XII. Specific Legal Arrangements
The rare quarrels which occur at times take the form of an exchange of public expostulation (yakala) in which the two parties assisted by friends and relatives meet, harangue one another, hurl and hurl back recriminations. Such litigation allows people to give vent to their feelings and shows the trend of public opinion, and thus it may be of assistance in settling disputes. Sometimes it seems, however, only to harden the litigants. In no case is there any definite sentence pronounced by a third party, and agreement is but seldom reached then and there. The yakala therefore is a special legal arrangement, but of small importance and not really touching the heart of legal constraint.
Some other specific legal mechanisms may also be mentioned here. One of them is the kaytapaku, the magical protection of property by means of conditional curses. When a man owns coco or areca palms in distant spots, where it is impossible to keep watch over them, he attaches a palm leaf to the trunk of the tree, an indication that a formula has been uttered, which automatically would bring down ailment on the thief. Another institution which has a legal side is the kaytu-butabu, a form of magic performed over all the coco-nut trees of a community to bring about their fertility, as a rule in view of an approaching feast. Such magic entails a strict prohibition to gather the nuts or to partake of coco-nut, even when imported. A similar institution is the gwara.13 A pole is planted on the reef, and this places a taboo on any export of certain valuable objects, exchanged ceremonially in the kula, while their importation on the contrary is encouraged. This is a sort of moratorium, stopping all payments, without any interference with the receipts, which also aims at an accumulation of valuable objects before a big ceremonial distribution. Another important legal feature is a sort of ceremonial contract, called kayasa. 14 Here the leader of an expedition, the master of a feast, or the entrepreneur in an industrial venture gives a big ceremonial distribution. Those who participate in it and benefit by the bounty are under an obligation to assist the leader throughout the enterprise.
All these institutions, kayasa, kaytapaku, and kaytubutabu, entail special binding ties. But even they are not exclusively legal. It would be a great mistake to deal with the subject of law by a simple enumeration of these few arrangements, each of which subserves a special end and fulfils a very partial function. The main province of law is in the social mechanism, which is to be found at the bottom of all the real obligations and covers a very vast portion of their custom, though by no means all of it, as we know.