Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

In Fiji the criminality of actions is said to have varied with the social rank of the offender, murder by a chief being accounted less heinous than a petty larceny by a man of low rank. Theft, adultery, witchcraft, violation of a tabu, arson, treason, and disrespect to a chief were among the few crimes regarded as serious. With regard to murder, we are told (and the passage is a favourite one for illustrating the extreme variability of moral sentiment), that to a Fijian shedding of blood was ‘no crime, but a glory,’ and that to be an acknowledged murderer was ‘the object of his restless ambition.’ In a similar strain it has been said, that in New Zealand intentional murder was either very meritorious or of no consequence; the latter if the victim were a slave, the former if he belonged to another tribe. The malicious destruction of a man of the same tribe was, however, rare, the lex talionis alone applying to or checking it;[146] and it is probable that this reservation in favour of native New Zealand should be made for all cases where murder is spoken of as a trivial matter. Whenever murder is spoken of as no crime, reference seems generally made to murder outside the tribe, so that from the circumstances of savage life it resolves itself into an act of ordinary hostility; or if the reference is to murder within the tribe, it is to murder sanctioned by necessity, custom, or superstition. The Carrier Indians, who did not think murders worth confessing when they confessed other crimes of their lives, yet regarded the murder of a fellow-tribesman as something quite senseless, and the man who committed such a deed had to absent himself till he could pay the relatives, since at home he was only safe if a chief lent him the refuge of his tent or of one of his garments.[147] ‘A murder,’ says Sproat, ‘if not perpetrated on one of his own tribe, or on a particular friend, is no more to an Indian than the killing of a dog.’ The sutteeism and parenticide, which missionaries describe as murders, are, from the savage point of view, rather acts of mercy, being intimately connected with their ideas of future existence, to which it is neither fair nor scientific to apply the phraseology and associations of Christian morality.[148]

Different tribes have evolved different institutions for the prevention of wrongs, which supplement to a large extent the absence of fixed legal remedies.

In Greenland there was the singing combat, in which anyone aggrieved, dancing to the beat of a drum and accompanied by his partisans, recited at a public meeting a satirical poem, telling ludicrous stories of his adversary, and obliged to listen afterwards to similar abuse of himself, till, after a long succession of charges and retorts, the assembled spectators gave the victory to one of the combatants. These combats, says Cranz, served to remind debtors of the duty of repayment, to brand falsehood and detraction with infamy, to punish fraud and injustice, and above all to overwhelm adultery with contempt. The fear of incurring public disgrace at these combats was, with the fear of retaliation for injury, the only motive to virtue which the writer allows to the natives of Greenland.

In Samoa thieves could be scared from plantations by cocoa-nut leaflets so plaited as to convey an imprecation; and a man who saw an artificial sea-pike suspended from a tree would fear, that, if he accomplished his theft, the next time he went fishing a real sea-pike would dart up and wound him mortally. Images of a similar nature, conveying imprecations of disease, death, lightning, or a plague of rats, seem also to have been effective restraints upon thievish propensities;[149] and in the Tonga Islands fruits and flowers were tabooed, that is, preserved, by plaited representations of a lizard or a shark.[150] It is likely that a similar meaning attached in Africa to certain branches of trees which, stuck into the ground in a particular manner, with bits of broken pottery, were enough to prevent the most determined robber from crossing a threshold.[151] Similar tabu marks were seen on some rocks at Tahiti, placed there to prevent people fishing or getting shells from the Queen’s preserves;[152] and it is possible that the origin of all tabu customs may have lain in the supposed efficacy of symbolical imprecation.

In New Zealand the institution of muru, or the legalized enforcement of damages by plunder, extended the idea of sinfulness even to involuntary wrongs or accidental sufferings. Involuntary homicide is said to have involved more serious consequences than murder of malice prepense; and if a man’s child fell into the fire, or his canoe was upset and himself nearly drowned, he was not only cudgelled and robbed, but he would have deemed it a personal slight not to have been so treated.[153] To escape from drowning was indeed a common sin in savage life, for was it not to escape the just wrath of the Water Spirit, and perhaps to turn it upon some one else? In Kamschatka so heinous was the sin of cheating the Water Spirit of his prey, by escape from drowning, that no one would receive such a sinner into his house, speak to him, nor give him food: he became, in short, socially dead. Fijians who escape shipwreck are supposed to be saved in order to be eaten, and Williams tells, how on one occasion fourteen of them who lost their canoe at sea only escaped becoming food for sharks to become food for their friends on shore. If the Koossa Kafirs see a person drowning, or indeed in any danger of his life, they either run away from the spot or pelt the victim with stones as he dies.[154] So also with death by fire: if an Indian falls into the fire or is partially burnt, it is believed that the spirits of his ancestors pushed him into the flames owing to his negligence in supplying them with food.[155] The custom of an African tribe to expel from their community anyone bitten by a zebra or an alligator, or even so much as splashed by the tail of the latter, is evidently related to the same idea.[156]

