least in the case of individuals possessing large amounts of "godliness," by having them combine their portions procreatively, by which their progeny contained a larger portion than either parent.

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According to the same reasoning, the progeny of parents possessing markedly different amounts of "godliness" came to possess an amount inbetween. (I doubt that the Polynesians holding such beliefs were mathematically precise in their eugenical calculations, but the logic behind it was not far removed.) People everywhere tend to show some deference toward the individuals they "honor," and when that honor is linked with "godliness," as it was in the case of incumbents of high descent-unit offices throughout much of Polynesia, the deference was often increased by religious awe, which was manifested in various kinds of behavioral avoidances that Polynesians in general labeled tabu (or kapu). As I described earlier, Tikopian paito were of two kinds, ariki (which Firth translated 'chiefly') and fakaarofa ('commoner'). Except for the residual tenure rights of the former, there was no appreciable difference between the two in amount of land directly held; nor was there any restriction on marriage between them. In fact, the main difference between chiefly and commoner persons was in terms of authority: members of an ariki paito were more apt to give than receive orders, and could strike a commoner with more impunity than the other way around. In Tahiti, as we saw, the society was stratified into three levels: ari'i, ra'atira, and manahune, with marriage forbidden absolutely between ari'i and the others, and discouraged between ra'atira and manahune. In addition, the ari'i were subdivided into an upper or "girdled" level, and a more numerous non-girdled one, and there was a tendency for girdled ari'i to seek marriage with one another, for purposes that combined religious eugenics and practical politics. Most other societies of Polynesia fell somewhere between that of Tikopia and the Society Islands with respect to the numbers of their social classes and the imperviousness of their boundaries, with Tongan and Samoan societies approximating Tahiti's in some aspects of stratification and even exceeding it in others. But see how much further the Hawaiians had carried this Polynesia-wide custom of classifying and stratifying people on the basis of birth. Like the Tahitians, Hawaiians categorized people on the basis of birth into only three major classes: ali'i, maka'ainana, ("people that attend the land" or "commoner"), and kauwa ("untouchable, outcast, pariah" [Pukui and Elbert 1957]), but among the ali'i ten levels were differentiated. They were from top to bottom as follows: 21 1. (a) nt'aupi'o (bent coconut midrib, i.e., of the same stalk). The offspring of a marriage between brother and sister of highest rank. The bent leaf metaphor signifies that the marriage producing the individual was a "loop" that turned a genealogy back on itself, thereby achieving the ultimate in sanctity. In fact, such

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individuals were called gods (ak.ua). A m'aupi'o ali'i was so taboo (kapu) that he or she could move about only at night so as not to interfere with other persons' activities, (b) pi'o (bent). The offspring of uterine m'aupi'o siblings and equal to them in sanctity. 2. naha (bent, curved, bowlegged). The offspring of m'aupi'o parents who were not uterine siblings. An ali'i of this level was not quite so sanctified as m'aupi'o and pi'o but like them was entitled to the kapu moe, the act of prostration obeisance, the ultimate form of ritual deference. 3. wohi. An offspring of a m'aupi'o, pi'o, or naha father and of a mother of lower ali'i grade. A naha could dispense with some of the kapu surrounding the rii'aupi'o and pi'o, but if a wohi did so he could be buried alive. According to Irving Goldman, most of the political-unit chiefs, including Kamehameha I, were of this level (1970: 229). 4. po'e lo ali'i. People who had high sanctity but who "lived in isola-

Figure 17.17. Rarotonga, wooden image of fishermen's god (after Wardwell 1967)

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tion in the mountains"—in other words, high-status people away from and taking no part in political or administrative affairs. (It is tempting to suggest that these were some of the higher-ranking descent-unit officials who had been completely dispossessed by the advent of large-scale political units.) 5. papa (?). The offspring of a nt'aupi'o, pi'o, or naha mother and a lower-ranking father. 6. lokea (?). The offspring of ni'aupi'o, pi'o, or naha father and a lower-ranking mother. (This and other evidence indicates that the

Figure 17.18. Hawaii, wooden temple image (after Cox and Davenport 1974)

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7. 8. 9. 10.

RELATIONS

rank of a person's mother was weighted more heavily than that of his father in adding sanctity to him.)22 la'au ali'i (?). The offspring of secondary (polygynous) matings within high-ranking families. kaukau ali'i (?). The offspring of la'au ali'i. ali'i noanoa (Freed of taboo, released from restriction). The offspring of any of the above and a maka'ainana. ali'i maka'ainana. People of ali'i rank living incognito among and as commoners.

Nothing further needs to be said about the maka'ainana themselves, the mass of the populace that provided the ali'i with much or most of their material goods and with the manpower for their wars. But the kauwa constituted a category of people, whole families and communities of people, which continues to puzzle students of ancient Hawaii. They lived in isolation from all other classes of people, and far from possessing any honor-making sanctity, they were believed to defile any "commoner" having contact with them. On the other hand, they performed a valuable service for the ali'i, having been used by them as the most appropriate kind of victim for human sacrifice!

C H A P T E R EIGHTEEN

Micronesia

M I C R O N E S I A is the name applied to the great arc of high islands and atolls that extend from Tobi in the southwest to Arorae in the southeast. 1 The label is more geographic than cultural; while many of the societies in this immense arc share some cultural features, they fall far short of the degree of cultural homogeneity that characterized Polynesia or even Australia. Micronesia may be divided into several subareas whose boundaries, however, would be found to differ according to the cultural features focused upon; for example, subarea boundaries based on principal crops differed from those based on social relations. Even with the latter the boundary lines would differ according to whether the focus was on kinship or political organization or social stratification. As this book is not primarily a study in taxonomy, I will attempt to provide an impression of Micronesia's social-relational similarities and diversities by dividing it into only three major parts: (1) the Palau and Mariana islands and Yap; (2) the southern Gilbert Islands and Banaba; and (3) all other islands between 1 and 2—except Kapingamarangi and Nukuoro, which were Polynesian in language and other cultural features.

Not surprisingly, this tripartite division was a reflection of, and in part the result of, the region's settlement history. As related in Part 1, the subarea of Palau-Marianas-Yap was first settled as early as about 1500 B.C. by peoples coming more or less directly from Indonesia and the Philippines. Some of these settlers' descendants may have moved farther east as well, but most if not all of the pioneers in the rest of Micronesia are, on linguistic grounds, believed to have come from the Solomons and /or New Hebrides, through a series of moves, first to the Gilberts and/or Marshalls, and then gradually westward, as far as Tobi. The historical events that differentiated the southern Gilbert Islands and Banaba from the rest of Micronesia were more recent contacts with western Polynesians, including perhaps actual colonial conquests by the latter.

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Figure 18.1. Mortlock Islands, Caroline Islands, mask, wood covered with lime. Linden Museum, Stuttgart

I will begin this description of social relations in Micronesia by focusing on subarea 3, which for present purposes will also be treated in three parts: (a) the area extending from Truk and its nearby atolls to Tobi; (b) Ponape, Kusaie, and nearby atolls; and (c) the Marshalls, the northern Gilbert Islands, and isolated Nauru. Commencing with area 3a, I will continue the practice followed in chapter 17, providing a somewhat detailed description of social relations in two societies—one small and the other larger and more complex—followed by some generalizations about the area as a whole. 2 Ifaluk Ifaluk is an atoll about midway between Yap and Truk. It consists of four low islets, a total land area of about 0.57 square miles, surrounding a lagoon about 0.94 square miles. During the first half of the twentieth century its population averaged 250-300 persons, thus constituting a density of 430-517 per square mile—that is, somewhat denser than some Micronesian atolls (e.g., Arno, Ulithi) but far less so than some others (e.g., Mokil and Lamotrek). The staple vegetable foods of Ifaluk were

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coconut, breadfruit, and Cyrtosperma taro, supplemented by bananas and a few other less-favored famine foods. The pigs, dogs, and chickens raised by twentieth-century Ifalukans were evidently a post-European introduction, but the fish and other marine animals eaten by them—their main source of animal protein—were of course a part of their traditional food system. Like most other Caroline Island atoll dwellers they built and traveled widely in single-outrigger canoes, for trade and pleasure. Most economic activities were allocated by sex—males having planted and harvested tree crops, fished in deeper waters, built and operated canoes, and constructed houses, while women did most of the gardening, reef gathering, daily cooking, and the making of textiles. 3 It should be noted that the whole populace resided in close proximity to one another, that all of them were personally acquainted with each other, that they cooperated as a unit in some subsistence activities (e.g., bonito fishing), and that they constituted a single political unit and a single (pagan) religious congregation. They were, in other words, a single community. And while they shared many ties of kinship and friendship with residents of neighboring atolls, they were (in the words of the ethnographers) " . . . keenly aware of their unity, and proud of it" (Burrows and Spiro 1953: 121). This multifaceted character of overall unity should be kept in mind when considering the several social divisions of the Ifaluk community, to which we now turn. Ifalukans occasionally associated with one another on the basis mainly of common age (e.g., children's play groups), or of sex a n d / o r occupation (e.g., men's fishing crews, women's cooking teams), but their more enduring kinds of social units were households, neighborhoods, districts, lineages, clans, and as noted above the politically and religiously organized atoll community as a whole. Except for main paths, the beach between high and low water marks, and the sites of canoe and other men's houses, all of Ifaluk's land was divided into separate "estates," each consisting of a named dwelling site (called by the ethnographers a "homestead") along with other named tracts devoted to growing food, and to other uses, and each owned in full or residual title by an exogamous matrilineage (a unit of living persons interrelated by close ties of matrilineal descent). Typically, members of a matrilineage were unable to trace their common ancestry beyond a common grandmother or great-grandmother, but in most cases the founding ancestress doubtless went back much further than that. In addition to its living member-owners each matrilineage estate was associated with the ghosts (alusisalup) of the former members. Each Ifalukan became a ghost after death but only a few of the latter were actively associated with their matrilineage estates. Moreover those who did so were not characteristically protective toward their living matrilineage mates, having behaved, either benevolently or malevolently, similar to the way they had behaved

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in life (see chapter 14). Except for such ghosts, Ifaluk matrilineages had no other supernatural associates—neither founding deities nor totems. In everyday affairs having to do with its estates, each matrilineage was governed more or less firmly by its senior male member, but only in the case of five of Ifaluk's twenty-nine matrilineages were such offices of "upper" rank; the incumbents of those five offices were shown aboveaverage deference generally and wielded community-wide authority on certain formal occasions. Moreover, these five offices (only three of which had labels to designate them) were also ranked, and the highestranked of them was looked upon as the community's paramount "chief' —of which more anon. The basis of this ranking is not explained for Ifaluk specifically, but in several nearby atolls it derived from remembered (or reconstructed?) priority of settlement on the atoll (Alkire 1977: 47). These "upper" level offices having been identified with specific matrilineages, on the death of an incumbent they passed to one of his male matrilineage mates, in the following order of preference: first, to a "brother" (i.e., his eldest male uterine sibling; or lacking that the eldest son of his mother's eldest sister; etc.), or, lacking any "brother," to a "sister's son" (i.e., the eldest son of his eldest sister), and so on. In the absence of any "brother" or "sister's son" the office would by rule pass to one of the deceased incumbent's own sons, but there were no remembered instances of that having occurred. In keeping with their importance as landowning units, matrilineages were named after their homesteads. On the other hand, there was no generic label for what is here called matrilineages; in fact, we are informed, the Ifaluk matrilineage was "not clearly conceived as a descent unit" (Burrows and Spiro 1953: 137). Instead, that conceptual distinctiveness was reserved for the matrilineal clan (or matriclan), the kailang.4 There were eight matriclans on Iflauk (and most of them were represented on neighboring atolls as well). Each of them was made up of one or more matrilineages, whose members believed themselves to be interrelated by matrilineal descent from some remote (but unremembered) common ancestress. Since the land holdings of the matrilineages of any one matriclan tended to be widely scattered, the latter cannot be described as localized. They were however exogamous, by rule and evidently by practice as well. Matriclans were socially ranked by virtue of the ranking accorded the upper-level offices belonging to one or more of their component matrilineages. One matriclan contained two matrilineages having such offices and three others contained one each; but regardless of this difference all four of these matriclans were recognized as being "upper-level," and hence in a way superior to the other four—a superiority that was manifested in a number of ways. Members of the highest-ranking matriclan, Kovalu, enjoyed the exclusive right to eat all turtles caught locally; the

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next highest one, Sauvelarik, had the right to all yellow-fin tuna. While it was not verbally formulated as a rule or even as a general preference, there was evident a statistical tendency for members of upper-level matriclans to intermarry. As already stated, and as will be described later on, it was the incumbents of the five upper-level offices who constituted the community's overall governmental body. And although those offices were, strictly speaking, matrilineage ones, their inclusion in certain matriclans lent pride and some feeling of superiority to all other members of the latter—a feeling that was encouraged and supported by the community's general attitude toward social hierarchy. Rank is so highly valued and respected that it stands out as one of the marker-values of this culture. A hierarchy of rank runs through the whole society. In it each individual has a place; and standards of good behavior require each to show by his conduct that he "knows his place." This involves not only deference toward superiors, but a certain lordliness toward inferiors, (ibid. 179)

As noted earlier, the historical basis for the rank-order among matriclans on many atolls in the central Carolines area seems to have been priority of settlement, but the principle that served to rank matrilineages within each matriclan, and among members of any matrilineage, was seniority, by generation and/or birth order. However, as Burrows and Spiro were at pains to emphasize, the "deference" and "lordliness" associated with rank were reserved for formal occasions—for public meetings, communal rituals, official visits, and the like; on everyday occasions, an observer would have been hard put to discern who outranked whom. While there was a tendency for the members of the upper-level matriclans to intermarry, that fell far short of the caste stratification that prevailed in some Polynesian societies. I will describe later on the role played by rank in Ifaluk government, but let us consider next the community's residential units. The twenty-nine household units existing on the atoll in 1947-1948 ranged in size from three to nineteen persons. Of these, three households were composed of nuclear families (father, mother and children); all others consisted of one or two extended families, plus in some cases one or more other persons, such as a bachelor kinsman or a distantly related nuclear family. The stated preference for marital residence was uxorilocal, and in about 70 percent of the married couples that rule had been followed. Inasmuch as this tendency had prevailed for some generations in the past, most households consisted of a core of matrilineally related females and unmarried males, who were residing on their own matrilineage estate, plus one or more married males whose own parental households and matrilineage estates were elsewhere. In most of the cases of

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virilocal residence—that is, families residing on the husband's estate, or on a homestead otherwise identified with the husband—that option appears to have been taken in order to make use of desirable but currently unoccupied land. 5 In any case in contrast to matriclan (and hence matrilineage) exogamy, which was based on a hard-and-fast rule enforced by stringent social and supernatural sanctions, virilocal residence was in no way condemned or punished. Where however uxorilocal residence prevailed—in the majority of cases—it resulted in older married men having two households. The buildings comprising a household included a cluster of one or more single-room dwellings and one or two cookhouses. While located fairly close together, mainly near the lagoon shore of the atoll's two inhabited islands, households were invariably separated from each other both spatially and conceptually: each one was located on a homestead tract that was distinct from its neighbors' in name and (matrilineage) ownership. In 1 9 4 7 - 1 9 4 8 all members of a household slept there regularly. In former times its unmarried youths spent their nights in a nearby canoe house along with youths from neighboring households, but that practice was in abeyance when the 1 9 4 7 - 1 9 4 8 study was made. Households were the focus of most of the activities having to do with food. Members obtained nearly all of their plant foods from their own groves and gardens; and while they often joined with neighbors to fish and comb the reefs for mollusks, and so forth, most of any common catch was divided among the participants and cooked and eaten in their respective households. Formerly, the ethnographers were told, "a chief could have two wives" (ibid. 302), but by the mid-twentieth century not even chiefs practiced polygyny, even though the community had remained pagan in religious belief and practice. Thus, nuclear families were the mode, and for most Ifalukans the persons with whom they spent most of their hours—sleeping, eating, working—were their own parents and siblings, and later on their offspring and spouse. In most households, the members were also in continuous interaction with other relatives as well, but that seems not to have erased the social and conceptual boundaries of distinct nuclear family groups. Most females participated actively in the activities of only one household throughout their lives: the one into which they were born and where they remained after marriage. In addition, most of the other members of a woman's own household were her matrilineage mates, who shared with her both a proprietary and a sentimental attachment to the land on which they resided. In contrast, most males after marriage were actively concerned with two separate households—the one located on their own matrilineage estate in which they grew up and which contained their parents, sisters, and unmarried brothers, and a second one which contained

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wife and children. Most men, it appears, devoted most of their productive efforts to the latter household, but that did not cancel their responsibility nor their sentimental attachment to the former, which doubtless occasioned both psychological and interpersonal conflicts. The residential arrangements just mentioned had a direct bearing on the ways Ifalukans conceptualized and interacted with kinsmen. As noted earlier, Ifalukans had a generic term for their matriclans (kailang), but none for their matrilineages and households. There were, however, terms for certain categories of relatives. Of these, welimwale, may be translated as "someone and his (or her) close relatives, consanguines and affines, for whom he 'feels responsible.' " Other terms, airo and tral li votai, had the meaning of "all of someone's consanguines" (corresponding to the anthropological term kindred). While data are lacking about the contents of these three named categories their existence suggests that the Ifalukans did not consider all their community mates to be consanguines, or even consanguines or affines. And, while the Ifalukans tended to behave "courteously" toward everyone (ibid. 180), they were expected to behave especially open-handedly to kailang mates (i.e., maternal kinsmen) and to airo (which included both maternal and paternal kinsmen). Turning now from the general to the specific, listed below are the terms used by Ifalukans to refer to their various classes of consanguines: tamai: father, father's brother; any male of father's matrilineage and genealogical level; any male consanguine of ego's father and of the latter's genealogical level. silei: (1) mother, mother's sister; any female of mother's (hence of ego's) matrilineage and/or matriclan and of mother's genealogical level. (2) father's sister; any female of father's matrilineage and/or matriclan and of father's genealogical level. menenepai: mother's eldest brother, mother's other brothers; any male of mother's (hence of ego's) matrilineage and/or matriclan. tamatamai: father's father, father's father's brother; any male of father's father's matrilineage and/or clan and of same genealogical level. taman ni silei: mother's father, with same extensions as with tamatamai. sin ni tamai: father's mother, father's mother's sister; any female of father's mother's (hence of father's) matrilineage and/or matriclan and of same genealogical level. sin ni silei: mother's mother, mother's mother's sister; any female of mother's mother's (hence of ego's) matrilineage and/or matriclan and of same genealogical level. bwisi: own sibling of same sex; any consanguine, patrilineal or matrilineal, of own sex and genealogical level.

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moengai: own sibling of opposite sex; any consanguine, patrilineal or matrilineal, of opposite sex but same genealogical level. vatuwei: sister's child, male or female, of a male; any member of a male's matrilineage or matriclan who was of the first descending genealogical level (i.e., who was of the same genealogical level as one's own child). lai mwal (son), lai rowot (daughter): these terms were used to refer to all other consanguines of a person of the first descending generation —to own sons and daughters, to all brothers' sons and daughters, and in the case of a woman (but not of a man) to all sisters' sons and daughters. launei: a grandchild, male or female; any consanguine of the second descending generation. What we have here is a terminological system of classifying consanguines that combines features of the "generational" system, which we found to be widespread in Polynesia, with an emphasis on matrilineal descent— the latter represented mainly by the terms menenepai (mother's brother) and vetuwei (sister's child of a male). The special nature of the menenepai/vetuwei relationship derives of course from the distinctiveness of matrilineages, which in this society were the only social units possessing full or residual ownership in land, and the only ones possessing upperlevel offices. Because of the widespread practice of uxorilocality, a menenepai and his vetuwei did not often reside in the same household, as did a father and son prior to the latter's marriage. Nonetheless, a menenepai, as active manager of his matrilineage lands, was in a position to control his nephew's use of them, which served to obligate the latter to reciprocate in the form of services. And when the older man held an upper-level office, an even larger obligation was placed on a nephew hoping to succeed him. On the other hand, the Ifaluk version of the avunculate (the term applied generally to the mother's brother/sister's son relationship) was not highly formalized (as it was, for example in the equivalent Tongan relationship), nor was it reinforced by preferential cross-cousin marriage (as was the case among the Murngin). In Ifaluk, marriage to a mother's brother's daughter (or to a father's sister's daughter) was permitted, but not required or even especially preferred; in fact, such cross-cousins were not terminologically distinguished from parallel cousins (Burrows and Spiro 1953:143). The connection between a person and his (or her) father's sister was distinguished neither by special terms nor special behavioral rules (in contrast, e.g., with Tikopia, where behavior between a male and his masikitanga—his "female father"—differed markedly from that permitted between son and mother (chapter 17). Equating "father's sister" with "mother" in this matrilineal society may appear curious, but that is what the Ifalukans did.

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A somewhat similar tendency can be seen in the Ifalukans' rules for the brother/sister relationship. While the terminology, like that of many other Oceanian peoples, emphasized the "oppositeness" of male and female siblings, their rules for "brother"/"sister" behavior were, by some other Oceanians' standards, exiguous and lenient. Formerly, young men were required to sleep in canoe houses in order to avoid sleeping in the same one-room house with their sisters, but that practice disappeared in the course of time. A brother and sister were supposed to avoid sexual topics when conversing together, but the same constraint was expected between men and women generally (except for married couples and lovers). In fact, the only restriction that seemed to prevail was that neither brother nor sister should eat food that had been cooked (presumably at the same time?) over the same fire. On the other hand the relationship between brother and sister was described as "close" and mutually cooperative; in fact, a man was supposed to be as concerned about the welfare of his sister as he was about his wife and children. Not much is reported about relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Something, however, should be said about Ifalukans' relations with their fathers, in this community where matrilineal ties were so definitively institutionalized. As was reported in chapter 13 the Ifaluk father was believed to play a necessary part in conception. Moreover, he resided in close co-residential contact with his children until their marriage in the case of sons and until his death in the case of daughters. While a man could not pass on any part of his matrilineal heritage—his land and his matrilineage office—to his son, he could and usually did pass on to the latter those coconut trees owned by him on someone else's land and, (more importantly) those most prized of Ifaluk skills and lores, canoe building and navigation. The weight given to relations with one's father is also indicated by the fact that marriage was forbidden not only between daughter and father (a well-nigh universal human taboo) but between persons having the same father (but different mothers) and between a person and his father's sister's children—that is, to otherwise marriageable members of the father's matrilineage. Finally, some of the rights and obligations that a man retained in his natal household, even when residing elsewhere, were passed on to his children to whom, we are informed, that household was a kind of "secondary" home. (One act symbolic of those rights and obligations was mentioned in chapter 14, namely, the parade of a girl to her father's homestead at the conclusion of her menstruation ceremony.) While some of the relations between a person and his or her father's household continued after death of the father, they tended to lapse altogether after a generation or two. Turning now to the affinal side of Ifalukan relationships, the rules and practices regarding marriage having been described in chapter 14, they will not be recounted here, except to emphasize that in recent times all

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marriages were monogamous, and divorce was infrequent. Most persons lived out their adult lives with the same spouse, and, as has been well noted, in close everyday contact with relatives of the wife. Moreover most couples tended to be mutually cooperative and considerate; and although they followed the general convention against the physical expression of heterosexual affection in public, in the intimacy of their homes, "affection between spouses is shown, and patently felt" (Burrows and Spiro 1953: 297). Yet the incidence of marital infidelity seems to have been very high: it was "taken for granted by the people that anyone, including one's own spouse, is capable of having an affair." But, remarkable to relate, "this knowledge creates no apparent jealousy or friction. If the person is indiscreet, however, and his affair becomes known, his spouse will then insist that he terminate the affair, not because of jealousy, but because of shame. Infidelity constituted an implicit aspersion on the mate's sexual ability and attractiveness, and it is a blow to his ego that others should know" (ibid. 304). A man spent much of his life in close residential proximity with his wife's sisters and mother. We are not informed about any rules regarding their relations with the former, but regarding the latter: "Mothers-in-law are treated with respect and deference, but not avoided. The sight of a man eating a household meal with his wife, children, and his mother-inlaw is not uncommon" (ibid: 145). Doubtless, in the eyes of members of many if not most other Oceanian societies this relaxed attitude toward what was usually a most conflictive relationship would have appeared flabby if not downright anarchical. It was, however, quite typical of the Ifalukans' attitude toward most social relationships. One might argue that the small size of the Ifaluk community, and the social intimacy required of it by its small and poorly endowed habitat, would have compelled people to be flexible in their social relationships; but evidence from some other Oceanian societies would make that argument logically difficult to sustain. Let us turn now to the more strictly territorially defined units of Ifaluk society. In 1 9 4 7 - 1 9 4 8 there were nine individually named canoe houses in active use. (Canoe houses are to be distinguished from the smaller sheds that served only to shelter small canoes.) Nominally, each canoe house was owned by one or two (adult male) individuals but they were used freely by all males living nearby: for constructing and storing all of their larger and some of their smaller canoes; for making nets, fish traps, and rope; for lounging about and napping; and as guesthouses for male visitors. Females were not absolutely prohibited from entering them but in practice seldom did so. Rarely if ever did the owner of a canoe house use it for some exclusive personal purpose; for most of the time it was regarded and used as property of its neighborhood, a type of social unit it in fact helped to define. The Ifalukans used the same term, gapilam,

to refer to both "neigh-

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borhoods" and "districts." Those two kinds of unit differed from each other mainly in scale. A neighborhood was simply a cluster of households whose members cooperated, fairly consistently, in activities that required larger numbers than resided in single households (e.g., manning canoes, repairing houses, preparing feasts, etc.) and, as just noted, whose male members regularly frequented the same canoe houses. (We are told that formerly such clubhouse buildings also served as regular sleeping places for all of the neighborhood's unmarried youths.) Some neighborhoods doubtless included one or two core units of individuals interrelated by closer-than-average consanguineal ties (in most cases matrilateral), but that seems not to have been always the case. While the higher-than-average interaction among a neighborhood's members doubtless encouraged some sentiment of unity and exclusiveness, this seems not to have developed very far. The distinctiveness of districts was more exclusive and much more highly conceptualized. There were three districts at the time of the study, two on Falarik Island and one on Falalap. Each of them was mobilized from time to time to undertake jobs beyond the capabilities of single neighborhoods, but always at the instigation and under the direction of one or more of its own district leaders. All but one of the latter held upper-level (matrilineage) offices, and each of them resided in the district in which he exercised active leadership. However, given the Ifaluk practice of uxorilocal marital residence, a leader's jurisdiction did not always correspond to the district in which his matrilineage estate was located. The principle here was that the incumbent of an upper-level office was a leader, by reason of rank, wherever he resided and, indeed, wherever he happened to be. In other words, although there was a general consensus concerning which office holder had jurisdiction over which districts (and over public order in general as well as over large-scale activities there), that authority was viewed more in terms of stewardly responsibility than of untrammeled right to exploit and rule. In fact, the community as a whole was the atoll's most important polity, and over it the senior members of the atoll's five matrilineages, acting jointly, effectively ruled. This they did in several ways: by making decisions and issuing commands concerning work affecting the whole community (e.g., keeping large seines in repair for bonito drives); by maintaining through admonition and ordering of sanctions certain universal rules of conduct (e.g., regarding theft); and by making new rules in response to new situations (e.g., how to deal with visiting anthropologists). On some occasions one or more of them would actively supervise projects resulting from their decisions, but most of their work was legislative and judicial and was performed in meetings attended by all of them. In other words, in the terminology adopted in this book they constituted a council of chiefs. The place where they regularly met was a special 'Big House' (Fan Nap) located in a tract of land named Katelu, the traditional meeting

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place for Ifaluk's chiefs. Big House itself was reserved for the chiefs; other persons entered it occasionally on official business, but at other times detoured respectfully around it or stooped deferentially when passing in front of it. Even more deference was exhibited to that part of Katelu that contained the ruin of an ancient Big House. For all except chiefs that area was strictly taboo; even chiefs avoided entering the site where the old building had stood, which was haunted by the ghosts of ancient chiefs. Beyond the particular situation just described, however, Ifaluk chiefs (unlike some of their Polynesian counterparts) were not imbued with any exceptional religious qualities. Ordinarily, their ghosts were not feared or revered more than those of non-chiefs; and their chiefly authority was not backed by supernatural sanctions. Some of them were (part-time) practitioners of religious professions (e.g., divining or healing), but so were many non-chiefs. And the community's most powerful religious practitioner was the tamon alusuia ('the leader for matters concerning spirits'), who was not necessarily a chief. The tamon alusuia acted mainly as a shaman-healer, his powers having come through possession by Tilitr, that one of the major sky-spirits revered in this part of Micronesia who was the special "patron deity" of Ifaluk. (Sky-spirits differed from Earth-spirits, the latter having been ghosts of mortals.) The office of tamon alusuia could be and usually was held by a non-chief. Moreover, unlike chiefly titles, succession to this office was not matrilineal; the incumbent appointed, say, a son or brother's son to succeed him, subject to approval by the god Tilitr (who indicated assent by "possessing" the candidate). From the above and other evidence it appears that "religion" and "government" were separated in Ifaluk—if perhaps not completely then at least to an extent that distinguished it widely from Polynesia. Ifaluk was close to Polynesia, however, in the way individuals came to occupy positions of governmental leadership. In Ifaluk succession to such positions was hereditary—although ability may have been a factor when several hereditary candidates were available—as was the case in most Polynesian societies as well. Also, as in many of the latter, individual Ifalukans could attain prestigeful positions through expertise in some activity or other (e.g., canoe building, navigation); and while such positions carried social influence, they did not endow their incumbents with tradition-sanctioned authority over the persons, services, and goods of others. Nor could an ambitious Ifalukan achieve a position of governmental leadership by distributing valuables and thereby gaining renown. In Ifaluk, suprahousehold exchange was mainly in the form of services, not objects. No efforts were made to accumulate objects in excess of consumption needs, and hence no prestige was attached to their conspicuous giving nor even to conspicuous consumption or display. Only chiefs

MICRONESIA

gave away objects from time to time (i.e., recently in the form of tobacco), and not as a way of paying for services (which however they often received) but as gesture of noblesse oblige. And while chiefs were said to "own" more objects than other persons—for example, the larger canoes and seines, all public paths—this referred more to their sometime power to control others' use over such properties than to any rights of exclusive self-use. It should be noted that Ifaluk was a unit in a larger social universe. Although the atoll was wholly self-sufficient in terms of most basic subsistence needs, its people did occasionally exchange some objects with peoples of neighboring atolls (e.g., breadfruit and taro in exchange for fish, turmeric, tobacco, and turtle-shell beads), not as commercial barter but in the form of "gift-exchange." Also, as noted earlier, most if not all Ifalukans had relatives on neighboring atolls; these, and many additional ties of interisland friendship, provided wide networks for reciprocal security and hospitality. And finally, Ifaluk like all of its neighboring atoll societies, occupied a position in the extensive exchange system that constituted the so-called "Yap Empire," which was described in chapter 12. Truk We turn now to the large complex of islands called Truk, whose society resembled that of Ifaluk in several respects but differed greatly from it in scale.6 Truk consists of a number of volcanic and coral islands encircled by a reef about 40 miles across. The seventeen high (volcanic) islands comprise a land area of some 39 square miles and the coral islands some 1.8 more—compared with Ifaluk's 0.58 square miles of low coralline land. Moreover, Truk's lagoon of about 822 square miles is 895 times larger than Ifaluk's, and its high islands, which average 575 feet in elevation, provided a much more varied resource base for its human population that appears to have reached a stabilized figure of 10,000-12,000 (and an overall density of 270-324 persons per square mile of dry land—compared with Ifaluk's 430-517). The main and most favored subsistence crop was breadfruit, which produced plentifully but only seasonally, leading the people to preserve it in pits for between-season use. The Trukese also produced taro (Colocasia and Cyrtosperma), sweet potatoes, arrowroot (subsequently replaced by manioc) for snacks, and of course coconuts. In addition, Truk's physical environment, much more diversified than those of its neighboring atolls, enabled its people to produce a number of other kinds of things that atoll dwellers wanted but could not produce, such as turmeric and (in recent times) tobacco. As I reported in chapters 10 and 12, these differences led some of the latter to undertake trade expeditions to Truk in

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Figure 18.2. Truk, wooden canoe prow. Museum für Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte, Hamburg

ordinary times and to seek survival there when storms destroyed their own food crops. The division of labor for subsistence activities differed from that of Ifaluk in that Trukese men not only collected the tree crops but did most of the gardening as well. In both places, however, it was mainly the women who collected marine animals from the reefs, and only the men who fished from canoes. The pigs and chickens now kept by the Trukese are evidently recent post-European introductions; their dogs may have been introduced somewhat earlier, from the Marianas (Lebar 1964: 64). Today the Trukese residential buildings are located on or near the coasts, a concession to European rules requiring over-water latrines; formerly they were mostly inland, partly for easier access to groves and gardens, and partly for defense against the surprise over-water attacks that figured in Truk's frequent internecine wars. Households were small and widely dispersed; each one consisted of one or two large dwelling houses (jimw) and several other structures that will be listed later on. In some cases two or three households were close enough together to be called hamlets, but larger and more nucleated settlements were absent. While all of Truk's populace constituted a single society (in fact, the boundaries of this society could by some criteria be extended to include the communities of several nearby atolls), it was divided into numerous districts, some of which occasionally united, in varying combinations, to wage war, but which were in all other respects independent and self-governing. In 1947-1948 the average number of households in each of the (no longer warring) districts surveyed was five to six, and the number of

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meeting houses in each district one to two. Formerly, the household units of each district were evidently large, and the number of meeting houses more numerous—about one to every one to three households. It is the composition of households, however, that attracts most interest and leads us to a description of Trukese kinship. Most Trukese households consisted of a set of sisters (and their parents, if alive), together with their husbands, their daughters, and their unmarried sons. Exceptions to this pattern did occur, as I will describe, but the more usual arrangement was in compliance with Truk's uxorilocal residential rule, which in turn was connected with this society's emphasis on matrilineal descent. (This is not meant to imply that matrilineal descent and rules favoring uxorilocality necessarily go together: several societies in Oceania can be pointed to in which that was not the case; but in Truk the two kinds of norms did obtain, and were in fact mutually reinforcing.) All of Truk's land was subdivided into estates each of which was corporately identified, by full or residual title, with sets of persons interrelated through close ties of matrilineal descent, that is, by traceable descent from a common ancestress no more than a few generations back. Some of these units also contained persons admitted to membership by adoption, either as children, or as adults so situated as to have no nearby comparable unit of their own. The Trukese themselves had no entirely distinctive generic label for these matrilineages, but they were otherwise conceptually well defined: by the aforesaid characteristic of corporate land ownership, by individual names (typically, that of their most important estate), by sentiments of mutual cooperation and obligation, and by common governance. In former times, it was also usual for each matrilineage to have a wuut of its own, a house where its male members met to confer and lounge about, and the unmarried men to sleep. Most matrilineages also had separate houses for making and storing canoes; if not, their wuut served that purpose as well. Also, it was usual for each matrilineage to have its own fanay, a hearth site containing a large earth oven where its male members worked together on occasion to prepare food for presentation to their district chief or for payment of "rent" due the residual owners of any land held in their matrilineage by provisional title. Concerning the latter, it is useful to emphasize the corporate aspect of matrilineage property ownership, especially with respect to its land. Ideally, all members shared more or less equally in using it, had a voice in its disposition, and were responsible for fulfilling any obligations its ownership might entail. Thus when a man married and moved away from his own natal household, which in most cases was located on his mother's— and thereby his—matrilineage land, he could if he wished continue to use that land; but he was also required to do his share of the work of, say, paying the "rent" on that land.

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Matrilineage mates were prohibited by forceful rules from engaging in sexual or sex-implied interaction, but such rules applied to other categories of kinfolk as well. Matrilineage mates were heavily responsible for one another's physical welfare; for example, while a woman's husband was conventionally required to keep her supplied with breadfruit and the other foods produced by males, her brothers were expected to see that the husband did so, or if not to do so themselves. The brothers' responsibilities continued even after they moved into their own wives' households elsewhere. (This, together with his "corporate" obligations mentioned in the preceding paragraph, meant that a man intending to reside uxorilocally was likely to marry a woman living nearby; to do otherwise would have made it difficult for him to fulfill his responsibilities to both his matrilineage and his conjugal family and affines.) While matrilineages were corporate and at least ideally close-knit units, they were at the same time hierarchically organized. Toward nonmembers they were regarded as a closed unit of "siblings," but among themselves the oldest male of the oldest generation, the oldest "brother" (the mwaaniici), was head of the entire matrilineage, with considerable authority over its members' actions—including their collective work (such as producing and processing food for "rent" or "taxes"), the apportionment of plots of land for household subsistence, and their choice of spouse. More direct supervision over the activities of the unit's female members was exercised by the finrtiici, the oldest "sister" of the oldest generation. Thus, while residential households were for the Trukese (as for most other Oceanians) the most important kind of unit for day-today living, matrilineages outweighed households in importance in most other respects. Like descent units everywhere, Truk's matrilineages were subject to change. Some of them died out altogether; others became so reduced in numbers that they merged with another with which they shared untraceable but legendary ties of matrilineal descent; and still others proliferated, in numbers and in property, to such an extent that they eventually split. The latter development typically took place when men came to acquire large amounts of land from their fathers—say, land owned by the latter as final members of an expiring matrilineage. By passing on such land to their children, the basis was laid for formation of a separate descent line, which might in time become an entirely separate matrilineage.7 All of Truk's matrilineages were subdivisions of one or another of the society's forty-two matriclans (jejinag).8 These averaged about 250 members each but in fact varied widely in size, some containing a single matrilineage on a single island, others many lineages represented on many islands, including islands outside Truk itself. Except for the single-lineage clan (doubtless one that was dying out), the only things shared in com-

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mon by all clanmates were: a common name, a tradition—though undocumentable—of ultimate common ancestry in the female line, and a proscription on intermarriage (not always observed, and not even harshly penalized). Otherwise, Truk's matriclans had no centralized headship and their constituent matrilineages were not ranked (i.e., none was "senior" to another in the total clan framework). Between the matrilineage and the matriclan, however, there were two other levels of intermatrilineage unity, namely supralineages and subclans. Supralineages came about when a lineage split into two or more independent landowning corporations but were based in the same district and maintained unity in some other respects as well. Thus, while each constituent lineage had its own 'head' (mwaaniici) in matters respecting its own property and internal affairs, the oldest one of them served also as somwonun ejinag ('head of the supralineage') on occasions when all of the connected lineages acted together (e.g., large fish drives, preparations for feasts). Subclans, on the other hand, came into being when a female moved to another island, or another district on her own island (i.e., in virilocal residence) and founded another matrilineage estate with land inherited there by her children (who were of course members of her matrilineage) from their father. Thereafter, and for as long as the original event was remembered (even though all the actual genealogical links might be recollected no longer), the members of the two units—the woman's original matrilineage and the colonial one founded by her—considered themselves "siblings," for purposes of using each other's land and of assisting each other in times of war. Matrilineages linked in this way had no overall headship and their members did not convene for work or ritual. But what is especially significant in the case of both supralineages and subclans was that their constituent lineages, qua lineages, were not ranked by seniority (or by any other criteria), and the estates of one of them did not revert to the other in the event one of them died out. Instead, such estates passed to the children of the last members—that is, the last male members—who then added them to their own matrilineage estates or established new ones.9 The last kind of social unit to be discussed is the district, but before doing so something remains to be said about other aspects of Trukese kinship. First, the terms used to refer to consanguines are: semej: father; any male consanguine of a higher generation, that is, father's brother, mother's brother, grandfather. 10 jinej: mother; any female consanguine of a higher generation, that is, mother's sister, father's sister, grandmother. pwiij: sibling of same sex. feefinej: applied by a man to his sisters. mwaatti: applied by a woman to her brothers.

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neji: son, daughter, sister's child, brother's child (but see below), grandchild. These terms also applied, according to their generation relative to ego, to all matrilineally-related consanguines: that is, to all members of ego's lineage, supralineage, subclan, and clan. They differed from the analogous ones of Ifaluk in three notable respects: they classed all consanguines into three generations instead of five (i.e., unlike Ifalukan practice, grandparents were classed with parents, grandchildren with children); there were two terms (instead of Ifaluk's one) for "siblings of opposite sex," according to the sex of ego; and, most significantly, they did not distinguish as did the Ifaluk between "father's brother" and "mother's brother." On the other hand, there was another Trukese term that emphasized the latter distinction in another way. That term was jefekyr, which was used to refer to all of the children (the neji) of all the male members of a lineage. In other words, all members of a person's own father's lineage were that person's "parent," either a "father" (semej) or a "mother" (jenej), regardless of generations. In view of the fact that a man's own property (including his lineage property if he were its sole-surviving owner) was rightfully inherited by his own children, the appropriate meaning of jefekyr would have been "heir." In line with this, all of a person's co-heirs—all of the jefekyr of a father's lineage—were referred to as that person's "siblings" (either pwiij, feefinej, or mwaani). Thus, Trukese labels for consanguines were applied to designate genealogical connection not only between individuals but between whole descent units as well. In addition, in three out of five instances the terms applied to consanguines were applicable to affines as well. Thus, jinej ("my mother") applied to anyone whom a person's spouse called jinej and to the wife of anyone whom a person called "my father." The applicability of semej was correspondingly similar. Also, neji ("my child") applied to anyone whom a person's spouse called neji and to the spouse of anyone whom a person called neji. For affines of a person's own generation, however, another set of terms applied: pwynywej applied to a person's own spouse, to anyone whom a person's spouse called pwiij ("sibling of same sex"), and to the spouse of anyone whom a person called pwiij; and jeesej applied to "sibling-in-law of opposite sex" (e.g., to anyone whom a person's spouse called mwaani or feefinej). These terms were also applicable to the spouses of all persons recognized as consanguines (except for those of clanmates, whose connections were considered too remote to count). Three other terms that figured in Trukese classification of consanguines and affines were tefej, futuk, and maaraar. Tefej included everyone whom a person could refer to by any one of the terms listed above— an indication that, unlike in many other Oceanian societies (especially the smaller ones), not all members were considered interrelated by ties of

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consanguinity (or affinity). Within a person's tefej, we have already seen the importance to him of his own lineage, supralineage, subclan and clan, and of the lineage of his father. We have also seen the importance to a person of his households—that into which he or she was born, and that into which, in the case of most men, he married. A person's futuk was important to him in a somewhat different way. It was in a sense a pool of all "close" consanguines—matrilateral and patrilateral, plus their lineage and jefekyr mates—who might be expected to attend a person's rites of passage and offer him protection and hospitality away from home. And finally, a person's maaraar consisted of all his (or her) affines, and all consanguines not included in his futuk, with whom he maintained an active relationship (in the form, say, of mutual hospitality). As in all Oceanian societies previously summarized in this book, there was some correlation between the kin term applied to a person and the interpersonal behavior considered appropriate by and toward him, not in all cases perfect, but at least tokenly symbolic of the norms for the relationship. For example, to call a person "sibling of opposite sex" usually entailed some sexual constraints; or, in many Oceanian societies a person called "mother-in-law" was subject to sexual and other constraints as well. In Truk the correlation between kin label and normative behavior is especially interesting (in addition to having been well documented). Some of the kin-linked behavioral prescriptions of the Trukese have already been mentioned, as, for example, the close cooperation and unreserved sharing expected of siblings, the firmest kind of social bond in this society and the one on which relations between all lineage mates was modeled. Ward Goodenough systematically investigated two other types of interpersonal behavior patterns, one having to do with what he calls "sexual distance" (i.e., the degrees of sex-related license or constraints allowable between various kinds of pairs of opposite-sex relatives: spouses, brother-sister, etc.), the other with "setting oneself above or below another." The latter warrants further discussion because of the importance attached to social hierarchy in this and most other societies of Micronesia. Being pin me woom ('taboo from above') to someone required a person to act, or to avoid acting, in certain specific ways toward that person. The kinds of actions or avoidances involved in this set of deferential behaviors were graded, in terms of most to least, as follows: a. Greeting the deferred-to person with the verbal expression: "faajiro" (applicable only to district chiefs and to jitag). b. Exhibiting jopworo behavior, remaining lower than the deferred-to person, by crouching or crawling when in his presence. c. Avoiding direct interaction with a person except at the latter's pleasure. d. Complying with a person's request if at all possible.

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e. Avoiding scolding a person or addressing him harshly. f. Avoiding addressing a person with belligerent or threatening language. By painstaking inquiry Goodenough succeeded in matching these behaviors with most of the various kinds of relatives and "officials" with whom a Trukese was accustomed to interact. Since the list is long, I shall reproduce only enough of it to reveal how very meticulous the Trukese were in expressing the concept of social hierarchy, and to indicate where certain kinds of persons were on a seven-step scale. In the most deferred-to category were two kinds of persons, district chiefs and jitag (i.e., a specialist who combined skill in oratory, native custom and tradition, diplomacy, and military tactics). When a relative of one of the above interacted with him, he behaved in the way that was appropriate to their consanguineal or affinal relationship. But when the "lower" person was not a relative of the chief or jitag he was required to observe all six of the deferential behavior patterns listed above. Recipients of the next highest level included a "daughter" (by her father), a "brother" (by his sister), a wife's brother (by her husband), a brother's son (by the brother's sister), and others. The behaviors required at this level included all of the patterns listed above except the one that required thefaajiro greeting. Behaviors at the next level included all but the two most deferential ones, the faajiro greeting and the crouching-crawling attitude. Recipients in this category were a male (by his younger brother) and a female (by her younger sister). And so on, down to the level that required no behaviors of the deferential type and whose recipients included, for example, a parent by his or her children and a spouse by a spouse. A sampling of these behaviors reveals a number of interesting conventions: a parent owed more deference to his or her children than vice versa; a sibling owed more deference to his or her older same-sex sibling than to his or her younger one (a convention that the Truk kin terms did not express); a sister owed more deference to her brother than vice versa; a husband owed more deference to his wife's brother than vice versa. It would require more space than is available here to attempt to "explain" these and other correlations between relationship term and deference behavior with respect to, say, lineage organization or marital residence rules, but even the sampling of data just given should serve to indicate how important deference was in Truk as a sign of status differences. In this respect Truk typifies most other societies in Micronesia, and in Polynesia and Fiji as well, in contrast with most of those in Australia and Melanesia. Status differences among relatives were also conceptualized and acted out in Australian and Melanesian societies, and in some cases very sharply, but more through behavior such as "sexual distance" and

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exchange of objects than through finely graded verbal and bodily signs of "inferiority." We turn now to Truk's division into soopwun feny ('section of the land'), which Goodenough labeled "district." When his study was made, in 1947-1948, there were ninety-eight of these units, which however were no longer self-governing and no longer waged war. They ranged in size from 0.128 to 0.77 square miles, and in population from 64 to 127 persons each, with an average of about 100. In other words, Truk's 1947-1948 districts were very small in size and population and indications are that they were even smaller during pre-European times. In many cases each of the pre-European districts constituted also a separate community (as was earlier defined), but in several cases two or more districts formed a single community whose members engaged in close and usually friendly everyday interactions, while retaining their separate governments.11 As noted earlier, the average number of households in a district was five to six, and in former times there was one meeting house (wuut) for every three households. Households per se, however, were not corporate units. It was lineages that owned property, corporately, and it is in terms of real property that the nature of Truk's districts can be best understood. Throughout this section lineages have been characterized as "owning land"; it now becomes necessary to define that relationship with more precision. To begin with, the Trukese distinguished between territory, soil, and plants growing on that soil; they also distinguished (in ways set forth in chapter 9) between full and divided ownership, and with respect to the latter, between residual and provisional titles. Let me exemplify these usages by means of a hypothetical series of episodes proposed by Goodenough and applicable specifically to Truk. A man goes to an as yet unpopulated and unowned island, or part of an island, and lays claim to it by setting up boundary-stones; at that point it is his territory, held in full ownership by him. By clearing and planting a portion of that territory, he also acquires full ownership over the soil of that portion, and over, say, the breadfruit trees planted there. Meanwhile he has sired children who, following his death, jointly inherit their father's full ownership to the territory as a whole (as well as to the soil used and the trees planted by him), thereby establishing a new matrilineage corporation—a branch, as it were, of their mother's matriclan. This new lineage, which in Trukese is characterized as having "staked the land," continues to own full title to the whole territory. But after its male members have brought their own wives to reside there, their own children form the cores of new lineages (i.e., branches of their respective mother's various clans), which acquire provisional title to the parts of the territory they occupy (residual title having remained with the parental "land-starting" lineage). As provisional owners the former owed the lat-

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ter "rent" in the form of certain objects and services, in default of which they could, theoretically, be required to vacate. However, those objects and services were not directed to the founding lineage as a whole but rather to its own individual headman—that is its oldest member, who thereby became chief of the whole territory, the district. Pioneering was not the only way of establishing chieftainship (i.e., residual ownership) over a district. Among the frequently warring Trukese the victors occasionally drove a chiefly lineage out of its district and assumed chieftainship, and residual ownership, for itself; even in such cases, however, the newly installed lineage came to be described as "starting the land." As senior member of the lineage holding residual title to all the district's territory, the chief was the focus of the "rent" owed his lineage. T h a t "rent" consisted mainly of produce (e.g., breadfruit and turmeric) from the provisionally owned land. However, most of that produce, which was ceremoniously presented at feasts, was returned to the donors, having been redistributed in proportion to the amounts contributed. In other words, it was a largely symbolic event. In addition, it was a chiefs privilege to mobilize his whole district for large-scale events, such as fish drives. It was also his prerogative to initiate wars, but not to force everyone to fight. And while it was expected of him to try to keep the peace in his district (e.g., by mediating quarrels), he had no coercive powers beyond the respect owed his office and his own personal influence. (Unlike their counterparts in many Polynesian societies, Truk's district chiefs per se had no special religious attributes or functions, such having been held by specialists in divination, healing, sorcery, and the like.) Moreover, a chief was expected to be a person of "humility" and to avoid "arrogant behavior." Chiefs who acted otherwise and who tried to interfere too forcefully in intradistrict quarrels risked assassination or expulsion (along with his own lineage mates) from the district. In summary, a chief was expected to be a "father" to his district, as indeed his whole lineage was in relation to the district's other lineages— an interesting example of matrilineal descent units interrelated by symbolically paternal ties. I mentioned earlier men known as jitag, specialists who combined skills in oratory, native custom and tradition, diplomacy, and military tactics. T h e knowledge behind such skills was acquired from other jitag, who, like the expert navigators of Truk and other Caroline Islands (see chapter 10), were divided into different "schools." A district chiefs effectiveness and prestige was enhanced if he were also a jitag, and many of them were, but in districts where that was not the case, another individual thus qualified (preferably but not invariably a lineage mate of the chief) assisted the chief. Indeed, so essential were those skills, especially

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in time of war, that a district without a jitag of its own sometimes hired one from elsewhere. M a n y of Truk's districts were linked together into one of two confederations for the purpose of assisting one another in times of war, but the allegiances shifted from time to time and resulted in no overall organization or even social ranking among the member districts. In fact, while the lineages within each district, and hence their respective clans, were ranked in terms of seniority, according to imputed order of local incorporation, there was no society-wide ranking of clans; the most senior one represented in one district could have been the most junior one in another. Finally, as I described earlier, Truk was the social center of a much wider array of islands stretching from Puluwat to N o m o n u i t o and from Murilo to Satawal; the most distant, Satawal and Puluwat, were some 175 miles away. As I described in chapter 10 for Satawal, canoes from all these islands used to sail to and from Truk for purposes which included barter. And as I mentioned in chapter 8, Truk's high islands served sometimes as havens for nearby atoll dwellers whose homelands had been devastated by hurricanes. In consequence of all this movement the culture of the whole area remained fairly homogeneous. And, what's more, many outer-islanders actually settled on Truk (the reverse having occurred less frequently), thereby establishing ties of kinship that were area-wide. As I described in chapter 12, the western and northern atolls of "Greater Truk" were also parts of other voyaging and social networks that extended as far west as Yap. With a few exceptions—for example Ulithi, where marital residence was virilocal instead of the normative uxorilocality that prevailed elsewhere—the social organization of all these atoll islands was closely similar to that of Ifaluk and Truk. Settlements tended to be located along lagoon shores of the islands, and households, the principal subsistence units everywhere, were in the main extended-families centered in a set of closely related females—for example an older woman and her married daughters or a set of adult sisters. (The exception was Ulithi, where the cores of households were males.) As on Ifaluk and Truk, the principal landowning units throughout that wide area were matrilineages, which were in all cases divisions of named matriclans, and in many cases of intermediate units (e.g., subclans) as well. Again, as in Ifaluk and Truk, those clans were exogamous, but usually had no other functions than to encourage their respective members to offer hospitality to one another when away from home, most clans having been represented on more than one island. In any one political unit—whether whole island or part of an island—the clans were ranked, and the senior male member of the matrilineage representing the highest-

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I®

Figure 18.3. Tobi, wooden figure with shell inlay. Staatliche Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin

ranked clan was the political unit's chief; but, as on Truk, the ranking of particular clans varied from place to place, having been based on order of settlement (or last conquest). The authority vested in chieftainship, too, resembled the kinds of powers and limits attached to the office on Truk. None of the above similarities in social organization is surprising, in view of the probability that all these islands were populated mainly from east to west, by pioneers whose ancestors had come from or through Truk, and whose descendants had maintained contact with one another through continuous interisland voyaging. In fact, the only noteworthy way in which these central Caroline atoll dwellers differed from the Trukese in terms of "international" relations was the interisland hierarchies exemplified in their overseas exchange institutions described in chapter 12. Far off to the southwest of the central Caroline atolls lie the tiny coral islands of Sonsorel, Pulo Ana, Merir, Mapia, and Tobi—all of them "high" except Mapia. None of them seems to have had a population of more than 2 0 0 - 3 0 0 , and they differed from one another in only minor cultural details. They were probably settled by residents of the central Caroline atolls, whom they closely resembled culturally (including linguistically). Each of the "Southwest Islands" formed a separate unitary community, which consisted of a number of matrilineal descent units loosely united under a common headman (tarnol). Inasmuch as the latter was usually succeeded by one of his sons, and not by a maternal nephew,

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Figure 18.4. Nukuoro, Caroline Islands, wooden figure. Musée de l'Homme, Paris

no one matrilineal unit was able to retain permanent headship of the whole community (Eilers 1935; R. McKnight 1977; P. Black 1978).

