VI. The Rules of Law in religious acts
I have referred so far mainly to economic relations, for civil law is primarily concerned with ownership and wealth among savages as well as among ourselves. But we could find the legal aspect in any other domain of tribal life. Take for example the most characteristic acts of ceremonial life — the rites of mourning and sorrow for the dead. At first we perceive in them, naturally, their religious character: they are acts of piety towards the deceased, caused by fear or love or solicitude for the spirit of the departed. As the ritual and public display of emotion they are also part of the ceremonial life of the community.
Who, however, would suspect a legal side to such religious transactions? Yet in the Trobriands there is not one single mortuary act, not one ceremony, which is not considered to be an obligation of the performer towards some of the other survivors. The widow weeps and wails in ceremonial sorrow, in religious piety and fear — but also because the strength of her grief affords direct satisfaction to the deceased man’s brothers and maternal relatives. It is the matrilineal group of kindred who, according to the native theory of kinship and mourning, are the people really bereaved. The wife, though she lived with her husband, though she should grieve at his death, though often she really and sincerely does so, remains but a stranger by the rules of matrilineal kinship. It is her duty towards the surviving members of her husband’s clan, accordingly, to display her grief, to keep a long period of mourning and to carry the jaw-bone of her husband for some years after his death. Nor is this obligation without reciprocity. At the first big ceremonial distribution, some three days after her husband’s death, she will receive from his kinsmen a ritual payment, and a substantial one, for her tears; and at later ceremonial feasts she is given more payments for the subsequent services of mourning. It should also be kept in mind that to the natives mourning is but a link in the lifelong chain of reciprocities between husband and wife and between their respective families.