Growing up in New Guinea; a comparative study of primitive education

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GROWING UP IN
NEW GUINEA

THREE MANUS WATER BABIES

These children spend almost all oj their waking hours in
the water

GROWING UP IN
NEW GUINEA

A Compaj-ative Study of
Primitive Educatiofi

By

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COPYRIGHT - 1930
BY MARGARET MEAD

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, nmst not be
reproduced in any form without permission of the p«blisber.

PRINTED AND BOUND BY THE CORNWALL PRESS, INC., FOR
BLUE RIBBON BOOKS, INC., 448 FOURTH AVE., NEW YORK CITY

Printed in the United States of America

N

TO

REO FORTUNE

51709^^^

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I MADE this study as a fellow of the Social Science
Research Council and I wish to acknowledge my great
indebtedness to the generosity of the Board of Fellow-
ships of that body. For the training which prepared
me to undertake this inquiry I have to thank Professor
Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth F. Benedict. I owe a debt
of gratitude to Professor A. R. Radcliffe-Brown of the
University of Sydney who most kindly sponsored my
field trip with the Australian research and governmental
interests and also gave me much advice and help.

I have to thank my husband, Reo Fortune, for assist-
ance in the formulation of my problem, for long
months of co-operative effort in the field, for much
of the ethnographic and textual material which under-
lies this study and for patient criticism of my results.

I am indebted to the Department of Home and
Territories of the Commonwealth of Australia and to
the Administration of the Mandated Territory of New
Guinea for furthering my research whenever possible j
most particularly I have to thank His Honour Judge
J. M. Phillips and Mr. E. P. W. Chinnery, Govern-
ment Anthropologist. For hospitality and courteous as-
sistance I would also thank Mr. J. Kramer and Mr. and
Mrs. Burrows of Lorengauj Mr. F. W. Mantle and
Mr. and Mrs. Frank MacDonnel, Mrs. C. P. Parkin-

viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

son of Sumsum and Mr. and Mrs. James Twycross of
Rabaul.

For the opportunity to work up my material I am
indebted to the American Museum of Natural History,
and for assistance in the long and laborious task of
manuscript preparation and revision I have to thank
Dr. Benedict, Miss Eichelberger, Mrs. Stapelfeldt and
Miss Josephson.

CONTENTS

Part One

Growing up in Manus Society

I. introduction I

II. scenes from manus life 12

III. EARLY EDUCATION 27,

IV. THE FAMILY LIFE 5 1

V. THE CHILD AND THE ADULT SOCIAL LIFE 8 1

VI. THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL 99

VII. THE child's WORLD II 8

VIII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY 135

IX. MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX I5I

X. THE ADOLESCENT GIRL 175

XI. THE ADOLESCENT BOY I9I

XII. THE TRIUMPH OF THE ADULTS 204

X Part Two

Reflections on the Educational

Problems of To-day in the Light

OF Manus Experience

XIII. bequeathing our tradition graciously 211

XIV. education and personality 223

XV. giving scope to the imagination 243

XVI. the child's dependence upon tradi-
tion 259
ix

X CONTENTS

Appendices

i. the ethnological approach to social

psychology 279

ii. ethnographic notes on the manus

PEOPLES 293

III. CULTURE CONTACT IN MANUS 302

IV. OBSERVANCES CONNECTED WITH PREG-

NANCY, BIRTH, AND CARE OF INFANTS 320

V. DIAGRAM OF THE VILLAGE SHOWING HOUSE
OWNERSHIP, CLAN MEMBERSHIP, RESI-
DENCE 327 -
VI. VIEWS OF THE VILLAGE AS SEEN BY TWO
CHILDREN, AGED FIVE AND ELEVEN, AND
EXPLANATORY COMMENTS 332
VII. A SAMPLE LEGEND 36O
VIII. ANALYSIS OF THE COMPOSITION OF THE

PERI POPULATION 363

IX. RECORD SHEETS USED IN GATHERING MA-
TERIAL 367
X. MAP SHOWING POSITION OF THE AD-
MIRALTY ISLANDS 370
XI. MAP SHOWING POSITION OF THE MANUS

VILLAGES 371

XII. GLOSSARY 372

PART ONE
GROWING UP IN MANUS SOCIETY

INTRODUCTION

THE way in which each human infant is transformed
into the finished adult, into the complicated individual
version of his city and his century is one of the most fas-
cinating studies open to the curious minded. Whether
one wishes to trace the devious paths by which the un-
formed baby which was oneself developed personality,
to prophesy the future of some child still in pinafores,
to direct a school, or to philosophise about the future of
the United States — the same problem is continually in
the foreground of thought. How much of the child's
equipment does it bring with it at birth? How much
of its development follows regular laws? How much
or how little and in what ways is it dependent upon
early training, upon the personality of its parents, its
teachers, its playmates, the age into which it is born? Is
the framework of human nature so rigid that it will
break if submitted to too severe tests? To what limits
will it flexibly accommodate itself? Is it possible to re-
write the conflict between youth and age so that it is less
acute or more fertile of good results? Such questions
are implicit in almost every social decision — in the

[i]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

mother's decision to feed the baby with a spoon rather
than force it to drink from a hated bottle, in the appro-
priation of a million dollars to build a new manual
training high school, in the propaganda plans of the
Anti-Saloon League or of the Communist party. Yet
it is a subject about which we know little, towards which
we are just developing methods of approach.

But when human history took the turn which is sym-
bolised in the story of the confusion of tongues and
the dispersion of peoples after the Tower of Babel,
the student of human nature was guaranteed one kind
of laboratory. In all parts of the world, in the densest
jungle and on the small islands of the sea, groups of
people, differing in language and customs from their
neighbours, were working out experiments in what could
be done with human nature. The restless fancy of
many men was drawing in diverse ways upon their his-
torical backgrounds, inventing new tools, new forms
of government, new and different phrasings of the
problem of good and evil, new views of man's place
in the universe. By one people the possibilities of
rank with all its attendant artificialities and conventions
were being tested, by a second the social consequences
of large scale human sacrifice, while a third tested the
results of a loose unpatterned democracy. While one
people tried out the limits of ceremonial licentiousness,
another exacted season-long or year-long continence
from all its members. Where one people made their
dead their gods, another chose to ignore the dead and
rely instead upon a philosopliy of life which viewed

[2]

INTRODUCTION

man as grass that grows up in the morning and is cut
down forever at nightfall.

Within the generous lines laid down by the early
patterns of thought and behaviour which seem to form
our common human inheritance, countless generations
of men have experimented with the possibilities of the
human spirit. It only remained for those of inquiring
mind, alive to the value of these hoary experiments,
to read the answers written down in the ways of life of
different peoples. Unfortunately we have been prodi-
gal and blind in our use of these priceless records. We
have permitted the only account of an experiment which
it has taken thousands of years to make and which
we are powerless to repeat, to be obliterated by fire-
arms, or alcohol, evangelism or tuberculosis. One
primitive people after another has vanished and left
no trace.

If a long line of devoted biologists had been breed-
ing guinea pigs or fruit flies for a hundred years and
recording the results, and some careless vandal burnt
the painstaking record and killed the survivors, we
would cry out in anger at the loss to science. Yet, when
history, without any such set purpose, has presented us
with the results of not a hundred years' experiment on
guinea pigs, but a thousand years' experiment on human
beings, we permit the records to be extinguished with-
out a protest.

Although most of these fragile cultures which owed
their perpetuation not to written records but to the
memories of a few hundred human beings are lost to

[3]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

us, a few remain. Isolated on small Pacific islands, in
dense African jungles or Asiatic wastes, it is still pos-
sible to find untouched societies which have chosen so-
lutions of life's problems different from our own, which
can give us precious evidence on the malleability of
human nature.

Such an untouched people are the brown sea-dwell-
ing Manus of the Admiralty Islands, north of New
Guinea.* In their vaulted, thatched houses set on stilts
in the olive green waters of the wide lagoon, their lives
are lived very much as they have been lived for un-
known centuries. No missionary has come to teach
them an unknown faith, no trader has torn their lands
from them and reduced them to penury. Those white
men's diseases which have reached them have been few
enough in number to be fitted into their own theory of
disease as a punishment for evil done. They buy iron
and cloth and beads from the distant traders j they
have learned to smoke the white man's tobacco, to use
his money, to take an occasional dispute into the Dis-
trict Officer's Court. Since 1912 war has been prac-
tically abolished, an enforced reformation welcome to
a trading, voyaging people. Their young men go away
to work for two or three years in the plantations of the
white man, but come back little changed to their own
villages. It is essentially a primitive society without
written records, without economic dependence upon
white culture, preserving its own canons, its own way
of life.

* See Appendix II, "Ethnographic Notes on the Manus Tribe."

[4]

ti^-

BRED TO THE SEA
Every child has his oii'n small canoe

THEIR ONLY PONY

Even pigs have learned to swim and the children have

learned to ride the pigs

INTRODUCTION

The manner in which human babies born into these
water-dwelling communities, gradually absorb the tra-
ditions, the prohibitions, the values of their elders and
become in turn the active perpetuators of Manus cul-
ture is a record rich in its implications for education.
Our own society is so complex, so elaborate, that the
most serious student can, at best, only hope to examine
a part of the educational process. While he concen-
trates upon the method in which a child solves one set
of problems, he must of necessity neglect the others.
But in a simple society, without division of labour, with-
out written records, without a large population, the
whole tradition is narrowed down to the memory capac-
ities of a few individuals. With the aid of writing
and an analytic point of view, it is possible for the in-
vestigator to master in a few months most of the tradi-
tion which it takes the native years to learn.

From this vantage point of a thorough knowledge of
the cultural background, it is then possible to study the
educational process, to suggest solutions to educational
problems which we would never be willing to study by
experimentation upon our own children. But Manus
has made the experiment for us 3 we have only to read
the answer.

I made this study of Manus education to prove no
thesis, to support no preconceived theories. Many of
the results came as a surprise to me.* This descrip-
tion of the way a simple people, dwelling in the shallow

* See Appendix I, "The Ethnological Approach to Social Psy-
chology."

[5]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

lagoons of a distant south sea island, prepare their chil-
dren for life, is presented to the reader as a picture of
human education in miniature. Its relevance to mod-
ern educational interest is first just that it is such a sim-
plified record in which all the elements can be readily
grasped and understood, where a complex process
which we are accustomed to think of as written upon
too large a canvas to be taken in at a glance, can be
seen as through a painter's diminishing glass. Further-
more in Manus certain tendencies in discipline or ac-
corded license, certain parental attitudes, can be seen
carried to more drastic lengths than has yet occurred
within our own society. And finally these Manus peo-
ple are interesting to us because the aims and methods
of Manus society, although primitive, are not unlike
the aims and methods which may be found in our own
immediate history.

We shall see how remarkably successful the Manus
people are in instilling into the smallest child a respect
for property J how equally remarkable is the physical
adjustment which very young children are taught to
make. The firm discipline combined with the unflag-
ging solicitude which lie back of these two conspicuous
Manus triumphs, contradict equally the theory that a
child should be protected and sheltered and the theory
that he should be thrown into the waters of experience
to "sink or swim." The Manus world, slight frame-
works of narrow boards above the changing tides of the
lagoon, is too precarious a place for costly mistakes.
The successful fashion in which each baby is efficiently

[6]

INTRODUCTION

adapted to its dangerous way of life is relevant to the
problems which parents here must face as our mode
of life becomes increasingly charged with possibilities
of accident.

Perhaps equally illuminating are the Manus mis-
takes, for their efficiency in training dexterous little
athletes and imbuing them with a thorough respect for
property is counterbalanced by their failure in other
forms of discipline. The children are allowed to give
their emotions free playj they are taught to bridle
neither their tongues nor their tempers. They are
taught no respect for their parents j they are given no
pride in their tradition. The absence of any training
which fits them to accept graciously the burden of their
tradition, to assume proudly the role of adults, is con-
spicuous. They are permitted to frolic in their ideal
playground without responsibilities and without ac-
cording either thanks or honour to those whose unremit-
ting labour makes their long years of play possible.

Those who believe that all children are naturally
creative, inherently imaginative, that they need only
be given freedom to evolve rich and charming ways
of life for themselves, will find in the behaviour of
Manus children no confirmation of their faith. Here
are all the children of a community, freed from all
labour, given only the most rudimentary schooling by
a society which concerns itself only with physical pro-
ficiency, respect for property and the observance of a
few tabus. They are healthy children j a fifty per cent
infant death rate accomplishes that. Only the most fit

[7]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

survive. They are intelligent children j there are only
three or four dull children among them. They have
perfect bodily co-ordination j their senses are sharp,
their perceptions are quick and accurate. The parent
and child relationship is such that feelings of inferiority
and insecurity hardly exist. And this group of chil-
dren are allowed to play all day long, but, alas for the
theorists, their play is like that of young puppies or
kittens. Unaided by the rich hints for play which chil-
dren of other societies take from the admired adult
traditions, they have a dull, uninteresting child life,
romping good humouredly until they are tired, then
lying inert and breathless until rested sufficiently to
romp again.

The family picture in Manus is also strange and re-
vealing, with the father taking the principal role, the
father the tender solicitous indulgent guardian, while
the mother takes second place in the child's affection.
Accustomed as we are to the family in which the father
Is the stern and distant dictator, the mother the child's
advocate and protector. It Is provocative to find a society
in which father and mother have exchanged parts. The
psychiatrists have laboured the difficulties under which
a male child grows up if his father plays patriarch and
his mother madonna. Manus Illustrates the creative
part which a loving tender father may play in shaping
positively his son's personality. It suggests that the
solution of the family complex may lie not in the par-
ents assuming no roles, as some enthusiasts suggest, but
in their playing different ones.

[8]

INTRODUCTION

Besides these special points in Manus educational
practice, there is also a curious analogy between Manus
society and America. Like America, Manus has not
yet turned from the primary business of making a liv-
ing to the less immediate interest of the conduct of life
as an art. As in America, work is respected and indus-
try and economic success is the measure of the man.
The dreamer who turns aside from fishing and trading
and so makes a poor showing at the next feast, is de-
spised as a weakling. Artists they have none, but like
Americans, they, richer than their neighbours, buy their
neighbours' handiwork. To the arts of leisure, conver-
sation, story telling, music and dancing, friendship and
love making, they give scant recognition. Conversa-
tion is purposeful, story telling is abbreviated and very
slightly stylised, singing is for moments of boredom,
dancing is to celebrate financial arrangements, friend-
ship is for trade, and love making, in any elaborate
sense, is practically unknown. The ideal Manus man
has no leisure j he is ever up and about his business
turning five strings of shell money into ten.

With this emphasis upon work, upon the accumula-
tion of more and more property, the cementing of
firmer trade alliances, the building of bigger canoes
and bigger houses, goes a congruent attitude towards
morality. As they admire industry, so do they esteem
probity in business dealings. Their hatred of debt,
their uneasiness beneath undischarged economic obliga-
tions is painful. Diplomacy and tact are but slightly
valued j obstreperous truthfulness is the greater virtue.

[9]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

The double standard permitted very cruel prostitution
in earlier days; the most rigorous demands are still
made upon the virtue of Manus women. Finally their
religion is genuinely ethical 3 it is a spiritualistic cult
of the recently dead ancestors who supervise jealously
their descendants' economic and sexual lives, blessing
those who abstain from sin and who labour to grow
wealthy, visiting sickness and misfortune on violators
of the sexual code and on those who neglect to invest
the family capital wisely. In many ways, the Manus
ideal is very similar to our historical Puritan ideal, de-
manding from men industry, prudence, thrift and ab-
stinence from worldly pleasures, with the promise that
God will prosper the virtuous man.

In this stern workaday world of the adult, the chil-
dren are not asked to play any part. Instead they are
given years of unhampered freedom by parents whom
they often bully and despise for their munificence. We
often present our children with this same picture. We
who live in a society where it is the children who wear
the silk while the mothers labour in calico, may find
something of interest in the development of these prim-
itive young people in a world that is so often like a
weird caricature of our own, a world whose currency is
shells and dogs' teeth, which makes its investments in
marriages instead of corporations and conducts its over-
seas trade in outrigger canoes, but where property,
morality and security for the next generation are the
main concerns of its inhabitants.

This account is the result of six months' concentrated

[10]

INTRODUCTION

and uninterrupted field work. From a thatched house
on piles, built in the centre o£ the Manus village of
Peri, I learned the native language, the children's
games, the intricacies of social organisation, economic
custom and religious belief and practice which formed
the social framework within which the child grows up.
In my large living room, on the wide verandahs, on the
tiny islet adjoining the houses, in the surrounding
lagoon, the children played all day and I watched them,
now from the midst of a play group, now from behind
the concealment of the thatched walls. I rode in their
canoes, attended their feasts, watched in the house of
mourning and sat severely still while the mediums con-
versed with the spirits of the dead. I observed the
children when no grown-up people were present, and
I watched their behaviour towards their parents.
Within a social setting which I learned to know inti-
mately enough not to offend against the hundreds of
name tabus, I watched the Manus baby, the Manus
child, the Manus adolescent, in an attempt to under-
stand the way in which each of these was becoming a
Manus adult.

["]

II

SCENES FROM MANUS LIFE

TO the Manus native the world is a great platter,
curving upwards on all sides, from his flat lagoon vil-
lage where the pile houses stand like long-legged birds,
placid and unstirred by the changing tides. One long
edge of the platter is the mainland, rising from its
fringe of mangrove swamps in fold after fold of steep,
red clay. The mainland is approached across a half
mile of lagoon, where the canoe leaves a path in the
thicket of scum-coated sea growth, and is entered by
slowly climbing the narrow tortuous beds of the small
rivers which wind stagnant courses through the dark
forbidding swamps. On the mainland live the Usiai,
the men of the bush, whom the Manus people meet
daily at set hours near the river mouths. Here the
Manus fishermen, the landless rulers of the lagoons
and reefs, bargain with the Usiai for taro, sago, yams,
wood for housebuilding, betel nut for refreshments,
logs for the hulls of their great outrigger canoes, —
buying with their fish all the other necessities of life
from the timid, spindly-legged bush people. Here also
the people of Peri come to work the few sago patches
which they long ago traded or stole from the Usiai j
here the children come for a fresh water swim, and the

[.2]

SCENES FROM MANUS LIFE

women to gather firewood and draw water. The
swamps are infested with sulky Usiai, hostile demons
and fresh water monsters. Because of them the Manus
dislike both the rivers and the land and take pains never
to look into the still waters lest part of their soul stuff
remain there.

At the other edge of the platter is the reef, beyond
which lies the open sea and the islands of their own
archipelago, where they sail to trade for cocoanuts, oil,
carved wooden bowls and carved bedsteads. Beyond,
still higher up the sea wall, lies Rabaul, the capital of
the white man's government of the Territory of New
Guinea, and far up on the rim of the world lies Sydney,
the farthest point of their knowledge. Stretching
away to right and left along the base of the platter lie
other villages of the Manus people, standing in serried
ranks in brown lagoons, and far away at each end of the
platter lies the gentle slope of the high sea wall which
canoes must climb if they would sail upon it.

Around the stout house piles, the tides run, now
baring the floor of the lagoon until part of the village is
left high and dry in the mud, now swelling with a soft
insistence nearly to the floor slats of the houses. Here
and there, around the village borders, are small abrupt
islands, without level land, and unfit for cultivation.
Here the women spread out leaves to dry for weaving,
the children scramble precariously from rock to rock.
Bleaching on the farther islands lie the white bones of
the dead.

This small world of water dwellings, where men who

[13]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

are of one kin build their houses side by side, and scat-
ter sago on the edge of the little island which they have
inherited from their fathers, shelters not only the living
but also the spirits of the dead. These live protected
from the inclemency of wind and rain beneath the house
thatch. Disowned by their descendants, they flutter
restlessly about the borders of the small islets of coral
rubble which stand in the centre of the village and
do duty as village greens, places of meeting and
festivity.

Within the village bounds, the children play. At low
tide they range in straggling groups about the shallows,
spearing minnows or pelting each other with seaweed.
When the water rises the smaller ones are driven up
upon the little islets or into the houses, but the taller
still wade about sailing toy boats, until the rising tide
drives them into their small canoes to race gaily upon
the surface of the water. Within the village the sharks
of the open sea do not venture, nor are the children in
danger from the crocodiles of the mainland. The paint
with which their fathers decorate their faces for a voy-
age into the open seas as a protection against malicious
spirits is not needed here. Naked, except for belts or
armlets of beads or necklaces of dogs' teeth, they play
all day at fishing, swimming, boating, mastering the arts
upon which their landless fathers have built their secure
position as the dominant people of the archipelago.
Up the sides of the universe lie dangers, but here in the
watery bottom, the children play, safe beneath the eyes
of their spirit ancestors.

[14]

SCENES FROM MANUS LIFE

II

In the centre of a long house are gathered a group of
women. Two of them are cooking sago and cocoanut
in shallow broken pieces of earthenware pottery, another
is making beadwork. One old woman, a widow by her
rope belt and black rubber-like breast bands, is shred-
ding leaves and plaiting them into new grass skirts to
add to those which hang in a long row from above her
head. The thatched roof is black from the thick wood
smoke, rising incessantly from the fires which are never
allowed to go out. On swinging shelves over the fires,
fish are smoking. A month-old baby lies on a leaf mat,
several other small children play about, now nursing at
their mothers' breasts, now crawling away, now return-
ing to cry for more milk. It is dark and hot in the
house. The only breath of air comes up through the
slats in the floor and from trap door entrances at the
far ends of the house. The women have laid aside
their long drab cotton cloaks, which they must always
wear in public to hide their faces from their male rela-
tives-in-law. Beads of sweat glisten on their shiny
shaven heads, sign of the wedded estate. Their grass
skirts, which are only two tails worn one before and one
behind, leaving the thighs bare, are wilted and work-
bedraggled.

One woman starts to gather up her beads: "Come,
Alupwa," she says to her three-year-old daughter.

"I don't want to." The fat little girl wriggles and
pouts.

[15]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

"Yes, come, I must go home now. I have stayed
here long enough making bead-work. Come."

"I don't want to."

"Yes, come, father will be home from market and
hungry after fishing all night."

"I won't." Alupwa purses her lips into ugly de-
fiance.

"But come daughter of mine, we must go home
now."

"I won't."

"If thou dost not come now, I must return for thee
and what if in the meantime, my sister-in-law, the wife
of my husband's brother, should take the canoe? Thou
wouldst cry and who would fetch thee home?"

"Father!" retorted the child impudently.

"Father will scold me if thou art not home. He likes
it not when thou stayest for a long while with my kins-
folk," replies the mother, glancing up at the skull bowl,
where the grandfather's skull hangs from the ceiling.

"Never mind!" The child jerks away from her
mother's attempt to detain her and turning, slaps her
mother roundly in the face. Every one laughs merrily.

Her mother's sister adds: "Alupwa, thou shouldst go
home now with thy mother," whereupon the child slaps
her also. The mother gives up the argument and be-
gins working on her beads again, while Alupwa prances
to the front of the house and returns with a small green
fruit from which the older children make tops. This
she begins to eat with a sly glance at her mother.

"Don't eat that, Alupwa, it is bad." Alupwa de-
[i6]

SCENES FROM MANUS LIFE

fiantly sets her teeth into the rind. "Don't eat it. Dost
not hear me?" Her mother takes hold of the child's
hand and tries to wrest it away from her. Alupwa
immediately begins to shriek furiously. The mother
lets go of her hand with a hopeless shrug and the child
puts the fruit to her lips again. But one of the older
women intervenes.

"It is bad that she should eat that thing. It will
make her sick."

"Well, then do thou take it from her. If I do she
will hate me." The older woman grasps the wrist of
the screaming child and wrenches the fruit from her.

"Daughter of Kea!" At the sound of her husband's
voice, the mother springs to her feet, gathering up
her cloak. The other women hastily seize their cloaks
against their brother-in-law's possible entrance into the
house. But Alupwa, tears forgotten, scampers out to
the trap door, climbs down the ladder to the veranda,
out along the outrigger poles to the canoe platform, and
along the sharp gunwale to nestle happily against her
father's leg. His hand plays affectionately with her
hair as he scowls up at his wife who is sullenly de-
scending the ladder.

Ill

It is night in Peri. From the windowless houses
with their barred entrances, no house fires shine out
into the village. Now and then a shower of incan-
descent ashes falls into the sea, betraying that folk are
still awake within the silent houses. Under a house,
at the other end of the village, a dark figure is visible

[17]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

against the light cast by a fan-shaped torch of palm
leaves. It is a man who is searing the hull of his water-
worn canoe with fire. Out in the shallows near the
pounding reef, can be seen the scattered bamboo torches
of fishermen. A canoe passes down the central water-
way, and stops, without a sound, under the verandah
of a house. The occupant of the canoe stands, upright,
leaning on his long punt, listening. From the interior
of the house comes the sound of low sibilant, indrawn
whistlings. The owner of the house is holding a seance
and through the whistles of the spirit, who is in pos-
session of the mouth of the medium, he communicates
with the spirits of the dead. The whistling ceases, and
a woman's voice exclaims: "Ah, Pokus is here and thou
mayst question him."

The listener recognises the name of Pokus, although
the voice of his mortal mother, the medium, is strained
and disguised. His lips form the words: "Wife of
Pokanas is conducting the seance."

The owner of the house speaks, quickly, in a voice of
command: "Thou, Pokus, tell me. Why is my child
sick? All day he is sick. Is it because I sold those
pots which I should have kept for my daughter's
dowry? Speak, thou, tell me."

Again the whistling. Then the woman's voice drow-
sily. "He says he does not know."

"Then let him go and ask Selanbelot, my father's
brother, whose skull I have given room under my roof.
Let him ask him why my child is sick."

[i8]

SCENES FROM MANUS LIFE

Again whistling. Then the woman's voice, softly:
"He says he will go and ask him."

From the next house comes the sharp angry wail of
a child. The floor creaks above the listener's head and
the medium says in her ordinary voice, "Thou, Pokanas.
Wake up. The child is crying. Dost thou sleep?
Listen, the child is crying, go quickly."

A heavy man climbs down the ladder and perceiving
the man in the canoe: "Who is it? Thou, Saot?"

"Take me quickly in thy canoe. The child has wak-
ened and is frightened." As the young man punts the
father across to his child, the whistling begins again.

IV

Against the piles at the back of his veranda a man
lounges wearily. After a whole night's fishing and the
morning at the market he is very sleepy. His hair is
combed stiffly back from his head in a pompadour.
Around his throat is a string of dogs' teeth. From his
distended ear lobes dangle little notched rings of coco-
nut shell, and through the pierced septum of his nose
is passed a long slender crescent of pearl shell. His
G-string of trade cloth is held fast by a woven belt,
patterned in yellow and brown. On his upper arms
are wide woven armlets coated with black, rubber-like
gumj in these are stuck the pieces of the rib bones of
his dead father. On the rough floor boards lies a small
grass bag, from which projects a polished gourd on
which intricate designs have been burned. In the mouth
of the gourd is thrust a wooden spatula, the end carved

[19]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

to represent a crocodile eating a man. The carved head
extends in staring unconcern from the crocodile's ornate
jaws. The lounger stirs and draws from the bag the
lime gourd, a cluster of bright green betel nuts and a
bunch of pepper leaves. He puts a betel nut in his
mouth, leisurely rolls a pepper leaf into a long funnel,
bites off the end, and dipping the spatula into the pow-
dered lime, adds a bit of lime to the mixture which
he is already chewing vigorously.

The platform shakes as a canoe collides with one of
the piles. The man begins hastily gathering up the
pepper leaves and betel nut to hide them from a pos-
sible visitor. But he is not quick enough. A small head
appears above the edge of the verandah and his six-year-
old son, Popoli, climbs up dripping. The child's hair
is long and strands of it are caked together with red
mud} before they can be cut off, his father must give
a large feast. The child has spied the treasure and
hanging onto the edge of the verandah he whines out
in the tone which all Manus natives use when begging
betel nut: "A little betel?" The father throws him a
nut. He tears the skin off with his teeth and bites it
greedily.

"Another," the child's voice rises to a higher pitch.
The father throws him a second nut, which the child
grasps firmly in his wet little fist, without acknowledg-
ment. "Some pepper leaf?"

The father frowns. "I have very little, Popoli."

"Some pepper leaf." The father tears off a piece of
a leaf and throws it to him.

[20]

SCENES FROM MANUS LIFE

The child scowls at the small piece. "This is too
little. More! More! More!" His voice rises to a
howl of rage.

"I have but a little, Popoli. I go not to market until
the morrow. I go this afternoon to Patusi and I want
some for my voyaging." The father resolutely begins
to stuff the leaves farther into the bag, and as he does
so, his knife slips out of the bag and falls through a
crack into the sea.

"Wilt get it, Popoli?"

But the child only glares furiously. "No. I won't,
thou, thou stingy one, thou hidest thy pepper leaf from
me." And the child dives off the verandah and swims
away, leaving his father to climb down and rescue the
knife himself.

V

On a shaded verandah a group of children are play-
ing cat's cradle.

"Molung is going to die," remarks one little girl,
looking up from her half-completed string figure.

"Who says so?" demands a small boy, leaning over
to light his cigarette at a glowing bit of wood which lies
on the floor.

"My mother. Molung has a snake In her belly."

The other children pay no attention to this announce-
ment, but one four-year-old adds after a moment's re-
flection, "She had a baby in her belly."

"Yes, but the baby came out. It lives in the back
of our house. My grandmother looks out for it." "If

[21]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Molung dies, you can keep the baby," says the small
boy. "Listen ! "

From the house across the water a high piercing wail
of many voices sounds, all crying in chorus, "My
mother, my mother, my mother, oh, what can be the
matter?"

"Is she dead yet?" asks the small boy, wriggling to
the edge of the verandah. Nobody answers him.
"Look." From the rear of the house of illness, a large
canoe slides away, laden high with cooking pots. An
old woman, gaunt of face, and with head uncovered in
her haste, punts the canoe along the waterway.

"That's Ndrantche, the mother of Molung," remarks
the first little girl.

"Look, there goes Ndrantche with a canoe full of
pots," shout the children.

Two women come to the door of the house and look
out. "Oho," says one. "She's getting the pots away
so that when all the mourners come, the pots won't be
broken."

"When will Molung die?" asks little Itong, and
"Come for a swim," she adds, diving off the verandah
without waiting for an answer.

[22]

Ill

EARLY EDUCATION

THE Manus baby is accustomed to water from the
first years of his life. Lying on the slatted floor he
watches the sunlight gleam on the surface of the
lagoon as the changing tide passes and repasses beneath
the house. When he is nine or ten months old his
mother or father will often sit in the cool of the eve-
ning on the little verandah, and his eyes grow used to
the sight of the passing canoes and the village set in
the sea. When he is about a year old, he has learned to
grasp his mother firmly about the throat, so that he
can ride in safety, poised on the back of her neck. She
has carried him up and down the long house, dodged
under low-hanging shelves, and climbed up and down
the rickety ladders which lead from house floor down
to the landing verandah. The decisive, angry gesture
with which he was reseated on his mother's neck when-
ever his grip tended to slacken has taught him to be
alert and sure-handed. At last it is safe for his mother
to take him out in a canoe, to punt or paddle the canoe
herself while the baby clings to her neck. If a sudden
wind roughens the lagoon or her punt catches in a rock,
the canoe may swerve and precipitate mother and baby
into the sea. The water is cold and dark, acrid in taste
and blindingly saltj the descent into its depths is sud-

[23]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

den, but the training within the house holds good. The
baby does not loosen his grip while his mother rights
the canoe and climbs out of the water.

