Man, Past and Present

by A. H. Keane

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

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

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

Stone Monuments.

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

The Dual-people.

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

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

Summary of Culture Strata.

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