Ponape The second part of central Micronesia to be considered comprised the large islands of Ponape and Kusaie (now Pohnpei and Kosrae) and their nearby atolls. Ponape, the largest and best known of these islands, is remarkable not only for its society's complex meshing of descent and political units but

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also, and especially, for its people's engrossment with titles and rank. 1 2 Physically it consists of a main island and numerous small offshore islands, comprising some 129 square miles, encircled by fringing or barrier reefs. The main island, which is roughly circular, is ruggedly mountainous, rising to an elevation of nearly 3,000 feet—making Ponape the highest island in Micronesia. Soil and climate combine to produce luxuriant vegetation, and the island's human population, which in 1844 was estimated to have been 7,000-8,000 (i.e., overall density of 5 4 - 6 2 persons per square mile), evidently had more than enough land to accommodate food trees (mainly breadfruit and coconuts) and garden crops (mainly yams, bananas, kava, and aroids—Colocasia, Alocasia, and Cyrtosperma). As in Truk, men did most of the agricultural work and women harvested the marine shallows. Settlements were located around the coastal zone and on some of the offshore islands, and except for concentration in chiefly residences, such as Nan Madol, 1 3 they were small and scattered. Ponape's descent-unit structure was similar to Truk's in many respects. The maximal units were matriclans (dipw, sou), which were individually named and exogamous; but unlike Truk's they were totemic as well. Recently, there were eighteen such clans; they ranged in size from 2 to 783 persons, thereby indicating that they were subject to both extinction and proliferation. As on Truk, the members of any one of them were to be found throughout the island (and in fact on surrounding islands as well), and although they were not united under an overall clan headman (and doubtless sometimes found themslves in antagonistic camps) they were supposed to offer each other hospitality when away from home. Moreover, the rule of exogamy was enforced not only by supernatural sanctions but by capital punishment as well. As on Truk, Ponape's clans were divided into numerous branches (keinek); the ethnographies label these branches "subclans" but are not entirely clear about their composition. It may be inferred that Ponape's clans, like their Trukese counterparts, consisted of two or three levels of branches: lineages and supralineages, and perhaps subclans as well. The "subclans" referred to in the works on Ponape appear to have been either (single and localized) lineages or supralineages (i.e., sets of closely related and in some respects unified lineages based in a single political district), but since the texts in question refer only to "subclans" I can only follow suit. In any case, members of a subclan were obligated to assist one another in all forms of work projects beyond the capabilities of single households, and each of them was headed by its senior male member. Subclans were also ranked with one another in terms of seniority, but whether that ranking obtained throughout each clan as a whole, or only within individual political districts, is not clear. As for the nature of subclans as corporations, I will return to that topic below.

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Turning next to territorial (in contrast to descent) units, there were three types: districts, sections, and what the ethnographies label farmsteads. A 'farmstead' (paliensapao) averaged about 8 - 1 0 acres in size, and was resided on by a household which in most cases may have consisted of an 'extended-family' (pananai). In recent decades they have been as often or more often patrilateral (i.e., based on virilocal residence) than matrilateral, but that may be largely the result of European influence. In any case most of them appear to have centered around monogamous couples—polygyny having been restricted mainly to district chiefs. The next larger territorial units were kousap, usually translated as sections. Most sections extended from coast to island center, and consisted of from fifteen to thirty-eight farmsteads. Each section had a meeting house of its own, and was headed by an official known as a kaun or soumas, who was usually the senior male member of the section's senior subclan. The section functioned mainly as an administrative subdivision of the district. The largest of Ponape's territorial units was the district (wehe). Within recent memory the island was divided into five such wehe (some legends say that in former times there were three, or even one); they were composed of from fifteen to thirty-eight sections each, and they recently contained populations ranging from 242 to 1463. (Since the recent population of indigenous Ponapeans numbered only one-half to one-third of that estimated for pre-European times, the figures for the ancient wehe need to be increased accordingly.) Wehe were autonomous political— self-governing, warring, and so forth—units, and their governance was highly and autocratically centralized; in addition, their chiefly offices were strictly hereditary. In these respects they were no different from political units in some Polynesian societies, but what distinguished them from the latter was the nature of those hereditary offices. There were hundreds if not thousands of named titles in circulation in Ponape. Some of them were hereditary; others were obtainable by performance of socially valued skills (e.g., fighting, priest-craft); still others were acquired as rewards for outstanding services to chiefs (e.g., by larger-than-average first-fruit payments, by supererogatory gifts). Some of them carried specific rights and duties; others only prestige and perhaps special shares of food at feasts. As John Fischer reported, the original meaning of many of them is unclear. Some of the titles suggest that the holders may have originally been assigned to supervise different types of f o o d production: "Master of the Banana Plantation," "Master of the Fruit," "Master of the Sea." Others suggest that the holders had religious functions connected with various shrines. S o m e of the titles include names of places which are found at N a n M a d o l . . . and may have been officials at the court of the legendary rulers of Ponape. ( 1 9 5 7 : 178)

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Some idea of their quantity is indicated by the fact that in many sections, virtually every man had at least one title (some persons had two or more), as did many women. (Some women had titles in their own right and some had them as wives of certain titleholding men.) As noted above, most titles carried little or nothing more than prestige and some minor privileges, but a few of them in every wehe entitled their holders to actual or potential chieftainship, which in Ponape was an office—or rather two complementary offices—of immense social power. In every wehe the titles entailing actual chieftainship were the same: Nahnmwarki and Nahnken. The bearer of the former (the higher ranking of the two) was supreme in terms of ceremonial prerogative and ultimate authority but was so hedged about with taboos (e.g., against appearing in public or being handed things directly) that the latter was in most cases the active manager of wehe affairs: something like the situation in Samoa, with its paired ali'i ('chief) and tulafale ('orator', 'talking chief). And as in Samoa, it was not unusual for an ambitious and able Nahnken to reduce his Nahmwarki to a position of administrative impotence while permitting him to retain ceremonial primacy. But ideally, and in fact usually, the pair ruled together complementarily and congenially, either by necessity or choice. The necessity for congenial co-rulership was due to the fact that the two rulers were by inviolable custom members of different local subclans (and of different clans), both of which constituted their district's "senior" and in many cases most populous subclans. (As in Truk, I suppose, their seniority had come about either through priority of settlement, or by conquest and confiscation legendized as such.) In other words, in every wehe each of the two co-rulers would have had the support of a sizeable and more or less equal supporting force of subclan mates—a situation characterized by some writers as "dynamic balance." As for the element of choice in this "congenial" co-rulership, I refer to the circumstance that in many cases the respective subclans owning these titles made a practice of intermarrying (being divisions of different clans that was of course allowable), so that the incumbents of the two titles were ofttimes close affines, or even father and son. Moreover, although the Nahnmwarki and his line of successors ranked higher than the Nahnken and his, the relations between the two were kept in some "balance," symbolically, by the practice of licensing the latter certain privileges in the Nahnmwarki's presence. For example, a Nahnken "could choose to ignore restrictions of manners and standards of behavior and formal speech patterns (which were elaborate in Ponapean society, where different speech forms were required when addressing different classes of persons) required of others in the presence of the high chief' (Alkire 1977: 62). But let us return to the other titles mentioned earlier, those carrying the right to "potential" wehe chieftainship.

MICRONESIA

In every ivehe there were twenty-two or so titles that served, potentially, to entitle their incumbents to one or another of the two chieftainships. Half of these led up to the office of Nahnmwarki, and half to that of Nahnken, and in both "lines" the titles were arranged serially in terms of succession order. Thus, when the top title, or any of the other ones, became vacant (i.e., usually by death) all the titleholders in line below it moved up a step, or at least that was the ideal. In many recorded instances, when either of the top titles became vacant, the next individual in line to occupy it was by-passed for someone farther down the line, the appointment having been made either by the surviving co-chief, or in respect for the dead chiefs wishes, or by the leaders of the two "chiefly" subclans. In some wehe the titles of actual and potential chieftainship were owned by three or more subclans, but in others they were the property of only two, whose members had acted deliberately to monopolize power by some strategy or other, and had sought to perpetuate it by intermarriage (thereby establishing a caste-like class similar to that of Tahiti and some other Polynesian societies). The holders of all the above "chiefly" titles had many privileges, including some consultative voice in wehe affairs; but it was the two chiefs themselves, and especially the Nahnmwarki, whose powers were commanding in nature and in extent. To mention only a few of them: he was the "owner" of all land within the district's boundaries; he chose or confirmed the incumbents of all titles held in the district; he made all the decisions concerning large-scale enterprises, including war making; and he was empowered to inflict punishment, including death, over any of his subjects. Practically speaking, his decisions on some of these matters were constrained by public sentiment, especially the views of a district's other influential people. To act consistently selfishly was to court open rebellion and assassination, which did sometimes occur; but according to the fundamental premises of this hierarchic society, the Nahnmwarki, and to a less extent the Nahnken, were virtually omnipotent. Two of the powers listed above warrant further discussion: the Nahnmwarki's control over titles, and his "ownership" of all district land. With regard to titles, some of the higher-ranking ones were hereditary and hence not within the chiefs power to confer; however, he and the Nahnken could and sometimes did jump some incumbents up the normal line of succession. Moreover, he was empowered to confer titles upon individuals for supererogatory donations to himself (usually, however, for redistribution), and for services which he himself chose to reward14—all very effective strategies for gaining and maintaining political support.15 The Nahnmwarki's "ownership of all district land" requires much closer scrutiny. Although the ethnographic sources do not explicitly say so, 16 I think

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that we find here a Ponapean distinction between territory and soil (and plants planted or already growing in that soil)—distinctions that were applicable in Truk and perhaps in most other Micronesian societies as well. What the Nahnmwarki owned either fully or residually, I suggest, was the district territory, a right which was exemplified in two ways: by the "first fruits," which all of his subjects owed him (some of which he utilized for his own household's subsistence, but most of which he redistributed among the donors), and by the requirement that all persons (usually all social units) wishing to utilize currently unused territory first obtain his consent. Meanwhile, a district's subclans and households continued to hold and exercise provisional rights over those parts of the district (wehe) territory allocated to them, and full or residual rights over the soil within those parts. In consequence of some of the above premises and practices, Ponapean society came to be stratified into major social classes, of "nobility" and "commoners" separated by what the Ponapeans themselves called a 'valley' (wau), an almost unjumpable gap. Marriage between the classes did sometimes occur but was discouraged, and the products of such marriages constituted an intermediate class, called seriso, more privileged than commoner and less than noble. A listing of noble privileges would lengthen this account unduly, but they included some that were material (e.g., choice portions of feast foods), some ceremonial (e.g., ranked seating places at public assemblies), and some sexual (e.g., wider latitude in sexual affairs, more wives, and in the case of the higher-ranking noblemen virtually preemptive choice of mistresses and wives). With all its emphasis upon heredity, however, the society did, as we have seen, provide opportunity for advance up the hierarchies through skillful performance in some activities and through special services to the chiefs. The aspects of social hierarchy described so far were mainly secular, but the phenomenon did have a religious side (not as important as in some Polynesian societies but present nevertheless). The most explicit expression of this religious element lay in the concept wau. As earlier described, wau in one sense referred to the 'valley,' the wide social gap that separated nobles from commoners; in another sense the word (as frequently translated by Bascom's Ponapean informants) meant 'holiness' or, perhaps more correctly, 'honor' or 'respect'. Modern-day (and largely Christianized) Ponapeans disagreed over whether supernatural sanctions served to enforce the respect due a possessor of wau. Some said that fear of being executed rather than of supernaturally produced death prevented a commoner from touching a Nahnmwarki; others said that remaining higher than a seated or passing Nahnmwarki was to court supernatural illness even though neither the latter nor the wrongdoer was aware of the misconduct. Nevertheless, even modern-day informants

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attributed a partly hereditary, hence somewhat mystic, quality to the attribute: Wau can be inherited through the blood; it is associated with the clan and is inherited primarily from the mother, but it can come also from the father. Wau can also be acquired; when a noble is given the title of Nahnmwarki, his wau is increased, and a commoner can acquire wau by being appointed section chief. Whether it is achieved or inherited, wau stems from the chiefs from whom titles are received and descent is traced. Wau is relative rather than absolute, and an individual's rank depends on whether he has more or less wau than others have. (Bascom 1965: 29)

Mention of section chiefs in the above quotation brings us to the question of how the subdivisions of wehe were structured; they were in many respects small replicas of wehe. Like the latter the descent units within their boundaries owned titles having to do with section headship, and those too were arranged in two distinct lines in terms of succession-order to the sections' co-headship. The functional distinction between co-heads (and lines) was less clearly marked than at the wehe level, and titles tended to be more widely distributed among a section's descent units— there having been what seems a deliberate (and perhaps egalitarian?) effort made to have all local descent units participate in the (relatively small) honors and powers that section titles entailed. Although a wehe chiefs approval was required to appoint anyone to a section title, nomination for the posts appear to have come mainly from local choice. Finally, it will be recalled that some Ponapeans held more than one title, including one that led to section headship and another to wehe chieftainship. Kusaie Not much can be said about Kusaie (Kosrae), the high 42-square-mile island located about 300 miles southeast of Ponape. 17 Beginning in the 1830s it was a frequent stopping place for beachcombers and whalers, which resulted in severe depopulation and far-reaching cultural changes. In addition, American missionaries, who began their efforts there in 1852, succeeded in converting the entire population to Protestant Christianity by the end of the century. The estimated 1852 population of 1,400-1,700 constituted a density of about 33-40 per square mile—that is somewhat less dense than pre-European Ponape. Like Ponape, whose culture Kusaie's resembled in some respects, the island was divided into territorial districts (of which there were four) and those into sections (which numbered fifty-seven), most of which extend-

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ed inland in wedgelike shapes. And like Ponape (and Truk, etc.) the residential and land- (or perhaps soil-) owning units were composed around cores of matrilineages, which were combined into supralineages and were divisions of island-wide exogamous matriclans. Kusaie's government is described as having been the most centralized of all Micronesian chiefdoms, and its paramount chief (tokosa) is said to have been recognized throughout the eastern half of the Caroline Islands as the area's highest-ranking chief. His was indeed a powerful and autocratic office and its incumbents resided on a well-guarded islet just off the coast of the main island—somewhat like Nan Madol, where Ponape's most powerful district chiefs used to dwell. The title he held was highestranking of the society's eighteen "chiefly" titles: nine of them described as "high" and nine "low." Moreover, the holder of the paramount title has been described as having had "the authority to grant other titles and allocate lands to be administered by each title-holder" (Alkire 1977: 66). Taken literally, one might infer from these words that the Kusaie polity was like that of some of Hawaii's, where territorial units had superceded descent units as a basis for officeholding and land ownership, and where the chief had unrestrained power to appoint and allocate: but was that actually the case? Although the sources are not clear on this point I suspect that, drawing on parallels from other Caroline societies, both "chiefly" titles and land (i.e., soil) remained the property of descent units, and what the paramount chiefs had was the right to choose someone to hold the title belonging to a particular descent unit from two or more member-candidates, and with that title went the right and duty of "administering" the descent unit's land. A second parallel to Ponape's polity is suggested in another statement by Alkire, namely, that "the low-ranking title-holders"—the holders of the nine low-ranking titles—"had a voice in selecting the paramount chief when that office fell vacant (ibid. 66). On the face of it, the arrangement closely resembled Ponape's two-line series of chiefly titles, wherein the highest-ranking titleholder of the lower-ranking line had the principal voice in choosing a new Nahnmwarki. As for the rest of Kusaie's population, the 'commoners' (metsisik) resembled their Ponapean counterparts in most respects, including the "taxes" they paid to their superiors, who were the residual owners of either the soil they used or the territory they occupied. Marshall

Islands

The Marshall Islands consist of five small raised coral islands and twenty-nine atolls, some of them multi-isleted and very large, in terms of lagoon size, that is; the total land area of all the islands and islets being

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only 70 square miles (as compared with Ponape's 129). 18 Moreover, these small dots and narrow strips of land are scattered, in two parallel chains, over an ocean area of 230,000 square miles. Nevertheless, the 10,000 or so persons who occupied most of the habitable land areas in this vast region spoke the same language, though with some dialectal variations. There were some interisland differences in food supply, based mainly on differences in rainfall; the drier northern islands produced only coconuts, pandanus, and arrowroot; the wetter southern ones produced breadfruit, taro, and bananas as well. Despite these differences however, the Marshallese were all very much alike in most cultural respects, including their social relationships. Assuming that they had a single origin, what probably served most to keep them alike culturally was their continuous interisland interaction, which was implemented by their superior skills in boatbuilding and voyaging (as I described in chapter 10) and facilitated by the distribution pattern of their islands (i.e., abeam the prevailing winds). Like all the Micronesians treated thus far, the Marshallese were divided into numerous named and exogamous matriclans, and these were subdivided into matrilineages that were themselves combined into supralineages. Most of the clans found in the archipelago had members on nearly every island or atoll, a consequence of much interisland intermarrying and movements brought about by war and political change. As in Truk and elsewhere, the clans (here called jowi) as such had neither overall headmen nor properties, and were not interranked. Clanmates were morally obligated to provide one another with hospitality, but the only other thing they shared was a tradition of (ascribed but untraceable) matrilineal descent from some remote common ancestress. Lineages, on the other hand, were composed of persons able to trace their common descent from an ancestress who in most cases was no more remote than about three generations above the oldest living member. Moreover, the lineages were corporations, whose properties consisted of rights to land estates (wato) (which in most cases consisted of tracts that extended across an island from shore of lagoon to shore of open sea). Unlike clans, each lineage had its headman, who was ideally—and in most cases actually—its oldest member, male or female. (In some instances a senile or otherwise incompetent male senior was bypassed, as was a female for a male, but the ideal was as stated.) As in all social units defined in terms of descent, ramification is bound to occur, and usually some segmentation as well. So it was in the Marshalls, where the most important kind of segment was what our sources call a "subclan" but what (following the terminology established for Truk) I shall call a "supralineage," namely, a unit made up of all the lineages in any given political district that claimed matrilineal descent, actually or reputedly, from a named common ancestress. In these islands supralineages had no

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corporately owned property, but each of them did have an overall head who was usually the leader of the unit's senior lineage, that is, the one descended from the eldest of the set of sisters to whom the lineages traced their separate identities. In these islands supralineages were formed not only by fission (i.e., by the breakup of lineages into separate corporations) but by fusion as well (i.e., by the deliberate uniting of lineages based in the same political district and having membership in the same clan). And finally, lineages of large size were usually divided into smaller subunits, of potential lineages (consisting, say, of a woman and her children and her daughter's children), but until such subunits had acquired separate ownership of a wato estate, their distinctiveness had little social import. In native terminology all of these levels of clan segmentation were called bwij, and the label given to the heads of all them was alab. With respect to the latter, however, there was some ambiguity in the rules of succession. Ideally, the head of a descent unit (of any level) was the eldest member of its senior generation, and that person was usually the unit's eldest (still competent) member, male or female. Such were the vagaries of demography and genetics that it sometimes happened the eldest member of the eldest generation of lineage mates was much, much younger— or female, or hopelessly senile, or markedly incompetent—than the eldest male member of the next-to-eldest generation. When group welfare was involved such situations often led to a waiver of the rules; or when the stakes were high and individual ambitions large, to wars of succession. However succession was eventually implemented, the alab of a lineage was its head in several respects. He (or in a few cases, she) allocated among the lineage mates (the 'workers', rijerbal no) their productive work on lineage land and received therefrom an ekan, a portion of the produce. In addition he represented the lineage in its relations with other units (including, e.g., passing on some of the ekan to the headman of his supralineage or to his district's chief). He even could, and in some cases did, transfer ownership of a portion of his lineage's estate to some outsider—say, to his sons. In the case of a powerful district chief, he was able to bestow a portion to a subject as a reward for meritorious service. On the other hand, it was considered improper for an alab to deny a lineage mate his right, as a worker, to reside and subsist on their joint lineage estate. (I have the impression that in pre-European times the Marshallese lineage head exercised more authority over his lineage mates than was the case, say, on Ifaluk or Truk; but, with the changes in authority patterns resulting from colonial control, it is now too late to test that impression.) Turning now to the residential and territorial units of Marshallese society, two to four types can be distinguished, according to place.

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Throughout the whole archipelago people resided in and obtained most of their subsistence as members of households. And everywhere the households were aggregated into communities, some of which were also divided into neighborhoods. In some places each community constituted also an autonomous political district, but in large parts of the archipelago several communities were also subdivisions of far-flung political empires. At this late date it is impossible to know with any certainty the size and composition of these islands' households in pre-European times, but it is likely that they varied quite widely in both these respects. (Recent studies of the Bikinians' households found them to average about fifteen members each, but to range from seven to twenty-five; recent figures on Majuro revealed an average of eight to nine and a range of six to twentyone.) The composition of a Marshallese household of course depended largely upon a married couple's choice of residence, which, while ideally uxorilocal (in keeping with matrilineage ownership of land), was influenced by other factors as well. As already noted, rights in land were sometimes transmitted in nonmatrilineal ways, for example, by a district chief to a subject as reward for service, or what was more usual by a father to his own children. With respect to the latter, it was not unusual for an alab to bequeath part of his lineage land to his own children; and where a lineage's sole survivor was an adult male it was customary for its land to pass to the latter's children. In either case, when an individual acquired land in this manner (which was labeled rights in ninnin), he was free to combine it either with his own matrilineage estate, or to transmit it to his own children (thereby creating a separate patrimonial estate). In any event, it came about that many Marshallese possessed land rights that made it more advantageous to reside virilocally than uxorilocally, despite the culture's ideological bias for the latter. Hence, the composition of households varied considerably, cores of matrilateral kinsmen having been somewhat more numerous in the northern atolls, bilateral ones in the south. Communities also varied widely in size and structure as well as in the degree to which they were politically autonomous. At one end of the size range were a few isolated communities with less than a hundred residents each; at the other were Majuro Island and Arno, with numbers approaching a thousand. A close look at pre-bomb Bikini will provide a useful basis for generalizing about community social structure. In 1946, just prior to the time when the inhabitants of Bikini were transferred to another island in order to clear their atoll for the experimental explosion of atomic bombs, the native population numbered 170. Their residences were concentrated on the islet of Bikini itself, but they owned and exploited the atoll's other thirty-five islets (a total land area of

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2.32 square miles) plus its very large (229 square miles) lagoon. The rights held by the 1946 inhabitants in their atoll and the social structure of their community stemmed from conquest, as Robert Kiste described: Legendary accounts a n d genealogical records give evidence that the Bikinians were descended f r o m a group of islanders w h o fled Wotje Atoll in the not t o o distant past. A c c o r d i n g to legend, a m a n named Lankelin w h o belonged to a chiefly line of the Ijjirik [matriclan] at Wotje w a s forced to flee the atoll after a dispute. H e and a g r o u p of followers f r o m his o w n [clan] and that of M a k a o l i e j [eventually arrived] at Bikini which w a s purportedly inhabited by a small number of people. Lankelin is said to have threatened t o m a k e w a r u p o n them, and they are held to have taken to their canoes in fright and sailed a w a y never to be seen again. (Kiste 1 9 7 4 , p a r a p h r a s e d f r o m M a s o n 1 9 5 4 and Tobin 1953)

(As Kiste noted, while this account may not be entirely accurate, it had importance as a charter for the community's subsequent social structure, and also it exemplified a widespread Marshallese theme.) Thenceforth, the conquering party proliferated and segmented into two sets of lineages, one set of the Ijjirik the other of the Makaoliej clan, with intermarriages between the two. In about A.D. 1850 successors to the legendary Lankelin married two Rinamu-clan women of Rongelap Atoll (about 80 miles distant) and brought them to Bikini, where they became founders of a third set of lineages. In due course a few persons from other atolls and clans came to live on Bikini, but by that time all the land had been subdivided among lineages of the three "pioneer" clans, which were interrelated in the following way. In 1946, three of Bikini's lineages were Ijjirik, three Makaoliej, and two Rinamu; they varied widely in membership from one member to 63 (by 1964 some of these had grown to 100 members each and others had become extinct), but our concern here is with lineages as corporate units regardless of their size. Each of the community's eight lineages had distinctive rights in one or more of the atoll's numerous estates, and each of the three sets of lineages (distinguished according to clan affiliation) constituted a separate, hierarchically structured supralineage. T h u s , in the case of the Ijjirik supralineage, its three lineages traced their descents, respectively, from the three daughters of an Ijjirik woman three generations back, and were ranked with each other according to the birth order of those sisters. While each of these lineages had its own alab, the alab of the senior lineage was lukuan alab ('major headman') of the whole supralineage as well, an office that gave him some authority over the other two lineages' affairs and a portion of the 'tribute' (ekan) produced by each of them. In view of the "fact"—legendary or historical—that the leader of the party that conquered the atoll was an Ijjirik, subsequent alab of this

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supralineage were 'chiefs' (iroij) of the community as a whole. An iroij had far-reaching administrative powers over activities of communitywide scale and some judicial powers over matters having to do with relations between supralineages. Moreover, he (there is no record of any female Bikinian iroij) had residual rights to all of the atoll's lands and waters as territory, rights which were regularly acknowledged by the payment of tribute, mainly in the form of first-fruits (such tribute having been rendered up the line, from lineage alab to supralineage lukuatt alab to iroij). As this tribute passed upward some of it was retained en route by the alab, and ultimately by the community chief, for their own use, but some of it was redistributed "downward"—the proportions having differed situationally and doubtless according to the characters of the various headmen. Elsewhere in the Marshalls most of the islands were divided among the realms of one or another iroij lablab, 'paramount chief—that is, iroij (and their successors) who had extended their realms over several atolls other than their own, by warfare or threat of warfare, and who exacted regular tribute from their subjects. The tribute was in the form of mats, cordage, preserved foodstuffs, and so forth, and of individuals sent to serve as domestics in the paramounts' households. The transactions however were not entirely one-way. In return for acknowledging his paramountcy, verbally and with tangible tribute, the paramount sent gifts of food to his subjects and was expected to provide assistance in times of natural and other disasters. Because of its isolation Bikini remained outside of any of these "empires" until about 1870, when an iroij lablab of Ailinglablab persuaded the Bikinians by show of force to become part of his realm. For our next example we turn to Majuro, an atoll island in the southern Marshalls and one that was (and is) wetter and thus more fruitful, larger and more populous, and more complex socially than Bikini. In 1947 when Alexander Spoehr studied this community (Spoehr 1949) it had a population of about 850 persons divided into about 120 households, which were somewhat smaller than those of Bikini and somewhat more bilateral in composition. Like Bikini (and all other Marshallese communities) Majuro's people were divided into corporate, landowning matrilineages, which were in turn joined together into supralineages, each affiliated with a separate clan. Here however there were many more lineages and supralineages, representing altogether some twenty or so clans. Moreover, all of these were interrelated in a structure that was not only hierarchic, as it was in Bikini, but was subdivided into two rival political districts and was stratified into social classes as well. Formerly the Majuro community consisted of a single political district, headed by a single paramount chief, an iroij lablab. (Unlike his Bikini counterpart, who was a mere iroij [i.e., the chief of a small and structur-

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ally homogeneous community], the M a j u r o paramount's domain was much larger and more heterogeneous, the product of both lineage ramification and imperialism.) Later, and shortly before European imperialism superposed its authority, the paramount then in office designated two of his nephews (the sons of two different sisters) to succeed him. When the older man died the two nephews vied for control of the whole realm, but the struggle eventually ended in a stalemate, with about half of the territory (and its associated lineages) going to each—a situation that was perpetuated by European overlordship but that is unlikely to have persisted for long in earlier times. T h i s split did not, however, alter the previous class-stratification system, which I will now describe. Majuro's lineages were classified into three levels: iroij ('chiefly'), bu/irak, and kajur, with a fringe level, the jib, between bwirak and kajur. T h e iroij supralineage was affiliated with the Rarno matriclan, which according to some evidence had its base on nearby Arno Atoll. Whether its primacy on M a j u r o had been established by pioneer occupancy or by conquest is not reported, but by the latter half of the nineteenth century that primacy had become established and the head of its senior lineage was iroij labalab of M a j u r o — t h e residual owner of the territorial aspect o f all its land, and the titular leader in community-wide affairs. T h e heads of all other lineages of the iroij supralineage were known as iroij erik, or 'lesser chiefs'. Their specific functions in the polity are not entirely clear, but they and all other members of their supralineage constituted the community's highest social class. It is essential to add that iroij was not the particular name of a particular lineage or supralineage, but rather the term applied, on M a j u r o and elsewhere in the Marshalls, to whatever lineage (or supralineage) that happened to be currently politically paramount at the time, by virtue either of earliest settlement or success in warfare. Next below the iroij lineages were those classified as bwirak. (No class-system prevailed on the northern and drier islands, such as Bikini.) It is not clear how lineages came to be classified as bwirak—quite possibly as a result of interclass marriage, or of warfare (say, as the junior lineages of a victorious side)—but like the iroij lineages, the bwirak lineages of one community did not necessarily have the same clan affiliation as did those of another. Next were the jib (whom Leonard Mason aptly described as having been on the "fringes" of the two upper classes) and finally the kajur, the " c o m m o n e r " lineages and their members, who made up the bulk of the populations in M a j u r o and in all other communities in which the class system prevailed. So far the discussion has been of lineages, but the class concept was also applicable to individuals per se. Thus, in Alexander Spoehr's words: "A man or woman is iroij if his or her mother is iroij, regardless of the

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[class] of the father. On the other hand, if the mother is a commoner or a jib and the father is iroij, account is taken of the superior class of the father and the children are bwirak, or lesser nobility, until the father's death, when they become kajur" ( 1 9 4 9 : 7 6 ) . As this passage indicates, Majuro's social classes had not developed into rigidly bound endogamous castes (such as had occurred with the upper class in some Polynesian societies), although the paramount chief (and perhaps some of the lesser chiefs as well) made a practice of marrying iroij women (i.e., of other islands, where their clans would have been different from those of the iroij lineages of Majuro). T h e behavior associated with Majuro's class system can be no better summarized than by reproducing another passage from Spoehr: In former times, the social distinctions that underlay this class system were very real indeed. The paramount chief was possessed of autocratic powers that were shared to a lesser extent by the nobility. The paramount chief and his nobles were the leaders in war and in sailing expeditions. They controlled the land and the fruits thereof. They provided the primary leadership of the community, and in turn enjoyed the privilege of being fed and supported by the commoners. Of the noble class, the paramount chief himself was accorded the greatest respect. His position involved the hereditary acquisition of magical power, somewhat similar to Polynesian mana. He was approached only in the most deferential manner; in his presence persons walked stooped over, or moved on their knees. Of all the members of the community he was supposed to command the best information on the affairs of the Marshallese world. In recompense for his inherited responsibility, he received the best of the food produced on the land or caught in the sea. He lived in the most favored location. His lineage had its own cemetery. No restrictions were placed on the number of his wives and he had access to all commoner women. Over his people he exercised autocratic powers. The commoners were the workers of the land, the fishermen, the sailors, and the ordinary fighting men. With the possible exception of the alabs—the heads of the commoner lineages—the commoner class were the workers (rijerbal) in every sense of the word. Their tribute supported the nobility. Their houses were built in less favorable parts of the island. Nor were they permitted the distinctive tatooing and the finer dress of the nobility. (1949: 77) As noted earlier, the class system just described prevailed throughout most of the central and southern Marshalls, where it was facilitated by the fruitfulness of these more fertile islands, and established and maintained by means of the area's wind patterns and of the natives' outstanding maritime skills. Interisland travel throughout this area by all accounts was frequent and was undertaken for various reasons: to wage war or to flee from defeat, to collect tribute, to obtain wives, to visit relatives, and so forth. Moreover, this frequent interisland interaction served not only

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to foster cultural homogeneity in an area of widely spaced communities, but the skills it depended upon served to create a category of specialists, atok (which included warriors and navigators, along with some religious practitioners), who were highly respected and deferred to regardless of the circumstance that most of them were commoners. Gilbert

Islands

The eleven atolls and five raised coral atolls that make up the Gilbert Islands (recently "nativized" to Kiribati) extend in a northwest to southeast line for about 500 miles.19 The land forms of this chain are the same throughout, but a clinal variation in rainfall from 130-138 inches per annum in the north to 32 in the south resulted in marked differences in vegetation and, indirectly, in population densities. Coconuts were grown everywhere, for their meat as well as for toddy (both fresh and fermented) and toddy "candy." In the drier south the only other staple was pandanus, while in the north both breadfruit and aroid Cyrtosperma were produced, the latter in natural swamps and in pits dug through the coral to the level of the freshwater lenses. In addition to ocean and lagoon fishing the residents of some islands constructed permanent fish traps in the lagoons or had ponds in which they raised milkfish (Chanos chanos) from fry gathered from the reef. Culturally the archipelago was a meeting place between Micronesia and Polynesia. Linguistically, the inhabitants spoke a language closely related to those of the Marshall and Caroline islands; there are grounds for believing that the residents of the southernmost atolls once spoke Polynesian dialects like those of the Ellice Islanders to the south but in the course of time they became "Gilbertized." Then, somewhat later, there was a return of Polynesian influence (quite possibly an immigration of Samoans), which secured a foothold on the southern island of Beru, and eventually spread throughout the archipelago. The most salient component of that influence was a large and well-constructed type of community meeting house, the maneaba, together with its (Samoan) fonotype institution. Underlying this Polynesian overlay, however, the basic Gilbertese culture was itself differentiated—partly perhaps the result of differences in food productivity, the communities of the northernmost (i.e., more productive) islands having been more socially stratified than those in the center and south. I will begin with a description of the former, namely, the geographically contiguous and societally united atolls of Makin and Butaritari. 20 In language as well as in other cultural features these northernmost people, like other Gilbertese, were "basically" Micronesian, but in one important feature of their social organization they differed markedly from the other Micronesians thus far treated in this chapter and resem-

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bled more closely several peoples of Polynesia. The feature in question concerns the nature of their landowning descent units, which in the Marshalls and east and central Carolines were matrilineal and exogamous but in the Gilberts, ambilineal and not concerned with choice of spouse. Let us proceed more systematically. The 2,000 or so inhabitants of Butaritari-Makin's 7Vi square miles of land area were divided into eight communities but constituted a single society, united by networks of kin ties and by a single dynastic line of paramount chiefs. The household homesteads constituting the communities were situated in long straggling lines near the shores and consisted of sleeping houses (most of them quite large), cooking places, and separate houses for menstruating women and girls (see chapter 14). In addition, each community had its own meeting house (maneaba) and shelters for its residents' large seagoing canoes. The residents of these two islands distinguished sharply between personal property, which was owned and transferred individually (e.g., clothing, tools, mats), and goods owned jointly. The latter consisted mainly of land, sections of the reef, fishponds, stone fish traps, and large seagoing canoes. Land was further differentiated into homestead areas (usually surrounded by pandanus, and coconut palms, and breadfruit trees), taro beds (natural swamps or excavated pits), and forest lands (which contained coconut palms and other useful trees). The ownership of all these nonpersonal goods was vested in ambilineal-descent units of different spans and genealogical depth. An individual (male or female) could transfer his personal property however he chose, but the principal (though not the only) way in which ttonpersonal property was transferred was by inheritance, that is, all of a parent's rights in such property passed to the offspring, both male and female, and the latters' to theirs, and so on. Thus an individual could have owned rights in estates from lines of ascendants spreading bilaterally and reaching back as far as genealogies could be recalled (and substantiated)—a very large number of estates indeed. In fact other norms and practices intervened to reduce that number, so that on the average an individual possessed socially recognized rights in only four or five ancestral estates, and relatively unrestricted rights in only one or two. In specific instances the corporation most directly and actively identified with any estate or part of an estate was one composed of a set of siblings, the previous owners' own offspring. This was true especially of the homestead where the owner had resided and of the taro pits he had cultivated. Other consanguines—say, the siblings and siblings' offspring of the previous owner—retained some rights in those properties, but considerably fewer than the offspring themselves (for example, only reversionary rights in the taro beds). And in the case of a homestead, the society's rules against marrying any close consanguine meant that for most

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marriages one of the spouses had to change residence. While a sibling who had moved away continued to have a strong claim to the resources of his natal homestead, his (or, what was more usual, her) own children's claims to it were considerably weaker. Thus in time the claims upon an estate by its absentee owners became weak to the point of extinction (in the meantime, however, the latter had acquired or retained viable claims in other estates). Moreover, the claims were weakened even further when an absentee member became less active in contributing his share of objects and services to the unit's communal activities—"membership" having been defined in duties as well as rights. In one sense this process of disaffiliation—the weakening of one's membership in a property-owning corporation—was gradual and continuous, but in fact it was socially formalized in one decisive step, namely, when the separating member ceased contributing to the collection of food regularly offered by the unit to the community's headman or higher-level chief, and when the member came to be represented by the headman of a different corporation in the community council (of which more later on). It was implied above that women changed residence upon marriage more often than men, due partly, no doubt, to the circumstance that daughters tended to receive smaller shares of a parent's estate rights than did sons. What's more, in the allocation of a parent's property rights, an eldest son tended to receive a larger share than younger ones, from which it may be inferred that the latter tended more often to reside elsewhere. In any case, most households were composed of a core of agnatic kin. And while the descent-unit corporations were theoretically ambilineal in composition it was the core of agnates that occupied the corporation's traditional homestead, its kaainga,21 and which had the strongest claims to its resources and made the most use of them. The descent units of Butaritari-Makin differed from those of northeastern and central Micronesia in yet another way, namely, in their irrelevance for choice of spouse. As in most of Polynesia, "closeness" of consanguinity and not unilineality set the rule, a person having been forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with any descendant of any of his great-grandparents. In addition, marriage with an even more remote consanguine was forbidden if the latter were classed either as "parent" or "child." (The Gilbertese' nomenclature for consanguines was the "pure" generational type, with no distinctions between lineal and collateral kin.) Mention was made earlier of a descent-unit corporation's headman. That official (called "speaker" or "arranger" or "eldest") was in most cases the oldest male member actually residing on the unit's traditional homestead—oldest in age, even if not in genealogical level, an exception having occurred when the oldest was senile or disinterested in public affairs. The descendant of a former core-member male took precedence

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over one of a core-member female unless the latter was much older. As the labels for such an official indicate, his (or her) duties were both supervisory and representative; for example, he supervised use of the unit's canoe and of its forest lands (and of its reefs and fish weirs if the unit owned them); he allotted the contributions required of the unit for food presentations to the community's chief; and he mobilized his unit when it became necessary to avenge some crime committed on its estate or to defend a member against outsiders. A descent unit's headman in his role of "speaker" had the duty (and privilege) to represent it in its dealings with other units and with chiefs. Each of the communities of Butaritari-Makin had its own meeting house (maneaba), where representatives of its various descent-unit corporations met together along with the community chief on formal occasions: to plan community-wide activities such as fish drives and wars, to settle some intracommunity conflicts, and to receive and send messages to the society's higher-level chiefs. For each descent unit in the community there was a prescribed seating place, a boti, in the meeting house, an area of the floor directly beneath a specified section of thatch. (The close resemblance of this arrangement to that of the Samoan fono house was not coincidental; as mentioned earlier, this and some other traits of Gilbertese culture were evidently introduced into these islands by Samoans.) We turn now to the relations between Butaritari-Makin's descent units and the society's "chiefs." When the United States Exploring Expedition visited in 1841, the society was divided into two, partly overlapping political units; the larger one centered on Butaritari, the other on Makin, but each with some subjects on both islands. In both cases the unit's chief was a direct descendant from one or the other of the two chiefs who had ruled half a century earlier and whose siblings and offspring were credited with having founded all of the "aristocratic" descent units in existence at that and subsequent times. All members of the "aristocratic" descent units were called toka or inaomata ('free people')—as distinct from the members of "commoner" descent units, who were called tabonibai ('fingers', figuratively, 'assistants') or taani m'akuri ('workers'). It is not explained how the two eighteenth-century political-unit chiefs or their chiefly predecessors came to attain that status (plausibly, through a mixture of pioneer settlement and warfare), but the social arrangements thereby established remained in operation until well into colonial times. One aspect of those arrangements had to do with relations between the "aristocratic" and "commoner" descent-unit corporations, the other with relations between all descent-unit corporations and their respective political-unit chiefs. To begin with, each of the latter headed his own descent-unit corporation—with its own (very extensive) estates, and with enough servants to

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exploit their resources. Unlike their humbler counterparts, however, each chief attained office not by virtue of being his unit's eldest male member but by being eldest son of the previous chief and the latter's principal wife. The extent of the authority of a political-unit's chief doubtless varied with the times and the man, from benign disinterest to despotic intervention; but two aspects of it that remained constant were his entitlement to tribute and his right to appoint the headman of the communities within his domain. Mention has already been made of the tribute, mainly in the forms of food, which every descent-unit corporation, both commoner and aristocratic, was obliged to render its chief. As for a chiefs appointive authority, the individual appointed (who was usually a close kinsmen and in any case a member of an aristocratic descent unit) became not only a community's headman but was endowed with a large local estate (along with local residents to work it for him). In addition to the above, some commoner descent units had direct relations with some aristocratic ones; not all those of either "class" were so engaged, but there were some. One such relationship was based on a chiefs fiat: he simply awarded to a close kinsman or prominent supporter coproprietorship over one or more commoner estates. In some cases the appointed co-owner and his own relatives resided elsewhere, in others they resided on the awarded estate—in some instances even in the commoner household itself (where, it appears, an outside observer would have had difficulty differentiating them from their commoner household mates). In both kinds of arrangements, however, the commoners were required to do most of the productive work. A more unusual form of relationship was based on what the ethnographers label "guardianship" (which differed from "adoption," wherein an adult assumed parental control and responsibility for a child, who was usually a close kinsman). In the process of guardianship, an adult obtained consent from a child's parent to receive the child, not as "son" or "daughter" but as "ward"—someone to provide for and nurture to adulthood. In return for this service the child's own parents repaid the guardian in the form of use-rights in land, and so forth, and when relevant, of protection as well. Guardianship was practiced between commoners and between aristocrats, but what concerns us here is the prevalence of that relationship between commoners and aristocrats (including political-unit chiefs). In a word, the practice was utilized by many commoners as a means of obtaining land and services (especially protection) from the latter. Moreover, when such a relationship became established, it usually involved the entire descent units of the principals as well, and for generations to come: a continuing relationship between goods-receiving, swperordinate "wards" and goods-giving subordinate "guardians." The other islands in the Gilbert archipelago differed sociologically

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from the northern ones (as exemplified by Butaritari-Makin) in at least two important respects: in the basis of their social stratification and in the composition and degree of autonomy of their descent units. In the first place, the institution of "guardianship" seems not to have prevailed in the central and southern islands. Instead, social stratification consisted largely of a distinction between "free" members of a community and "slaves"—that is, the thieves, war captives, and castaways kept by "freemen" as landless workers and dependents. In some places (e.g., Abemama) the political-unit chiefs engaged in wars of conquest against neighboring communities (including other islands) and confiscated their victims' estates (and the victims themselves as slaves). While such chiefs doubtless exercised authority over some local activities in their own communities—the amounts having differed with the place and the man—they appear not to have had rights, residual or otherwise, over the estates of their "freemen" compatriots. Thus, the descent-unit corporations of the central and southern Gilbert Islanders possessed fuller ownership rights in their estates than did those of Butaritari-Makin, and they were correspondingly more autonomous. In addition, their membership was even more agnatic, in ideology as well as in practice; not only did females receive smaller shares of parental inheritances, but residence was even less frequently uxorilocal than in the north. The result was that claims to membership in a boti (the name applied in this part of the Gilberts not only to a descent-unit's place in the maneaba, but to the descent-unit corporation itself) were sometimes disallowed unless all of a claimant's connecting links had been males. Finally, whereas in the northern islands succession to the headship of a descent-unit corporation was based on absolute-age seniority and may have tended to be patrilineal, it was prescriptively patrilineal in the central and southern islands of the chain. The isolated Island of Banaba (Ocean Island), some 250 miles west of the Gilberts, differed markedly from the latter in geography and in several subsistence and other cultural respects. Its social organization, however, resembled that of the (central and southern) Gilbertese too closely to justify further description and discussion here.22 Nauru Nauru, another raised coral island, is about 170 miles west of Banaba and even more isolated than the latter; and while the Austronesian language spoken by its 1,500 or so people (in precolonial times) has not been more specifically classified, their social organization resembled closely that of the Marshallese in some respects and of the central and eastern Caroline Islanders in others. 23 As on Truk, for example, the society was divided into exogamous matrilineal clans and lineages, but the latter were not the principal landowning units that they were on Truk,

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land having been more subject to individual ownership and transmission, including transmission not only t o one's children but to non-clanmates as well. However, as Alkire points out, since residence was more often than not uxorilocal, co-residing sets of sisters and their daughters came in some instances to possess joint ownership of land—a situation resembling Truk's matrilineage corporations. And since it was the tendency for land to be transmitted down the senior matriline, a larger-than-average amount of it came to be owned by members of a clan's senior matrilineage. Another similarity to Truk was Nauru's division into political districts, of which there were fourteen, each with its own chief. Wedgew o o d , however, holds that these were a post-contact development, the traditional polities having been smaller hamlets (i.e., clusters of extendedfamily households administered by senior lineage males) and heterogeneous war-making factions headed by aggressive military leaders. According to one writer there were three "status levels" in Nauruan society: temonibe ('senior rank'), amenengame ('junior rank'), and "serfs" ("individuals w h o had fled their homes during warfare and subsequently placed themselves under the protection of a higher-status landholder in another hamlet or district" [Alkire 1 9 7 7 : 8 2 - 8 3 ] ) . F r o m the source on which Alkire's statement is based, however, it is not altogether clear whether temonibe and amenengame applied to individuals or to matrilineages: In Nauru, as in so many parts of the Pacific, considerable stress is laid upon primogeniture, and the most important man in the clan is the eldest son of the woman who traces her descent back, through a line of eldest daughters, to its original foundress. Such a woman and her children are spoken of as being temonibe. People who belong to junior branches of the clan are amenegame. Often it is very difficult to determine clearly whether an individual is temonibe or amenegame for there is no hard and fast distinction between the two, and men or women whose position is on the borderline may be regarded as either, their personal character and popularity often helping to determine which. What power or influence the leading man or woman of the clan had we cannot now really tell. During the nineteenth century one who had a dominant personality and, if a man, was a noted warrior, could wield considerable authority, not only within his own clan, and also within his own locality, but even throughout the greater part of the island. Before this time, however, and especially before influences from the Gilbert Islands had introduced the God of War and the Gilbertese methods of fighting, it is probable that the head of the clan though respected on account of his or her birth, had little political importance, and it is interesting to notice in this context, that the word temonibe by which they are designated is itself of Gilbertese origin. In the nineteenth century when warfare became increasingly important, certain men belonging to junior branches of a clan came to be regarded as temonibe on account of their valour and skill in fighting, and sometimes seem to have eclipsed in importance the true clan leader. (Wedgewood 1936: 337)

(I):, fifös

: '« , 'I/: ' I « /'

Figure 18.5. Yap, Caroline Islands, post of men's house. Museum für Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte, Hamburg

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Yap The islands of Yap are geographically in the Caroline chain but they, along with the Palau Islands, appear to have been settled (and more directly from the west) several centuries before the other Caroline islands (which linguists believe were settled mainly from the south and east). And while the people of Yap shared some features of social organization, and fairly frequent social interactions, with other Caroline Islanders, their social institutions contained many traits that set them far apart. Yap's four large and six small islands contain a land area of about 39 square miles, with hills of up to 590 feet above sea level and a large proportion of uplands of eroded badlands. The earliest systematic census, around 1900, put the population at about 7,500. But for several fairly credible reasons it has been proposed that before European-derived diseases began to reduce it the number was far larger, at least three times as large and possibly even five or six. 24 In comparison with some Micronesian atolls the population density of Yap—even calculated on the basis of the larger estimates and of the islands' extensive infertile areas—was not excessively high, but the circumstance of so many people residing in such close and easily accessible proximity does seem to have been reflected in (although not directly the cause of) the society's extraordinary complexity. One feature of that complexity was the connection between the society's two kinds of descent units, the one matrilineal the other patrilineal. Yap's matrilineal descent units (gertung) were individually named, exogamous, and totemic. While all the members of each particular genung referred to themselves as "one branching tree of people," they, unlike clanmates in many other Oceanian societies, used kinship terms (and correspondingly appropriate modes of behavior) only for those to whom genealogical connections could be traced. With regard to the latter, that is, the members of a matrilineage (in the terminology of this book), the norms called for mutual assistance and loyalty, especially on critical occasions, when the relationship was ideally modeled on that between a mother and her child. When some occasions brought members of a matrilineage together their leadership rested in the hands of the one who combined older age and close genealogical connection with the member being honored or supported. Even so, no matrilineage as such held permanent rights of tenure in any particular area of land, although parts of matrilineages possessed a kind of short-term residual right in certain patrilineage estates, as will now be described. In terms of residential and political behavior in general, and of permanent landownership in particular, patrilineal ties were much more important than matrilineal ones. As the Yapese might have phrased it, however, the lands in question were not "owned by" patrilineal units; rather, particular sets of patrilineally related males were "connected in certain ways

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with particular named estates (tabinaw)." All such estates contained one or more residential areas along with food producing plots of various kinds, and some of them included fishing sections of lagoon as well. Within each estate's principal residential area was a large dwelling house whose stone floor platform was the estate's "central foundation" within which dwelt the ghosts of former estate residents, to whom the living members prayed and whose names were given to newborn children of the estate's male associates. In addition—a matter of utmost importance for the society's overall structure—many estates were said to have "owned" certain kinds of "authorities" or entitlements (e.g., the right to be a community's official magician, or war leader, or chief). Moreover, all of the estates were ranked vis-à-vis each other within individual communities, and some of them within larger political units, or even within the society at large. But before outlining these wider relationships let us take a closer look at the composition and structure of the social units identified with individual estates. Most households consisted of a single nuclear family, with or without an extra person or two (e.g., an elderly dependent relative or friend); in a recent census only 5 percent of all of them were extended families (e.g., an elderly couple and a married offspring, a pair of married brothers). This situation was in close conformity with Yap norms, which held that each nuclear family should have its own separate house and food-producing land. The spatial arrangements in a Yap residence were described in chapter 9. To summarize them, the dwelling house was divided longitudinally into two sections: the back side (tabgul 'place of origins') was reserved exclusively for the father, the front side (to'or 'place of many') was frequented by all other household members except for females during menstruation (when they occupied a separate house some distance removed). In the tabgul side the father slept and kept his valuables along with the sacred objects used by him as household priest in his prayers to the estate's ancestors. Both wife and small children slept in the to'or side; girls older than ten or so slept in an adjacent cookhouse and boys, in the community's faluw, or young men's clubhouse, which was in most cases built at the shore. A similar pattern of separation applied to food. Yapese males did all the fishing and females all the garden work. Men reserved for themselves the best of the fish wherever it had been caught, but a woman had to produce her taro and other crops in different plots, one for her husband, one for a menstruating daughter, and one for herself and her other children. Moreover, all the above had to be cooked on correspondingly different hearths and eaten separately. Underlying this separation was the concept of 'pure' (tabugul) versus 'impure' (taay), which, as we shall see, was very pervasive in this society, and which applied especially to menstruation but was not limited to that condition alone. In the context of a household, a man was "pure" vis-à-vis his wife and chil-

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dren (see chapter 1 4 ) ; in fact, a wife's "impurity" with respect to her husband was such that she was required to wear a different garment when cultivating her husband's garden and preparing his food on his own separate hearth. T h e division of authority among household-mates was also precisely allocated as were the statuses occupied by individuals bearing kin-term labels, such as 'father', 'mother', 'child', 'oldest siblings', and so forth. In most cases the persons occupying those statuses were indeed so related in a familial sense, but not always so. For example, if the "real" father were dead, another older relative sometimes acted as household "father" in his place. But what about the division of "ownership" rights in the estate used by a household? T h e Yapese way of defining and allocating those rights is one of the most distinctive features of their social structure. It was implied earlier that the Yapese ideal was for each household to "have" its own estate—including residence site, garden lands, associated ancestral spirits and names, and authorities. On the other hand, all members of a household did not possess identical titles (i.e., rights and obligations) in "their" estate. In the case of a man residing there who had been born there and had inherited his entitlements from his father, he had what were called tafen rights (i.e., permanent and almost exclusive userights), which he in turn passed on to his sons. A larger share of tafen rights (including occupancy o f the estate's "central foundation" house site) passed to his eldest son, but some shares passed to all sons. A daughter possessed temporary use-rights in the estate before her marriage, and when she left to live on her husband's estate (as women invariably did), she was usually permitted to resume those rights when visiting her natal family or in case of her divorce. Also if there were no sons to inherit a father's rights, a daughter received the right to transmit tafen rights to her children—a situation that added considerably to a woman's value as a wife (i.e., her husband's sons by her received permanent use-rights in two estates). What rights did the Yapese woman, who in most cases enjoyed only temporary use-rights in her own natal estate, acquire in her husband's estate, the one whose heirs she bore and whose productivity she did so much to sustain? Temporary use-rights, of course, as long as she lived, but in addition, after her death, her contribution to that estate's welfare was acknowledged by the practice of entitling her matrilineal descendants (including her daughters) to serve as trustees of the estate—a set of rights called mafen—which may be translated literally as 'a feeling for ownership' and paraphrased as temporary residual rights. Such rights were temporary, inasmuch as they were exercisable for only three generations succeeding the woman whose services, as a wife, had instituted them. Since a new matriline was established with every new wife, there were at any one time three different matrilines holding mafen rights in

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each estate. Mafen rights tended to diminish with time, but in the case of the most recently instituted matriline of trustees, the "new trustee," its eldest member, male or female, played a very active role in the affairs of an estate: H e [or she] participated in deliberation at all life-cycle functions and at important family gatherings on economic, social, and religious matters. . . . His most important trust is to insure that . . . those born into the estate meet their obligations to their father and exercise proper care of the resources of the estate. In this role, he has the right to chase the children they neglect either their father

off the land

should

or the land. (Lingenfelter 1 9 7 5 : 5 5 - 5 7 : italics

added)

It is the right specified in the last sentence that warrants use of the word residual with reference to mafen. When a man had two or more married sons, the younger ones of them and their wives and children were accommodated, ideally, by assigning them separate house sites and garden lands—or in some cases by acquiring new lands for them, which eventually became new estates. 25 In any case, there were in Yap society numerous patrilineages, consisting of persons tracing patrilineal descent from a common ancestor three or four generations back. Such a unit was exogamous, but only in the sense that its members were all consanguines, and in Yap society marriage was prohibited between any persons believed to be consanguines. Ideally, patrilineage mates were expected to be mutually supportive and cooperative, including having generous use-rights in each other's estates. Also, if one male patrilineage mate died, wholly without issue, his tafen rights in his estate passed to a patrilineage mate, say, to a brother's eldest son. Yet their several different estates did not constitute a single patrilineage heritage, a unified bundle of tafen rights. Another type of relationship that obtained between individual estates (and their tafen owners) was that of landlord and tenant. As this arrangement involved relations between whole communities it will be described later on in that context. The thousand and more estates of Yap were grouped into binaw, which the ethnographers call "villages." At the time of Lingenfelter's study (1967-69), there were ninety-one of these actually inhabited, but evidence points to there once having been twice as many in the past, when these islands were more populous. With the exception of several low-caste villages (see below) the territories of most had at least one coastal boundary, with their residential areas near the shore and their contiguous garden areas just inland. Today some villages contain only a few households; formerly some of them may have contained a hundred and more. All of the land in every village may at one time have been iden-

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Figure 18.6. Yap, Caroline Islands, painted beam of men's house. Museum für Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte, Hamburg

tified with one or another of its several estates, but some of it was set aside for public use—for paths, for dance grounds, for official battlegrounds, and for three types of buildings: pebaly, faluw, and dapal. The pebaly ('men's house') was a large rectangular structure used daily by the village's older men as a social center and occasionally by village officials for meetings and ceremonies. It was strictly forbidden to females during menstruation; in fact, all women of child-bearing age tended to avoid it, but women past childbearing age used it for formal meetings. A village's main dancing ground was usually located in front of this men's house, as were the largest and most valuable pieces of stone "money" owned by the village's estates (see below). The faluw, which was usually built at the shore or in some cases on a platform extending into the lagoon, was a social center for young men, a place where they could meet and carouse, unconstrained by the rules that required them to be quiet and well-behaved elsewhere in the village. Many of the village's youths slept there regularly, and it served as a work place for them and a storage

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place for fishing tools. It was off-limits for all females, with one exception: every faluw had its own mispil ('hostess'), who lived there as "wife" to any and all of its young men. This practice was of course outlawed by Yap's colonial masters long ago so that little is known about it at present, but it appears that most such women were ones who had been captured in wars; in any case, most of them eventually married and lived ordinary domestic lives. Every village also contained several dapal, menstrual houses, where all women resided during their menstrual periods and for a hundred days after giving birth, and where girls resided for a full year after their first menstruation, as was described in chapter 14. Since dapal were always well secluded and were scrupulously avoided by males past early childhood—mainly for fear of contamination—they were resorted to by women who wished to discuss matters private to them. Returning briefly to the matter of a village's pathways, the main ones, which led past men's houses and other "official" places, were forbidden to impure persons, which included mainly the low-caste, and young women in the rugod stage of life (i.e., the early menstruating years). Until menopause, women were required to detour around a village's "official" places. Most of Yap's villages were divided into two or three neighborhoods (balay e binaw) and these in turn into two or more sub-neighborhoods (gilaruc). The latter consisted of one or more physically adjacent estates, or what Lingenfelter calls "associations" of estates—that is estates linked by ties of patriliny or by ties created when one estate's headman donated part of its land to a nonmember (most typically, someone who had little or no land of his own and who had rendered a service to the donor). Subneighborhoods differed considerably in numbers of households and in kinds and amounts of their collective activities, and so on. Most of them, however, had common young men's clubhouses and menstrual houses, and some had their own men's houses (pebaly) as well. In addition, just as the estates were ranked within each association so were the associations (and the separate "non-associated" estates, if any) interranked in each sub-neighborhood. The bases for the ranking of estates within an association would appear to be axiomatic: the "ancestral" estate in a set of patrilineally derived branches ranked above the latter, as did a donor estate above its donee. Among otherwise unrelated associations (and separate estates), however, the reasons for the ranking are unclear—priority of settlement, perhaps, or victory in warfare (both of which served to create differences of rank in some other societies of Micronesia). However the ranking had come about, the head of a sub-neighborhood's highest ranking estate was ipso facto headman of the sub-neighborhood as well; that is to say, one of the "authorities," the entitlements, belonging to his estate was the right and duty to be sub-neighborhood headman.