Occasionally the child's introduction to the water
comes at an even earlier age. The house floor is made
of sections of slats, put together after the fashion of
Venetian blinds. These break and bend and slip out
of place until great gaps sometimes appear. The un-
wary child of a shiftless father may crawl over one
of these gaps and slip through into the cold, repellent
water beneath. But the mother is never far awayj her
attention is never wholly diverted from the child. She
is out the door, down the ladder, and into the sea in
a twinkling J the baby is gathered safely into her arms
and warmed and reassured by the fire. Although chil-
dren frequently slip through the floor, I heard of no
cases of drowning and later familiarity with the water
seems to obliterate all traces of the shock, for there are
no water phobias in evidence. In spite of an early
ducking, the sea beckons as insistently to a Manus child
as green lawns beckon to our children, tempting them
forth to exploration and discovery.

For the first few months after he has begun to ac-
company his mother about the village the baby rides
quietly on her neck or sits in the bow of the canoe
while his mother punts in the stern some ten feet away.
The child sits quietly, schooled by the hazards to which
he has been earlier exposed. There are no straps, no
baby harnesses to detain him in his place. At the same
time, if he should tumble overboard, there would be

[24]

EARLY EDUCATION

no tragedy. The fall into the water is painless. The
mother or father is there to pick him up. Babies under
two and a half or three are never trusted with older
children or even wfth young people. The parents de-
mand a speedy physical adjustment from the child, but
they expose him to no unnecessary risks. He is never
allowed to stray beyond the limits of safety and watch-
ful adult care.

So the child confronts duckings, falls, dousings of
cold water, or entanglements in slimy seaweed, but he
never meets with the type of accident which will make
him distrust the fundamental safety of his world. Al-
though he himself may not yet have mastered the
physical technique necessary for perfect comfort in the
water, his parents have. A lifetime of dwelling on the
water has made them perfectly at home there. They
are sure-footed, clear eyed, quick handed. A baby is
never dropped j his mother never lets him slip from
her arms or carelessly bumps his head against door post
or shelf. All her life she has balanced upon the inch-
wide edges of canoe gunwales, gauged accurately the
distance between house posts where she must moor her
canoe without ramming the outrigger, lifted huge
fragile water pots from shifting canoe platforms up
rickety ladders. In the physical care of the child she
makes no clumsy blunders. Her every move is a re-
assurance to the child, counteracting any doubts which
he may have accumulated in the course of his own less
sure-footed progress. So thoroughly do Manus chil-
dren trust their parents that a child will leap from any

[25]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

height into an adult's outstretched arms, leap blindly
and with complete confidence of being safely caught.

Side by side with the parent's watchfulness and care
goes the demand that the child himself should make
as much effort, acquire as much physical dexterity as
possible. Every gain a child makes is noted, and the
child is inexorably held to his past record. There are
no cases of children who toddle a few steps, fall, bruise
their noses, and refuse to take another step for three
months. The rigorous way of life demands that the
children be self-sufficient as early as possible. Until
a child has learned to handle his own body, he is not
safe in the house, in a canoe, or on the small islands.
His mother or aunt is a slave, unable to leave him for
a minute, never free of watching his wandering steps.
So every new proficiency is encouraged and insisted
upon. Whole groups of busy men and women cluster
about the baby's first step, but there is no such delight-
ful audience to bemoan his first fall. He is set upon
his feet gently but firmly and told to try again. The
only way in which he can keep the interest of his ad-
miring audience is to try again. So self-pity is stifled
and another step is attempted.

As soon as the baby can toddle uncertainly, he is put
down into the water at low tide when parts of the
lagoon are high and others only a few inches under
water. Here the baby sits and plays in the water or
takes a few hesitating steps in the yielding spongy mud.
The mother does not leave his side, nor does she leave
him there long enough to weary him. As he grows

[26]

EARLY EDUCATION

older, he is allowed to wade about at low tide. His
elders keep a sharp lookout that he does not stray into
deep water until he is old enough to swim. But the
supervision is unobtrusive. Mother is always there if
the child gets into difficulties, but he is not nagged and
plagued with continual "don'ts." His whole play
world is so arranged that he is permitted to make small
mistakes from which he may learn better judgment and
greater circumspection, but he is never allowed to make
mistakes which are serious enough to permanently
frighten him or inhibit his activity. He is a tight-rope
walker, learning feats which we would count outra-
geously difficult for little children, but his tight-rope is
stretched above a net of expert parental solicitude. If
we are horrified to see a baby sitting all alone in the
end of a canoe with nothing to prevent his clambering
overboard into the water, the Manus would be equally
horrified at the American mother who has to warn a
ten-year-old child to keep his fingers from under a rock-
ing chair, or not to lean out of the side of the car.
Equally repellent to them would be our notion of get-
ting children used to the water by giving them com-
pulsory duckings. The picture of an adult voluntarily
subjecting the child to a painful situation, using his
superior strength to bully the child into accepting the
water, would fill them with righteous indignation. Ex-
pecting children to swim at three, to climb about like
young monkeys even before that age, may look to us
like forcing themj really it is simply a quiet insistence

[27]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

upon their exerting every particle of energy and
strength which they possess.

Swimming is not taught: the small waders imitate
their slightly older brothers and sisters, and after
floundering about in waist-deep water begin to strike
out for themselves. Sure-f ootedness on land and swim-
ming come almost together, so that the charm which
is recited over a newly delivered woman says, "May
you not have another child until this one can walk and
swim." As soon as the children can swim a little, in a
rough and tumble overhand stroke which has no style
but great speed, they are given small canoes of their
own. These little canoes are five or six feet long, most
of them without outriggers, mere hollow troughs, dif-
ficult to steer and easy to upset. In the company of
children a year or so older, the young initiates play all
day in shallow water, paddling, punting, racing, mak-
ing tandems of their small craft, upsetting their canoes,
bailing them out again, shrieking with delight and high
spirits. The hottest sun does not drive them indoors j
the fiercest rain only changes the appearance of their
playground into a new and strange delight. Over half
their waking hours are spent in the water, joyously
learning to be at home in their water world.

Now that they have learned to swim a little, they
climb freely about the large canoes, diving off the bow,
climbing in again at the stern, or clambering out over
the outrigger to swim along with one hand on the flex-
ible outrigger float. The parents are never in such a
hurry that they have to forbid this useful play.

[28]

EARLY EDUCATION

The next step in water proficiency is reached when
the child begins to punt a large canoe. Early in the
morning the village is alive with canoes in which the
elders sit sedately on the centre platforms while small
children of three punt the canoes which are three or
four times as long as the children are tall. At first
glance this procession looks like either the crudest sort
of display of adult prestige or a particularly conspic-
uous form of child labour. The father sits in casual
state, a man of five feet nine or ten, weighing a hundred
and fifty pounds. The canoe is long and heavy, dug
out of a solid logj the unwieldy outrigger makes it
difficult to steer. At the end of the long craft, perched
precariously on the thin gunwales, his tiny brown feet
curved tensely to keep his hold, stands a small brown
baby, manfully straining at the six foot punt in his
hands. He is so small that he looks more like an un-
obtrusive stern ornament than like the pilot of the
lumbering craft. Slowly, with a great display of energy
but not too much actual progress, the canoe moves
through the village, among other canoes similarly
manned by the merest tots. But this is neither child
labour nor idle prestige hunting on the part of the
parents. It is part of the whole system by which a
child is encouraged to do his physical best. The father
is in a hurry. He has much work to do during the day.
He may be setting off for overseas, or planning an im-
portant feast. The work of punting a canoe within
the lagoon is second nature to him, easier than walk-
ing. But that his small child may feel important and

[29]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

adequate to deal with the exacting water life, the father
retires to the central platform and the infant pilot mans
the canoe. And here again, there are no harsh words
when the child steers clumsily, only a complete lack
of interest. But the first sure deft stroke which guides
the canoe back to its course is greeted with approval.

The test of this kind of training is in the results.
The Manus children are perfectly at home in the water.
They neither fear it nor regard it as presenting special
difficulties and dangers. The demands upon them have
made them keen-eyed, quick-witted, and physically
competent like their parents. There is not a child of
five who can't swim well. A Manus child who couldn't
swim would be as aberrant, as definitely subnormal
as an American child of five who couldn't walk. Be-
fore I went to Manus I was puzzled by the problem
of how I would be able to collect the little children
in one spot. I had visions of a kind of collecting canoe
which would go about every morning and gather them
aboard. I need not have worried. A child was never
at a loss to get from house to house, whether he went
in a large canoe or a small one, or swam the distance
with a knife in his teeth.

In other aspects of adapting the children to the ex-
ternal world the same technique is followed. Every
gain, every ambitious attempt is applauded j too am-
bitious projects are gently pushed out of the picture j
small errors are simply ignored but important ones are
punished. So a child who, after having learned to walk,
slips and bumps his head, is not gathered up in kind,

[30]

EARLY EDUCATION

compassionate arms while mother kisses his tears away,
thus establishing a fatal connection between physical
disaster and extra cuddling. Instead the little stumbler
is berated for his clumsiness, and if he has been very
stupid, slapped soundly into the bargain. Or if his
misstep has occurred in a canoe or on the verandah, the
exasperated and disgusted adult may simply dump him
contemptuously into the water to meditate upon his in-
eptness. The next time the child slips, he will not
glance anxiously for an audience for his agony, as so
many of our children doj he will nervously hope that
no one has noticed his jaux fas. This attitude, severe
and unsympathetic as it appears on the surface, makes
children develop perfect motor co-ordination. The
child with slighter original proficiency cannot be dis-
tinguished among the fourteen-year-olds except in
special pursuits like spear throwing, where a few will
excel in skill. But in the everyday activities of swim-
ming, paddling, punting, climbing, there is a general
high level of excellence. And clumsiness, physical un-
certainty and lack of poise, is unknown among adults.
The Manus are alive to individual differences in skill
or knowledge and quick to brand the stupid, the slow
learner, the man or woman with poor memory. But
they have no word for clumsiness. The child's lesser
proficiency is simply described as "not understanding
yet." That he should not understand the art of han-
dling his body, his canoes well, very presently, is un-
thinkable.

In many societies children's* walking means more

[31]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

trouble for the adults. Once able to walk, the children
are a constant menace to property, breaking dishes, spil-
ling the soup, tearing books, tangling the thread. But
in Manus where property is sacred and one wails for
lost property as for the dead, respect for property is
taught children from their earliest years. Before they
can walk they are rebuked and chastised for touching
anything which does not belong to them. It was some-
times very tiresome to listen to the* monotonous reitera-
tion of some mother to her baby as it toddled about
among our new and strange possessions: "That isn't
yours. Put it down. That belongs to Piyap. That
belongs to Piyap. That belongs to Piyap. Put it
down." But we reaped the reward of this endless vigi-
lance: all our possessions, fascinating red and yellow
cans of food, photographic material, books, were safe
from the two- and three-year-olds who would have
been untamed vandals in a forest of loot in most so-
cieties. As in the attitude towards physical prowess,
there is no attempt to make it easy for the child, to
demand less than the child is capable of giving. Noth-
ing is put out of the child's reach. The mother spreads
her tiny brightly coloured beads out on a mat, or in a
shallow bowl, right on the floor within the reach of the
crawling baby and the baby is taught not to touch them.
Where even the dogs are so well trained that fish can
be laid on the floor and left there for an hour without
danger there are no excuses made for the tiny human
beings. A good baby is a baby which never touches
anything J a good child is one who never touches any-

[32]

EARLY EDUCATION

thing and never asks for anything not its own. These
are the only important items of ethical behaviour de-
manded of children. And as their physical trustworthi-
ness makes it safe to leave children alone, so their well-
schooled attitudes towards property make it safe to
leave a crowd of romping children in a houseful of
property. No pots will be disturbed, no smoked fish
purloined from the hanging shelves, no string of shell
money severed in a tug of war and sent into the sea.
The slightest breakage is punished without mercy.
Once a canoe from another village anchored near one
of the small islands. Three little eight-year-old girls
climbed on the deserted canoe and knocked a pot into
the sea, where it struck a stone and broke. All night
the village rang with drum calls and angry speeches,
accusing, deprecating, apologising for the damage done
and denouncing the careless children. The fathers made
speeches? of angry shame and described how roundly
they had beaten the young criminals. The children's
companions, far from admiring a daring crime, drew
away from them in haughty disapproval and mocked
them in chorus.

Any breakage, any carelessness, is punished. The
parents do not condone the broken pot which was al-
ready cracked and then wax suddenly furious when a
good pot is broken, after the fashion of American par-
ents who let the child tear the almanac and the tele-
phone book and then wonder at its grieved astonish-
ment when it is slapped for tearing up the family
Bible. The tail of a fish, the extra bit of taro, the

[33]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

half rotten betel nut, cannot be appropriated with any
more impunity than can the bowl of feast food. In
checking thefts, the same inexorableness is found.
There was one little girl of twelve named Mentun who
was said to be a thief and sometimes taunted with the
fact by other children. Why? Because she had been
seen to pick up objects floating in the water, a bit of
food, a floating banana, which obviously must have
fallen out of one of the half a dozen houses near by.
To appropriate such booty without first making a round
of the possible owners, was to steal. And Mentun
would have to exercise the greatest circumspection for
months if she were not to be blamed for every disap-
pearance of property in the years to come. I never
ceased to wonder at the children who, after picking up
pieces of coveted paper off the veranda or the islet near
our house, always brought them to me with the ques-
tion, "Piyap, is this good or bad?" before carrying away
the crumbled scraps.

The departments of knowledge which small children
are expected to master are spoken of as '^understanding
the house," "understanding the fire," "understanding
the canoe," and "understanding the sea."

"Understanding the house" includes care in walking
over the uncertain floors, the ability to climb up the
ladder or notched post from the verandah to the house
floor, remembering to remove a slat of the floor for
spitting or urinating, or discarding rubbish into the sea,
respecting any property lying on the floor, not climbing
on shelves nor on parts of the house which would give

[34]

EARLY EDUCATION

beneath weight, not bringing mud and rubbish into the
house.

The fire is kept in one or all of the four fireplaces
ranged two along each side wall, towards the centre of
the house. The fireplace is made of a thick bed of fine
wood ash on a base of heavy mats edged by stout logs
of hard wood. It is about three feet square. In the
centre are three or four boulders which serve as sup-
ports for the cooking pots. Cooking is done with small
wood, but the fire is kept up by heavier logs. Neat
piles of firewood, suspended on low shelves, flank the
fireplaces. Swung low over the fire are the smoking
shelves where the fish are preserved. Understanding
of the fire means an understanding that the fire will
burn the skin, or thatch, or light wood, or straw, that
a smouldering cinder will flare if blown upon, that such
cinders, if removed from the fireplace, must be car-
ried with the greatest care and without slipping or
bringing them in contact with other objects, that water
will quench fire. "Understanding the fire" does not
include making fire with the fire plough, an art learned
much later when boys are twelve or thirteen. (Fire
is never made by women, although they may assist by
sheltering the kindling dust between their hands.)

Understanding canoe and sea come just a little later
than the understanding of house and fire, which form
part of the child's environment from birth. A child's
knowledge of a canoe is considered adequate if he can
balance himself, feet planted on the two narrow rims,
and punt the canoe with accuracy, paddle well enough

[35]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

to steer through a mild gale, run the canoe accurately
under a house without jamming the outrigger, extri-
cate a canoe from a flotilla of canoes crowded closely
about a house platform or the edge of an islet, and
bail out a canoe by a deft backward and forward move-
ment which dips the bow and stern alternately. It does
not include any sailing knowledge. Understanding of
the sea includes swimming, diving, swimming under
water, and a knowledge of how to get water out of the
nose and throat by leaning the head forward and strik-
ing the back of the neck. Children of between five and
six have mastered these four necessary departments.

Children are taught to talk through the men's and
older boys' love of playing with children. There is no
belief that it is necessary to give a child formal teach-
ing, rather chance adult play devices are enlisted. One
of these is the delight in repetition. Melanesian lan-
guages very frequently use repetition to give an
intensity to speech. To go far is expressed by "go go
go," to be very large by "big big big." So an ordinary
anecdote runs: "So the man went went went. After
a while it was dark dark night. So he stopped stopped
stopped stopped stopped. In the morning he awoke.
His throat was dry dry dry. He looked looked for
water. But he found none. Then his belly was angry
angry, etc." Although strictly speaking these repeti-
tions should all have a function in expressing duration
or intensity, very often the mere habit of repetition runs
away with the narrator and soon he will be saying,
"Now he met a woman. Her name was Sain Sain

[36]

EARLY EDUCATION

Sain," or even repeating a preposition or particle. A
crowd also has a tendency to pick up a phrase and re-
peat it or turn it into a low monotonous song. This is
particularly true if one chances to utter a phrase in a
singsong tone, to call it out in another key from the
surrounding conversation, or even to mutter to oneself.
The most casual and accustomed phrases, like, "I do
not understand," or ^'Where is my canoe?" will be taken
up in this way and transformed into a chant which the
group will repeat with complete self-satisfaction for
several minutes thereafter. Tricks of pronunciation
and accent are picked up and imitated in the same way.
This random affection for repetitiousness makes an
excellent atmosphere in which the child acquires facility
in speech. There is no adult boredom with the few
faulty words of babyhood. Instead these very grop-
ing words form an excellent excuse for indulging their
own passion for repetition. So the baby says "me,"
and the adult says *'me." The baby says "me" and
the adult says "me," on and on in the same tone of
voice. I have counted sixty repetitions of the same
monosyllabic word, either a true word or a nonsense
syllable. And at the end of the sixtieth repetition,
neither baby nor adult was bored. The child with a
repertoire of ten words associates one word like me or
hoU'Se with the particular adult who engaged in this
game, and will shout at his uncle or aunt as he passes
in a canoe, "me," or "house," hopefully. Nor is he
disappointed: the obliging adult, as pleased as the child,
will call back "me" or "house" until the canoe is out

[37]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

of earshot. Little girls are usually addressed as "Ina"
little boys as ^^Ina^^ or "Papu'^ by adults and the child
replies "Ina'^ or "Papu," establishing two reciprocals
which are not included in the formal kinship system.

What is true of speech is equally true of gesture.
Adults play games of imitative gesture with children
until the child develops a habit of imitation which seems
at first glance to be practically compulsive. This is
specially true of facial expression, yawning, closed eyes,
or puckered lips. The children carried over this habit
of repeating expression in their response to a pencil of
mine which had a human head and bust on the end of
it. The bust gave the effect of a thrown-out chest.
The thin lips seem compressed, to a native, and almost
every child, when first looking at the pencil, threw out
the chest and compressed the lips. I also showed the
children one of those dancing paper puppets which
vibrate with incredible looseness when hung from a
cord. Before the children used to marvel at the
strange toy, their legs and arms were waving about in
imitation of the puppets.

This habit of imitation is not, however, compulsive,
for it is immediately arrested if made conscious. If
one says to a child who has been slavishly imitating
one's every move, "Do this the way I do," the child
will pause, consider the matter, and more often than
not refuse. It seems to be merely a habit, a natural
human tendency given extraordinary play in early child-
hood and preserved in the more stereotyped forms in
the speech and song of adult life. It is most marked

[38]

EARLY EDUCATION

in children between one and four years of age and its
early loss seems to be roughly correlated with precocity
in other respects.

Adults and the older children are very much inter-
ested in the baby's learning to talk, and comment on
different degrees of facility. Conversation also turns
upon the relative talkativeness of different small chil-
dren. "This one talks all the time. He can't do a
thing without telling you that he is doing it." Or:
"This one hardly ever speaks, even when he's spoken
to, but his eyes are always watching." Despite the
great encouragement given to articulateness, there are
many untalkative children, but this seems to be a matter
of temperament rather than a matter of intelligence.
The quiet children when they did talk displayed as good
a vocabulary as the garrulous infants, and very often
showed a greater knowledge of what was going on
about them.

Children encouraged to garrulity sometimes seem to
carry over this habit into adult life. At least, it is a
temptation to make a comparison between the child who
exploits his new instrument, language, by constant com-
ment, as: "This is my boat. Come on. Going in my
boat. My boat is in the water now. Right in the water
now. All in the water. Other boats in the water. Get
the paddle. Yes. I get the paddle. I'll paddle. No,
I won't paddle. I'll punt. This is my punting pole.
My pole. Punting," etc. — ^and the man who cultivates
an imperfect knowledge of pidgin English in the same
way, and will keep up a stream of conversation like this:

[39]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

"Get him hammer. All right. Fight him. Fight
him. Fight him nail. Hammer he good fellow along
nail. Me savee. Me savee make him. All right.
Me work him now. Me work him, work him. All
right. He fast now. He fast finish. Me catch him
other fellow nail. Where stop hammer. He stop
along ground. All right. Catch him hammer." This
conversational accompaniment of activity is not found
among the most intelligent men.

Repetition is a very useful medium for teaching
pidgin English to the young children. Young men who
have been away to work for the white man return to
their villages and teach the younger boys, who in turn
teach the very small boys. There is a class feeling about
pidgin which prevents the women, who do not go away
to work, from learning it. But it is a common spec-
tacle to see two or three twelve-year-old boys gathered
about a three- or four-year-old little boy, "schooling
him." An older boy gives the cues: "I think he can."
"I think he no can." "Me like good fellow kai kai
(food)." "Me like kai kai fish." "One time along
taro." And the child repeats the lines in his piping
little voice without any grasp of their significance. But
as it fits in so well with the game of repetition for
repetition's sake neither teacher nor pupil tires easily,
and the result is that boys of thirteen and fourteen speak
perfect pidgin although they have never been out of
their isolated villages. Learning pidgin is as much of
a feat for native children as learning French by similar
methods would be for our children. It involves learn-

[40]

EARLY EDUCATION

ing a large new vocabulary, new idioms, the pronuncia-
tion of some unfamiliar sounds. So in this atmosphere
of delight in repetition and imitation, a new language
is taught painlessly by one age group to another. The
general set shows not only in the willingness to teach
and the enjoyment of the lessons but also in the younger
child's continuous practising. As the baby practised its
first Manus words with endless glee over the hundred-
fold repetition of one syllable, so the six-year-old goes
about repeating long passages of pidgin with perfect
pronunciation and cadence, but without understanding
more than a tenth of what he is saying.

The girls are often present at these lessons j they
hear the men speak pidgin to the boys. The men when
they are angry speak in pidgin to the girls and women
but with two exceptions no pidgin passes feminine lips.
Women in delirium will speak excellent pidgin which
the natives explain in terms of possession of the
woman's mouth by the spirit of a former work boy.
The other exception is even more significant — the cases
where small girls, imitating their brothers, teach smaller
children the language which they usually refuse to
speak or to understand. The desire to imitate the for-
mal teaching situation is stronger than the convention
against betraying a knowledge of pidgin. Both of these
examples are interesting as cases of learning with an
almost complete lack of audible practice. They are
comparable to the cases of those children whose speech
habits have seemed seriously retarded and who sud-
denly begin speaking in complete sentences.

[41]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Other activities learned through imitation are dancing
and drumming. The small girls learn to dance by
standing beside their mothers and sisters at the turtle
dance given to shake the dust out of the house of
mourning. Occasionally a child is inated to dance at
home while the mother taps on the house floor. Six-
and seven-year-olds have already grasped the very sim-
ple step: feet together and a swift side jump and return
to position in time to the drum beats. The men's dance
is more difficult. The usual loin cloth or G-string is
laid aside and a white sea shell substituted as pubic cov-
ering. The dance consists in very rapid leg and body
movements which result in the greatest possible gym-
nastic phallic display. It is a dance of ceremonial de-
fiance, accompanied by boasting and ceremonial insult,
most frequently performed on occasions when there is
a large display of wealth in a payment between two kin
groups connected by marriage. Those who make the
heavy payment of dogs' teeth and shell currency dance
and dare the other side to collect enough oil and pigs
to repay them. Those who receive the payment dance
to show their defiant acceptance of the obligation which
they are undertaking. The smaller children are all
present at this big ceremony and watch the men's ath-
letic exploits. Boys of four and five begin to practise,
and the day that they master the art of catching the
penis between the legs and then flinging it violently
forward and from side to side, is a day of such pride
that for weeks afterwards they perform the dance on
every occasion, to the great and salacious amusement of

[42]

EARLY EDUCATION

their elders. Slightly older boys of ten and twelve
make a mock shell covering out of the seed of a nut
and practise in groups.

Whenever there is a dance there is an orchestra of
slit drums of all sizes played by the most proficient
drummers in the village. The very small boys of four
and five settle themselves beside small hollow log ends
or pieces of bamboo and drum away indefatigably in
time with the orchestra. This period of open and un-
ashamed imitation is followed by a period of embar-
rassment, so that it is impossible to persuade a boy of
ten or twelve to touch a drum in public, but in the boys'
house when only a few older boys are present, he will
practise, making good use of the flexibility of wrist and
sense of rhythm learned earlier. Girls practise less,
for only one drum beat, the simple death beat, falls to
their hands in later life.

The drum language the children understand but
make no attempt to execute. This language consists of
a series of formal phrase beginnings which mean "Come
home — ," or "I am now going to announce how many
days it will be before I will do something," etc. The
first one will be followed by the individual combina-
tion of beats which is the call of a particular household
for any of its members. The second is followed by
slow beats, interspersed with a formal spacing beat.
Every one in the village stops work or play to count
these beats, but only a knowledge of who is beating the
drum and what he is planning to do in the near future
make it possible to Interpret the announcement. The

[43]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

children stop their play to hear which house call follows
the formal introduction, and go back to their games if
it is not their own. They seldom bother to further
identify the call. If a date is announced they mechanic-
ally count the days and may stop to guess who is beat-
ing the drum. There their interest ceases. One cere-
mony is too like another to matter. But there are three
drum calls which do interest them, the beats announc-
ing that some one is about to die, that some one is dead,
and the drum beat which means "Trouble," — theft, or
adultery. For these they will pause in their play and
possibly send a small boy to inquire into the cause. The
drum beat for death is so simple that children can make
it and are sometimes permitted to do so in the event of
the death of an unimportant person.

Singing is also learned through imitation of older
children by younger children. It consists in a monotone
chant of very simple sentences, more or less related
to each other. A group of children will huddle to-
gether on the floor and croon these monotonous chants
over and over for hours without apparent boredom or
weariness. They also sing when they are chilled and
miserable or when they are frightened at night.

Similarly the art of war is learned by playful imita-
tion. The men use spears with bamboo shafts and cruel
arrow shaped heads of obsidian. The children make
small wooden spears, about two and a half feet in
length and fasten tips of pith on them. Then pairs of
small boys will stand on the little islets, each with a
handful of spears, and simultaneously hurl spears at

[44]

EARLY EDUCATION

each other. Dodging is as important a skill as throw-
ing, for the Manus used no shields and the avalanche
of enemy spears could only be dodged. This is an art
which requires early training for proficiency, and boys
of ten and twelve are already experts with their light
weapons. The older men and boys, canoe building on
the islet, or paddling by, stop to cheer a good throw.
Here again, the children are encouraged, never ridiculed
nor mocked.

Fishing methods are also learned yearly. Older men
make the small boys bows and arrows and tiny, pronged
fish-spears. With these the children wander in groups
about the lagoon at low tide, skirting the small rocky
islands, threading their way through the rank sea un-
dergrowth, spearing small fish for the sport of it.
Their catch, except when they net a school or minnows
in their spider-web nets, is not large enough to eat.
This toying with fishing is pursued in a desultory fash-
ion by children from the ages of three to fifteen. Then
they will go on expeditions of their own and some-
times join the young men on excursions to the north
coast after turtle, dugong, and kingfish.

Small children are also sometimes taken fishing by
their fathers. Here as little more than babies they
watch the procedures which they will not be asked to
practise until they are grown. Sometimes in the dawn
a child's wail of anger will ring through the village;
he has awakened to find his father gone fishing without
him. But this applies only to small boys under six or
seven. Older boys prefer the society of other children

[45]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

and of grown youths, but shun the company of adults.
Boys of fourteen and fifteen never accompany their
parents about their ordinary tasks except when a boy
has fallen out with his playmates. For the few days
of strain which follow he will cling closely to his parents
and be officiously helpful, only to desert them again as
soon as friendly relations are re-established.

Little girls do very little fishing. As very tiny chil-
dren they may be taken fishing by their fathers, but this
is a type of fishing which they will never be required to
do as grown women. Women's fishing consists of reef
fishing, fishing with hand nets, with scoop baskets, and
with bell shaped baskets with an opening at the top for
the hand. Girls do not begin this type of fishing until
near puberty.

Of the techniques of handwork small boys learn but
little. They know how to whiten the sides of their
canoes with seaweed juices j they know how to tie a rat-
tan strip so that it will remain fastj they have a rudi-
mentary knowledge of whittling, but none of carving.
They can fasten on a simple outrigger float if it breaks
off. They know how to scorch the sides of their canoes
with torches of coconut palm leaves, and how to make
rude bamboo torches for expeditions after dark. They
know nothing about carpentry except what they remem-
ber from their early childhood association with their
fathers.

But children have learned all the physical skill neces-
sary as a basis for a satisfactory physical adjustment
for life. They can judge distances, throw straight,

[46]

EARLY EDUCATION

catch what is thrown to them, estimate distances for
jumping and diving, climb anything, balance themselves
on the most narrow and precarious footholds, handle
themselves with poise, skill, and serenity either on land
or sea. Their bodies are trained to the adult dance
steps, their eye and hand trained to shooting and spear-
ing fish, their voices accustomed to the song rhythms,
their wrists flexible for the great speed of the drum
sticks, their hands trained to the paddle and the punt.
By a system of training which is sure, unhesitant, un-
remitting in its insistence and vigilance, the baby is given
the necessary physical base upon which he builds
through years of imitation of older children and adults.
The most onerous part of his physical education is over
by the time he is three. For the rest it is play for which
he is provided with every necessary equipment, a safe
and pleasant playground, a jolly group of companions
of all ages and both sexes. He grows up to be an adult
wholly admirable from a physical standpoint, skilled,
alert, fearless, resourceful in the face of emergency, re-
liable under strain.

But the Manus' conception of social discipline is as
loose as their standards of physical training are rigid.
They demand nothing beyond physical efficiency and
respect for property except a proper observance of the
canons of shame. Children must learn privacy in excre-
tion almost by the time they can walkj must get by
heart the conventional attitudes of shame and embar-
rassment. This is communicated to them not by stern-
ness and occasional chastisement, but through the emo-

[47]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

tions of their parents. The parents' horror, physical
shrinking, and repugnance is communicated to the care-
less child. This adult attitude is so strong that it is
as easy to impregnate the child with it as it is to com-
municate panic. When it is realized that men are fas-
tidious about uncovering in each other's presence and
that a grown girl is taught that if she even takes off her
grass skirt in the presence of another woman the spirits
will punish her, some conception of the depth of this
feeling can be obtained. Prudery is never sacrificed to
convenience j on sea voyages many hours in duration, if
the sexes are mixed the most rigid convention is ob-
served.

Into this atmosphere of prudery and shame the chil-
dren are early initiated. They are wrapped about with
this hot prickling cloak until the adults feel safe from
embarrassing betrayal. And here social discipline
ceases. The children are taught neither obedience nor
deference to their parents' wishes. A two-year-old
child is permitted to flout its mother's humble request
that it come home with her. At night the children are
supposed to be at home at dark, but this does not mean
that they go home when called. Unless hunger drives
them there the parents have to go about collecting them,
often by force. A prohibition against going to the other
end of the village to play lasts just as long as the vigi-
lance of the prohibitor, who has only to turn the back
for the child to be off, swimming under water until out
of reach.

Manus cooking is arduous and exacting. The sago

[48]

EARLY EDUCATION

is cooked dry in a shallow pot stirred over a fire. It
requires continuous stirring and is only good for about
twenty minutes after being cooked. Yet the children
are not expected to come home at mealtime. They run
away in the morning before breakfast and come back
an hour or so after, clamouring for food. Ten-year-
olds will stand in the middle of the house floor and
shriek monotonously until some one stops work to cook
for them. A woman who has gone to the house of a
relative to help with some task or to lay plans for a feast
will be assaulted by her six-year-old child who will
scream, pull at her, claw at her arms, kick and scratch,
until she goes home to feed him.

