[13] Nelson, ‘Eskimo about Bering Strait,’ in Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn. xviii. 300.
[14] Yakof, quoted by Petroff, Report on Alaska, p. 158. Cf. Dall, op. cit. p. 391 (Aleuts).
[15] See infra, on [Suicide]; Lasch, ‘Besitzen die Naturvölker ein persönliches Ehrgefühl?’ in Zeitschr. f. Socialwissenschaft, iii. 837 sqq.
[16] Bradley-Birt, Chota Nagpore, p. 104. Cf. Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, p. 206.
[17] Colenso, op. cit. p. 57.
Like other injuries, an insult not only affects the feelings of the victim, but arouses sympathetic resentment in outsiders, and is consequently disapproved of as wrong. Among the Maoris, if anybody wantonly tried to hurt another’s feelings, it was immediately repressed, and “such a person was spoken of as having had no parents, or, as having been born (laid) by a bird.”[18] In the Malay Archipelago, “among some of the tribes, abusive language cannot with impunity be used even to a slave. Blows are still more intolerable, and considered such grievous affronts, that, by law, the person who receives them is considered justified in putting the offender to death.”[19] The natives of the Tonga Islands hold no bad moral habit to be more “ridiculous, depraved, and unjust, than publishing the faults of one’s acquaintances and friends …; and as to downright calumny or false accusation, it appears to them more horrible than deliberate murder does to us: for it is better, they think, to assassinate a man’s person than to attack his reputation.”[20] According to the customary laws of the Fantis in West Africa, “where a person has been found guilty of using slanderous words, he is bound to retract his words publicly, in addition to paying a small fine by way of compensation to the aggrieved party. Words imputing witchcraft, adultery, immoral conduct, crime, and all words which sound to the disreputation of a person of whom they are spoken are actionable.”[21]
[18] Ibid. p. 53.
[19] Crawfurd, op. cit. iii. 119 sq.
[20] Mariner, Natives of the Tonga Islands, ii. 163 sq.
[21] Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws, p. 94.