Argonauts of the Western Pacific

by Bronisław Malinowski

The tauva’u have sometimes sexual intercourse with women; several present cases are on record, and such women who have a familar tauva’u become dangerous witches, though how they practise their witchcraft is not quite clear to the natives.

A much less dangerous being is the tokway, a wood sprite, living in trees and rocks, stealing crops from the field and from the yam-houses, and inflicting slight ailments. Some men in the past have acquired the knowledge of how to do this from the tokway, and have handed it on to their descendants.

So we see that, except for the very light ailments which pass quickly and easily, all disease is attributed to sorcery. Even accidents are not believed to happen without cause. That this is the case also with drowning, we shall learn more in detail, when we have to follow the Trobrianders in their dangerous sea-trips. Natural death, caused by old age, is admittedly possible, but when I asked in several concrete cases, in which age was obviously the cause, why such and such a man died, I was always told that a bwaga’u was at the back of it. Only suicide and death in battle have a different place in the mind of the natives, and this is also confirmed by the belief that people killed in war, those that commit suicide, and those who are bewitched to death have, each class, their own way to the other world.

This sketch of Trobriand tribal life, belief and customs must suffice, and we shall still have opportunities of enlarging upon these subjects that most matter to us for the present study.

VIII

Two more districts remain to be mentioned, through which the Kula trade passes on its circuit, before it returns to the place from where we started. One of them is the Eastern portion of the Northern Massim, comprising the Marshall Bennett Islands (Kitava, Iwa, Gawa, Kwayawata), and Woodlark Island (Murua), with the small group of Nada Islands. The other district is that of St. Aignan Island, called by the natives Masima, or Misima, with the smaller island Panayati.

Looking from the rocky shores of Boyowa, at its narrowest point, we can see over the white breakers on the fringing reef and over the sea, here always blue and limpid, the silhouette of a flat-topped, low rock, almost due East. This is Kitava. To the Trobrianders of the Eastern districts, this island and those behind it are the promised land of the Kula, just as Dobu is to the natives of Southern Boyowa. But here, unlike in the South, they have to deal with tribesmen who speak their own language, with dialectic differences only, and who have very much the same institutions and customs. In fact, the nearest island, Kitava, differs only very little from the Trobriands. Although the more distant islands, especially Murua, have a slightly different form of totemism, with hardly any idea of rank attached to the sub-clans, and consequently no chieftainship in the Trobriand sense, yet their social organisation is also much the same as in the Western province⁴⁰. I know the natives only from having seen them very frequently and in great numbers in the Trobriands, where they come on Kula expeditions. In Murua, however, I spent a short time doing field work in the village of Dikoyas. In appearance, dress, ornaments and manners, the natives are indistinguishable from the Trobrianders. Their ideas and customs in matters of sex, marriage, and kinship are, with variations in detail only, the same as in Boyowa. In beliefs and mythology, they also belong to the same culture.

To the Trobrianders, the Eastern islands are also the chief home and stronghold of the dreaded mulukwausi (flying witches); the land whence love magic came, originating in the island of Iwa; the distant shores towards which the mythical hero Tudava sailed, performing many feats, till he finally disappeared, no one knows where. The most recent version is that he most likely finished his career in the white man’s country. To the Eastern islands, says native belief, the spirits of the dead, killed by sorcery, go round on a short visit not stopping there, only floating through the air like clouds, before they turn round to the North-West to Tuma.

From these islands, many important products come to Boyowa (the Trobriands), but none half as important as the tough, homogeneous green-stone, from which all their implements were made in the past, and of which the ceremonial axes are made up till now. Some of these places are renowned for their yam gardens, especially Kitava, and it is recognised that the best carving in black ebony comes from there. The most important point of difference between the natives of this district and the Trobrianders, lies in the method of mortuary distributions, to which subject we shall have to return in a later part of the book, as it is closely connected with Kula.

From Murua (Woodlark Island) the Kula track curves over to the South in two different branches, one direct to Tubetube, and the other to Misima, and thence to Tubetube and Wari. The district of Misima is almost entirely unknown to me — I have only spoken once or twice with natives of this island, and there is not, to my knowledge, any reliable published information about that district, so we shall have to pass it over with a very few words. This is, however, not so alarming, because it is certain, even from the little I know about them, that the natives do not essentially differ from the other Massim. They are totemic and matrilineal; there is no chieftainship, and the form of authority is the same as in the Southern Massim. Their sorcerers and witches resemble those of the Southern Massim and Dobuans. In industries, they specialise in canoe-building, and in the small island of Panayati produce the same type of craft as the natives of Gawa and Woodlark Island, slightly different only from the Trobriand canoe. In the island of Misima, a very big supply of areca (betel) nut is produced, as there is a custom of planting a number of these nuts after a man’s death.