The parents who were so firm in teaching the chil-
dren their first steps have become wax in the young
rebels' hands when it comes to any matter of social dis-
cipline. They eat when they like, play when they like,
sleep when they see fit. They use no respect language
to their parents and indeed are allowed more license
in the use of obscenity than are their elders. The veri-
est urchin can shout defiance and contempt at the oldest
man in the village. Children are never required to
give up anything to parents: the choicest morsels of
food are theirs by divine right. They can rally the de-
voted adults by a cry, bend and twist their parents to
their will. They do no work. Girls, after they are
eleven or twelve, perform some household tasks, boys
hardly any until they are married. The community de-
mands nothing from them except respect for property
and the avoidance due to shame.

[49]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Undoubtedly this tremendous social freedom rem-
forces their physical efficiency. On a basis of motor
skill is laid a superstructure of complete self-confidence.
The child in Manus is lord of the universe, undis-
ciplined, unchecked by any reverence or respect for his
elders, free except for the narrow thread of shame
which runs through his daily life. No other habits of
self-control or of self-sacrifice have been laid. It is
the typical psychology of the spoiled child. Manus
children demand, never give. The one little girl in the
village who, because her father was blind, had loving
service demanded of her was a gentle generous child.

But from the others nothing was asked and nothing
was given.

For the parents who are their humble servants the
children have a large proprietary feeling, an almost
infantile dependence, but little solicitude. Their ego-
centricity is the natural complement of the anxious pan-
dering love of the parents, a pandering which is allowed
by the restricted ideals of the culture.

[jo]

IV

THE FAMILY LIFE

A MANUS child^s family is very different from the
picture of American family life. True, it consists of
the same people: father, mother, one or two brothers
or sisters, sometimes a grandmother, less frequently a
grandfather. At night the doorways are barricaded
carefully and the parents insist that the children be all
home at sundown except on moonlight nights. After
the evening meal the children are laid on mats for
sleep, or allowed to fall asleep in the elders' arms, then
gently laid down. The bundles of cocoanut leaves light
the dark corners of the house fitfully. At first glimpse
this looks like the happy intimate family of our own
preference, where strangers are excluded and the few
people who love each other best are closeted together
around the fire.

But a closer knowledge of Manus homes reveals
many differences. Young men do not have houses of
their own, but live in the backs of the houses of their
older brothers or young uncles. When two such fam-
ilies live together the wife of the younger man must
avoid the older man. She never enters his end of the
house, partitioned off by hanging mats, when he is at
home. The children, however, can run about freely
between the two families, but the continual avoidance,

[51]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

the avoidance of all personal names, and the fact that
the younger man is dependent upon the older, tends
to strain relationships between the two little households.
The Manus are prevailingly paternal, a man usually
inherits from his father or brother, a wife almost al-
ways goes to live in her husband's place.

But although the family group is small, and the tie
between children and parents close, the relationship be-
tween husband and wife is usually strained and cold.
Father and mother seem to the child to be two disparate
people both playing for him against each other. The
blood ties of his parents are stronger than their rela-
tionship to each other, and there are more factors to
pull them apart than there are to draw them together,
A glance into some of these Peri families will illustrate
the fundamental feeling tone which exists between hus-
bands and wives.

Let us take for instance the family of Ndrosal.
Ndrosal is a curly-haired, handsome waster, quick to
boast and slow to perform. His first wife bore him
two boys and died. His sister's husband adopted the
elderj the younger stayed with him to be cared for by
his new wife, a tall, straight-limbed woman from a far-
away village. The new wife straightway bore him a
girl which refused to thrive. Month after month the
baby fretted and wailed in the little hanging cradle its
father fashioned for it. While the baby was so ill it
might not be taken from the house on any pretext nor
might the mother leave it for more than a few min-
utes. Month after month she stayed in the house

[52]

THE FAMILY LIFE

swinging the cradle, growing pale and wan herself.
Food was not too plentiful. Ndrosal was very de-
voted to his elder sister, a woman of definite and un-
mistakable character. She was middle-aged, a woman
of a£Fairs, always busy and always needing her brother's
help. When the baby became ill, she took the other
child, so both of NdrosaPs little boys were in his sister's
house. He loved to carry them about on his back, to
lie prone and let them play over his bodyj or take them
fishing. So he spent most of his time in his sister's
house next door, and when he made a good haul of fish,
most of it went into his sister's pot. His wife had no
close relatives in the village, but one day a younger
sister of her husband brought her some crabs. Crab-
bing is woman's work, so there had been no shell fish
in the house for months. She cooked them eagerly,
careless of the fact that one of the varieties was for-
bidden to all members of her husband's family. Her
husband came home late, empty handed, and demanded
his supper. His wife served him crabs, and in answer
to his questions professed to be pretty sure that the tabu
variety was not among them. Cooked, it was impos-
sible to distinguish them. He began to eat his supper,
grumbling over her short answer and lack of concern
with his tabus. Almost immediately the baby started
to cry. His younger sister and her husband were tem-
porarily lodged in the back of the house. His sister
went to the cradle but the baby still wailed. Ndrosal
turned sternly to his wife, "Give that child thy breast."
"She's nursed enough to-day. She's not hungry, only

[53]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

sick," the wife answered. "Nurse her, dost thou hear
me, thou useless woman! Thou woman belonging to
worthlessness. Thou root of lying and lack of thought,
who carest neither for thy husband's tabus nor for his
child." Rising, he poured out the stream of expletive
upon her. Still she lingered over her supper, tearful,
sullen, convinced that the child wasn't hungry, until
the enraged husband seized his lime gourd and flung
a pint of powdered lime into her eyes. The scalding
tears slaked the lime and burned her eyes horribly as
she stumbled blindly from the house, wailing. One
of the women who gathered at the sound of trouble
took her home with her, and the little baby with her.
Ndrosal went to his sister's house to sleep, and when
the younger boy sleepily cuddled his father and asked
why his adopted mother was crying, he was told gruffly
that his mother was a bad woman who refused to feed
his little sister.

Or let us go into the house of Ngamel. Ngamel
and his wife Ngatchumu got on quite well together.
Once Ngamel brought a second wife home but Ngat-
chumu was so cross that he sent her away to keep peace.
Years ago Ngamel used to keep a piece of cordlike vine
specially for beating his wife. Those were the days
when their first five children all died as babies, owing
to some evil magic which clung to a borrowed food
bowl, lying forgotten among the rafters. But now
Ngatchumu had borne him four beautiful children j
one he gave away to his brother, three were at home.
Ngamel was ageing, a quiet man who loved to sit on

[54]

THE FAMILY LIFE

his verandah at twilight and play with the children.
But one afternoon Ngatchumu took Ponkob, aged three,
with her to a house of death, where her sister lay struck
down by the ancestral spirits of NgamePs clan for
aiding remarriage of a widow of a dead brother of
Ngamel. The house was close, filled with the odour
of death, and the maddening wail of many voices.
Little Ponkob pressed close between his mother and
another woman, wilted, and finally fainted quite away.
The frightened mother carried the sick child home in
desperate fear over her husband's anger. His ancestral
spirit's vengeance had been flouted by a member of
his family attending the dead woman. For two days
neither he nor their eight-year-old boy spoke to her
who had loved her dead sister so much that she had not
thought of the possible wrath of her husband's aveng-
ing spirit.

Or take the feast for ear piercing held in Pwisio's
house. The house is full of visitors, all the relatives
of Pwisio's wife are there, with laden canoes to cele-
brate the ear piercing of Pwisio's sixteen-year-old son,
Manuwai. In the front of the house all is formal.
Manuwai, in a choker of dogs' teeth, painted and
greased, sits up very straight. His father's two sisters
are waiting to lead him down the ladder. But his
mother is not there. From the curtained back of the
house come sounds of weeping and the low-voiced ex-
postulation of many women. In the front sits Pwisio,
facing his guests but pausing to hurl insult after insult
to his wife whom he had caught sleeping naked.

Iss]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

(There were strangers in the house and during the
night an unwedded youth, a friend of her son's, had
stirred the house fire into a blaze.) So Pwisio over-
whelms his wife with obloquy, fearful to beat her
while so many of her kin are in the house, and she
packs her belongings, tearfully protesting her innocence
and angrily enumerating the valuables she's taking with
her. "This is mine. I made it and my sister gave me
these shell beads. These are mine. I traded the ma-
terials myself. This belt is mine 3 I got it in return for
sago at the birth feast last week." Her little adopted
daughter Ngalowen, aged four, stands aside in shame,
from her mother whom father brands thus publicly as
a criminal. When her mother gathers up her boxes
and marches out the back door, Ngalowen makes no
move to follow. Instead, she slips into the front room
and cuddles down beside her self-righteous and mut-
tering father. After the long confusion, the ceremony
is resumed, the absence of the mother who would have
had no official part in it receives no further comment.

In order to understand such dissensions it is neces-
sary to go back of the marriage to the engagement
period and follow a Manus girl from her betrothal to
motherhood.

Ngalen is eighteen} for seven years she has been en-
gaged to Manoi, whose very name is forbidden to her.
She had seen him once as a very small child when her
mother had taken her children to her own village of
Peri. She remembers that he had a funny nose and a
squint in one eye and had worn a bedraggled old la^p

[56]

THE FAMILY LIFE

lap. But she has tried not to think of these things, for
her mother had taught her that it was shameful to think
of her husband personally. She might dive for lailat
shells of which winglike ornaments would be made for
her small back. She might bend all day over the bead
frame, straining her eyes to make beadwork for her
sister-in-law. She might think of the thousand of dogs'
teeth, of the yards of shell money which had been paid
for her betrothal feast, or feed the pigs with which
those payments were being met. But of her husband
himself she might not think. She was forbidden to go
to Peri, her mother's home village, except on very im-
portant occasions, like the death of a near relative.
Then she must go about very circumspectly, wrapped
in her mantle of cloth lest she encounter her be-
trothed's father or brother. If a Peri canoe passed
her father's canoe at sea, she must hide within the pent-
house or double up in the hull. When she was very
tiny, she had sometimes forgotten to avoid some words
which contained syllables like the names of her hus-
band's relatives and had cowered in shame before her
elders' sense of outrage. Once the spirits had men-
tioned in a seance how careless she was in not hiding
properly from a distant cousin of her betrothed, a boy
who had been her playmate since childhood. But that
was several years ago. Now for two or three years she
had been very careful. Her village was full of boys
returned from working for the white man with who
knew what evil magic In their possession. One had
a curious bottle which he carried in his betel bag. He

[57]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

said it was only ringworm medicine but every one knew
it was love magic. Her own people did not make these
evil charms which led a girl to forget her betrothal and
wander into sin. But the inland people of the great
island had charms which could be slipped into tobacco
leaves, or whispered over betel nut, or secretly mut-
tered into a purloined pipe. These they sold to the
young men of her people, the young men who sat up
all night in their club house, laughing and beating
drums and plotting evil. Long ago these young men
would have gone to war and captured a foreign girl to
minister to their pleasure. But there had been no such
prostitute in the village since Ngalen was a little girl,
and the youths were very dangerous.

When she went abroad she took care never to let the
wind blow from these young men to her. For there
were charms which could be sent upon the wind.

There were a few boys in the village with whom she
was friendly, her brothers, her cross cousins, the younger
cousins of her betrothed. To these last she was
"mother," and must only be careful not to eat In their
presence.

All day she made beadwork for her sisters-in-law
and mother-in-law. After she was married they would
give her beadwork to give to her brothers. In her hus-
band's house she would work hard and feel secure. She
would learn to understand the intricate financial ex-
changes. She would learn to make the great square
pancakes used in ceremonies, and how to cut cocoanut
meat into lilies to decorate the ceremonial food dishes.

[58]

THE FAMILY LIFE

She would bear children to her husband. Once a
mother she would be no longer a fair and desirable
woman, for the Manus consider childbearing, not vir-
ginity, the dividing line between youth and experience.
Ten times the Pleiades would pass over the sky and
she would be old.

Already she knew what the marriage costume was
like, for twice she had been decked out in heavy aprons
of shell money, her arms and legs laden down with
dogs' teeth. But to-morrow she is to be married in-
deed to the man whose name she mustn't pronounce,
of whose squint eyes it is wrong to think. She is going
to a village of strangers. True, it is the village of her
mother's people, but some of these, because they are
closer kin to her husband, are tabu to her. In all her
life she may not say* their names. And they are to live
in the house of her future husband's paternal uncle j
he will be her father-in-law. She must always refer to
him as "they," never as "he." When he comes into
the house she must hide behind the mat curtains and
never raise her voice lest he should hear her speak.
All her days she will not look upon his face unless as
an old man, bald and with shaking hands, he decides
to lay aside the tabu by making a large feast for her.

All the men in the village will comment on her, she
knows. Uneasily she plucks at her long pendulous
breasts, the breasts of an old woman. Fortunately the
heavy bindings of dogs' teeth will hold them up into
the semblance of a young girl's breasts. Will her hus-
band hate her for her breasts? She has heard the men

[59]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

of her own village talk and she knows how women
are valued for their youthful looks. Will she be quick
enough to suit her sisters-in-law, make thatch with a
steady hand, design pleasing beadwork, and cook effi-
ciently? Her sisters-in-law will hate her, as she and
her sisters hate her brother's wife. She can never ex-
pect them to love her, only to tolerate her, only to for-
bear to provoke her too far.

All this she thinks as she sits huddled in her tabu
blanket under the pent-house of the canoe. Her rel-
atives are taking her to Peri 5 all about her is a lively
chatter of dogs' teeth and shell money, pigs and oil,
unpaid debts, possible contributors, trade opportunities.
Her father is well pleased with the match. Ten thou-
sand dogs' teeth will be paid, ten thousand dogs' teeth
which he can very well use to pay for a wife for his
brother's son who is turned fifteen and unbetrothed.
Talk shifts to the financial status of his nephew's bride-
to-be.

She looks at her mother, sitting with her sister's
baby on her lap, at her older sister, who frowns sul-
lenly into the sea. It is a month since her older sister
left her husband, and he has sent no messenger to ask
her to come back. Her sister has not told them what
happened, only that her husband beat her. A sharp
word of command arouses her to the approach of a
canoe and she crawls quickly inside her robe.

At last they are in the village itself. Mufiled from
hand to foot, she climbs hastily into her grandmother's
house. Her grandmother is very old, the muscles in

[60]

THE FAMILY LIFE

her neck are stringy like uncooked pork. She has seen
three husbands into the grave. Her voice is cracked
and weary as she bids them hurry to dress her grand-
daughter, for the party will be here soon to fetch her
for "the journey of the breast." The cedar boxes are
brought in from the canoe and the heavy ornaments
spread on the floor. Her father and brothers go away
and she is left alone with the women, who dye her
hair red, paint her face and arms and back orange, wrap
the long strands of shell about her limbs. Two heavy
shell aprons are fastened under a belt of dogs' teeth;
crescents of shell are stuck in the breast bands. In her
arm bands are hidden porcelain pipes, knives and forks
and spoons, combs and small mirrors, the foreign prop-
erty which is never used except to deck out a bride. A
bristling coronet of dogs' teeth is fastened about her
forehead. Inside it are ranged a dozen tiny feather
combs. Yards of trade cloth and bird of paradise
feathers are stuck in her arm bands. Her distended
ear lobes are weighted down with extra clusters of dogs'
teeth. Finally, a slender bit of bone is thrust through
the hole in her septum and from her nose hangs an
eighteen-inch pendant of shell and bone and dogs'
teeth.

Like a rag doll she submits to the dressing process,
or obediently turns and twists at command. Mean-
while there is a sound of many voices outside. The
women of her future husband's house have come to
fetch her. She bends her laden head still lower. But
they do not come in. Instead a violent quarrel ensues

[6i]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

as to whether the canoe is big enough or not. More
women keep arriving in little skiffs, but all must return
in the bride's canoe. After a violent altercation two
women set out to get another canoe. The others wait
on the verandah. Ngalen can distinguish among their
voices that of her husband's aunt who is a noted
medium and has a spirit dog to do her biddings all
the other voices are strange to her. There are no young
girls, only married women, she knows. She has seen
canoes set out for "the journey of the breast" before.

At last the larger canoe is at the door. Her mother
and aunt pull her to her feet. She stoops a little under
the weight of wealth which covers her. With bowed
head she is hustled down the ladder onto the canoe
platform. She looks at no one and is greeted by no one.
A storm is coming up and the overcrowded canoe rides
precariously, low, shipping water. She sees the punts
flash quickly in muscular hands and notes a new bead
design on one wrist, but she does not look above the
wrists to their faces.

It is a short journey through the lagoon to the home
of her betrothed, a home from which he is banished
for the night. At a word from the mother-in-law she
climbs up the ladder and sits down, miserable, abashed,
in a corner. Immediately all of her betrothed's pater-
nal aunts and female cousins fall upon herj they pull
the feather comb from her hair, they tug and tear at
her armlets to find combs, mirrors, pipes. One pipe
is broken in their haste. The ragged porcelain edge
cuts the girl's arm. No one notices, but bitter com-

[62]

THE FAMILY LIFE

ment is made on the useless broken pipe, the stinginess
of the bride's relatives in giving broken pipes. One
old crone remarks that they probably needn't expect a
very fine display with the bride to-morrow, a lot of the
pots looked pretty small and cracked, and she's heard
that there are only ten pieces of cloth. Another old
woman mutters unamiably that the men of the bride's
family aren't good for much : the bride's older brother
hasn't begun to pay for his wife yet, and her younger
brother isn't even betrothed. Shamed, furious, the girl
sits in a corner, her bristling coronet of dogs' teeth sag-
ging over one eye. Meanwhile, the women leave her,
as birds of prey leave picked bones, and turn to the next
business of the day, the distribution of the big green
bundles of sago which the bride's kin loaded into the
canoe. There is a furious argument as to who will
preside, for the woman who presides must see that
every one has a good share, even if she suffers herself.
All of the women gather around the pile of sago. The
bride sits forgotten in a corner, stripped of her finery,
alone among hostile, grasping strangers. Later, some
of the women will go homej most of them will stay
to sleep with her. They will offer her food which she
will refuse to eatj the fires will die low and they will
sleep. No one will have spoken to herj she will have
spoken to no one. If one wakes in the night and stirs
up the fire for a moment, she will see that the bride is
not sleeping, naturally "because she is ashamed."

Early in the morning her own kin fetch her home,
surreptitiously. Again she is dressed and anointed.

[63]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

An incantation is pronounced over her to make her a
strong rich woman, active in the accumulation and ex-
change of property. This time, on the canoe which re-
ceives her stands a high carved bed, one leg of which is
cracked and sagging. Her husband's kin will mention
that defect later. The canoe proceeds slowly through
the village, past crowded verandahs, to her betrothed's
house. His aunt comes down on the verandah to. receive
her, and half drags her up the steps. She huddles at
the top, with her back to the inmates of the house. She
has just caught a glimpse of a bedizened youth sitting
behind her, with feet stretched out stiffly in front of
him. For a moment there is silence, then a hurried
sound of footsteps. The bridegroom has left the house,
to be seen no more until after nightfall. Every one
breathes freely, the children are allowed to run about
again. Her parents' canoe returns to the landing. She
is hustled out upon her platform, and the party pro-
ceeds to the little islet where the day will be spent in
speech-making, in the distribution of property. The
drums will boom, the men will dance. But the bride
will sit veiled in her canoe.

Late at night the bridegroom will return to the vil-
lage and take his bride. He has no attitude of tender-
ness or afFection for this girl whom he has never seen.
She fears her first sex experience as all the women of
her people have feared and hated it. No foundation
is laid for happiness that night, only one for shame
and hostility. The next day the bride goes about the
village with her mother-in-law to fetch wood and

[64]

THE FAMILY LIFE

water. She has not yet said one word to her husband.
All eyes turn towards her, and everywhere she hears
the words "breasts," "breasts of an old woman." "The
breast bands held them up yesterday." Late in the
afternoon she breaks her silence to scream angrily at
a child who has followed her into the back of the house.
This too is reported throughout the village, the village
where she must now live but to which she in no sense
belongs.

And this sense that husband and wife belong to dif-
ferent groups persists throughout the marriage, weak-
ening after the marriage has endured for many years,
never vanishing entirely. The father, mother and chil-
dren do not form a warm intimate unit, facing the
world. In most cases the man lives in his own village,
in his own part of the village, near his brothers and
uncles. Near by will live some of his sisters and aunts.
These are the people with whom all his ties are closest,
from whom he has learned to expect all his rewards
since childhood. These are the people who fed him
when he was hungry, nursed him when he was sick,
paid his fines when he was sinful, and bore his debts
for him. Their spirits are his spirits, their tabus his
tabus. To them he has a strong sense of belonging.

But his wife is a stranger. He did not choose herj
he never thought of her before marriage without a sense
of shame. Because of her he has many times lain flat-
tened out under a mat while his canoe passed through
her village or by the house of one of her relatives. Hot
with embarrassment, he has lain sometimes for half an

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

hour prostrate on his stomach, afraid to speak above a
whisper. Before he married her he was free in his own
village at least. He could spend hours in the men's
house, strumming and singing. Now that he is married,
he cannot call his soul his own. All day long he must
work for those who paid for his wedding. He must
walk shamefacedly in their presence, for he has dis-
covered how little he knows of the obligations into
which he is plunged. He has every reason to hate his
shy, embarrassed wife, who shrinks with loathing from
his rough, unschooled embrace and has never a good
word to say to him. They are ashamed to eat in each
other's presence. Officially they sleep on opposite sides
of the house. For the first couple of years of marriage,
they never go about together.

The girl's resentment of her position does not lessen
with the weeks. These people are strangers to her. To
them her husband is bound by the closest ties their
society recognises. If she is away from her people, in
another village, she tries harder than does her husband
to make something of her marriage. When he leaves
her to go to his sister's house, she frets and scolds, and
sometimes even commits the unforgivable sin of ac-
cusing him of making a second wife of his sister. Then
the spirits send swift punishment upon the house, and
the breach between husband and wife widens. If the
bride has married in her own village, she goes home
frequently to her relatives and makes even less efiFort
at the hopeless task of getting along well with her hus-
band. For her marriage her face was tattooed, her

[66]

THE FAMILY LIFE

short curly hair was dyed red. But now her head is
clean shaven and she is forbidden to ornament herself.
If she does, the spirits of her husband will suspect her
of wishing to be attractive to men and will send sick-
ness upon the house. She may not even gossip, softly,
to a female relative about her husband's relatives. The
spirits who live in the skull bowls will hear her and
punish. She is a stranger among strange spirits, spirits
who nevertheless exercise a rigid espionage over her be-
haviour.

All this is galling enough to the young girl and she
grows more and more sulky day by day as she sits
among her relatives-in-law, cooking for feasts, or goes
with them to the bush to work sago. If she does not
conceive promptly, she is very likely to run away.
Sometimes her relatives persuade her to return and she
vacillates back and forth for several years before a child
is born. When she does conceive, she is drawn closer,
not to the father of her child, but to her own kin. She
may not tell her husband that she is pregnant. Such
intimacy would shame them both. Instead, she tells
her mother and her father, her sisters and her brothers,
her aunts and her cross cousins. Her relatives set to
work to prepare the necessary food for the pregnancy
feasts. Still nothing is said to the husband. His wife
repulses his advances more coldly than ever and his dis-
like and resentment of her increases. Then some chance
word reaches his ears, some rumour of the economic
preparations his brothers-in-law are making. A child
is to be born to him, so the neighbours say. Still he can-

[67]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

not mention the point to his wife, but he waits for the
first feast when canoes laden with sago come to his door.
The months wear on, marked by periodic feasts for
which he must make repayment. His relatives help
him but he is expected to do most of it himself. He
must go to his sisters' houses and beg them for bead
work. His aunts and mother must be importuned.
Here where he has always commanded, he must plead.
He is constantly worried for fear his repayments will
not be enough, will not be correctly arranged. Mean-
while his pregnant wife sits at home making yards of
beadwork for her brothers, working for her brothers
while he must beg and cajole his sisters. The rift be-
tween the two widens.

A few days before the birth of the child the brother
or cousin or uncle of the expectant mother divines for
the place of birth. If he does not have the power to
handle the divining bones himself, a relative will do it
for him. The divination declares whether the child
shall be born in the house of its father or of its maternal
uncle. If the former is the verdict, the husband must
leave his house and go to his sister's. This is usually
only done when the couple have a house of their own,
a very rare occurrence in the case of a man's first child.
His brother-in-law and his wife and children move into
his house. Or else his wife is taken away, sometimes
to another village. From the moment her labour be-
gins he may not see her. The nearest approach he can
make to the house is to bring fish to the landing plat-
form. For a whole month he wanders aimlessly about,

[68]

THE FAMILY LIFE

sleeping now at one sister's, now at another's. Only
after his brother-in-law has worked or collected enough
sago, one or two tons at least, to make the return feast,
can his wife return to him, can he see his child.

Meanwhile the mother is very much occupied with
her new baby. For a month she must stay inside the
house, hidden by a mat curtain, her food must be
cooked on a special fire in special dishes. Only after
dark may she slip out and bathe hastily in the sea.
Life is more pleasant for her than it has been since
before her marriage. All of her female relatives stop
in to chat with her, those with milk suckle her child
for her during their call. Her brothers' wives cook
for her, bring her betel nut and pepper leaf, humour
her as an invalid. Her husband, whom she has not
learned to love, is not missed. She hugs her baby to
her breast, runs her pursed lips along its little arms,
and is happy.

The day before the big feast of sago and pots, a
small feast is made within the household. Her brothers
and their wives and sisters all prepare special foods, all
kinds of shell fish, taro, sago, a white fruit called ung,
and two kinds of leaf puddings. One of these called
tchutchu is nine or ttn inches square and an inch thick.
After the food is cooked it is dished up in carved
wooden bowls, and set away on the shelves until after
the mother is dressed. Her hair, which has been al-
lowed to grow during pregnancy, is painted red. She
puts on beaded anklets and strings of dogs' teeth j all
this is finery, not heavy money for her husband's rel-

[69]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

atives. The food is arranged on the platform of a
canoe and the whole party of women and the small
girls of the family proceed to one of the small islands
in the village, an island belonging to one of her an-
cestral lines. Here her father's sister or her father's
mother solemnly slaps her on the back with one of the
tchutchu cakes, invoking the family spirits to make her
strong and well and keep her from having another child
until this one can walk about and swim. Then all the
party partakes of the feast j the mother returns to her
baby J the others go about the village leaving bowls
of food at the homes of relatives. For the last time the
mother sleeps alone with her child.

The next day is one long tiring round of ceremonies.
The morning is spent in cooking for the feast. Here
and there in the village sago is being loaded onto canoes,
pigs are being caught ready for transfer. The mother
is again dressed, this time in the heavy kind of money
costume she wore as a bride. Her hair is painted for
the last time. To-morrow it will be shaved off as is
befitting a virtuous wife.

The long procession of canoes, sometimes fifteen or
twenty strong, forms outside the house. On the most
heavily laden canoes are slit gongs upon which the
owners beat vigorously. The heavily clad young
mother steps into the last canoe and as the flotilla moves
slowly, pompously about the village, she steps from
one canoe to another. She is expected to walk from
end to end of the sago which has been collected in her
honour. The heavy money skirts drag at her body,

[70]

THE FAMILY LIFE

wearying her. This festival of return to her husband
gives her no pleasure. Very often on the plea that she
is ill or that her child is crying for her she leaves the
procession and goes home. The feast goes on merrily.
Her absence is not missed. She is only a pawn, an occa-
sion for financial transactions.

Finally, after dark, the time has come to make ^*the
journey of the breasts": to return her to her husband.
This is a profitable business for the women who accom-
pany her so there is much wrangling among the women
of the house as to which kindred shall punt the canoe.
The quarrelling may go on for an hour while the young
mother sits sullen and bored. The house of feasting
is dark now, except for flickering fires. Food bowls
and children crowd the floor. The voices of the greedy
women crack in the stifling smoke-charged air. At last
a compromise is reached and a group of women lead the
young mother down the ladder and bundle her into a
canoe. A storm has come up ; the canoes rock and bump
one another by the landing. Not a house can be seen.
The practised women punt the laden canoe to the house
of her husband's sister, where her husband has lived
since their separation. The wife climbs upon the plat-
form and sits there quietly. Her husband may be
within the house but it is not necessary that he be there.
He gives no sign. After a little she climbs back into
the canoe and returns to her baby, to the crowded house
and the new wrangling over the sago payments in-
volved in the journey. Only after the last reckoning
is settled will the guests disperse. Her brother's wife

[71]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

is the last to go, gathering up her belongings and mut-
tering because her own children have fallen ill among
the spirits of strangers. The young wife goes to sleep,
wearily, and late that night the husband returns.

Now begins a new life. The father takes a violent
proprietary interest in the new baby. It is his child,
belongs to his kin, is under the protection of his spirits.
He watches his wife with jealous attention, scolds her
if she stirs from the house, berates her if the baby cries.
He can be rougher with her now. The chances are that
she will not run away, but will stay where her child
will be well cared for. For a year mother and baby
are shut up together in the house. For that year the
child still belongs to its mother. The father only holds
it occasionally, is afraid to take it from the house. But
as soon as the child's legs are strong enough to stand
upon and its small arms adept at clutching, the father
begins to take the child from the mother. Now that
the child is in no need of such frequent suckling, he
expects his wife to get to work, to go to the mangrove
swamp to work sago, to make long trips to the reef
for shell fish. She has been idle long enough for, say
the men, "a woman with a new baby is no use to her
husband, she cannot work." The plea that her child
needs her would not avail. The father is delighted to
play with the child, to toss it in the air, tickle it be-
neath its armpits, softly blow on its bare, smooth skin.
He has risen at three in the morning to fish, he has
fished all through the cold dawn, punted the weary
way to the market, sold some of his fish for good bar-

[72]

THE FAMILY LIFE

gains In taro, in betel nut, in taro leaves. Now he is
free for the better part of the day, drowsy, just in the
mood to play with the baby.

From her brother too come demands upon the
woman. He worked well for her during her preg-
nancy. Now he must meet his obligations to his wife's
people. His sister must help him. From every side
she is bidden to leave the baby to its doting father and
go about her affairs. Children learn very young to take
advantage of this situation. Father is obviously the
most important person in the homej he orders mother
about, and hits her if she doesn't "hear his talk."
Father is even more Indulgent than mother. It is a
frequent picture to see a little minx of three leave her
father's arms, quench her thirst at her mother's breast,
and then swagger back to her father's arms, grinning
overbearingly at her mother. The mother sees the
child drawn further and further away from her. At
night the child sleeps with the father, by day she rides
on his back. He takes her to the shady island which
serves as a sort of men's club house where all the canoes
are built and large fish traps made. Her mother can't
come on this island except to feed the pigs when no
men are there. Her mother Is ashamed to come there
but she can rollick gaily among the half-completed
canoes. When there is a big feast, her mother must
hide In the back of the house behind a hanging mat.
But she can run away to father in the front of the
house when the soup and betel nut are being given out.
Father is always at the centre of interest, he is never

[73]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

too busy to play. Mother is often busy. She must
stay in the smoky interior of the house. She is for-
bidden the canoe islands. It is small wonder that the
father always wins the competition : the dice are loaded
from the start.