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The same kind of ranking mechanisms prevailed at the level of a village's neighborhoods and of a village as a whole, and, as we shall see, at even higher levels of the society's political structure. Membership alone in a high-ranking estate conferred some advantage over all members of lower-ranking estates—but mainly in terms of non-negotiable prestige (e.g., of ceremonial deference and respect). In terms of power—command over persons, objects, and services—that rested solely or mainly in the hands of the individual who headed the household occupying the "central foundation" of the sub-neighborhood's (or neighborhood's, or village's) highest ranking estate. In Yapese terms that individual was the pilung, the "voice of the authorities" vested in that estate. However, there was not only one such highest-ranking estate (and hence "voice") in a village, but three, each of whom spoke for the estates endowed with such powers. The incumbent of the entitlement possessing general authority over most village-wide affairs (ceremonial, religious, economic, diplomatic, etc.) was the "voice of the village." Although the initiator and the leader, he was, however, usually guided by a council made up of representatives of the village's other high-ranking estates. The second top village official was the "voice of young men," whose estate's entitlement it was to represent the young men in the council and to supervise their collective activities in carrying out work projects, and so forth. It was also his job to look after the village's shell valuables, and as "chief messenger" to represent his village in its dealings with other villages. Third was the village's "ancient voice," whose role was not to initiate or supervise but to "sit and listen" and act as advisor to the council and village chief. In addition to the above there were in most villages a number of other kinds of officials—for example, a principal priest, a leader of net fishing (and a magician of net fishing), a leader of communal gardening (and a garden magician), a war leader (and a war magician)—all of whose statuses were identified with the estates of their incumbents. In the case of many villages (presumably the larger ones) the offices of "village chief' and of "head of young men" were replicated at the neighborhood and sub-neighborhood levels, as were some of the other functional village offices as well. In addition to the above there were in many villages functional offices of other kinds (e.g., "overseers" for gardens, men's houses, sacred places, etc.), but enough has been presented to demonstrate that the principal political unit of Yap society, the village community, was highly, minutely, and comprehensively organized, and was guided and administered by a veritable phalanx of officers whose jobs were explicitly differentiated and for the most part the fixed prerogatives of the incumbents' estates. (It was as if the presidency of the United States were an entitlement enjoyed by members of the family owning, say, Hyannisport!) As was noted earlier, the ideal succession order in estate headship (and thus in many cases to

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chieftainship or principal counselor or head gardener or war leader, etc.) of a whole village, was from father to eldest son. All of this raises a question about the workability of a political system based not only on such a principle of succession but also on a seemingly arbitrary allocation of leadership functions. Fortunately for the Yapese, the principle of succession was occasionally bent to by-pass an eldest son in favor of, say, a better qualified younger brother or nephew. While specific village offices were, ideally, allocated to specific estates, there were enough ambiguities in that allocation, especially concerning the top village offices, to invite competition for them. And competition there was: in the form of political maneuvering, assassinations, and inter-neighborhood feuds. As the ethnographers tell us, the quest for political power, within individual villages and on the wider stage, was a pastime of many men; and success even at the village level often depended upon having allies outside. As for the wider political stage, the connections and maneuvers were numerous and complex; I shall mention only a few. Villages as such were most typically the type of social unit to engage in "external" relationships, but individual estates and neighborhoods also did so. Most of those relationships were hierarchic and were cataloged into several types, the most important of which were: tha'—obligations for support in work, warfare, and mitmit (i.e., ceremonial) exchanges; and suwon/lungun tafem—obligations for food, services, and other resources. As pointed out by Lingenfelter (whose admirable analysis I am following here), although phrased as "tribute," most of these transactions were two-way, having included not only the obligation of the subordinate to donate but of the receiver to reciprocate in some way—for example, by redistribution of most of the objects received, by promotions in rank, by promises of future assistance. Nevertheless, the act of tribute-giving had the political effect of publicly establishing or validating a hierarchic relationship between donor and donee. The word tha' signified "a series of things tied together with string," and had reference to the social units (mainly villages) obligated to provide some chief (i.e., some particular estate in the person of its "voice") with one or other of the kinds of support specified. Thus, a chief might have one "string" of tributaries for work projects, another for war, and another for assistance in ceremonial exchanges. The word "string" derived from the fact that the message from the chief asking for the services had to pass along a fixed sequence of intermediate units, which itself served to validate hierarchic relationships among the latter. It should be noted, however, that the sequence did not remain "fixed" for all time. Positions in the sequence were continually changing, as was the identity of the "things"—the villages and other social units—in the "strings," due to changes in political strength of those units as a result of

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warfare, population increase or decline, decrease of food supply, and, not least, as a result of the ambition and political skills of individual leaders. The second kind of "obligation" in the list, that between a suwon, an "overseer," and a subordinate unit, had a number of forms, perhaps the most interesting of which was the so-called fak ('child') relationship between a high-ranking chief and a village of much lower rank. Most such relationships seem to have come about as the result of the head of a land-rich estate having given a portion of it to individuals rendered landless, say, by war or by overcrowding in their own estates. The new village thereby established became a "child" of the donor estate, and was thereafter required to repay the gift with various kinds of objects and services, which, however, did not require the measure of reciprocation that characterized the tha' relationship. Some of the "child" villages in this kind of relationship had the status of "servants" to their overlords, and others the status of "serfs." For readers who recall our earlier account of the sawei expeditions to Yap from the atolls to the east—the so-called Yap Empire—it is interesting to note that for the Yapese hosts it was based on the fak relationship: not between all of Yap and all of the many atolls participating in the exchange, but between certain estates in only two Yap villages (in Gagil district) and certain ones of the atolls. While the exchanges that took place during those expeditions were valued highly by both parties, the atoll visitors were required to behave like "serfs" (i.e., they were forbidden access to Yap women, were required to assume postures of respect, etc.). The combination of "string" and "overseer" relationships that obtained in Yap, along with some other types of extra-village relationships, resulted in the existence of a number of geographically bounded "nets" (nug) and of two society-wide alliances, at the political center of both of which were three estates whose "voices" were acknowledged to be the society's highest-ranking chiefs. Space will not permit the description of the roles played by the incumbents of these offices, or to summarize the legendary accounts of how their estates came to have such offices. It is interesting to note, however, that in the case of two of them, the estates in question were transmitted matrilineally and the incumbents selected had to be members of particular matriclans. Another noteworthy feature of these highest-level offices was the special relationship that obtained between one or another of the three chieftainships and certain high-ranking villages classified either as its bulce' or uluti (the former signifying 'land', 'chiefs', and 'females', the latter 'sea', 'warriors', and 'males'). When occasion demanded, the bulce' provided its paramount with garden produce (the product of land and of females' labor), while the ulun provided him with fish and with fighting men. In fact, if a man of a bulce' village wished to fight on behalf of his paramount, he was required to join the ulun forces to do so.

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Yap society was so pervasively hierarchic and opportunities for raising one's status so numerous (and ambitions for doing so so widespread and compelling), that warfare and political maneuvering were a dominant part of men's life. However, no one man or social unit had within memory succeeded in attaining a monopoly of power or prestige. For some time in the past the quest had evolved into a rivalry between two major alliances, each of them centering around one of the three paramounts. However, when either side appeared to be winning, it was the practice of those supporting the third of the paramounts to join forces with the weaker side to adjust the balance—a practice based on a political philosophy that likened Yap's three paramount chieftainships to the three pedestal stones on which cooking pots rested over a fire, that is, "if one stone fell the pot would also fall"! Finally, a word of explanation about speaking of Yap society in terms of caste. As we have seen, the society was minutely graded throughout: older siblings over younger, males over females, one estate over another in an association of estates, one association over another in a village neighborhood, one village over another in "string" or "net," an "overseer" unit over its "child," and on and on. In addition to these specifically matched dichotomies of "upper" versus "lower," there was a society-wide system of categories that were stratified in the following way: pilung ("high caste"): "chiefs" (with high and low subdivisions); "nobility" (with high and low subdivisions); "commoners." pimilugay ("low caste"): "chiefs servants"; "serfs." While "chiefs" and "nobility" looked with disfavor upon marriage with "commoners," such marriages did occasionally take place. Marriage between pilung and pimilugay was forbidden, and evidently never engaged in. Those who were born into estates classed as "chiefs servants" suffered several disabilities—social, economic, and political. But the lot of "serfs" was even more burdened because of the 'impurity' (taay) that they bore as a class. That "impurity" derived in part from their duty to bury all of Yap's dead, and on taay estates. But it was also a logical consequence of their positions at the bottom of a class system in a society where the concept of "impurity" (versus "purity") was so important a dimension. Because of the "impurity" of themselves and their estates, they were relieved of providing food to their overseers—such food having been "impure" because grown on "impure" land—but they were required to perform what Yapese considered the menial task of thatching their landlords' roofs, and the dangerously contaminating task of burying their landlords' dead. In addition, they had to observe numerous taboos and patterns of respectful behavior vis-a-vis members of the upper caste, including walking only on the paths used by girls during their period of

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Figure 1 8 . 7 . Palau, wood carving. Museum für Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte, Hamburg (after Bühler, Barrow, and Mountford 1 9 6 2 )

puberty isolation. To violate any of these restrictions was to invite severe punishment, even death.

Palau T h e student of Palau society is faced with difficulties and complexities. From a precontact population of about 2 0 , 0 0 0 the numbers had plummeted to 3 , 0 0 0 - 4 , 0 0 0 by the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century, when the first observations by ethnographically sophisticated visitors were made. It was not until the 1 9 3 0 s , and again after World War II, that professional anthropologists carried out intensive field studies there. 2 6 By that time the Palauans had adapted, in some respects very successfully, to four colonial regimes—Spanish, German, Japanese, and American—all of which differed in their policies and their practices. While some features of the traditional culture remained relatively unchanged (e.g., the sexual division of labor in subsistence, whereby females did most of the gardening and males all of the fishing except for the collection of mollusks, etc.), many other features of traditional social structure were not only altered but forgotten. T h e islands of the archipelago extend in a northeast to southwest direction for a distance of about 1 2 5 miles and contain a land area of some 1 8 8 square miles. T h e northernmost, Kayangel, is a small atoll; the

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others are high islands of which the largest by far is Babeldaob, containing some 153 square miles of land and rising to elevations of about 700 feet. The staple crops were taro (Colocasia), giant swamp taro (Cyrtosperma), yams, manioc, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, and coconuts; and the reefs and extensive lagoons abound with marine life. Evidently the amounts of time required for food production were small enough, at least for males, to permit them to devote much of their energy to the popular pursuit of material wealth and political power, for their kin units as well as for themselves. Although distributed over a large area and wide range of habitats, Palau's people constituted a single society, whose social institutions were quite uniform. In fact, the whole populace was organized into two political confederations whose rivalry, including much lethal warfare, never ceased. Early accounts of Palau households describe the main building of most of them as large and well constructed, and the personnel as consisting of extended families, which were mostly patrifocal as the result of fairly consistent conformance to the rule of virilocal marital residence. Households were the basic social units for food production and consumption, but in this emphatically age-graded society every youth slept regularly in one of his community's clubhouses until his marriage, as occasionally some married men also did. The population sizes and physical layouts of traditional Palau communities were not systematically recorded by the early European visitors, but early drawings of them along with other kinds of evidence suggest that they were fairly compact—that is, nucleated—and that they varied widely in population size. All or most of them were bisected by a road, or stream, or other boundary—into "right" and "left" "sides," and on each side were three clubhouses and the land and dwellings identified with several descent units. Palaun society was divided into a large number of individually named, exogamous, quasitotemic descent units—clans. These were in turn subdivided into named lineages: each was a landowning corporation and was evidently localized within a single community. Some writers refer to "clan-owned land," but whether that was meant to be taken literally, or referred to lands owned by the larger units' lineage subdivisions, is not clear. (Nor is it clear to me whether each clan was similarly localized; elsewhere in the Caroline Islands the analogous units were not localized in that way.) The question of membership in Palau's clans is complicated in two ways. In the first place, while most persons belonged to the lineage of their mothers it occasionally happened that a person (more often a male) became affiliated with the lineage of his father instead (e.g., if needed to occupy a vacant leadership position in the latter). In view of the fact that

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in such cases the father's lineage was itself a matrilineage, the principle of matrilineal descent may have been bent on occasion but nevertheless continued to prevail over the long run. (In other words, the practice of affiliating with a father's lineage did not occur continuously enough to result in the formation of patrilineages.) The second complication in Palau's descent-unit composition arose out of the practice, which took place now and then, of two previously separate clans joining together when, for example, the membership of one of them became so small that they could no longer carry out their obligations in their community's political or ceremonial affairs. When that occurred, however, no great mental effort was required for the principals to "recall" some appropriate ancestral connection in order to legitimize the union. So, despite these aberrations we may, I think, label such units matriclans. Within each matriclan its lineages were ranked mainly, it seems, on the basis of the birth-order and/or generational seniority of their respective eponyms; but again, the published evidence on this point is not altogether clear. In some clans its lineages were also grouped into two units (i.e., subclans), each with its own leader and treasure (of native money), and each acting somewhat autonomously, and even competitively, in matters having to do with, say, overall clan leadership. In addition, the clans of each village were ranked one with the other and distributed correspondingly by village "side." On one "side" were the clans ranked first, third, fifth, and seventh; on the other those ranked second, fourth, sixth, and so on. This ranking culminated in the village council, the body that governed the village (which in many respects was the society's basic political unit). In the large and handsome houses in which these councils convened there were reserved sitting places for heads of each of the village's clans. Those whose clan ranking was odd numbered sat on the "front" side; those with even numbered ranking, on the "back" side. In terms of authority it seems clear that the voice of the first-ranked clan representative was most decisive, and that of the second-ranked one next. It is also stated that these two, together with numbers three and four, were the principal voices of authority—the "four parts" of the village—however many other clans the village may have contained. Several aspects of the above arrangement require elucidation: first, how a person came to be head of a clan. Each of Palau's lineages had both a male and female merreder, or head. The persons occupying those offices were usually the oldest members, male and female, having most direct matrilineal connections with the lineage's eponymous ancestress. And the male and female heads of a clan's highest-ranking lineage were ipso facto heads of the whole clan. It was a clan's male head who sat in the village council, but as we shall see there was a corresponding village body for female clan heads as well. The second matter requiring elucidation is, how did a village's clans

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come to be ranked as they were. One reason, given by the Palauans themselves, was priority of settlement. As in many other Oceanian societies in which this explanation was given to account for differences in social ranking, it could well have been historically accurate, or it might have been a favored means of rationalizing and legitimizing what had always been or what had come to be by other means. Another possible explanation for some intravillage clan ranking may have been the victory of one over the other in physical fighting, due, for example, to quarrels over land boundaries. A weightier explanation, however, lies in the size of a clan's membership and in its wealth in native money. The relative number of its able-bodied members served to define a clan's ranking in a number of ways: in producing food for clan purposes, in fighting strength, in vocal support for its heads vis-a-vis others, to name a few. In the case of females, especially, they served to bring money wealth to their clanmates through both bride-price and prostitution (see chapter 13, and below). But women were not the only source of, or drain on, a clan's wealth; in fact, the large part played by wealth in general, and by money in particular, in Palauan life was matched in no other societies of Micronesia. The "native" money used in Palau was in fact not native to Palau itself (Force 1959; Ritzenthaler 1954). It consisted of various kinds of polychrome glass beads similar to those found throughout Malaysia (Borneo, Sumatra, Cebu, etc.) in association with twelfth- through sixteenth-century porcelains, and which were probably of Chinese or mainland Southeast Asian origin. How they got to Palau is not known, but they were an established feature of exchange when Europeans first arrived there. Palauans required money for many purposes, including the following (based on Force and Force 1972,1981): status symbol: money served as a direct, visible symbol of high status and was displayed as such. marriage: payments to one's wife's consanguines, including an initial bride-price and periodic payments to them throughout the marriage; payments to one's wife for resumption of sexual relations after birth of first child; payment for ceremony to honor one's wife; payment to one's wife and her consanguines in case of divorce; payment by a deceased man's consanguines to his widow and her consanguines; and other payments. birth: payments to a diviner to discern sex and future of expected child; payment to celebrate birth and to "present" child's mother to community. fines: in addition to the monies a person was required to pay for various kinds of interpersonal "injuries" (e.g., for committing adultery), a community's leaders levied fines for violation of a variety of "public" rules. In connection with the latter, it has been reported that an

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individual could atone for almost any behavioral aberration—if he could afford a fine. services:27 payments to spirits (via priests) in anticipation of and in reward for success in growing food, catching fish, waging war, curing afflictions, and so forth; payments to specialists for building houses, manufacturing canoes; payments to women and their consanguines and village leaders for extramarital sex. war consequence: the losers in intervillage wars were required to pay indemnities to the winners—in fact, powerful villages sometimes obtained such payments by merely threatening attack; a defeated village could obtain sanctuary in another one by payment for protection and material aid; bodies of warriors killed in warfare could be ransomed for money, and similar transactions. validation of office taking: when a new clan head assumed the office of head chief of a village council he was required to pay a large sum to the council's next-ranking chief; and so on down the line. ceremonial exchange: as in many other Oceanian societies, ambitious individuals, backed by their supporters, vied with one another for prestige and political power by giving sumptuous feasts, for which money itself was always required. Many types of social units engaged in such exchanges—households, lineages, subclans, clans, clubs (see below), village "sides," whole villages. In addition to there having been a need for money for purchases and exchanges of various specific kinds, social merit was attached to exchanging per se: Palauans speak metaphorically o f a person w h o does not engage in exchange as having "crippled hands," [and as such] was not esteemed in the community. . . . [At burials] as the body of a deceased male was being lowered into the grave, a eulogy was usually delivered. An o r a t o r would speak of the various exchange practices that the man had engaged in during his life, . . . pointing t o them as evidence of virtue. The deceased was able to begin his journey t o the afterlife properly because of his participation in exchange practices. By engaging in them he had used the money and followed the customs given by the gods. (Force and Force 1 9 8 1 : 7 8 )

Money was evidently not needed for ordinary subsistence purposes. However for many social purposes, such as marriage, at least some money was essential, and for persons wishing to achieve or maintain high social status, it was indispensable. Also, the supply of money was very limited, and constant; none was "minted" locally, and for a long time in the past little or none had reached Palau from elsewhere. Moreover, what there was of it came in time to be concentrated within a small percentage

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of the populace, mainly in the highest-ranking clans. One can only speculate about how that came to be in particular cases, but it is quite clear h o w some of the wealthier ones acted to keep it that w a y — n o t only by waging successful wars or by "renting" out to other villages the sexual services of some of its young w o m e n , but by local measures as well. Through the manipulation of native currency a lower-ranking [clan] could increase its wealth and succeed in upward mobility, but ordinarily such mobility was restricted in degree; for example, if the members of an upper-ranking and wealthy keblil ['clan'] became aware of the fact that a lower-ranking keblil possessed a large and valuable piece of Palauan money, they would make plans to secure it. Perhaps they would contrive a situation in which they could levy a fine and take the money. Frequently they would instruct one of their female [clan] members to marry into the [clan] which possessed the money. They would then bargain for the specific piece in the transactions which required the groom's kin to make money payments to the family of the bride. Such tactics made it very difficult for a low-ranking [clan] to amass sufficient wealth to raise itself in the [clan] hierarchy. (Force 1960: 51) Students of Palau have described the relations between the two "sides" of a village as having been "competitive" and "dynamic"—this having been especially true of relations between a village's two highest-ranking clans, wherein the number two clan characteristically sought to wrest council, and hence village, chieftainship from the number one. Ethnographies do not report h o w often such changes took place, or how they were actually accomplished, but they agree that competition of this kind was a prominent feature of Palauan political life. Mention w a s m a d e earlier of there having been female counterparts of the male heads of lineages and clans. There w a s in fact in each village an official "council of women," which consisted of the female heads of the village's clans; moreover, those women were ranked in exactly the same w a y as their male counterparts. They had no council house of their o w n , but their voices as a group and individually were influential in village affairs. In addition, when a clan's male head w a s not available to attend council meetings his female counterpart substituted for him. And there were cases in which females occupied permanent positions in a village's main council. Mention has also been made of village clubs (chelde bechel); each village contained twelve of them, six for each sex. Only male clubs had clubhouses—three on each of the village's "sides." Recent ethnographies describe the organization of male and female clubs as having been "identical," but they focus on the male ones, which perforce I shall also do. T h e three (male) clubs on each "side" of a village were similarly agegraded in membership—one for "youths," one for the "middle-aged," and one for the "old." At adolescence a boy usually joined the one housed in

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Figure 1 8 . 8 . Palau, wooden table-bowl inlaid with shell for offerings. British Museum the club building designated for "youths," 28 and as he and his age-mates progressed in age they moved as a group to the club building designated for the "middle-aged," and so on. The moves occured when men reached an age that they themselves considered too old to carry out the duties of membership, and they retired as a group and vacated their clubhouse for the next-younger group. Until such retirement every youth and adult male in a village belonged to one or another of its clubs, but since membership into specific ones was by invitation it happened now and then that, say, a young lad was invited to affiliate with a club of "middle-age" (e.g., in order to reinforce its depleted membership). In addition, in some cases a member of one club transferred to another older (or younger) one for some reason or another, but usually to one of the same village "side." While a member was, ideally, supposed to remain thereafter on the same "side" as his initial club, it was not essential that that "side" be the same in which his clan was affiliated. In another respect, however, clan and club did overlap: the head of the village's highest-ranking clan (who was ex-officio village chief) was also head of one of the village's "old" clubs, and the heads of the village's other five clubs were clanmates of his. (Correspondingly, the second-ranking member of each club was a member of the village's second-ranking clan.) Women's clubs were organized in the same way as men's, but differed from them in having had no clubhouses, and in the kinds of activities they engaged in. Those of the men, for example, provided work groups, war parties, and village policemen; those of women prepared food for the men's work groups, kept the village's paths cleaned, and so on. Those

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tasks done (presumably at the behest of the village council) were for the benefit of the village as a whole. Men spent much time in their clubhouses, which were solidly constructed and elaborately decorated buildings; and most clubhouses were provided with female attendants, usually from other villages, for the sexT ual enjoyment of club members. In some cases the attendants were war captives; in others they were contractually "leased"—the payments for them having gone both to their parents and to their natal village chiefs. In still other cases a women's club of one village—presumably one of its "young" ones—would lease its members' sexual services to the men's clubs of another village, partly for their own pleasure and partly for pay (which was divided between their village's treasury and their own club treasury). Clearly, Palau's clubs were very important units, both in the functioning of their villages, as political entities, and as foci of interest and energy in their members' individual lives. Expulsion from one's club (e.g., for lack of cooperation or for breaking one of its rules) was tantamount to expulsion from the village itself. The bonds of friendship among clubmates were very firm, and pride in membership and commitment to club objectives equally so, to the extent (it was reported) that they sometimes overrode loyalties based on kinship. It was also reported that a village's clubs often "competed" with each other, but in what ways is not explicitly described. However, despite that competition, and the competitions among a village's lineages, and other divisions (which culminated in rivalry between its two "sides" and their respective highest-ranking clans), Palau's villages remained the society's most important units for collective political action, as I will now describe. As we have noted, villages varied widely in population, and in Palauan society political power was highly correlated with the ability to provide labor. In the course of time there evolved throughout Palau society several named districts,29 each consisting of a number of smaller, less powerful villages grouped around a larger, dominant one. It is not clear how such groupings originated, although war or threat of war was probably one important factor; nor is it clear how long they endured. There were fourteen of them during the early colonial period, all seemingly stable, but in view of the Palauans' penchant for political rivalry—fueled by invariable disparities in demography and in quality of leadership—the sizes and numbers of such aggregates cannot have been "permanent." Details are also lacking about the inner workings of these districts, for example, about the transactions that took place between a dominant village and its satellites—although we can infer that they usually fought together in wider wars. Finally, Palau's districts were grouped into two rival archipelago-wide alliances, which were divided by a boundary running northwest to south-

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east through the middle of the largest island. The northern one was called Bab el Daob ('up-ocean'), the southern You el Daob ('downocean'), and the two together 'other-heaven and other-heaven.' Again, details are lacking concerning the kinds of interaction that took place among the several districts of each alliance, except that they sometimes fought together against the opposite alliance. At the time of European contact the northern one contained six districts, the southern one eight, and each alliance was centered on one or two "capital" villages much larger and more powerful than the rest. We are informed however that districts near the alliance boundary sometimes shifted their allegiance to the other side. The principle of oppositional dualism characteristic of Palau's overall political structure (and of so many other aspects of the society) stands in interesting contrast to the Yapese commitment to the maintenence of political stability and equilibrium by means of a tripartite structure—the necessity of balancing "a cooking pot on three support stones." Marianas The Chamorro, the name that has been given to the native peoples of the Mariana Archipelago, received their first contact with Europeans in 1521, when Magellan's expedition arrived there (and among other actions, burned forty houses and killed seven persons in an effort to recover a stolen skiff). More continuous contact with Europeans commenced in 1668 with the establishment of a Spanish Jesuit mission and its protective military force. After three decades of introduced diseases, two powerful typhoons, and losses in fights against the Spaniards, the precontact native population of about 50,000 (?) had been reduced to fewer than 4,000; since then even that remnant has been so thoroughly intermixed with outsiders—Spaniards, Filipinos, Japanese, Americans—that genetically "pure" Chamorros have long ceased to exist. Accompanying the physical hybridization has been a cultural one, and, although some of the modern Chamorro have been perceived as retaining some personality traits of their indigenous ancestors, 30 the institutional forms of the ancestral culture have largely vanished, so that attempts to reconstruct the precontact social structure have had to be pieced together from fragmentary records of the earliest missionaries and visitors, with some help from archaeological evidence. 31 The total land area of the five southern Mariana Islands, where most of the Chamorro lived, is 337 square miles. This would imply a preEuropean population density of about 150 persons per square mile—a highly favorable human-land ratio compared with most other parts of Micronesia, and especially so in view of the Mariana's high-island topog-

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raphy and the fertility of much of the land. On that land the Chamorro produced aroids, yams, breadfruit, bananas, coconuts, sugar cane, and rice (the only place in pre-European Oceania where it was grown). No pigs, dogs, or chickens were present until late in precontact times, and possibly not even then, but the sea and reefs provided plenty of marine foods. In contrast to practices in Palau and Yap, men did most of the gardening as well as the deep-water fishing. Early visitors were impressed with the Chamorros' outrigger canoes, some of which had sails and could move very fast. On the larger islands several communities were located inland, but most of them were near the shore. They varied widely in population, from about 50 to 600 and more; both archaeological remains and eyewitness accounts indicate that at least some of the settlements were nucleated in layout. The most impressive house remains are in the form of latte, stone foundation columns; some of the buildings they supported are likely to have been the dwellings of high-status families (the society having been class stratified). The remains of most dwellings (i.e., those not built on stone-column foundations) have not survived, but the large sizes of many of the latte-based ones indicates that at least some of the dwellings were occupied by extended families.32 It is well established that the Chamorros' descent units were matrilineal, but we cannot infer from this that their marital residence pattern was ipso facto uxorilocal. Within the Chamorros' matrilineal descent units they recognized both clans and lineages, but it is not known what, if any, units of intermediate span and depth may have been recognized. Also, while it is likely that land ownership was in some way or other associated with these units— either lineages or clans, or both—the nature of the relationship is not known. As for the internal structure of the descent units, some evidence points to leadership and privilege having been allocated according to a combination of seniority in terms of generations and birth-order in terms of siblings—a pattern for which other Micronesian societies provide many parallels. Turning now to more specifically territorial and political organization, it was the judgment of Laura Thompson, who combed the accounts of the earliest European visitors, that the district, composed of one or more neighboring villages, was the largest autonomous unit, and that each of the larger islands contained more than one of these. Further, she stated: "There was a strong solidarity within the district and considerable rivalry between certain districts, the leaders of which vied with one another for power and prestige. This rivalry was expressed in warfare and ceremonial exchange, both of which were apparently highly developed . . ." (Thompson 1945: 13). We can infer from this passage the presence of some type of supradistrict hierarchy, both in terms of prestige and of

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political hegemony, but what that was is not known. 3 3 (As we have seen in our accounts of other Micronesian societies, the forms of those hierarchies were not all the same.) Writing about the district chief, called maga-lahe ('leader', 'firstborn'), Thompson identified him as having been the "highest-ranking male relative within the clan," and described succession to the office as having been "through younger brothers, male parallel cousins, and nephews by order of seniority" (ibid. 1 2 - 1 3 ) . If the latter two were in fact matrilineally related to the former chief, then we have here a Palau-like situation, where village chieftainship remained within one clan. Some ambiguity also beclouds the same writer's description of a chiefs role: " T h e power of the maga-lahe was, to a considerable extent, based on inherited wealth. H e apparently controlled much, if not all, of the district lands and fishing grounds, as well as having certain wealth-getting prerogatives, such as the manufacture of shell 'money' and of sailing canoes" (ibid.). As the reader will by now have concluded, after being introduced to a number of Oceanian societies, such phrases as "power being based on inherited wealth" and "control over land" admit to too many different interpretations to indicate what they really mean. And finally, while early writers on the Chamorro drew attention to their social classes—class stratification was a phenomenon that all Europeans were familiar with—the lineaments of the institution remain obscure. Most agree upon there having been three such classes: matua or chamorri ("highest-ranking nobles or chiefs"); atchaot ("demi-nobles," "middle class"), and mangatchang ("lowest class," "plebeians"). M o s t also agreed that the matua did not usually marry down, and mangatchang could not marry up, but where this left the atchaot is not explained. A similar lack of clarity applies to the community roles of the different classes. The matua, we are informed, ". . . were highly privileged and controlled the wealth and exchange in the islands. They were the warriors, sailors, fishermen, professional canoe builders, and traders. . . " (ibid. 1 3 - 1 4 ) . Conversely, the mangatchang could not become warriors, sailors, or canoe builders, and their fishing was restricted to "spearing river eels with wooden-tipped spears" (ibid. 13). And, needless to say, the lowly mangatchang was required to observe rigid rules of conduct vis-a-vis a matua, including crouching and headlowering. As for the mystery-shrouded atchaot, they "assisted the matua in what the latter did." And while a mangatchang could not possibly rise above his class, a matua found guilty of "certain offenses" could be exiled or deprived of his property and reduced to atchaot level. All or most of the above resembles in some ways what is known about class-based behavior in many other societies of Micronesia (and of Polynesia). But the early writers on Chamorro society failed to throw light on another, structurally more important, aspect of its class institu-

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tions, namely: Were the matua of any district recruited from the senior lineages of all or most of the locally-based matriclans, or from only, or mainly, one of them? Unable to shed further light on the class stratification of this last Micronesian society to be considered in our survey, we proceed next to an examination of social relations in Melanesia, where, according to a widespread stereotype, the phenomenon of class stratification did not occur.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Melanesia

the geographic region of Melanesia there were some eleven hundred languages, and hence about as many distinct societies. The large number of these and their heterogeneity in social institutions makes it impracticable to describe the latter in the ways employed for characterizing those of Australia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. That is to say, it would not be true to the facts to select and summarize two or three—or even a dozen—of the societies of Melanesia as having typified all of the others with respect to their more important social institutions.1 Instead, I have selected a few social institutions and shall describe and compare them topically, beginning with kinship, wherein the main focus will be on descent units. WITHIN

Kinship Kinship, as defined in this book, refers to relationships believed by a people to have derived from reproduction—that is, to filiation, siblingship, and descent, and to collateral extensions of these relationships. Every Melanesian society that I know of had one or more conceptual categories corresponding in some respects to what is here called kinship, but, needless to say, what were included in those categories differed from society to society. In one important respect, however, all but a few were committed to the belief that both a cohabiting woman and man contributed to the reproduction of a child—although ideas about the nature of those contributions differed widely (see chapter 13), as did the relative social weights attached to them. (The best known Melanesian exception to this belief was the Trobriands, where the sex partner of a child's mother was thought to have had little to do with its conception, although a great deal to do with its nurturance.) Leaving aside for the moment the Trobrianders' somewhat exceptional belief, in most other Melanesian societies sampled, the principal contri-

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Figure 1 9 . 1 . Middle Sepik area, New Guinea, bark painting bution of the father consisted of something in his semen, and of the mother something in her "blood" (plus, of course her indispensable womb); but, as just noted, the meanings and social weights attached to these components varied. Thus, in some societies the semen received from a father—and through him from bis father, and so on—was held to be the basis of and rationale for membership in the society's most important social units, whereas in others no weight at all was attached to it beyond acknowledgment of its role in quickening the mother's blood. As we noted in chapter 13, in most Oceanian belief systems exogenous spirits also played a part in human reproduction—either as serving merely to vivify the fetus or, at the other extreme, to become its most socially important attribute (as, for example, in the Trobriands, where a fetus was believed to be the rejuvenation of an ancestral spirit, usually a matrilineal one, which entered a woman through her head and worked its way down into her womb). Whatever role was attributed to a person's mother or father (or moth-

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er's spouse) in a person's reproduction, in all of Melanesia's societies known to me, some social importance was attached to relationships with both mother and father (or mother's spouse), as well as to some relationships traced through each of them (always including relationships with their siblings and parents and, of course, their other offspring). With enough ingenuity and time it might be possible to devise a scale for weighing and comparing the "social importance" of these two sets of relationships—the one with and through the mother, the other with and through the father. Such a scale would with good reason include factors such as place of marital residence, rules of inheritance and succession, responsibility for protection and vengeance, and more. However, I must leave such a project to more patient and systematic scholars and turn to the more tangible phenomena of descent units. Descent units (i.e., a type of social unit—either an interactive group or a conceptualized category—formed exclusively, or mainly, through descent) were present in most of Melanesia's societies, and in many of them they were the most important collective-action and property-owning units. In addition, most of them had religious functions, through their affiliations with ancestral and other spirits. And in most instances, among the members themselves there were some rights and obligations that applied generally to all of them as a unit, whatever else their particular dyadic kinship relationships may have entailed. Melanesia's descent units differed widely from society to society in several structural respects, the most important of which were span, genealogical depth, degree of segmentation, and sex of successive genealogical links. They differed also, in some cases widely, in the degree to which practice adhered to ideal with respect to membership. But rather than consider each of those variables separately for the whole of the region, let us focus mainly on one of them and examine the other variables within that context. The most salient structural feature of Melanesia's descent units had to do with the sex of the links in their genealogical "chains." In some societies the units were ambilineal—that is, a person could become a member of one or more of the descent units of either or both of his or her parents. In most societies of the region, however, the only, or principal, kind of descent units present were unilineal—a person became a member of the descent unit of either his mother or father, but not of both. In addition, there were some societies in the region that were double unilineal, having contained both matrilineal and patrilineal descent units (a person was a member of a matrilineal unit through his mother and a patrilineal one through his father, as, it will be recalled, was the case on Yap). Finally, there were a few societies in this region containing descent units so unusual that they will be placed under that useful label of "miscellaneous," and described separately at the end of this section.

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We begin this survey with a closer look at some of the region's societies wherein the most important descent units were matrilineal. Matrilineal Descent Units Societies in which the principal types of descent units were matrilineal were located in New Ireland, New Britain, the northern Solomons, Guadalcanal, New Hebrides, Massim, and along some stretches of New Guinea coasts. Beyond sharing that one common feature, however, they differed widely in the morphology and functions of those units: so widely, in fact, that no one, or two, or five, or six of them can be presented as typifying the rest. Nevertheless, I shall begin this section with comprehensive descriptions of two of them, to serve as the basis for comparison with some salient differences found among the others. The Nagovisi are a Papuan-speaking people living on the plains and foothills of southwest Bougainville. In the 1920s, just prior to intensive European contact, they numbered about 2,000. During that era the Nagovisi resided in clusters of hamlets each of which contained from two

Figure 19.2. Bougainville, wood carving. Museum für Völkerkunde, Basle

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to five households. Taro was their principal food crop; they raised pigs mainly for feasts, and fished, hunted, and collected as well. Most households were composed of nuclear families at some stage of their development, from newlywed couples to an elderly relict. While households were the principal units for the production, pooling, preparation, and consumption of food, most other activities of the Nagovisi were carried out within the contexts of their matrilineal descent units. 2 Before discussing the morphology of these, however, it will be useful to look at some of the beliefs and practices that helped to shape them. First, in the domain of subsistence, even with their practice of long-fallow gardening there was more than enough land for the Nagovisi to satisfy their food requirements and their wishes for growing additional pigs for prestige and influence-gaining exchanges. The superfluity of land had the additional advantage of permitting groups to shift their residences around the area (i.e., to escape conflict, etc.), and of allowing migrants from neighboring (and somewhat more densely populated) societies to move in. Second, their communities as such lacked offices of ascribed chieftainship. Each descent unit of narrow span had its head, filled mainly by ascription, but influence over a whole community was achievable by males or females and mainly through generosity (hence wealth) and forceful character. A third set of circumstances that helped to shape Nagovisi descent units had to do with marriage, namely: they were exogamous; there was a stated preference for marriage with a member of one's father's descent unit, and with someone living nearby; post-marital residence was most usually uxorilocal; and even when it was virilocal the husband was expected to devote most or all of his productive energies to the physical well-being of his wife and offspring and to their close matrilateral kin; in contrast to marriage transactions in most other societies in Melanesia, the principal one here was not bride-price but dowry—a payment, it was explained, for the man's labor (which was no longer available to his natal family and descent-unit mates). A fourth array of practices relevant to Nagovisi descent-unit morphology concerned property, of which there were three principal kinds: Land. Uncontested demand-rights in land without limits of time were in the hands of women, and were inherited by those women's daughters —usually but not invariably by an eldest daughter. In the event there were no daughters, such rights were transferred to some other close

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matrilateral kinswoman of the deceased, and so on, within the span of matrilineal kinship, which both J . Nash and D. Mitchell labeled a "clan," and which will be discussed later on. In sharp contrast, men used already claimed land only by permission, say, of mother or wife; even if a man had cleared previously unclaimed land (e.g., for a garden or housesite), upon his death it passed automatically to his daughters. Marewa. This label was applied to useful trees already owned such as sago, coconut, breadfruit, areca (betel nut), and almond. Whoever planted one or discovered a previously unowned one could use its products for the rest of his life, but thereafter ownership passed to the women on whose land it grew. Shell-bead valuables. These were of two functional types, wolupia and viasi. The former were corporately owned descent-unit heirlooms, used by members on ritual or festive occasions and transferred (upon extinction of the owning unit) only to a matrilineally related unit. Viasi were owned both by descent units and individually and were used in barter and in ceremonial exchanges of many kinds—for example, for dowry, for funeral feasts. Men as well as women could and did amass viasi but even that which a man acquired separately was at the disposal of his wife (or before marriage, of his mother). Moreover the viasi of both parents were inherited by their daughters in order of seniority. A fifth set of practices that had to do with Nagovisi descent units was in the domain of ritual, which focused mainly on an individual's life cycle (e.g., biological birth, naming, social birth, first visit to garden, marriage, death) and which differentiated only episodically between males and females. For example, only boys were formally introduced into the clubhouses, where mainly—but not only—males congregated; only females underwent puberty (i.e. first menstruation) rites, there having been no analogous rites for boys. This underplaying of male-female opposition (in contrast to its emphasis in so many other Melanesian societies) might perhaps be seen as related to the social importance given to females in other contexts, but of more direct relevance to our present discussion is the prominent part that descent units played in those rites—for example, the incantations for most rites were descent-unit properties, the officiants in most of them did so as descent-unit officials, the audiences were mainly members of the subjects' descent units, and some of them took place at descent-unit shrines. And now for a look at the descent units themselves. Except perhaps in societies undergoing rapid depopulation it is characteristic of some of their descent units to proliferate and segment. In most cases the de facto segmentation—the disjunction among members in terms of interests and activities—is a gradual and continuous process. De jure, however, such segmentation usually occurs discontinuously, in

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socially institutionalized stages. Such was the case in Nagovisi, where three main "levels" of descent-unit span were institutionalized: moiety, clan, and lineage. A person became a member of his (or her) mother's lineage (hence clan and moiety) at birth and that affiliation could not be changed. Moieties, the descent units of widest span, were exogamous and totemic, but in neither of their moieties did their members as a whole own property in common or engage in collective activities. N o lands, not even sacred places, were identified with either of the moieties, and the members and lands of their respective segments were scattered throughout the whole Nagovisi area. Although there was a voiced ideal calling for amity among moiety mates, the latter were frequently enemies if they did not reside nearby. On the other hand, the rule against moiety mates marrying one another, or even engaging in sex together, was strictly enforced, violators having been killed by other members of their moiety. There was no term in the Nagovisi language for what is here labeled a "moiety," however, all the members of one were called Hornbills, those of the other Eagles. Hornbills were supposed to refrain from eating or touching birds of that species under threat of sickness, as was the case with Eagles and their avian counterparts, but the ethnographies contain no further explanation for the relationship. (In the case of children the taboo extended to both species of birds, "because they were in between both parents") In addition, each moiety was associated with a different female spirit and her offspring: Eagles with Makonai and her snake progeny Paramorung (a boa); Hornbills with Poreu and her progeny Giant Tree Rat, Eel, and Vine. H o w the people called Eagles originally came to be associated with Makonai, and the Hornbills with Poreu, is not explained; they appear not to have been ancestresses—moiety founders —in a genealogical sense. And although their assistance seems to have been solicited by means of birth and maturation rites (and their disfavor courted by neglect of those rites), they were not otherwise actively altruistic, that is, "motherly," toward their human associates; in fact, one of them was depicted as gratuitously malicious. Most relations between humans and their other moiety totems involved prohibitions of some kind. In addition, Hornbills were totemically related with Kingfishes (and hence all kingfishes), and Eagles with Crocodiles and Yellow-throated White-eyes. A common explanation for such relations was that peoples from elsewhere possessing those totems had immigrated into Nagovisi territory and had, for one reason or another, "become" Eagles, or Hornbills, after arriving there. Societies divided into two exogamous unilineal descent units (moieties) were found elsewhere in Melanesia, and several theories for such structures have been put forward. The Nagovisi case is especially inter-

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esting because in the neighboring societies of Bougainville (which resembled Nagovisi in many other cultural respects) the analogous types of descent units numbered more than two. It would require too long a detour to list and evaluate such theories in the abstract, but the Nagovisi's ethnographer, Jill Nash, has offered the persuasive suggestion that, once the moiety structure had become established among them, they were unable to "accommodate more than two inter-marrying groups" (1972), with the consequence that immigrants from the neighboring societies were simply assimilated into the local two-unit system. Each of Nagovisi's moieties consisted of a number of clans. The latter were individually named; they had no totems of their own (none in addition to those shared with other moiety mates) but they were distinct landowning corporations, in two respects. First, each clan held residual rights in the lands of all its subdivisions, which tended to be contiguous; when all the members of a clan subdivision (lineage) died out its lands passed into the hands of another lineage of that clan. Second, each clan held undivided rights in a number of shrines (e.g., some extraordinary stone boulder, a deep river-pool), which were usually located on clan land and at which some maturation rites for clan members were performed. Each clan had its own repertoire of such rites, which were conducted by certain of its older female members. Finally each clan was subdivided into lineages, the vernacular term for which was wetetenamo ('their-two-one-maternal-grandmother'). Members of a lineage traced matrilineal descent from an ancestress usually about four generations above the oldest living generation. Moreover, each lineage had a distinctive name, usually that of the residence site of its founder. The ethnographies do not describe how lineages were "founded" (the last segmentation at this level having taken place decades prior to the field research); it is plausible to suggest that the process became "formalized" when others came to acknowledge a lineage's exclusively uncontested use-rights in its members' portions of their clans' land. (A lineage often permitted non-members to use such land, but only for a time, and eventually became owner of any food-bearing trees planted on it by the temporary users.) Ideally, each clan owned a hoard of heirloom, shell valuables (wolupia —span-length strings of polished marine-shell disc beads), but in larger clans some of the heirlooms were held by members of their respective lineage segments. The head of each lineage was in most cases its eldest nonsenile female member, called tu'meli ('firstborn'). It was this woman who served as trustee of the lineage's heirlooms, who had final say over distribution of use-rights of lineage land, and who in general made the final decision regarding use of lineage valuables and marriage of younger lineage members.

