263. Melanesia and Polynesia
As one passes out from the East Indies into New Guinea and Melanesia, the mass effect of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization comes to an end, and the primitive culture that has been outlined is altered. Metals, rice, the buffalo, disappear. The growing of taro and other tropical plants, the pig and fowl, the use of bamboo where nature permits, skull cult or cannibalism, remain. Other features, such as the totemic and matrilinear moiety organization of society and adolescence rites for girls, obtrude, and are sometimes elaborately developed. How far such traits represent secondary local developments or on the other hand survivals from a Negroid culture phase anterior to that of primitive Malaysian-Southeast Asiatic culture, is not clear. Local diversity of custom is unusually great in both New Guinea and Melanesia.
Micronesia and Polynesia present a different although allied set of problems. The Polynesians in particular manifest a remarkable uniformity of speech and, on the whole, of culture, especially in view of the thousands of miles of ocean through which their island groups are dispersed. This uniformity suggests that the language and culture became characterized in a limited area from which they spread over Polynesia after or while contact with the remainder of the world was lost. But it is difficult to settle even tentatively on such an area of original characterization because certain sides of Polynesian culture are relatively high and carry suggestions of Asia, whereas other elements are lacking which would be expectable if higher Asiatic influences had ever carried to the ancestral Polynesians. Royal lineage, for example, bears to the Polynesians a powerful implication of sanctity, of descent from the gods, such as is unparalleled among any truly primitive people. Religion and mythology also contain an abstract, spiritual strain that is almost reminiscent of Buddhism. Yet there seems no single specific idea or name that can be traced to an Asiatic source; and the essentially ancient ideas of magic and taboo are strong—the word taboo itself is Polynesian. There are structures and sculpture in stone, sometimes monumental, but never more than barbaric in quality. The absence of metals may mean little, since they might have been possessed but the art have been lost in the island habitat, often coralline. Yet pottery, the bow and arrow, the men’s club house, the clan or moiety type of society, are also wanting or weakly developed. On the other hand, the dog, pig, and fowl, cultivated plants like taro, bark cloth, cannibalism, and human sacrifice are shared with the island regions to the west.
The various Polynesians possess genealogies and often migration traditions which on comparison, and after computation of the number of generations, seem to point to two waves of migration, both within the Christian era, perhaps about the fifth and tenth centuries respectively. The traditions fail, however, to throw clear light on the area of origin, since they attribute this either to Hawaiki, which may be either Java or a mythical land, or crisscross back and forth among the island groups within Polynesia. Something of the mysteriousness which the discoverers felt continues to attach to the origin and history of this people, and is deepened by the fact that the affiliations of their racial type remain ambiguous.