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.
264. Australia
The human history of Australia is as detached from that of the remainder of the world as its biological history. The race is distinctive: sub-Negroid, it might be called. The languages relate to no other. The culture is primitive and well characterized. The isolation of Australia was aided by the fact that the one approach to it other than by a sea-voyage of some length, the approach across Torres Straits, was blocked by New Guinea, the area of most backward culture in Oceania. The Papuans did not possess enough civilization to hand on much to the Australians; but they prevented higher elements from Asia from flowing to them.
The Australians lacked not only all agriculture and domestic animals, but pottery, the bow, and apparently the harpoon. These deficiencies would at once stamp their culture as pre-Neolithic in type, were it not that they grind some stone implements.
All in all, Australian culture is unusually meager on the industrial and economic side. Houses, clothing, weapons, boats, tools, are most scantily developed: often lacking and always rude. This poverty of Australian material culture cannot be explained wholly from the prevailing desert character of a large part of the continent, since the natives of the most favored regions were not appreciably better off as regards variety of arts conducive to comfort.
Social organization is much more complicated than the arts. Most of the Australians are divided into moieties, which frequently are subdivided into four classes or eight-sub-classes, all exogamous. A frequent peculiarity is that the child belongs to a different class from both its parents. So far as the moiety is concerned, custom varies locally as to whether the child is born into the mother’s or father’s side of the community. Frequently there are also hereditary totemic groups. These may be subdivisions of the moieties or descend independently of them. A few tribes, chiefly in southeastern Australia, are without moieties or classes; some are totemless ([Fig. 29]). The moiety scheme of course prescribes equally that one must marry into the opposite moiety and out of one’s own. The extension of this principle to classes and sub-classes still farther limits the group among whom marriage is permissible, thereby emphasizing its prescriptive character. Where the individual belongs to a third or different class from his parents, his wife must come from the fourth or remaining one, and his children will belong again to the first or second, according as moiety descent is patrilinear or matrilinear. Consequently he has blood relatives in every class; and conversely all the members of each class stand in a certain defined kinship to every individual in the community, according to their respective sex and age. This means not only that certain relatives are within the absolutely prohibited degrees, but that others are prescriptive spouses. These are only a few of the innumerable ramifications and variations of Australian social organization.
The origin of these social schemes is in dispute. Some ethnologists interpret them as original inventions of the Australians, manifestations of their peculiar primitiveness. Others look upon then as evolved somewhere in the region between India and Melanesia where analogous institutions are frequently encountered, and as carried into Australia by diffusion or migrations. The contiguity of Australia to the Indo-Melanesian area of totems, moieties, unilateral descent, etc., is not likely to be wholly a matter of coincidence (§ [110]). Moreover, the strongest development of this type of organization within Australia is on the whole in the northern part, the tribes that show least or none of it being in the south, farthest from the presumptive entrance via New Guinea. On the other hand, certain features of the systems are confined to Australia: the classes and sub-classes, the occasional coexistence but non-relation of totems and moieties, for instance. These variations must have originated among the Australians; and this raises the question whether many other traits may also be indigenous. The most probable course of events would appear to have been the importation of the basic pattern of exogamy, followed by its diffusion with numerous new growths in Australia.