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In some cases, however, the authority of a firstborn was superceded by that of a kaskelo, a more junior but richer and more aggressive woman— a momiako (the label which was applied to both men and women who had achieved wealth and prestige through interpersonal and managerial skills). Lineages were ranked within each clan: both in terms of seniority and of wealth and power. The lineage tracing its descent from the eldest daughter of the clans' legendary common ancestress was also labeled 'firstborn', and its members were owed deference from members of the junior lineage branches, called vidaruma (i.e., 'descendants of younger sister[s]'). In some cases a clan's firstborn lineage was also its momiako one (richest, most powerful); however, even a junior lineage could become momiako through success in raising pigs, acquiring shell money, giving feasts, and waging war. The lowest status among a clan's lineages was reserved for those that were both junior and poor (hence unable to give feasts or finance their own defense). These were called nangkitau ('chattels'?); it was reported that their members could be killed with impunity by other clanmates and that their children were sometimes bartered to outsiders for axes and other objects. In pre-European times, when the Nagovisi were less numerous, their lineages were much smaller than they were when Nash and Mitchell were there. During the earlier era the core of nearly every hamlet settlement consisted of the female members of a single lineage, who along with their husbands and unmarried sons cooperated closely in gardening, pig raising, and other economic and social activities. As described above, most Nagovisi land was identified with particular clans, because of their residual rights in all of the tracts in which their component lineages held uncontested usufructuary rights. In fact, those use-rights were exercised by individuals, namely, by the lineages' older women, and were transferred to the latters' daughters—usually the eldest —when the mothers died or became senile. (A woman's own shell money and foodbearing trees were also transferred in this way, but not her pigs, which were eaten at her funeral feast.) Where did men fit into this kinship system composed largely of "official" statuses occupied by females? A male also belonged to a lineage (and a clan and moiety), but what was the nature of that membership? As already stated, in most cases a man moved to his wife's hamlet upon marriage; and after doing so he was expected to devote all or most of his energies to the well-being, physical and social, of a wife and children and to their co-residential lineage mates. Even if a wife moved to her husband's natal home—to his lineage hamlet—the proximity of it to her landholdings made it possible for him to carry out his obligations, that is, to spend most of his labor on them rather than on his own lineage lands (which were gardened by the husbands of his sisters and of other

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female lineage mates). Indeed, after his marriage a man "neither contributes to nor may profit from the assets of his own descent group, be these shell valuables, money, pigs or land" (Nash 1974: 38). He continued to have some voice in the affairs of his lineage mates (e.g., regarding their marriage and the disposition of their lands), and he was expected to assist them in their conflicts with non-members—except when the latter included his wife and children, when he was expected to support them even against his own lineage mates. At his death a man's body was handed over to the women of his own lineage and clan for cremation and other funeral rites, but during his married life he was assimilated into the life of his wife's lineage, where he and the other husbands there constituted a special category labeled the motai. It must not be imagined from the above that the motai were an underprivileged and stigmatized category of "outsiders," as their uxorilocally resident counterparts are said to have been in, say, matrilineal Dobu (chapter 13). On the contrary, they were thoroughly "at home" in their wives' communities. For one thing, the products of their labor there conduced directly and legitimately to the welfare of their own offspring (and not, as in many other matrilineal societies, mainly to their sisters' offspring). Also, their interests and energies were not subjected to the conflicting pulls of conjugal family and lineage (as was the case, e.g., in Truk). And third, they were in most cases, and despite being outsiders, the heads of their respective households. According to the ethnographer: "The Nagovisi believe that the husband must dominate the wife in domestic matters, and that she ought to defer to him. Ordinarily this is the case" (Nash 1974: 64). But, this "does not mean that husbands may mistreat their wives with impunity" (ibid.), for, were he to do so she had the option of separation, thereby depriving him of his children and all the material fruits of his labor, including bearing trees, cleared land and shell valuables—all of the things that men worked for in order to achieve the status of momiako (wealthiness and power) and that as male members they were unable to acquire by exploitation of the resources of their own lineages. As noted earlier, the term momiako also referred to a clan's wealthiest and most powerful lineage, but when applied to individuals— mainly men but occasionally also women—it signified 'community leadership'. Busama society, like Nagovisi, was divided into landowning, exogamous and totemic matrilineal descent units,3 but these differed from those of Nagovisi in several noteworthy ways. The community of Busama contained a population of about 600 persons who resided on a narrow strip of land along the shores of New Guinea's Huon Gulf (Hogbin 1963, which is the main source for the following résumé). According to a fairly plausible tradition, Busama had

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Figure 19.3. Huon Gulf, New Guinea, wood carving. Museum für Völkerkunde, Basle

been established many generations previously by migrants whose original homes were at a place on the Gulfs northern shore some 4 0 miles distant by land. The Busama shared their (Austronesian) language with about 6 , 5 0 0 other people, including nearby communities—some of whom were friends and some foes, the heritage of ancient alliances and feuds. Busama dwellings straggled along the back of the beach singly or in clusters of two to a dozen. In addition there were some fourteen men's clubhouses located about 150 to 2 5 0 feet apart. Most of the dwellings were one-room affairs and housed a married couple and their offspring; those with two rooms contained separate families, the second usually that of a married son or married sister's son. The clusters of dwellings resembled a "duplex" dwelling in that their male household heads were related mainly as father to son, brother to brother, or a man and his sister's son. As in most of Melanesia, Busama's households were the main

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units concerned with subsistence; and here such activities took place within the context of narrow-span matrilineal descent units whose morphology will be the focus of our attention, after a listing of some of the beliefs and practices that shaped them. As in Nagovisi there was more than enough land to provide for the subsistence needs of the Busama, who maintained their dwellings in the community-held shoreside area (where residents could build anywhere they pleased) and commuted to their gardens in the bush area inland. And as in Nagovisi, Busama contained no offices of community-wide chieftainship. Descent units and men's clubs had their heads, and several men were paragons as the result of their technical skills, but that was all. The most relevant features of Busama marriage were the following: descent units were exogamous, but marriage was also prohibited with first cousins, both parallel and cross, on both mother's and father's side; postmarital residence was almost always virilocal, at the residence of either the husband's father or maternal uncle; unlike Nagovisi, but like most other peoples of Melanesia, the principal marriage transaction was bride-price (i.e., to compensate the wife's family for loss of her presence and services). Goods of a consumable nature—for example, pigs and other food— were usually shared among household mates, although personal objects acquired by an individual and not consumed in that way could be bequeathed: a mother's to her daughters, a father's to his sons. In the case of more durable goods however, and especially land, these were owned by descent units. When a Busama man cleared virgin forest for a garden, he could bequeath the site to his sons, but the latter were required to share it with their descent-unit mates, and they were not permitted to bequeath it to their sons. Magic for gardening, fishing, hunting, and curing was individually acquired and passed on, but rites and ritual offices of a community-wide nature—for example, for victory in warfare and safety in overseas trading—were owned by and transmitted within descent units. We turn now to the morphology of this society's descent units. Unlike those of Nagovisi, with their three-level structure (moiety, clan, and lineage), Busama's consisted of numerous matrilineages of fairly narrow span and of depths averaging about five generations.4 Moreover, such units were neither themselves segmented nor segments of units of wider span: Formerly when a lineage became unduly large it seems that some of the members sought out territory that w a s either virtually unoccupied or illdefended, established a settlement there, carved the land into sections, and

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passed them on to their sons, who founded more lineages. Often a migrant maintained contact with the people who had stayed behind, but as he and his heirs no longer made gardens with them, the old land rights lapsed. (Hogbin 1963:23)

F r o m this a n d other i n f o r m a t i o n supplied by H o g b i n the descent units of the B u s a m a differed f r o m those of the Nagovisi in t w o n o t e w o r t h y respects. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t — i n d e e d , the definitive—aspect of lineage m e m b e r s h i p w a s the o w n e r s h i p and active use of l a n d . C o m p a r e d to t h a t , descent ideology (i.e., beliefs a b o u t , a n d high value placed u p o n , c o m m o n ancestry) w a s of little if any i m p o r t a n c e in m a i n t a i n i n g social b o n d s ; in f a c t , there is little evidence in the e t h n o g r a p h y t h a t such ideology prevailed. 5 While m e m b e r s h i p in the lineage l a n d o w n i n g c o r p o r a tions w a s t r a n s m i t t e d t h r o u g h females (that is, after the original male creator of l a n d estates h a d b e q u e a t h e d t h e m to his son[s]), the actual control of such estates w a s exercised by the lineage's male m e m b e r s , w h o looked u p o n their female c o - m e m b e r s as w a r d s . I will n o w c o m p a r e the matrilineal descent-unit systems of Nagovisi a n d B u s a m a w i t h those of some other M e l a n e s i a n societies. Since "whole-system" c o m p a r i s o n s are unfeasible, b o t h because of t h e gaps in i n f o r m a t i o n a n d of the impracticability of weighting the systems' numero u s variables, this one will be piecemeal, each "piece" representing a significant variable of such systems. T h e e x a m p l e s given will aim at revealing ranges of differences r a t h e r t h a n c o m m o n m o d e s . As far as possible the variables will be expressed in w o r d s of degree. Span—the extent to w h i c h the collateral r a n g e of a society's highestlevel unit (i.e., matrilineal descent unit) included the society's total p o p u lation. In this respect Nagovisi a n d Busama represented e x t r e m e s ; each of Nagovisi's widest-span units included a b o u t o n e half of the society's total p o p u l a t i o n , while Busama's p o p u l a t i o n of 6 , 7 0 0 w a s divided into thirty t o f o r t y units. M a n y o t h e r societies resembled Nagovisi in this respect, 6 a n d there m a y have been some others like B u s a m a ; in m o s t of Melanesia's matrilineal societies, however, the widest-span descent units n u m b e r e d s o m e w h e r e between those extremes. T h u s , a m o n g the N a g o visi's n e i g h b o r s , the Siuai, there were six; a m o n g the Lakalai of n o r t h central N e w Britain over sixty; and a m o n g t h e several matrilineal societies of G u a d a l c a n a l one w a s divided i n t o t w o (i.e., moieties), a n o t h e r into t h r e e , a n o t h e r i n t o four, a n d a n o t h e r into five (Hogbin 1 9 6 4 : 16). Several theories—ecological, d e m o g r a p h i c , ideological—might be p r o p o s e d for such differences. A p o p u l a t i o n m o v i n g into an area of scarce a n d widely scattered n a t u r a l resources might be expected to segm e n t into n u m e r o u s a n d largely a u t o n o m o u s units. Or, as w a s suggested

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for Nagovisi, a society deeply committed to the idea of duality might influence all immigrants to adjust to that kind of structure. Satisfying as that kind of speculating may be, however, in the absence of historical documentation most of it is untestable. Another kind of theory that might be proposed about descent-unit span concerns its consequences for intrasocietal conflict. In view of the widespread prevalence of the ideal of amity among descent-unit mates, it would seem to follow, that in a society with moieties a person could count at least half of its members as friends, in contrast to a person in a society with, say, four u/idest-span units, whose "guaranteed" friends numbered only one in four. The flaw in this theory is that the ideal of amity among descent-unit mates seems to have been practiced only in those units of relatively narrow span. Thus, in Nagovisi, while relations among matrilineage mates were normally amicable, and those among clanmates normally peaceful, people living in distant communities were regarded as potential enemies whether or not they were moiety mates. There was, however, one aspect of descent-unit communality that served to mitigate some of the xenophobia so typical among Melanesians, and that was the widespread view that persons having the same descent-unit totem were thereby related, and hence normatively amicable, however geographically remote and culturally alien they happened to be. Thus, if a member of the Siuai Eagle clan happened to be visiting in a far-away society speaking a totally different language—a situation which was unlikely to have occurred before European times—he was assured of hospitality from local Eagle-respecting people, on the assumption that they were related "somehow." 7 Property—the extent to which a society's most important kinds of property were associated with its matrilineal descent units. Many kinds of property—land, religious shrines and rites, heirloom treasures, dances and dance appurtenences, larger-than-average canoes, public buildings, and so forth—were, in one society or another, "owned by" such units. In some societies all of these items, along with others, were held in either undivided or residual ownership by one or another of the segments of such units; in other societies such ownership extended to only two or three items; but in probably all cases if a unit held any property corporately, one of those properties was sure to have been land. Having said that, however, it is necessary to add two provisos. In the first place, the nature of the land title held by a unit depended largely on the unit's span. Thus, in the case of the Nagovisi the exceedingly wide-spanned moieties themselves had no ownership rights in land. While their intermediatelevel clans held residual rights in the lands of the constituent lineages, it was the latter that actually used and controlled the use of land. A similar allocation of rights prevailed in other matrilineal societies of Melanesia, leading to the conclusion that there was a necessary correlation between

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size (i.e., span) of unit and type of rights: a correlation, I suggest, that was influenced heavily by the small scale of Melanesians' food-producing techniques. The second proviso is that, while Melanesia's matrilineal descent units were invariably landowning units, they were not everywhere the only type of landowning unit. Thus, among the Siuai of southern Bougainville, while most land was held undividedly or residually by matrilineages, a son could acquire a portion of his deceased father's matrilineage land by contributing liberally to the latter's mortuary feast. Although the land so acquired was normatively annexed to the estate of the son's own matrilineage, it sometimes happened that the son of that son repeated the practice, and so on, so that such land became credentials for incipient patrilineages (a process that was in part promoted by the widespread practice of patri-virilocal residence). Finally, it is worth noting that, while membership in a matrilineal descent unit was a birthright, it was the practice in some societies to require members to submit to certain conditions in order to obtain full rights in their units' land estates. Thus, among the Trobrianders, a young man was required to make payments (which the ethnographer called "tribute") to his mother's brother before obtaining full use-rights in the latter's portion of their common matrilineage estate (Malinowski 1935: 345). In several societies, a person was obliged to make use of his (or her) unit's estate, or to take active part in the unit's collective activities, in order to be an uncontested shareholder in that estate. Activities—the extent to which a society's matrilineal descent units engaged in that society's most important collectively performed activities ("important" in terms of the time, attention, etc. devoted to them). The activities referred to here are those described in Part 2, namely, food production, public works, feast giving, religious ritual (including passage rites), warfare, external exchange, and such. Needless to say, Melanesian societies differed widely in this respect, but there are some generalizations that can be offered about most of them. First of all, while the natural resources required for producing food were in most matrilineal societies owned by their descent units, the actual work of producing (and the action of consuming) food was in most places carried out by households acting singly, or jointly with other households and not by descent units as such. Also, external exchange was seldom if ever an affair of such units, having been carried out mainly by individuals acting either on their own or as fellow members of community-wide enterprises. In many matrilineal societies some feasts, especially those associated with rites of passage, were sponsored mainly by its descent units,8 but many others, including especially those having to do with political ambitions and cult status, were the works of whole communities.

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The role of matrilineal descent units in physical conflict also varied from society to society and context to context. In all known cases matrilineages were, at least normatively, the units within which members were required to eschew physical violence against one another and to protect or avenge one another against outsiders. Moreover, in many such societies the canon of collective responsibility (often based on belief in shared mystical attributes) also served to identify members with one another to the extent that a harm done by one of them to a non-member could be adequately avenged by the latter (and his fellow members) by harming any members of the malefactor's unit. As we have seen, however, the ideal of such unity in feuding and warfare seems everywhere to have weakened with the relative size of a unit's span, so that (as, e.g., in Nagovisi) few or no constraints were placed on harming a geographically remote moiety mate. In collectively performed religious activity, however, a society's matrilineal descent units were in many cases its principal type of "church." Thus, among most matrilineal societies the myths relating to them were among the most, if not the most, prominent of their cosmogonies, and their tutelary spirits—founding ancestresses, totems, ancestral ghosts— were usually the societies' most powerful and active spirits. Such spirits acted in perhaps most cases more benevolently than malevolently toward their human congregations (e.g., protecting them from enemies, making their crops and children grow, etc.), unless the latter transgressed the units' rules (e.g., committing incest, harming a mate, eating a totem), whereupon they inflicted punishments up to and including death. Marriage—the extent to which descent unit membership controlled choice of spouse. In all of Melanesia's matrilineal societies, their descentunits were normatively exogamous, violations having been considered not only grave social infractions but supernaturally punished sins. Yet those societies differed from one another in the harshness of official sanctions (e.g., from death to minor illness and temporary ostracism) and in the agents of punishment (e.g., either the violator's unit spirits, or his [other] mates, or both). Also, in virtually all reported cases, the harshness of the sanctions varied with the unit's span: the wider the span, the more tempered the penalty, so that in some cases a sexual affair or even marriage between genealogically and geographically distant moiety mates was publicly tolerated. Localization—the extent to which the adult members of a society's matrilineal descent units resided together. Wide variation prevailed in this aspect of descent units, with correspondingly wide differences in their activities, governance, and so on. At one extreme—and extreme it was—was Nagovisi (and perhaps also the New Ireland Lesu), where permanent uxorilocal residence prevailed. At the other extreme was Busama, where patri-virilocality was the preference and in most in-

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stances the practice as well. More common by far than either of these variants was avunco-virilocality—that is a man and his wife residing close to one of his mother's brothers, the person who had most direct authority over him as a (fellow) member, including especially his rights in the unit's land. In some such societies boys made the move to the mother's brother's place early, in others they did so only after marriage. A fourth variant was the one that prevailed among the Dobu, where a married couple resided part of each year in the community of the wife's matrilineage and part in that of the husband; the consequences of this arrangement were described in chapter 13. Still another variant was to be found in Siuai (and perhaps a few other societies), where in the absence of any verbalized rule, a couple's choice of residence depended on several circumstantial factors (e.g., sentimental attachments, perception of economic advantages, the magnetism of a feast-giving leader, etc.) and resulted in a wide range of residential arrangements. In this connection, the attraction exerted by outstanding leaders had pulling power in many Melanesian societies, of widely different structures, and even in some of those where rules of marital residence were explicitly otherwise. Finally, there were some matrilineal societies, with or without explicit marital-residence rules, where some communities were made up of two or more matrilineages whose members had been intermarrying for so long that only minor residential changes accompanied marriage (and where the respective matrilineage estates had become virtually merged). Governance—the extent to which the authority statuses of a society's descent units constituted those of the whole society. Two generalizations may be made about most or all of Melanesia's descent units where authority statuses existed (they were usually absent in those of very wide span, such as Nagovisi's moieties, and were most explicitly defined at the matrilineage level): they were most commonly ascribed by seniority of genealogical level and by birth order; and those involving command were most usually occupied by males (i.e., "matrilineage" does not betoken "matriarchy"!). Nagovisi was somewhat exceptional to the above. In the first place, males there had little or no authority over the affairs of their own units. (Uxorilocal residence was a contributing but not a sufficient cause for this circumstance—on Truk, e.g., men also resided uxorilocally but maintained influential voices in their own descent unit's affairs.) 9 Nagovisi was also exceptional (though less so) in that the ascribed head of each descent unit, the "firstborn" (eldest nonsenile female), was in some cases superceded in authority by a kaskelo, one of its younger, but richer and more aggressive female members. Busama also represents an exception to one of the generalizations, but at the other extreme. There, where marital residence was virilocal and in close proximity to the husband's matrilineage estate, men in general, and

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Figure 19.4. Northern Bougainville, wood carving. Museum für Völkerkunde, Basle

the most senior male in particular, exercised control over those estates, looking upon all their female matrilineage mates as wards. An arrangement closer to the average was exemplified by the Nagovisi's neighbors, the Siuai. There, where married couples lived wherever they pleased, and where even uxorilocal husbands continued to take part in their own lineage affairs, each matrilineage had both a female and a male firstborn head, who shared supervision over matrilineage affairs: the female as priestess (in the conducting of members' transition rites), the male as foreman (over matrilineage work projects), and both together as final decision-makers over most other matrilineage affairs (including marriage of its members and disposition of its heirlooms). Although exceptional in regard to the relative authority of males and females over unit affairs, in another respect Nagovisi exemplified a fairly widespread (but by no means universal) feature of descent-unit structure, namely, the status of seniority having been ascribed not only to individuals within each segment but to whole segments within the encompassing units. As noted earlier, within each Nagovisi clan its lineages were ranked in terms of seniority: the members of a clan's senior lineage were collectively owed deference by other clanmates; and in some cases the head of

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that lineage, its female firstborn, exercised control over the heirlooms of all other lineages making up the clan. Interlineage ranking also prevailed in the matrilineal societies of Buka Island and in contiguous parts of northern Bougainville. Despite that area's division into four distinct languages (of the Petats subdivision of Austronesian) its social institutions were quite uniform and included several exogamous, totemic matriclans whose members were distributed widely throughout.10 (In the case of two of the clans—the Naboin [eagle totem] and Nakaris [hawk totem]—their members were so numerous and widely distributed as to suggest a former moiety system, but one diversified by immigration and segmentation.) In every community (which consisted of dispersed, lineage-based hamlets) one lineage "took precedence" over all its neighboring ones. In most (or all?) cases that lineage was a segment of the community's most frequently represented clan, whichever one that happened to be. It is not certain how one of a clan's lineages came to be senior, but it may have been the one that had formed the nucleus around which the community had grown (Blackwood 1935: 45). Nor is it clear whether it was the whole lineage that "took precedence," or only its heads, but the latter unquestionably did so—and not only over their own clanmates but over all other community mates as well. In Buka and northern Bougainville the title of tsunaun was applied both to the head of a community's premier lineage and to all of his (the actual headship having been limited to males) potential successors and to women whose children would be in direct line of succession, that is, all of the incumbent's uterine male siblings, by order of birth, then those of his mother's next-eldest sister, and so on. All persons bearing the title tsunaun seem to have been privileged—to have "taken precedence"—over their community mates, but (as just implied) it is not clear whether they constituted the whole of any premier lineage or only one of its segments (i.e., the ethnographer does not indicate how lineages varied in span). Nor was the ethnographer able to discover, to her own satisfaction, how the office of actual headship (tsunaun tshau, Great Tsunaun) had originated. Her only information on that point came from one old man, who asserted that the office was awarded to men who performed valiantly in battle, and after that". . . if the sister of the new tsunaun bore a child, he was tsunaun from birth, and so the rank was perpetuated" (ibid. 47). Whatever its origin, the hereditary office of Great Tsunaun evidently endowed its incumbent with extensive authority over his own community mates, including support enough to be permitted to kill with impunity any local person who offended him. Depending upon his personal skills and temperament, such a man was also able to extend his authority over neighboring communities, but even without that the prestige and

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influence of Great Tsunauns, as a class, were considerable over the whole of the Petats language area. In other words, we are describing here not only a community office of (hereditary) chieftainship, but a whole society-wide chiefly class. And now we look again at the Trobriands, for another example of the extension of intra- and interlineage ranking to community- and societywide leadership. 11 As described earlier (chapter 14), the 8,500 or so inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands resided in some eighty nucleated settlements (villagetype communities) most of which were combined into fairly stable clusters of two to five or so villages each. In addition, some individual villages and clusters were connected into larger (but less stable) networks, which had grown mainly out of marriages and which were consolidated by means of marital "tribute" and by cooperation in ceremony, overseas exchanging, and war. Crosscutting those connections was another one based on descent. 12 Trobrianders were divided into four named, exogamous, totemic matriclans (kumila), which were themselves divided into lineages (dala); in addition, some of the latter were divided into sub-lineages. The origin of the four clans was explained in myths, which related that the clan's primary totemic animals first emerged from the underworld (which was like the world of living humans in most social respects) through a hole in the ground on the northern shore of the main island: first to emerge was the giant lizard of the Lukulabuta clan, next the dog (Lukuba clan), next the pig (Malisi clan), and finally an animal variously described as snake, opossum, or crocodile (Luwasisiga clan). Then, according to some versions of the myth, the Malisi clan became 'superior' (guyau) to the others as the result of its totem (the pig) having eschewed eating a despised famine-type food that the dog (Lukuba clan) nevertheless ate. When Bronislaw Malinowski carried out his studies (19141920), members of the other clans were not inclined to accept the Malisis' views on their superiority as a clan over the members of all other clans. In fact, except for their exogamy and totemic prohibitions the Trobriand clans had little social import, having been neither property-owning corporations nor collective-action groups. 13 Much more important were the dala, the lineages, each of which was named and each of which held corporate residual title to a localized estate containing both cultivable and waste land and an area of house sites. Within most lineage estates there was also its sacred place—a hole or pool or large boulder or other natural feature—whence its members' common pair of ancestors had emerged from an underground universe similar in its social institution to the one aboveground. Each ancestral pair consisted of a sister and a brother: she to become the womb of the

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first overground member of their underground lineage, he to protect her and manage their resources, which included not only land but heirloom valuables and distinctive magical formulas. (According to the Trobrianders' theory of conception, it will be recalled, the spirit part of a human fetus was the reincarnation of an ancestral spirit, a member of the pregnant woman's lineage. Sexual intercourse was necessary to prepare a woman to receive the spirit-fetus; otherwise, her sexual partner, the child's father, contributed only indirectly to the child's reproduction.) Through the act of "emergence" the woman's matrilineal descendants became known as 'owners' (toli) of the surrounding territory in the following sense: individual members of the lineage acquired "permanent" provisional use-rights in specific parts of it, including rights of transfer to lineage mates (and rights of temporary transfer to outsiders), but residual rights to such parts remained with the lineage as a whole, which also held full (undivided) rights to all unallocated parts of the estate. (Except in a few places there was more than enough land to support the nearby residents.) If a member holding "permanent" use-rights died before transferring them, his portions presumably reverted to the lineage as a whole, to be reallocated to another member by the unit's head. (I have been unable to discover what happened to the estate of a lineage in the event all of its members died: whether it passed into the ownership of a nearby lineage of the same clan or to the offspring of the last of the male owners.) As stated above, every lineage estate included a site for dwellings. In some instances a site of this kind was physically isolated from all others of its kind and the dwellings on it constituted a whole village community. In most instances, however, a village was made up of the houses of members of two or more owner lineages, each of which occupied a separate section of the village circle of dwellings and yam storage houses. Ideally, the dwellings of a village were those of the married male members of its owner lineage(s) in which they lived with their wives, unmarried children, and in some cases the unmarried son of one of their sisters. In actuality, however, other circumstances intervened, so that only a few villages conformed to this ideal. Nevertheless, a lineage's autonomy was intensified in those cases where it constituted a village's only set of owners. In villages containing more than one owner lineage, however, one of them was always "senior" or "dominant," and its head was village head as well. As to the basis of that "seniority" or "dominance," the ethnographers provided only a partial explanation, namely, that in villages containing both guyau ('superior') and tokay ('inferior') owner lineages, one of the former would occupy that position. Also, in villages containing two owner lineages of guyau rank (as was the case, e.g., in Omarakana village, where Malinowski spent the most time) their relative "seniority" seems to have been decided by other considerations, which will be

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described below. This leaves unaccounted for the basis that was used for assigning "seniority" or "dominance" in villages where all its owner lineages were of tokay rank: "seniority" in terms of priority of settlement or of clan segmentation; "dominance" in terms of numbers or of wealth? Unfortunately, these important political questions remain unexplained. More information is available concerning the distinctions between guyau and tokay lineages, and the information is of such crucial importance for an understanding of Trobriand social structure that I quote one statement on it in full: What ultimately distinguishes [lineages of guyau] rank from others is that they are created with the possession of peculiar powers which make their members, especially their leaders, dangerous men, and therefore entitled to receive the marks of respect and other privileges, including the accumulation of wealth by polygamy, which in turn enable them to increase the fear in which they are held by the employment of sorcerers. Thus the Tabalu [lineage] of Omarakana [village] possess the To'urikuna magic of weather and prosperity by which they are believed to be able to bring famine or plenty on the whole Island. To other high-ranking [lineages] are credited other kinds of powers; the Toliwaga [guyau lineage] of Tilataula district, for instance, are believed to possess very potent war magic and skill as fighters, which underlie both their pre-eminence in that district and their traditional role and importance as the military rivals, though the inferiors in rank, of the Tabalu; for the Tabalu magic is considered in the long run more dangerous and more far-reaching than that of the Toliwaga. . . . Within the guyau category . . . the [lineages] tend to be graded in an order of precedence which reflects ultimately the degree of fear in which their leaders are held, which varies according to the nature of the power attributed to them but also with their nearness to or distance from the populations of different locations. Only the Tabalu [lineage] is everywhere regarded as preeminent; otherwise although the classing of a [lineage] is normally unequivocal and uniform, the residents in the various clusters [of villages] tend to regard their local guyau [lineages] as of higher rank than others. (H. Powell 1960: 128-129) The privileges of guyau rank included the following: the right to be so addressed, the exclusive right to wear certain ornaments, and the necessity for one's head to be higher than those of nearby commoners (hence obeisance by the latter). Moreover, persons of guyau rank regarded certain foods to be "disgusting" and avoided eating them, but not all guyau lineages had the same f o o d taboos. In most cases, it seems, a lineage's estate was located in one place, that is, within the territorial boundaries of a single village. In the case of one or t w o of the higher ranking guyau lineages however, there were t w o or more branches of adult male members and estates in different villages. Although one of the branches was usually regarded as more "senior"

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(presumably, in terms of genealogy) than the others, that seniority seems to have been expressed in ceremonial deference rather than interpersonal authority or land tenure. Note, however, that the internal structure of Trobriand lineages (i.e., the degree and nature of their segmentation, the relations among segments, etc.) has received little attention in the ethnographic literature. The Trobriand village has been described as "the primary political unit in these islands" (Uberoi 1962: 24). Whether containing one owner lineage or several, its residents (including members of non-owner lineages) acted collectively on many occasions—in clearing land for gardening, in performing ceremonies, in waging warfare, in undertaking trading expeditions, and in other endeavors. Moreover, all these actions were carried out under the general control of the village headman, although direct supervision of such activities was commonly delegated by him to, say, a garden magician or boat captain. As a minimum, a village headman was, in H. Powell's words, "chairman, spokesman, and representative in external affairs of the corporate village population, whose adult, i.e., primarily married, male members discuss and settle all matters of public interest in more or less formal meetings. . . . The leader takes part in these discussions and formulates the decisions or conclusions reached, which are always unanimous. He has no casting vote or final authority in discussion by virtue of his position as such, but his opinions like those of other senior men tend to carry more weight the stronger his personality and prestige" (1960: 132). Moreover, in the case of most village headmen (and especially those of tokay rank), they had no means by which to enforce decisions other than through public opinion and the withholding of use of lineage resources. As a maximum, however, a headman of wealth and guyau rank was in a position to exact obedience by means of coercion—physical (through his henchmen) and psychological (through threat of sorcery). The autonomy of each village was based upon a large measure of economic self-sufficiency, and its unity was expressed, spatially, in the conventional form of two concentric rings of houses (an inner one of yam houses, an outer one of dwellings) enclosing a central public open space used for feasting, dancing, and burial ground. One point that should be kept in mind about the units described so far is their small size, most villages having had fewer than a hundred residents and most lineages less than fifty members. From this and other circumstances (including the short distances and easy communications among them) most villages were combined into larger and fairly stable clusters, which averaged about five villages each and which united occasionally for feasting and for conducting warfare and competitive feasting against other clusters. Clan, and hence lineage, exogamy was probably another factor—perhaps even the primary one—in the formation of clus-

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ters. Even in the case of villages containing more than one owner lineage it would have been necessary for many of its male residents to seek wives in other villages, and the intervillage ties that resulted from such marriages doubtless served to encourage more of the same. In any case, whatever the factors that had led to their formation and persistence, fairly stable village clusters were salient features of the Trobriand political landscape. Each cluster had a headman, who was also head of one of its villages (and hence one of that village's owner lineages). Most such headmen were members of guyau lineages, and perhaps in most cases the same village of a cluster tended to provide it with most of its headmen over time, but since the position was in some measure elective, a candidate's personal (including achieved) qualifications must also have influenced the choice. This raises the question of how headmanship of lineages, and thence of villages and clusters, was attained?

Figure 19.5. Trobriand Islands, wood carving. Peabody Museum, Salem Massachusetts

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Some writers have characterized "headship," "chieftainship," and so forth, in Trobriand society as hereditary. There is some accuracy in this characterization, but only up to a point. Some individuals began life with better chances for such positions than others, but realization of them nearly always required some personal achievement as well, mainly by means of success in two kinds of transactions, pokala and urigubu. I can do no better than reproduce H. Powell's concise description of pokala. Junior members of a [lineage] are expected to render gifts and services to their seniors, who in return are expected to confer assistance and material benefits on the juniors. Thus a young man desiring exclusive use of, e.g., some coconut palms or a plot of land, may select an 'elder brother' (tuwa), 'mother's brother' (kada), or 'mother's mother's brother' (tabu), whom he knows to have such property at his disposal, and upon whom he has some personal claim. . . . According to the nature of the desired return, the young man will render gifts and services of a greater or a lesser extent, ranging from small gifts of fish or firewood made as opportunity occurs, to undertaking to help his senior with his gardening commitments or the like, and caring for him in illness (notably by guarding him against sorcery). When he feels he has done enough, the young man will make a formal request in public for the desired return; and if the senior feels he merits it, it will be made. Any property allocated to him in this way, especially land, out of the corporate holding of his [lineage] he can use himself if he wishes; but its primary value lies in the fact that it is material evidence of the esteem in which he is held by his elders, and makes it possible for his juniors to pokala him in turn.

Powell concluded: . . . pokala is important as one means by which an ambitious young man can attract attention and build up his prestige among his contemporaries with the aim of being selected as the next leader or 'headman' (tolivalu) of his [lineage] and its village. If no ambitious young man emerges in this way, the senior man of a lineage will in time single out the likeliest successor to the current headman and require of him the same kinds of services and assistance that an ambitious junior would render voluntarily. (1960: 126)

Powell added that not every young man wished to be selected, for, in the average "commoner" lineage, headship tended to be more onerous than rewarding. But headship of a guyau lineage, and thence perhaps in a wealthy village and powerful village cluster, could be highly rewarding in terms of the goals of lofty prestige and regnant social influence evidently cherished by many Trobrianders. To achieve those goals, however, pokala was only a start, and had to be augmented by uribugu. As described in chapter 14, an urigubu was the annual harvest gift— mainly of yams—owed to a man by his wife's brothers. 14 In one sense it

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was a rendering to a woman of her share of the food produced on what was her own lineage's estate, but in practice it constituted an addition to her husband's resources, to be displayed by him in his storage house as a prestige-gaining sign of his wealth, or to be used by him in equally prestige-gaining and obligation-creating feast giving and other kinds of exchange, including the well-known kula exchanges described in chapter 12. For monogamists (which included virtually all "commoners") the food received from a wife's brothers was in most cases counterbalanced by that rendered to the husband of his sister, and nothing more tangible was gained by the transactions than the maintenance of amicable affinal ties. But to the ambitious guyau man, urigubu provided an added incentive for polygyny, whereby wealth could be increased and additional affinal relationships generated. Indeed, like Europe's nobility in times not long past, their Trobriand counterparts used marriage both to increase wealth, through dowry-like urigubu, and to maintain or gain political support (the difference being that the Europeans could practice polygyny only sequentially!). Moreover, as in Europe, the quest for political advantage was not all one-way; many Trobrianders took the initiative by offering their "sisters" to influential men in return for anticipated political support—a practice that has led some writers to label (in my view, inappropriately) the accompanying urigubu "tribute." The headmen of most Trobriand village clusters were content—or limited—to marrying (and hence gaining affinal supporters) within their own clusters, but some of them acquired additional wives (and sets of allies) elsewhere. (In one case a man had a total of thirty wives.) If to these kinds of extracluster connections one adds the numerous "inland" kula partnerships engaged in by those same individuals, the resulting map would reveal an intricate society-wide network of intercluster relationships that were not nearly as stable as those between villages of the same cluster but had their uses nevertheless. One of those uses was mutual assistance in warfare; but war alliances tended to be short-lived, and victory rarely if ever resulted in confiscation of territory or in subjection of the defeated. (Even within most clusters their headmen "governed" mainly by example and persuasion.) In fact, the principal political use of a man's extracluster relationship, both urigubu and kula, was to enhance his prestige abroad and thereby strengthen his influence at home —all of which could be still further increased through his generosity in feast giving and (as described in chapter 12) his temporary possession of highly-admired kula valuables. At the time of Malinowski's landmark study, the pinnacle of this prestige hierarchy was occupied by the branch (and its headman) of the Tabalu lineage localized in the village of Omarakana in the cluster of that name. But, contrary to the cosmogonies then current, there is no historical evidence that that particular lineage had always been supreme. In fact, another lineage of the same clan was dur-

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ing that era the society's lowest-ranking "commoner" one. Moreover, as an indication of the nature of the hierarchy now being discussed, during that same era the selfsame Tabalu lineage and its other village mates had been defeated in warfare and driven into lengthy exile, with however no lasting loss of its position at the top. Patrilineal Descent Units Societies in which the descent units were mainly patrilineal were located in New Guinea (where they greatly outnumbered all others), in the southeastern Solomons, the central and southern New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and the Loyalty Islands. As I did with the foregoing section on matrilineal units, I begin this section with comprehensive descriptions of two of them, to serve as basis for comparison with salient differences among the others. The Mae Enga, as described by Mervyn Meggitt (1965b, 1971), provide a textbook case of a society structured mainly in terms of segmentary patrilineal descent units. As mentioned in previous chapters, the 36,000-37,000 persons comprising this society occupied about 300 square miles of the western New Guinea Highlands between altitudes of 4,500 and 7,500 feet. Their staple crop was sweet potatoes, supplemented by other root crops and leafy vegetables; they also raised pigs and did a little hunting and collecting. Like many other New Guinea Highlanders the men engaged frequently in warfare and in large-scale prestigebuilding, ally-gaining exchange. The descent-unit system of the Mae contained five levels: phratries, clans, subclans, lineages, and sub-lineages. Their phratries contained an average of eight clans each (range 4-19), their clans an average of four subclans each (range 2-8), their subclans an average of two lineages each (range 1-4). Furthermore, lineages formed the agnatic cores of an average of seven monogamous or polygynous families (range 1-14). According to Mae cosmogony their original ancestors were (male) Sun and (female) Moon; these begot numerous Sky People, some of whom descended to earth and begot humans, who became the founders of human social units that were the counterparts of the Sky-world phratries. Then, the human male phratry founders begot sons, who founded clans, and so on down the line. (As in the mythical genealogies of many segmentary descent systems, the only ancestors "remembered" were the ones occurring at points of segmentation.) In addition, some Sky People brought fertility stones to earth, and these—along with certain water pools— became the focus of clan rituals carried out to propitiate ghosts and ensure clan welfare. Of all these "levels" of segmentation, that of the clan was most noteworthy inasmuch as each clan constituted the core of a distinct community. The average Mae community contained about 350 persons (range

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1 0 0 - 1 , 0 0 0 ) residing in a compact, named, and sharply boundaried territory that averaged about one square mile in area (range one-half to six or seven). Since clans were exogamous and marital residence mostly patrivirilocal, the majority of residents in any community consisted of a core of adult male members of the owning clan along with their wives and unmarried children. But in addition, most communities also contained several outsiders, such as matrilateral kinsmen of the clan members and kinsmen of the latter's wives. Uncontested use-rights over portions of a clan's territory were allocated to specific, individual, adult male members, who passed these rights on to their sons, but residual rights over all of the territory were retained by the clan as a whole. Thus, while an individual clan member could permit an outsider—say, a son of his mother's brother, or a brother of his wife—to reside and garden on some of his portion of clan land temporarily, the consent of his clanmates was required in order to give permanence to the arrangement. According to Meggitt, the reason most men moved out of their natal clan territories was shortage of land, and the reason most outsiders were permitted to settle permanently in another clan's territory was the hosts' desire for additional warriors needed to protect their boundaries against land-hungry enemy clans. For as long as he lived, an outsider remained a kind of "second-class citizen," but his offspring usually became accepted as fullfledged members of the community and its core clan, provided they behaved as such and were no longer loyal to their fathers' natal clans. In addition to fighting as a unit in some kinds of warfare (see chapter 11), the members of each clan acted collectively in several other ways: to make payments for the killing of members of other clans and for deaths incurred by allies fighting on their behalf; to engage in the large-scale interclan te exchanges (see chapter 12); and to conduct rites to propitiate the clan's ancestral ghosts. With regard to the latter, the members of each clan referred to themselves as a "line of men" begun by "the one penis" of the clan's putative founder. While the metaphor implies that such descent had been strictly patrilineal, genealogical and other evidence indicates that there had been many acceptable exceptions to that ideal, as, for example, when a line had descended through a clanwoman's son (who in Mae terms was a "nephew"), or in the case of the other outsiders mentioned above. In other words, for pragmatic reasons the Mae not only permitted nonagnates to settle among them but on occasion "bent" their descent dogma sufficiently to adopt nonagnates into their patricians. At the highest level of descent-unit organization, Mae clans were united into phratries, which according to Meggitt was the largest type of patrilineal descent group recognized by them. The mythical explanation for these connections was that the founders of phratry-related clans had been sons (or in some cases "nephews") of the putative phratry-founder. Here is how the ethnographer described the relationship:

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Normally, the territories of the component clans of a phratry lie side by side along a river valley. T h e phratry, which is not an exogamous unit, rarely engaged in corporate [i.e., collective] activities. When, however, one clan enacts a ritual for its ancestral ghosts, its fraternal clans have the right to participate. Similarly, a clan seriously threatened by a clan of another phratry m a y rally all of its brother clans to its defense. Phratries also occasionally challenge each other to relatively formalized battles in tournaments in order to test their opponents' strength and to enhance their own prestige. (Meggitt 1 9 7 1 : 196-197)

As noted earlier Mae clans were divided into subclans; in some cases the dwellings and garden areas of subclanmates were contiguous, in other cases separated by those of other subclans. The collective activities distinctive of subclans had to do mainly with crises in the members' own lives (e.g., sponsoring their mortuary feasts, "compensating" their matrilateral kinsmen for misfortunes suffered by them—the members, not the kinsmen!—and conducting purificatory rites for fellow members during their bachelorhood [see chapter 13]). The living and gardening areas of lineage mates tended to be contiguous, thereby permitting and encouraging them to cooperate in subsistence activities. In addition, it was at this level of clan segmentation that members' marriages were arranged and financed. The smallest unit of segmentation was the sub-lineage—the male head of a family household and his unmarried offspring. Although, as just stated, there was some cooperation among lineage mates (including their respective households) in subsistence, the individual household was the basic unit for such activities. Moreover, it was the sub-lineage that held most unequivocal use-rights in specific plots of land. The sequence in which land rights passed from one descent-unit level to another followed the order of segmentation, but of course in the opposite direction, with the clan being the ultimate residuary. "In theory the phratry as a subordinate group has a residual interest in the territories of its clans and incurs a corresponding obligation to defend them from invasion. But in practice the broken terrain hinders the rapid movement of forces between fraternal clans, while the [clans] themselves also enjoy considerable de facto autonomy" (Meggitt 1965b: 225). Just as the patterns of Mae land tenure and collective activities corresponded to the levels of descent-unit segmentation, so did that of authority. That is to say, when a young man was to be wed it was his father who arranged most of the preliminaries with the father of the bride, but final arrangements were made by the leaders of the couple's respective lineages. When a man died it was the right and duty of the leader of his subclan, and not his lineage, to supervise arrangements for his mortuary feast (unless, of course, his lineage and subclan leader were the same).

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And when some individual set in motion a train of events leading to interclan hostilities, it was the leader of his whole clan, and community, who directed the ensuing war. The functions of leadership were very predictable; what was not predictable was exactly who would occupy such positions of leadership. Unlike many of the descent-unit systems so far considered in our survey, the principle of seniority played little or no part in succession to positions of authority in units higher than the family (i.e., sub-lineage) level. And what was true of individuals applied to whole units as well; in other words, "fraternal" lineages were not ranked with one another on the basis of the birth-order of their respective ancestors, and the same was true of subclans and clans. Authority was achieved by success in a number of different ways: for example, by exercising skill as manager and arbitrator, by gaining local supporters through assistance and generosity, and by acquiring prestige and "foreign" allies through extensive ceremonial exchanges (see chapter 12). In much of this the aspiring leader had to depend upon support from his close kinsmen (and in some situations, affines as well), but the process of becoming a leader (especially of subclans and clans) required single-minded commitment, boundless energy, political shrewdness, and diplomatic finesse. And even after such leadership had been attained, it could be maintained only by continuing exercise of the same qualities and activities that served to gain it—which, according to Meggitt, some men were able to exercise for a decade or more, but which could not be indefinitely sustained. For our second example of a patrilineal descent-unit society we look at New Caledonia, some 1,700 miles southeast of the Mae Enga. 1 5 This long (160 miles), narrow (30 miles) island at the southernmost end of Melanesia had a population of 30,000-40,000 at the time of European discovery, by James Cook, in 1774. The native vernaculars consisted of twenty-eight distinct Austronesian languages, which linguists have classified into six groups but which shared enough grammatical features to give them a measure of unity vis-a-vis Austronesian languages elsewhere —a unity that extended to other aspects of the island's cultures as well. The main food crops were yams and taro—the latter identified as "wet" and associated with females; the former as "dry" and "male," and the object of much more ritualistic nurture (see chapter 8). Chickens were domesticated but pigs were not; fishing was actively engaged in, hunting far less so. Except for its dry southwestern grasslands, the island's coasts, valleys, and plains were extensively though thinly populated. Communities were widely dispersed and most of them were quite small, having been on the average a compact cluster of five to ten households separated from all other communities by wide stretches of garden lands and forest. In its

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Figure 19.6. New Caledonia, mask. Museum für Völkerkunde, Basle smallest and simplest variant a community consisted physically of a long rectangular plaza flanked by beehive-shaped family dwellings and terminated by a larger beehive "clan house." Behind the dwellings and parallel to the plaza were other narrower street-like spaces. Off to the side were rectangular work sheds (e.g., for pottery making, wood carving, etc.) and farther away one or more huts for menstruating women. Both dwellings and clanhouses were exceedingly well constructed and based on artificially built earthen mounds. Each married woman had a house of her own, which she shared with her unmarried children and, for at least part of the time, her husband. In addition, men spent much of their nonworking time in their "clanhouse," which was closed to women except on occasion and served as the clan's temple (e.g., for seances with and offerings to its ancestors and other tutelar spirits). Most of a community's public life—festivals, dances, and so forth—took place in the central plaza, the side plazas having been reserved mainly for the women and, of particular significance, for visiting members of the wives' own clans, or in native terms for interaction with "mothers' brothers" (see below).