And then the mother becomes pregnant again, an-
other baby which will be her own for a year is on its
way. She withdraws more from the struggle and be-
gins to wean the present baby. The weaning is slow.
The child is spoiled, long accustomed to eating other
foods, it is used to being given its mother's breast when-
ever it cries for it. The women tie bundles of hair to
their nipples to repel the children. The weaning is
said to last well into pregnancy. The child is offended
by its mother's withdrawal and clings still closer to its
father. So on the eve of the birth of a new baby, the
child's transfer of dependence to its father is almost
complete. The social patterning of childbirth reaffirms
that dependence. While the mother is occupied with
her new baby, the older child stays with its father. He
feeds it, bathes it, plays with it all day. He has little
work or responsibility during this period and so more
time to strengthen his position. This repeats itself for
the birth of each new child. The mother welcomes
birth J again she will have a baby which is her own, if
only for a few months. And at the end of the early
months the father again takes over the younger child.
Occasionally he may keep a predominant interest in the
older child, especially if the older is a boy, the younger
a girl, but usually there is room in his canoe for two

[74]

THE FAMILY LIFE

or three little ones. And the elder ones of five and
six are not pushed out of the canoe, they leave it in the
tiny canoes which father has hewn for them. At the
first upset, the first rebuff, they can come swimming
back into the sympathetic circle of the father's indul-
gent love for his children.

As the father's relation to his child is continually
emphasised, so the mother is always being reminded
of her slighter claims. If her father is ill in another
village, and she wishes to go, her husband cannot keep
her, but he keeps her two-year-old son. Some woman
of his kin will suckle the child if he cries and the father
will care for him tenderly. The woman goes off for
her uncertain voyage, torn between her blood kin and
her child. This is in cases of perfectly ordinary rela-
tions between husband and wife. In case of a quarrel
she will take her young children with her if she runs
away from her husband. But even here five- and six-
year-olds make their own choices and often elect to stay
with their father.

Or a woman will come with her husband and children
to visit in her own village during a feast. The hus-
band will put up a ban against her father's house. One
of the children got sick there before j the spirits are
inimical, none of his children shall enter that house
again. Instead, the whole family must stay with his
relatives in the other end of the village. The grand-
parents must come there to see their grandchild. The
mother may go if she wishes but, says the husband, Ms
child shall not.

[75]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

A man's attitude is the same whether a child be
adopted or his own child. One fourth of the children
in Peri were adopted, in about half of the cases the
parents were dead. In any event, the real parents re-
linquished all hold on the child if the adoption had
taken place in infancy. An elder brother's child
adopted by a younger brother called the younger
brother "father" and his real father "grandfather." A
little girl adopted by her older sister called her sister
"mother," her mother "grandmother." In one strik-
ing instance the foster father had died and the real
parents took back their son whom they always addressed
formerly as "child whose father is dead," a special
mourning term. Children adopted by elder members
of the family called their true parents by their given
names. An adopted child belonged to the clan of his
foster father} the spirits and tabus of that house were
his. But to his foster mother he had no bond except
that she it was who gave him food. And with this
denial to the woman of her share in the rewards of pro-
viding a home for the foster child goes a curious change
of emphasis.

Much has been written to prove that mother-right
is natural because maternity is unmistakable. Paternity
being always questionable, is a less firm basis for de-
scent. Native statements are quoted in support of this
view.

Manus presents a vivid contrast to this attitude which
seems so credible to many modern authors. Physical
paternity is understood} the natives believe that the

[76]

THE FAMILY LIFE

child is a product of semen and clotted menstrual blood.
But physical paternity does not interest them in the
least. The adopted child is considered to be far more
his foster father's than his true father's. Does he not
belong to his foster father's spirits? Men marry preg-
nant women who are widowed or separated from their
husbands and when the children are born welcome them
as their own. The real father makes no claim upon his
child born to a runaway wife. Although the whole vil-
lage may know the true father of a child, they will
never mention it unless pressed, and never to the child
unless the child remembers its adoption.

But maternity is a very different matter. Blood or
adopted, the father's claims, the father's rewards are
the same. But to her child the mother has very little
claim except the claim of blood. So we find not dis-
putes about paternity but disputes about maternity. A
woman will declare, holding a child fiercely to her
bosom, "This is my child. I bore him. He grew in
my body. I suckled him at these breasts. He is mine,
mine, mine!" And yet every one in the village will
tell you she is lying and point to the real mother of
the child adopted in early infancy. An aspersion on a
woman's maternity rouses all the shamed defensive
rage usually associated among us with throwing doubt
upon paternity.

This passionate attitude may also be due to the rela-
tion between mediumship and maternity. Only women
who have dead male children can act as mediums and
acting as a medium is the only way in which women

[77]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

can exercise any real power in their husband's house-
holds. Where upon her rests the ultimate determina-
tion of the will of the spirits, a woman can, innocently
enough, read into the odd whistling sounds which the
spirit makes through her lips, motives and counsels con-
genial to her. And a child spirit will not act as a con-
trol for a foster mother. It is of course equally pos-
sible that the insistence upon real maternity of mediums
may have flowed from the attitude towards blood
motherhood.

Even the blood tie between mother and children is
likely to be disrupted. Salikon and Ngasu were two
of the brightest, best dressed little girls in the village.
Salikon was about fourteen, so near to puberty that her
foster father had already stored the coconuts away
for the puberty feast. Ngasu was eleven, curly-haired,
bright-eyed, quick-limbed. She could swim as well as
the boys and she fought almost as many battles. Their
mother was a widow, a plump, buxom woman, still
comely, and highly skilled in every native industry.
Her husband, Panau, had been a man of wealth and
importance in the community. He had just been on the
verge of making the important' silvei* wedding pay-
ment for his wife when he died suddenly. One so cut
off in his prime was bound to feel angry, and fear of
Panau's spirit was strong in the village. His younger
brother Paleao inherited his house, the care of his
widow, whom he called mother, and the guardianship
of his daughters. Salikon was betrothed and it was
Paleao who collected the pigs and oil to meet her be-

[78]

THE FAMILY LIFE

trothal payments. The widow was much respected in
the village and very much attached to her daughters.
She disciplined them more carefully than any other
mother in the village, and dressed them better. Their
grass skirts were always nicely crimped j they always
wore beaded bracelets and armlets which "mother
made." The widow was such an expert worker that
she was in great demand everywhere and she moved
about the village, sometimes living in the house of
Paleao, sometimes in the house of one brother, some-
times of another. Wherever she went the two little
girls w^ent with her instead of settling in the house of
their foster father and mother. It was a pretty pic-
ture of mother and daughter devotion.

But the day came when the charming picture was
shattered. The widow of Panau was still young.
Many men sought her hand, all clandestinely, for her
kin did not dare to connive at her remarriage for fear of
her dead husband's ghostly wrath, nor did they wish
to lose such a good worker. Finally the widow found
a suitor of her own choice and in great secrecy she
eloped with him to another village. All the amiability
of her relatives and relatives-in-law vanished. Furious
at her desertion, desperately afraid of Panau, they all
vied with each other in loud-mouthed condemnation
of her flight. And loudest of all were the two little
daughters, who refused to see their mother and spoke
of her with the greatest bitterness. Now their dead
father would be angry. Once before their mother had
planned to elope and Ngasu had nearly died of fever.

[79]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

This time one of them would surely die. Oh, their
wicked, wicked mother, to think of her own happiness
instead of theirs! They lived on in the house of their
father's brother and thrust their mother's image from
their hearts.

[80]

THE CHILD AND THE ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

MANUS children live in a world of their own, a
world from which adults are wilfully excluded, a world
based upon different premises from those of adult life.

To the Manus adult, trade is the most important
thing in lifej trade with far-away islands, trade with
the land people, trade with the next village, trade with
his relatives-in-law, trade with his relatives. His house
roof is stacked with pots, his shelves piled with grass
skirts, his boxes filled with dogs' teeth. The spirit of
his ancestor presides over his wealth and chastises him
if he fails to use it wisely and well. When he speaks
of his wife he mentions the size of the betrothal pay-
ment which was made for her, when he quarrels with
his neighbours he boasts of the number of large ex-
changes he has made for her. When he speaks of his
sister he says, *^I give her sago and she gives me bead-
work" j when he speaks of his dead father he mentions
the huge burial payment he made for him. When he
angers the spirit of a neighbour's house he atones in
pigs and oil, or boxes and axes. The whole of life,
his most intimate relation to people, his conception of
places, his evaluation for his guarding spirits, all fall
under the head of kawaSy "exchange." He has no other
word for friend, naturally friendship too falls under

[8i]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

the spell — friends are people with whom one trades,
or who help one in trade. A specially beautiful food
bowl or well woven grass skirt is praised as "belonging
to kawasJ'* Pregnancy, birth, puberty, betrothal, mar-
riage, death, are thought of in terms of dogs' teeth and
shell money, pigs and oil. The chief events in the
village life are these exchanges and the accompanying
pomp and ceremony, oratory and ceremonial jesting.
Trade widens and narrows through the generations, so
a man and his sister help each other for a quid pro quoy
but are not conceived as actually exchanging wealth.
But the sons of the brother and sister become formal
traders as the financial backers of the arranged mar-
riage between their sons and daughters. These busi-
nesslike cousins are permitted to jest with one another,
to refer lewdly to each other's private life, to break
every convention of sobriety of speech, to shatter every
reticence. Thus the strain of economic antagonism is
ceremonially broken. A man who is receiving advance
payments from his cousin of ten thousand dogs' teeth,
payments which it will take him years to meet, is per-
mitted to dance an obscene defiance to his creditor.
When the children of these two men marry, the gap
made by property is complete, the wife is on one side
of the exchange, the husband on the other. Business
rivals, they are careful to betray no secrets, one to the
other.

The attention of adults is fixed upon trade: when
the canoe will be in from Mok with coconuts j when
that landsman will bring the promised and paid-for-in-

[82]

THE CHILD AND ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

advance sagoj if all the preparations have been ade-
quately made for next week's post-birth ceremony. All
day they bustle to and fro in the village, consulting
relatives, dunning creditors for small repayments, giv-
ing orders, making requisitions on pr.operty. In every
exchange fifteen or twenty people take part, relatives
of each of the principals exchanging with a partner on
the opposite side. The exchange may be a mere three
hundred pounds of sago, but it is an individual stake,
not a contribution to the good of the whole, and so of
vast importance to the person making it.*

During the days before a big exchange, the village
is in a fever of expectancy. For instance, Pomasa is to
make a metcha, the silver wedding payment which a
rich and successful man makes for a wife to whom he
has been married fifteen or twenty years. For three
years Pomasa has been preparing for this great event.
He is an expert turtle fisher, and turtle after turtle he

* As we invest in factories or stores or export companies, so
Manus financiers invest in marriages, or more accurately the eco-
nomic exchanges which centre about marriage. In the initial be-
trothal payment for a male child, a large number of relatives invest
dogs' teeth and shell money and the recipients on the bride's side
pay these amounts back later in pigs and oil. At each new economic
exchange resulting from a betrothal or marriage new investors may
come in provided they can find partners on the opposite side. Some-
times would-be investors of little economic importance are seen
cruising about the edges of a ceremony looking for partners. And
just as our financiers hesitate to back a man who has gone bankrupt
or a store which is forever being shifted from one location to an-
other, so the Manus are canny about backing a man who has been
often divorced. They centre their investments about tried and
enduring marriages and the marriages so substantially endorsed by
society assume greater prestige; their stock goes up, so to speak.

[83]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

has sold to the land people for dogs' teeth and shell
money. He has trade friends on the north coast, and
he has made long expeditions there to fish for dugong.
All his sisters, his aunts, his brothers, have helped him
collect the necessary property. To do this they have
had to call in all their debts, dun and dun their credi-
tors for repayment. Now it is only a month until the
great day. Pomasa kills a turtle and punts it through
the village, drumming triumphantly, boastfully, upon
his slit drum. He cooks the turtle and sends it to all
his relatives who are helping him in the exchange.
That night, in their presence, he counts his dogs' teeth
and measures his fathoms of shell money.

For the rest of the month he does no work, neither
he nor the members of his household. Instead, re-
splendent in dogs' teeth and ornament, they voyage
here and there in search of more contributions of wealth.
A great wooden bowl is placed on the canoe j the canoe
stops at the landing platform and the woman relative
in the house brings out her contribution and drops it
into the bowl. Each contributor will receive an exact
return in pigs, oil and sago, when the return payments
are made. Another day, Pomasa will hang the jaw
bone of his father down his back, fasten a specially
large and ornamental bag over his shoulder, and set
out overland to call on some distant relatives among
the land people. Or the whole household will sail off
to another village, coming back this time with a couple
of new canoes, collected from some cousins.

Meanwhile the relatives of his wife to whom he

[84]

THE CHILD AND ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

will make the spectacular payment are busy cooking.
Day after day they send bowls of food to the house of
Pomasa, that he and his wife may be free of any need
to think about their daily bread. Pomasa is always
dressed up, always portentous in manner, the centre of
public interest. As the time for the metcha approaches,
all the members of his wife's family are invited to an
inspection of the payments they are later to receive.
In the crowded house, lit by blazing torches, kindled
in the low fireplaces, men and women crowd eagerly
about the display of wealth. "Oh, Nali, Panau's sis-
ter-in-law, is to have this string of dogs' teeth ! " Care-
fully, avariciously, she notes its special characteristics,
five teeth and then a broken one, blue beads between
the teeth except in the middle, where there are five
red ones, blue and red tags on the ends. If two weeks
later there is a mistake and Nali does not receive this
very string, she will clamour loudly for her rights.
After this exhibition the in-laws go home to cook bigger
and better meals for the household of Pomasa.

When the great day comes Pomasa is arrayed in
yards of ornament. His sad-eyed wife is dressed in
bridal finery. Her tenth child is within a month of
being born. Five of her children are dead- Popitch,
the last to die, died only six weeks ago. Her long,
worn breasts sag in spite of the supporting ornaments.
Her face is lined and haggard and she stoops awk-
wardly beneath the weight of the bridal aprons. This
is a great day for Pomasa, her husband, and a great

[85]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

day for Bosai her brother who will receive Pomasa's
spectacular payments. It is her silver wedding.

The village is crowded, strangers come from all parts,
every house is filled with guests. Canoes are clustered
about the little islets, the thousands of dogs' teeth are
hung on lines, and both sides dance and make long
speeches. An event of major significance and interest
has taken place. For years this metcha will be men-
tioned: who did or did not make a good showing j how
Pomasa smugly refu-^ed to make the secret extra pay-
ments usually made at dead of night. When Pomasa
quarrels with his neighbors who have not made a
metcha, he will boast of his great achievement. And
with the pigs and oil in which his creditors gradually
repay him, he and his family will feast and pay their
debts.

In this complex pattern of dog tooth finance, every
person who owns property is involved, weekly, almost
daily. Where a pig changes hands half a dozen times
in a morning, the participation of many individuals is
inevitable. Every metclm, every betrothal, every mar-
riage, has reverberations through many villages, aflFects
the plans of scores of households.

From this world the children are divided completely
by a very simple fact: they own no property. They
have neither debtors nor creditors, dogs' teeth nor pigs.
They haven't a stick of tobacco staked in the transac-
tion. True, the exchange may be made in the name of
one of them. Kilipak's father may be paying twelve
thousand dogs' teeth to his cousin, the father of Kili-

[86]

THE CHILD AND ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

pak's future wife. This brings the question of Kilipak's
one-day marriage before the minds of the other chil-
dren. They chafiF him a little, suddenly stop using his
personal name and call him instead "grandson of Nate,"
the name of his bride's grandfather. Kilipak turns
hot and sullen under their teasing but he takes no extra
interest in the ceremony, although in the name of it his
elders will some day bring him to account. To-day he
simply goes off fishing with the other boys.

Afterwards Kilipak will feel this payment in which
he takes no interest: henceforth he must avoid his bride's
name and the names of all her relatives, and he must
lie hidden if his canoe goes through her village. So
to the child's eyes, the elders have a great economic
show which takes up all their time and attention, makes
mother cross and father absent-minded, makes the food
supply in the house less subject to the child's insistent
demands, takes the whole family away from home, or
separates him from the large pig which he used to en-
joy riding in the water. Then there is a great deal of
beating of drums, speech making, and dancing. Every
ceremony is just like every other. It may be of huge
interest to his elders that for a kinekin feast for a preg-
nant woman the packs of sago are stacked in threes,
while for a finpuaro feast after birth the sago packs
are stood upright. To the elder such important bits of
ceremonial procedure are sign and symbol of intimate
knowledge, like the inside knowledge on the stock
market which the new speculator displays so proudly.

[87]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

But to the child as to the non-investor, this is all so
much unintelligible rigmarole.

His version of the whole spectacle is brief and con-
cise. There are two kinds of payments — the payments
made on a grand scale and the small gradual repay-
ments made individually. The big ones may be canoes
of sago and pigs and oil, or they may be hundreds of
dogs' teeth hung up on the islet, in which case there may
be dancing. Sometimes, for wholly inexplicable rea-
sons, there is no dancing. At other times a pig changes
hands and a drum is beaten about that, most annoy-
ingly. The drum beat may turn one from one's play
in anticipation of some interesting event. And it turns
out to be nothing but the payment of a debt. After-
wards there are always quarrels, insults, and recrimina-
tions. If mother is very much involved in the trans-
action, so involved that it would be inconvenient to go
home — in the children's words, if mother "has work" —
father will be especially nasty to her, knowing she won't
dare leave him. But if it's "father's work," mother is
likely to be extra disagreeable, to weary of it in the
middle, and go ojff to her own kin. The fact that a
lot of this "work" is ostensibly in his name only serves
to set the child more firmly against it, as a most incom-
prehensible nuisance. To all questions about commerce,
the children answer furiously: "How should we know
— who's grown up here anyway, we or you? What do
you think you are to bother us about such things! It's
your business, not ours."

The parents permit their children to remain in this

[88]

THE CHILD AND ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

happy state of irresponsible inattention. No attempt
is made to give the children property and enlist their
interest in the financial game. They are simply ex-
pected to respect the tabus and avoidances which flow
from the economic arrangements, because failure to do
so will anger the spirits and produce undesirable results.

In the child's world property, far from being gar-
nered and stored, is practically communal in use if not
in ownership. Property consists of small canoes, pad-
dles, punts, bows and arrows, spears, spider-web nets,
strings of beads, occasional bits of tobacco or betel nuts.
These last are always shared freely among the children.
One poor little cigarette of newspaper and Louisiana
twist trade tobacco will pass through fifteen hands be-
fore it is returned to its owner for a final farewell puff.
If among a group of children one name is heard shouted
very frequently above the rest, the listener can be sure
that that child has a cigarette which the others are beg-
ging. Similarly a string of beads will pass from child
to child as a free gift for which no return is expected.
Quarrels over property are the rule in the adult world,
but they are not frequent among children. The older
children imitate their parents' severity and chastise
younger children for even touching adults' property,
but this is more for a chance to start a fight and from
force of habit than from any keen interest in protect-
ing the property.

Quarrels which spring up from other causes will be
justified in terms of property, if an adult inquires into
them. The children know that to say "He took my

[89]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

canoe" will elicit more sympathy than "I wanted to
make cat's cradles and he didn't" j and the child is an
adept at translating his world into terms which are ac-
ceptable to the adult.

The constant buying and selling, advance and repay-
ment in the adult world is a serious obstacle to any co-
operative effort. Individually owned wealth is a con-
tinual spur to self-centred individualistic activity. But
among the children, where there are no such individual
stakes, much more co-operation is seen. The boys of
fourteen and fifteen who stand at the head of the group
organise the younger children, plan races, on foot or
in canoe, organise football teams, the football being a
lemon J or institute journeys to the river for a swim.
Surface quarrelling and cuffing is fairly frequent, but
there is little permanent ill humour. The leadership
is too spontaneous, too informal, and has developed no
strong devices for coercing the unwilling. The recalci-
trant goes home unchastised, the trouble-maker remains.
The older boys scold and indulge in vivid vituperation
but they dare not use any appreciable force. A real fight
between children, even very tiny ones, means a quarrel
between their parents, and in any case the child always
finds a sympathiser in his parents. Irritation over mis-
sped plans or a spoiled game takes itself out, very much
as dominoes fall down one upon another. Yesa tells
Bopau to get his canoe. Bopau refuses. Yesa slaps
him, Tchokal slaps Yesa for slapping Bopau and Kili-
pak slaps Tchokal for slapping Yesa. Kilipak being
the largest in that group, the scuffle degenerates into a

[90]

THE CHILD AND ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

few wailing or sulking individuals. In five minutes all
is fair weather again unless some child feels so aflfronted
that he goes home to find sympathy. These teapot
tempests are frequent and unimportant, the consequence
of a large number of aggressive children playing to-
gether without devices for control. At that, they are
far sunnier and less quarrelsome than their elders, more
amenable to leadership, friendlier, less suspicious and
more generous. Deep-rooted feuds and antagonisms
are absent. Among the elders almost every person has
definite antagonisms, always smouldering, always likely
to break out into open quarrels. But the size and the
varying ages of the children make a fluid unpatterned
grouping in which close personal attachments and spe-
cial antagonisms do not flourish.

Although the parents take violent part for their chil-
dren, their children do not reciprocate. Children whose
parents are making the village ring with abuse, will
placidly continue their games in the moonlight. If the
quarrels between the parents grow so serious that the
spirits may be expected to take a hand, the children
are warned against going to the house of the enemy, a
prohibition which they may or may not obey.

The whole convention of the child's world is thus a
play convention. All participation is volitional and
without an arriere fensee. But among the adults cas-
ual friendliness, neighbourly visiting is regarded as al-
most reprehensible. Young men without position or
standing go to the houses of older relatives to ask for
assistance or to render services. Men may haunt their

[91]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

sisters' homes. But visiting between men of the same
status, or between married women who are neither sis-
ters nor sisters-in-law, is regarded as trifling, undigni-
fied behaviour. A man who goes about the village from
house to house must have considerable prestige to stand
the raillery which such behaviour calls for. The only
man in Peri who habitually visited about had been given
the nickname of "Pwisio," Manus for the white man's
cat, whose wandering ways are known to the natives.
Social gatherings are for purposes of exchange, either
to plan the exchange or to execute it, or about the sick,
the shipwrecked, the dying, or the dead. To leave
one's own home and go to sleep in the house of trouble
is regarded as the highest expression of sympathy.
Men, women, and children crowd the floor of the house
of mourning, men sleeping in the front of the house,
women in the rear, husbands and wives separated, some-
times for a month at a time. To sleep in the house
of another is a solemn matter, not to be undertaken
lightly.

Manus men, uninterested in friendship themselves,
are intolerant of friendship on the part of their wives.
As one woman phrased it: "If a man sees his wife talk-
ing for a long time with another woman or going into
another woman's house, he will look at her. If she is
her sister or her sister-in-law, it is well. If she is an
unrelated woman, he will scold his wife. He may even
beat her." But with her own feminine relatives a
woman must always speak circumspectly. Her hus-
band is tabu to them J their husbands are tabu to her.

t92]

THE CHILD AND ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

She cannot mention any intimate matter about any one
who is tabu. A daughter cannot comment upon her
married life to her mother who has never even been
allowed to look her daughter's husband in the face.
The tabus between relatives-in-law act most efficiently
in keeping such relatives not only out of the social scene
but also out of the conversation.

With her sister-in-law she is on even more formal
terms. The sister-in-law is devoted to her brother, re-
sents the wife, will not hear the most casual complaints
against him. Sisters-in-law may not use each other's
names; a certain reserve in conduct is always enjoined
upon them, and remarks from one to the other are
prefaced by the vocative: "P'mkaiyo" (sister-in-law)!
As a man's relations to his sisters, a woman's to her
brothers, are one of the strongest threats against the
stability of marriage, cultural insistence upon the ap-
pearance of friendship between sisters-in-law and be-
tween brothers-in-law has important results.

All through adult life in Manus there is a struggle
between a man's wife and a man's sister for his alle-
giance and his gifts. This struggle is far keener than
between brothers-in-law. The obscenity in which a
jealous and outraged wife accuses her husband of mak-
ing his sister into her co-wife has no parallel in the
relationship of brothers-in-law. It is the wife who is
the stranger, who is at a continual disadvantage in fight-
ing the vested interests of the sister. So the community
votes it good for these two traditional enemies to sign
a continuous public truce. And it is true that in lasting

[93]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

marriages brothers-in-law learn to be good partners if
not good friends and sisters-in-law become adjusted to
working together with some show of co-operation. But
the societies' insistence upon those friendships which
are most difficult as the friendships which are most ad-
mirable hampers free choice and regiments human re-
lations.

A man's formal relationships with his brothers and
brothers-in-law is in strong contrast to his joking rela-
tionship to his cross cousins.* Wherever he goes he is
almost sure to find a man who can address him as
"Cross cousin," and straightway make mock of what-
ever solemnity he is engaged in. Although often em-
barrassing and often provoking, this ceremonial inti-
macy gives a sort of outlet which is not permitted in
other relationships. And to his female cross cousin a
man who is a widower may even talk about his matri-
monial plans in fairly personal terms.

But between female cross cousins this jesting does not
obtain. It is permitted but never used. And the
woman, although she receives the confidences of her
male cousin, does not reciprocate j better drilled in
prudery than he, she is silent.

The children, especially the boys, act as cavalierly
towards all these ceremonial prescriptions of the adult
world as they do towards the economic exchanges.
Small children class older relatives indiscriminately as
fathers, mothers, and grandparents. The special terms

* The children of a mother's brother, or a father's sister, i.e.,
first cousins whose sibling-parents are of opposite sex.

[94]

THE CHILD AND ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

for mother's brother and father's sister are treated with
complete neglect, and a boy of fourteen or fifteen can-
not even give the proper term for father's paternal
aunt, although she and her female descendants will be
the principal mourners when he dies. The adult world
is divided for the children into father's clan, mother's
clan, people who are related to father and mother in
some way which brings them within the circle of atten-
tion, people whom mother avoids, people whom father
avoids, people whom one must avoid oneself. The
most conspicuous fact about a grandmother may be the
way she runs when father approaches, and father's
blushing fury if her name is mentioned in his presence.
There is no word for relatives in general usej instead
one says, "I belong to Kalat.* He belongs to Kalat,"
or, "We two belong to Kalat." Children under seven
or eight will simply know the houses of their mother's
clan as friendly places, but older children can usually
give the fact of their mother's clan membership as an
explanation of this fact. Sharply singled out from the
host of relatives are father and mother and semi-foster
fathers who have adopted one in name or are in process
of adopting one. These elders are the ones most com-
pliant to one's whims. So Langison, who had been in-
formally adopted as an older child by his father's
mother's sister's husband and by his father's younger
brother was said to have "three fathers," or, as the
other boys put it, "three places where he can cry out

* Kalat is a localised paternal clan group, the houses of whose
members stand near each other in one part of the village.

[95]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

for food." The houses of grandparents are also places
where one can "cry out for food" without bringing
shame and opprobium upon oneself and one's parents,
for the rule against asking for food is part of the train-
ing in respect for property.

The adult's general tolerance of negligence on the
part of children permits the child to reap all the ad-
vantages of his kinship arrangements but requires him
to pay very slight attention. If a household of the clan
of Motchapal is giving a ceremony, all the children
belonging to it may ride in the canoes, dress up in dogs'
teeth, nibble greedily at the feast, if they wish to. But
their presence is never required. Even in mourning
ceremonies no demands are made upon children under
fifteen 3 only slight demands are made on the unmar-
ried. The whole adult scheme is phrased in terms of
children's claims upon it. The strongest claims it makes
on the child are the demands for avoidance.

Nor are the strictly delimited friendships of the adult
demanded or even expected from the children. The
play groups include the village. If one clan Is a little
isolated from the others, as is the case with Kalat, the
younger children of Kalat will play together more than
they will play with the children at the other end of
the village. Children use no kinship terms among
themselves and are not conscious of exact relationships.
Adults will laughingly point out the Infant uncle of
a lusty ten-year-old or comment on the way In which
the adoption of a little girl makes her her own sister's
titular cross cousin. But the children themselves pay

THE CHILD AND ADULT SOCIAL LIFE

no attention. The first consciousness of relationships
outside the household group comes with the recogni-
tion of some common avoidance. I saw this happen
in the case of four boys, Pomat, Kilipak, Kutan and
Yesa, boys who had played together constantly from
childhood. Pomat knew that his mother called Kili-
pak's mother "sister," but he never addressed Kilipak
as "cross cousin." He knew that Ku tan's father,
Pomasa, called his own father, Kemai, "grandfather,"
but he had never been accustomed to calling Kutan
"son" on that account. He knew that Yesa had been
adopted by his mother's clan brother and still he never
addressed Yesa as "cross cousin," either. All four boys
thought first of each other as individuals. They had
not learned the adult habit of thinking first of relation-
ships. Then the husband of Pomat's sister, Pwondret,
came to live in the village. This youth, named Sisi,
was a tabu relative of all four boys because he had mar-
ried Pwondret, the sister of Pomat, cross cousin of Kili-
pak and Yesa and "mother" of Kutan. Sisi's marriage
with Pwondret had been sudden and without a long be-
trothal so for years all four boys had known him as an
occasional visitor whom they called by his name. Now
all four had to give up using his name and call him
"husband of Pwondret." This annoyance brought to
their attention that they were all related one to another
and laboriously they traced out this relationship and the
kinship terms which they should use to one another.

So the simplified canons of the child's world may
become complicated by contact with the adult world,

[97]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

but the gulf between the two worlds is not thereby nar-
rowed. Rather age-class consciousness is increased} all
four boys realised their common inconvenience under
this adult convention. There is no real attempt to in-
duct the child into this alien adult world. He is given
no place in it and no responsibilities. He is permitted
to use it for his own egocentric purposes and only made
to feel its pressure when the observance of tabus is felt
to be absolutely necessary for the safety of the com-
munity.

[98]

VI

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

MAN US religion is a special combination of spirit-
ualism and ancestor worship. The spirits of the dead
males of the family become its guardians, protectors,
censors, dictators after death. The skull and finger
bones are suspended from the roof in a carved bowl,
and the desires and preferences of the spirit of the
house consulted upon all important occasions. Severe
disaster falling upon the household discredits the prin-
cipal spirit, who is then either demoted to the rank of
spirit guard of some young man or small boy or else
expelled altogether from the house. Without a house,
a spirit is as much a social nonentity as a man would
be. He roams, impotent and vaguely malicious, in the
open spaces between the houses, finally degenerating
into some low form of sea life. Meanwhile a new
spirit is set up in the house. This regnant house spirit
is the special guardian of the male head of the family.
Unless requested to remain at home, he accompanies
the house father on his overseas expedition or on his
trips to the mainland. His spirit wife or wives, who
are of little importance, and are not represented by
skulls, remain at home. Women and girls have no
personal guardians and are therefore spiritually un-
equipped for venturing into dangerous places. But

[99]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

little boys, from the time they are four or five, are
usually given guardian spirits who are supposed to at-
tend them everywhere. These guardians may be the
spirits of dead boys, or children born to spirits on the
spirit plane, or occasionally the slightly discredited or
outmoded adult spirits of their fathers.