Again, however much Catlin’s assertion that self-denial, torture, and immolation were constant modes among North American Indians for appealing to the Great Spirit for countenance and forgiveness, may overstate the truth, it is remarkable that not only penance by fasting and self-torture, but the practice of confession, should occur in the lower culture as a mode of moral purification. Confession was common not only in Mexico and Peru, but among widely remote savage tribes, being closely connected with the belief in the power of sin to cause, and of priestcraft to cure, dangerous sickness. The Carrier Indians of North America thought, that the only chance of recovery from sickness lay in a disclosure before a priest of every secret crime committed in life, and that the concealment of a single fact would meet with the punishment of instantaneous death.[157] The Samoan Islanders believing that all disease was due to the wrath of some deity, would inquire of the village priest the cause of sickness, who would sometimes in such cases command the family to assemble and confess. At this confessional ceremony each member of the family would confess his crimes, and any judgments he might have invoked in anger on the family or the invalid himself; long-concealed crimes being often thus disclosed.[158] In Yucatan, confession, introduced by Cukulcan, the mythical author of their culture, was much resorted to, ‘as death and disease were thought to be direct punishments for sins committed.’ The natives of Cerquin, in Honduras, confessed, not only in sickness, but in immediate danger of any kind, or to procure divine blessings on any important occasion. So far did they carry it, that, if a travelling party met a jaguar or puma, each would commend himself to the gods, confessing loudly his sins, and imploring pardon; if the beast still advanced they would cry out, ‘We have committed as many more sins; do not kill us.’[159]

But over and above the wrong acts from which restraints lie in the revenge of individuals, in punishment by the community, or in artificial restrictions, there is a large class of acts, defended rather by spiritual than secular sanctions, deriving their sinfulness from pure misconceptions of things, and constituting for savages by far the larger part of their field for right and wrong. The consciousness of having trodden in the footstep of a bear would be as painful to a Kamschadal as the consciousness of having stolen, the possible consequences of the former being infinitely more dreadful. Such acts as the experience of primitive times has thus generalized into acts provocative of unpleasant expressions of dissatisfaction from the spiritual world, and so far as sinful, become in the folk-lore of later date acts merely unlucky or ominous. The feeling to this day prevalent in parts of England and Germany, that if you transplant parsley you may cause its guardian spirit to punish you or your relations with death, fairly illustrates how the wrongful acts of bygone times may even in civilised countries continue to be guarded by the very same sanction that gave them potency in the days of savagery.

Of such regulations in restraint of the natural liberty of savage tribes let it suffice to give some instances of sinful acts which derive all their associations of wrong from rude notions concerning the nature of storms, of ancestors, of names, and of animals. It will be seen that in some cases such superstitions act as real checks to real wickedness; though the connection between them seems purely accidental, rather than the result of any intuitive discrimination of the qualities of actions.

As English sailors will refrain from whistling at sea, lest they should provoke a storm, so the Kamschadals account many actions sinful on account of their storm-breeding qualities. For this reason they will never cut snow from off their shoes with a knife out of doors, nor go barefooted outside their huts in winter, nor sharpen an axe or a knife on a journey. The Fuejian natives brought away by Captain Fitzroy felt sure that anything wrong said or done caused bad weather, especially the sin of shooting young ducks. They declared their belief in an omniscient Big Black Man, who had his living among the woods and mountains, and influenced the weather according to men’s conduct; in illustration of which they told a story of a murderer, who ascribed to the anger of this being a storm of wind and snow which followed his crime.[160] In Vancouver’s Island there is a mountain, the sin of mentioning which in passing may cause a storm to overturn the offender’s canoe.[161]

Prominent among the moral checks of savage life is the fear of the anger of the dead. Among savages the supposed wishes of their departed friends, or deified forefathers, operate as real commands, girt with all the sanction of superstitious terror, and clothing the most fanciful customs with all the obligatory feelings of morality. A New Zealand chief, for instance, would expect his dead ancestors to visit him with disease or other calamity if he let food touch any part of his body, or if he entered a dwelling where food hung from the ceiling.[162] The wide prevalence of the feeling that disease and death are due to the displeasure of the dead, who may return to earth, to reside in some part of a living person’s body, may be illustrated by the Samoan custom of taking valuable presents as a last expression of regard to the dying, or by way of bribing them to forego their incorporeal privilege of post-mortem revenge.[163] On the Gold Coast also friends make presents to the dead of gold, brandy, or cloth, to be buried with them; just as in ancient Mexico all classes of the population would beg of their dead king to accept their offerings of food, robes, or slaves, which they vied in giving him, or as the Mayas would place precious gifts or ornaments near or upon the corpse of a deceased lord of a province. So the Bodos, presenting food at the graves of their relations, would pray, saying, ‘Take and eat ... we come no more to you, come no more to us.’