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Other features of most communities included numerous ornamental plants and a smaller house for the clan treasures. Also, many of them were surrounded with fences but not for protection against attack, as all intercommunity fighting took place on mutually agreed upon battlegrounds elsewhere. Such was the basic pattern for single-clan communities. In places where most of the male members of two or more clans resided the elements of the pattern were much the same for each clan but their arrangements differed somewhat, except for the large plaza, which was common to all. So far I have referred, loosely, to "clans"; I must now be more precise. The task is complicated by the absence in most of the sources of distinctions among types and levels of clan segmentation, but all sources agree that such "clans" were exogamous, totemic, and, normatively at least, patrilineal. The smallest institutionalized clan segment—in the terms I employ here, a lineage—consisted of a locally domiciled set of adult men (and their offspring) considered by themselves to be descended through males from a common male ancestor usually no more than about three generations past. The married sisters of those men were also counted as members of the lineage, but they resided in their husbands' communities, which were usually located elsewhere. Some of the units referred to in the literature as "clans" may have consisted of a single lineage, but most of them seem to have contained two or more lineages, whose interconnections, however, were not all of the same kind. One such interconnection was exemplified in communities containing two or more lineages claiming common (patrilineal) descent—that is, segments of the same clan. In all such cases, the lineage that was senior in terms of the birth-order of its eponymous ancestor, or the one whose ancestor had first occupied the place, was superior in rank to the others. In another quite common variant of single-clan, multilineage communities, one or more of the component lineages appear to have been, originally, segments of other clans—segments which had become integrated into their current clan-like unit in consequence of defeat by the local segment or, at their own seeking, because of their migration from elsewhere. 16 (Like most other Oceanians, the New Caledonians were adept in inventing myths and genealogies to incorporate outsiders into their normatively exclusive social units, even into those based on common descent.) In other cases, single clans were composed of lineages localized in several different places, some of them many miles apart. One circumstance that contributed to this arrangement was the scantiness of the population relative to the island's extensive arability. Another was the island's topography, which, compared with many other parts of Melanesia, imposed

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fewer obstructions to people's movement. And a third was the tendency, evidently quite common, for lineage mates (and especially brothers) to solve their conflicts with one another by one of them moving away. In any case, and whatever the causes, the maps constructed by ethnographers picture single clans dispersed over wide areas (in some cases even across language boundaries), their lineages interspersed, and their respective legendary migration routes intricately criss-crossed. The mnemonic device used for reconstructing those migrations, and for "remembering" each lineage's genealogical position in its clan, was in terms of the earthen mound on which a lineage's "clanhouse" was built. Each such house and its mound was given a particular name, which in time came to be used for the constituent lineage as well. Thereafter, when recounting their migrations—thereby, metaphorically, their line of descent—people did so in terms of a succession of "mounds," and genealogical connections among lineages were explained by reference to "descent" from common mounds (a metaphor that differed strikingly, and significantly, from the more usual Oceanian usage of a branching tree). 17 As mentioned earlier, in cases where two or more lineages of the same clan were domiciled in the same or in closely neighboring communities one was held to be senior to the others, but the implications of such seniority were confined largely to the senior lineage's headman, who was ex officio headman of all other local lineages of the clan. 1 8 The nature of that office can be made clearer by listing some other clan-associated offices. One was "master-of-the-soil," whose exclusive right and duty it was to communicate with the ancestral and other spirits that exercised control over the lineage's or clan's lands and hence over the members' material welfare. This office was reserved for a community's pioneer lineage or clan, and was usually held by that unit's eldest male member. In single-clan communities the offices of headman and master of the soil were combined in one man, but in more complex communities that was often not the case. Another office was clan priest, whose right and duty it was to communicate with the clan's tutelar spirits as representative of the clan as a whole. Unlike headmanship and soil-mastership, this office was reserved for one of the clan's junior lineages, and within that unit it usually passed from father to son. Two other offices, which obtained in some clans and in most or all larger multiclan communities, were war leader and war priest. And in addition to all the above there were several specialized occupations, such as diviners, curers, sorcerers, wood-carvers, which though not "offices" in the usual sense did include practitioners who on occasion performed on behalf of whole clans or multiclan units. The clan headman had a leading voice in deciding, say, when to go to war or when to communicate with spirits on behalf of the whole clan, but he himself did not engage in fighting, or in petitioning clan tutelars

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(except when he w a s also master-of-the-soil). And even though he had a leading voice in decisions respecting his clan as a whole, his w a s not the only voice, most matters having been decided in council with other clan officials and lineage heads, and with the clan's principal carvers, and so forth. A clan's headman w a s neither encouraged nor permitted to be autocratic. H e w a s described as "older brother" to his clanmates. While he w a s shown the deference due an older brother by his younger siblings, he was at the same time a brother, from w h o m much assistance w a s expected. In fact, a headman's principal rights and duties were to announce the clan council's joint decisions, to initiate clan activities ceremoniously, and to glorify the clan's past, which he did at large-scale assemblies where he delivered perorations concerning the clan's divine origins, its vicissitudinous migrations, its martial victories, and the miraculous and heroic acts of its ancestors. T h e ability to perform this function required long and arduous training. T h e prime candidate for the office was the current headman's eldest son, but if he proved incapable of performing this exacting part of the office, the clan's elders chose another candidate: usually a younger "brother" of the candidate or of the current officeholder himself; or in s o m e cases some member of a lineage only recently "incorporated" into the clan, the assumption having been that such a person, backed by few lineage mates and owning little or no local land, would prove to be more malleable than an influential and wealthy "insider," and less troublesome in that office than outside. U p to now the discussion has been focused on the structure and governance of individual clans. Still to be described are the ways in which clans were interrelated—either by marriage, by allegiance to certain "chiefs," or by military alliance. As previously noted, N e w Caledonia's clans were e x o g a m o u s . While it w a s permissible for a person to marry anyone of any clan but his or her o w n , there w a s a decided preference for a m a n to marry a member of his mother's clan—ideally, a "mother's brother's daughter"—a choice that w a s commonly contracted for through child- or even infant-betrothal. A person's relationship with his (or her) mother's brother—and indeed with the mother's whole lineage—was colored, typically, by affection and mutual support. T h e relationship w a s specifically institutionalized. . . . in practice the chiefs often deferred to uterine kin, members of clans from which the paternal clan received its wives. The maternal uncle, or kanya, had to be given gifts at births, deaths, pilou festivals, marriages, to ensure the counter gift of female life. But the kanya did not hold power in himself anymore than the chief did. The latter was spokesman . . . of the clan ancestors; the former was representative of the maternal line. The [chief] incarnated the heritage of masculine "power," the kanya of feminine "life." An elemental living force flowed as blood from mother to child; its original source was the totem,

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or rhe. The totem was an animal, plant, or mineral, peculiar to a clan and recognized by a system of ritual gestures and sacrifices. (Clifford 1980: 17, based on the several works of Leenhardt) After a series of marriages between particular pairs of clans the practice developed into a rule. And, since alliance based on marriage called forth amicable relationships generally, each clan came in time to be linked with several others in durable pacts of peace and exchange. Moreover, in some parts of the island the connections of this kind developed into extensive groupings of the clans into large and named units, whereby the members of one unit married into the other one—a system reminiscent of Nagovisi moieties, though not, it seems, rationalized in terms of common descent. The second way in which many clans were interrelated was by common allegiance to the headman of one of them. These "chiefdoms" varied widely in size and coherence, from single multiclan communities to some containing numerous communities (and clans), including a few whose territories were not all contiguous or whose members did not all speak the same language. There appear to have been several kinds of factors that had served to bring diverse communities (and clans) together in this way: for example, warfare (either as consequence of victory or defeat, or by voluntary attachment for purpose of protection); matrimonial alliance; the desire for barter; and, of course, the ambitions of individuals for the kinds of privileges that chieftainship of this type permitted. At a minimum such privileges were no more extensive or rewarding than those enjoyed by a clan headman, except of course that they involved deference, and so forth, from members of other clans as well. Even at a maximum they seldom permitted an incumbent to exercise direct authority over clans other than his own, unless such clans resided on lands belonging to his own, or unless the chief possessed other characteristics (e.g., proven skill as sorcerer or mediator, personal participation in several strategic marital alliances) that added fear and political weight to his influence as an individual. Moreover, it sometimes happened that the head of a large and populous chiefdom had little or no direct authority respecting the lands on which he was domiciled, if, for example, his presence there had come about by immigration or martial victory and the lands had remained under control of the indigenous clan's "master-ofthe-soil," who alone was qualified to communicate with the lands' tutelar spirits and thus insure their productivity. (It was mainly for this reason that when a community was defeated in warfare, its residents—and particular its "master-of-the-soil"—were permitted and encouraged to reoccupy their lands.) Succession to the headship of a political chiefdom followed, ideally, the same general principles that governed succession to headship of a

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multi-lineage clan. In practice, however, as was also the case with clans, practical considerations (e.g., of competence) intervened to such an extent that chiefly dynasties seldom endured for more than a few generations. And what was true of chiefly dynasties was true of chiefdoms themselves. As one writer stated: "Clan loyalties endured, while those to a political chief tended to be more ephemeral and were often more ambiguous. Chiefdoms expanded, contracted and altered in composition on the basis of political and military considerations and on the success or otherwise of their leaders" (Douglas 1980: 26-27). Finally, the third way in which many of New Caledonia's scores of clans were interrelated was into durable confederations that transcended even the boundaries of large chiefdoms. The most extensive of those confederations prevailed throughout the island's northern region, where the clans were grouped checkerboard fashion into two more or less permanent mutually hostile factions, Oot and Waap (ibid. 30; Guiart 1956:23). Following the procedure adopted in the treatment of Melanesia's matrilineal descent units we will now examine how the descent units of New Caledonia and Mae Enga compared with those of other patrilineal Melanesian societies with respect to, for example, their spans, their property holdings, and their governance. But before setting out to do that one must face the essential question: Were the kinship units under discussion formed on the basis of descent, or did those so labeled come to be as result of what one writer calls "cumulative patrifiliation," the tendency over successive generations (resulting from a number of factors not necessarily including a dogma of descent) whereby a person becomes a member of his (or her) father's (exclusive of his mother's) kinship unit (Barnes 1962)? As with so many other questions posed by anthropologists, the answer to this one hinges on definitions—in this case that of descent. If, as in the present book, descent refers to "the genealogical process whereby a person is related to a male or female ancestor through his or her parent, his or her parent's parent and so on in ascending generations,"19 the question also becomes: Is the descent in question a matter of ideology (i.e., of dogma), or of actual practice, or both? The issue posed by those questions came to be asked about Melanesia, specifically about the New Guinea Highlands, mainly through the article by John Barnes cited above and has since then been the subject of several other writings (e.g., Barnes 1967a, 1971; P. Brown 1978; de Lepervanche 1967, 1973; Langness 1964; P. Lawrence 1971a; A. McArthur 1966-1967; Strathern 1972). The conclusions reached by most writers on this subject is that while all Highlands peoples adhered to the dogma that their clans and phratries were formed on the principle of affiliation

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of members over successive generations to their father's unit, many such units in every Highland society (including the Mae Enga) had in fact been formed in other ways: by incorporation of, for example, affines or the offspring of a female member or unrelated persons seeking refuge. At any one time, it appears, the contemporaries of such "outsiders" would have known full well that the latter were such, but after a generation or two of living together the descendants of these outsiders would have come to be treated as true agnates and, moreover, to be believed to be so. Other parts of "patrilineal" Melanesia have not been re-examined in this respect as critically as the Highlands, but it is likely that the same qualifications would be found to apply to most of them as well. In fact, it is also likely that some of Melanesia's so-called matrilineal kinship units were less consistently matrilineal, genealogically, than their members held them to be. Nevertheless, I have the impression (not, however, backed by any systematic survey) that the matrilineal units of this region were more orthodox, genealogically, than were their patrilineal counterparts (it is, after all, easier to counterfeit paternity than the incontestable process of motherhood). Now, with these qualifications in mind, we can proceed to inquire about variations among the units that were believed by their own members to be constituted by patrilineal descent (or by successive patrifilial affiliation approximating it). Span—the extent to which the collateral range of a society's highestlevel patrilineal unit included the society's total population. The total estimated population of 3 6 , 6 0 0 Mae Enga was divided into fourteen phratries—the society's "descent" units of widest span. 20 While the clans making up a Mae Enga phratry occasionally cooperated in warfare and in rites for common ancestral ghosts, the phratries were far less important than their component clans, of which the society contained about a hundred, with an average membership of 350 each (Meggitt 1965b: 9). Comparable information about New Caledonia is far less precise, and generalizations on "inclusiveness" dependent upon how many distinct "societies" there were. Despite all these uncertainties and ambiguities, however, I have the impression that the island's clans (its descent units of widest span) were smaller, both absolutely and relative to a society's total population, than was the case of Mae Enga phratries, but similar in these respects to Mae Enga clans. Moreover, the larger phratry unities of Mae Enga were in some measure matched by the interclan military and matrimonial "confederations" of New Caledonia, which, however, were not rationalized (as they were by the Mae Enga) in terms of common descent. When comparing Mae Enga and New Caledonia with other patrilineal societies of Melanesia in this respect, they appear to be in-between two extremes. At one extreme were societies in which the whole population belonged to one or another of two exogamous patri-moieties, divisions

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of which were however localized in virtually every community. One example of this form of organization is provided by the Keraki, whose marriage customs were described in chapter 14. The 7 0 0 - 8 0 0 Keraki lived in small communities that were scattered widely over the uninviting low-lying country between New Guinea's Fly River and the Torres Strait. The communities, which contained an average of 5 0 - 6 0 residents each, were united into what the ethnographer called "tribes"—territorial units whose members shared a common name and a common dialect, together with a disinclination to wage warfare among themselves and a tendency to unite in wars against non-member communities. 21 The most important type of descent unit among the Keraki was the exogamous and localized patrilineage, a set of close agnates whose male (and unmarried female) members resided in the same community (i.e., residence was almost invariably virilocal), who owned land in common, and who cooperated closely in economic and other activities, including assistance to one another in the financing of the marital exchanges that were described in chapter 14. Some communities were composed around a single patrilineage; others around two or more, with each patrilineage occupying a separate neighborhood. The only other descent unit of the Keraki was the moiety, which was also normatively exogamous—but less so in practice than its component lineages. 22 In the case of some multi-lineage communities all of their core lineages were of the same moiety, in others they were not. In any case, lineages of each moiety were distributed throughout all Keraki, and, for that matter, throughout the neighboring (western) Semariji and Gambadi societies as well. In addition to their function in restricting choice of spouse, each moiety had its distinctive set of identifying emblems (e.g., totemic animals, food crops), of personified celestial objects (e.g., sun, moon), of ritual artifacts (e.g., bull roarers, drums), and of magic-making prerogatives (e.g., rain making, garden magic). Also, for each moiety there was a distinctive myth, which recorded the origin, the wanderings, and the cultural innovations of its own ancestors. Beyond a hint or two, however, there is nothing in the ethnography to indicate the existence of shared activities among moiety mates as such, and nothing to suggest that membership in the same moiety carried a moral obligation for mutual assistance or for abstention from mutual harm. For all these kinds of behavior the patrilineage was the primary unit, and after that the community and the so-called tribe. At the other extreme (in terms of span) were the Sio, a coastal people of New Guinea's Vitiaz Strait area, whose participation in that region's commercial trading system was described in chapter 12. 2 3 Their main food crop was yams, which they supplemented with fish and with food obtained from inlanders in exchange for pots they made themselves and for other goods they obtained by trade with seagoing Siassi Islanders.

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Figure 1 9 . 7 . Umboi Island, New Guinea, mask (after Dark 1974)

The Sio lived in compact village-communities divided into neighborhoods, most of which were composed of a set of close agnates—males and unmarried females—plus wives from other neighborhoods or villages (marital residence having been mainly virilocal). There was no generic label for the lineages of which these co-residential agnates formed the core, but they were definitely bounded, property-owning units. No figures are given about the size of Sio patrilineages but they cannot have been large, the founding ancestors of most of them having been only two to four generations removed (i.e., from the eldest living members). Sio lands were of three functional types: house sites, small blocs near the coasts, and much larger tracts inland. The first two were owned corporately—that is, residually by patrilineages, and provisionally by individual members of the same. In each lineage there was one man—the senior male descendant of the ancestor who first established ownership —who was known as tono tama, "father of the land." More trustee than headman, this official had little authority over member's use of the land and evidently did not receive first fruits from it, but he is described as having been the "rallying point" for lineage members in disputes concerning the land. The larger inland tracts, too, were inherited by the patrilineal descendants of their pioneer cultivators, but at the time of Thomas Harding's field study were not identified with specific lineages, although

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they were clearly in the process of becoming so (a slower process on account of the large sufficiency of land). Despite their function as landowning corporations, Sio lineages seldom engaged in activities collectively. Such enterprises as sponsorship of marriages, funerals, housebuilding, and landclearing were the role of neighbors and of the personal kindreds of the principals themselves; and although some patri-kin were always among the participants such activities were not within the domain of lineages as such. There was however among the Sio a type of social unit that was very visible in terms of collective activity. That was the mbwanza, a highly solidary association of male neighbors who cooperated, under leadership of a koipu, in ancestor rites, blood-revenge expeditions, and competitive feasting with like units. A boy was usually initiated into his father's mbwanza. Each mbwanza had its own clubhouse and a raised platform for display of ceremonial presentations and for exhibition of ritual paraphernalia, including especially carved wooden mask representations of the unit's ancestral ghosts. There was some parallel in membership between mbwanza and lineage, but not a perfect fit. The leaders of most mbwanza were also "fathers" of the corresponding lineages' lands. In some instances, however, the residential neighborhood of a lineage contained not one but two or three mbwanza (evidently, despite the continuing unity of the lineage as a landholding body). This raises the question, Who were the leaders of a neighborhood's second and third mbwanza? "The position of [mbwanza] leader was acquired through primogenitural succession [as was that of a patrilineage's "father of the soil"] and rested on the control and use of hoards of [dog] teeth and shell valuables, and most important, the provision of large-scale distribution (wena) of pigs and food on a variety of occasions" (Harding 1967: 67). This and other questions about the Sio mbwanza and their relationship to patrilineages cannot be answered, inasmuch as they ceased to exist a half-century ago. 24 Not only were the Sio lineages "unsegmented" (according to the ethnographer) but they were also "not embraced in a sib [i.e., higher-level clan] or [wider] totemic organization" (ibid: 66). Most of Sio society was, it is true, divided into two named, residential, and in some respects political, divisions, and while membership in these tended to be "patrifilial" at least for males (and in consequence of virilocal residence), they were not normatively exogamous or descent units in the literal meaning of the term. According to legend these divisions came about when the Sio moved their dwellings from the mainland to their tiny offshore island, to escape harassment by inlanders and the plague of mosquitoes that besieged their former settlements. The move of the thousand or so people into the far smaller area (only about two acres in all) necessitated a planned constriction, which the migrants' two principal leaders accom-

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plished by dividing the island into two communities—a division that persisted when the Sio moved back to the mainland after World War II. In summary, while Melanesia's patrilineal kinship-unit sytems were as varied as its matrilineal ones with respect to the range of their inclusiveness, there were relatively fewer societies with patrimoieties and other wide-spanned patrilineal descent units than there were societies with analogous matrilineal ones. I am inclined to attribute the difference to the circumstance that patrilineal descent units tended to be more political than were the matrilineal ones, and in Melanesia the diameters of political (i.e., war making and other forms of rivalry) units seem to have been inherently narrow. I will hazard two guesses as to why they were more political: in Melanesia men were more "political" than w o m e n , and that inclination was reinforced by the sentiments of agnatic solidarity made realizable by the high incidence of virilocal residence that accompanied patrilineal descent. 2 5 We will now compare Melanesia's patrilineal kinship units with respect to some other variables, namely, property ownership, collective activities, marriage, localization, and governance. Property. We saw in our discussion of Melanesia's matrilineally organized societies that many of their more important kinds of property, especially land, were owned corporately by descent units. The same generalization applies—to an even greater degree—to the area's patrilineally organized societies. Activities. Generally speaking, patrilineal descent units engaged in relatively more collective activities than did their matrilineal counterparts. This was especially true of warfare and of large-scale ceremonial exchange, including competitive feasting. It was also true of male initiation rites and of the cult activities of all-male associations, although there were some notable exceptions that will be described later on. It may also have been true (but perhaps to a less extent) of ancestor-focused religious rites. Patrilineal units also played a role in their members' marriages and funerals, but no more so than their matrilineal counterparts. O n the other h a n d , even in the more emphatically "patrilineal" societies most collective activities having to do with subsistence were more often within the domain of neighborhood groupings than of patrilineal units as such. Marriage. A more extensive and systematic survey might prove otherwise, but I have the impression that patrilineal units had somewhat less to do with choice of mate than did their matrilineal counterparts. For one thing, some patrilineal units of wide span were not even normatively exogamous. And more so than in matrilineal societies, the categories of non-marriageable persons tended to include a wider range of other types of cognates. Localization. The male members of patrilineages and patricians

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tended to reside close to one another far more often than did those of matrilineages and matriclans; virilocality occurred in many matrilineal societies but uxorilocality was the very rare exception in patrilineal ones. Governance. As with its matrilineal units, the authority statuses of Melanesia's patrilineal ones were usually ascribed in terms of seniority— of genealogical level and order of birth. But in contrast with matrilineal units, some of whose authority statuses were occupied by women, all of those in patrilineal units were occupied by men. Also, to a far greater extent than in matrilineal societies, the authority statuses of patrilineal units constituted those of the society at large. A few noteworthy exceptions to these correlates will be described later on in this chapter, but they were not numerous.

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Finally, I should add that, as in some matrilineal societies, the segments of the patrilineal units of some Melanesian societies were internally ranked, usually in terms of seniority; in one well-known case, that ranking carried over to the society as a whole. The Mekeo were an Austronesian-speaking people occupying about 150 square miles of flat, lowlying terrain inland from the Gulf of Papua and about 60 miles northwest of present-day Port Moresby. The area is bounded by swamps and foothills; its fertile soil supports natural stands of forest and high grass, and easily won garden crops. Both domesticated and wild pigs supplied the people's feast needs; most other animal protein was obtained in trade with their coast-dwelling neighbors. In 1897, when they were visited by C. G. Seligmann, the Mekeo numbered about 3 , 0 8 3 ; in 1971, when they were studied more intensively by Epeli Hau'ofa, their numbers had increased to 6 , 4 1 1 . 2 6 Even by 1897 Mekeo society had undergone many changes as the result of contact with Europeans (e.g., the outlawing of warfare), but in the later study Hau'ofa attempted to reconstruct—with persuasive authenticity it seems to me—the precontact social structure, which will now be summarized. The Mekeo lived in compact village-communities, which ranged in size from about 90 residents to 600 or 700. According to legend the ancestors of all "true" Mekeo had come to the adjacent coastal area by sea and established two ancestral villages there. After some generations (and the exhaustion of the local supply of wild pigs) many of them moved farther inland and established other villages, whose populations were increased by immigrants from neighboring societies (who however became thoroughly integrated into Mekeo society with the passage of time). Warfare was frequent both between Mekeo villages and between them and villages of neighboring societies. But the Mekeo were divided into two of what the ethnographer called "tribes," which were "the largest territorial grouping[s] for military cooperation and also the largest unit[s] within which warfare was not supposed to be waged" (but which had no common functions or organization other than that) (Hau'ofa 1 9 8 1 : 45). Although Mekeo traditions contained beliefs about larger commondescent categories (i.e., descent from the residents of the two "ancestral" villages), the largest active type of descent unit was the ngopu, a set of clans that were interrelated, putatively, by common patrilineal descent and that occasionally joined together in multi-village ceremonies. It is not clear what functions the 'clans' (pangua) themselves performed except that most (or all?) of them were divided into 'subclans' (ikupu), which were the most salient of Mekeo units of descent. Subclans were individually named, localized, corporate groups of closely related and collectively active agnates who were usually under the authority of hereditary chiefs. ("There are named descent groups which have no chiefs and have, therefore, been partly absorbed by other groups

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on whose chiefs they depend for their ceremonies and feasts" [ibid: 1 7 0 ] . ) E a c h subclan owned residual rights to a residential section in a village and to garden and foraging lands nearby, and each of them owned an ufu, a large and impressive house that served as a center for village formal activities and for (men's) social life. M o s t subclans were subdivided into patrilineages (oko, 'type' or 'kind'; ninina, 'line' or 'row') of varying degrees of autonomy, but when a certain degree of autonomy had been reached (as will be described) a lineage was formally acknowledged to be an independent subclan. 2 7 T h e focus of our present interest is in the internal structure of subclans and in their relations with other subclans of the same village and elsewhere. The most pervasive features of their internal structure served to express superiority of males over females and of senior over junior males. The basic unit of relationship between senior and junior is the set or pair of real brothers. The eldest has an institutionalized entitlement to respect and deference from his younger brothers, and his judgments should hold if good relations are to prevail among them. His younger brothers expect him to be morally correct in his behavior, and to be impartial in his dealings with them. He represents his sibling unit in its dealings with other groups. By virtue of his seniority he inherits his father's position, house and house site, his father's "friendship" and food exchange ties, and the lion's share of his father's magical knowledge. He is the leader of his brothers, the focal point of the fraternal collective life. He is the steward of the fraternal property the most important item of which is land, and of the family wealth, in particular such items as shells and feathers for bride-price payments. He organizes family weddings and marriage payments. Wealth which flows in from the marriage of sisters (real and father's sisters' daughters) is apportioned under his auspices, or is held in trust by him for the marriages of his younger brothers. He organizes family funerals and minor mortuary ceremonies for the family dead, receives and distributes payments for the death of their father's and of their own married sisters. . . . In practice [the applications of this ideology] vary depending on the character and personality of the eldest brother, and on extant relationships between him and his younger brothers. Nevertheless, the ideology is there and is adhered to or manipulated in some circumstances, (ibid. 1 0 0 - 1 0 2 ) The relevance of this ideology is heightened by marital residence being preponderantly patri-virilocal and within the same section of the same village w a r d — t h a t is, the agnates in question were in close, everyday interaction. (In addition, even their houses were spatially arranged in hierarchical order, from nearest to farthest from the village's center, and from right to left.) This principal of seniority obtained also among the patrilines making up a lineage, and the lineages making up a subclan. 2 8 But while each patriline and lineage had its own (hereditary, senior) headman, formal

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descent-unit offices pertained to the subclan as a whole. Two of these offices had to do with peacetime (i.e., "civilian") matters, the third with making war. While there was a recognized division of labor between civil and war chiefs, the civil chief had the higher authority, as manifested in his power to prevent the outbreak of hostilities or to stop them in their course. In subclans containing only two lineages, there were only two offices, the head of the senior lineage having been civil chief, that of the junior lineage chief of war. In subclans with three lineages, however, there was only one war chief but two civil chiefs, one senior and one junior. And in those containing four lineages both civil and war chieftainships were split into senior and junior offices, each occupied by a lineage head. Beyond that, however, in subclans with more than four lineages the more junior ones were deprived of chiefly roles in subclan affairs, which doubtless led some of them to secede and form subclans of their own. In addition there were in every subclan two kinds of offices, usually hereditary, having to do with magic—one associated with the civil chief, the other with the chief of war. The official duty of the war chiefs associate was to use his mystical powers to harm the enemy and protect his subclanmates from outside attack; the duties of the "civil" magician included inflicting harm upon subclanmates at the behest of the civil chief (for example, in order to punish disobedience). Every village contained a number of subclans, and hence both civil and war chiefs, and in most of them the senior chief of the village's founding subclan occupied the office of village chief. However, except in instances where the office was held by an unusually dominant individual it was largely symbolic and ceremonial; matters affecting the village as a whole (e.g., large-scale warfare and ceremonies) were decided in council by the chiefs of the several subclans. (It is this circumstance that warrants labeling the latter "chiefs" and not merely "headmen.") Three aspects of Mekeo social structure that remain to be summarized are the ufuapie relationship between subclans, and the processes of subclan segmentation and fusion. (While treating Mekeo as a whole under the general heading of "governance" in Melanesia's patrilineal societies— specifically, as an example of a society with hereditary chieftainship—I use Mekeo also as an illuminating example of a society where the principle of descent-unit ranking prevailed.) In addition to the many ties that linked individual members of separate Mekeo subclans, the latter were also interlinked as units through a type of relationship known as ufuapie (literally, 'w/w-on-the-other-side'; a partnership between [descent] units whose symbolic centers were their respective «/«-houses). Partners in an ufuapie relationship interacted in three ways: (1) they performed for each other the ceremony of "charcoal carrying," which was indispensable for release from the restrictions attending mourning; (2) they were dependent upon each other's consent,

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and sometimes material assistance, in the building of new ufu; and (3) any section of a subclan in quest of a larger degree of autonomy was dependent upon an ufuapie partner to formalize the move. To elucidate this last-named process I can do no better than quote from Hau'ofa (who, in turn, uses some data from Seligmann). . . . when a localised descent group expands in number, one of its junior branches, perhaps through the ambitions of its leader, starts to assert a certain degree of autonomy or full independence from its parent group. . . . In order to have its autonomy legitimised the new unit has to select ufuapie partners for itself, for it cannot achieve this without their consent. Normally, the ufuapie it selects are the same as those of its parent group. However, it sometimes occurs that not all or even any of the chiefs of the original ufuapie will comply with its wishes, and when that happens the aspiring group will approach other descent groups with which it has close relationships and will propose that ufuapie ties be established between them. Following this the new group provides a major feast to which it invites the chiefs of its ufuapie. The ceremonial involved is "lengthy and extremely grave" in Seligmann's words. Chiefs from all the surrounding villages attend the ceremony and witness the ufuapie chiefs presenting the leader of the new group with a special lime gourd called fa'onga, formally inducting him into their chiefly rank. At the same time the ufuapie chiefs "acknowledge and make clear to all other pangua ['clans'] the social and political status of the newly constituted unit." If the new unit remains with its parent group then its chief is regarded officially as a junior chief, lopia eke, who defers precedence to the senior chief, lopia fa'a (niau). (ibid. 167)

In all these cases the petitioners were required to compensate their ufuapie partners with a lavish amount of food, mainly pork, and the ethnographer's descriptions of specific occasions reveals that the latter were usually greedy, even extortionate, in their demands. Nevertheless, to achieve and maintain autonomy—to have its own headman publicly recognized to be a chief, and hence qualified to perform the ceremonies, and so forth, which only chiefs were qualified to do—a descent unit had to have at least one ufuapie partner, and some of them had more (and hence that much more prestige and influence in village- or "tribe"-wide affairs). Ufuapie partnerships were prohibited between units of the same village ward and between those belonging to the same clan; most of them were however within the same or nearby villages, and it was perhaps because of this, and not because of any rule favoring such ties, that a large percentage of marriages was between members of descent units linked in ufuapie partnerships. The above from Hau'ofa describes the procedures for descent-unit segmentation and fission. As for the causes leading up to the formal event, they were both demographic (e.g., an increase in the size of the junior branch) and personal (e.g., ambition in the headman of the junior

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branch, dissatisfaction with the leadership of the senior chief, and of course interpersonal strife). Finally, it occasionally happened that a branch, that is, a lineage, of a subclan reversed its progress toward semi- and then complete autonomy by reintegration with the senior branch. The main cause for this reversal seems also to have been demographic—a depletion in membership to the point of being no longer able to mobilize the goods needed to engage independently in ufuapie and other exchanges. The Mekeo provide the best-known example of a New Guinea society with patrilineal descent units headed by hereditary chiefs, but it was by no means the only one. Others included several peoples along the Gulf of Papua and in its hinterland. In addition, in many of those New Guinea societies in which the patrilineal descent units were given to branching, emphasis on birth-order among siblings tended to carry over into seniorjunior relations among branches, and to award at least some advantage to seniority in rivalries for leadership. Societies with two unilineal descent systems The best described example of this type of society is the Ngaing, a people numbering 800-900 who lived inland from the Rai Coast of northeast New Guinea (P. Lawrence 1965). This is a region of sharp mountain ridges separated by deep gorges and swift rivers, most of it covered by rain forest. Its people resided in some twenty well-defined communities, each of which was more or less autonomous politically, but which were interconnected by ties of kinship and trade. Each community consisted of a number (how many is not reported) of named and exogamous patricians, which were divided into an unreported number of lineages of shallow (three to five generations) unnamed patrilineages. Curiously, members of a clan did not acknowledge a putative common ancestor. In addition to its exogamy the Ngaing patrician constituted a unit in four important respects. First, in consequence of virilocal residence its male and unmarried female members lived in close proximity to one another, in a community of their own or as a physically distinct community neighborhood. Second, it was the society's basic landowning corporation and was the exclusive proprietor of certain kinds of ritual goods, for example, a whole or part of a cult house (around which dwellings were built), certain major cult artifacts (e.g., a slit-gong and its distinctive gong beats, gourd trumpets and their distinctive melodies, a sacred water pool), and distinctive ceremonies performed for invoking and honoring deceased members (whose goodwill and assistance were required for the physical and material welfare of living members of the clan). Leadership in a clan had to be achieved—by proven skill in warfare, or gardening, or management of exchange, or, most importantly, by mastery of sacred knowledge and ritual. Even so, such leaders had no com-

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manding judiciary authority over fellow clansmen, and, despite their monopoly of clan leadership statuses little more than persuasive influence outside their own clans. In addition, each Ngaing was a member of a named, exogamous, totemic matrilineage of three to five generations in depth. As residence was virilocal, the members of a matrilineage were scattered among several communities, and sometimes they lived far apart. Besides identification with their totemic animals and plants, matrilineage mates owned nothing in common and (not surprising in view of their wide scatter) engaged in no activities collectively. On the other hand, the sentiments of kinship and mutuality fostered by co-membership in a matrilineage provided a person with cooperative assistance at home and protection abroad. Running swiftly through the questions posed earlier, the Ngaing descent groups may be characterized as follows: Span. In view of their narrow span and highly localized bases each individual patrician constituted only a very small part of the whole population, but this parochialism was offset in part by the extensive spread of each matrilineage (i.e., an individual's patrician connections tended to be narrowly localized but those of his matrilineage quite widespread). Property. The unimportance of matrilineages in this respect was more than offset by the importance of patricians, which among them owned most of the society's highly valued goods. Activities. Patricians as such were not directly involved in subsistence activities but played an important role in marital transactions and in most cult activities. Matrilineages, on the other hand, did not function actively as groups. Marriage. Because of the narrow span of both patricians and matrilineages, the rules prohibiting marriage with a descent-unit mate reduced only slightly a person's choice of spouse. Much more important was the conventional preference (or was it an actual prescription?) for marriage between cross-cousins.2' Localization. Ngaing patricians were localized; Ngaing matrilineages widely dispersed. Governance. P. Lawrence stated that there was "no single political authority over the whole of Ngaing society" (1965: 203). He made no explicit reference to leadership in the society's twenty autonomous communities (masowa, 'bush group') but implied that it consisted of the leaders (eik tandabi, 'important men') of their component patricians. Societies containing two well-institutionalized unilineal descent systems have been reported from Wogeo, an island off New Guinea's northcentral coast (H. Hogbin 1939b, 1970); the Small Islands, off the northeast coast of Malekula (Layard 1942); and nearby northern Ambrym and southern Raga (Lane and Lane 1962). There may have been

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Figure 19.9. Wogeo Island, New Guinea, wooden mask (after H o g b i n l 9 7 0 )

others. In addition there appear to have been societies in Melanesia wherein a well-institutionalized (e.g., named, property-owning, exogamous) patrilineal descent system was accompanied, that is, intersected— by a less-palpable matrilineal one—for example, in western Ambrym and southern Raga (Lane and Lane 1962). And finally, there were doubtless others wherein a well-institutionalized matrilineal descent system was accompanied by the beginnings of a patrilineal one: a situation likely to have been encouraged by a combination of matrilineal descent and a tendency toward virilocal residence, as occurred for example in some parts ofSiuai (Oliver 1955). Before turning to those societies in Melanesia containing ambilineal descent units (called by some writers cognatic or non-unilineal), I direct the readers' attention to one that fits into neither the latter category nor into those already discussed. It is the Mundugumor, a riverine people numbering 1,000-1,500 who lived along a tributary of the Middle Sepik River. The description of their descent-unit organization is tantalizingly brief, and is offered here in its entirety. There is no genuine community in Mundugumor[!]; there are a series of named places in which individuals own land, and in which they reside more or less irregularly, living in different small residential constellations that represent temporary alignments of male kin or of men related by marriage. The society is

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not organized into clans, as is the Arapesh, so that a group of related individuals form a permanent unit, bound together by common blood, a common name, and common interests. Instead Mundugumor social organization is based upon a theory of a natural hostility that exists between all members of the same sex, and the assumption that the only possible ties between members of the same sex are through members of the opposite sex. Instead therefore of organizing people into patrilineal groups or matrilineal groups, in either one of which brothers are bound together in the same group as either their father or their mother's brother, the Mundugumor have a form of organization that they call a rope. A rope is composed of a man, his daughters, his daughters' sons, his daughters' sons' daughters; or if the count is begun from a woman, of a woman, her sons, her sons' daughters, her sons' daughters' sons, and so on. All property, with the exception of land, which is plentiful and not highly valued, passes down the rope; even weapons descend from father to daughter. A man and his son do not belong to the same rope, or respect the same totemic bird or animal. A man leaves no property to his son, except a share in the patrilineally descended land; every other valuable goes to his daughter. Brothers and sisters do not belong to the same rope; one is bound in allegiance to the mother, the other to the father." (M. Mead 1950: 176-177)

There may be other societies in Melanesia with descent units—either groups or categories—just as unusual as those of the Mundugamor, but I shall leave such curiosities to scholars having more taste for them and resume our survey of the region's more common types. Ambilineal Descent Units As there is some inconsistency and ambiguity about this type of descent unit in the ethnographic literature, it is advisable to elucidate its distinguishing features. A descent unit, it will be recalled, is "a social unit—either an interactive group or an indigenously conceptualized category—formed exclusively, or mainly, through descent." Up to now in this chapter we have been concerned with descent units that were unilineal—that is, those made up of members who based (or at least "explained") their affiliation on putative descent from a common ancestor and exclusively through males, or from a common ancestress and exclusively through females (leaving aside the historical question of how such units had been actually formed). Now, in this section we shall be concerned with descent units whose members base their affiliation on common descent from some ancestor or ancestress through males a n d / o r females, without too much concern with the sex gender of the intervening links. (Use of the qualification "too much" is necessitated by the circumstance that in most of the cases to be examined, links through males were given heavier weight than links through females in situations involving use of a unit's property or incumbency in a unit's offices.) I use the word ambilineal for such

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Figure 19.10. Choiseul, Solomon Islands, shell carving. Museum für Völkerkunde, Basle units in place of "non-unilineal" or "cognatic," by which they are labeled in some ethnographies. The first society we shall examine is that of Choiseul Island (northern Solomons), whose structure has been described in a study that has proved to be the pioneering model for analysis of societies of this type. 3 0 Choiseul Island is about 80 miles long and 8 - 2 0 miles wide. Except for a 3,500-foot-high mountain in the center most of it consists of sharp ridges and plateaus, averaging one to two thousand feet in altitude. Outside of gardens, groves, and secondary growth areas in fallow, it is covered by high canopied rain forest. The pre-European population of 8,000 to 10,000 was distributed fairly evenly over the whole of it except directly on the coasts, which were vulnerable to raiding by aggressive, headhunting warriors from New Georgia and other nearby islands. Communities were located mostly along the tops of ridges and consisted of small hamlets grouped into neighborhoods. On occasion (e.g., when war threatened or when holding a large feast) the residents of a whole community built and congregated into more concentrated and betterprotected settlements, but returned to their hamlets after the threat subsided or the feast ended. A network of paths facilitated intercommunity warfare and peaceful interaction as well; and while the island was

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divided into six language areas (some writers classify them as dialects of a single language) the whole population has been described as having been "culturally uniform" (Scheffler 1963: 131). The basic food crop everywhere was taro, supplemented by yams and bananas; pigs were raised and used mainly for feasts and other forms of exchange. Shell "money" served as an object of exchange and a measure of wealth, more so than in most other societies of Melanesia. The basic subsistence unit was the family household, more often extended than nuclear in composition; some were widely separated but most were grouped into small hamlets. Beyond these the most important entities of Choiseulese society were territorial estates, ambilineal descent categories, and the aforesaid residential communities. 31 The Choiseulese apply the same term, sinangge, both to "estates" and to "ambilineal descent categories," as well as to "personal kindreds" and in fact to any type of collectivity of kinsmen; while that is an interesting and significant circumstance in itself, it does not assist in our understanding of differences among these various entities. The whole island was divided into some 150 to 200 major estates, each one named and fairly clearly bounded (by ridges, streams, notable rock outcrops, etc.). They varied widely in size; four of those plotted by Scheffler ranged from 3.5 to 10.5 square miles, and averaged 7.2. Evidently, each major estate contained numerous more or less permanent groves of useful trees (e.g., ivory nut palms for house thatch; stands of coconut palms, and canarium almond trees), which were used, more or less exclusively, by individuals or small units of kin. Most of the undivided parts of any estate were, however, open to more or less temporary use (i.e., for gardening, fishing, collecting) by any and all persons domiciled there. In addition, each estate contained a number of shrines, where communication took place between the living residents and spirits, including locally associated deities and ancestral ghosts. Each major estate was identified with a named ambilineal descent unit, a category composed of all persons generally recognized to be "descendants" (including adoptees), through either or both parents, of a particular ancestor who in most cases had lived no earlier than six to seven generations preceding the oldest living members. In his sample of sixteen of those units, H. Scheffler found them to contain an average of about 164 members (range 40 to 600), all of whom claimed rights of varying weight in the estate. Those having "strongest" claims were the popondo valeke ('born of men'), persons tracing descent entirely through males to the unit's apical ancestor. Those having next strongest claims were the popondo nggole ('born of women'), persons whose descent from the apical ancestor included one or more females. Complicating this distinction somewhat was the factor of residence: a person 'born of women' residing on the estate had stronger claims than one residing elsewhere.

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Moreover, since a man could not claim jural paternity of a child unless he had paid bride-price for the child's mother, in cases where it had not been paid the child had no rights in that man's estate, but stronger than usual rights in the estate of his mother—a situation that sometimes accompanied uxorilocal marital residence. Marital choice was governed not by descent-unit membership but by closeness of consanguinity, marriage having been prohibited between first cousins and, in the views of some Choiseulese, between second cousins as well. Most of Choiseul's descent units were segmented. In that part of the island studied most intensively by Scheffler, four of the sixteen he surveyed were not; the other twelve contained an average of seven to eight segments each (range two to twenty plus), and in each of these the (genealogically) senior one, called the "trunk" (or "straight," or "base") was most important in that its senior member (by primogenitural succession) had some privileges and authorities over the unit as a whole. The remaining segments of each descent unit were not arranged in any comprehensive hierarchical order. It should be emphasized that all of the units just discussed were categories—and overlapping ones at that. Every person "belonged to" (in Choiseulese 'kept' or 'looked after') two or more of these units but in most cases was identified principally with only one, which in the case of most men was the one on whose estate they resided. Since most marriages were virilocal—not, it would appear, by hard-and-fast rule but by husband's choice—women usually resided away from their natal homes and, with exceptions, at some distance from their principal (i.e., their father's) estate. Turning now to Choiseul's residential communities (what Scheffler calls "local descent groups," or "ramages"), these consisted of one or more closely neighboring hamlets united under the authority of a batu (translated by Scheffler as "manager"). The average population of such communities is not specified but appears to have ranged between about twenty to a hundred or more; in any case their numbers varied greatly over time, depending, for example, upon the fortunes of war and the drawing powers of individual headmen. The community was the basic unit for fighting, feast giving, and large-scale exchanging. It was also a religious congregation; each had one or more tutelary deities and ancestral ghosts, at whose shrines the parish priest (sometimes but not necessarily its batu) offered first fruits and other sacrifices in return for general benevolence and for aid in specific enterprises. (Associated with such spirits were also "totemic" plants and animals, which community members were expected to "respect" in various ways, but which were not related to them by mythical genealogical ties.) The residents of a community were of several recognized types. The

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most privileged were the kapakapa ('core'), that is, the 'born of men' members of the descent-unit owning the estate on which the community was located. (Ideally, and in most actual cases, a descent unit's 'core' resided on its own estate; warfare sometimes scattered them but usually only temporarily.) The rights of such persons were "primary" and "strong"—that is, they "took an active" voice in community affairs, such as disposition of land use, exchanges with other communities, participation in vengeance actions, and control over the unit's hoard of shellmoney heirlooms. "Secondary" status in a community was ascribed to two classes of persons: those who belonged to the proprietary descent unit by birth but who were 'born of women' (i.e., descended from the founding ancestor through at least one female link), and those attached to the descent unit by adoption or by capture. According to the ethnographer, "Secondary status obliges them to 'keep their peace,' which is to say that they must abide by the decision of primary members and never become obtrusive in group [i.e., community] affairs. Only so long as they do so are they welcome in the group. One who became presumptuous— and many do—may be reminded of his status, be told to lay quiet or made to feel unwelcome" (ibid. 101). Under certain circumstances, however, "secondary" members became "primary," for example, if all of the "primary" members died. And in the case of a community branch founded by a woman (see below), its members were "primary" in matters concerning that branch but "secondary" vis-a-vis the community as a whole. All other residents of a community had only "contingent" rights in its properties and affairs; they included the spouses of "primary" and "secondary" members (i.e., if they were not "primary" or "secondary" members themselves) and other affines. While such persons may have participated fully in community affairs—which, as residents, they inevitably did —their rights were conditional. The batu of a community exercised his authority in several ways. He was primary custodian of its lands and shell-money heirlooms; the ultimate decision-maker over its collective actions (but not necessarily leader in the activities themselves); its representative in dealings with other communities (including sponsor and principal financier of larger-than-average community feasts); and principal link with the community's tutelar spirits (including the ghosts of former batu, who continued to influence community affairs). He was usually the senior, by primogenitural succession, of the community's "primary" members, but he had to be more than that in order to exercise authority singly and effectively. He had to exhibit the kinds of skills that served to enhance his personal prestige and to maintain the loyalty of followers, for example, accumulating wealth (in pigs and in shell money) and using it for feasts and for support-winning "loans," mitigating and maintaining intercommunity alliances that

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served to strengthen security—in other words, by some of the kinds of actions that characterized "achieved" leadership in many other Melanesian societies already described. In some communities the ascriptively designated batu was able to fill these roles, but in others he held only titular rights (including some of the ritual deference that accompanied them), while active community authority was exercised by another, who had achieved it in competition with other "primary members." The shell money, kesa, just referred to consisted of sets (usually nine) of thin-walled cylindrical beads made from giant-clam shell; according to Scheffler's informants, kesa "was not made by humans." It came in several denominations (in terms of size and relative valuation), and was of two functionally different types: "working kesa" used for ordinary exchange, and "large kesa" used for socially important exchanges. As already mentioned, each community had its own hoard, which was supposed to be used for transactions important to the community as a whole; it was in the custody of the batu and was hidden away in a place known only to him and a few other "primary" members (i.e., it was liable to theft by outsiders). In addition, individual Choiseulese also owned kesa (of both types) of their own, having acquired it by inheritance or exchange (or theft). There were several ways to acquire kesa through exchange: by raising and selling pigs; by bride-price; by compensation for injury suffered while assisting someone (e.g., during work parties or warfare); by sale of a dependent into something approaching slavery; by hire as a paid killer; and by coercive gift giving (i.e., making an unsolicited gift to someone in expectation of a larger countergift). Acquiring kesa was evidently the consuming passion of many men, and in doing so they were assisted by certain kinds of spirits (who, for example, revealed where community or individually owned hoards were hidden). T h e C h o i s e u l e s e talk as t h o u g h kesa w e r e the be-all a n d end-all o f p e r s o n a l s i g n i f i c a n c e . A m a n w i t h o u t kesa w a s a " n o b o d y , " a " p o o r " m a n , n o t just peke o r " w e a k , " b u t sarakutu, " w e a k " in the m o s t d e r o g a t i v e s e n s e , w i t h o u t a relatively i n d e p e n d e n t m e a n s o f livelihood a n d w i t h o u t d e f e n s e , p r e y t o all, a m a n w h o h a d t o b e " f e d " by o t h e r s . A descent g r o u p [ c o m m u n i t y ] w i t h o u t kesa w a s in a similar p o s i t i o n . O n e with kesa w a s w e a l t h y a n d , t h e r e f o r e , p o w e r f u l , c a p a b l e o f s e l f - d e f e n c e , n o t t o b e " d o w n e d " by o t h e r s a n x i o u s t o e x a c t revenge o r to " e l e v a t e " t h e m s e l v e s by t a k i n g a d v a n t a g e o f the w e a k n e s s e s o f o t h e r s . A g r o u p ' s f a t e is seen a s h a v i n g been closely b o u n d u p with the w a x i n g a n d w a n ing of its w e a l t h in . . . (ibid. 2 0 7 )

A man acquired some fame from his ability to accumulate kesa, but as in many other societies of Melanesia, influence-gaining prestige and the following usually attracted by it came about mainly from using such money in praiseworthy ways, especially in kelo-type exchanges. These

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latter resembled the muminai feasts of the Siuai on nearby Bougainville (see chapter 12), but were even more explicitly competitive. As in the case of the Siuai leader (mumi), a batu's followers themselves benefitted from his successes not only in terms of reflected glory but also from the increased security provided by association with him. 32 The ambitions and actions of batu are relevant not only to an understanding of community governance and of intercommunity relations but of other dimensions of community structure as well. As mentioned earlier, there were times when all of a community's residents congregated in a single, nucleated settlement (e.g., for mutual protection). Ordinarily, however, they lived in hamlets dispersed about their estate, and over time the residents of each hamlet became more and more distinctive as they concentrated on their own affairs and exploited their own part of estate land. The process was a gradual one, and perhaps most branch hamlets remained closely associated with their community's "original" hamlet group; while managing their own internal affairs they remained under the authority of the "original" group in dealings with outsiders. Many others, however, became independent of the "original" group, in terms of control over their portions of estate lands and of relations with other communities. This usually came about as the result of the wishes of a branch's leading men, especially its batu; and the segmentation was formalized by presentation by the branch members of a kelo-type feast (including a gift of kesa) to the batu of the "original" group. Thereafter, the relations between the formally separated branch and the "original" group (and the latter's other, still-dependent, branches) tended to remain amicable and mutually supportive, but that was due to the sentiments engendered by close ties of kinship and not to any residual authority residing in the batu of the "original" group. (In the ethnographer's words, the latter "acted largely as a 'keeper of the peace' between them and not as their 'boss' " (ibid. 195). In this way many estates came to have two or more (autonomous) communities within their borders, and while one of them remained known as "original" (i.e., the one whose core members were members of the truncal segment of the estate's proprietary descent unit), there was no overall correspondence between an estate's several residential divisions in terms of genealogical order of segmentation or of relative political power. For, no matter how "junior" a branch may have been in terms of its core members' genealogical position within its overall descent unit, it could have become, and sometimes was, more powerful politically than any other branch, as a result of demographic vicissitudes and of the leadership of an outstandingly ambitious and successful batu. But such intergroup relations were never static for very long. Moreover, the rises (and the falls) in the political fortunes of Choiseul's communities were facilitated by the composition of the society's descent units. Because

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Figure 19.11. New Georgia, Solomon Islands, wooden canoe prow. Museum für Völkerkunde, Basle most individuals had entitlements of some kind in two or more estates, shifts in residence required fewer adjustments (such as "adoption" or Active invention) than was the case in many unilineally organized societies —provided of course the "hosts" were agreeable to the newcomers' claims. Thus, an ambitious and successful batu was able to attract followers from elsewhere with greater "institutionalized" facility than could his counterparts in, say, Siuai or Mae Enga. And, when his fortunes began to decline, it was easier for his disgruntled followers to move elsewhere. Several societies with descent units resembling those just described were located on the Island of Malaita, some 275 miles southeast of Choiseul. 33 While the resemblances were in some respects very close,

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there were enough differences among them and between them and Choiseul, to warrant some attention to at least two of their most salient features, namely, those having to do with composition and governance. Composition. A difficulty is experienced in comparing these societies' descent units because some of the ethnographers do not distinguish precisely enough between common-descent categories and residential communities, especially in terms of land tenure, the most important aspect of their corporateness. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the Malaita societies differed among themselves in their relative weighting of paternity and maternity. One extreme in this regard were the To'ambaita, about whom H . Hogbin wrote: "The members of a [To'ambaita] district group, [community] . . . though able to trace their descent from a common ancestor, regard ties through males and ties through females as of equal importance. . . . a person may go and live in any of the areas where an ancestor [is buried]—an ancestor, that is, from whom he is descended directly through males or through males and females" (1939a: 29). But further along Hogbin reported that persons related to oneself patrilaterally were referred to as "a planted tree" in contrast to matrilateral kin, who were likened to the branches and twigs of a planted tree, which is said to indicate that "the natives are predominantly patrilineal in sentiment" (ibid.). H. Ross described the Baegu as having been not only patrilineally biased in sentiment but in practice as well. 34 Baegu territory was divided into some sixteen or so districts (lo lofaa), each the property—estate—of a maximal descent unit ('ae bara), which Ross called a patrilineage. Like its Choiseul counterpart, each Baegu 'ae bara had a name, which was the same as that of its estate. It was also totemic (i.e., associated with a natural species) and agamous (neither exogamous nor endogamous, marriage having been allowed between anyone no closer related than second cousins). And, as on Choiseul, sacrifices to the ghosts of important former members were made at shrines located in sacred groves on the estate, in the belief that their goodwill was essential for the welfare of living 'ae bara members, especially for the continuing fertility of their estate. Only agnatic ancestors, however, were buried (and worshipped) on an 'ae bara's estate. And Ross stated, "Exact reckoning of patrilineal descent is important for establishing connections with the ancestors and therefore with sources of supernatural power" (1973: 138). Yet, he added, "a person may by right garden or live on land properly 'belonging' to his cognatic or uterine kinsmen, the justification being that both parties share a common ancestor who was indeed of the patrilineage holding residual title" (ibid. 167; italics added). Moreover, whereas an agnatic descendant is described as having had an obligation to sacrifice to a particular ancestor, any descendant had a right to do so—and benefit from the blessings thereby obtained. So, just as the "cognatic" (i.e., ambilin-

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eal) To'ambaita are acknowledged to have been more "patrilineal" in ideology, so are the "patrilineal" Baegu said to end up being "cognatic" (ibid. 168). An even more emphatic emphasis on patrilineality has been attributed to the Baegu's neighbors, the Fataleka, who are described as having been "organized in eight localized clans which trace descent through the male line from Ava [the mythical founding ancestor of all Fataleka]" (Russell 1950: 2). In fact, however, while there may have been some differences among all these societies of Malaita in the relative weight attached to patrilineality both in ideology and in practice, it seems likely that none of them differed widely from the neighboring Kwaio, as described by Roger Keesing in the following admirably lucid passage: 1. Agnatic descendants of the founding ancestor of a fanua [descent-unit estate] are entitled to exercise primary rights in the corporation and to be primary members of the associated descent group. The fanua to which a person is agnatically related is fulina "his true estate" and his rights there are primary whether or not he has activated or maintained them. Primary rights entitle him to garden there for profit, to participate in certain first fruit rituals, to have a say in alienation, and to receive a share of the profits. 2. The sons and grandsons of female members have a right to assume primary rights, but they can secure them only through prolonged residence and use of the estate (which implies at least partial deactivation of rights over the paternal estate). When this happens, the female link is treated as if it were a male link for most but not all purposes (not, for example, ritual succession). This can, though rarely does, happen through two successive female links. 3. The descendants of other women, who have not strengthened their matrilateral rights, fall into a category of nonagnates who hold secondary interests in the estate. They are entitled by virtue of nonagnatic descent from the founder to live and garden on the estate. 4. When priority rankings of rights must be made among nonagnates, they are determined by the number of descent links to the closest past primary owner. The closer the genealogical linkage to a person with primary rights (mother or grandmother), the stronger the secondary rights (other things being equal). If agnates die out or cease to exercise primary rights, those nonagnates with the strongest descent entitlement legitimately assume them. (1970: 756757) A situation very similar to that of the Kwaio prevailed among the Langalanga, who occupied the small artificial islets off Malaita's western coast, and whose role in the manufacture of shell money was described in chapter 12. Matthew Cooper described their descent units as follows: All persons who claim descent through any combinations of links from a founding ancestor are members of a descent category or fera. Segments of a descent category, known as fuiwale or akwala afu, comprise all who claim

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descent from an ancestor who founded a branch shrine. Fuiwale, as so defined, are often co-extensive with descent groups, by which I mean a collection of individuals who not only claim common descent but also act upon that claim. Because agnates have stronger rights than non-agnates in descent-group decision-making, and because of the patrivirilocal residence rule and the effects of propinquity on marriage choices and settlement patterns, Langalanga descent groups often resemble small-scale localized patrilineages. As Keesing has pointed out for Kwaio, however, contextual definition of status makes it possible for Langalanga to act without confusion as members of several descent groups, in all of which they may have rights and obligations. ( 1 9 7 2 : 1 1 3 )

Governance. In these Malaita societies leadership roles were of two kinds: (1) those specifically associated with descent-unit categories—the land-master and the priest; and (2) those associated more with the residential group—the war leader and the manager. Not all of these societies distinguished the four roles separately, and even in those that did one person could occupy two or more. Role individuation seems to have developed most highly among the Baegu,35 where all four were separably conceptualized and, in some instances, performed by four separate men: land master (wane inotoo, 'in the middle', 'glorious', or 'renowned'). An incumbent of this title supervised the distribution of use-rights over his descent-unit's estate and was its most highly respected member. The office was strictly hereditary, having been held by the unit's senior member, the eldest member of its agnatically senior line. Ordinarily land masters did not act as "executioners" and are described as bearing themselves "with the quiet, aloof dignity of those who expect deference as their birthright" (Ross 1978: 12). priest (wane nifoa, 'man who offers prayers'). The duties of such men were to officiate at offerings to a descent-unit's tutelary spirits, including especially to its ancestors. Ideally a priest was succeeded by his eldest son, but since knowledge and demeanor were essential for effective performance of the office, it was sometimes awarded to someone else, by consensus of the descent unit's leading men. war leader (wane ramo, 'strong man'). Such men served not only as commanders in warfare but as public executioners, or privately hired killers. Again, ramo was ideally an inherited office, but it was sometimes usurped by another if the heir were non-bellicose. manager (wane baito, 'Big-man').36 This role was the closest Baegu counterpart of the Siuai mumi and of the stereotype New Guinea Highlands "Big-man." "There are de facto neighborhood leaders, who organize communal work projects, to whom people turn for help, and who mobilize and articulate public opinion" (ibid: 13). And as with their stereotype counterparts they usually attained their position through personal achievement, assisted, of course, by relatives. They were characteristically "gregarious, aggressive men of action."