In Manus there is neither heaven nor hell; there are
simply two levels of existence. On one level live the
mortals all of whose acts, each of whose words, are
known to the spirits, provided the spirit is present and
paying attention. The spirit is not conceived as omnis-
cient. He, like a living man, can only see and hear
within the range of his senses. A spirit will disclaim
knowledge of what went on in a house during his ab-
sence. Spirits are invisible, only rarely are they seen
by mortals, but they occasionally make their presence
manifest by whistling in the night. They are more pow-
erful than mortals, being less dependent upon time and
space and having the power to translate material ob-
jects into their own sphere of invisibility. They act
upon mortals by extracting bits of the soul stuff. If
all of a mortal's soul stufF is taken by a spirit or spirits
the mortal will die. Spirits can also hide things, steal
things, throw stones, and otherwise manipulate the ma-
terial world in a capricious, unaccountable fashion.
This, however, they very seldom do. In spite of their
greater powers they are conceived very humanly. So
a man will beseech his spirit to drive an expected school
of fish into a particular lagoon. He will not ask his
spirit to multiply the fish, only to herd them. The

[ 100 ]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

chief duties of a spirit are to prosper the fishing of his
wards and to preserve their lives and limbs against the
machinations of hostile spirits. It is the spirits' priv-
ilege to demand in return the exercise of certain re-
straints and virtues. In the first place, the living must
commit no sex offences which interfere with the Manus
social order (i.e.: a spirit will not object to an intrigue
with a woman of another tribe). This is a rigorous
prohibition J light words, chance physical contacts, evil
plans, careless jests, non-observance of the proper avoid-
ance reactions towards relatives-in-law, all these may
bring down the spirits' righteous wrath, either upon
the sinner or upon some one of his relatives — perhaps
pushing a decrepit old man from his lingering death
bed into death, perhaps afHicting a new born baby with
the colic. Additionally, the spirits abhor economic lax-
ity of any sort: failure to pay debts, careless manipula-
tion of family properties, economic procrastination, and
unfair allotment of funds among the needs of several
relatives, as when a man uses all the wealth which comes
into the family to make spectacular payments for his
wife and fails to make betrothal payments for his
younger brothers. Insubordination within a family,
quarrels between in-laws also stir their wrath. And
bad housing annoys the critical spirits, who object to
presiding over unsafe floors, sagging piles, and leaky
thatch.

In addition to their obligations to their dutiful wards
and their stern role as upholders of a moral order, the
spirits engage in various activities which may be said

[lOl]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

to be the results of their mortal natures carried over
into the spirit level: they marry or strive to marry, they
beget children, they quarrel among themselves, they
shirk their obligations, they maliciously vent old
grudges upon the living, or transfer enmities arising
on the spirit plane to the mortals connected with the
hated spirits. So a spirit will punish his mortal wards
who fail to treat as in-laws the mortal relatives of his
spirit wife, or he will strike ill the living younger
brother of a spirit who has seduced his spirit wife.
Also, while yet newly translated to the spirit plane he
will work havoc among the living in revenge for his
own death. If he is a youth, he will try to kill other
youths who are living while he is dead; if he died for
adultery he will constitute himself official executioner
of all adulterers. If he died before making a large
feast, he will afflict others who give promise of success-
fully making the same kind of feast. Or he will exer-
cise special malice towards any who arrange or assist
in the remarriage of his widow.

The will of the spirits is conveyed to mortals through
seances, women with dead male children acting as me-
diums. The spirit child acts as a messenger boy upon
the spirit plane. He speaks through his mother's
mouth, in a whistling sound which she translates to the
assembled questioners. At her bidding he goes about
interrogating the various spirits who may be responsible
for the illness, misfortune, or death, or he collects the
bits of purloined soul stuff and returns them to the
sick person.

[102]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Men are able to hold less satisfactory converse
with their own guardians by a kind of divination — a
question is propounded and a bone hung over the shoul-
der. If the back itches on one side the answer is "yes,"
on the other, "no." Thus the man often determines
the direction which the medium's responses in the
seance will take.

So a Manus village is seen as the abode of mortals
and spirits. There in the house of Paleao is the newly
translated spirit of his dead adopted brother, Panau,
still smarting from his sudden demise in the midst of
preparations for a feast. He has a bad habit of strik-
ing people with a hatchet. The afflicted person spits
up blood and is likely not to recover. In the little
house next door lives Paleao's mother-in-law presided
over by the guardian spirit of Paleao's small son,
Popoli, his namesake. The spirit Popoli, restive after
he had been displaced by the newly dead Panau, sys-
tematically afflicted the household, making ill Paleao's
pig, Paleao's wife, Paleao himself, until Paleao built
a separate house for his mother-in-law, where his son's
spirit could reign supreme. Just down the way is the
house of a man whose guardian spirit has two spirit
wives who get on very badly together and who vent
their continual quarrels upon the child of the house.

So it goes J the personalities, prejudices, marital ar-
rangements, of the spirits are known as well as are those
of their living wards. Most of them are the recently
dead J their very faces are still fresh in the memory of
the living. But this spirit world is a world in which

[103]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

adult values and adult values alone are current, where
the chief preoccupations are work, wealth and sex —
ideas with which the children are essentially uncon-
cerned. Furthermore, the children do not recognise
that the spirits are still exercising the tenderness and
humanity which they were accustomed to receive from
fathers and uncles while they were still on earth. The
children are little in need of protection — they are not
permitted to wander abroad, they do no fishing which
needs spirit supervision, they have no economic affairs
to prosper. So the spirits of the dead appear to them
in a stern, inimical light. Panau was a beloved father,
but since he died he made his daughter Ngasu sick be-
cause her mother wanted to marry again. Popitch was
a jolly little comrade, a romping, scatter-brained boy
of eleven, up to any prank, undeterred by authority.
Dead, he is suddenly elevated to be the chief spirit of
his father's house, and makes his fourteen-year-old
brother Kutan sick, in a spirit quarrel as to who shall
be Kutan's spirit. The children forget their grief for
Popitch the comrade, in dread and resentment towards
Popitch the hostile spirit. Father or comrade, the spirit
is usually no longer felt to be the children's friend.

Furthermore, although the adults are accustomed to
bear almost any exaction or take any trouble to meet
their children's whims, they dare not anger the spirits,
nor expose their beloved children to the hostile spirits'
malice. A father will usually take a child along fish-
ing, although it means extra trouble and delay, pos-
sibly a smaller catch. But he will not take a child out

[104]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

of the shelter of the village if illness or recent death
has tainted the very air with fear. Then the child's
pleadings and rages are equally powerless to move the
usually compliant father. In the name of fear of the
spirits, obedience is forced upon the child. Usually
this is quite sincere. The adult really delights in grati-
fying the child where he can, but occasionally it is an
alibi behind which the father, unwilling to take the
child and afraid to say so outright, hides. In the hands
of the impious young people of the village, it becomes
much more alibi than truth. The small fry are bidden
to stay at home because "the place is full of spirits."
The ten-year-olds proceed to try the same game upon
the five-year-olds, and complete lack of faith and con-
scious mendacity usurps the place of the adults' genuine
anxiety and solicitude. The spirits seem to the younger
children a factor in the adult world which is especially
troublesome and unkind.

Of the existence of the spirits the children have as
little doubt as have the adults. They do not know
them as well, many of the names which recall person-
alities to their elders are only empty names to them.
Those spirits whom they do remember seem to have
changed their very natures. The account of a spirit
adultery as revealed in the night seances is a long,
tedious business J the children go to sleep and do not
listen. Affairs on the spirit level generally lack vivid-
ness and do not command their attention. Further-
more, seances usually turn upon the economic arrange-
ments of adult life, which they do not understand and

[105]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

in which they take no interest. The occasional seance
with a straight plot of adultery or an alleged spirit at-
tack on a mortal with a hatchet, the children discuss
casually among themselves. They know that Kutan
is sick because Popitch fought with another spirit
brother and that Pikawas no longer wears a betrothal
cloak because her spirit aunt objected to the proposed
marriage. Kisapwi of fourteen knows that her dead
father made her uncle sick because he wanted Kisapwi
to go and live with her uncle instead of remaining with
her mother. She knows too that her mother refused
to let her go, professing to fear harm for the child her-
self. But more often the children do not know the
substance of a seance which explains their own illnesses.
The boys of five to fourteen, who have special guard-
ian spirits of their own, might be expected to find in
them imaginary companions of power and compensa-
tion. But they make singularly little use of them.
They neither see them nor talk with them, although
they have heard their fathers utter long chatty mono-
logues to their spirits. They don't ask them to do
things for them, as one boy explained, "The spirit only
hears if he's right beside you, and he probably is not,
so it's no use bothering to talk to him." Sometimes
they do not even know their names. They never quote
the fact that they have spirits and the girls none as evi-
dence of masculine superiority, although the men do
that very thing. Instead they tend to push away from
them, to neglect, ignore, depreciate, the importance of
the most powerful factor in the adult world.

[io6]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Besides the formal religious system there are bits of
magic, legends of the land devils, stories of water
devils. The magic the children know little about j it
again is concerned primarily with the accumulation of
property, success in love, the demolition of an economic
rival, or the prosecution of a fight between cross cousins.
The blessing and cursing powers of fathers' sisters and
their descendants in the female line are not even known
to children under fifteen. Children are never taught
charms of any sort, and if an incantation is being recited
over the sick, a new baby, or a bride, they are either
chased away or constrained to perfect quiet. The chil-
dren view these occasional magical scenes with annoy-
ance.

The legends of land devils and water serpents played
a slightly different part. Manus legends are dull,
truncated, unelaborate accounts of encounters between
human beings and *Hchinah^* — ^the supernaturals of the
land people, whom the Manus regard as mischievous
inimical devils. There are also some myths of the
origin of natural phenomena. But the tales are not
knit up in any way with the life of the people, they
neither explain religious ceremonies nor validate social
position. They are not even a device for filling unused
time. The elders count them dull and unimportant.
It never occurs to any one to tell them to children.
However, the adults do describe the devils occasionally
to intimidate the children and keep them from going
to the mainland. These devils are said to have finger-
nails as long as their fingers and matted hair falling

[107]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

thickly over their eyes. They will kidnap children or
tear out their eyes. Here again, the children give only
half credence. The grown ups so obviously pay no at-
tention to the devils but go freely about their business j
they so transparently use them as nurses among our-
selves use the bogie-man to persuade reluctant children
to go to bed, that the children hold them in amused
contempt. They occasionally embody them in their
games, calling any one who is dressed strangely or ges-
ticulating queerly a "devil," and usually naming a poor
attempt to draw a man a "devil." In their drawings
they did not elaborate the "devils," invent special char-
acteristics for them, or give them names. They have
developed no legends or haunted spots or dangerous
water holes. The imaginative faculty which our chil-
dren spend upon such ideas is not called into play by a
society which provides them with a ready-made set of
spirits, ghosts, devils, dragons, and then uses these same
dreadful and marvellous creatures as instruments of op-
pression, as alibis for seemingly irrational behaviour.
Where our children react to a militantly matter-of-fact
world with compensatory interest in fairies and ogres,
derived from fairy tales, Manus children, also acting
contra-suggestibly, reject the supernatural in favour of
the natural.

These long-nailed devils are not especially congenial
to the child mind. They are an adult device, and the
child is traditionally uninterested in the adult world.
So legends play no part at all in the child life, and the
people of legend are given contemptuous tolerance.

[108]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

It is also interesting to note the relationship between
early childhood conditioning, the family situation, and
the religious system. The Manus attitude towards the
spirits is composite of the attitudes of the child towards
the father and of a man towards his children. To the
very small child the father is the indulgent protecting
parent who exists primarily to gratify the child's de-
sires. This intensity is modified somewhat as the child
grows older and turns to other children for some of his
social satisfactions. But behind the knocks and blows
of contact with his fellows stands his father, always
willing to take his part, make him toys, take him as a
companion and friend, quarrel with his mother over
him. It is his father who makes the first payments for
his wife, who is taking anxious thought for his little
son's future, at the time when this financial solicitude
has not yet become a burden to the son. But the father
seldom lives to carry through his obligations, to com-
plete the payments for his son's wife, to see his daugh-
ter-in-law safely installed in the rear of the house.
The father-in-law tabu which forbids a man's seeing
his daughter-in-law is felt as a poignant deprivation
where the own father is concerned.

This is one of the few situations which the Manus
feel as romantic, the adventure of looking upon the
face of a loved son's wife. "Should I die," says an old
man, "and never see the wife whom I have purchased
for my son?" So the old father, tottering towards
death, beyond the age when disrespect could lurk in
his glance, is allowed to make a feast for his daughter-

[ 109]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

in-law. After thus publicly showing his respect for
her, the tabu is removed forever and father, son and
daughter-in-law live as one household.

But this is a situation which very seldom occurs: there
were only two men in Peri who had lived long enough
to see the wives of their own sons. Both had removed
the tabu. Usually the father dies while his son is in
the late teens or early twenties, often while the son is
away at work. The Manus way of life is hard and
exacting and Manus men die very young.

The duty of paying for the son's wife passes to a
younger brother, or cousin, a man for whose wife the
father has paid. Thus the taskmaster who can capi-
talise the newly married man's ignorance and poverty
is a man sometimes ten or fifteen years his senior, a
man who is just emerging from servitude himself. For
years he has worked for the boy's father, who financed
his marriage. Now he will finance the son in return
and the son must work hard for him. The complica-
tion of this system can be seen in the family of Potik.

Potik adopted Panau, who was to him as a son.
Later Potik married Komatal, who had adopted her
cousin's baby boy, Paleao. Paleao grew up to call
Potik father. Later Komatal bore him two sons, Tunu
and Luwil. Potik lived to see Panau married, and died.
Panau paid for Paleao's wife and began payments for
Tunu and Luwil. He adopted a young son, Kutan.
As long as Panau lived, Paleao worked for him and
owed him allegiance, as did the young Tunu and Luwil.
Panau died just after Kutan went away to work. Paleao

[no]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

continued to finance Tunu and Luwil and took over the
financing of Kutan's marriage. Paleao was now pay-
ing for his own marriage entirely j he had no financial
backers and was therefore an independent citizen. He
now made the first payments for his young son, Popoli,
which he may not live to complete. In that case Tunu,
or more probably Luwil, who is the more intelligent,
will continue helping Kutan and finance Popoli's mar-
riage. Throughout this whole chain only one son,
Panau, and he an adopted son of a man's old age, was
married before his father died. In every other case
the kind indulgent father was replaced by an older
brother or uncle, to whom the young man owed no
affection and from whom he could expect no paternal
solicitude.

But in the whole organisation of the family in its
relation to little children, the brother relationship is
never stressed. Older children do not take care of
younger ones. Younger ones are not allowed to ac-
company the older ones because, say the mothers, "If
the babies cried to be brought home it would interrupt
the older children's play." This terrible intrusion upon
the children's leisure must be avoided at any cost. The
household constellation is therefore not a series of chil-
dren each dependent upon the next older, each cherish-
ing the next younger, as in Samoa, but a group each of
whom centres his or her interest in the father, and,
secondarily, in the mother. The first seven or eight
years of delightfid dependence upon the devoted father
determine the child's pattern response. This is over-

[III]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

laid by his interest in his companions but it is not fun-
damentally changed. His father's death leaves him
bereaved, perhaps permanently. Children under four
or five are adopted and made to feel that the foster
father is their own. Girls of any age are adopted more
easily because their participation in the household life
is more continuous. The loneliest children in the vil-
lage were the boys whose fathers were dead.

Banyalo was one of these. His father had died
when he was seven. He had passed into the care of
his father's sister, an old widow living alone. No new
man took his father's place. His mother went to live
with her brother and later married again. When the
recruiting officer came through looking for school chil-
dren, Banyalo was given to him. Fatherless, there was
no one to object to his going. When he returned to
the village after six years in Rabaul, he came home as
a stranger. His mother he hardly knew. His mother's
brother extended a formal welcome to him. He might
of course sleep in his house, but he did not feel himself
as having real part in his household. After wandering
about from place to place he finally settled down in
the home of his mother's younger sister's husband,
Paleao, who took upon himself the duty of paying for
Banyalo's wife. To the constraint and embarrassments
which belonged to the brother-in-law relationship was
added the invidious dependence of the wifeless upon
him who bought his wife. Banyalo turned finally to
a warm friendship with a younger boy and so staved
ofF his loneliness for a little.

[112]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Even lonelier was little Bopau, the son of the dead
Sori. Sori had been a gentle, firm man, respected by
every one, peaceful, unaggressive. It was said that
only after much urging would he ever state a request
and that he had been silent and abashed among men
younger and poorer than he. Bopau's mother had died
when Bopau was born and Sori had devoted long and
tireless care to him. The child took on his father's
personality like a perfectly fitting glove, grew up quiet,
soft spoken, unaggressive. Sori married again, but the
child did not form any attachment for his new mother,
who brought with her an uncouth deaf child whom
Bopau disliked. And then Sori died while still a young-
ish man of thirty-five or so. His second wife had quar-
relled with him before his death. She lived with her
people without any interest in her unmourned husband's
seven-year-old son. It fell to the lot of Pokenau, Sori's
younger brother, to care for the little orphan. Pokenau
took Sori to be his own guardian spirit and grew very
proud of his exploits. To Sori's credit he laid the
success of the month's fishing for the entire village.
But he did not love Sori's son. His own little boy
Matawei, Bopau's junior by three years, was very near
Pokenau's heart. Pokenau's wife was occupied with
two young children and had no time for Bopau. He
lived in the house, a patient, undemanding lonely child.
His foster father was of so vociferous, aggressive a na-
ture that the government officials had christened hira
"Big-mouth." Matawei imitated his father's every
gesture. But Bopau remained faithful to Sori's per-

[113]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

sonality. On the playground he never fought. If dif-
ficulties arose he simply retired from the field and sat
quietly by himself. When nightfall came, he often
curled up to sleep on our floor. There was no one to
worry about him, to seek for him.

For one brief month, in his ninth year, Bopau tasted
again the importance, the enveloping affection which
he had known as a younger child. He was adopted by
Pataliyan, himself a lonely stranger, a native of another
place who had been captured in war as a child by Sori's
father. Pataliyan was a widower, without any true
relatives, lonely in this place, and yet not wishing to
return to his own people of the island of Nauna, whose
language he had forgotten. A great friendship sprang
up between him and the fatherless little boy, and finally
he took Bopau to live with him in his bachelor quarters.
Bopau grew prouder, more self-confident, held his head
higher. But his happiness was short-lived. Pataliyan
eloped with a widow, an elopement which shook the
village. The widow had been the wife of Sori's cousin.
In the seances and dreams which followed, Sori vio-
lently took his dead cousin's part. Pataliyan had fled
to another village with his bride. He had not trusted
Bopau with his secret. Pokenau and all his relatives
pointed out to Bopau how angered his father was by
Pataliyan's conduct, how all of them were in danger
of death if they spoke to Pataliyan. Bopau, hurt by
Pataliyan's desertion, held by long habit to his father's
will, repudiated Pataliyan as firmly as the rest. When

[114]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

Pataliyan's canoe passed through the village, Bopau.
turned his head away.

Kapeli was the third boy whose father was dead and
who had no new father to take his place. He was fif-
teen, a stocky, loyal little youngster, always ready for
a fight or an adventure. He lived with his mother
Ndrantche, an old virago, in her widow's hut. The
head of his clan, his half-brother Tuain, had quarrelled
with his mother and his other brothers over a projected
marriage. A man with whom old Ndrantche had had
an affair fifteen years before and who had fled from,
the village to avoid marrying her, now wished to marry
her daughter. Furiously the old woman fought the
ideaj the younger members of the family sided with
her. Kapeli, ever loyal, took her side. He had nothing
in common with either the eldest male of the family,
Tuain, or the weak, shifty-eyed Ngamasue, his other
brother. In his fiery-tongued mother he recognised
something of his father's indomitable spirit. His father
had kept two wives in order within one house.

Kapeli was too old to shift his affection to one of
his brothers and these older brothers repaid his lack
of allegiance with an equal lack of responsibility.
Kapeli had no wife paid for. Tuain and Ngamasue
paid their own debts and took no thought for him. And
he, alone of all the adolescent boys who worked for us,
never ran away. Each of the others, when he became
bored or annoyed with our establishment, followed the
usual pattern and ran away for a few days. But as

[115]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Kapeli explained, he "had no father to receive him and
so he might as well stay."

These were the loneliest boys, the most unplaced.
Their fathers died too late for their reabsorption into
some other household. This in itself is good indica-
tion of the degree to which a child's personality is fixed
by the age of five or six. None of these three had yet
learned to depend upon the spirits, though little Bopau
stoutly maintained, in the face of Pokenau's contempt,
that Sori was to be his special guardian. The spirits
do not begin to play a role in the lives of young men
until after marriage, when they have economic obliga-
tions to fulfil, and fishing is of great importance to
them. It is after marriage also that the average youth
feels most keenly his father's death, a death which usu-
ally takes place while he is a young man absorbed in
young men's pursuits or else while he is away at work.
The harshest reality he has ever faced comes to him
with marriage, and his father's care is no longer there.
Here it is that he turns to the spirits, sometimes his
father's, sometimes others of the family dead who take
on the same supervisory tenderness which the father
displayed towards him in childhood. He lives in the
care of these omnipresent, paternalistic spirits, who
care for him as well as they are able and who frown
upon him if he fails in his moral obligation and forgive
him if he makes amends for his faults. Towards the
spirits he continues to play the capricious, unfilial part
which he played with his father, now threatening to
withhold or transfer his allegiance, taunting them with

[ii6]

THE CHILD AND THE SUPERNATURAL

the loneliness which will be theirs should he reject
them.

As in childhood the child clung to his father, depend-
ent upon his father's affection and care in a one-sided
relationship which always emphasised the child's right
to receive love, never the father's right to filial devo-
tion, so it is with the spirits. The Manus do not love
their spirit guardians who after all are only doing their
proper spirit duty in looking after them. The more
alert natives who consider quite calmly the future en-
trance of Christianity know that this means that all the
ancestral skulls will be thrown into the sea, the spirits
ejected forever. But they look upon this with the
naughty glee of bad children contemplating the over-
throw of their parents, with only a passing regret, and
a great feeling of relief. Spoiled children in early life,
they are spoiled children to their spirits, accepting every
service as their due, resenting discipline, quick to desert
a spirit which has not been powerful to protect them.

["7]

VII

THE major issues of the adult world are thus ig-
nored by Manus children. They are given no property
and they acquire none. There are none of those col-
lections of shells, odd shaped stones, fish spines, seeds,
etc., which clutter the secret caches of American chil-
dren and have led to the construction of theories of a
"collecting stage" in childhood. No child under thir-
teen or fourteen had any possessions except his canoe
or bow and arrow, furnished him by adults. Spinning
tops of seeds are made with some labour, only to be
discarded after an hour's play. The short sticks used
as punts, the mock spears, the dart, serve a few hours'
use and are thrown away. The beaded anklets and
armbands are made by the parents, placed on the chil-
dren and taken off again at the parents' whim. The
child does not complain. Even the new and strange ob-
jects which we brought to the village were not hoarded.
The children scrambled eagerly for bits of coloured
ribbon or tinsel, the tin wrappings of films or rolls of
exposed and used film, but they never kept them.
After I threw away about one hundred wooden film
spools, an accidental discard left one camera without a
spare spool. I asked the children to bring back one of
the dozens they had picked up in the preceding weeks.

[ii8]

THE CHILD'S WORLD

After an hour, a fourteen-year-old boy finally found
one which had been put away in his mother's work box;
all the others had disappeared.

But this dissipation of property, so eagerly clutched
and so swiftly relinquished, was not due to destructive-
ness. Objects were lost far oftener than broken. In-
deed, the children showed a touching care of a toy while
they were still interested in itj a respect for property
far exceeding our children's. I shall never forget the
picture of eight-year-old Nauna mending a broken
penny balloon which I had given him. He would
gather the edges of the hole into a little bunch and
painstakingly, laboriously, wind it about with raffia-like
grass. The hole made temporarily fast, he would in-
flate the balloon, which a moment later would collapse
and have to be mended again. He spent three hours
at this labour of love, never losing his temper, soberly
tying up the rotten flimsy material with his sturdy grass
string. This was typical of their care of material things,
an attitude instilled into them as children. But their
elders had been at no pains to give them any pattern
of collecting things for themselves or hoarding their
small possessions.

Similarly in social organisation, the children found
no interesting adult pattern upon which they could
draw. The kinship system with its complex functions
and obligations of relatives was not taught them, it was
too complicated for them to grasp readily themselves.
Their habitual contempt for grown-up life kept them
from drawing on it for play purposes. Occasionally,

C"9]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

about once a month, a group would make slight mimetic
play with it — stage a payment for a marriage, or pre-
tend that one of their number was dead and that tobacco
must be given away for his death feast. Just once I
saw the small girls pretending to keep house. Twice
the fourteen-year-old boys dressed up as girls, donned
grass skirts and calico cloaks and dashed about in gay
imitation of betrothed maidens avoiding tabu relatives.
Four times the six-year-olds built imitation houses of
tiny sticks. When one stops to compare this lack of
imaginative play with a large, free play group among
our own children — with its young pirates, Indians,
smugglers, "sides," its clubs, secret societies, pass words,
codes, insignia, initiations, the difference is striking.

Here in Manus are a group of children, some forty
in all, with nothing to do but have a good time all day
long. The physical surroundings are ideal, a safe shal-
low lagoon. Its monotony broken by the change of tide,
by driving rains and occasional frightening whirlwinds.
They are free to play In every house in the village,
indeed the reception section of the house is often hung
with children's swings. They have plenty of materials
ready to hand, palm leaves, raffia, rattan, bark, seeds
(which the adults make Into tiny charm cases), red
hibiscus flowers, coconut shells, pandanus leaves, aro-
matic herbs, pliant reeds and rushes. They have mate-
rials in plenty with which they could imitate any prov-
ince of adult life — playing at trade or exchange, or the
white man's trade store which a few of them have seen,
of which all of them have heard. They have canoes

[i20]

THE CHILD'S WORLD

of their own, small ones, entirely their own, the larger
ones of their parents in which they are always free to
play. But do they ever organise a boat's crew, choose
captain and pilot, engineer and helmsman, reproduce the
crew of the white man's schooner of which they have
heard so many tales from returned work boys? Never
once in the six months I spent in close contact with them
did I see this happen. Or did they pluck large shrubs,
fashion spears, whiten their bodies with lime, advance
in a war fleet formation upon the village as their elders
did at great ceremonies? Did they build themselves
small dancing pole platforms in imitation of their eld-
ers? Did they catch small turtles and beat miniature
drums in triumph over their catch ? They never did any
of these things. They put on seeds instead of shells and
practised with the little blunt spears their elders had
taught them to make. They beat toy drums when the
young men drummed for a dance, but they held no
dances of their own.

They had no sort of formal organisation, no clubs,
no parties, no codes, no secret societies. If races were
held, the older boys simply divided the children up
into fairly equal teams, or selected pairs who were
matched physically. But there was nothing permanent
about these teams, no continuous rivalry between the
children. Leadership there was, but only the spon-
taneous, free sort due to intelligence and initiative.
Very loose age groups, never exclusive, never perma-
nent, tended to form about special activities, as a fishing
trip a little afield of the village for part of an after-

[I2l]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

neon J stepping-stone groups also formed for a few
minutes' play — of one adolescent, a twelve-year-old, a
seven-year-old, and possibly a baby brother. These
serial groupings were partly dependent upon neighbour-
hood or relationship, but even these were fluid — the
smaller children retained no permanent allegiances to
older ones.

Their play was the most matter of fact, rough and
tumble, non-imaginative activity imaginable j football,
wrestlings of war, a few round games, races, boat races,
making figures in the water, distorting their shadows
in the moonlight while the person who was "it" had
to guess their identity. When they were tired they
gathered in groups and sang long monotonous songs
over and over:

I am a man.

I have no wife.

I am a man. I have no wife

I will get a wife in Bunei.

From my father's cross cousins,

From my father's cross cousins.

I am a man,

I am a man,

I have no wife —

Or they made string figures, or burnt decorative
scars on each other's arms with red hot twigs.

Conversation turned on who was oldest, who tallest,
who had the most burned beauty spots, whether Nane
caught a turtle yesterday or to-day, when the canoe
would be back from Mok, what a big fight Sanau and

[122]

THE CHILD'S WORLD

Kemai had over that pig, how frightening a time
Pomasa had on the shipwrecked canoe. When they do
discuss events of adult life it is in very practical terms.
So Kawa, aged four, remarked, "Kilipak, give me some
paper." "What do you want it for?" "To make cig-
arettes." "But Where's the tobacco coming from?"
"Oh, the death feast." "Whose?" "Alupu's."
"But she's not dead yet." "No, but she soon will be."
Argumentative conversations sometimes ending in fis-
ticuffs were very common. They had an enormous
passion for accuracy, a passion in which they imitated
their elders, who would keep the village awake all night
over an argument as to whether a child, dead ten years,
had been younger or older than some person still liv-
ing. In arguments over size or number attempts at
verification were made, and I saw one case of attempted
experiment. In the midst of several exciting days,
during a death in the village, I had less time than usual
for meals, and a can of fruit, of a size usually consumed
at one meal, did for two. Pomat, the little table boy,
commented on it, but Kilipak, the fourteen-year-old
cook, contradicted him. I had never divided a can of
peaches between two meals. All the other boys, the
children who haunted the house, the married couple
who were temporarily resident, my two adolescent girls,
were drawn into the argument, which lasted for forty-
five minutes. Finally Kilipak declared in triumph,
"Well, we'll try it outj we'll give her another can of
the same kind to-morrow. If she eats them all, I'm
right j if she doesn't, you are."

[123]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

This interest in the truth is shown in adult life in
various ways. Pokenau once dropped a fish's jawbone
out of his betel bag. Upon being questioned, he said
he was keeping it to show to a man in Bunei who had
declared that this particular fish had no teeth. An-
other man returned from working for a scientific-
minded German master to announce to his astonished
companions that his master said New Guinea was once
joined to Australia. The village took sides on the ques-
tion and two young men fought each other over the
truth of the statement. This restless interest in the
truth takes its most extreme form when men try out
the supernatural world j disbelieving the results of a
seance, they will do something which, if the seance
were true, would endanger their lives.

So the form of children's conversation is very like
their elders' — from them they take the delight in teach-
ing and repetitious games, the tendency to boasting and
recrimination, and the violent argument over facts.
But whereas the adults' conversation turns about feasts
and finances, spirits, magic, sin, and confession, the chil-
dren's, ignoring these subjects, is bare and dull, pre-
serving the form only, without any interesting content.

The Manus have also a pattern of desultory, formal
conversation, comparable to our talk about the weather.
They have no careful etiquette, no series of formal
pleasantries with which to bridge over awkward situa-
tions; instead meaningless, effortful chatter, is used.
I participated in such a conversation in the house of
Tchanan, where the runaway wife of Mutchin had taken

[124]

THE CHILD'S WORLD

refuge. Mutchin had broken his wife's arm, and she
had left him and fled to her aunts. Twice he had sent
women of his household to fetch her and twice she had
refused to return to him. On this occasion I accom-
panied her sister-in-law. The members of her aunt's
family received usj the runaway remained in the back
of the house, cooking over a fire. For an hour they
sat and talked, about conditions at the land market,
fishing, when certain feasts were to be held, when some
relatives were coming from Mok. Not once was the
purpose of the visit mentioned. Finally a young man
adroitly introduced the question of physical strength.
Some one added how much stronger men were than
women j from this the conversation shifted to men's
bones and women's bones, how easily broken the latter
were, how an unintentional blow from a well-meaning
man might shatter a woman's frail bone. Then the
sister-in-law rose. The wife spoke no word, but after
we had climbed down into the canoe, she came slowly
down the ladder and sat in the stern. This oblique con-
versational style is followed by some children when
talking with adults. They make prim little statements
which apply to any topic under discussion. So Masa,
when her mother mentions a pregnant woman in Patusi
remarks, "The pregnant woman who was at our house
has gone home." She is then silent again until some
other topic gives her a chance to make a brisk comment.
The adults give the children no story-telling pat-
tern, no guessing games, riddles, puzzles. The idea
that children would like to hear legends seems quite

[125]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

fantastic to a Manus adult. "Oh, no — legends are for
old people. Children don't know legends. Children
don't listen to legends. Children dislike legends!"
And the plastic children accept this theory which con-
tradicts one of our firmest convictions, the appeal of
stories to children.

The simple narration of something seen or experi-
enced does occur, but flights of fancy are strictly dis-
couraged by children themselves. "And then there was
a big wind came up and the canoe almost upset." "Did
it upset?" "Well, it was a big wind." "But you didn't
go into the water, did you?" "No-oo." The insist-
ence on fact, on circumstantial accounts, on accuracy
in small points, all serve as checks upon the imagina-
tion.

