Next they gave a demonstration of the method used in knocking out an initiate’s front tooth. The subject lies on the ground on his back, with his head resting on the operator’s lap; the latter takes a kangaroo bone in his left hand, and a stone in his right, and inserts the former first on one side and then on the other of the tooth to be extracted, the bone being worked sideways; this is done several times till the tooth is loosened. The tooth is then smartly tapped, and with each tap the name is mentioned of one of the “countries” owned by the lad’s mother, or by her father, or other of her relatives. These are given in order, and the name spoken when the tooth breaks away is the country to which the lad belongs in future. The lad is then given some water with which to rinse his mouth, and he gently lets the gory spittle fall into a leaf water-basket. The old men carefully inspect the form assumed by the clot, and trace some likeness to a natural object, plant, or stone; this will be the ari of the newly made man. So far as I know, this is a previously undescribed method of fixing the territory of an individual, or rather that land over which he has hunting, and root and fruit collecting rights. It is worth noticing that only the lands belonging to the mother’s family were enumerated; that is, a boy inherits from his mother and not from his father. Thus the mother’s land goes to her children, and a father’s to his nephews and nieces. On November 10th the same natives came again for a talk in the afternoon, and we obtained some additional information from them. Tomari, one of the most intelligent of them, has three ari: (1) aru, a crab, which fell to him through blood divination at initiation in the manner just described; (2) untara, diamond fish; (3) alungi, crayfish. The two latter were given to him as the result of dreams. It appears that if an old man dreams of anything at night, that object is the ari of the first person he sees next morning; the idea being that the animal, or whatever appears in the dream, is the spirit of the first person met with on awakening. Tomari’s father was a carpet-snake, his mother an oyster, and his wife a particular kind of fruit. The ari is very similar to the manitu or okki of certain North American tribes, or to the “personal totem,” as Dr. J. G. Frazer terms it in his valuable little book on Totemism.
Women obtain their ari in the same manner as men. If it was true, as I was told, that men and women may not marry into the same ari in their own place, but may do so when away from home, its sanctity is local rather than personal. A wife must be taken from another “country,” as all belonging to the same place are brothers and sisters; which indicates that there is a territorial idea in kinship and in the consequent marriage restrictions.
SKETCH MAP OF BRITISH NEW GUINEA.
CHAPTER XIV
A TRIP DOWN THE PAPUAN COAST
As explained in the Preface, I have not strictly followed a chronological order in this book, and the events narrated in this and the three following chapters took place from May 23rd to July 20th, during the whole of which time Rivers, Myers, and McDougall remained on Murray Island.
The Rev. James Chalmers had very kindly sent the Olive Branch to convey those of us who wanted to go to Port Moresby, and Ray, Seligmann, Wilkin, and myself took this opportunity to learn something about the natives of part of the south-eastern peninsula of British New Guinea. But for this timely aid it is most probable that we could not have got across the Papuan Gulf.