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The Baegu also singled out the more influential of the above with special titles. For example, a priest qualified to officiate at several shrines— that is, for more than one branch of a descent unit—was a "Big Priest" (or "Head of Prayer"), and a manager whose influence and authority extended over a whole district was wane sarea ('to feed or foster') or wane saungia ('to kill'). Among other societies, the Fataleka most closely approached the Baegu with respect to the individuation of governance roles. At the other extreme, the To'ambaito, Kwaio, and Langalanga seem to have institutionalized only those of priest and manager. And while the Choiseulese institutionalized three of the roles—land master, priest, and manager—it was not unusual for one person to hold two of them or even all three. An unusual (for Melanesia) feature of some of the above roles was their institutionalization as offices—as positions well established enough to require incumbency. This was the case mainly with the roles of land master and priest, which in some Malaita societies involved formal rites of investiture, along with insignia of office. The highest development of such practices occurred among the Fataleka, in connection with two offices of the Rakwane, which was the society's senior descent unit. (Since legend held the whole Fataleka populace to be descendants of a single ancestor, they considered themselves to be members of a single maximal descent unit over which these two offices were paramount.) One, the aofia, was largely a ceremonial office and its incumbent (whose insignia consisted of 100 strings of shell money and 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 dogs teeth) was the object of immense deference. The other, the taniota, was considered the keystone of the whole society . . . "converting it from a number of [separate units] into a composite structure" (Russell 1950: 8). The taniota was a man of peace and carried no weapon but his walking club, and wherever he went he was accompanied by three bodyguards, who wore distinctive ornaments of many kinds. T h e taniota decided when to go to war and instructed the ramo [war leader] and the nwane inoto [master] accordingly. H e had the power of decision for all the Fataleka people and was the intermediary between them and other peoples. H e adjudicated disputes between clans and could overrule the decision of the nwane inoto. His authority was absolute within the system of clans and his edicts were obeyed as if they were indeed sanctioned by the akalo [ancestral spirits] to w h o m they felt indebted for his leadership" (ibid. 1 0 )

Societies with ambilineal descent units have also been identified in the Massim area, on New Britain, and on New Guinea. Only enough about them will be reported here to indicate how widely they differed among themselves and from those already described. Among the Molima, of Fergusson Island (Massim area), the ambilin-

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eal descent units (i.e., categories) averaged about nine to ten generations in depth, and a person was entitled to membership in any of those to which he (or she) could trace genealogical links; however, most persons tended to stress entitlements in only five or six of them—except when they had need for others (e.g., for assistance in preparing a large mortuary feast), at which times they invoked previously neglected links (Chowning 1962). Here as on Choiseul and Malaita the descent units were individually named and totemic, but appear to have involved less emphasis on ancestral cults—hence on shrines—as focuses for land holdings, and on ancestor worship as a means of implementing descent-unit membership. Also, whereas on Choiseul and Malaita the descent units were agamous, the Molima expressed a preference for descent-unit endogamy. But perhaps the most salient difference between Molima and the ambilineally organized societies previously considered was its matrilineal " b i a s " with respect to rights in descent-unit land. The basic residential unit of Molima society was the hamlet, which was at the same time the property and focal center of a separate descent unit, the place where the unit's putative founder had resided. While all persons entitled to membership in the unit had some right to reside in the hamlet and to garden in its associated lands, the strongest of such rights passed through women and not men. According to Ann Chowning, residents who had inherited their rights through their mothers were called "owners," whereas those receiving rights through their father-members were called "boundary men," and their presence in the hamlet was at the discretion of the "owners"—the exact opposite of the situation that prevailed on Choiseul and Malaita. 3 7 Another society possessing cognatic descent units was located at Mówenhafen, on the shoreline of southeastern N e w Britain. The only published description of the society (Todd 1 9 3 4 - 3 5 ) is very brief and provides little information about its descent units except that they were named, "quasi-totemic," landowning corporations, which played no part in marital choice. Marital residence was not prescribed, and men tended to congregate residentially, around prominent "headmen." Whatever sexgender bias there may have been in the allocation of property rights among descent-unit mates is not reported. Turning now to the New Guinea mainland, cognatic descent units have been identified in several societies there: notably the Telefolmin (Upper Sepik), the Garia (Madang hinterland), the Huli (southern Highlands), and the Kunimaipa. (Descent units of the same type have been reported for the Koiari of Papua, but the data on them are scant.) The published description of the Telefolmin descent units is brief. T h e k i n s h i p s t r u c t u r e is c o g n a t i c [i.e., a m b i l i n e a l ] . D e s c e n t is irrelevant in m o s t c o n t e x t s , b u t the filiative tie is i m p o r t a n t . A m a n h a s full rights in t h e vil-

Figure 19.12. Tami Island, Huon Gulf, New Guinea, mask. Field Museum, Chicago

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lage to which his father or his mother belonged. Women also retain membership in their natal villages and may exercise their land rights there even if they marry away. Adult immigrants, including affines, are welcomed without discrimination. They are freely given good land, which passes indisputably and with full rights to their children. However, although it is easy to transfer village membership, men rarely do so. Because of the preference for intravillage marriage, for most men the village comprises cognates and affines who were previously cognates. This produces a strongly solidary unit, a friendship network which people are unwilling to forsake. In one parish [community], Kialikmin, 83 men (98 percent) are birth members of their village of residence; only two men born there live elsewhere. Both the village and the parish [tribe?] are political units. Members gather for religious and initiation ceremonies, for social feasts and dances and, formerly, for warfare and communal gardening near enemy territory. Tribal unity is expressed at the most important ceremonies and in large-scale warfare. In all these contexts where there is a need for coordinated activity, Big Men take charge. (Craig 1 9 6 9 : 1 7 6 - 1 7 7 )

The Garia, who numbered about 2,500, inhabited some low mountain ranges 20-30 miles southwest of the modern town of Madang (P. Lawrence 1955,1971b). Their ambilineal descent units were only four generations deep (beyond the oldest living member) and hence quite small and narrow in span. It would appear that the only things shared by members of such units as members were land holdings and a distinctive name. Like those of Choiseul and Malaita the Garia descent units were agnatically biased, having consisted of a core of members, the swaibopi, who traced descent from the founder exclusively through males, and a fringe of secondary members, the uibopi, whose links with the founder included at least one female. The sawaibopis rights to the land associated with the unit (which consisted of several non-contiguous tracts) are described as being "corporate rights of guardianship over [it, together with its] agricultural ritual secrets" (P. Lawrence 1971a: 78). The uibopi also had userights over such land, but not in perpetuity. In fact their membership in the descent unit tended to lapse after a few generations—which did not however render them landless, since they would have been sawaibopi in other units elsewhere. The small size and mobility of residential hamlets, together with the dispersion of a descent unit's tracts of land, meant that even its sawaibopi did not habitually reside or work together; and unlike their Choiseul and Malaita counterparts they did not join together for ancestor worship or any other kind of ceremony (ibid). The Huli of the New Guinea southern Highlands numbered about 30,000-40,000 people who spoke the same language (though several dialects) and who believed themselves interrelated by common descent from a legendary ancestor of that name (Glasse 1965, 1968). In this sense their whole society was a single, huge ambilineal descent unit, but one that was not unified in any other way. Instead, the largest type of

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descent unit having the characteristics of a group, that is, a community, was one whose members numbered on average about 100. By some other Highlands' standards, population density was relatively low—about 20 persons per square mile—and garden land relatively abundant. A Huli community (hamigini) was a named, landowning corporation, whose members considered themselves descendants of the unit's putative founder, and who were ideally expected to settle disputes among themselves peaceably and to defend one another against outside attack. Each community was divided into a number of named genealogical segments, whose members held exclusive, long-term use-rights over a part of the community's territory and who were expected to fight together as a unit and to share in paying or receiving the indemnities attending war. Both communities as wholes and community subdivisions sponsored religious rituals of various kinds (e.g., boys' maturation rites, fertility rites), and although some of these were addressed to ancestral spirits, they seem not to have resembled very closely the ancestor-focused religious rites of the Malaitans, in which whole descent units functioned as priest-led congregations. As with most individuals in the other ambilineally structured societies we have examined, a Huli had entitlements to membership in several communities, but the Huli differed from the others in at least two important ways: in the finer distinctions that they drew among those having entitlement to membership; and in the multiplicity of memberships that many persons actually exercised. Like the Choiseulese and Malaitans the Huli distinguished persons having entitlements based entirely on patrilineal descent (tene damene) from those in which at least one of the links with the apical ancestor had been through a female (yamuwine). The Huli, however, distinguished several yamuwine subtypes: ainyia damene (offspring of a female tene damene), aqua damene (offspring of an ainyia damene), aquanani damene (offspring of an aqua damene), and aquaneli (persons whose female link to the descent unit was more than four generations removed). No information is provided about how these distinctions among yamuwine figured in the weight given to a person's entitlement, but it is perhaps justifiable to suppose that they were labels for some kind of distinctions in entitlement (and were not invented by the Huli merely to confound the inquiring ethnographer!). The broader distinction, between agnates (tene damene) and nonagnate cognates in general (yamuwine), was reflected in three ways: first, in certain kinds of descent-unit ceremonies, wherein agnates and nonagnates played complementary roles; second, in the circumstance that in any one community there was a higher proportion of agnates than of nonagnate cognates; and third, in the use of a descent-unit's land holdings, wherein agnate members tended to possess rights over larger areas than did their nonagnate co-members.

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Many persons had entitlements to membership in some descent units that they never attempted to effectuate—a characteristic, it seems, of all societies of this kind. More so than most, however, many individual Huli maintained active membership in two or more descent units—and not just sequentially but simultaneously as well, active membership having consisted of supporting the unit in warfare, contributing to its indemnities, and participating in its ritual—whether residing in its territory or not. A terminological distinction was made between resident members ("long-time member") and nonresidents ("outside member), and also between those residents who were "stable" (who lived there permanently) and those who moved about from one unit to another ("those who come and go"); however, the use-rights of all these are said not to have differed provided that they fulfilled the above-mentioned requirements of membership. It was not unusual for the wives of a polygynous man to reside permanently in separate communities—in some cases where they were born. Most communities also included affines other than the members' wives—for example, cognates of present and former spouses, and igity yango, 'unrelated friends'. Huli communities were linked together, on the basis of putative common descent, into named districts of two to eight communities each, whose members congregated on occasion to perform rituals. In addition, the society may be described as having been divided into patrilineages, each of which consisted of the known agnatic descendants of any community's male founder. Such lineages, however, functioned only to proscribe marriage among each one's members (Glasse 1965: 29; 1968: 49). Little information is provided on Huli governance other than to identify it as having been mainly of the New Guinea so-called "Big-man" type. In any case, the descent units appear not to have been hierarchically structured along lines of ascriptive seniority, such as was the case—up to a point—in Choiseul and Malaita. For our final example of ambilineal descent units, we turn again to the Kunimaipa, the mountain-dwelling New Guinea people whose dance-village exchange system was described in chapter 12. To recall them briefly: they lived in small widely scattered hamlets, and were given to moving from one to another every few years, especially upon completion of their hamlet's sponsorship of a dance-village ceremony. The population was thin and stable, and land was plentiful for their gardening (mainly sweet potatoes) and silviculture (mountain pandanas and areca nuts)—so plentiful that rights to own and use it are described as having been "flexible" (M. McArthur 1971: 156). The Kunimaipa acknowledged their membership in named descent units, kapot, but had no myths to explain the origin of them and little knowledge of genealogy beyond the grandparental generation (of adults). In the words of their ethnographer, "Some [persons] presume

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they [the kapot] are named after founding ancestors, but maintain they do not know—'My mother told me I am an X person but did not say who X was,' they say" (ibid: 158). Because most couples resided virilocally most of their lives, children tended to identify more closely with members of their fathers' units, but not exclusively, inasmuch as most couples also spent some years living with the wives' brothers as well. In fact, besides having a name the only distinguishing feature of a descent unit was ownership of a tract of forests which had value mainly as a source of building materials, pandanas fruit, and a little game. In practice, however, even these estates remained open to exploitation by non-members of the proprietary descent unit; as with garden land, outsiders were usually free to cultivate it unless they were outright enemies of the owners. Ego-centered kinship Up to now this survey of Melanesian kinship has been concerned with membership in ancestor-focused units: in categories and interactive groups of persons who based their relationships on (historical or fictive) common descent. I shift now to another perspective, to consider kinship from the viewpoint of an individual. Much less space will be devoted to this perspective, not because it was less "important" (indeed, for the average Melanesian the converse was probably true), but for other reasons (with which some anthropologists will doubtless disagree). In the first place, descent units are less protean, more palpable, easier to classify, than ego-centered kinship. Second, in perhaps most Melanesian societies there was a closer correspondence between descent units and political units than between the latter and ego-centered arrays of kin. 38 We can best begin this section by restating what was said earlier, that in all Melanesian societies some social importance was attached by its members to relationships with both mother and father (or mother's spouse), as well as to relationships traced through each of them—including relationships with their parents' siblings and parents and other offspring. But before shifting our perspective it should be noted that there were some societies in Melanesia in which there were no ancestor-focused common-descent kin units: in which the ego-centered arrays were the principal forms used to classify kinsmen for the purpose of defining interactive, operational groups. An example of such were the Kiman, the swamp-dwelling people of Frederik Hendrik Island (southwestern New Guinea), whose method of time reckoning was mentioned in chapter 8 and whose male maturation rites were described in chapter 14. In addition to his household and to his community (which contained various assortments of kinsmen and affines), the kinship units of most importance to a Kiman were his jaeentjwe and his tjipente (Serpenti 1965). A person's jaeentjwe consisted of all of his (or her) "siblings"—full, half,

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adoptive, and classificatory (i.e., the offspring of his parents' jaeentjwe). Jaeentjwe were expected to assist one another in gardening and canoe making, to exchange food on festive occasions, to support one another in times of crisis, and if of opposite sex to forgo mutual sex and marriage. A person's tjipente (literally, 'man-tree') was a much larger category, having consisted of both of a person's parents and all of his grandparents and children, along with all of his own and their respective jaeentjwe. Some members of this category of kinfolk usually attended a person's feasts and participated in other critical events of his life. Evidently, both jaeentjwe and tjipente were categories of kinfolk, and the boundaries of their memberships were indefinite. Nevertheless, certain specific kinds of behavior were expected from all of them. Moreover, some members of each category occasionally performed in the ways expected, but the sizes of those interactive groups or gatherings varied widely, as did their actual composition. Thus, because of the preponderance of virilocal residence, a man's jaeentjwe helpers usually included more patrilateral than matrilateral "siblings." In societies with unilineal descent units it goes without saying that in the course of a person's lifetime, he (or she) had something to do with kinfolk other than those belonging to his own descent unit. 39 Thus, in any of Melanesia's matrilineally organized societies, a person inevitably interacted with members of his father's matrilineage, his father's father's matrilineage, his mother's father's matrilineage, and so forth. However, societies differed widely in the ways they categorized the kinfolk not belonging to a person's own unilineal descent unit, and with that went differences in the behavioral norms laid down for each category. In some cases a general term (and its corresponding behavior norms) was applied to each of the related descent units as a whole—for example, " 'myfather's-unit', whose members I must support in war." In other societies the terms and their corresponding behavior norms were limited to specific classes of such kin (e.g., " 'my fathers' to whom I must act in an X kind of manner; and 'my-father's-mothers' to whom I must act in a Y kind of manner"). Other ways in which the region's unilineal societies differed in this realm of kinship have to do with the numerical size of their categories of nonuterine (or nonagnatic) kin, and with the kinds of behavior assigned to them. In some matrilineal societies, for example, the persons recognized to be one's patrilateral kin included only the father's very closest lineage mates, while in others the boundaries of the category were indefinitely wide. And in some patrilineal societies, marriage was proscribed with any of one's designated matrilateral kin, while in other patrilineal societies marriage with some matrilateral kin, however defined, was permitted or even preferred. There was however one feature shared by most of these societies with

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respect to ego-centered kinship, and that was the part played by all of a person's closer kinfolk in connection with his or her major transition rites. Deaths in particular, but in many places marriages as well, brought together the principals' kinfolk of all types, and even in the most unilineally biased of societies, the principals' nonagnatic (or nonuterine) kinfolk were usually assigned specific parts to play. Affinity In many of Melanesia's societies all individuals known to a person were identifiable as kin of one or another kind so that marriage between any two of them served not to create a relationship between them, but only to transform it (i.e., from consanguine to affine, or from consanguine to affinal consanguine). Even in the larger societies, whose members were too numerous and widely dispersed for the nature of all dyadic kinship ties to be known (or invented extempore), it was possible, when circumstances required, to assign one or more specific kinship terms to any pair of individuals on the basis of their known membership in descent units. In other words, most marriages were between kin, hence most rules regarding whom one could or could not marry had to do with kinship. But in view of the space already devoted to the topic, in the preceding part of this chapter and in chapter 1 4 , 1 will say nothing more of it here except to call attention to two widely prevalent proscriptions, namely: that while most of the region's unilineal descent units were ideally exogamous, the ideal tended to lose weight with the widening of a unit's span; and in most of the region's societies (including most of those containing unilineal descent units) marriage was proscribed bilaterally within at least two and in many cases three degrees of kinship (e.g., with anyone closer than third cousins). The most notable exceptions to this rule occurred in certain unilineal societies, where marriage with an actual (first) cross-cousin was highly preferred. Beyond these widespread usages, however, kinship-based marital rules and preferences differed greatly. For example, in some patrilineally organized societies marriage with a member of one's mother's clan was strictly proscribed, while in some others it was highly preferred. While kinship was the weightiest factor in a Melanesian's choice of spouse, it was certainly not the only one. In many societies locality was a criterion, either pro or con. Thus in some places specific residential units were explicitly exogamous, in others the corresponding units were preferentially endogamous. Again, in some societies, affinity itself was a factor in choice of mate. While in some of them marriages were forbidden between descent units already linked by ties of affinity, in others the preference was for a multiplicity of such ties. Somewhat related to this were

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the explicit preferences expressed by several peoples toward either "enemies" or "friends": some of them made a deliberate effort to marry into "enemy" clans or communities (for purposes of extending exchange relationships and marital alliances), in others, such ties were deliberately avoided on account of their risks. The factor of ascribed social class also entered into choice of spouse in a few societies, but only a very few (which markedly differentiated this region from much of Polynesia and some of Micronesia). Preferences of a more individual kind also figured in the choice of spouse in many societies of Melanesia, but only within the proscriptive and preferential limits set by the society, and only to the extent that the principals had a voice in the choice. This raises the question of the nature of the social units that were involved in marital relationships. In a very narrow sense the husband and wife, as separate individuals, were most directly involved in everyday conjugal life, but in all Melanesian societies one or more larger social units participated in some phases of a marriage—for example, in arranging, financing, and formalizing it; in helping to sustain or dissolve it; and in providing for the widowed spouse. Usually it was the families or the lineages of the principals that figured in most of those phases except for nuptial ceremonies, which in nearly all of the societies that held them were celebrated by other kinfolk of the principals as well. The different ways by which men in Melanesia obtained wives included capture, inheritance, elopement, and socially approved consent and contract—ways that occurred elsewhere in Oceania as well. Of these contract was by far the most common, both in terms of norms and of practices. All types of transactions that accompanied marriage contracts in Oceania as a whole were to be found in Melanesia: services for services, wife-for-wife exchange, and objects for services. Of these the latter type was by far most prevalent, and its subtype, bride-price, was much, much more common than its opposite, dowry. Another aspect of marriage that had wide influence both upon the principals themselves and upon the larger structure of their society was marital residence. Here again, all of the forms practiced in Oceania as a whole were practiced in Melanesia as well; of these, virilocality—either normatively and statistically, or only statistically—was in Melanesia most common by far (and not only in the patrilineally organized societies, but in most of the matrilineal and ambilineal ones as well). There were a few societies where uxorilocality was predominant (e.g., Nagovisi, Trukese), or where bilocality was both the norm and the mode (e.g., Dobu), or where residences shifted so frequently as to defy classification (e.g., Kunimaipa), but these were exceptional enough to invite special attention. Turning now to the interactive relationships between persons and their

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affines, it must first be noted that Melanesian societies differed regarding which of the kin of a person's spouse were identified as "affines" (i.e., terminologically and behaviorally). In some the relatives classified and treated as affines were few, having included only the spouse's parents and siblings and the latter's offspring. In many others the category was extended to include all members of a spouse's descent unit along with a wide span of his (or her) bilateral kin and some of the latters' affines as well. In still others there were no distinctive terms (or prescribed behavior patterns) for close affines as such—the term and prescribed behavior for spouse and cross-cousin having been identical. There were however some beliefs and practices associated with spouses in particular, and with affinity in general, that were fairly widespread. One of these was cognitive and psychological, namely the social distance and tension that was engendered between spouses in many Melanesian societies by beliefs about female pollution. Another was the practice that prevailed in many societies whereby the regular sleeping quarters of males past childhood were separated from those of females, including husbands' from their wives'. Still another had to do with offspring. In some societies the offspring of a couple were so firmly and exclusively identified with the kin of one of them that the kin of the other expressed little or no interest in or concern for them. But in perhaps most societies of the region, including the most definitively unilineal ones, kin of both spouses concerned themselves, in one way or another, with the offspring (and even, in some cases, with the offsprings' offspring). Another widespread though not universal feature of Melanesian relations of affinity was the strict avoidance practiced between a man and his wife's mother; similar practices prevailed in other regions of Oceania, but not to the same rigorous extent. Even more widespread (but not universal) was the disposition of amity which affinity promoted, or was supposed to promote, between a couple's respective kin. In many societies, marriages were arranged for that specific purpose; and in some of them the relevant marriages were themselves dissolved when that amity turned into enmity. Various means were utilized to exemplify and maintain the amity: mutual support in war and ceremonial exchanges, revalidation of a specific marriage with periodic increments of bride-price or dowry, and by additional marriages over time. In some societies certain of their descent units—usually closely neighboring ones—intermarried so regularly that they had the appearance of localized (exogamous) moieties. In most societies of the region the relationship of affinity was also conceptualized as one of equality, not of course between the spouses themselves but between their respective "sides"—those of their respective kin who were deemed to be affines. There were only a few societies in which the two "sides" were ranked according to whether they were husband's or wife's.

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Social Distance A n attempt has been made in the previous sections of this chapter to list and exemplify the m a n y different w a y s in which Melanesian societies were divided into descent units and between kinsmen and affines. T h e mental images provided by that kind of representation m a y be "scientific a l l y " useful, and m a y even reflect, more or less accurately, images that the Melanesians themselves had of their societies—but not all of their images. For, while the members of all societies probably distinguished between, say, " a g n a t e s " and other "cognates," and between " c o g n a t e s " and " a f f i n e s " (as locally defined), there were several societies w h o s e members also made other kinds of categorical distinctions a m o n g the persons populating their social universe. N o systematic study has been made of the compositions of those categories, but a couple of examples will provide an impression of their wide variety. T h e first is that of the K u n i m a i p a , the N e w Guinea mountain-dwelling, "dance-village" people, w h o s e rather tenuous ambilineal descent units were described earlier in this chapter. F o r the individual Kunimaipa the most important w a y of distinguishing among the persons of his social universe w a s not by descent-unit affiliation but by whether they were " p a i n people" or "pleasure people." T h e ethnographer M a r g a r e t M c A r thur described this distinction in more detail. Everybody can cite one and usually two kinship reference terms f o r the thousand or more men, women and children with w h o m he comes in contact. From among the hundreds w h o constitute his (or her) social universe he recognizes a smaller group w h o are "his people," his close relatives, with w h o m he is enjoined to behave in certain ways. H e lives with some of them and visits the others from time to time, depending on how far a w a y they are. He helps them in a host of ways. H e is ashamed to refuse their requests and tries to oblige if he possibly can. He extends them credit, and ideally he is willing to await their convenience for the return gift. H e feels safe from sorcery in their company. If he and they are members of opposing forces in a battle they avoid harming each other, even to the extent of trying to warn against a threatened attack by somebody on their o w n side. A man should not quarrel with these people or injure them in any way. He attends their feasts, and whenever he can spare a pig he becomes their supporter at a major ceremony. He gives them pork which they reciprocate. T h e generalization is commonly made that a person should not eat meat from the pigs ["his people"] raise, but this restriction applies to fewer relatives than do all the other rules. Finally, he should not joke with or tease any of these people, make any mention of sexual matters or have sexual intercourse with them. Because of the restraints and constraints on his behaviour towards them they are his "pain people," kakamari (kakamapu, sing.); kakam is the pain of sores and wounds. A man's belly "pains" when he is angry, anxious, or mourning the death of a relative.

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All of an unmarried person's cognates together with their spouses are his "pain people." His bilateral kindred forms the core. This means his "pain people" are a category relative to him, not a group in any sense. After marriage the spouse's "pain people" become incorporated. "Pain people" are contrasted with "pleasure people," muzeri (muzupu, sing.); muz is the sweet, salty or pleasant taste of foods. A person's belly becomes muz, relaxed or relieved when he recovers f r o m anger, anxiety or grief and when he hears good news. "Pleasure people" include both strangers, for w h o m n o kinship reference term is k n o w n , and people not closely related for w h o m a term can be given. It is said that behavior towards them is permitted to be in all respects the reverse of that towards "pain people." O n close examination this generalization turns out to be not strictly true, for there is an intermediate category called by a term that may be translated as "distantly related pleasure people." It comprises "pleasure people" who live in the same parish [community] and distantly related people, kapotakari, w h o live in different parishes [communities]. They suffer fewer restrictions on behaviour and have fewer obligations to each other than do "pain people." M a n y of these kapotakari relationships are presumed to stem f r o m marriages long ago, but . . . essentially the same tie can arise f r o m homicide. Though couched in kinship terms they are more in the nature of mutually beneficial business links that are maintained if the parties satisfy each other's requirements. Partners provide goods and services, especially piglets or the wherewithal to obtain them, hospitality when visiting, and p o r k at ceremonies. Kinship reference terms pass f r o m generation to generation in the usual way, but as men exploit the ties more than women they are more likely to hand them on to their sons or their daughters' husbands. T h e correct people to marry are "pleasure people." (1971: 1 5 8 - 1 5 9 ) T h e s e c o n d e x a m p l e I o f f e r concerns the K a p a u k u o f w e s t e r n N e w G u i n e a ( n o w West Irian), w h o s e subsistence activities w e r e m e n t i o n e d in chapter 8 , w h o s e m o n e y - u s i n g trading w a s described in chapter 1 2 , a n d w h o s e m o r t u a r y c u s t o m s w e r e t o u c h e d o n in chapter 1 4 . K a p a u k u kinship o r g a n i z a t i o n w a s e m p h a t i c a l l y agnatic. C o m m u n i t i e s w e r e c o m p o s e d a r o u n d patrilineal lineages and sublineages, w h i c h w e r e s e g m e n t s o f e x o g a m o u s , t o t e m i c , a n d widely dispersed patricians. T h e largest stable political (including w a r - m a k i n g ) u n i t — w h a t the e t h n o g r a p h e r labeled a "confederacy"—cut across clan lines, having c o n s i s t e d o n the average o f t w o or m o r e c o m m u n i t i e s s o m e o f w h o s e core lineages w e r e s e g m e n t s o f different clans. A g a i n s t this b a c k g r o u n d o f ancestor-focused units a n d political groupings, the individual K a p a u k u classified all p e o p l e in his social universe into three categories: imee bagee ('the pertinent kind'), ojaa bagee ('the n o t pertinent kind'), a n d jape bagee ('the e n e m y kind'). Imee bagee consist of 23 categories of relatives, some of w h o m Ego acquires by birth (consanguineal relatives), and Oiliers through the institution of mar-

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riage (affinal relatives). Each of the 23 categories is provided with distinctive kinship terms, and the behavior of the members of each category vis-à-vis Ego (and vice versa) is defined by a special pattern of rules. These pertain, for example, to the kind of joking, power relations, legal liability, duty of blood vengeance, economic dependence, duty to participate in various ceremonies, obligation to contribute to certain payments, degree of emotional involvement, and so forth.[ 40 ] . . . Ego's close or "best friend," maagodo noogei, is equated with brother, and kinship terms and pertinent behavior are extended to his primary relatives. Kinsmen and best friends are the only people a Kapauku trusts and is fond of. He relies heavily upon their financial, economic, and political support, which often are unsolicited. The category of ojaa bagee includes Ego's acquaintances as well as complete strangers and foreigners. This comprises a mass of people with whom a Kapauku has casual social or trade relations. Since every stranger is a prospective customer, and thus a means of furthering the individual's wealth, Kapauku are not unduly suspicious of, and are very seldom hostile to strangers. They certainly do not regard them as personal enemies unless, of course, the stranger invites such a status by his behavior. Jape, the enemy, are a very special category of people who assume this status in relation to Ego by ascription rather than by any hostile actions on their part. Jape are not necessarily Ego's personal enemies. They are defined by tradition, by the fact of their membership and Ego's in particular political groups. A Kapauku's enemies are members of a traditionally hostile political confederacy (or confederacies) who have periodically waged war against the political groups of his father or of his residence. Since Ego classifies as his jape not only the traditional enemies of his father's political confederacy, but also those of his foster father, best friend, and of the group of his actual residence (which is not necessarily that of his father), a jape category is different, in its totality, for almost every Ego in the Kapauku society. (Pospisil 1963b: 33-34)

Relationships Based on Gender and Age I have already said much about this topic, so it now remains to summarize and supplement those statements with data from a few other societies in which relationships of this type were especially salient. Beginning with gender, it should be possible to locate Melanesia's societies along a continuum with respect to the degree to which malefemale differences and opposition were emphasized—ideologically and in terms of interactive separation. (Ideology and interaction did not necessarily correlate in this or any other domain of a society's culture, but in the matter of sexual opposition I have gained the impression that they were fairly close.) I have no intention of undertaking that exercise as systematically as would be required, but I shall offer some scattered evidence to indicate what I mean. Of the societies already discussed from this point of view, the Mae Enga of the New Guinea Highlands clearly stand at one end of the con-

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tinuum and the Trobrianders at the other, with Bougainville's Siuai about half-way between. Mae Enga men, it will be recalled, were preoccupied, in fact obsessed, by their beliefs in the pollutive dangers inherent in women, especially in female genitalia and menstrual flow. These fears were expressed in residential arrangements, in ordinary everyday avoidance, and in males' maturation rites. Similar to Mae Enga in this respect were many other Highland peoples, including the Gahuku Gama, whose male maturation ceremonies were described in chapter 14. 41 Among the latter the opposition reached a level of active and aggressive antagonism between the sexes, in and outside marriage, and it came to be institutionalized in the part played by females during boys' initiation rites. Females were of course not permitted to witness, nor even to be near where the rites were carried out. But on one occasion, when the company of men and initiates returned to the residential part of the community, the women set upon them with a variety of weapons; no male escaped some damage, and some were badly wounded. Here is how the ethnographer Kenneth Read described one such encounter witnessed (and painfully experienced) by himself: The fury of the present assault convinced me that the ritual expression of hostility and separation teetered on the edge of virtual disaster. The men had bunched together as they ran, so closely packed that they struck each other with their legs and arms. In the center of the throng the initiates, riding the shoulders of their escorts, swayed precariously from side to side, their fingers clutching the feathered hair of the head between their legs. The noise reached out to every corner of the world, the shrill cries and imprecations of the women beating against the stylized male chant that answered them in rising volume, swelling in a concert of defiance. For several minutes the two groups kept apart, an occasional stone or piece of wood hurtling from the sidelines and usually striking home, for it was almost impossible to miss the running target. The outraged shouts of those who were hit spurred the bolder women on to closer combat. Leaving the protection of the grass they darted at the flanks of the men's procession, wielding their weapons with every intent to hurt. Several victims staggered under their blows, lost their footing and their place in the crowd, and separated from their fellows, threatened on every side, took refuge in temporary flight, turning when they had reached a safe distance and hurling back their outrage in abuse. (1965: 136-137)

Many societies in other parts of Melanesia resembled those of the Highlands in their ideological emphasis on male-female opposition, while being somewhat less antagonistic in that opposition and while differing from them in the practices through which those beliefs and attitudes were expressed. One such was Manus, the Admirality Islands society whose members' sexual relations were described in chapter 13. Among others of this type the more notable were concentrated along the

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Figure 19.14. Malekula, New Hebrides, wooden mask. Musée de l'Homme, Paris western shores of the Gulf of Papua, in the Sepik River area, and in a large bloc of societies located in the Banks and Torres islands and the northern New Hebrides. All of these societies differed from those of the Highlands in their manifestations of male-female opposition; but those of the northern New Hebrides were so distinctive in this, and in many other cultural respects, that they require a closer look, which we shall take by examining one of the better-known examples, the Seniang of southwest Malekula, which were studied by Arthur Deacon in 1926. 4 2 The large (60 miles long by 5 - 2 0 miles wide), moderately mountainous island of Malekula may have contained a much larger population when Captain Cook touched there in 1774, but by the time of Deacon's visit he estimated that it was "considerably below" 9,000, having been reduced to that level by coercive labor recruiting, by disease, and by native warfare rendered more than usually devastating through use of European firearms. 4 3 Seniang was the name applied to a district along the southwest coast, whose people shared a common dialect and other cultural traits. By 1926-1927 it had only about 125 adults, so that much of Deacon's information about the traditional social institutions came from elderly informants drawing on their memories of a vanishing culture. The basic type of residential settlement of traditional Seniang was a compact village, which contained a core of male agnates, a division of one or another exogamous patrician. There were thirty to forty clans in the district, each localized in from one to ten different villages (average three to six). Among the villages identified with each clan one was

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"parental," the others "offspring"; the former contained the clan's religious center, where the clan's religious leader performed rites for the whole membership. 44 The Seniang villages were named but not the clans; instead, each had its identifying beat on wooden slit-gongs. Before describing the layout of Seniang villages it will be necessary to explain the peoples' concepts concerning male-female opposition. . . . there are two hostile qualities or properties—igah and ileo—the former belonging especially to women, and by analogy to the female of the species, as, for instance, a sow; the latter belonging to men and all things male. Ileo has been translated "sacred," but it would be a great misapprehension to translate igah as "profane." (Deacon 1934: 23) Igah is not used with reference to things that are regarded as profane, but rather to those that are possessed of a kind of sanctity which is different from, and indeed opposed to that which is termed ileo. The relation between igah and ileo is something like the relation of positive and negative electrical potentials. Things which are strongly igah are definitely feared by the men because they counteract and destroy the ileo property appertaining to males and to men's ritual objects. On the other hand, the possession of the quality of igah or of objects imbued with this quality confers power and prestige upon women. The dichotomy and opposition between the sexes is a feature of the social life of the Malekulans and is thus reflected in their ritual life also. (ibid. 478)

There was doubtless some connection between igah and menstruation, but evidently not strong or exclusive enough to warrant the ethnographer's attention or comment. It was believed that too-frequent coitus weakened men physically, and that abstention was desirable before participating in magic (but not before going to war). Also, men are said to have expressed "great disgust at the sight of or proximity to menstrual blood" (ibid: 156). But there was nothing approaching in scale or intensity the attitude toward menstruation that prevailed in many New Guinea Highland societies. Moreover, among the Seniang a male was also igah until puberty, when his initiation into adult status took place. The ileo-igah opposition was clearly represented in village layout. Each village was divided by a fence into two parts. In the igah part were the dwellings; females spent all of their time there when not in the gardens. In the other part were the village dancing ground and slit-gongs and the men's house, the amel. While the whole of this part was ileo, the intensity of that quality increased with distance from the dividing fence, the most ileo places of all having been the amel and a dense patch of bush behind it, where the most secret of men's rites took place. Ordinarily this part of the village was restricted to men (including initiated boys); on some "secular" occasions females were allowed within it, but only in the less ileo area between fence and gongs. When men were engaged in per-

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forming their most profound ceremonies the height of the fence was raised to the extent that women could not even see over it. While men spent most of their daylight hours in their ileo part of the village, they usually returned at nightfall to their dwellings in the igah part to sleep. Still another way in which the Seniang variety of male-female opposition differed from those of New Guinea Highlanders lay in their institution of graded societies, of which there were two for men and one for women, and in which progress up the grades was accompanied by increasing ileo or igah, respectively. Put briefly, each of the societies consisted of a number of named grades that could be entered in set sequence by payments to the current members of those grades. And while progress up the grades correlated to some extent with increasing age it depended actually on ability to pay the entry fees. One of the men's societies was called Nimangki, the other Nalawan. They resembled each other in many respects but differed in others. Thus, the rites and so forth associated with the former were more public and secular, those of the latter more secret and religious in flavor. A dead man's highest attained position in Nimangki defined only how his corpse should be decorated; his position in Nalawan determined the whole course of his death rites. Also some of the ritual objects and insignia of Nalawan were more hidden and inviolate than any of the Nimangki ones, and the seclusion that accompanied entry into one of the higher Nalawan grades lasted a whole year—that is, much longer than usual— during which time the candidate was regarded and treated as if he were once more a young child. Nimangki contained some thirty-two grades, entered more or less in sequence, Nalawan seventeen to twenty-three; but in each society the grades were classified into larger categories of "high" and "low." The more "public" Nimangki was housed in the village amel, where each grade had its own section (arranged sequentially from front to back, from least ileo to most); the most ileo place of the more secret Nalawan was in the clump of bushes behind the amel, which only members of its highest grade could safely visit. Each grade of both societies had its name, gong signal, and image (protective), along with special ornaments, insignia and titles for its members (a man's society-grade title having superseded his personal name in daily life). In addition, each grade had its own and in some respects distinctive initiation ritual. As mentioned earlier, entry into each grade had to be purchased by payments to its current members, the indispensable, most important and costliest item of payment having been a boar whose tusks had reached a certain state of growth. (Sows were eaten only by women and were excluded from all matters of concern to men.) In order to produce the desired kind of tusk the two upper canine teeth of an animal were knocked out while it was still young. After that, the lower ones, having

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nothing to bite against, grew even longer until they curved around and pierced the lower jaw, thereby forming a complete circle and, if left to grow, part or all of another one. The value of the pig increased correspondingly, so that a double-circle boar could buy entry into the highest Nimangki or Nalawan grades. All Seniang males became members of both Nimangki and Nalawan, after they had passed from childhood status (imbamp) by means of a general initiation rite that included seclusion in the amel and penis incision. With every advance a man became more ileo and prestigious. As the ethnographer described it: It would I think be true to say that there is no chieftainship. Authority is vested in the higher Nimangki ranks, and is a corollary also of the prestige conferred by [membership in] the higher Nalawans and the Nevittbttr. [ 4 5 ] It may be noted, however, that a man may occupy a high Nimangki rank because his father, a rich and powerful man, paid for his entrance to the ranks while he was yet a boy. Thus I have met small boys who have made Nimew [a fairly high grade in Nimangki] or rather whose fathers had had Nimew made for them. (ibid. 4 8 )

Thus, a Seniang man had a double reason for acquiring wealth, especially pigs, both for his own individual social advantage and, to some extent, for that of his sons. It is not surprising then to learn that: "The dominant interest in a Malekulan's life is . . . to have abundance of vegetable food [not just for family subsistence but for feeding pigs], and by judicious lending and borrowing to increase the number and value of his pigs" (ibid. 17). Perhaps the sharpest difference between Seniang and the New Guinea Highlands with respect to opposition between male and female is to be seen in the presence, in the former, of a women's society, which closely resembled those of the mens'. This society, the Lapas, also contained several grades, whose rites and paraphernalia were similar to those of the mens' in many respects, including entry by purchase. To qualify for membership a girl also had to undergo an initiation (comparable to a boy's) by having her two upper incisor teeth knocked out. And with advance up the grades a woman became more and more igah. The ceremonies of the Lapas took place in a house in the bush far away from the village. In it were kept ritual objects of such igah potency that they could neutralize or destroy the ileo, and even bring about the death, of any man approaching too close. Even if he were man of the highest Nimangki rank and therefore possessed of a great degree of ileo all this would pass from him and he would become "like a child." . . . He would lose his Nimangki rank and Nimangki title, and

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men would call him by his personal name; he would be treated with ridicule, contempt, or pity until he had collected sufficient wealth of pigs to buy back his former status." (ibid. 479-480)

Institutions expressing male-female opposition were prevalent elsewhere on Malekula and throughout most of the northern New Hebrides and the Banks and Torres islands. They differed from those of the Seniang in several respects but, as a whole, resembled one another enough to move one writer to impute historical connections among them. There were, however, enough differences among them to suggest that if there had been a common source for the ideas that gave rise to them, those ideas had been reshaped to fit local ideologies and social structures (M. Allen 1967). The Trobrianders provide one example of the other pole of the malefemale opposition range—a society in which that opposition was minimal. Another example were the Kunimaipa, who occupied an area not far away from the Highlanders in distance but who were very remote from them in terms of male-female antithesis. "No formalized antagonism exists between the sexes. Men, however, are 'hot' because they kill, make sorcery and perform magic. Women do none of these (except a little garden and pig magic), hence they are 'cold' and 'dead.' Consequently they must stay away from certain activities and buildings for fear of vitiating the outcome of ceremonies" (M. McArthur 1971: 159.) There were separate houses, where men slept and spent much of their waking time, but: "Sex is not deemed polluting. . . . Women are not segregated nor is intercourse prohibited during menstruation, though probably most couples refrain for aesthetic reasons. I was told adulterers are not so fussy" (ibid.). Most Melanesian societies appear to have lain between these extremes, and while maintaining some distance between males and females in extra-household situations (e.g., in the form of men's clubhouses and of exclusively male religious ceremonies) did not build social institutions based on paranoid anxieties about women's pollution or on ideas about reciprocal male-female harm. What kinds of influence did "age" have on the structuring of social relationships? Probably every language in Melanesia contained words for what in English might be glossed as 'infancy', 'childhood', 'adulthood', and 'old age', and in most of them there were words for finer age distinctions as well. As was shown in chapters 13 and 14 there were large and small differences between societies in the criteria by which they defined, say, the ending of childhood or the beginning of old age. Also, there were differences in the way societies signalized transitions from one stage to

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another, and in the kinds of behavior deemed appropriate for each stage; moreover, in perhaps most Melanesian societies there were rules concerning, for example, how "children" ought to interact with "adults," or the latter with "old men." Some generalizations about these matters have been offered in earlier chapters: for example, the widespread practice of equating males with females during infancy and childhood, and the tendency, almost as widespread in Melanesia, for men to lose their social influence with the onset of physical senility (a fate not usually shared by their counterparts in Australia). Beyond these points, however, I will not attempt to generalize systematically about this multifarious matter, and I shall limit myself to some instances in which coevality—being of common age—was institutionalized in the form of enduring groups. There were doubtless cases in all Melanesian societies in which friendships formed among females in childhood or early womanhood persisted, but I know of only one society in which all or most of a community's older female coevals united exclusively on a continuing basis. Informal bonding was also common among young Melanesian males —a relationship promoted in many societies by their shared maturation rites; examples of such occurred in Busama (Hogbin 1970) and in Buka and northern Bougainville (Blackwood 1935). (The Sepik River Iatmul should perhaps also be added to the list [Bateson 1958], although I must confess I am unable to discover what activities the various "generation groups" of this people engaged in except for their initiation rites.) In addition, there were some societies in which the relations between male coevals were formally institutionalized, and others where the groups defined in this way were the society's dominant type of social unit; the most noteworthy examples of the former were located in New Guinea, and included the Gahuku-Gama (whose maturation rites and malefemale opposition have already been discussed). Few social relationships outside the family are as important as the bonds established by age. A boy and his age-mates share a wider range of common mutual interests and activities than close kinsmen. They have mutual interests, share the same experiences, submit to the same moral teachings and are therefore supposed to be friends for life. The typical features of the relationship can be seen in children of five years of age, in the groups of small boys who walk about with their arms around each other's shoulders, talking and whispering confidentially, and in the little girls who run screaming through the kunai [grassland], their long hair dresses clutched in the hand of some boy while his friends menace them with toy bows and arrows. Later, this same group of boys pass through the rites of initiation together, and through all stages of their novitiate in the zagusave [men's house] their common interests and dependence on those who are senior to them are emphasized. Their principal duty is to serve the senior members, performing the domestic chores about the men's house, fetching firewood and water and doing the everyday cooking. They should be

IIO8

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betrothed at the same time, and their elder kinsmen ought to procure the brides as the period for the idza nama festivals approaches. Finally, after a lengthy period of waiting during which the elders continually criticize their conduct, they are permitted to cohabit with these women. The young men shoot an arrow into the thighs of their future wives, and in a ceremony afterwards share a formal meal with them. It sometimes happens, however, that a girl has not been procured for a particular youth, and when his age-mates perform these rites he may feel his position so keenly that he runs away to an enemy group, seeking death rather than remain in his own community." (Read

1952-53:12)

Another people, the Fore, resembled most other societies of the eastern N e w Guinea Highlands in their subsistence economy, their (patrilineal) clan organization, their emphasis on male-female opposition, and their pattern of leadership and exchange (Berndt 1 9 6 2 ; Lindenbaum and Glasse 1 9 6 8 - 6 9 ) , but their groups of male coevals were even m o r e highly institutionalized than those of the G a h u k u - G a m a with respect to the members' relationship. T h e Fore term for that relationship w a s ttagaiya, which also meant "twins." M a l e s became nagaiya in either of two ways: if they were initiated together or if they were born at about the same time—that is, of women whose periods of seclusion in the same hamlet childbirth hut had overlapped in time. T h e relationship w a s extended to all other boys of other hamlets of the same community w h o were initiated m o r e or less simultaneously, but these were known as "small nagaiyo" and such relationships were considered less binding. T h e relationship, which w a s reinforced but not superseded by close kinship ties, w a s expressed in a number of ways: by mutual support in everyday affairs as well as in times of public crisis (by gardening together and sharing the produce, by help and protection in warfare and other situations of danger, etc.); by mutual support in domestic crises (e.g., if a man's wife struck him during an argument, his nagaiya w o u l d force her to pay a fine by ransacking her gardens and using one of her pigs for a feast for themselves); and by sharing one another's dangers f r o m pollution by their wives. T h u s , when a m a n first consummated his marriage—a time of great s h a m e and embarassment for himself—he confided not in his brothers but in his nagaiya, and gave them a gift to atone for his act. Or, when his wife first menstruated, all of his nagaiya joined with him in forgoing the eating of certain f o o d delicacies—a t a b o o that w a s maintained in some cases until the wife gave birth to a child. A n d when a m a n died his nagaiya not only played a principal role in his funeral, and were duty-bound to revenge his death, but they also became prime candidates (along with his brother) to inherit his w i d o w (she herself having had the right to choose a m o n g them). Some Fore women also joined together as nagaiya,

and under the same

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circumstances as men. However, because of their absorption in domestic duties, and because of the scattering of childhood partners as a result of virilocal residence after marriage, such partnerships did not actively survive. For a third example of institutionalized coevality we look at the Wamira, whose settlements were located along the shores of Bartle Bay, about 50 miles west of New Guinea's East Cape (Seligmann 1910). All Wamira males born within the same period (which lasted about two years) became members of the same (male) kimta; a similar institution existed for all females. Then, when they were old enough, kimta-matts began to activate the relationship, which continued for the rest of their lives and included the following: mutual help in everyday activities (e.g. among men, hunting together and constructing irrigation ditches and dams; among women, fishing together); mutual hospitality and mutual support in times of material need (e.g., of crop failure); and eating together exclusively on special occasions (e.g., by men, after a successful hunt, or before going to war, or when eating a human victim; by women, eating food other than human flesh when men of their corresponding kimta were cannibalizing). The kimta tie was extended to coevals throughout Wamira society, although it was most binding among age-mates of the same community. In addition, the Wamira added a pragmatic touch to the institution of coevality by adjusting it to physiological and demographic circumstance: if a child did not develop physically as fast as his original kimta cohorts, he was assigned to the next younger group; and when the kimta of elderly people became depleted by death, two or more of them would combine. Partnerships

of Other

Kinds

The Wedau people, close neighbors of the Wamira, institutionalized a type of relationship, though somewhat similar to coevality, has not yet been considered in our survey. I refer here to the eriam relationship between men, wherein each partner had sexual access to the other's wives. The relationship between a man and his eriam1 s wife was conjugal in other ways as well: a woman mourned the death of her husband's eriam as strictly as she would have mourned her husband, and the rules regarding choice of wife extended to an eriam's wife as well. It was possible for men to dissolve their existing eriam relationships or to inaugurate new ones, but more commonly the relationship was inherited, from eriam fathers by their sons. Some eriam partners were kimta as well, but the two types of relationships were not otherwise linked. Partnerships labeled eriam also existed among the Wamira and other peoples of this area, but they were not all alike. Among the Wamira, for

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SOCIAL RELATIONS

example, the relationship involved mutual assistance but not access to each other's wife. And elsewhere in this same area the relationship was more in the nature of an exchange partnership between men of different villages. Common, however, to all of the localized variants of eriam was the concept of a more or less voluntary or contingent relationship that served to regularize and promote cooperation between individuals not otherwise linked by kinship. Institutionalized relationships similar in some respects to eriam were widespread in Melanesia—for example, the taovu partnership of the northern Solomons and the kula partnership of the Trobriands (both of which were described in chapter 12). Although they differed from one another in some respects, they were all alike in their commitment to amicable interaction outside the narrow bounds of kinship and membership in particular political units. Cults Many of the social units already described in this chapter had, along with their secular features, others that were explicitly religious (the ancestor "worship" connected with descent units, the involvement of spirits in men's clubs, etc.). In addition, there were social units in several Melanesian societies that were primarily religious in focus—so much so, in fact, that they warrant the label cult. For an example of this type of social unit we can do no better than focus on the Tolai people of northeast New Britain, whose market-trading activities were described in chapter 12, and whose most notable cult—known as dukduk and tubuan—has been a subject of anthropological interest for more than a century. Notwithstanding that interest, however, many features of the cult remain obscure, partly as the result of the observers' incomplete knowledge or personal biases, but also perhaps because of changes in the cult itself during a century of intensive colonialism. The most concise description of the cult's focal activities was provided by Peter Sack. 4 6 E a c h of the dukduk societies [cults] was centred around a named female mask, the tubuan, which was owned by one particular individual. At intervals the tubuan was said to give birth to one or more male masks, the dukduk. With the birth of the dukduk a festive season began. N e w members were initiated into the society at its secret meeting place, the tariau. Dancers, wearing the conical tubuan and dukduk masks, their bodies hidden by cloaks of leaves, made public appearances. After t w o to six weeks the dukduk died; only the tubuan remained to bear new dukduk when the time had come. ( 1 9 7 2 : 9 6 )

An example of the masks is shown in figure 1 9 . 1 5 . They consisted of barkcloth, variously painted and decorated, stretched over conical

MELANESIA

M I

frames of light wood (rigid vines, coconut-frond midribs, etc.). One of the principal cult mysteries lay in the construction of its masks—a secret that was revealed to initiates, along with the true nature of the bizarre voice sound made by the mask wearers when parading in public. It is not clear whether the masks were supposed to represent spirits, to be spirits, or to be like spirits. In any case, although they were supposed to disguise their wearers before the uninitiated, some observers stated that only small children were ignorant of the latters' true identities. (In these small communities an individual's physical blemishes and ways of movement were known to nearly everyone.) The geographic distribution of the cult and the composition of its membership are also obscure. There were undoubtedly many local chap-

III2.