So the story-telling habit, the delight in story, is en-
tirely absent. Imaginative speculation about what is
happening on the other side of the hill, or what the
fish are saying, is all completely lacking. And the
"why?" element in children's conversation with adults
is superseded by the "what?" and "where?" questions.

Yet this does not mean a lack of intelligence on the
children's part. Pictures, advertisements in magazines,
illustrations of stories, they greeted with interest and
delight. They pored for hours over an old copy of
Natural History^ explaining, wondering, admiring.
Every explanatory comment of mine was eagerly re-
membered and woven into new interpretations.
Their alert minds had been neither dulled nor inhibited.
They took to any new game, new pictures, new occupa-

[126]

THE CHILD'S WORLD

tions, with far greater eagerness than did the little
Samoans, smothered and absorbed in their own culture.
Drawing became an absorbing passion with them. Tire-
lessly they covered sheet after sheet of paper with men
and women, crocodiles and canoes. But unused to
stories, unpractised in rearing imaginary edifices, the
content of the realistic drawings was very simple: two
boys fighting, two boys kicking a ball, a man and his
wife, a crew spearing a turtle, a schooner with a pilot.
They drew nothing with plot. Similarly, when I
showed them ink blots and asked for interpretations, I
got only straight statement, "It's a cloud," "It's a bird."
Only from one or two of the adolescent boys whose
thinking was being stimulated by the thought of the
other lands they would see as work boys, gave such
interpretations as "a cassowary" (which he had never
seen), a motor car, or a telephone. But the ability of
children in this society of developing whole plots from
the stimulus of an ambiguous ink blot was lacking.

Their memories were excellent. Trained to small
points and fine discriminations they learned to distin-
guish between beer bottles of medicines in terms of
slight differences in size of label or number of words
on the label. They could recognize each other's draw-
ings of four months before.

In other words they were in no sense stupid children.
They were alert, intelligent, inquisitive, with excellent
memories and receptive minds. Their dull unimagina-
tive play life is no comment upon their minds, but
rather a comment upon the way in which they were

[127]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

brought up. Cut off from the stimulation of adult
life, they were never asked to participate in it. They
took no part at feasts or ceremonies. The grown ups
did not give them patterns of clan loyalty or chieftain-
ship which they could use in their organisation of their
children's group. The intricate interrelations of the
grown-up world, the relationships between cross cousins
with its jesting, cursing, blessing j the ceremonial of
war, the mechanics of seances, any one of these would
have given the children amusing material for imitation
if only the adults had given them a few hints, had
aroused their interest or enlisted their enthusiasms.

The Plains Indian life with its buffalo hunt, its
pitching and breaking up of camp, its war conventions,
does not provide any more vivid material for its chil-
dren than does the Manus life. But the Cheyenne
mother makes her child a little tipi in which to play
house. The Cheyenne household greets the diminutive
hunter's slain bird as a great addition to the family
cook pot. In consequence the children's camp of the
Plains, which reproduces in mimetic play the whole
cycle of adult activities, forms the centre of Cheyenne
children's play interest.

If on the other hand, the Manus had wilfully, ag-
gressively excluded the children, shut doors against
them, consistently shooed them off the ceremonial scene,
the children might have rallied to positive defensive
measures. This has happened with Kaffir children in
South Africa where the world of grown ups treat chil-
dren as little nuisances, lie to them, pack them off to

[128]

THE CHILD'S WORLD

watch the grain fields, forbid them even to eat the small
birds of their own catch. This play group of children,
put on its mettle by adult measures, organises into a
children's republic with spies and guards, a secret lan-
guage, outlaw conventions of its own, which reminds
one of city boys' gangs to-day. Either active enlist-
ment of the children as on the Plains, or active sup-
pression, as among the Kaffirs, seems to produce a more
varied, richer child life. Even in Samoa, which does
neither but gives every child tasks graded to its skill,
the children's life is given content and importance be-
cause of the responsibilities placed upon them, because
they are part of a whole dignified plan of life.

But the Manus do none of these things. The chil-
dren are perfectly trained to take care of themselves j
any sense of physical insufficiency is guarded against.
They are given their own canoes, paddles, swings, bows
and arrows. They are regimented into no age groups,
made to submit to no categories of appropriate age or
sex behaviour. No house is denied to them. They
frolic about under foot, in the midst of the most im-
portant ceremonies. And they are treated as lords of
the universe j their parents appear to them as willing,
patient slaves. And no lord has ever taken a great
interest in the tiresome occupations of slaves.

As in the social organisation, so with the religious
life. There is a ready-made adult content in which the
children are given no part. Their invisible playmates
are given them, pedigree complete, making no appeal
to the imagination and no plea for its exercise.

[ 129]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

In the less formal thought and play of children,
which seems more spontaneous than their attitudes
towards the finished system of religion which they have
to learn by rote, a contrast with our own children is also
seen. The habits of personalising inanimate things, of
kicking the door, blaming the knife, apostrophising the
chair, accusing the moon of eavesdropping, etc., are
lacking in Manus. Where we fill our children's minds
with a rich folklore, songs which personalise the sun,
the moon, and the stars, riddles and fairy tales and
myths, the Manus do nothing of the sort. The Manus
child never hears of "the man in the moon," or a rhyme
like Jean Ingelow's:

"Oh, moon, have you done something wrong in Heaven,
That God has hidden your face?
I hope if you have, you will soon be forgiven.
And shine again in your place."

nor hears his older sister dance to:

"Turn off your light, Mr. Moon Man,
Go and hide your face behind the clouds.
Can't you see the couples all spooning?
Two's a company and three's a crowd.
When a little lad and lady
Find a spot all nice and shady,
It's time to say good-night.
When you want to spoon.
Say, 'Please, Mr. Moon,
Be a good sport and turn off your light.' "

His parents and grandparents have given him no rich
background upon which to embroider ideas about the

[ 130]

THE CHILD'S WORLD

moon, and he thinks of the moon as a light in the sky
which is there and not there, periodically. He does
not think the moon is a person. He believes it cannot
see because "it has no eyes." His view of the moon
is a matter-of-fact, naturalistic view, uncorrected by
science, of course, for, like his untutored father, he be-
lieves that sun and moon alike proceed across the sky.
His folklore gives him no help and the Manus lan-
guage is cool and bare, without figures of speech or
rich allusiveness. It is a language which neither stim-
ulates the imagination of children nor provides mate-
rial for adult poetry. It is a rigorously matter-of-fact
language where ours is filled with imagery and meta-
phor.

So where we give the moon sex and speak of her as
"she," the Manus language, which makes no distinc-
tion between he, she, and it, all of which are "third
person singular," gives no personalising suggestion.
Nor are verbs which apply to persons applied to the
moon. The moon "shines," but it never smiles, hides,
marches, flirts, peeps, approves j it never "looks down
sadly," or "turns away its face." All the impetus to
personalisation which our rich allusive language sug-
gests to a child are absent.

I couldn't even persuade children to cast the blame
upon inanimate objects. To my remarks, "It's a bad
canoe to float away," the other children would reply,
" — ^but Popoli forgot to tie it up" or "Bopan didn't
tie it fast enough." This suggests that this "natural"

[131]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

tendency in our children is really taught them by their
parents.

Their attitude towards any sort of pretense or make
believe is symbolised by the reply of a small girl when
I questioned the only group of children which I ever
saw playing house. They were pretending to grate
coconuts and the little girl said ^'grease e joja^^ "this
is our lie." The word grease is pidgin English for
flattery or deceit. It has found its way into the native
tongue as a deceit or lie. The little girPs answer con-
tained a condemnation of their make believe play.

From this material it is possible to conclude that
personalising the universe is not inherent in child
thought, but is a tendency bequeathed to him by his
society. The young baby's inability to differentiate
or at least to respond differentially to persons and
things, is not in itself a creative tendency which makes
an older child think of the moon, the sun, boats, etc., as
possessed of will and emotion. These more elaborate
tendencies are not spontaneous but are assisted by the
language, the folk lore, the songs, the adult attitude
towards children. And these were the work of poetic
adult minds, not the faulty thinking of young children.

Whether or not an adult philosophical system of re-
ligion or science will appeal to the child is not a func-
tion of the child mind but of the way the child is
brought up. If the parents use matter of fact methods
of suppression and invoke the child's size, age, physical
incapacity, the child may respond with seven league
boots and attendant genii, ideas drawn not out of its

[ 132]

THE CHILD'S WORLD

head, but from the folk lore which it has been taught.
But if an unscientific point of view is used as a disci-
plinary method, as when the child tears a book and
the adult says, "Don't pull the cover off that book.
Poor book! How would you like to have your skin
pulled off like that?" the same aged child can reply
in the most superior tone, "Pooh, don't you know that
books can't feel? Why, you could tear and tear and
tear and it would never feel it. It's like my back when
it's numb." The naturalistic approach is no less con-
genial to the child than the supernatural j his accept-
ance of one rather than of the other will depend on
the way they are presented to him and the opportuni-
ties which arise for their use.

Children are not naturally religious, given over to
charms, fetishes, spells, and ritual. They are not natu-
ral story tellers, nor do they naturally build up imagi-
native edifices. They do not naturally consider the sun
as a person nor draw him with a face.* Their mental
development in these respects is determined not by
some internal necessity, but by the form of the culture
in which they are brought up.

The Manus play life gives children freedom, won-
derful exercise for their bodies, teaches them alertness,
physical resourcefulness, physical initiative. But it
gives them no material for thought, no admired adult
pattern to imitate, no hated adult pattern to aggres-
sively scorn, no language rich in figures of speech, no

* In thirty thousand drawings, not one case of personalising nat-
ural phenomena or inanimate objects occurred.

[133]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

wealth of legend and folk tale, no poetry. And the
children, left to themselves, wrestle and roll — and even
these games are stimulated by passing adult interest —
tumble and tussle, evolving nothing of interest except
general good spirits and quick wits. Without food for
thought, or isolation, or physical inferiority to compen-
sate for, they simply expend their boundless physical
energy, and make string figures in the shade in com-
plete boredom when they are weary.

[134]

VIII

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

WHILE Manus permits its children to spend their
formative years in such a good-natured vacuum, its
treatment of very young children does make for the
development of marked personalities.

So differences in personality are seen very early.
This is true not only of the idiosyncrasies of manners,
speech and gesture which play so pronounced a role in
giving individuality, but in the more fundamental as-
pects of personality, — aggressiveness, dominance, reces-
siveness, etc. Although the play group is an important
factor in their lives from four to fourteen for girls,
from five to twenty or so for boys, it does not have
the levelling effect upon personality which was so con-
spicuous in Samoa. There children were more like
their playmates than they were like the members of
the family — in Manus it is just the opposite. There
is the most vivid correspondence between the person-
ality of children and their real or foster fathers. If it
were a matter of father and own children only, the
likenesses could be put down to heredity but the number
of similar resemblances between fathers and foster chil-
dren rules heredity at least partly out of the question.

The children, real or adopted, of older men with
strong wills and dominant natures are aggressive, vocif-

[135]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

erous, sure of themselves, insatiable in their demands
upon their environment. They are noisy, unabashed.
As babies they stamp their feet, shout their every in-
tention, slap any one who refuses to pay attention to
them. As children of six or seven they bully and scrap
with their companions, rage up and down the lagoon
in exact imitation of their fathers. As boys of fourteen
or fifteen they are the leaders of the group. Children
of timid young men who are still economically unim-
portant, unskilled in finance and abashed in the pres-
ence of their elders, and children of older men who are
failures, are recessive, timid, untalkative. Between
these two extremes are the children of men who though
young and temporarily under a social eclipse, were ag-
gressive children and will become aggressive again as
soon as they gain financial independence.

These differences are so conspicuous that it is pos-
sible to watch a group of children for half an hour
and then guess at the age or status and general de-
meanour of their parents, particularly of their fathers.
In the cases, of which there were several, where the
mother was the more dominant personality, the mother's
behaviour was reflected in that of the child.

Pwakaton was a mild, good-humoured, stupid man.
He was one of the best drummers in the village and
a passable fisherman, but he had no head for planning
and he muffed his financial obligations so badly that
he was a nonentity in the village. He had one little
girl, a mild child who aped his unsure manner and his
timid ways. But his younger child had been adopted

[136]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

by the leading older man in the village, Talikai, a man
much given to stamping, and to making loud statements
of his intentions. This child at almost two years of
age was a small counterpart of his foster father. Talikai
had another adopted son, a boy whose real father had
been of no note in the community, and he, Kilipak, was
the leader of the fourteen-year-old group.

Among the eight- to eleven-year-olds, there were a
group of small boys whose parents were of small im-
portance. Tchokal was a clever little gamin, lacking
neither in wit nor resource, but his father was a de-
spised waster and defaulter without prestige or self-
respect. Polum was the son of a man who had failed
to make any financial mark. Kapamalae's father was
a mild good-natured bear, whose younger brother
dominated and managed him. Bopau's father, recently
dead, had been a mild, soft-spoken man, who died in
debt. This group was dominated by Nauna, the son
of Ngamel, one of the most respected elders of the
village. Ngamel was neither as aggressive nor as volu-
ble as Talikai, but he was firm, self-assured, rich,
powerful, and reliable. Nauna imitated his father's
virtues and his father's manners and led a group of
boys older than himself.

In some cases it was possible to see a child's person-
ality change under adoption. Yesa, Kapamalae's older
brother, was a quiet, abashed child of twelve when I
came to the village. Like his younger brother he took
his colour from his mild, unremarkable father. Shortly
afterwards he was adopted by his father's younger

[137]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

brother, Paleao, one of the most enterprising men in
the village. Paleao had a small foster son, Popoli,
whom he had adopted as a baby from another tribe,
and who showed a great resemblance to him now in
every gesture. Yesa, the quiet, immediately took colour
from the decisiveness of his new father: his real father
became "grandfather," relegated to unimportance, and
his shoulders squared beneath his new prestige. But
the correspondence was less marked and would probably
be less marked always than if he had been adopted
in babyhood.

Kemai was the most substantial man in the village,
sound, reliable, slow of speech, routine in his thinking.
His wife's sister's son, Pomat, whom he had adopted
as a baby, reproduced not only his mannerisms, but his
character traits.

There were two brothers, Ngandiliu and Selan.
Ngandiliu was the elder, but he lacked the definite-
ness, the assurance, which makes for success. Having
no children of his own, he adopted Selan's child Topal,
on the death of Selan's wife. Topal grew up, like
Ngandiliu, quiet, persevering, never taking the initia-
tive, never making his own points.

Selan was still a young man, too young to be per-
mitted much importance in the social scheme. Ngan-
diliu had paid for his wife and Selan had not yet as-
sumed full economic status. But he was restlessly am-
bitious. He became a medium, an unusual thing for
a man; he even engaged in furious altercations with
the old men of the village. Although usually preserv-

[138]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

ing a subdued mien, suitable to his years, beneath it he
was quietly aggressive, persistent, self-assured. And so
was Kawa, his five-year-old daughter, who broke her
silences only to make carefully calculated demands.
Three years younger than Topal, she was already a
more poised and vigorous person.

But the sum total of the cases is more impressive
than is any individual case. Differences between one
set of brothers, brought up in different circumstances,
can be explained away on other counts, hereditary dif-
ferences, accident, and so on. But when the children
of young or unsuccessful people as a group exhibit one
type of personality, and the children of older, success-
ful people exhibit another, the matter assumes signifi-
cance.

There is a great deal of inbreeding in Manus, both
the inbreeding which results from the prescribed mar-
riage between second cousins and the inbreeding inevi-
table in small communities, where there is much com-
mon ancestry. It may therefore be argued that all the
children have similar potentialities upon which environ-
ment has only to play in order to develop striking dif-
ferences. Nevertheless, It Is important to note that the
leading lines in the community represent the inheri-
tance, not of blood, nor of property, which is largely
dissipated at death, but of habits of dominance ajcquired
in early childhood. Let us follow, for a moment, the
family tree of one group of leading men in the village
history.

Malegan, a man of importance, adopted Potik, a

[139]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

nephew. When he died Potik became a leading citi-
zen in the village. Potik adopted Panau, and later
Paleao, dying while Paleao was very young and leaving
two blood sons, Tunu and Luwil. Panau and Paleao
had been the adopted children of Potik's years of
power J they grew up under his influence. Luwil was
reared by a maternal uncle of no consequence, Tunu
by Panau while Panau was still a young and unimpor-
tant man. Panau attained prestige and importance and
died at its height. His position in the economic scheme
was taken over by Paleao, his adopted father's second
wife's adopted sister's son. Paleao's own blood brother
was adopted not by the powerful Potik, but by a mild
maternal uncle, and remained a mild, though not at all
unintelligent, nonentity.

This discussion might seem to depreciate the role of
intelligence. It is not meant to do so. But personality
is a more powerful force in Manus than is intelligence.
The man of force with average intelligence gets on bet-
ter than the less-assured man of higher intellect. And
it is this very matter of force, of assurance, which seems
so heavily determined by the adult who fosters the
child during its first seven or eight years.

This means that the scales are most unevenly
weighted against the children of a man's youth and the
children, real or adopted, of unsuccessful older men.
It also means that a dominant man can be far surer of
a satisfactory successor than he could be if he had to de-
pend upon an accident of native endowment which

[140]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

would persist through the levelling process of a dif-
ferent kind of education.

This latter is the case in Samoa. The care of young
children by slightly older children, themselves without
defined personalities, perpetuates a far lower level of
development of social individuality. The gifted man
in Samoa does rise to the top, but he never comes in
contact with his young children. He is given no op-
portunity to pass on the assurance which he has gained
after years of apprenticeship.

The same result would be likely to obtain where
children were left to the care of nursemaids, or slaves,
or of old or infirm dependent female relatives of a
household. Such a fostering group, whether of chil-
dren, servants, or old women, may present an effective
barrier through which the influence of father or mother
does not penetrate. This may be as powerful a factor
in producing the startling discrepancies between fathers
and sons in our own society as the more popular ex-
planation of inferiority complexes.

The successful identification of the child with his
father's personality in Manus, is also made possible
by the father's tender regard for the child and lack of
domineering in the parent-child relationship. Talikai,
haughty and uncompromising in his attitude towards
adults, left an important ceremony in the middle to
come and beg a balloon from me for his two-year-old
child. The child's cry turned the most dominant per-
son in a roomful of people into an anxious servitor.
It is no wonder that that child did not develop an in-

[141]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

feriority complex. But constant association with Talikai
led him to imitate his manner, to take over and make
his own Talikai's assurance. Nor are the children of
shy, quiet, abashed fathers given an inferiority complex,
it is rather a question of acquiring a habit of inconspic-
uous, socially unimpressive behaviour.

In the case of girls the effects are less impressive.
In girls under eight or nine the father's personality is
reflected almost as completely as it is in the personality
of little boys. But the break of identification with the
father tends to confuse the girPs later development.
The girl's spirit is broken at an earlier age by the tabus.
She never makes as strong an identification with any
woman as she made with her father. Her individuality
is allowed full play only up to thirteen or fourteen, in-
stead of up to twenty to twenty-four, as in the case of
boys. So, although early association with an important
father turns a small girl into an assured little tyrant,
there are more social forces at work to blur her aggres-
siveness, to tone down her individuality. The most
aggressive girls in the village were the daughters of
prominent widows, the first identification with the
father had carried over peacefully to an identification
with strong self-sufiicient personalities of their own sex.

The children's play groups are sharply influenced by
this early development of individuality. Any group of
children of the same age tends to break in two, the pas-
sive, quiet children of the young and unsuccessful fall-
ing on one side, the noisy, aggressive children on the

[142]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

other — with the children of young men of dominant
character in the middle.

The earliest play groups are of pairs or trios of chil-
dren of two or three. As soon as a child can wade with
safety, the attraction of the water life brings it into
the company of other children. Three-year-olds may
still hesitate or have difficulty in climbing up the slip-
pery piles to seek out companions in strange houses,
but it is easy for two or three children to gravitate to-
gether beneath the houses — in the low tide shallows.
Play pairs are found often where one child is aggres-
sive and one passive. The differences in social person-
ality are much more pronounced than other differences
— of skill or intelligence, and it is possible for the ag-
gressive children to gratify their urge to leadership
most simply if they select another child of a different
temperament. Alliances between two aggressive chil-
dren are much less frequent. The children are too
spoiled to enjoy having any point contested by another
will of equal strength. Sometimes two meek, passive
children will drift into an association — for there seems
to be no similar will to be commanded. But these as-
sociations are less firm, fall apart quickly at the word
of one of the more aggressive children.

Ponkob and Songau were a typical play pair. Ponkob,
Nauna's younger brother, was a strong, lusty child, im-
perative in gesture, wearisomely expansive in conversa-
tion and manner. He was lord of the world and par-
ticularly lord of Songau, the son of an anxious unre-
liable failure, Pomat. Pomat came of a line which

[ 143 ]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

had once played an important part in village life — ^his
shiftless ways called forth much comment from his fel-
lows. He himself was a furtive and occasionally honey-
tongued manj when delirious with fever, he spoke in-
cessantly of fulfilled obligations. His wife had been
married before, and lost her first baby because she had
tattooed her face, arousing the virtuous anger of her
husband's spirits. Her marriage with Pomat was a
step down. She was abashed by life and wholly in-
efficient in dealing with it. Little Songau was a bright
child, he often showed more knowledge of his sur-
roundings than Ponkob, who was too busy exclaiming
over them, fighting them, manipulating them, to ob-
serve them properly. Songau's whole trend was to-
wards silence, quiet little activities of his own, slow
wondering at the things he found in the water or saw
in the sky. But Ponkob wanted an audience. The pair
would pass a whole hour together in a companionship
which could hardly be called co-operative play. Ponkob
would decide to push his canoe into the water, and call
Songau. Songau would go, help him for a minute,
wander away, find a stick, throw it into the water, swim
after it, apparently oblivious to Ponkob's continuous:
"Come and help me. Help me put the boat, put the
boat in the water. Songau, Songau, come here. What's
that? I'll fix it, this boat. Just me. Just me. It's
my boat. Oh, it's stuck. Songau!" At the tenth
"Songau ! " Songau would wander back, help him for a
minute, then lose interest and go off about his own
affairs. This would go on for an hour, Ponkob shout-

[ 144]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

ing, commanding, doing purposeful things, Songau say-
ing little and most of that to himself, only half co-
operating with Ponkob, losing interest half way through.
Ilan was a small girl who sometimes was present at
their play, sitting on the side lines, with her finger in
her mouth, hardly moving, rising only at an insistent
command and never remaining engaged in activity long.
If Ponkob were not there and Ilan and Songau played
together, Ilan emerged a little more from her shell,
and the two of them would meander about the shallows,
picking up his seaweeds, Songau occasionally comment-
ing on it to himself, "Mine — seaweed. It's mine"j
Ilan saying nothing and doing little.

Another type of association — a less common one —
was like that of Ponkob and Ngalowen. Ngalowen
was his sister, a year older than he, who had been
adopted in babyhood by their uncle, whom she called
father. But Ngamel, her true father, she addressed by
his first name and she called her true mother by the
mourning term, "One whose baby died while newborn."
Her adopted father was an older man, self-assured,
devoted to Ngalowen. His only son was nearly grown
and all the affection of his old age he expended on this
winning, adopted child, who at four was an accom-
plished coquette, the darling of all the men in the vil-
lage. Pwisio, her adopted father, was vain but not
talkative. He demanded a hearing when he spoke.
Ngalowen's picture of the world was of one which re-
sponded to her, made way for her, by virtue of her
mere presence. Any person who was not responding

[145]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

to her, every smile not directed at her, was anathema.
She was too vain to like the company of strong willed,
aggressive children, too accustomed to adulation to be
willing to lead a group of unaggressive ones. So she
played very little with other children, but spent most
of her time with her father or paddling or swimming
about the village by herself, looking for adults who
would pay attention to her. But when she wearied of
these precocious activities and wanted a good play in
the water, she turned for a playmate to Ponkob — he
was younger and less adept than she, and his running
line of chatter, his constant appeal to her, gave her the
needed sense of calling forth a response. Ponkob
meanwhile was perfectly contented with a companion
who let him talk and boss, and gave far more efficient
co-operation than did his crony, Songau. Ngalowen
carried her mania for personal recognition further than
any other child — she was the only child who usually
refused to draw. When she did draw, for each stroke
on paper, she made half a dozen self-conscious moves,
wasted the paper, ran about, climbed on adults' laps,
pouting, flirting, drawing attention to herself. Her
one foster brother had been away all her life so that
she had no competition from brothers and sisters.

Masa belonged to the silent, unaggressive type. She
had lost one eye in an attack of conjunctivitis and her
father had never cared as much for her as for her half-
brother, three years her senior. She had stayed with
her mother, a quiet, efficient woman without self-im-
portance or pretentiousness. Masa hardly ever spoke.

[146]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

She played about with the other children, in a small
canoe, waded contentedly about the edges of the little
islet, a round-faced homely child with a bad eye. Very
infrequently she would ask a question of an adult, never
of a child. She seemed to have no desire to make an
impression on other children, or to draw their attention
to herself. Her favorite companion was Posendruan, a
little boy with a club foot. His infirmity, which he
handled amazingly well, and his attachment to his mild-
faced young father made him unusually quiet and un-
aggressive. Older than Masa, he followed where she
aimlessly, unimpressively led. Yet Masa in a group
of grown people would participate in the conversation
in a completely adult manner. If a strange woman,
talking to her mother, would ask, "Has that woman
going by in the canoe ever been pregnant?" — after her
mother's negative answer, Masa would add, "The preg-
nant woman who was at our house has had her child j
father took sago to her husband," in a cool, clear little
voice. She never monopolised the conversation, only
contributed to it brief, apposite remarks when they
seemed called for. Her behaviour was in striking con-
trast to that of Ponkob, Songau, Pokus, Bopau, Piwen,
Ngalowen, Salaiyao and Kawa, all of whom regarded
a group of adults as an audience. If one or several
grown people entered their group, the children gave
up contending with one another and all concentrated on
gaining the adults' attention, using varied techniques:
Ponkob, Pokus and Manoi by rapid fire conversation j
Piwen by stubbornness and active intractability, Salai-

[147]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

yao by fits of temper; Ngalowen and Songau by flirta-
tiousness, and Kawa by persistent teasing for some par-
ticular object. Each of these techniques for gaining
attention was firmly fixed in the particular child j every
child of three had developed a definite line for dealing
with the adult world. And so fixed is the Manus tradi-
tion that the child should be the centre of the group,
that the children found their methods almost invariably
successful, even when directed towards the busier and
less docile women instead of the indulgent men.

This constant orientation towards an adult prevents
the development of co-operativeness among the small
children, but also makes them particularly amenable
to the leadership of older children. When a group
of five-year-olds are loitering, splashing, scuffling aim-
lessly about on the edges of an islet, it is easy for an
older child of nine or ten to come along and organise
a race or a game of ball. The organisation does not
last long among children less than six or seven, but
the ten-year-olds are indefatigable in attempting to
put over in the younger group the play methods of
their seniors. This again is a pattern taken from the
older men, who are always ready to act as referees,
cheer leaders, beasts of burden, in a children's game.
The more usual play group, in which there are round
games, races, tugs of war, etc., consists of one or two
older children and a mass of younger ones. The older
ones, lacking the docile adult psychology, act as tyrants,
choose sides, assign partners, decide who shall play and
who not, and the others agree good-naturedly. The

[148]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY

habit of being taught and ordered about in play by-
older children is fixed quite young.

But it is not until the growing children begin to feel
the adult world as slightly inimical, until there comes
over them a faint premonition of the subservience which
must supersede their present gay insouciance, that group
consciousness forms. A boy of ten drifts — now teach-
ing a baby to count, now organising a game of "kick
ball" among the eight-year-olds, turning from that to
a canoe race with a number of age mates, joining two
older boys to chase a group of small girls j home, to
stamp his foot and scream until food is cooked specially
for him, back in the lagoon, to wade placidly about all
alone with a toy pinnace.

This easy give and take, group play, partnership, in-
dividuality activity, now as teacher, now as leader, now
as slavey, gives the child a maximum opportunity to
develop those personality traits set in babyhood. A
greater preference for following than for leading, for
playing with the baby, or tagging after an older boy,
does not set him off from his fellows, because of the
lack of age norms and fixed age groups. Each child's
active potentialities are stimulated to the full.

The result of this form of social life is seen in the
fourteen-year-old boys, not yet sullen and shamed, har-
ried by financial obligations, nor struggling for free-
dom. They are attractive, self-sufficient children, with-
out feelings of inferiority, afraid of nothing, abashed
by nothing.

The capacities of this group were shown when our

[ 149]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

household was turned over to five boys, Kilipak, Pomat,
Taumapwe, Kapeli, and Yesa. Kilipak was cook and
head boy, Pomat, butler, Taumapwe, bedroom boy,
Kapeli, cleaner of fish, hewer of wood, and drawer of
water, Yesa, dish washer and kitchen knave. With
hardly any directions or advice — for I wished to see
what they made of the strange situation — they ran the
house, divided up the work, scrupulously parcelled out
tasks and rewards, with a minimum of quarrelling.
Primitive children, unused to any type of apparatus,
unused to punctuality, unused to regular work, they
came regularly day after day, learned to handle lamps,
take temperatures, handle a stop watch, wash negatives,
expose the printing frame for sun prints, fill and light
a tilly lamp. In a few years their culture will have
claimed them, turned their minds to commerce, tangled
up their emotions in a web of shame and hostility. The
roots of their future are already laid in their lack of
affection for any one, their prudery, their awed respect
for property, their few enjoined avoidances. Emo-
tionally they were warped in early childhood to a form
of egocentricity, against which the fluid child world is
helpless j but in active intelligent adjustment to the
material world, they have had years of excellent train-
ing.

[150]

IX

MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

THE father treats his young children with very
slight regard for diflFerences in sex. Girls or boys,
they sleep in their father's arms, ride on his back, beg
for his pipe, and purloin betel from his shoulder bag.
When they are three or four he makes them small
canoes, again regardless of sex. Neither boys nor girls
wear any clothing except tiny bracelets, anklets, neck-
laces of dog's teeth, and beaded belts. These are usually
only worn on state occasions, as continued wear chafes
the skin and produces an ugly eruption. The adults
emphasise sex differences from birth in their speech —
a boy is a nat, a girl is a ndrakeln^ at an hour of age.
Before birth only is the term nut used to denote child.
These terms are used so frequently by women — who
are likely to wax voluble about "boy of mine," or "girl
of mine" — that a child of three will gravely correct the
misapplication of a term to the baby of the house.

But before three, no other distinctions are made be-
tween the sexes. At about three maternal pride makes
a new bid for the small girl. A tiny curly grass skirt
is fashioned with eager hands and much comment, and
the solemn-eyed baby arrayed in it for a feast day.
The assumption of this costume unites the daughter
with the mother in a way that has never happened be-

[151]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

fore. Her mother is addressed as fetiy woman, but she
is a ndrakeiny similarly her father is called a kamal,
and her brother is a nat. The differences between her
body and her brother's is obvious, as both sexes go
naked. But as adults are clothed and most prudish
about uncovering, and her undeveloped breasts are
more like her father's than her mother's, mere anatomy
does not give her nearly as good a clue to sex as does
clothing.

The children were asked to draw pictures of men
and women, or of girls and boysj where differences
were shown — far more often they were ignored —
the male anatomy was drawn correctly and the female
was indicated by drawing a grass skirt.

From the moment when the baby girl and her
slightly older sisters are dressed identically with their
mother, although it is only for an hour, the girls begin
to turn to their mothers more, to cling to their older
sisters.

Little girls are not forced to wear grass skirts until
they are seven or eight j they put them on, go swim-
ming, get them wet, put on green leaves instead, lose
the leaves, run about naked for a while, go home and
put on dry skirts. Or they will take their grass skirts
off and wade through the water at low tide, grass skirts
high and dry on top of their curly heads. Not until
twelve or thirteen is the sense of shame at being un-
covered properly developed.

At about the age of three little boys begin to punt
their fathers to the lee of the island which all the men

[152]

MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

of the village use as a latrine. Girls and women never
go there, and the boy child learns thus early to slip
apart from the women to micturate.

But little boys' great realisation of maleness comes
when they learn the phallic athleticism practised by
their elders in the dance. A child grown suddenly pro-
ficient wriggles and prances for days and the adults
applaud him salaciously. This is learned at about the
age of three or four. Soon after this age, the boys are
given bows and arrows and small fish spears; very tiny
girls and boys wander about the lagoon at low tide play-
ing with sticks and stones, imitating the more purpose-
ful play of the older children without regard to sex.
But little girls are never given real fishing toys. They
are given small canoes and are as proficient in paddling
and punting as the boys, but they never sail toy canoes
of their own. From the time of this differentiation in
play and dress the sex groups draw apart a little. There
is no parental ban upon playing together nor is there
any very deep antagonism between the groups. The
line is drawn more in terms of activities. Round games
and water games are played by both groups j fist fights
as frequently cross sex lines as not j on moonlight nights
boys and girls race shrieking over the mud flat of the
lagoon laid bare by tide.

But as the adolescent girls are drawn more and more
Into the feminine activities of their households, the
twelve-year-olds, eight-year-olds, five-year-olds, tend
to follow in a long straggling line. When a girl reaches
puberty all the younger girls down to the age of eight

[IJ3]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

or nine go to sleep in her house for a month. This
draws the girls closer together. There was one little
island in the village reserved for the women. Here
they went occasionally to perform various industrial
tasks, and here on a grass plot at the peaked summit
of the small steep cone, the little girls used to dance
at sunset, taking ofiF their grass skirts and waving them
like plumes over their heads, shouting and circling, in
a noisy revelry, high above the village.

The boys would be off stalking fish in the reedy
shallows and sternly schooling the crowd of small boys
who followed in their wake. Between the boys' group
and the girls' there would be occasional flare ups, bat-
tles with sea animal squirt guns or swift flight and pur-
suit. Very occasionally, as we have seen, they united
in a semi-amorous play, choosing mates, building houses,
making mock payments for their brides, even lying
down cheek to cheek, in imitation of their parents. I
believe that fear of the spirit wrath over sex prevented
this play from ever developing into real sex play. Each
group of children believe that the young people who
are now grown engaged in much more intriguing play
when they were young. But as this golden age theme
is investigated, each group pushes it back a generation
further to the days just before their time when the
spirits were not so easily angered. This play is always
in groups. There is no opportunity for two children
to slip away together j the group is too clamorous of all
its members.

With the child's increased consciousness of belong-

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MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

ing to a sex group and greater identification with adults
of the same sex comes a rearrangement of the family
picture. Up to the time a little girl is five or six, she
accompanies her father as freely as would her brother.
She sleeps with her father, sometimes until she is seven
or eight. By this time she is entering the region of
tabu. If she is not engaged herself, younger sisters and
cousins may be engaged, and she will be on terms of
avoidance with the boys to whom they are betrothed.
If she is engaged herself, there will likely be several
men in the village from whom she must hide her face.
She is no longer the careless child who rode upon her
father's back into the very sanctuary of male life, the
ship island. More and more her father tends to leave
her at home for her younger brothers and sisters, or
to go more staidly, babyless, about his business. But
she is used to adult attention, dependent upon the sense
of pleasant power which it gives her. Gradually de-
serted by her father, she comes to identify herself either
with her mother or with some older woman of her
kindred. It is curious how much more frequent this
latter adjustment is, except where the mother is a
widow. It is as if the girl had so thoroughly passed
over her mother in preference to her father that she
could not go back and pick up the dropped thread.
These attachments to older women have nothing of the
nature of a "crush" in themj they are very definitely
in terms of the family picture. Often a grandmother
is chosen. The older women are freer to teach the girls
beadwork, to start them at work for their trousseaux.

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

The younger women are more preoccupied with baby
tending, which does not interest the little girls and in
which their help is not enlisted. Little girls have no
dolls and no pattern of playing with babies. We
bought some little wooden statues from a neighbouring
tribe and it was the boys who treated them as dolls and
crooned lullabies to them.

This shift is not made without some unhappiness and
rebellion. The little girls kick off their grass skirts and
rebel against the domestic tasks in which their more fre-
quent presence at home involves them. Gathering fire-
wood, fetching water, stringing beads, — these are dull
activities compared with following their father about
and playing noisy games in the lagoon. At play with
the other children they are still gay, but those who are
engaged are ridden with anxiety. A calico veil or a
pandanus rain mat is a clumsy thing to carry about,
but the fourteen-year-old who leaves hers behind her
may find herself crouching for fifteen minutes in the
wet hull of a canoe, head bowed between her knees,
while her betrothed's father stands near by, chatting un-
concernedly. For it is the women and the very young
boys who must make the positive moves of avoidance j
a grown man will always stand his ground unconcern-
edly while a group of women flutter away like fright-
ened birds. If the young girl goes to the house of a
friend she has no guarantee that at any moment the
cry of "Here comes a tabu relative of yours," will not
send her scurrying from the house, conversation inter-
rupted and beadwork forgotten. Only in her own

[■56]

MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

house will she receive adequate warning. If she goes
on a fishing expedition, the same thing may happen.
So the happy friendships formed among the ten- and
twelve-year-olds tend to break up. Association between
older girls is too troublesome. Also, any absence from
home and the company of reliable relatives, is looked
upon with suspicion.

All this is reflected even in the play group. Solemn-
eyed children of eight will comment upon the free and
easy ways of their comrades, and add, "But we mar-
ried women must sit at home and do beadwork to give
to our husbands' sisters." More with their mothers
now, they become increasingly conscious of the speech
tabus, and learn to avoid all the words tabu to the elder
women of the group, remarking proudly, when ques-
tioned, "No J that is not my tabu, it is my grand-
mother's. But I help my grandmother with her tabu."
It is the small girls who become conscious earliest of the
social organisation, and who know all the engagements
in the group. "Kutan is going to marry a boy in Patusi.
Pikewas was engaged but there was a seance, and they
took away the engagement." This type of running
social comment is never volunteered by boys, and
usually they do not have the necessary information to
make the simplest comments on the social organisation.

At menstruation the girl's pact with her sex is sealed
forever. She learns that not only must she endure
first menstruation, but the strange fact, the fact that
no man in all Manus knows, that she will menstruate
every moon and must hide all trace or knowledge of

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her condition from every one. Here is a new handicap
to a free untrammelled life. The girl is not told that
the menstruation of immarried girls is a secret which
no man knows. Indeed, few Manus women realise
clearly that this is a complete secret. The sense of
shame is so deep that the subject is hidden away with-
out the mental process being rationalised. The mother
has only to communicate this shame to her daughter
and the secret is safe for another generation. If the
children were told it as a secret, some one might have
betrayed it long ago. But secrecy enjoined as a shamed
precaution works infallibly. Manus men, told that
among other peoples girls not only menstruate initially,
at puberty, but every moon, wed or unwed, until the
menopause, simply shrug and reply, "Manus women
are different."

But this close identification of the girls with the
women is neither voluntary nor enthusiastic. For the
women of her group she has no such enthusiasm as she
had for her father, her father who still is fond of her
but is separated from her by so many necessary ret-
icences. If the women huddle closely together, it is
as prisoners, under a common yoke of precaution and
tabu. But the early conditioning to receive rewards
from men, to look for affectionate care and response
from men, still lingers in the girls' minds. How much
they confuse this partially lost picture with the hus-
bands they are to marry, it is hard to say. Marriage
is of course identified with tabus and avoidances, with
the life they are leading now, not with the happier life

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MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

of childhood. But a girl's comments upon marriage are
placidly expectant, as if a little of the peace of child-
hood coloured them. The disappointment is all the
ruder when marriage comes. In the home of her hus-
band, her fellow females are enemies and her husband
regards her as fit for forced intercourse, child-bearing,
and housework. Nor can she reproduce her relation-
ship to her father in her relationship to her children,
for they belong to a different clan, are more her hus-
band's than hers. And never in her life has she learned
to know shared emotion, from the days when her father
and mother fought over her cradle.

When the small boy wearies of riding on his father's
back, he wanders away to play with his companions, but
he is never thrust away by his father, nor forced away
by convention. The relationship between fathers and
sons of six and seven is particularly satisfactory. The
child has learned motor control and respect for prop-
erty— there are no more unpleasant lessons to learn.
Indeed, these lessons are principally taught by the
mother, in the child's first eighteen months. To the
father fall all the pleasanter tasks. He treats his six-
year-old son like a tyrannous and favourite boon com-
panion, indulges his every whim, gaily, as if it were
his greatest delight.

Pokenau and Matawei presented a most attractive
picture. The mother was occupied with a new baby,
and Matawei was his father's constant companion.
Pokenau had given him, as guardian spirit, the spirit
of his grandfather Gizikau. Matawei knew that the

[159]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

skull of his grandfather hung in the wooden bowl near
the door, while the skull of Sori, his father's guardian
ghostly elder brother, was kept in the other bowl.
Father and son used to laugh about their spirits,
threaten each other with the spirits' wrath. Pokenau
would tease Matawei, saying Gizikau's skull was so old
it would fall to pieces, and Matawei would make gay
rebuttal. If Matawei awoke to find his father gone
fishing without him, his wail sounded through the vil-
lage. For his mother he had not even tolerance, but
his father he followed everywhere.

If his father went out in the evening, Matawei ac-
companied him and fell asleep at his feet. When the
conversation was finished, his father lifted him on his
shoulder and bore him home, still sleeping, to rest by
his side until dawn. Matawei had mastered whole pas-
sages of pidgin, and went about reciting them in imita-
tion of his father's truculent manner. One day Poke-
nau struck his wife and she fled from the house with
the two young children. All day he was in a flutter
of anxiety for fear Matawei would follow his mother.
There would be food with his mother. Pokenau had
no sisters, and his uncle's aged widow had gone with
his wife, for it would have been improper for her to
remain alone with him. There was no one to cook.
Perhaps Matawei would be hungry in the fireless, cheer-
less house. But the next morning Pokenau appeared
beaming. Matawei had elected to stay with him. He
reported his happiness as proudly as a lover relates his
triumph over his mistress's heart.

[i6o]

MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

But the slightly older boys spend less time with their
fathers, more time with other boys. They grow tired
of the role of demanding spectator and plunge into ac-
tivity. Any difficulty sends them back again, crying for
sympathy. So the boys have no sense of being pushed
out of their father's affections. Their fathers are there,
glorious but humble before their sons, waiting to give
all that is asked. And the fathers demand nothing
in return J no item of work, no little chore is asked of
them. Only at sea are they ever made to perform
tasks and this is marine discipline, not parental exac-
tion. The boys, spending less time with adults than
do the girls, know far less of the social organisation.

The relationship between the sexes becomes more
complicated as the young people grow older. The en-
gaged girls avoid some youths as in-laws, some as pos-
sible seducers. With the others, their relatives, they
are free to go about the village, joke, exchange pres-
ents, and non-embarrassing confidences. Here is laid
the foundation of the strong brother-and-sister tie
which lasts through life. The only feminine society
permitted young men is that of "sisters" for whom they
must show tenderness and respect, and "cross cousins,"
with whom they are allowed to engage in rough, semi-
sexual play. During this period the threefold division
of attitudes towards women which is to govern a man's
thinking all his life is developed. For sisters tender-
ness, solicitude, a sense of mutual obligation, the duty
of helping each other economically are emphasised.
*We are brother and sister. He gives me food, and

ri6i]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

I give him beadwork. We work for one another.
When he dies I will lament for him a beautiful la-
ment." So a woman will describe her relation to her
brother. "It is well to have sisters who will make
beadwork for you and wail you well at your death,"
say the men. "Unfortunate is the man who has no sis-
ters." When the son of Talikatin seduced an engaged
girl in Taui, it was the girPs brother who attacked her
furiously with a wooden pillow, declaring he would kill
first her and then himself. This is the only emotional
tie which is truly reciprocal, for the equally strong tie
between father and child is very one-sided in its em-
phasis.

Furthermore, this brother and sister relationship pro-
vides a pleasant outlet for puritanical feelings j sex for-
bidden, the community approving, a slight sentimen-
tality is permitted. If the relation between brother and
sister seems to us a little commercial, with a strong
flavour of beadwork and sago about It, it should be re-
membered that where wealth is the dominant interest,
loyal assistance in matters of wealth is the strongest of
bonds. It is comparable to the feeling of an American
whom I once heard define "a friend" as "a man who
will lend you any amount of money without security."
To his sister's verandah goes the man who needs finan-
cial aid and he does not go in vain.

From this brother-and-sister relationship specific
mention of sex is sternly excluded. As the Manus
phrase it, "A father may tell his daughter that her
grass skirt is awry, but her brother may not. However,

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MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

if her grass skirt is often awry, he may upbraid her
formally for her carelessness." Similarly, a brother
may discuss with his sister the financial details of her
marriage, but when she flees to his protection after a
marital quarrel, he asks no questions. The relation-
ship upon which adult men and women rely for com-
fort, support, understanding, is a relationship from
which sex is specifically debarred. One possible com-
ponent of the rounded attitude which we expect be-
tween husband and wife has been extracted and labelled
"non-sexual" and "belonging to the sister."

The feminine cross cousin receives yet another atti-
tude which a man might entertain towards his wife.
This is the element of play, of light laughter, of famil-
iarity. Her he can accuse of marriage with impossible
mates, to her he can attribute conception and childbirth
— points which he can never mention to his own wife.
He can seize her by her short curls, or grasping her
under the armpits swing her roughly back and forth.
He can hold her pointed breasts in his hands. All this
is play, which must not be carried too far, or the spirits
will be angry. But it is nevertheless permitted. Habits
of rough and tumble sex play, established in youth,
persist into the maturer years, and it is a curious sight
to see a stout burgher of forty playfully mauling a
worn widow, or making sprightly accusations against
her character. Among the few and scattered sex of-
fences which outrage the spirits and terrify the living,
occasional liaisons between cross cousins are recorded,
but they seem few enough to be non-significant. I

[163]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

found nothing to suggest that this sex play sets up pat-
terns which have a tendency to work themselves out
in more complete sex relations. Rather another split
is accomplished: playfulness and easy casual familiarity
are marked as inappropriate to the sex relation by their
permissible presence in this cross cousin relationship,
where sex is tabued.

The effect of this distribution of possible sex atti-
tudes upon the marriage relation itself is hard to over-
estimate.* A man gives the allegiance of dependence
to his father, occasionally to his mother, mutual affec-
tion and feeling of reciprocity and co-operativeness to
his sister, playfulness and easy give and take to his
female cross cousin, anxious, solicitous, sedulous care to
his children. For his wife he reserves — what? Un-
relieved by romantic fictions or conventions of wooing,
untouched by tenderness, unbulwarked by co-operative-
ness and good feeling as between partners, unhelped by
playfulness, preliminary play or intimacy, sex is con-
ceived as something bad, inherently shameful, some-
thing to be relegated to the darkness of night. Great
care is taken that the children should never be wit-
nesses. In the one-room houses it is impossible to ac-
complish this, but the children soon learn the desirabil-
ity of dissembling their knowledge. Their clandestine

* It is interesting to compare these disassociated sex attitudes in
this primitive setting where arranged marriage is the backbone of
the social order, with the conditions in Europe, where prostitution,
homosexuality and adultery all drain off emotional attitudes in-
compatible with arranged marriages. For a vivid analysis of Euro-
pean conditions, see Floyd Dell's "Love in the Machine Age."

[164]

MANUS Al^ITUDES TOWARDS SEX

knowledge is as shamed, as marred by a sense of sin,
as is their parents' indulgence. Children sleeping in an-
other house will say formally to their host or hostess
upon leaving a house, "We slept last night. We saw
and heard nothing." But children of six are sufficiently
sophisticated so that one small boy remarked about a
marital quarrel, "Why doesn't he copulate with his wife
instead of beating her all the time?"

Married women are said to derive only pain from
intercourse until after they have borne a child. The
implications of this statement are obvious. They
confide little in each other. Each conceals her own
humiliating miserable experience as did the Puritan
women of the Victorian era. Every woman, however,
successfully conveys to her growing daughters her own
affective reaction to the wearisome abomination which
is sex. And most women welcome children because it
gives their husbands a new interest and diverts their
unwelcome attentions from themselves. The husband's
growing interest in the child which often means that
he will sleep all night with the child clasped in his
arms, is welcomed as a diversion. As one woman
phrased the common attitude, "That house is good in
which there are two children, one to sleep with the
husband on one side of the house, one to sleep with the
wife on the other. Then husband and wife do not
sleep together."

Variations of the sexual picture are slight. The
spirits are not concerned at all with any aspect of sex
which does not involve heterosexual activity on the part

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

of Manus women. All other types of sex behaviour are
enveloped in the prevailing atmosphere of shame, but
escape the stigma of sin. Masturbation is practised by
the children but always in solitude, and solitude is hard
to find. It seems to have no important psychological
concomitants J engendering as it does no very special
shame in a society where every act of excretion is
lamentable and to be most carefully hidden. The girls'
superficial masturbation does not seem to diminish their
frigidity at marriage. Homosexuality occurs in both
sexes, but rarely. The natives recognise it, and take
only a laughing count of it, if it occurs between unmar-
ried boys, in which cases it is sometimes exploited pub-
licly in the boys' houses. Sodomy is the only form of
which I received any account. Homosexual relations
between women are rare and frowned on as inappro-
priate. I neither saw nor heard of any definite in-
verts, but mental instability in several cases frequently
took a sexual form, with manifestations of exhibition-
ism and gross obscenity.

The utilisation of other erogenous zones, and varia-
tions of the sex act in heterosexual relations do not seem
to occur. (All my comments on sex must be so qual-
ified because in such a puritanical society it is difficult
to rely upon any kind of information about sex.) Sex
play is barred out, because of the specialisation of the
cross cousin picture. A woman asked if her husband
is permitted to touch her breast indignantly replies, "Of
course not; that (privilege) belongs to my cross cousin
only." The unwillingness of the women and the un-

[i66]

MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

tutored brutality of the men give little encouragement
to experimentation.

Unmarried men of over twenty are a definite menace
to the inflexible sex code of the village. Affairs with
young girls or with married women are almost the in-
evitable result of an unattached young man in the vil-
lage. In Peri there were two such youths, one a boy
of low mentality, brutal, unreliable, dishonest, the son
of a shiftless father, descendant of a shiftless line. His
short-lived affair with his cross cousin Lauwiyan had
caused the illness of little Popitch, brought the stately
Lauwiyan to shame and disgrace. He also prated of
affairs with two visiting girls. Unbetrothed because
his father was so poor and improvident, he was a real
problem in the village. The other youth was Tchokal,
lately fled from the village which accused him of adul-
tery with the head man's wife, which had caused her
death. He likewise was unbetrothed: no one was will-
ing to give his daughter or even to enter into nego-
tiations with him because he refused to confess his sin.

For the Manus carry the doctrine of confession to
its logical conclusion. A sin confessed, is a sin wiped
out. There is no word for virgin, and disgrace follow-
ing confession is temporary. An arranged marriage is
not broken off because of the lapse from virtue of the
bride j instead the marriage date is hastened. It is the
concealed sin only which angers the spirits j a sin con-
fessed and paid for in a fine to the mortal wards of the
avenging spirits is no more cause for illness and death.
A man will describe an affair with a woman in the

[167]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

quietest, most impersonal terms, giving name, date, and
place, if he can add something like, "Later on my
brother was ill. I confessed my sin and paid for it
and my brother got all right again."

To the sinner who steadfastly refuses confession the
community turns a cold, distrustful face. To make an
alliance with such a one is courting death. So Tchokal
goes unwed, but for the time being too hurt to be dan-
gerous. Some day the people say he will marry a
widow. He can never hope to get a young wife now.

The obligation to confess sins committed is accom-
panied by an obligation to confess sins accidentally dis-
covered. Thus when Paleao was a small boy he climbed
up unannounced into his cousin's house, only to find his
cousin, a man of thirty-five, copulating with his uncle's
wife, a woman of fifty. Paleao climbed hastily down
and slipped away, trembling with shame and fear.
Where would the wrath of the spirits fall? He had
not long to wait. In a week his cousin fell ill of cerebral
malaria. He lay at the point of death, too ill to con-
fess his own sin, and his uncle's wife had gone on a
visit to another village. The ten-year-old boy proudly
rose to the occasion and "saved his cousin's life." "Had
I not done so," says he, "he would surely have died
and as a spirit, angry over his death, he would have
killed me, who had known the truth and concealed it."

Sometimes the consequences of sin become so com-
plex that the ordinary marriage arrangements are upset.
So it was with Luwil and Molung. These two lived
in the same house, the house of Luwil's mother's

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MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

brother and Molung's father's sister. Both were be-
trothed. Mutchin, the head of the house, went off on
a long expedition to Mok, in a canoe heavily laden
with sago. While he was away and the house in charge
of a deaf old woman, Luwil and Molung slept together.
This went on for three nights undiscovered and then
the sounds of mourning broke out in the village. A
canoe had come in from Mok and reported that Mut-
chin had never arrived. Drums were beaten as for the
dead, a dreadful wailing sounded through the village,
three search parties set out at once. For two days doubt
and misery lay over the village. Then news was
brought that after being overturned in a gale, losing
all their food, and floating helplessly under water for
two days, the canoe had arrived safely. Neither Mo-
lung nor Luwil doubted that their sin was responsible j
afraid to face the angry Mutchin, they did a most un-
usual thing, they eloped to the shelter of an inland vil-
lage where Luwil had a friend.

Angry and disgruntled as their elders were, they
ratified the marriage with an exchange of property. To
leave the young couple living in sin for another day
would invite further disaster. By a quick rearrange-
ment of debts, a marriage was planned between the
fiancee of Luwil and the fiance of Molung, so that
some of the cherished financial arrangements were saved
from the wreckage. But such rewarding recklessness
is rare: it is seldom that one has good friends among an-
other tribe, and no Manus home would dare to give
the eloping pair shelter. The offended spirit of that

[169]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

house would immediately punish the inmates. Luwil
and Molung were one of the rare cases where husband
and wife get on fairly happily together, perhaps be-
cause the affair began by their own choice.

The observance of the sex mores of the community
is based upon no respect for personal relations, no
standard of love or of loyalty, but simply upon prop-
erty rights and fear of the spirits. The ideal of every
man in the community is the golden age, which each
believes to be just a generation behind him, when the
spirits took no interest in mortal amours and whenever
one met a woman alone, one could take her by the hair.
Rape, the swift and sudden capture of an unwilling
victim, is still the men's ideal.

They tell with gusto the story of how Pomalat got
his large, dour wife. She had had a mixed career:
seduced by her cousin, carried ofF by a man from Ram-
butchon, then returned to her village, she knew far
more of sex than did the average woman. Her uncle
wanted her to marry Pomalat, a slender, under-sized,
indeterminate youth. This she refused to do. Now
an unwilling widow, and as such Ngalowen ranked,
commands a higher price than a willing one, possibly to
compensate her relatives for their troubles. Ngalowen
refused to marry Pomalat. Pomalat did not wish to
make a higher payment for her. Finally he and three
other youths captured her and carried her off for three
days with them on the mainland. After the third day,
the men say sagely, "She was no longer unwilling."
This only happened once within memory but it ap-

[170]

MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

pealed to all the men as an excellent way to make the
women see reason.

In the village there were only two women of bad
character — one was Ngapan, one of Poiyo's two wives,
the other was the widow Main. Ngapan had had a
secret intrigue with Selan and become pregnant. The
women accused her of pregnancy but she flouted their
questions, affirming that a magical charm had made her
body swell. Then Selan's small sister fell ill and in
desperation he confessed to his cousin, only insisting
that his sin be not proclaimed abroad until after he had
left the village. When Ngapan's pregnancy became
unmistakable, her family dressed her as a bride and
took her to the house of Selan's older brother. But
the older brother, advised of their purpose, barred the
door, and fled to the bush. The rejected bride had to
be taken home again. A little girl was born and died
soon after. The spirits could not be expected to pro-
tect such a brazen child. For two years Ngapan lived
sullenly at home and then became involved in an illicit
affair with Poiyo, who already had one wife, a dull,
industrious woman. Again she became pregnant. Her
family threatened to take the matter to the white man's
court and Poiyo married her as his second wife, legit-
imising his son, and saddling a licensed quarrel upon
the village. The little boy was regarded as legitimate,
so there was not a single illegitimate child in the village.

The other woman. Main, had been five times wid-
owed. Her only child had died at birth. Her first
husband had died, her second she had left, her third

[171]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

had taken her by force. From him she had returned
to the second, who died soon after. A fourth and fifth,
first as intrigues, later solemnised, had followed. Her
path was strewn with infidelities. Of the Pontchal clan
only two men still lived, all the rest had died in the
influenza epidemic. In native belief the two who lived,
lived only because they had confessed to what the others
no doubt had concealed, intrigues with Main. She was
a jolly, impudent woman, self-sufficient, sensuous, sure
of herself, devoted to various nieces and nephews —
those who remained after their brothers and sisters had
died for her sins. She was a little stupid and went
about at night In fear of the spirits of her five dead
husbands.

She would have been a woman of easy virtue, quick
compliance, in any society. Given her reputation, ac-
quired early in youth, the young men gravitated to-
wards her, the older men boasted that they had resisted
her evil attempts, for had she not killed off all Pontchal
and would she not like to finish off their clans also?
Her venlality was regarded not a sin of the flesh but
as a definite malicious attempt directed against man-
kind. She was the incarnate wicked feminine prin-
ciple of the early Christian fathers. Where frigidity
up to first childbirth and distaste and weariness with
sex were the rule, and illness and death followed sex
indulgence, men could only conceive her as a sort of
pursuing fury, and hope for strength to avoid her.
But a Manus community Is too democratic, too unor-

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MANUS ATTITUDES TOWARDS SEX

ganised to make any concerted move against such a
social evil as Main.

The whole picture is one of a puritan society, rigidly
subduing its sex life to meet supernaturally enforced
demands, demands which are closely tied up with its
property standards. To interfere with marriage ar-
rangements for which thousands of dog-s' teeth have
been paid, is blasphemy. Accompanying this banish-
ment of the sex motive in life are various other social
traits. Casual profanity takes the form of references
to the private parts or sex adventures of the dead. The
commonest of these expressions which fall from every
lip are, "Inside my mother's vagina," and "Copulate
with my father who is dead." And this is a society
where the sex activity of the living is only referred to
between jesting relatives or by outraged elders dis-
pensing punishment.

Dress and ornamentation, removed from any pos-
sibility of pleasing the opposite sex, become a matter
of economic display and people only dress up at eco-
nomic feasts. Sweet-smelling herbs are seldom used.
Faces are painted in mourning and as a defence against
inimical spirits. The elaborate forms of ornamentation
are interpreted either as money or as mourning. Al-
though the people are moderately cleanly because of
their water lives, they are seldom spick-and-span. The
young men, in the boys' house, occasionally dress up,
piling their compliant hair into great structures on top
of their heads, winding necks and arms with leaves. So
dressed, they parade through the village, beating their

[173]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

drums the louder, as if to drown the aimlessness of
their proceedings. There is no word for love in the
language. There are no love songs, no romantic myths,
no merely social dances. Characteristically, the Manus
dance only when a great deal of property is given away,
and after a period of mourning, "to shake the dust
from the house floor." An hibiscus in the hair is a
sign of magic making, not of love making. The village
lies fair in the moonlight, the still lagoon holds the
shadow of houses and trees, but there is no sound of
songs or dancing. The young people are within doors.
Their parents are quarrelling on the verandas or hold-
ing seances within doors to search out sin.

[174]

X

THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

PUBERTY for girls means the beginning of adult
life and responsibility, the end of play, careless com-
panionship, happy hours of desultory ranging through
the village. The tabus begun some years earlier if a
girl has been betrothed as a child, now settle upon al-
most every girl, for there are seldom any girls past
puberty unbetrothed. But puberty does not mean the
beginning of a new life, only the final elimination of
play elements from the old life. The girl performs
no new tasks, she simply does more beadwork, works
more sago, does more fishing. She makes no new
friends, but she sees less and less of her old friends.

The hour of puberty itself is marked by ceremony
and public observance. When the girl has her first
menses, her father or guardian (that is, the. elder male
relative who is bearing the onus of her marriage ex-
changes) throws great numbers of coconuts into the
sea. All the neighbours' children leap in after them
shouting, struggling with one another for the nuts. So
word circulated quickly through the village that Kiteni
had attained puberty. The event is regarded without
embarrassment as important to the adults because a
whole round of ceremonial is set up, important to the

[^5]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

children because a sort of house party will be instituted
in the house of the pubescent girl.

Kiteni herself was placed in a little cubby hole made
of mats near the centre of the house. About her neck
were dogs' teeth, her hair was combed to a glossy per-
fection. For five days she had to sit in this little room
without stirring thence.

She might not eat puddings of taro leaves or the
pudding known as tchutchuy taro, the fruit called img^
or shell fish. All that she ate had to be prepared for
her on a separate fire, in separate cooking vessels, by
her mother. She might not talk aloud, nor might any
one address her in a loud voice, or pronounce her name
audibly. Every night most o£ the girls of the village,
especially the younger ones, came to sleep with her.
They came after sunset and lay down to sleep on the
floor slats, one recumbent little figure curled close to
another. At dawn they slipped away before breakfast,
for a family has no obligation to feed this horde of
visitors. If young married women come to sleep, they
are fed before leaving. During the day some of the
girls returned to play cat's cradle with Kiteni, or simply
to lie contentedly upon the floor murmuring scraps of
song.

Meanwhile all the elders of Kiteni's household were
very busy. Each day tall black pots of bulukolj a coco-
nut soup, had to be taken to the family of her be-
trothed. Extra hot stones were dropped in just as the
canoe reaches the house, so that the gift arrived in a
flare of steam. (Throughout the observances for pu-

[176]

THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

berty runs the pattern of heat and fire.) The family
of her betrothed had to bring fish each day, her future
mother-in-law bringing it to the house platform at
dawn, but not entering the house. Kiteni^s own brothers
and paternal uncles had to fish for herj the heads of
these fish were eaten by her father's mother and her
father's sisters. After she has eaten the bodies of the
fish, the skeletons were hung up above her head, as a
boast to visitors of the family's success in fishing.
These men had to set to work to make sago, to trade
for sago, to travel overseas to collect debts of sago due
to them. All of those who were parties to Kiteni's
projected marriage were involved. KitenI had a brother
in the island of Mokj he had to be warned to prepare
his quota of sago. This could be no mean offering.
For Kiteni was to marry Kaloi, the younger brother
of the dead Panau. Paleao, a man of great economic
consequence, was financing the marriage. Every inland
trade partner of the family was importuned for sagoj
the men worked sago by day and fished by night to
obtain fish to pay for more sago.

At the end of five days the first feast for relieving
the girl of her tabus was held. This was a feast looked
forward to by all the girls and regarded by the men
as particularly daring and spectacular behaviour on the
part of womankind. It was held after nightfall. A
great quantity of bamboo torches and large lumps of
raw sago were prepared. The house was crowded with
women and girls and brightly lit by torches piled in
each of the four fireplaces. On this particular occa-

[ 177]

/

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

sion last to arrive was Kiteni's paternal grandmother.
Kiteni, who giggled and held back, was bidden to stand
up and run the length of the house pursued by her
grandmother, waving a burning torch over her. But
Kiteni ran without conviction and the whole party
laughed as the grandmother perfunctorily pursued the
girl. The torch was held overhead as the grandmother
pronounced an incantation over her.