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RELATIONS

ters of it, but whether there was one or more per community is not clear. And while only males were admitted to membership, we do not know whether all of a community's post-childhood males actually joined. Those who did, however, had to undergo three separate initiation rites. The first took place around the time of puberty but could occur earlier (e.g., for the son or, in this society containing matrilineal clans, the maternal nephew of a wealthy man). Since each initiation required a large fee of shell money (tambu), the second and third stages were in some cases delayed for several years. Unlike initiation into many other Melanesian cults, the dukduk cult-novices underwent only playful hazing and a very brief seclusion. Instead of suffering deprivation, their initiations were accompanied by sumptuous feasting. In addition to initiating new members and manufacturing masks—and feasting sumptuously on any and all cult occasions—the members of the cult appeared now and then in public during the dukduks' annual period of regeneration. I am not certain that all members wore masks. During such appearances it seems they did at least three things vis-a-vis nonmembers: they doubtless provided an exciting and entertaining spectacle for many onlookers; they hazed and possibly hurt and frightened others; and they collected shell money from all—universally according to "custom," and by more direct demand from a particular few. The leader in all of this was the wearer (the owner) of the chapter's tubuan mask. (It is not entirely clear from the literature that each chapter had only one.) In any case, tubuan owners were very influential and usually very wealthy men. Some leaders obtained their masks by inheritance (whether from father or mother's brother, or either, I cannot say); others obtained theirs by purchase, and at a very high price (which however was in most cases eventually regained many times over). A chapter's tubuan owner (owners?) was expected to organize and supervise chapter activities. In addition he was expected to "raise the tubuan" on public occasions throughout the year (dances, memorial ceremonies, etc.), presumably to maintain it, and the cult itself, in a viable state. In return for all of these services he was handsomely recompensed, for not only was he paid directly for his "raising" of the tubuan (both by the sponsor of each particular festivity and by the appreciative audiences), but he also received a lion's share of the money collected by the cult's chapter on such occasions. And even that was not all the tubuan owner gained. Because of the social influence (and/or spirit-backed authority?) possessed by a tubuan owner, he was called upon now and then to protect his neighbors' goods—for example, gardens, coconut groves—which he did by placing his taboo sign upon them, in return for a fee. More significantly, he was empowered to collect fines not only from cult members (e.g., for breaking cult rules) but from non-members as well (e.g., for trespassing on the cult meeting place, for speaking "disrespectfully" of

MELANESIA

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cult members, and according to some observers for theft, incest, adultery, and lying). Clearly, owning a tubuan was potentially a very profitable enterprise. But what other functions, if any, did the cult itself have? According to some observers, the cult served as the Tolai's most important—some say their only—agency of social control. The Duk-duk . . . may be spoken of as the administration of law, being judge, policeman, and hangman all in one, as he settles all disputes and punishes all offenders. This mysterious power is in reality one man, appointed by the chief[P] . . . [Masked he] travels through the bush visiting each village, and if any man has received wrong at the hands of his neighbour he pays the Duk-duk so much dewarra [tambu, shell-money] to settle the question. This functionary then goes off to the aggressor's house, and demands restitution of the stolen goods, or payment for the harm done, which if the person accused does not pay, or restore at once, the Duk-duk sets fire to his house or in some extreme cases spears the offender. . . . [No] man is allowed to lift his hand against him but must submit to everything the Duk-duk does, if not his life is not worth a day's purchase, as the chief of the Duk-duk's district will find a method of putting the offender quietly out of the way. (W. Powell, Wanderings in a Wild Country, London 1884, quoted in Sacks 1972: 96) Writing a generation later, the planter, R. Parkinson, viewed the institution differently. Over the years I have gradually come to the conclusion that the dukduk and other cults of this area lack deeper meaning and simply have the materialistic purpose of increasing the social importance of members in their relations with women and non-members. Moreover, membership does not merely offer certain social advantages, but also materialistic pleasures, better food, the opportunity to be idle, unrestricted intercourse with the female sex, and finally the opportunity to acquire property at the expense of non-members. In some areas secret societies possibly also take the place of a chief who has the power to judge and punish . . . and concern themselves with the maintenance of order within the tribe and the observance of traditional customs. However, while doing so, they often look primarily after their own well-being. (Parkinson 1907: 5 7 0 - 5 7 2 , quoted in Sack 1972: 97) In the view of this same observer the tubuan owner (at the turn of the century) was the closest approximation to a "chief," the only official with enough authority to maintain community-wide "law and order," so long, that is, as he kept his greed for shell money and social power within bounds. For, if he became extortionate and despotic, the older members of his cult chapter secured help from tubuan owners of other chapters to bring him into line. Another observer during that era put it even more bluntly, having described the cult as: "A society of men whose principal object is to

III4

SOCIAL

RELATIONS

extort money from everyone else who is not a member, and to terrify women and those who are not initiated"; and when not so engaged, to assemble at their secret meeting place to "gossip, eat, and sleep to their heart's content" (G. Brown, Life History of a Savage, quoted in Sack 1972:97). In contrast to this view, Richard Salisbury characterized some tubuan owners of 1961, as being "not only hard-headed businessmen but also conscientious theologians who are concerned about the inward and spiritual meanings of the outward and visible ceremonies which they organize" (1970: 301). The nature of those "inward and spiritual meanings" is however not explained. One other aspect of the dukduk cult worth noting is its (Tolai) societywide distribution. Parkinson's descriptions included accounts not only of cooperation among tubuan owners of different communities but also of interchapter gatherings in connection with large public ceremonies.

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While this doubtless betokened a kind of society-wide "freemasonry," and hence a potential check on warfare, it is not reported that it actually had that effect. Mask-using cults similar to dukduk were present in many societies of New Britain, New Ireland, and some smaller islands near them. 47 Indeed, some of their similarities were so close as to indicate historical connections among them. However, in none of those other cults was membership in general, and grades of membership in particular, so directly dependent upon monetary purchase and monetary reward as among the Tolai. Even in the northern New Hebrides and the nearby Torres and Banks islands (whose graded men's clubs were mentioned earlier), where advance up the grades had to be "purchased" with tusked boars, the privileges earned by advancement were entirely sociopolitical rather than, as in Tolai, a blend of these and negotiable wealth. Relationships

Based on

Expertise

The social relationships heretofore discussed in this chapter were based mainly on a participant's parentage, or sex, or age, or identity of spouse, or place of residence, or cult commitment—or some combinations of these. A few of the roles in such relationships entailed attributes of other kinds: for example, in the clans of some societies the role of priest called for qualifications other than mere seniority, the same having been true of leadership in many cults (in contrast to mere membership, which was in most cases open to all locally resident males past childhood). Nevertheless, the focus of previous sections has been on social roles (and hence relationships) that derived mainly from circumstances beyond the roleholders' individual qualifications and choices. In contrast, the present section will focus on roles that derived mainly from such qualifications and choices, and inferentially on the relationships that accompanied them. Expertise (better-than-average knowledge and skill) in almost any activity was highly valued in Melanesian societies and was usually rewarded in some manner, at least by deferential behavior and praise—in other words, by kinds of "services" to which the experts themselves doubtless attached value. The societies, however, differed in the nature of the activities that their members valued and in the preference order in which they ranked them. Thus, while expertise in fishing was valued highly by the peoples of, say, coastal north Bougainville, fishing itself was virtually unknown to many inland peoples. And although gardening was the source of food in nearly all Melanesian societies, regard for expertise in it varied from mild approval to institutionalized expression of high praise. Other ways in which Melanesian societies differed with respect to

III6

SOCIAL RELATIONS

experts included their recruitment, the routes having ranged from nearly unconditional inherited succession to an office, to free-for-all competition for a contingent role. (The "nearly" is added to take account of the fact that even where, say, an eldest son was supposed to succeed to his father's office of garden-magician, he was sometimes superseded by someone else more technically skillful in the job.) The region's societies also differed with respect to the supernatural component of expertise. Except for such roles as magician and diviner, in which that component was inherently paramount, there were wide differences in the types of expertise that were held to be dependent upon supernatural assistance, differences concerning specific jobs within any one society, and differences between whole societies concerning the degree of religiousness associated with expertise in general. Differences aside, in most Melanesian societies the age (i.e., life stage) at which individual experts were held to be most proficient and most deserving of praise and deference, was middle and late "adulthood" (as locally defined). And in this region of almost unalloyed male chauvinism the jobs conventionally allocated to women were only rarely valued highly enough to place their expert practitioners among any society's notables. Moreover, even when women had contributed most heavily to a man's high reputation as an expert (e.g., in raising the pigs which he gave away), the credit usually went to him alone. Before discussing the various types of expertise that were valued in the region a few words are called for concerning the connection between expertise and temperament (or, if the reader prefers, personality, or character). Each of Melanesia's societies that has been written about in this respect distinguished a finite, and usually distinctively labeled, number of types of temperament, and either ranked them generally in terms of the approval and respect (including fear) they educed, or considered them to be appropriate to certain highly valued types of expertise. However, no type of temperament was of itself sufficient to earn outstanding prestige; it had to be associated with a specific expertise. Thus, while the Siuai (like perhaps all other Melanesians) approved highly of 'generosity' (rakuraku) in general, they reserved their prestige-enhancing praise for men who dispensed goods in certain specific ways (some of which were anything but benevolent in intent), and they spoke with some contempt, albeit affectionately, of men who gave away valuables haphazardly. Again, while aggressiveness (e.g., "angry man," "killer," "hot-worded") was considered by many Melanesian peoples to be an essential component for some types of expertise, in most societies it was regarded with only mild approval, or with indifference, or in some cases with active discountenance when displayed out of appropriate context.

MELANESIA

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The types of expertise that were valued, sometimes highly, in one or another Melanesian society were numerous and varied. They had to do with the following kinds of activities: gardening, pig raising, hunting, fishing, "arts and crafts," music and dance, orating, fighting, barter, accumulating wealth, religion, and managing and organizing collective activities. The rest of this section will be devoted to examining expertise in each of these activities in terms of the social value attached to it (and hence the respect, obedience, and other payoffs owed to the experts themselves). Wherever possible examples will be drawn from data presented in earlier chapters, but in some cases supplementary facts from primary sources will be required. Gardening As the reader doubtless already knows, gardening was practiced in all but a few Melanesian societies, although there were wide differences in kinds of crops, in relative amounts of time devoted to it, in proficiency of techniques, in proportion of garden produce to total food consumed, and so on. There were also wide differences in the status of the expert gardener relative to those of his society's other types of experts. In view of the relatively large amount of time devoted to gardening in most of these societies, and of the importance attached to garden produce—for everyday consumption, for feasts, for exchanging—it may be surprising to learn that expertise in gardening was highly valued in only a few. Consider the Trobriands, where gardening was pursued enthusiastically and meticulously and where the produce was exhibited with great satisfaction and pride. Men proficient in gardening were singled out as tokwaybagula, "one of the proudest titles which a Trobriander can enjoy" (Malinowski 1935: v. 1, p. 62), but one far, far less "proud" than that held by a successful participant in kula exchanges, and even less influential than that of an official garden magician (towosi) (ibid. v . l , p . 67). Or consider the Kalauna of Goodenough Island, whose desire for "full gardens and small bellies" Michael Young judged to be one of their highest goals (see above, chapter 8). Men who achieved that goal were indeed highly respected, but such expertise was only one of several highly respected attributes (e.g., wealth in pigs and shell valuables and reputations for ritual power, sorcery, and food exchanging)—along with old age ("senior generation") and a disciplined manner. ("In personality, while being expected to demonstrate greater energy, self-discipline, oratorical skill, and somewhat more assertiveness than non-leaders, they generally try to adopt the cool and modest mien which the culture approves of in men and women, young and old alike" [Young 1971: 109].)

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SOCIAL RELATIONS

In another society, the New Guinea Baruya, the successful gardener was honored not so much for his expertise as a gardener as for the use he made of the produce. Such a man was known as a tannaka or tsimie. Tannaka means a "protrusian" which gives a handle for pulling oneself up a rock face or the trunk of a tree. Tsimie denotes the central post of a great ceremonial house. . . . These are the men who are strong at agricultural work, who make large gardens and with whose help the warriors and the aoulatta (expert warriors) make war without having to be preoccupied with their subsistence. One or two of these men, upon whom everyone counts, exist in all villages. They mobilize their women and receive the aid of other women of the village and sometimes even the youths of the men's house to clear the forest. In times of peace, the tannaka put their gardens at everyone's disposal, when it is necessary to organize initiations, or assemblies, or discussions on general points of interest. By their ability to pool the male and female workforce around them, the tannaka strongly resemble big-men [i.e., the term used by anthropologists for e.g., the Siuai and Hagener type of high-status men]. But the difference from big-men, who finally raise themselves above all others, is that the tannaka do not pursue personal enrichments. (M. Godelier 1982: 20-21)

To allay the reader's suspicion at being asked to accept this as a case of unalloyed altruism, the ethnographer added: "They [the tannaka] produce in order to redistribute, and they redistribute in circumstances of wars and initiations where they gain stature with others, the aoulatta, who also appear as indispensable as themselves to the general 'interest' " (ibid. 21). One of the few societies in which proficiency in gardening may have ranked highest in the hierarchy of skills was that of the Kiman of Frederik Hendrik Island, whose agriculturally adapted calendar system of six distinct seasons was mentioned in chapter 8. To these swampdwellers gardening was an arduous and exacting activity, and reputation as a good gardener was evidently a man's highest goal, or so one may conclude from the following: "The most frequent motive for holding ndambu [a food-exchanging competition], apart from the mortuary ritual, is disparagement of someone's ability as a cultivator. Derogatory remarks of this nature wound the Kiman in their dearest ambition, which is to be respected and appreciated as producers of food" (Serpenti 1965: 234). But on reading further we get the idea that it was not skill so much as industriousness that mattered. To say that someone is too lazy to produce sufficient food for himself and for his family, that he is unable to make a proper contribution to the feasts held by his relatives or by his local group, that he fails to give the prescribed feasts for his children or that he is sponging on others: all these are insults so gross that

MELANESIA

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one cannot let them pass without loss of face. The important position occupied by agriculture and food in general in the world of the Kiman, moreover, causes conflicts of the most diverse nature to end up always in remarks of this kind, (ibid.)

In yet another society, the evidence points somewhat less equivocally to the paramountcy of the expert gardener in the hierarchy of skills. Reference here is to the Abelam, a people who numbered about 30,500 and who occupied some 120 communities between New Guinea's Torricelli Mountains and the Sepik River plains (Kaberry 1971). Their communities were divided into hamlets, in each of whose three or four sections resided the core members of a separate patrician. Each hamlet was fairly autonomous, having had its own plaza, men's cult house, ceremonial life, and leaders—who were the "elders," the senior members (in age and in genealogical position) of the local clans and subclans. Individually, these elders managed the affairs (including the land) of their respective descent units, and together the secular affairs of the hamlet as a whole. In addition some of them were known as name-man, which was the most respected status, and which was applied to individuals who excelled in the growing of "long yams." The Abelam grew two types of yams, a long hairless species called

II2.0

SOCIAL R E L A T I O N S

wabi, and a short hairy species called ka. The latter were grown for food, the former, which could be nurtured to reach lengths of up to ten feet, mainly for show. Long yams were grown in separate gardens, which were taboo to women—and to men as well until they became ritually purified of the effects of sexual intercourse, believed to be inimical to yam growth. Sexual intercourse was thought likely to provoke the anger of spirits, including those of ancestors, local men's houses, sun, m o o n , forest, and—most directly—those incarnate in the yams themselves. Thus, the growing of long yams involved not only a great deal of painstaking physical work but religious care as well. All these spirits watch over yams and require sacrifice of coconut milk and pork fat, and the constant attendance of men in the gardens. The main rites are performed by elders, who must observe a taboo on sexual intercourse and certain foods for six or seven months. There is a close identification between a man and his finest yam: it is a symbol of his manhood and his industry. Many of the longest yams (five to ten feet in length) are not eaten: they are displayed at harvest, stored, distributed, sorted again and eventually planted, except for a few unsuitable portions which are handed over rather grudgingly to the women for soup. After the harvest ceremonies, some are given away at girls' puberty ceremonies, male initiation, marriage and death; but the finest are normally reserved for presentation to a ceremonial partner once or twice a year; and one or two may be handed over to men in another village with which there is a relationship of traditional hostility. When a man dies, some of his yams are lashed to a mortuary frame by his grave and allowed to rot. (Kaberry 1971:40-41) Ideally each clan should have its own big man who excels in the growing of long yams and who may or may not be its most senior elder in terms of age. At the harvest display, the big man assumes titular ownership of all the yams for which he has performed magic, because he is said "to have looked after them." In other words, he takes the credit for the crop, although after the display individual owners take away their yams and control their disposal. Over a period of years he has established his reputation—one that is acknowledged by members of his hamlet, by the clan of his ceremonial partner, and by the village at large. His own clansmen entrust many of their yams to him, as may also sisters' sons, cross-cousins and affines. He is described as one who has a name: "This name-man [man of renown], his wabi and ka are good. When he plants them they are abundant"; or he is one who "has harvested big yams." He has many garden plots and storehouses; he and his wife or wives produce a surplus of food for lavish distribution at feasts, (ibid. 52) The name-man of a hamlet's founding clan ipso facto became that of the hamlet as a whole, in which position he was known as kumbu-ndu, 'the tip (or growing point) of a yam or tree' (ibid.). The growing of yams, particularly the giant-size Alata species, would

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appear to provide much scope for the exercise of expertise. It is likely that such expertise was honored in other Melanesian yam-growing societies as well, but Abelam appears to be the only one where it was an essential component of top authority. Pig raising "Pigs are our hearts." This statement voiced by the Mae Enga (Meggitt 1974: 165) could have been echoed in scores of other Melanesian societies as well. For most peoples of the region who raised pigs, they were the principal criteria for estimating wealth, and pork was the most highly favored food. In addition pigs alive or dead were for such peoples the most valued items used for celebrating important rituals, for maintaining or validating social relationships, and for acquiring political power. It is therefore somewhat surprising to learn, after perusing dozens of ethnographies, that expertise in the raising of pigs (as distinct from accumulating, exchanging, or distributing them at feasts, etc.) evidently received relatively little public acclaim—nothing approaching, say, that received by the Abelam yam-growing expert. One reason for that may have been that pig raising itself required little or no technical finesse. Hard and constant work was required to keep pigs fed (and hence domesticated), to protect them from theft, and to prevent them from robbing neighbors' gardens (thereby precipitating conflict), but such work demanded much less knowledge and skill than did, say, consistently successful hunting or fishing. Another and perhaps more decisive reason for the scant public praise and deference earned by successful pig-raisers was that most of them were women, and in most of these societies women were ipso facto ineligible for special deference and public praise. Hunting Skill in hunting was publicly respected in several Melanesian societies, but in only a few of them was the repeatedly successful hunter singled out for honor (e.g., the Keraki, as described in chapter 8). And in none was success in hunting a route to community leadership. For example, among the Baruya (New Guinea), where the cassowary was avidly hunted and its flesh reserved exclusively for males, and where expertise in trapping was dependent upon spirit-possession (by a cassowary spirit!): ". . . the activity does not confer a very great status on its practitioners. It adds to the renown of those who are already great warriors or great shamans by another route, but it is not sufficient to push the individual to the first rank" (Godelier 1982: 26). Even among the Anggor (Sepik area), where (as described in chapter 8) the killing of a wild pig constituted the principal kind of event that mobilized community interest and interaction, "Men are never praised for hunting, nor criticized for not hunting, and the same may be said of hunting successfully" (Huber 1980: 52).

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Figure 19.18. Ulawa, Solomon Islands. British Museum? (after Guiart 1968) Fishing As with hunting, skill in fishing was admired and respected in many Melanesian societies, but in none was fishing expertise prestigious enough to elevate its best practitioners to positions of overall community leadership. Even in the southeastern Solomons, where fishing in general, and bonito fishing in particular, was a major focus of social and religious activities (see chapter 14), belief in the importance of the supernatural ingredient of success in fishing seems to have deflected respect from the technical to the religious aspect of such success (Ivens 1927: 1 8 0 - 1 8 1 ) . Moreover, there was at least one society (i.e., Dobu) in which fishing as an occupational specialty was held in low public esteem, not, I suggest, because of any disesteem of fishing as an activity, but because morethan-average engagement in it denoted lack of access to gardening land, and hence social impoverishment in general. Arts and crafts Ethnographic accounts of Melanesia are replete with descriptions of the objects made by natives and of the way they were made, but few of them have anything to say about the persons who made them except to note, for example, that certain of them were conventionally made by women and certain others by men. In addition, many accounts state or at least

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imply that all adults were capable and practiced in making the things conventionally assigned them, but most accounts neither assert nor deny that one adult w a s better at making things than another. O n the basis o f a few other accounts, however, and supplemented by field observations o f my o w n , I can assert positively that in some o f these societies some individuals surpassed most others in making certain things, and that some individuals were wholly incapable of making some things; moreover, I find it hard to believe that a similar situation did not prevail everywhere. T h a t is not to say, however, that all societies o f the region rewarded expertise in making things or ranked it comparably with other skills. T h e matter warrants much more than the cursory attention I have given it, but I did come across a few societies in which expertise in this domain was rated very high. O n e such was Kilenge, whose members occupied a section of the coast o f northwest N e w Britain. Like many other peoples of N e w Britain (and of neighboring N e w Ireland) the Kilenge engaged in cult activities that involved the making and wearing o f carved wooden masks. In addition, like many other Melanesians they made a practice of embellishing other objects—men's houses, canoe prows, and so forth—and the man w h o excelled in any of these crafts was labeled a namos. The Kilenge recognise that not all namos are equally good in all the artistic activities . . . , that some are good canoe builders, but do not know how to paint the proper design on its prows and so forth. Only the rare artist who excels in all or in many of the arts, and whose skills are recognised by everyone, is considered worthy to be called namos tame. With the epithet goes a considerable amount of prestige. Still, among the select group of namos tame some are held in higher esteem than others. It is hard to say what could have been the original reason for the difference in rank among the namos tame. Probably it was a combination of underlying factors, his artistic qualities, his magic power, the social status of the family group to which he belonged and maybe even his personality. (Gerbrands 1978: 195) Another society in which craftwork was highly valued and expert craftsmen highly rated was Asmat, whose people resided in southwest N e w Guinea. T h e i r headhunting activities were described in chapter 1 1 , but they are much better known among E u r o p e a n s for the extraordinary profusion and, in European terms, "artistry" o f their woodcarvings. Several beautifully illustrated b o o k s on those carvings have been published and, to our present good fortune, a most professionally competent one about some o f the carvers themselves. Here is h o w its author described the position of Asmat woodcarvers: . . . the woodcarver is in the first place a villager like all the other villagers. Preparing sago, hunting, fishing, headhunting, he is one among the others. His

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house may be a somewhat better one than the others, but that is due primarily to the fact that as quid pro quo for his work as sculptor he can draw on a certain amount of help from the men he has carved for when he himself must make something as ordinary as a house. In a community in which wood is such a dominant factor, everyone can take care of what we may call his "daily wood

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requirements" without much difficulty: a canoe, a paddle, a digging-stick, a sago pounder. But for special occasions—which always have to do with a more or less important ritual associated with ancestors and headhunting—the organizers approach the wow-ipits, the woodcarvers of the village. Wow is Asmat for woodcarving, ipits means human being. It is obvious that when a wow-ipits is occupied for days in making a drum or shield, or even longer on a big ancestor pole, he will have no time left to pound sago, to fish, or to hunt. The man who has employed him takes over these tasks as a matter of course. In connection with the festive background of the commission, the sculptor and his family usually receive quantities of extra delicacies: the hind foot of a pig, the tail of a crocodile, and especially the larvae of the capricorn beetle, the most ambrosial of all. Perhaps, too, a plug of tobacco, a metal fishhook, or—who knows—even a knife or an old pair of shorts may occasionally come his way. But that is all. Payment, if we may speak of "payment," of the Asmat sculptor takes the form of prestige, the respect of his fellow villagers, rather than anything resembling our European compensation. In a society in which money is unknown and time plays no part, this is indeed the only way to give the individual that which, after all, for us too in many cases constitutes the pleasure of working: the appreciation and recognition of an exceptional performance. The importance of the woodcarver in Asmat society can be judged from the fact that a renowned wow-ipits differs little in status from a successful headhunter. (Gerbrands 1967: 36-37)

As the reader may recall, in Asmat belief successful headhunting was indispensable for natural fertility in general and for human fertility in particular, human heads having been required for a community's spiritual and hence material welfare, and for the initiation of youths into full manhood. Not surprisingly, the successful headhunter (i.e., the "man of frequent killing," the "man with a large bunch of skulls") was preeminent in the society's hierarchy of expertise—a position that the successful woodcarver evidently shared with him. M u s i c and D a n c e Music and dancing accompanied some public occasions in nearly every Melanesian society. Moreover, the playing of flutes or panpipes was central in the religiously colored rites of numerous peoples of the region. Thus it is reasonable to conclude that expertise in dancing and music making was admired and emulated nearly everywhere. And so it was, at least in those societies whose ethnographers have reported on the matter. But in none were these kinds of expertise considered important enough to elevate their practitioners to positions of community-wide authority or influence in matters beyond dancing and music making. Even among the AreAre (Malaita, Solomon Islands), where panpipe music pervaded the people's public and domestic life, and where its technology and performance appear to have attained high peaks of excellence, there is no evi-

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Figure 19.20. Are Are, Solomon Islands, panpipes (after Coppett and Zemp 1978)

dence for concluding that virtuosity in it was a route to community leadership. 48 Eloquence Men capable of persuasive talk in public gatherings were respected in most Melanesian societies, although the conventional modes of doing so varied widely, from measured reticence to vigorous harangue. In this connection, it should be noted that in many societies it was not only permitted but actually expected that a man would call attention to his own accomplishments (e.g., to his prowess as a warrior, to his largesse to a rival) in a manner that Europeans would judge to be vaunted boastfulness. On the other hand, in perhaps most societies of the region talk alone was not enough, verbal persuasiveness having been qualified by the

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talker's ascribed status or by his accomplishments in other activities as well. In fact, there were only a few societies in Melanesia where oratorical eloquence per se was a highly respected skill. One such was the Duna, whose members resided in the montane area o f eastern N e w Guinea: An anoa hakana is a "man with talk," a man with knowledge who can express himself forcefully, sometimes poetically and melodically, to persuade his hearers in the frequent moots that continue interminably whenever men gather. There are some men to whom "everyone comes to listen" while others "speak only a little in small gatherings, but sit and listen when everybody is there." A man with nothing to say is an anoa yao, a "nothing man," an uninfluential man or a tsiri, an ignoramus, fool or coward. A "man with talk" is usually also a man with real knowledge, sacred, secular, or both. (Modjeska 1982: 8 7 - 8 8 ) For a society in which eloquence in the service of knowledge was one of the most honored and influential statuses, we must look at the Iatmul, whose large nucleated communities were located along a hundred-mile stretch of the banks of the middle Sepik River. E a c h village was politically autonomous and there was much intervillage fighting—including headhunting, which served to enhance the killer's prestige and, supernaturally, the welfare o f his clan. Where the swampy topography permitted, a village was laid out in two lines of dwellings divided by a large dancing place on which stood men's clubhouses. E a c h village was composed of several patrilineal clans, which were combined into "moieties" (but see footnote 2 5 of this chapter); ideally, the dwellings of each "moiety" were located in the same (ideal) line. Space will not permit a rounded treatment of Iatmul society; for present purposes it will suffice to describe only two aspects of it: the social ambience of its men's clubhouses and the totemism of its clans. T h e former can best be done in the words of its first ethnographer, Gregory Bateson: The ceremonial house is a splendid building, as much as a hundred and twenty feet in length, with towering gables at the ends. Inside the building, there is a long vista from end to end down the series of supporting posts as in the nave of a darkened church; and the resemblance to church is carried further in the native attitudes towards the building. There is a series of taboos on any sort of desecration. The earth floor must not be scratched nor the woodwork damaged. A man should not walk right through the building and out at the other end; he should turn aside and pass out by one of the side entrances. To walk right through the building is felt to be an expression of overweening pride—as if a man should lay claim to the whole building as his personal property. But the analogy between ceremonial house and church must not be pushed too far for many reasons: the ceremonial house serves not only as a place of ritual but also as a clubhouse where men meet and gossip and as an assembly-

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room where they debate and brawl. Further, the ceremonial house does not stand to the natives as a symbol of their devotion but rather as a symbol of their pride in headhunting. Where we think of a church as sacred and cool, they think of a ceremonial house as "hot," imbued with heat by the violence and killing which were necessary for its building and consecration. Lastly, the ethos of behaviour in the ceremonial house is as far removed from the austerity which we associate with certain churches as it is from the meek devotion associated with others. Instead of austerity or meekness, there is a mixture of pride and histrionic self-consciousness. An important man on entering the ceremonial house is conscious that the public eye is upon him and he responds to this stimulus by some sort of over-emphasis. He will enter with a gesture and call attention to his presence with some remark. Sometimes he will tend towards a harsh swagger and over-consciousness of pride, and sometimes he will respond with buffoonery. But in whichever direction he reacts, the reaction is theatrical and superficial. Either pride or clowning is accepted as respectable and normal behaviour. In this country there are no steady and dignified chiefs—indeed no formulated chieftainship at all—but instead there is continual emphasis on self-assertion. A man achieves standing in the community by his achievements in war, by sorcery and esoteric knowledge, by shamanism, by wealth, by intrigue, and, to some extent, by age. But in addition to these factors he gains standing by playing up to the public eye; and the more standing he has, the more conspicuous will be his behaviour. The greatest and most influential men will resort freely either to harsh vituperation or to buffoonery when they are in the centre of the stage, and reserve their dignity for occasions when they are in the background. (Bateson 1936: 123-125) Any matter of general interest could be disputed formally in the clubhouse: The tone of the debates is noisy, angry and, above all, ironical. The speakers work themselves up to a high pitch of superficial excitement, all the time tempering their violence with histrionic gesture and alternating in their tone between harshness and buffoonery. The style of the oratory varies a good deal from speaker to speaker and that of the more admired performers may tend towards the display of erudition or towards violence or to a mixture of these attitudes. On the one hand there are men who carry in their heads between ten and twenty thousand polysyllabic names, men whose erudition in the totemic system is a matter of pride to the whole village; and on the other hand there are speakers who rely for effect upon gesture and tone rather than upon the matter of their discourse, (ibid. 126) Associated with every clan were hundreds or even thousands of totemic ancestors—of spirits, stars, animals, birds, adzes, p o t s , and all sorts of things—and it w a s desirable for clubhouse debaters to know all of them, as well as those of other clans, in order to prove the superiority

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or autonomy or land claims and all manner of entities of their own clans. Moreover, this enormous profuseness of nomenclature extended to other cultural domains as well, so that a man learned enough to be a successful debater w a s capable of recalling as many as ten to twenty thousand names. Some men earned respected (including feared) reputations through histrionic ability alone, but the man w h o was both eloquent and learned, was one of the Iatmuls' most highly respected experts. Fighting In discussing this topic it is essential to distinguish between the warrior and the war-manager (although some men were both). The former was the man w h o engaged personally and physically in fighting; the latter was the one w h o organized, supervised and sometimes financed it. Our concern here is with the former, that is, with the man who through skill or bravery or ferocity, or even treachery or luck, or various combinations of these, had wounded or killed one or more "enemies" (however those happened to be defined). Mercifully this subject can be disposed of in short order, for in most Melanesian societies even the one-time killer was honored, at least for a while. (In fact, in many societies a male did not become a full-fledged "adult" until he had killed.) Moreover, in many of these societies, the man w h o made a practice of killing "enemies" on all possible occasions achieved a high level of prestige, usually accompanied by deference (including some based on fear, because on some occasions such men were employed to kill not "enemies" but "friends"). Apart from actual physical killing, the temperament that w a s widely associated with it—general aggressiveness in manner, outspokenness in speech, quickness to anger—was itelf much admired, as a mark of proper manhood, at least in young and middle-aged men. The Maring of N e w Guinea provide a good example of this view. [Informants distinguished two types of men] mbamp yu ('fight-men') and yu amun (probably 'quiet men'). Yu amun are said to be men w h o do not lose their temper when they are displeased. They are also described as being less strong than mbamp yu. They cannot endure long, hard walks. They are not physically vigorous. Some women are said to prefer marriage to this type of man because he is less likely to injure his wife should she annoy him. M a n y of my adult male Kauwatyi informants (about twenty-five [mature men]) stated, however, that yu amun are not common and that adult Maring men are more typically mbamp yu. T h e more vigorous and responsive informants boasted that they had been mbamp yu before the Australian Government Patrol Post was established in the region. They would volunteer stories about their own acts of violence against wives or fellow clansmen. Mbamp yu are said to be physically strong and vigorous men w h o can walk rapidly and great distances. They are quick to bursts of temper and quick to

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action, and they may commit acts of physical violence against those who antagonize them. Men who are mbamp yu may therefore depend on physical coercion to sanction and maintain their own vested interests. Males are said not to acquire a fighting temperament until they have nomani, knowledge about clan life, that is, until they have assumed the duties of adult clansmen. Angry mbamp yu have been known to beat persons offending them with the back side of a steel axe or to shoot an arrow or throw a spear. Such assaults within the clan are not considered serious unless blood is drawn. Maring informants say that people do not die of arrow or spear wounds unless the "liver" is penetrated. The weapon that kills is said to be the axe. Despite the fact that relatively few intraclan assaults result in death, they do frequently appear to result in injury. It is not surprising therefore that Fight Men (mbamp yu) are stated to be feared and can be observed to be handled cautiously by their agnates and other residents in the territory. (Lowman-Vayda 1971: 3 3 2 333)

To qualify the above, however, two other points need to be made. The first is that, notwithstanding the admiration that was shown in Maring and other societies to the experienced killer and the 'fight-man' temperament, few societies rewarded such individuals with positions of leadership on the basis of those qualifications alone. In a few societies (such as the Tairora, who were described in chapter 11) men of this type "seized" leadership, but that is a different thing. In most other societies in which warfare was of major concern, it was the war-manager rather than the warrior who was held in highest esteem. The second point to be noted is that in most Melanesian societies warrior-like temperament was admired only within bounds, and the behavior that typified it was rewarded with community-wide esteem only so long as it was directed toward community "enemies." The man unable or unwilling to curb his aggression within his own community was usually curbed by his fellows by one means or another, including private sorcery or tacitly decreed public execution. Barter As was amply exemplified in chapter 12, bartering was a major activity for many Melanesians, and the goods thus secured were important in several ways: to acquire needed foods (e.g., the Hiri trade of the Papuan Gulf, the Langalanga shell money-for-food exchange, the Lau-Baegu and Tolai fish-for-vegetable exchange); to obtain pigs for feast giving (Siassi); to secure artifacts of one kind or another (Siuai pottery); to obtain dance complexes (Arapesh); and on and on. Many of those transactions took place without explicit haggling, but they did involve maneuvers of less overt and more subtle kinds—in other words, social-relational skills. It is therefore surprising (to this writer anyway) to find so little evidence of native recognition of bartering expertise—of labels for, say, "clever bar-

Figure 19.22. Gulf of Papua, barkcloth mask. Museum für Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte, Hamburg (after Schmitz 1962)

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gainer," or "sharp trader." The absence of such evaluation is understandable when the exchange took place within the context of politically motivated gift exchange, but not for transactions in which a dissatisfied buyer had no redress. Accumulating Wealth Many ethnographies on Melanesia contain statements to the effect that wealth in itself does not serve to enhance its owner's status: that it must be distributed in appropriate ways to accomplish that goal. 49 In the majority of cases that conclusion was doubtless correct; but was it true in every case? Were there any societies in Melanesia where the mere possession of valued objects also engendered praise and deference for its owner? In my view there were. 50 In fact, I would go so far as to say that, up to a point, the wealthy individual—a very relative term—was respected in every society, even in those (such as Siuai) where distributing wealth was deemed a far better thing than accumulating it. The respect may have been in many cases tinged with envy, or even fear (e.g., in many societies a wealthy man could employ a hired killer or a professional sorcerer to attain his ends), but similar sentiments were often focused on the successful spender or distributor or manipulator of wealth as well. Here however the "up to a point" qualification comes in. In most of these societies, there was a tacitly agreed-upon point beyond which the acceptable level of wealth retention became unacceptable hoarding in the case of individuals. And in most societies the chronic hoarder was penalized by sanctions that ranged from contempt to murder. But let us turn to those societies, which were fewer in number but nonetheless "Melanesian" in location, wherein the accumulation itself of wealth was deemed a good thing and the status of the expert accumulator a highly respected one. Certainly, one of the most outstanding of this type was Tolai, whose members occupied the northern part of New Britain's Gazelle Peninsula. Their dukduk cults were described earlier in this chapter, and their extensive and active trading activities were described in chapter 12. The most highly valued objects of the Tolai were tambu, the fathomlong strings of bead-like discs of shell (Nassa camelus) that they obtained by dangerous canoe voyages to the Nakanai coast some 200 miles to the west. The Tolai used tambu in all kinds of exchange, from commercial barter and payment of services, to ceremonial gift giving and funeral distributions. In the words of one ethnographer, "The Tolai had a price for almost everything"—including human flesh (T. Epstein 1968: 24). 51 The strings of tambu were often broken up into shorter lengths for small purchases, or were combined into large coils that were placed in the owners' matrilineage storehouses for safekeeping—an act done publicly and ceremoniously. It was the goal of every Tolai man to own as much tambu as

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possible. For one thing, it enabled him to purchase desirable things, such as food, tools, dance and song compositions (for use at feasts), and entry into the mens' secret dukduk society. But more important, it enhanced his status both in the present and the Afterworld. When a man died almost all of his accumulated tambu was distributed among the mourners, "in order that a lot of people would cry and speak of him with respect and arrange many [memorial] feasts" (an observer in 1905, quoted in T. Epstein 1968: 26). As for status in the present world, a man known to have a large accumulation of tambu was labeled uviana ('rich man'), 5 2 and if he were also a matrilineage headman (lualua) he became known as a ngala ('Bigman'), the society's highest status, which usually combined other functions, such as manager of most large-scale secular affairs. In this connection, although a matrilineage's official headman (lualua) was ideally its senior member, by genealogy, "a more junior uviana (rich man) often managed to displace a senior but poorer and less enterprising man. [And] though most uviana were also lualua, only few lualua managed to become uviana" (ibid. 27). As noted earlier, individual Tolai usually deposited their coils of tambu in their matrilineage storehouses, which were guarded over by the unit's lualua. While a full storehouse doubtless redounded to the prestige of the matrilineage as a whole, the tambu remained individually owned. (And woe to the reputation of any lualua who was discovered to have embezzled such funds.) It should be emphasized that wealth in this society did indeed result from expertise. During mortuary rites for a wealthy man almost all of his accumulated stock of tambu was distributed as well as s o m e belonging to his next of kin, and hence the power arena w a s always left wide open for n e w and enterprising contestants to enter. N o doubt sons and sisters' sons of wealthy men were in a slightly advantageous position, since their father or mother's brother frequently tried to launch them in the struggle for power and prestige, but this support was not enough to ensure their success. There was certainly an element of ascribed status operating in Tolai society, but this did not carry much weight, (ibid. 2 6 - 2 7 )

This being the case, how then did an individual become wealthy and— what seems to have been coincidental—politically influential? An answer is provided by Richard Salisbury. There were many ways for earning tambu, which it should be recalled had a degree of convertability far greater than most other forms of "money" in Oceania. One way was by producing and selling consumer goods of various kinds—food crops, pork, fish, lime (for betel chewing)

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—a commerce that arose from environmentally based regional specialization and that was facilitated by the system of markets described in chapter 12. The money that an individual (or a household) could earn in this way was however quite small; and even those earnings were reduced by the contributions that every adult was expected to make in order to fulfill kinship and other social obligations (such as weddings and funerals). Somewhat larger amounts could be earned (and saved) by sale of more specialized objects and services, such as canoes, carvings, and songs and dances (usually invented on commission). But even these earnings were not sufficient to make an individual wealthy. As Salisbury put it, the Tolai thoroughly believed in the "Horatio Alger ethic" and most of them worked industriously in line with that belief, but the few who actually succeeded in becoming wealthy did so by means of entrepreneurial skills rather than by services and hard toil. Moreover, once an individual had joined the ranks of the wealthy, the gap between himself and the nonwealthy—I hesitate to label anyone " p o o r " in a society where everyone evidently had a sufficiency of food and shelter—tended to widen even further inasmuch as the wealthy received much larger portions of goods handed out at feasts, funerals, and other public occasions, not only from other wealthy persons but from non-wealthy ones as well. ("He who has, receives more" is not a Tolai aphorism, but it appears to have applied to them.) Becoming wealthy required exceptional initiative and social-relational skills, along with a financier's expertise. One way in which a man could exercise those skills was by organizing a labor association (kivung) among clanmates and by 'managing' the tambu earned by it, say, by making and operating a large seine-net and selling the catch. Such earnings were not usually distributed, so that when the association disbanded—a common occurrence—the treasury usually remained in the manager's hands. Another way to earn large sums of tambu was to purchase a dance (usually by commissioning its composition) and then have it performed, for pay, at as many ceremonies as possible. (This of course required the owner to hire people to perform it, but, needless to say, a shrewd owner kept much of the receipts for himself.) A third way was to purchase and make use of a tubuan, as was described earlier in this chapter. However, the most elaborate and potentially profitable way to earn large amounts of tambu was to sponsor a clan memorial ceremony, a matamatam, which included one or more tubuan-raisings along with performance of "copyrighted" dances by teams from neighboring villages, and a great deal of frenzied open-handed gift giving by all present. The cost of sponsoring a matamatam was typically very high, but the sponsor was almost certain to receive in return more than the financial cost, from fees paid by tubuan-raisers and dance-owners, and from gifts received at the time and on future occasions when he was a guest—all

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this in addition to the political profits received in the form of enhanced prestige, and the social debts owed him by relatives of the deceased person honored by the ceremony. Even that w a s not all, since much of the cost of sponsoring a matamatam w a s contributed by others, for example, by clanmates of the sponsor and of the person honored. In other w o r d s , although a sponsor may have invested a considerable amount of his own tambu in a matamatam, the larger part of his investment consisted of his own energies and entrepreneurial-political skills. Generalizing even more widely, from this and other Tolai institutions, I conclude that wealth for them consisted not only of a man's tangible, liquid assets in the form of stored coils of tambu, but also of debts o w e d to him. A man's store of tambu w a s clearly important—to a degree perhaps unequaled in other Melanesian societies—but even more important to his " t o t a l " position in Tolai society were the amounts owed to him, both of money and services of various kinds.

Religious specialists Virtually every one of the skills so far discussed w a s believed, by its practitioners and the latters' community-mates, to be in some measure dependent upon assistance from supernatural agents; in other w o r d s , nearly all of the types of experts heretofore listed were religious specialists as well. But in addition, there were in many Melanesian societies specialists whose principal or only job, as such, w a s to interact with supernatural entities, for a variety of purposes and in a variety of ways. At one extreme were the holders of religious offices, whose job it w a s to promote their community's welfare (by priestly intercession with its tutelar spirits, by magical attacks against its enemies, and so forth); at the other extreme were sorcerers w h o were employed by individuals to settle their o w n individual (and usually intracommunity) scores. Unfortunately (i.e., for would-be generalizers like myself), the situations were so varied from society to society with respect to these specialists that it would require a study as comprehensive as, say, Michael Allen's 1 9 6 7 study on male initiation cults (summarized above, in chapter 14), to discern patterns in them. A r a n d o m and cursory look at the ethnographies, however, reveals a few noteworthy points: first, regarding the degree of occupational specialization that obtained. In chapter 6 I proposed that religious actions might be classified for analytical purposes under three headings: magic (manipulation of spirits or spirit-like forces for goals either constructive or destructive); petition (prayers and offerings to spirits for assistance); and divination (attempts to learn, from spirits or spirit-like forces, the cause of past and the outcome of future events). In that same chapter I p r o p o s e d we label the persons performing these three kinds of actions correspondingly: magicians (including sorcerers), priests, and diviners (including human m e d i a , or

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shamans). In writing about some of Oceania's societies (e.g., Tahiti) it has proved feasible to retain these occupational distinctions, because there were individuals, even offices, that specialized in one or the other of the three kinds of actions. The question now is: To what degree did that specialization obtain in Melanesia? It is my impression that destructive magic (sorcery) was subject to more occupational specialization in Melanesia than was priestcraft, divination, or constructive magic. Next in order was priestcraft, which in some societies (e.g., those of Malaita) was institutionalized in distinctive offices, although it was more commonly one of several functions of the heads of kinship units. Also, unlike most sorcerers, individuals practicing priestcraft commonly performed divination and constructive magic as well. There were in many societies experts in one or another kind of the latter—for example, garden, weather, health—but in no society that I know of were there indivdiuals who specialized in all kinds. This domain of religious action was fragmented even further, as most adults in all of these societies practiced one or two magical actions of their own. And I know of no society in the region in which individuals specialized in divination only. In Melanesia the boundaries around specializations in religious actions were rendered even more indefinite by the tendency of many adults to be their own religious practitioner—priest, magician, and diviner—and in groups—cults and congregations—to perform priestcraft and/or magic collectively. Notwithstanding the above, there were individuals who specialized in one or another kind of religious practice, and while few of them practiced their specialties full-time, they were recognized to be experts. Where in a society's hierarchy of experts did they fit in? In some Melanesian societies (e.g., Malaita and New Caledonia) priestcraft ranked very high in the hierarchy of expertise, in others a similar ranking was accorded magicians (e.g., the Trobriand garden magician) or shamans (e.g., among the New Guinea Baruya). Nevertheless, I have the impression that religious expertise alone was nowhere the most prestigious kind of specialization. However, there is one report which, if reliable, might require some revision of this conclusion. (I write "might" because of the uncertain reliability of the report—based on hearsay evidence, more than a century ago.) In any case, the circumstances described are unusual enough to warrant quoting in full: T h e most conspicuous chief in Florida [central Solomons] at the time and in the place in which Europeans became acquainted with that island was Takua of Boli, whose position it may be safely said w a s never so exalted in the eyes of the natives as in the eyes of their visitors. He was not a native of Florida but of M a l a [Malaita], and his greatness rested in its origin on a victory in which as a

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Figure 19.23. Florida Island, Solomon Islands, claymodeled skull (after Moore 1968)

young man he took a principal part, when a confederation of enemies attacked the people of Ta na ihu in Florida, where he was then staying. His reputation for mana, spiritual power, was then established; and from that, as a member of a powerful family . . . his influence increased. Thus according to a native account of the matter "the origin of the power of chiefs, vunagi, lies entirely in the belief that they have communication with powerful ghosts, tindalo, and have that mana whereby they are able to bring the power of the tindalo to bear." (Codrington 1891: 51-52)

In order to sustain and increase that influence it was essential for the incumbent to remain spiritually powerful and to build up a body of henchmen. A man's position being in this way obtained, his own character and success enhanced it, weakness and failure lost it. Public opinion supported him in his claim for a general obedience, besides the dread universally felt of the tindalo power behind him. Thus if he imposed a fine, it was paid because his authority to impose it was recognized, and because it was firmly believed that he could bring calamity and sickness upon those who resisted him; as soon as any considerable number of his people began to disbelieve in his tindalo his power to fine was shaken. But a chief had around him a band of retainers, young men mostly, from different parts of the island some of them, of various kema [clans], who hung about him, living in his canoe-house, where they were always ready to do his bidding. These fought beside him and for him, executed

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his orders for punishment or rapine, got a share of his wealth, and did all they could to please him and grow great and wealthy with him. They would marry and settle round him if strangers in the place; and thus a chief and his retainers would be by no means always the representatives of the people among whom they ruled, and who sometimes have suffered for their misdeeds. The influence of a chief, if his band of retainers is large, and the district in which he rules is populous, extends widely in the island; his brother chiefs aid him, and, for a consideration, carry out his wishes. The power to impose a fine was an active one; a chief forbids under penalty of a fine, which is a form of taboo; he orders one who has done wrong or has offended him to pay a certain sum of money to him. Thus Takua imposed a heavy fine on the man who had proposed to marry within the prohibited degrees, and the offender had to hire an advocate to state his case discreetly, apologize, and beg off a part of the fine. The chief sends women or boys to fetch the fine he has imposed; these sit at the man's door and dae, dun him by their presence and demands, till he pays. If he refuses, the chief sends his retainers to destroy and carry away his property. It is evident that a chief of sense, energy and good feeling, will use his power on the whole to the great advantage of the people; but a bad use of a chiefs power is naturally common, in oppression, seizing land and property, increasing his stock of heads, and gaining a terrible reputation. For example, a man who had a private enemy would give money to a chief to have him killed, as one did not long ago to Dikea; Dikea would send one of his young men to kill him. But sometimes the man would know his danger and send more money to the chief to save his life. Dikea would take both sums and do as he pleased, (ibid. 52-53)

Under some circumstances a chief could choose his own successor. A chief would convey his knowledge of the way to approach and to use the power of the tindalo to his son, his nephew, his grandson, to whom also he bequeathed as far as he could his possessions. Thus he was able to pass on his power to a chosen successor among his relations, and a semblance of hereditary succession appeared, (ibid. 52)

But it did not always work out that way. The power of a chief naturally diminished in old age, from inactivity, parsimony, and loss of reputation; and, to the credit of the people, also if, like Takua when he took the daughter of one who was already his wife, he did what was held by them to be wrong. In any case some one was ready, it might be by degrees, to take the place of one whose force was waning. A chief expecting his death prepared his son, nephew, or chosen successor, by imparting to him his tindalo knowledge; but this could not always be done, or the choice made might not be acceptable. The people then would choose for themselves, and make over the dead chiefs property to their chosen head. Sometimes a man would assert himself and claim to be chief, on the ground that the late chief had designated him, or because he had already a considerable following (belonging perhaps to an increasing kema, as the dead chief to a decreasing

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one), or boldly standing forth and crying out to the people that he w a s chief. Without a chief a village would be broken up. (ibid. 5 3 - 5 4 )

M a n a g i n g and Organizing With a few possible exceptions the kinds of expertise that Melanesians valued most highly were demonstrated skills in "personnel management" and in the organization and execution of large-scale enterprises, both at home and abroad. The possible exceptions include, for example, the Florida shaman-chief just mentioned, the master yam-growers of the Abelam, and the repeatedly successful headhunters of the Asmat; I write "possible" because of my belief that something additional to an individual's ability to communicate with spirits, or grow yams, or capture heads, may have been involved in these activities, such as an ability to mobilize the assistance of other persons. The kind of "personnel management" referred to had to do with administering (supervising, adjudicating, etc.) the extra-household affairs of the manager's own hamlet or, in the case of nucleated villages, his own neighborhood or "ward." In instances in which a hamlet or village ward was formed around some division of a descent unit—perhaps the most common kind of Melanesian residential arrangement—it was customary, if he were capable enough, for the division's "senior" member to occupy the position of manager or headman. In most instances this widely held prescript was in fact followed; at the hamlet or ward level of organization the tasks required of the manager were seldom demanding enough to warrant substitution of another, possibly more able man. However, as we have seen, such substitutions did sometimes occur, either by usurpation or by some process of "election." In the case of whole communities, which in most cases contained two or more discrete multi-household units, either hamlets or wards, the demands upon overall management were correspondingly heavier, both for adjudicating interunit conflicts and for supervising collective activities of the group as a whole. In many cases this was accomplished more or less democratically by a council composed of headmen of the hamlets or wards, but in others the demands, and the opportunities, led to concentration of authority in one of those headmen, or in someone other than an "official" headman. The actions that promoted such concentration differed somewhat from one society to another, but some of the underlying strategies were the same. Thus, in some the individual ambitious for leadership accumulated some wealth and then used it to win supporters by contributing liberally to their undertakings—bride-price payments, funeral obligations, and so forth. In other societies he used his accumulated wealth, or credit, to win community-wide renown by one or another of the forms of conspicuous display or consumption described earlier (e.g., by display of

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valuables, by sponsorship of feasts, by purchase of entry into higher cultgrades). Or, in some places an ambitious individual assumed a position of community-wide leadership by more direct means, for example, by persuasive personal initiative, or overriding oratory or barefaced bullying. By whatever means an individual had attained community-wide leadership, either by ascription or by some form of achievement, it was in most cases essential for him to possess and continue to exercise "managerial" skills in order to hold onto that leadership. Even in the most ascriptively oriented communities there were sure to be chiefly peers, or junior kinsmen, willing or eager to assume the role if the incumbent showed signs of faltering. There were doubtless communities in which individuals, having attained local leadership, were content to stop there and hold on to what they had. But in many other places there were local leaders with ambitions to extend their renown and influence into other communities, both for the intangible personal satisfactions thereby derived and for the increased respect that "foreign" praise and influence tended to engender at home. As I have described in this and previous chapters, Melanesia's peoples instituted many different ways by which ambitious individuals went about acquiring "foreign" renown. One that was widely used was marriage to foreigners; other ways included institutions such as the Hageners' moka, the Enga te, the Siuai muminai, the Tolai matamatam. Despite their differences in cultural trappings, however, all of these institutions were alike in two important respects. First, while the attainment of success in them required outstanding organizational skills on the part of their sponsors, in most cases the latter could not even have launched them without home-community support, which itself was in large part also the product of managerial skill. And second, however much renown a man may have generated elsewhere by his organizational coups, any authority that he possessed was usually limited to his own community, or even to his own hamlet or ward. While some of the institutions just mentioned were performed in symbolic trappings of war, they were usually tranquil, even amicable, affairs. There is reason to believe, however, that the peacefulness observed by ethnographers in some of them was an adjustment to colonial rule—that is, their forms of peaceful exchange were deliberate post-European substitutes for armed conflict. In any case, there is ample evidence for believing that, prior to colonial rule, one of the most widespread ways ambitious individuals used to expand their renown was to sponsor military campaigns. As we have seen, much intercommunity fighting was small scale and ad hoc—immediate and impulsive responses to specific acts perceived to be hostile. But in many societies some military campaigns were long-planned, large-scale affairs initiated and sponsored by individ-

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uals, who organized and financed them in ways similar to those used for "foreign" ceremonial exchanges and multi-community feasts. H o w M a n y Experts? Having defined "expertise" as "better-than-average knowledge and skill," and having described in this section the principal types of expertise valued highly enough by Melanesians to call forth special kinds of interaction between expert and nonexpert (e.g. praise, deference, obedience, fear), there remains the question of proportion: Actually how many experts were there? (To rephrase an old adage: What's the point of being Chief in a tribe with no Indians and all Chiefs?) Regrettably, with only a few exceptions the ethnographies do not provide precise answers to this question besides stating (or implying) that each community contained "one or two," or "only a few." One of those exceptions is a report on the Duna, a people of the southern Highlands of New Guinea. Here is the way Nicholas Modjeska, went about the answering the question. Three knowledgeable informants were asked to agree upon a rating for each [of the 104 men in their community] in respect of [three of the community's most prestigious statuses: oratorical skill ('men with talk'), possession of wealth, and helpfulness in exchanges and distributions ('men who help')]. Assessments in each respect were on a three-point scale with men of the first order being "truly men with talk," "truly wealthy men," and "men who help everywhere." Men of the second order were "middling men" (anoa aroko), and the third order included "little men" and "nothing men." (1982: 97)

The results were as follows: (1) Approximately 75 percent of all men have some reputation for "helping"; about 50 percent have some reputation for wealth, and 25 percent for wealth of the same [high?] rank; about 35 percent have some reputation for oratorical ability, but only 14 percent are considered "truly men with talk"; (2) almost half of the moderately and truly wealthy men have little or no influence in speaking, and 60 percent of the truly wealthy men have little or no influence [in speaking]; (3) only 30 percent of the men with some influence in speaking fail to be at least moderately wealthy; (4) although 12 percent of all men combine reputations for wealth and "helping" generosity of the first order while having only modest influence or less in speaking, there is no man who is both wealthy and skilled in speaking who is not also active in "helping"; (5) only 8 percent of the men of the [community] are pre-eminent in all three respects: wealth, generosity, and skill in speaking; although I would not see these men as quite "big-men," they were certainly the most influential and pre-eminent in the group, (ibid. 97-98)

(By 'big-men' the writer presumably was referring to the successful leaders in moka and other Highland institutions of large-scale exchange.)

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One case cannot a generalization make,s3 but I have the impression that proportions like those just instanced may have been quite typical of many societies in Melanesia. Communities Melanesian communities ranged in size from about 20-30 persons to more than a thousand. In some forested mountainous areas the average was only about 50-75; in parts of the New Guinea Highlands and along stretches of the Sepik River it reached 300-500. As has been mentioned, the dwellings of some communities were concentrated into compact villages; in others they were scattered about in hamlets or in single-household homesteads. Even in most compact villages, however, there were divisions into spatially and socially distinct neighborhoods or wards. In many communities there were socially significant spatial arrangements in addition to hamlets or wards (such as e.g., the Iatmul village's [ideal] division into two parallel lines of dwellings), but rather than attempt to devise a classification for all such arrangements—a tedious and probably not very profitable undertaking—I will reproduce, with a few additions, one that deals with the composition of communities in terms of their enduring kinship units. It was authored by Marie de Lepervanche, and was itself a revision of an earlier scheme provided by Hogbin and Wedgewood;54 it proposed a classification into four major types: 1. Communities composed (ideally) of the male members of a single exogamous patrilineal clan, along with their wives and unmarried female clanmates. The community territory was owned corporately and exclusively by the clan—residually, that is, as it was subdivided into parts in which clan segments held more or less permanent use-rights. Most New Guinea Highland societies were of this type, but it must be emphasized that the pattern delineated was an idealized one, based on what their adult members believed it ought to be. Most such communities also included various kinds of "outsiders" (e.g., the brothers of in-marrying wives, the husbands of female clanmates) who were by some fiction or other assimilated into the clan. In view of the rule of clan exogamy most members of the owning clan had to seek spouses from other communities, an arrangement that facilitated but did not guarantee peaceful intercommunity ties. 2. Communities composed of two or more locally-based exogamous, (patri- or matrilineal) descent units. Because of the possibility, and usually high frequency, of intracommunity marriages, such communities (e.g., Abelam, Gahuku-Gama, Ngarawapum, Nagovisi) were potentially more self-contained than those of type 1. However, this tendency toward parochialism was more often than not offset by intercommunity ties of

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other kinds, including the presence of a second kind of descent unit of society-wide distribution (e.g. Wogeo, Ngaing, Small Islands, southern Raga, northern Ambrim), and of intercommunity residence changes by males (e.g., Trobriands). 3. Communities composed of segments of unilineal descent units of society-wide distribution, and those of societies lacking fixed rules of marital residence (i.e., a man had wider options for residence and landowning than in communities of type 2). Examples of type 3 communities occurred in Lakalai and Tolai (both on New Britain) and to a lesser extent in Siuai (Bougainville)—all of these societies having had non-localized matrilineal clans. 4. Communities in societies composed of ambilineal descent units. As we have seen, in all societies of this kind there was a tendency for close agnates to reside together on their common descent-unit land, but otherwise the wide choice of where to live served to foster intercommunity moves, and intercommunity ties. An extreme example of this type was Kunimaipa. Insofar as the above classification concerned the degree of a community's social discreteness, it did so mainly in terms of a resident's outside kinship ties. Needless to say, those were not the only kinds of relationships that served to render Melanesian communities more, or less, discrete. Of those other relationships the most conjunctive were trade partnerships and networks, and large-scale kula- and moka-type institutions of ceremonial exchange; and the most divisive perhaps were ideologies (such as that of the Asmat) that encouraged intercommunity killings in order to maintain a community's spiritual welfare or to enhance the status of its individual members. Killings and cults, however, worked both ways. In some societies they were divisive to an atomistic degree; in others they served to unite two or more communities into fighting alliances or into joint ceremonial enterprises (say, for initiating their young males). Another aspect of any community's social structure is its governance— a huge and protean topic that has inspired many attempts to classify (including the less explicit but nevertheless relevant discussions in this chapter about authority and expertise). The most influential treatment of the topic has been by Marshall Sahlins (1963), who distinguished achieved "leadership" from ascribed "chieftainship." Sahlins identified the latter with Polynesia and the former with most of Melanesia, including especially a type of leader whom he labeled "big-man" (which according to him, was typified by, among others, the mumi of the Siuai of Bougainville.55 Godelier provided a succinct characterization of Sahlin's "big-man" stereotype. A big-man, according to Sahlins, is a man who possesses personal power acquired by his own merits, which is not inherited and cannot be passed on.

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These merits arise from the exercise of several talents: magical powers, oratorical gifts, courage in war, competence and effort in agricultural work, [talents] which have proved his superiority in these various contexts. Yet, according to Sahlins, these talents are not sufficient to make a man a big-man. It is still necessary that he should add to them a capacity which seems to play a decisive role in the formation of his prestige and power: the capacity of knowing how to accumulate wealth and distribute it with calculated generosity. Little by little, these talents, this wealth and this generosity make this man worthy of the respect of a large number of individuals who belong to his own and neighbouring tribes. And soon, for some of them, the respect and admiration are transformed into loyalty and active support. These people are in general close and distant relatives, affines, and neighbours who consent to help this man in his enterprises and thus form a "faction," upon which he depends to make the fame of his name spread far beyond the frontiers of his tribe. (Godelier 1982: 3 - 4 )

While Sahlin's formulation has received wide acceptance by writers of textbooks, it has been severely criticized by some specialists on Melanesia, who have pointed out (1) that his "chieftainship" (i.e., ascribed authority) was more widespread in Melanesia than he specified, and (2) that "leadership" was achieved in more ways than he implied.56 Readers who have persevered thus far will be well aware of the accuracy of these two points of criticism, so there is no need to discuss them further here. There are, however, other points about Melanesian institutions of governance that require mention. One point worth recalling is that in many societies of the region, there existed side by side statuses of ascriptive and of achieved governance. A second point to recall was the occurrence in many Melanesian societies of a blending of the two types: that is, the necessity of ascriptive statuses of governance to be "maintained" by achievement, and the tendency for some achievable statuses of governance to become ascriptive over time. A third point, which I have not focused on in this chapter but which nevertheless requires mention, is the probability that most Melanesian communities periodically underwent changes in their institutions of governance, in some cases cumulatively and in others cyclically—and not only as a consequence of alien intrusions or of cumulative changes in technology, as appears to have taken place in the Wahgi area of the New Guinea Highlands,57 but autochthonously as well. As witnessed among the Siuai, nearly every community I knew was in process of swinging, pendulum-like, between ascriptive governance by the headmen (and headwomen) of its one or more matrilineages, and achieved "leadership" by a feastgiving mumi. Its position on the pendulum swing depended upon the presence—and the degree of local and regional political success—of an individual intent on achieving mumi status (see chapter 12, and Oliver 1971). An accurate representation of the social structure of Melanesia's com-

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munities would be incomplete without mention of another form of social inequality: the reference here is not to inequalities between leaders and followers, or males and females, or older and younger, or "owners" and "immigrants," and so forth, but to those deriving from individual differences in personal capabilities and/or access to material resources. Melanesia's societies have often been characterized as "egalitarian" and their members as "fiercely" so. And so most of them appear to have been, in comparison with some societies of Polynesia and Micronesia. Nevertheless, in most Melanesian societies there were adult males so far below the local average in material possessions or in socially valued capabilities, or both, as to earn the vernacular labels "nothing man," or "rubbish man," or (among the Baruya) "sweet-potato man." In a few cases the disparagement was directed mainly at war captives or refugees, and in at least one case at occupational status (i.e., Dobu's fishermen). In some others the unfortunates were "bachelors"—men destined to permanent bachelorhood either because of extreme physical or mental shortcomings, or of inability to finance a marriage. (See for example, Bowers 1965.) In perhaps all Melanesian societies individuals varied enough in socially valued characteristics to prompt their members to classify one another into two or three levels, as was reported of the Duna earlier,58 but the stratification I am here drawing attention to—which I suspect was also widespread—was of a sharper, more institutionalized kind. Finally, I must add an example of one other form of social inequality (or at least, social distinction) that has been reported for a Melanesian society: one that was unlike any other I have encountered in the ethnographic literature. Little Mala lies just off the southern end of Big Mala (i.e., Malaita) in the southeastern Solomons. There was little left of the traditional culture of the Little Malans when British missionaries began recording "customs" there, but one of the institutions they described had to do with a division of the populace into "chiefly" and "commoner" sectors. (The terms in quotes are those of the missionaries and hence might include English meanings not contained in the native terms for those sectors.) 59 In any case, whether "chiefly" or not in the English sense, those so described differed from the "commoners" in several respects, especially in the way in which they had become "chiefly." I turn again to Codrington for an account of their origins—in this case for those who "reigned" at the coastal village of Sa'a. According to this missionary-ethnographer the larger, and "chiefly," percentage of the inhabitants of coastal areas were descendants of fugitives from inland Sa'a, who had migrated coastward some eleven generations earlier. The migration t o o k place under the following circumstances. T h e r e were four brothers at the ancient [inland] Sa'a, of w h o m the eldest w a s the chief;

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two were named Pau-ulo, the eldest Pau-ulo paina, the great, the second Pauulo oou, the champion; the two younger had the same name, Ro Ute seu oo'u. The chief was a quiet man; the two youngest, aided by the second, were always fighting and damaging their neighbours' property; all Pauulo Paina's [shell] money was spent in paying compensation for their injuries and in making peace, and he told them he must leave them and go away. The neighbouring people, however, determined to make an end of their trouble; they collected, and began to surround the village of Sa'a as night fell. Before their circle was complete the Sa'a people learnt their danger, gathered their women and children, and escaped unseen and unheard in the darkness, carrying with them three drums, which remained at the present Sa'a within the memory of old men yet alive. . . . Thus they escaped and descended towards the coast; and when they came to a fork where the path divided Pauulo Paina made a speech, saying that no fighters, bullies, thieves or wizards were to follow him. One party then branched off with Pauulo Oou; and lower down a second separation was made, so that in the end three settlements were formed of people who counted themselves of [sic] kin. The inhabitants of what is now Sa'a ani menu [coastal Sa'a] received the fugitives with Pauulo Paina, and his descendants in the male line have ever since been the hereditary chiefs. The descendants of the old inhabitants are now but few and of the lower orders, but they are still the owners of the land. It has never occurred to the Sa'a immigrants to dispossess them; the new-comers remain, even the chiefs, landless men, except so far as a little has been given to them and a little sold; they have always been allowed what they wanted for their gardens, and have been content. When the move was made there was no great difference in speech, and there is none now in words; but the older race speak very slowly, and may be distinguished now by that slow habit of speech. There are then at Sa'a, and at the other two settlements founded by the refugees from the ancient Sa'a, a family of chiefs with a history, and with descent in the male line. All of that family are born in a certain sense chiefs, the eldest son succeeding to the position of his father as principal chief unless he be judged incompetent. If he turns out a bad, vicious man he loses respect and power, and his brother insensibly replaces him. Sometimes a man will retire because he knows his own unfitness. The chiefs power therefore at Sa'a comes from his birth and personal qualities, not from his intimacy with supernatural beings and his magical knowledge; he may have these, and is in fact pretty sure to have them, but if one, like Dorawewe now, sacrifices for the family, it is not as chief, but because he has had the knowledge how to do it passed on to him. In the same way the chief curses in the name of a lio'a, powerful ghost, forbidding something to be done under the penalty of death, taboos, because of his ancestral connexion with that lio'a. He inherits wealth from his father, and adds to it by the fines he imposes and by the gifts of the people; but no wealth or success in war could make a man a chief at Sa'a if not born of the chiefs family. (1891: 48-50)

The intriguing, and unanswerable, question arising from this saga is of course, H o w did the fugitive inlanders come to be accepted as "chiefs" by

Figure 19.24. Gulf of Papua, barkcloth mask. Museum of Primitive Art, New York (after Guiart 1963b)

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their coastal hosts? By their control of supernatural powers? (Not so, according to the text just quoted.) By force of arms? (And if that why did the victors stop short of confiscating the losers' lands?) By managerial ability? Or by what? The case has some parallels with the sea-people/ land-people dichotomy found elsewhere in Oceania (e.g., in Fiji, as will be described in chapter 20), except that the Sa'a sea-people counterparts happened to be inlanders. Supracommunity

Relationships

Throughout this chapter, and in chapters of Part 2 , 1 have mentioned several kinds of social relationships that served to connect single Melanesian communities into wider cooperative relationships: not just an absence of overt hostility and not merely shared sentiments of cultural similarities and common origins, but relationships involving mutual collaboration and some measure of coordination, between individuals or segments of communities or whole communities. Such relationships ranged in kind from the ties of kinship or affinity of a few individuals to full-scale community-wide cooperation in cult activities and war. The interactions comprising those relationships varied also, in frequency and duration, from one-time episodes to sequences lasting a generation or longer. And the relationships involving whole communities varied from hesitant partnership to strong centralized coordination, including, in some cases, corporately shared rights in or concern with each other's territory. 60 They were, however, far too varied to fit under a single label (such as, for example, the popular—and correspondingly troublesome—term "tribe"). Therefore, I shall close this long chapter by simply reminding the reader of the variety of relationships—kinship, affinity, economic, marital, religious, and so on—that served to connect single communities into larger units, rather than attempt to devise a classification for such units. Experience shows that sociological classifications, including those proposed in this book, seldom survive the appearance of more data or different ways of viewing them.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Fiji

T h e 140,000 or so people who inhabited this far-flung archipelago two centuries ago shared enough distinctive cultural traits to warrant considering them together, and as a region separate from Polynesia or Melanesia (to which some writers assign them). Some difficulties, however, stand in the way of generalizing about their traditional social-relational ideas and practices. The first of the difficulties arises out of the geographic diversity of the islands themselves. There are about 2 6 2 of them, of which some 95 were permanently inhabited, the latter having ranged in size and topography from tiny coral islets, to Viti Levu (which had an area of 4 , 0 5 3 square miles—more than half of the area of the whole group—and mountains up to 4 , 4 3 1 feet above sea level). Moreover on the larger islands themselves there were sharp contrasts in rainfall—and hence in natural vegetation and horticultural potential—between windward (rainier) and leeward sides. In the face of such wide geographic differences it is reasonable to assume that there were differences in social institutions as well, especially in the case of communities isolated by topographic barri-

Figure 2 0 . 1 . Kava bowl (after Parsons and Savage 1975) 1150

FIJI

h5I

Figure 20.2. Map of Fiji Islands ers or open-sea distance. (This is not to propose that geography determined predictably the overall nature of Fijian social institutions, but it is unreasonable to conclude that it was entirely without effects on them.) Despite such geographic differences, and the division of the vernaculars into several mutually incomprehensible dialects (or languages), many of those who have written about the social institutions of these islanders have referred to them sweepingly as being characteristic of the Fijians. Another potential source of diversity in the social institutions of the Fijians was the long-term presence of many Tongans among them. As noted earlier, since Fijian "Lapitans" first colonized Tonga about 3,200 years ago, people and objects and ideas have continued to move back and forth between the two archipelagos. By 1700, if not earlier, this traffic had become regularized in the form of Tongan (and Samoan) barkcloth, mats, and whale teeth for Fijian canoes, red feathers, pottery, and sandlewood. Most of the transporting was done by Tongans, but in Fijian-type canoes (bartered directly from Fijians or built by Tongans in Fiji). Concurrently, many Tongans traveled to Fiji not only to trade but to serve as mercenaries in Fijian wars and, in some cases, to conduct piratical raids of their own. 1 As a result of all these activities there were by the 1840s large numbers of Tongans residing in Fijian islands—some of them living as craftsmen or traders or mercenaries in Fijian villages, and some (mainly in the eastern, or Lau Archipelago) in colonies of their own.

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Then, in 1837, the Tongan presence began to increase with the arrival of the first Wesley an missionaries, who were accompanied by a retinue of christianized Tongan teachers. Basil Thomson recorded the story: They [the new arrivals] were at once joined by all the resident Tongans, who were now as zealous in converting the Fijians to Christianity as they had formerly been in converting their property to their own use. T h e countenance and encouragement of the white missionaries fostered their natural arrogance, and, when persuasion failed to effect conversion, stronger methods were sometimes resorted to. By the year 1 8 4 8 the Tongans had got thoroughly out of hand, and King George, [George Tupou I] who was not yet secure against conspiracy, foresaw that any rival who might choose to recruit partisans in Fiji could return to Tonga with a formidable army. In order to provide a legitimate outlet for the ambition o f his cousin Maafu, he dispatched that redoubtable warrior to Fiji ostensibly as governor of the Tongan colony, in reality as conqueror of as much of the group as he could take. Maafu's strong personality, aided by the lash, soon reduced the turbulent Tongans to order, and island after island of the eastern group went down before him. T h e Tongan teachers, now established in most of the western islands, acted as his political agents, and the missionaries were powerless to discountenance aggressions that were avowedly made with the object of spreading the Christian faith. So horrible were the excesses of his warriors in these raids that the Wesleyan authorities were occasionally obliged to wash their hands of him, but their somewhat half-hearted protests did not prevent Taveuni and the greater part of Vanualevu from falling under his control. T h e Tongans had carried all before them by their superior courage and dash in frontal attack, and by their intelligent use of European weapons. ( 1 9 0 8 : 52-53)

The question raised by the above is, In what ways were the Fijian's traditional social institutions altered by their post-1837 Tongan contacts? The contacts prior to that seem to have been sporadic and small-scale enough to have produced only marginal effects, but the later ones, described by Thomson, were massive enough to lead one to expect that they brought about some large social changes in at least some of the islands; but according to the best balanced historical study of that era those changes were only slight.2 The introduction of guns doubtless helped their owners to kill from greater distances but probably did not measurably increase the ferocity or the frequency of warfare. And while many native chiefs seemed eager to enroll European beachcombers and traders in their retinues and campaigns, the latter had little or no effect upon native social organization or intercommunity politics. As for the English missionaries, far from transforming the chief-focused social structure, they reportedly took pains to support it, having preached: "The necessity of subjection to those who were in authority; and that the people should diligently provide and cheerfully render tribute in prop-

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erty, and willingly obey their chiefs in all reasonable labour and service" (James Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, vol. 2, p. 75, quoted in P. France 1969:31). Eventually of course the missionaries and the many other outsiders who visited or settled in Fiji produced profound effects upon the ideas and practices of the Fijians. But our concern here is not with those transformations per se; instead, it is with the effects that those transformations had upon our knowledge of these islanders' traditional social institutions. With this purpose in view, perhaps the largest impediment to that knowledge can be imputed to the well-intentioned efforts of Fiji's colonial masters to codify certain aspects of those institutions as they conceived them to be. Aside from the practical consequences of that codification, which have been numerous and profound,3 it presented an erroneous but "official" model of traditional Fijian social structure—one that has stood in the way of discovering what that social structure actually was. Not only has that model been perpetuated in the writings of nonofficial "experts" on Fijian society, but many Fijians themselves came to accept it as a faithful view of their pre-European past. Fortunately, several other scholars, largely historians and ethnographers, have by now rejected the authenticity of the official model, and some of the latter have provided unvarnished accounts of present-day social institutions, along with some persuasive suggestions about what they were like two centuries ago.4 One point on which the official model was accurate had to do with the patterns of settlement that prevailed in the ninety-five inhabited islands of the Fijian archipelago. In most cases the dwellings of a community were nucleated, that is, like most dwellings of New Caledonia but unlike those of nearby Tonga they were clustered together into villages. As I noted in chapter 9 some instances of that clustering was necessitated by spatial limitations (e.g., in the case of tiny islands such as Bau), and many others doubtless constituted sensible adjustments to the need for defense (but not inevitable ones, as witnessed by the presence of dispersed settlements throughout much of war-ridden Polynesia). In other words, it would appear that the early nineteenth-century Fijians constructed and resided in nucleated villages mainly because their immediate ancestors had done so. What the aforementioned "official" model of Fijian society did not adequately conceptualize was the extent to which many village communities moved about, abandoning one site and constructing their buildings in another. This was especially so of those in the interiors of the larger islands, where, according to a missionary who served for forty years among them: "They harried and chased each other, frequently burning villages, which were speedily replaced by others. . . . The impression in my mind after some study of their legends and folklore stories

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is that life in the hills in the older times was like a huge game of hide-andseek" (Brewster 1922: 59). The nature and extent of such warfare was indicated earlier, in chapter 11. But warfare was not the only circumstance that led to shifts in village locations. According to Peter France, who examined the oral traditions of scores of villages, and found them to be well enough authenticated to "encourage reliance in their substantial accuracy": T h e original peopling of the land follows the same pattern in each story: after the first settlement the tribe grew in numbers and then the various families went off t o seek land and to settle in different villages. . . . T h e rest of the story usually relates the constant movements from place to place, either at the whims of the chief, o r because o f the increased population, or the threat or existence of a state of w a r with a neighboring chiefdom or between the tribes o f their own area. . . . There is no period of calm and enduring settlement of land as far back as the traditions record. ( 1 9 6 9 : 1 1 - 1 2 )

Nor, in France's view, were such movements confined to the peoples of the interior. "A general state of ferment persists throughout the group as far back as oral traditions extend. Even the chiefly yavusa [quasi-descent units, see below] of the present day make no claim to immemorial occupation of the lands they occupy" (ibid. 13). Other important points on which the official model was erroneous had to do with the nature of descent units and the principles of land tenure. The whole of the Fijian population was viewed in the official model as having been divided, neatly and exclusively, into (maximal) patrilineal clans (yavusa), each one of which was segmented into two or more occupationally differentiated subclans (matanggali), which were themselves segmented into two or more patrilineages (tokatoka). In addition, according to the official model, the matanggali of each yavusa were ranked vis-a-vis one another on the basis of genealogical seniority, as were also the tokatoka segments of each matanggali. In most cases, it was held, a yavusa and all its segments were localized in a single village (solely or with other yavusa), but it was conceded that the matanggali segments of a yavusa had in some cases become established in two or more neighboring villages (M. Groves 1963a: 282). Regarding land tenure, it was the official view that all land was owned corporately by one or another matanggali, that it was inalienable (even in the event of defeat in warfare), and that a headman had no stronger claims than other members in their matanggali" s estates. Part of the error contained in the official view about Fijians' descentunits may have resulted from the authors' simplistic tidy-mindedness, but the main source of it seems to have been their preoccupation with the chiefdom of Mbau, and their assumption that the descent-unit system of

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Figure 2 0 . 3 . Temple in Mbau Island village that confederation of eastern coastal Viti Levu was typical of all Fiji. That assumption was certainly erroneous with respect to some other communities in Fiji, as will be described; in fact, the neatly polysegmentary model may not have been representative of Mbau itself. As for the official view of land tenure, it was based not on experience with Fijian land ownership, with which it was patently at odds, but on a theory propounded by the nineteenth-century American scholar, Lewis Henry Morgan. It was Morgan's view that land ownership was communal and egalitarian in all societies at the "middle Barbarism" stage of evolutionary development—at which stage the scholar-missionary Lorimer Fison declared Fiji to be. (Fison, whose writings on Australia were mentioned in chapter 7, had an influential role in Fiji in creating the official model.) 5 After decades of administrative inquiry and field research there has emerged a more complex picture of postcontact social relationships, and more credible inferences about those of former times. One of these findings has to do with the labels applied to the descent units defined in the official model—yavusa, matanggali, and tokatoka. Through field research it has been learned that not all of those terms were in use everywhere, and further that they served to label different kinds of units in dif-

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ferent places—and even different kinds of units in the same place. Thus, in Moala, yavusa was used in different contexts for all or part of an agnatic stock, for various aggregates of cognates (including nonagnates), and for kinship in general. The same degree of variability applied to usage of the terms matanggali and tokatoka. Another, more positive, finding relates to descent—that is, to the undeniability of the fact that Fijians in most of these islands attached more social importance to patriliny than to other kinds of descent. Moreover, it has been generally concluded that in former times (as well as now) patrifiliation was normatively the most acceptable basis for membership in localized corporate or collective-action groups, but not the only basis. However, instead of merely listing the differences and similarities among the many subcultures of these islands, let us examine more comprehensively the social institutions of one of them, not because it is more "typical" of the whole (a conclusion that would require a comparative study not yet made) but because the ethnographic report on it excels any of those made elsewhere in these islands. The report is Marshall Sahlin's on the inhabitants of Moala, some of whose large-scale exchange institutions were described in chapter 12. Moala Moala Island, 90 miles southeast of Viti Levu, is about 24 miles in area, the remnant of an ancient volcano. Its topography is generally mountainous, the highest peak reaching 1,535 feet; it contains little level land but a fair number of freshwater streams, along with coastal waters containing a large and varied supply of fish. Sahlins estimated the pre-European population to have been 900-1,000 (i.e., a density of 37-41 persons per square mile). This relatively favorable ratio, accompanied by a wide variety of food crops and techniques (including irrigation), evidently provided the inhabitants with an overall sufficiency of food. All of the island's present-day villages are on the coasts; formerly some of them were inland, and most were either fortified or close to pre-prepared places of refuge—the "war villages" mentioned in chapter 11. The former villages may have been more compact than the present-day ones, and were evidently subdivided into more spatially distinct wards of close kinsmen. Both archaeology and oral tradition bear witness to the frequency of population shifts of whole villages and of parts of them. The causes of village relocations, fissions, and fusions are nearly always phrased politically in traditions, the strategy of warfare being the most common explanation. Villages are said to combine because of threat of attack, divide in order to occupy strategic sites, migrate because of vulnerability to an

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enemy, or relocate at the c o m m a n d of a conqueror. Besides this, internal rivalry and conflict over chieftainship are frequently cited as reasons for the migration and resettlement of local kin groups. (Sahlins 1 9 6 2 : 7 3 )

In addition, "It seems likely that since ancient times local growth in population has resulted in a certain amount of resettlement in areas known to be more fertile" (ibid. 76), but "It does not appear that population relocation [has been] a direct, immediate consequence of [the technique of] shifting agriculture" (ibid. 74). By routes overland and/or by sea all of Moala's villages were within reach of each other, but natural barriers of one kind or another served to divide the island into three separate "communication spheres" which, not surprisingly, corresponded to the Island's three perdurable chiefdoms. The most important social units in aboriginal Moala were extended families, local descent units, villages, and regional confederations of villages (i.e., the three "chiefdoms" just mentioned). In pre-colonial Moala the extended family was the basic unit of residence and of food production and consumption. It was also the basic element of the society's political structure, and its internal structure a microcosm of that of the society as a whole. Most extended families were composed of an elderly or middle-aged man and his wife (or wives), their unmarried daughters, their sons, and the latter's wives and children. In some cases they included a married daughter and her husband and children, and some households also contained one or more other relatives—"strays" who for one reason or another chose or were forced to leave their former households. For each married man and his wife (or wives) and unmarried children there was a separate dwelling house for sleeping, but only one cookhouse for the extended family as a whole. The dwelling houses were built on "permanent" earth platforms and formed a cluster that was separated somewhat from those of other extended families. Each house, or rather house platform, had a name, the cluster as a whole having been known by that of the house of its senior male. An extended-family's common cookhouse reflected the collective activity of its members to produce and process their food. Under the headship of the senior male all able members tended the unit's gardens and groves and fished from its boat and pooled their produce for common processing and consumption, or for contributions to village or other extra-household occasions. Land clearing was typically carried out by village members acting together, but the rest of the work of producing food was done separately by each extended family. An extended family as a unit possessed undivided rights of ownership in its (named) house sites. It also retained indisputable use-rights in its

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groves, irrigated taro plots, and other cleared garden sites as long as its members continued to use them; after that, presumably, the rights reverted to the tokatoka of its core members (see below). The distinctiveness of an extended family was also exemplified through its solidarity, for example, when one of its members was threatened by outsiders, or in its collective responsibility for misdeeds by any of its members. Internally each extended family was a miniature replica of a "chiefdom." Its eldest male member was its turangga ('head' or 'chief) both in name and in practice; he directed the unit's collective activities, maintained order among them (with, reports Sahlins, a "heavy hand"), and was treated deferentially with "chiefly custom" by all of them. (For example, his bed was at the "highest" or extreme rear part of the house; he was the first to be served food; and it was considered magically dangerous for any other member to eat the remains of his portions of food. )6 Similarly, the principal wife of a family head was known and treated as 'lady' (marama), the female equivalent of a male "head" or "chief." Only her marriage was celebrated ceremoniously; the other wives were "secondary," having been "taken" from their natal families in return for payment of whale teeth. Hierarchy among family members was pervasive, all members of an extended family having been interranked in terms of authority and social protocol. Uterine siblings were ranked by birth-order, half-siblings (same father, different mothers) by the order of marriage of their mothers, and first cousins by the birth-order of their parents. However, while a man's firstborn child, either male or female, bore the title and received the honors (e.g., special birth rites) reserved for an ulumatua, only the firstborn male succeeded to his father's position of authority. "Daughters enter the rank hierarchy in the same way as sons and are treated respectfully by both younger brothers and sisters, but normally a girl marries out, and she does not succeed to the headship of the family" (ibid. 106). Further to the last point, a woman's social position in her family of marriage was usually based on that of her husband, unless the societal ranks of her own parents were much higher than his, in which case the deference due her was correspondingly greater than that due him. (One youth informed the ethnographer that he did not worry about becoming ill as a result of using his father's personal possessions, because he was of higher rank than him—his own mother having been of higher rank than his father's mother.) Mention was made above of the location of the bed of a family's head in the most socially elevated part of its house. This was only one aspect of a comprehensive metaphoric relation between rank and space. For example, the several parts of a house were either "high" or "low" and were occupied by its members according to their intrafamily rank. And it was improper for a person to stand while talking to a superior, especially if the latter were seated.

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The principle of rank was potent enough on occasion even to overrule that of consanguinity. Thus, a man who married into and resided with the family of a firstborn daughter was treated by her family with corresponding high respect. And if he were of high rank in his own birthright, he or his children might even succeed to the headship of his wife's family, or to any other office held by that head (ibid. 106). Notwithstanding the social importance attributed to seniority per se, the principle was ultimately qualified by the physical deterioration accompanying old age. When a headman was no longer capable of actively supervising his family's affairs, he and his wife or wives usually moved into a smaller house, leaving his eldest son to succeed him. (That was the time, also, when younger brothers tended to establish separate households of their own.) By moral precept sons were obligated to look after the physical needs of their aging parents, but the ethnographer observed several cases in which the latter were ill-cared for and virtually despised. And reports from other parts of Fiji indicate that aged men were frequently strangled to death, sometimes at their own request (ibid. 114). Beyond the extended-family level, Moalan society was structured into two basic types of social units: categories of persons claiming common patrilineal descent; and groups of kinsmen most of whose members resided near one another and engaged now and then in activities collectively, and who shared in common some measure of property ownership. Each of these types of units, or subdivisions of them, had Moalan and/or "official" Fiji-wide labels, but, because of the ambiguities of those labels mentioned earlier, the units will be referred to here by terms that will serve better to define them analytically and to compare them with social units elsewhere in Fiji (and throughout Oceania generally). Turning first to the descent-unit categories, there were on Moala four major, that is, maximal, ones of these centered on that island, and parts of others centered elsewhere. The four major ones were Udolu, Nasau, Manukui, and Turanggalevu. Except for Udolu, the members of each of these claimed common descent through males from one or another of three ancestors who were believed to have founded settlements on the island about ten generations earlier. Each of those three founding ancestors was held to be an 'ancestral spirit' (kalou vu), who appeared occasionally before his (patrilineal) descendants in the "vehicle" of a particular kind of animal or plant. Continuing the Moalan genesis story: each kalou vu sired a number of sons who became the founders of distinct branches whose members proliferated and spread throughout the island, eventually becoming the cores of numerous local groups. Beyond their reverence for their own kalou vu, the only thing shared by the members of each of these three maximal descent-unit categories was their rank visà-vis that of the members of the other two. They were agamous (i.e., neither exogamous nor endogamous); they owned nothing corporately

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(except for their name and the symbolic "vehicles" of their founder); and they engaged in no activities collectively—in fact, some of them belonged to mutually antagonistic local groups. As for their social ranking, Turanggalevu and Manukui, the two "chiefly" units, ranked highest and next highest, respectively. (As we shall see this kind of ranking was also signified in the hierarchic structure of local groups.) The nature of Udolu was somewhat anomalous. Some of its members claimed common descent from a kalou vu named Tui Wai, but other evidence suggests that it was composed of a number of small, scattered, and politically subordinate descent lines whose members were oblivious of their wider connections. Collectively, its members ranked even lower than Nasau. In any case, both Udolu and Nasau were believed to have been the island's taukei ('owners', 'original occupants'), or kai vanua ('land people', 'cultivators'), in contrast to and in rank lower than the later-arriving, "chiefly" Manukui and Turanggalevu.7 Politically the relations among the island's patricians (i.e., its four "maximal" descent units) was more complex. Upon their arrival, legend has it, Manukui and Turanggalevu were equally "chiefly" in rank and were rivals for political power, but in time the kai vanua Nasau joined with the Turanggalevu and after a series of wars they together gained political ascendancy over the Manukai. (That is to say, the wars were fought not by the patricians per se, but rather by local groups—in this case, villages—whose leaders belonged to those patricians.) Evidently, political power was not consistently equated with social rank: the victorious Nasau did not thereby become higher-ranking than the Manukui, although the "chiefly" Turanggalevu did become so. In addition to the four patricians just described, there were on Moala single branches of other clans that were centered on other islands. According to tradition these were late arrivals on Moala, and their reasons for being there varied, from marriage with local women to war service with local chiefs.

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Cross-cutting the above relationships based on patrilineal descent were four types of groups (not mere categories) based, as a minimum, on residential proximity and collective activity. One of these, the extended family, has already been described; the labels that will be used here for the other types are tokatoka, matanggali and local yavusa.8 Tokatoka means literally a 'place to stay'. Most Moalan tokatoka contained one or more (unsegmented) extended families—the exceptions having been those, usually in process of extinction, which contained only the remnant of an extended family. The mean (and median) size of such units was 22-23 persons; those having more than 30-40 members were on the threshold of segmenting. In most cases each tokatoka consisted of a single core of extended-family heads who were members of a single patrician or subclan. There were some tokatoka, however, containing two such cores, which represented different patricians—the result, say, of the formation of a separate extended family by an in-marrying male of a different patrician. Each tokatoka had a name, which was usually that of the house platform of its founder. And each had a headman (liuliu), who with his family occupied the house built on that platform and who was usually, but not invariably, the senior (nonsenile) male of the founder's patriline. In the case of most tokatoka the genealogical depth, from living middleaged adults to ascribed founder, was from four to eight generations. In single-core tokatoka the principles governing ranking were extensions of those that obtained in extended families. ("Generally speaking, every natal member of a [single-core] tokatoka has a different standing, one precisely proportionate to his genealogical distance from the local tokatoka ancestor" [ibid. 260].) In tokatoka containing an extra core, the senior man of the extra one ranked equal to that of the founding-line one only if the former's patrician or subclan ranked much higher than that of the latter. The houses of members of a tokatoka were usually concentrated in the same part of a village. Also, the unit had corporate, more or less permanent use-rights over particular tracts of garden land as well as over sections of irrigated taro-growing areas; although, it should be added, such rights of the unit as a whole were in many cases obscured by the more immediate claims of its component extended families or by the overriding claims of matanggali and local yavusa. A similar ambiguity prevailed concerning the role of tokatoka in collective activities. In some cases a tokatoka operated as a unit, for example, in holding feasts (say, for a life-crisis rite of one of its members) and in exchanging goods or services with other units. But in other cases people engaged in such activities as separate extended families or as parts of larger units. Moala's matanggali ("a kind [of people]") were composed usually of

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two and rarely more than three tokatoka. Three types of tokatoka can be distinguished. One consisted of tokatoka whose core members belonged to the same patrician, the matanggali having in most cases developed as the result of segmentation of a single tokatoka. The second and third types consisted of tokatoka cores of different patrician affiliation—the one having developed as result of the growth of a cognate line (i.e., of an in-marrying man) within the original tokatoka, the other by fusion with an "immigrant" line (say, some war refugees). Ranking and leadership within a matanggali were based on the same principles that prevailed within tokatoka. The traditional domain of Moala's matanggali has been obscured by the action of colonial authorities, who designated them the principal unit within a village in terms of collective activity and property ownership. (As mentioned earlier, this policy was based on the authorities' view of social organization in eastern Viti Levu; it seems not to have been altogether accurate for that part of Fiji, and it was even less so for M o a l a . ) That the Moalan matanggali was traditionally a named group, and that its members occupied a distinct section of a village, seems quite certain, but of its other features Sahlins said the following: T h e land holdings of [its tokatoka] segments could be considered as a combined matanggali estate under the sway (lewa) of the matanggali leader, w h o held the titular title of " o w n e r " (taukei). T h e matanggali h e a d m a n , however, customarily exercised even less control over the matanggali estate than did the tokatoka leaders over their respective sections. T h e matanggali co-operated occasionally in production and distribution in the old days . . . however, the matanggali has been subject to the s a m e structural weaknesses as the tokatoka: different [patri-lines of the tokatoka] or different tokatoka of the matanggali m a y [have acted] separately, even antagonistically, on particular occasions which presumably [called] for collective matanggali action, (ibid. 2 2 4 - 2 2 5 )

Some writers on Fiji have described tokatoka a n d / o r mattanggali as exogamous. It is true that on M o a l a very few marriages took place within such groups (i.e., only one percent within tokatoka, and only four percent within matanggali), but that is accounted for, not by any stated rules of exogamy but by the Moalans' preference for cross-cousin marriage and by the fact that kinsmen of that relationship rarely belonged to the same tokatoka or matanggali. On M o a l a with the exception of the village of Naroi each village constituted a single local yavusa. Naroi was the island "capital," the place of the island's paramount chief; it consisted of two local yavusa, which had formerly been two separate villages. In Sahlins' words, a local yavusa is "an association of matanggali and [in some cases one or more] unaffiliated tokatoka centering around a dominant chiefly office and the kin group [currently] holding that office" (ibid. 225). The primary basis for

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Figure 2 0 . 5 . Fly whisk

that association of tokatoka and matanggali was their respective connections with the chiefly nucleus, and not because of any traditions of common descent. Their connections with the chiefly nucleus (which was either a whole tokatoka or a patriline) were of various kinds: by membership in the same patrician; or by some former marriage (and hence by cognatic kinship); or by traditional subservience as, say, master fishers or official spokesmen and executives (i.e., "talking chiefs"). In 1 9 3 6 the size of Moala's local yavusa ranged from 5 0 to 1 9 4 persons and averaged about 9 3 . All of them contained at least two matanggali along with one or more unaffiliated tokatoka. Ranking within them followed the same principles as obtained within matanggali, having been, however, somewhat more complicated because of the presence in each of them of members of most of the island's patricians. With respect to property, the chief of a local yavusi was titular "owner" of all land claimed by the unit's component matanggali and tokatoka, but his authority over the tracts claimed by segments other than his own were, in the ethnographer's words, "negligible." N o r did the local yavusi as such have many economic functions, except for building the houses and working the gardens o f its chief. The latter enjoyed some economic prerogatives, including his right to lala, that is, to levy objects and services for community or personal purposes, which however he customarily repaid with food. He also received the largest share in local food distributions, he retained a large proportion of the yams delivered as first fruits, and he was the object of elaborate ("chiefly") deference at home and elsewhere. His institutionalized power to rule depended somewhat on the rank of his patrician. If that were high, then:

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His political position was sustained by an elaborate social ceremonial, and it was reinforced by display of insignia of rank. The chief was also exalted above others by virtue of the spiritual power of descent . . . : he was supposed wiser than others, more capable of enlisting supernatural power, and his person and possessions were secured against the hands of the community on pain of magically inflicted illness. Humility should be displayed in the chiefs presence, obsequity in addressing him. . . . (ibid. 2 9 2 )

But I will return for a moment to a chiefs right to lala and at the same time describe another important type of transaction, kerekere. Kerekere derives from kerea, 'to request'. It involved a "gift" of something from a donor to a recipient in response to the latter's specific request. The something could be almost any kind of object or service (except for houses, house platforms, and permanent titles to land)—provided that the recipient genuinely needed the thing required. (To request something not genuinely needed was kothokotho, 'greedy', 'covetous'.) According to Sahlins the transaction was not an "exchange," that is, it did not require, even implicitly, a counter-gift, much less one of equivalent value; it did however open a "path" for the donor to request something in the future from the recipient, provided he had a genuine need to do so. Kerekere was based on one aspect of the ethic of kinship, specifically on the view that persons ought to share their goods with kinsmen in need —the potential for extending one's kinship ties having been virtually unlimited. On the other hand, the transaction also served to create, or in some instances reinforce, a social inequality between donor and recipient: "To solicit an object . . . is to admit weakness; . . . to honor a kerekere is to show 'strength' (kaukauwa), productive ability" (ibid. 210). Expressing this inequality, a kerekere customarily took place in the donor's own house, where he sat in the most honorable location while the requestor remained near the least honorable location, the entry. Persons of affluence (including those of high rank and/or chiefly office) were of course especially subject to kerekere requests, and because of the visibility of that affluence, and of the social implications of requesting and receiving, such persons seldom made requests. Instead, persons holding chiefly offices possessed the means of obtaining from their subjects what they needed (or simply wanted) in their power to lala, to command. Moreover, in stating their wishes the word "request" was not used; instead, "I have come for such and such" (ibid. 211). As noted previously, only one of Moala's present-day villages was composed of more than one local yavusa, but since there had been other multi-;yavusa villages in the island in the past, let us shift our reference from yavusa to village. A Moalan village was integrated structurally by means of three kinds of relationships. It was first of all an aggregate of matanggali and (unaf-

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filiated) tokatoka (and in the case of one present-day village two separate local yavusa); all of these units were ranked one with another according to the rank of their respective patricians and thereby interrelated by common subordination to the village's tui, the headman of the highest-ranking local kin unit. In most present-day and recent Moalan villages the core of the latter was a branch of either Turanggalevu or Manukui, the island's two "chiefly" patricians. That subordination was institutionalized in several ways (in addition to the ways already mentioned, including the overriding power of the lala of the village's tui): The headmanship of most matanggali and of (unaffiliated) tokatoka was expressed in a verbal title, which in most cases was the name of the function customarily performed by the tokatoka on behalf of the village tui (e.g., master fisher, executive officer, spokesman, priest). As Sahlins described it, "The village is an association of socially specialized groups, each doing its part in community life, each considered necessary to maintain the integrity of the village" (ibid. 297). The village was a single religious congregation among whose several deities the kalou vu, the "ancestral spirit," of the tui (i.e., of the highestranking patrician represented in the village) was considered supreme. While each of a village's kin units may have had particular ties with kin units elsewhere, the ties of the tui's kin unit were considered to be that of the village as a whole. 9 The second kind of relationship by means of which villages were internally integrated had to do with the "land-people"/"sea-people" dichotomy mentioned earlier. Aboriginally, many villages contained kin units affiliated with both land-people and sea-people patricians—the former said to have been better farmers, the latter better fishermen and seafarers. In any case, whatever the historical accuracy of that stereotype it served to influence the distribution of food at feasts; when eating together land-people should not eat food relishes (e.g., pork) produced on land, and sea-people should not eat fish from the sea. (However, landpeople could eat taro and other vegetable staples, and sea-people could eat freshwater fish.) Third, Moala's villages came to have a measure of internal integration by means of their members' numerous individual ties of affinity. In the three villages examined for this feature, an average of 40 percent of the marital unions were endogamous. In other words, many members of any village were interrelated by ties of kinship or affinity, or both—which calls for some further characterization of the Moalan connotations of those terms. In keeping with the Moalans' own bias in reckoning kinship, most of the discussion so far has focused on the agnatic side of it. But like all

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other peoples of Oceania they had specific rules for behavior vis-á-vis relatives on the mother's side as well. And as in most other societies of Oceania of comparable size, most marriages took place between persons who were already kinsmen. 10 Turning briefly to the subject of kinship, the Moalans distinguished fairly sharply between "true" and other kinsmen—the former having been the descendants of one's own grandparents. Cross-cutting that distinction was another one that characterized certain kin-types as "very serious" (namely, mother's brother, father's sister, a male's sister's son, and a female's brother's son). 'Serious' (dredre) meant that such relationships were of critical importance and hence that interaction with such a person should be conducted with strict regard to the prescribed form. The latter called for strict "avoidance" between a male and his father's sister; avoidance was also prescribed between a man and his sister's son, but that relationship included another kind of behavior as well. The sister's child is an extremely privileged relation, the vasu. This term is most commonly used in reference to the sister's son (particularly the oldest sister's oldest son) but it is also appropriate in certain contexts to the sister's

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daughter if she is first-born, and it may be extended to all of a man's sister's children—or even beyond, for a kin group can be collectively considered the vasu of another kin group in consequence of a marriage between important ancestral figures of the two units. The vasu, again the oldest son in particular, has unusual rights of access to his mother's brother's goods. And if the maternal uncle is of high office, these rights to goods and also to respect extend to all of the uncle's following. The sister's son is then a "great vasu" (vasu levu). (ibid. 169) The relationship was not, however, entirely one sided. . . . this reciprocal privilege had a name, bale naijitoko, "the staff falls," or ravi nai jitoko, "the staff leans." The term refers to the custom of placing a walking stick in another's garden to claim the produce, a custom traditionally supposed to have been exercised by chiefs as well as mother's brothers. In any event the economic obligations on the paternal side of a vasu relation toward the child's maternal relatives are just as strong as their converse, (ibid. 218) In addition to these special ways of categorizing kinsmen, the terminology used by the Moalans—and in fact by Fijians in general—to classify kin types was of the configuration that anthropologists have labeled "Dravidian"—a pattern that (as the label indicates) occurred in India, and also in some societies of Australia and Melanesia (not however in Polynesia). In terms of the ways it distinguishes and lumps together a person's cognates, the Dravidian pattern of kin terms is consistent with a form of society made up of two exogamous (hence intermarrying) patrimoieties. (And in some of the societies employing this pattern of kin terminology that kind of social organization actually prevails.) I quote Murray Groves about the applicability of this pattern to Moala in particular (and by implication to Fiji in general). . . . the basic postulate [underlying the Dravidian system of kin terminology is] that it places kin in those categories of relationship in which they would necessarily stand if the society in question consisted of only two lineages exchanging women prescriptively. Accepting this postulate, it would follow that in adult life all the kin with whom Ego has the "serious" relationship specified [by Sahlins] must live with the patrilineage other than his, while all those whom he treats informally must live with his own patrilineage. The realities of social life in Fiji do not in fact accord with this postulate; Ego's cognates do not all belong either to Ego's local group or to only one other. What the etiquette of kinship ensures, nevertheless, is that your relationship with all of those cognates who might be adult members of your patrilineage is relaxed, while your relationship with all those cognates who might be adult members of a patrilineage with which you have an affinal alliance is carefully formal. (1963a: 281)

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It is no longer possible to discover why the "realities of social life" in nineteenth-century Fiji (e.g., the prevalence of numerous separate and agamous descent units) were not in accord with the postulate underlying their kin terminology. It is however interesting to note the presence of such terminology in Melanesia (associated in some cases with more consistent "social realities") and its total absence in Polynesia. In other words, however "Polynesian" Fiji may have been in some aspects of its culture, it was not so in this underlying, almost subliminal, possibly vestigial, system of classifying cognates. Descriptions were given in previous chapters of the ways in which Fijians in general fought and exchanged goods with one another as members of individual villages or of multivillage units. The next few paragraphs will be devoted to intervillage relations on Moala in particular— not on ways of fighting and exchanging but on the social contexts of those ways. Each of Moala's precolonial villages was connected with several others by numerous kinds of ties. In the first place, individuals and their local kin units were linked by intermarriage and by membership in one or another of the island's patricians, and when the links in question were between members of high-ranking kin units they tended to involve all of the latters' village mates as well. However, ties of kinship and affinity were not a sufficient basis for promoting or maintaining intervillage amity; the factor of proximity was crucial for that. Thus, most individuals had clanmates, and hence potential partisans, in nearly every other village, but it was only in nearby, easily accessible ones in which such potentials tended to become fulfilled. Moreover, the importance of proximity is revealed even in less parochial present-day times; Sahlins found that over half of the extravillage marital unions recorded by him were between residents of nearest villages. The combination of kinship, affinity, and proximity served to promote intervillage relationships of various kinds: economic, "gregarious," and political. Goods and services circulated through kerekere and hospitality; people attended one another's ceremonies; and villages linked in these ways tended to be allies in war. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the island's villages were divided into three regional confederations. One of these, Little Moala, was led by high-ranking men of the Manukui, that is, "chiefly," patrician. The second, Great Moala, was led by a line of the Turanggalevu (the other "chiefly" clan) in alliance with leaders of the Nasau ("indigenous" and non-chiefly) clan. For a while the island's political history was dominated by the enmity of these two chiefdoms, punctuated with numerous battles, including some treacherous massacres and changes of side. The third confederation, Vaua, remained distant and aloof from those struggles until its leadership was captured by

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another line of Turaggalevu and thereby brought into the perennial conflict. While they lasted, Moala's three chiefdoms were evidently quite stable, at least in a geographic sense. But according to Sahlins they were not strongly centralized. . . . the several villages of the chiefdom each maintained a great deal of autonomy. First fruits and labor services (lala) were given to the paramount of the region, but within each village the local chiefs [headmen] ran things without much outside direction or interference. Furthermore, the loyalty of individuals, kin groups, or villages to a chiefdom could not be guaranteed or enforced. ( 1 9 6 2 : 3 8 0 )

As we have seen, ties of kinship and affinity were so widespread on Moala that a person, alone or with his kin unit, had a wide choice of domicile and political affiliation if economic or political expediency required a move. Moreover, "the village political structure itself was a weak link in a regional chain. Factionalism and rivalry for chieftainship among or within the kin groups of a village provided motivation for migration, or for betrayal of the village and its allies to hostile chiefs" (ibid. 381). The situation just described was further complicated by the presence on the island, beginning in the eighteenth century, of some high-ranking adventurers from Mbau, the powerful chiefdom of eastern Viti Levu, one of whose leaders, with European assistance, eventually became "King" of Fiji. On Moala the Mbauans mixed into the local wars and in some places became even more influential than the Moalan chiefs. Moreover, Moalans became subordinate to the Mbau paramount chief in the sense that some of its chiefs sent first-fruit "tribute" to him. We will discuss Mbau and Viti Levu in a moment, but first a word about Moala's subsequent political fate. In 1853 Moala was conquered by Tongans, who made it a part of their Lau Islands empire. The conquest was carried out in defense of Christianity—specifically to avenge the burning by Moalans of the island's first Christian church. Finally, in 1874 Moala (along with Lau) was incorporated into the British Colony of Fiji.

Other Subcultures of Fiji As stated earlier in this chapter, Moalans constituted only a small part of Fiji's precolonial population (probably not more than about 0.7 percent of the total). Moreover, in the absence of a comprehensive comparative study of all of Fiji's traditional major subcultures—a project probably no

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