Meanwhile the girls seized the bowls of raw sago
and the bundles of burning torches, loaded them upon
a large canoe, and set off through the village. As they
went they waved the torches and showered sparks into
the sea. Three small girls encountered on the way
were bidden to splash vigorously as the canoe passed.
At the houses of brothers, grandparents, uncles, a cake
of sago and a torch were left on the platform. The
village streets were empty of canoes. Attracted by the
shouting or by the gleam of the torches reflected
through the floor slats, people came to the doors and
peered out, shouting hilarious greeting. The last sago
distributed, the last glowing torch laid quickly on a
doorstep, the party returned, only slightly sobered, to
the house of Kiteni where a feast was spread.

Kiteni was now free to walk about the house and to
go out on the platform or into the sea near by, in the
dark or in the rain. She still was not allowed to go
about the village or leave the house when the sun was
shining.

Seven days later a second feast was held, "The Feast
for the Ending of Coconut Soup." Three kinds of

[178]

THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

food, a taro and coconut oil pudding, cakes of sago
and coconut, and puddings of taro and grated coconut,
were prepared. The women of Kiteni's family took
these, carefully laid out in carved bowls on canoe plat-
forms, to the house of Kiteni's future mother-in-law,
who received them formally and distributed them to all
her sisters-in-law who were to help with the return pay-
ment of beadwork. For each bowl of food a bead belt
was expected in return. This ended the exchange of
soup and fish.

Five days later a third feast was held. This is the
most thoroughly feminine and most amiable feast held
in Peri. No debts are contracted, no old debts paid
off. It is a feminine feast for all the women of the
clan and all the women who have married into it. At
the centre of the house with a mat spread before her
sat Kiteni, the pramatafiy literally, "female owner," of
the feast. Over the distribution presided the wife of
her uncle, who was paying for her marriage. About
the fireplaces sat the women of the clan. At one end
of the house sat her mother's sisters-in-law, at the
other, her young sisters-in-law who had married her
brothers." Bowls of food were set aside for the girls
betrothed to sons of the house. Every guest brought
a bowl of food. These were spread out on the mat in
front of Kiteni, and her aunt garnished each with shiny
betel nuts and pepper leaves, pronouncing as she did
so, "This is for the wife of Malean" — "This for the
wife of Pokus." Then the bowls of each group were
formally passed over to the other group. Followed a

[ 179]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

friendly argument between Kiteni's paternal aunt and
grandmother as to which one should perform the tare
feeding ceremony. The aunt prevailed and the grand-
mother washed her hands carefully, and taking up a
large handful of taro, she worked it into a ball, saying:

"Pomai!
Tchelantune !

I take the taro of Paleiu — he is strong!
I take the taro of Sanan — he is strong!
The two grandfathers are strong!
For the descendant of Pomai,
For the descendant of Tchelantune.
She eats our taro.
May fire be in her hand.

May she kindle forehandedly the fire of her mother-in-law
In the house of the noble one who receives this exchajige.
May she blow the housefire,
Providing well for the funeral feast,

the marriage feast,

the birth feast.
She shall make the fire swiftly,
Her eyes shall see clearly by its light."

(Here the grandmother thrusts a handful of taro into
the girPs mouth.) Taking up another handful she con-
tinues:

"I give this to her mouth in order to brighten
the funeral fires with it,
the fire of gift exchange with it,
all that belongs to it."

(Again she feeds her taro.)

[180]

THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

"I give taro to the daughter of Palei'u,
To the grandchild of Sanan,
To the grandchild of Posanau."

(She eats our taro.)

"When she keens she must not merely cry,
*My mother, my mother,*
She must first cry on the names of people,
Then all will understand."

(She feeds her taro. Then the widow Polyon, sister
of Kiteni's dead father, takes up the chant:)

"I give her this food,
I give her this taro.
She vi'ill eat our taro,
She will recite our mourning songs.
By eating it her mouth will become flexible.
She will keen because of it.
As for us of (the clan of) Kamatachau,
We are all dead,
Only I remain.

We give taro to the mouth of this one.
I give my fire.

She will take my fire in her hand.
It will be the fire of the gift exchanges.
All that belongs to the gift exchange

She will give to her mother and her fathers, her sisters, her
brothers."

Now it was the turn of Ngatchumu, another aunt.
Ngatchumu was unaccustomed to the ceremony. She
stumbled and halted, and was prompted by Kiteni's
grandmother. Halfway through, she paused and said
hopefully, "Is that all.?"

[i8i]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Her chant:

"Ponkiao,
Poaseu,
Ngakeu,
Ngatchela,
This is your grandchild.

(She feeds her taro.)

"Let her take my fire to kindle her fire with it.
All the women of her father's side,
All the women of her mother's side,
Let them all give her shell money quickly.
In her own hands there are no possessions."

The hilarity occasioned by Ngatchumu's ignorance
continued. Women began to feed each other taro and
utter mock incantations j a most unusual good humour
prevailed. Once a woman raised her voice to hush a
group of small children who were playing under the
house. When the feast was ended the women left the
house to find a flotilla of canoes waiting to take them
home, a flotilla of canoes punted by husbands who had
the sheepish air worn by men waiting outside a woman's
club house.

The kin of the betrothed later makes a feast in which
the food is specially decorated. Coconut meat is cut
into star-shaped flowers and fastened on the ends of
sticks giving the e£Fect of tall stiff lilies. Among them
single betel nuts are placed, also on little standards.
These flower and bud decorations are arranged in bowls
of taro.

[182]

A GIRL'S PARTY

The boxes oj the village have been ransacked to dress all

the small girls for the feast

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DUCKING THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

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THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

This ended the small ceremonies. There only re-
mained the great exchange with the betrothed husband's
family. Kiteni had to stay about the house until that
was completed. The days dragged on. The little
girls wearied of sleeping in Kalat. She had fewer com-
panions and she had to get about her business, making
beadwork for her trousseau. Finally, after nearly two
months the sago, the pigs, and the oil were ready. The
day before the big exchange Kiteni was finally released
from her tabus. The women of her household had pre-
pared scores of sago balls, about the size of grapefruit.
These were placed in large carved bowls on the canoes.
Kiteni was dressed in a few simple bits of finery — dogs*
teeth, beaded leglets — and carried down the ladder
on her grandmother's back. The canoe was punted out
into a weedy shallow far from any houses. Here all
the women of the village had gathered. The flotilla
of canoes stretched for five hundred feet — mothers and
children, old crones and little girls. Kiteni stood in
the shallow lagoon while her grandmother poured oil
over her head, chanting.

Then she broke a young coconut, spilling the juice
over the girl, repeating another incantation.

This concluded, all the girls leaped into the water
and splashed Kiteni laughing, shouting, making as
much of a foaming confusion as possible. Afterwards
they swam about, damp blinking little servers passing
the refreshments, balls of sago, among the different
canoes. Now the whole convoy returned to the house.
Kiteni was dressed in the heavy finery of a bride, and

[183]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

all the boxes of the village were ransacked to dress up
the other girls in shell money or bead aprons. Finally,
in a long slender canoe, Kiteni's slender charm com-
pletely obscured by her heavy trappings, they paraded
the village in solemn procession. The next day all the
accumulated sago was also paraded through the village,
piled upon the little islet and presented to the opposite
side with impressive orations.

Older girls when they speak of their own adolescence
ceremony, always emphasise the same points, the num-
ber of girls who came to sleep with them, the splash-
ing in the sea, and the size of the display of property
which was made in their name. Poor Ngaleap alone
in the village was betrothed after her first menstrua-
tion, so she had had a very poor ceremony indeed. It
stands out in the girls' minds as a rather gay social
event, an occasion for pride and display without the un-
pleasant connotations of the similar great display at
marriage. The association with menstruation does not
seem very fundamental. Menstruation is a point which
is never discussed, about which young boys know noth-
ing beyond this first event. The fact of its recurrence
is locked away in the girPs mind as a guilty and shame-
ful secret and is automatically separated from the pub-
lic ceremonial of which she is so proud. A similar cere-
monial, including the torchlight distribution of fire and
raw sago and the water party, marks the memandra^ a
feast held just before marriage.

There is a period of tabu and a gift exchange be-
tween her father's relatives and her mother's relatives

[184]

THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

when a girPs ears are pierced, but this ceremony which
will be described in detail for the boys, is entirely over-
shadowed in the case of girls by the longer, more im-
pressive puberty ceremonial.

Past puberty, betrothed, tabu, and respectable, the
girl is expected to settle down peacefully to her labours,
to submit silently to eternal supervision. The slightest
breath of scandal means a public scene and exaggerated
ignominy. The majority of girls prefer to submit like
Ngalen, to go soberly about their tasks and look for-
ward to becoming resigned and virtuous wives. No
girl can manage a long career of rebellion. While she
sins, all of her kin, her betrothed's kin, her betrothed,
her partner-in-sin, she herself, are in danger of death
from the ever observant spirits. But occasionally
tempted, a girl will become involved in a swift, sur-
reptitious sex affair. Ngaleap was a buxom, laughing
girl, stout, good-natured, quick-tongued, at eighteen
quite unable to take life seriously. She was engaged
to marry a boy who had been adopted into the next
village, a boy whom she had never seen and whom she
cared nothing about. She was sick to death of snatch-
ing up her cloak and hiding her head at the approach
of someone from Patusi. Patusi was only half a mile
away: Patusi men were continually coming and going,
interrupting her at her fishing, making the houses of
other girls intolerable to her. These were men she
had known all her life; why should she not joke with
them? And the village shook its head and said Ngaleap
kept her tabus in a most slovenly fashion. Two years

[185]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

before Kondai had come to visit in Peri. Kondai was
tall and arrogant, twenty-three and unwed, used to loose
living from many moons spent upon a small trading
schooner. More than once his master had had to weigh
anchor quickly to escape the rage of the local natives
because Kondai had been allowed ashore. Ngaleap
slept in the house of her uncle, and in the early morn-
ing Kondai was seen slipping from the house. No one
could prove that anything had happened, but Ngaleap
was soundly whipped. Two illnesses were attributed
to her sin J Kondai was bidden to go home to his own
village. Two years later the little schooner anchored
within the reef, and Ngaleap, Ngaoli, and a grass
widow who had been away among white men, surrep-
titiously went out to the schooner and spent an hour
aboard, while Kondai borrowed their canoe and went
fishing. His boys told the white trader, who told
Ngaleap's uncle. It was also said that Kondai was
boasting that he was going to marry Ngaleap. The
uncle shouted the girls' names through the village.
They came to the little islet, abashed, sullen, wrapped
in their tabu cloaks. They admitted nothing, except
the visit to the steamer, out of the corners of their
mouths sullenly denying all else. The uncle stormed,
"This Kondai — he possessed thee before. Now I know
he possessed thee before. And thou still dost think of
him. Did I not warn thee that his magic was strong,
that thou shouldst beware when he came into the vil-
lage? Thou girl belonging to worthlessness, I have
paid five pigs and one thousand sago for thy marriage.

[i86]

THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

Who dost thou think paid these? I, even I, thy uncle.
Where is thy father? He is dead. Where is thy
mother? She is dead. Who will finance thy marriage
if I desert thee? Wilt thou bring disgrace upon my
house?"

The foster father of Ngaoli took a diflFerent vein.
He was little and insignificant and unstable. His four
successive wives had borne him no children. His
brothers were dead. In uncontrollable hysteria he
danced about on the islet, shouting to Ngaoli that he
had fed her, he had cared for her, he had cherished
her, and now her sin would kill him, the spirits would
kill him, he would die, he, the last of his line, slain
by her fault.

After these two had finished, other male relatives
joined in the abuse. The crowd grew thicker. Finally
almost the whole village was assembled, the women
huddled in their cloaks. After the men, the women
joined the girls, adding their upbraiding, lower keyed
only because of the presence of so many men j the girls
were sullen, defenceless, miserable. For weeks they
went about with eyes cast down, especially avoiding
each other's company. The village waited — no illness
followed, and gradually the furore died down. The
girls must have told the truth after all or the spirits
would have expressed their anger. But this pragmatic
test is no salve to injured feelings. A girl who has not
sinned is helpless in the face of the damning evidence
contained in the illness or death of a relative. Whether
she confesses to an uncommitted sin or stubbornly re-

[187]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

fuses to confess is a measure of the depth of her shame.

From puberty until marriage a girl is given no greater
participation in village life: she is less free but no more
important. She never cooks for feasts, she makes no
exchanges. In the big gift exchanges she is simply
dressed up and pushed about like a dummy. Unless
some overbold youth catches her alone, sneaks into the
house unobserved or intercepts her between sago patch
and river, the years between puberty and marriage are
uneventful. She learns a little more about sago work-
ing, she learns to sew thatch, she finishes a few lots of
beadwork, she does more reef fishing, she fetches wood
and water.

Around her, across her beading frame, over her head,
behind her bent shoulders, goes the gossip of gift ex-
change, of shrewd planning, anxious devices, chatter
of the market place. She does not participate, she is
given no formal instruction, but day by day she absorbs
more of the minutise of adult life, learns the relation-
ship, the past economic history, the obligations of each
member of the community. When a ceremony takes
place she attends it perforce because she is working in
the house. She sees the magicians brew their leaves
and spit their henna-coloured betel juice over the sick,
she sees the red paint of the property-eliciting magic
poured over the head of the bride or bridegroom} she
helps dress her married sisters and sisters-in-law for
the birth ceremonials. Less sleepy than in her child-
hood, forbidden to go abroad in the dark night, she
lies awake and listens to the hour-long colloquies be-

[i88]

THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

tween mortals and spirits. She can no more learn the
medium's art than she can engage in gift exchange.
Marriage is required for both occupations. But per-
force she listens.

Thus three or four years are spent as a rather bored,
very much inhibited spectator to life, years during which
she gets the culture by heart. When she marries she
will know far more than her husband, especially as the
woman's role in economics is a private one. The woman
is expected to plan, to carry debts in her head, to do
the quiet person-to-person canvassing for property.
Upon the shrewdness, social knowledge, and good plan-
ning of his wife a young or stupid man is very depend-
ent, for in all his dealings she is his adviser. So the
young married woman who has never cooked for a feast
takes her place unerringly among her sisters-in-law.
She has seen each dish made a hundred times. She
plans and selects the beads or the food for exchange
with equal sureness. She has had four or five years of
education by contemplation.

Except for the unusual intrusion of a brief, penalty-
ridden sex affair, these years are not years of storm and
stress, nor are they years of placid unfolding of the
personality. They are years of waiting, years which
are an uninteresting and not too exacting bridge between
the free play of childhood and the obligations of mar-
riage. In so many societies the late teens are a time
of some sort of active sex adjustment. Whether it be
the many love affairs of the Samoan, the studied social
life of the debutante, or the audacious technique of the

[189]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

flapper, ways of attracting the opposite sex form an ab-
sorbing occupation. In Manus, a girl has no need to
seek a husband j he has been found. She may not seek
a lover J she is denied the outlet of close friendship
with other girls. She simply waits, growing taller and
more womanly in figure, and in spite of herself, wiser
in the ways of her world.

[190]

XI

THE ADOLESCENT BOY

FOR the Manus boy there is no one puberty cere-
mony. At some time between twelve and sixteen, when
his family finances suggest the advisability, his ears are
pierced. The feasts of ear piercing pay back the great
display which his father made at his silver wedding.
Much property must be collected, many plans laid.
The boy's size or age are relatively unimportant. But
some day a boy comes home from playing with his
companions, to be told that his ears will be pierced in
a month. If he is the first among his age mates to
undergo the tiresome ceremony, he rebels. Occasionally
a father will follow his pattern of indulgence, more
often he insists. The wives of the boy's mother's
brothers come in a body to stay in the house with
him. His father's family prepares a feast of cooked
food. He himself is dressed in his very best — his
small neck bristles with dogs' teeth, a gorgeous new
laflap proclaims his special state. He sits beside his
father, very stiff and straight, divided between em-
barrassment and pride. None of his friends come to
the ceremony, only grown people and little children.
His father's sisters take him by the hands and lead him
down the ladder to the platform. Here his mother's
brother pierces his ears with a sharpened bit of hard

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

wood. Bits of soft wood are inserted in the newly made
hole, and small protectors of sago bark are placed over
each ear. Now the boy is under strict tabu. He can-
not cut with a knife j he cannot kindle a fire ; he cannot
bathe for five days. He must eat only of the food
which his mother's brothers' wives cook for him. When
he leaves the house, he sits very erect and gaudy upon
the canoe platform while the other boys punt him.
His companions are very impressed with his strange
state. They gladly act as oarsmen. They take him all
the tobacco they can beg. At the end of the five days,
he may wash, and he is free to move quietly about the
village. The other prohibitions hold until his mother's
relatives make a big feast for his father's relatives.
Until then his ears are in danger should he be unob-
servant of the tabus.

The adolescent girl observes her tabus out of a gen-
eral vague fear that something will happen to her if
she does not. But of the boy (or girl) at ear piercing
no such vague precautions are required. If he fails
in the tabus, his ears will break, his beauty will be for-
ever marred. He can never have the long ear lobes,
heavy with ornament. So he is docile, walks carefully
like some one trying a broken foot after a month on
crutches. During this period he is given no instruction,
he is not made to feel more adult. He is simply being
quiescent for beauty's sake.

If his relatives are very slow in making the feast,
he becomes restive. When the feast is made, he is
taken in a canoeful of women — his paternal grand-

[192]

THE ADOLESCENT BOY

mother and paternal aunts and cousins — ^to the family
island, and his grandmother calls on the family spirits
to bless him, make him strong in war, clever in ex-
change, active in finance. Then he is released to go
back to his companions. No new duties are required
of him, no new knowledge has been given him. He
returns to play leapfrog on the islet, to run races by
moonlight, to catch minnows in spider web scoops.
When his ears heal he sticks rolls of leaves in them
as a bit of swank and the next boy for whom an ear
piercing is planned will be less unwilling.

In the life of the fifteen-year-old boy only one
change is shown. His play group — over which he and
three or four of his age mates are petty lords — is de-
prived of the girls of his own age. Instead, he must
lord it over twelve-year-olds, chase and pretend to cap-
ture giddy ten-year-olds. It is much easier to manage
the play group than of old.

Girls of his own age who were well-developed physi-
cally, strong of arm and swift of tongue, formed a real
obstacle to supremacy. These are all gone. The small
boys are independent but devoted slaves. There is no
work to be done, only the same old games. The boys
form closer friendships, go about more in pairs, make
more of the casual homosexuality current in childhood.
There is much roughhouse, arm linking, whispered con-
ferences, sharing of secret caches of tobacco.

These close friendships are broken into by the chance
absence of one of the boys, who is permitted to go on
an overseas voyage with his father, or on a turtle hunt

[193]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

with the young men. The boys grow taller, heavier.
They are skilled in navigation j racing their canoes about
the lagoons, they have learned the details of sailing.
They are ready for adult life, but under no constraint
to enter it.

And here at sixteen or seventeen there must come a
sharp break in the description of the old way of life
and the new. Twenty years ago, before government
was established in the Admiralties, this group of youths
was proficient in the arts of war. They had learned to
throw an obsidian-pointed spear with deadly aim and
dodge spears directed at themselves. They were lusty,
full of life, anxious for adventure. And the motive
for war was present. They cared nothing for the eco-
nomic quarrels of the elders nor for the compulsion
under which various adults lived to kill a man or at
least take a prisoner for ransom. But they followed
gladly where the older men led for the fun of it and
to capture women. Their spirits forbade love-making
directed towards Manus girls, but like most gods, they
were not interested in the women of the enemy. Usiai
girls, Balowan girls, Rambutchon girls, were fair game.
Even the girls of other Manus villages with whom an
open feud was maintained were fair prey. So the old
men led the war parties and the young men slaughtered
gaily enough and carried off a woman, wed or unwed.
On some little island where the women of the village
had walked in safety and the little girls danced with
their grass skirts as flags, the unfortunate captive was
raped by every man in the village, young and old. The

[194]

THE ADOLESCENT BOY

men kept her in the boys' home; her particular captor
collected tribute from the others; sometimes he even
took her on a money making tour through friendly vil-
lages. The men dressed her in finery to further out-
rage the women, who disagreed with the spirits about
the innocuousness of the whole proceeding. Every-
where the men went, they took their unhappy captive
with them, afraid to leave her exposed to the vengeful
hatred of the women. But the men did nothing to
ameliorate her lotj they showed her neither kindness
nor consideration. It is hard to describe vividly enough
the exultant venom with which the respectable, virtuous
married women of thirty-five and forty describe the
misery of the prostitute's life. Upon her the men
wreaked their hatred of women aroused by the frigid-
ity of their wives and the economic exactions imposed
by matrimony. Upon her single person the young men
savagely expended all the pent-up energy of the youth
which was denied the joys of courtship and flirtation.
Worn and old in a year or two, or displaced by a new
prostitute, she was permitted to go back to her home
where she usually died soon after. Sometimes she died
in captivity.

War, war dances, heartless revels with one unwilling
mistress, occupied the energy of the young men before
marriage in the old days. The years between puberty
and twenty to twenty-four were occupied in learning
no peaceful art, in forming no firmer bonds with their
society. They did no work, except casually, as when
a thatching bee followed by a feast or house raising

[•95]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

involved the whole village. They were a group of
arrogant, roistering blades, the terror of their own vil-
lage girls, the scourge of neighbouring villages.

To-day this picture is entirely altered. War is for-
bidden. The capture of women is forbidden. The
"house boy" is merely a small house where the young
men of the village noisily kick their heels or hold paro-
dies on the activities of their elders. Spears are used
only to dance with, and quarrels with the bush people
are settled in court. But the comm^unity has not had
to devise some way of dealing with its youthful unem-
ployed. The recruiting of the white man does that for
them. Now all Manus boys go away to work— two
years, five years, sometimes seven years — for the white
man. This is the great adventure to which every boy
looks forward. For it, he learns pidgin, he listens
eagerly to the tales of returned work boys. Among
themselves the small boys ape the habits of the work
boys, forming partnerships for the division of spoils.
Our group of fourteen-year-olds shared their weekly
tobacco as the work boys, without a bank or means of
saving money, share their monthly allowance. With a
shilling or two shillings a month a boy can buy nothing
important, so the boys form groups — each month a
different boy receives the pool and with eight or ten
shillings something really worth while can be bought:
a flashlight, a knife, a camphor wood box. In that one
far-away village, our small boys repeated this ritual,
quite meaninglessly, with tobacco.

Di£Ferent kinds of service, the relative advantages of

[196]

THE ADOLESCENT BOY

working for Englishmen, Chinamen, Malays, are dis-
cussed endlessly in the boys' house. The small boy
has three possible ambitions: to be a "boats crew" on a
schooner, a "police boy," or a "child's nurse." In the
first capacity one sees the world, in the second one has
great power and prestige, in the third one has that
dearest of playthings, a baby, and also a possible chance
to go to Sydney. When one comes home laden with
the purchases from three years' earnings, the drums
will sound, there will be dancing and merriment over
much property. One can be lordly in the distribution
of property to the elders who have a right to it because
they have buried the family dead and paid for one's
betrothal.

Through their work years it is impossible to follow
the boys. Some are police boys and return to the vil-
lage with increased respect for authority, knowledge
of the white man's ways of government, respect for
time and efficiency. These men become government
appointees, active in future dealings with government
officers, active in village affairs. Others work on an
isolated plantation, eat and sleep with a group of their
own people, return to the village little wiser than when
they went away. The boys who have been on schooners
in the Admiralties return with a smattering of other
languages and some new friends in near-by villages who
will be useful trade connections. Every work boy
dreads returning alone to his village while his former
playmates are away at work. From island to island
messages are sent, "How much more time have you

[197]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

signed for?" — "A year," and the boy receiving the an-
swers consents to sign on for one year only. So by
careful planning a group of three or four usually "fin-
ish time" together and the drums beat for more than
one pile of boxes and trade cloth.

The sex experience of boys away from home is as
varied as their other experiences. Some go to Rabaul,
where there are only a few native women who almost
inevitably become prostitutes. Others isolated on plan-
tations turn to homosexuality and finish their contracts
in a passion of regret. All the affection, congeniality,
mutual tolerance, sharing of wealth, which is absent
in marriage, is given full play in these relationships.
But they provide no pattern of personal relations which
can be carried over into a Manus marriage, hedged
about with precedent and tabu.

Many boys learn bits of magic, paying away part
of their earnings for some formulas for causing and
curing illness, winning a woman's charm, or extracting
other people's property. So a smattering of alien ex-
periences, foreign learning, and material objects, birds
of paradise feathers and cassowary bones, baskets from
Buka and pouches from the Ninigos, a knowledge of
the properties of calomel, a deep dyed hatred of all
Malays, a rosary and a half remembered pidgin English
pater noster, a few stolen forks and spoons, worn
camphor wood boxes with the initials of some white
man burned in their lids, a torn photograph of a former
master, are brought to the village by the returning work
boys. For three years they have lived in a men's world,

[198]

S ^3

-•I

il

2:^

SJ 5^

^^j

''■^

*>J a:

THE ADOLESCENT BOY

a world with its own social traditions, its pet economics,
its feasts, its feuds, its legends. But these are not of
the village, they belong to the polyglot, work boy cul-
ture, which has pidgin English as its speech, tobacco
and shillings as its currency, a strong feeling of unalter-
able difference from the white man as a bond of union,
homosexual friendships as its principal romance. Its
legends are mainly of the white man's world and the
sorcery of strange peoples, of the glass crystals which
the Salamoa natives use to cause and cure disease. Or
they tell of what happened to the Buka boy who stole
a bottle of cognac, of the St. Mathias woman who died
from a love spell put on her by an Aitape boy, of the
weird habit of the natives of Dutch New Guinea who
can only visit their wives by stealth, of the boy from
Kieta who had a charm which would woo money paid
away to a storekeeper out of the storekeeper's lock box
and back to its native owner, of the master who beat a
Manus boy and was found in his bed with his throat
cut by the ghostly father of the injured boy.

It is a world where the boy is often lonely and home-
sick, overworked, hungry, sulky, shrinking and afraid;
where he is as often well fed, gay, absorbed in new
friendships and strange experiences. It is a world
which has nothing in common with the life which he
will lead on his return to the village; it is usually no
better a preparation for it than were the old days of
war and rape. Furthermore, the leaders in the village,
the substantial older men who have the greatest eco-
nomic power and therefore the greatest social power,

[199]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

did not go away to work. Their tales are of war, not
of the white man's world. In deference to them, all
pidgin English must be discarded except the few terms
which even the women understand, like "work," "Sun-
day," "Christmas," "flash," "rice," "grease." In the
world of the white man there was much evil magic
afoot but at least his own Manus spirits were not con-
cerned with his sex offences. He has suddenly returned
to a world of which he has a fundamental dread, the
details of which he never knew or has forgotten. The
spirits whose oppressive chaperonage he has escaped for
three years are found to take a lively interest in his sur-
reptitious gift of tobacco to young Komatal who has
grown so tall and desirable in his absence.

His return is celebrated by a ceremony which com-
bines a family blessing and incantation with a feast of
return. The blessing is called tchanty for the whole
ceremony there is only the hybrid term, ^^kait (feast)
— he — finished — time." Food is prepared and sent to
other families, who have made similar feasts in the
past, and the boy is ceremonially fed taro by his pater-
nal grandfather or grandmother or aunt, while the fol-
lowing incantation is recited over him:

"Eat thou my taro.
Let the mouth be turned towards dogs' teeth.
The mouth turn towards shell money.
The shell money is not plentiful.
Let the taro turn the mouth towards ft,
Towards plentifulness,
Towards greatness.

[ 200]

THE ADOLESCENT BOY

The mouth be turned towards the little transactions,

Towards the giving of food.

Let it become the making of great economic transactions.

Let him overhaul and outstrip the others,

The brothers whom he is amongst;

Let him eat my taro,

May he become rich in dogs* teeth,

Attaining many,

Towards the attainment of much shell money."

He feeds him taro, a lump so large that the boy can
hardly hold it in his mouth. Then, rolling another
handful in his hand, he says, calling the names of the
clan ancestors :

"Powaseu !
Saleyao !
Potik!
Tcholai !

Come you hither!

On top of the taro, yours and mine,
I bestow upon the son of Polou,
Upon the son of Ngamel.
He will monopolise the riches
Amongst all of his clan.
Let Manuwai become rich,
Let him walk within the house, virtuously.
He must not walk upon the centre board of the house floor,*
He must walk on the creaking slats,
He must wait below on the lower house platform,
He must call out for an invitation (to enter),
He must call out announcing his arrival to women
That they may stand up to receive him.

* Traditional phrase, i.e., he may not enter the house in a stealthy
fashion, seeking to surreptitiously possess one of the women inmates.
This is symbolic of any underhand dealings.

[201]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Afterwards he may climb up into the house.

Let him eat my taro.

He must do no evil.

May he grow to my stature !

I endow the taro with the power of war!

And I now fight no more.

I give this taro to my grandson !

Let him eat the taro.

I am the elder, thy father is the younger.

It passes to this boy.

I give him the taro for eating,

I give thee power.

He may go to war.

He shall not be afraid.

There may be twenty of them.

There may be thirty of them.

He shall terrify all of them.

He shall remain steadfast.

He shall stand erect.

They will behold him.

They will drop their spears.

They will drop their stone axes on the ground;

They will flee away.

Let him eat my taro.

I give him my taro and he eats of it.

Let him live, let him live long,

Until his eyes are blinded

As are mine *

Let him grow towards a ripe old age."

This incantation blesses him, as the parallel incan-
tation blesses the adolescent girl, and gives him power
to conform to the ethical code of his elders, industry

* The man who performed this ceremony in both cases where it
was observed was blind. This is probably an individual touch.

[ 202 ]

THE ADOLESCENT BOY

leading to wealth, open and impeccable sex conduct,
courage in war, health.

There are no tabus associated with this feast, nor
are there important economic obligations. It is a
family ceremony of blessing. The youth goes about as
before, still unmarried, still free of economic or social
duties, but with the shadow of his approaching marriage
hanging over him.

[203]

XII

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ADULTS

THE way in which the jolly little tomboy has been
transformed into a proper young girl has already been
described. Begun much earlier, completed in the mid-
dle teens, it is not a very difficult task. But the sub-
jection of the young men is more difficult. They have
been allowed to grow up in much greater freedom
than have the girls. The little boy who slapped his
mother in the face, demanded pepper leaf from his
father and angrily threw it back when his father gave
him only half, who refused to rescue the dogs' teeth
for his mother, who stuck out his tongue when he was
told to stay at home and swam away under water, has
grown to manhood with these traits of insubordination,
uncooperativeness, lack of responsibility unmodified.
He has spent all his years in an unreal world, a world
organised by industries which he has not learned, held
together by a fabric of economic relations of which he
knows nothing, ruled by spirits whom he has ignored.
Yet if this world is to continue, the young man must
learn to take his part in it, to play the role which his
ancestors have played. The adult world is confronted
by an unassimilated group, a group which speaks its
language with a vocabulary for play, which knows its

[204]

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ADULTS

gods but gives them slight honour, which has a jolly
contempt for wealth-getting activities.

Manus society does not meet this situation consciously
or through group action. None the less subtle is the
unconscious offensive which the culture has devised.
To subject the young man it uses the sense of shame,
well developed in the three-year-old, and only slightly
elaborated since. The small children have been made
ashamed of their bodies, ashamed of excretion, ashamed
of their sex organs. The adult has been shocked, em-
barrassed, revolted, and the child has responded. Sim-
ilar response to failure to keep the tabus of betrothal
has grafted the later, more artificial convention on the
former. The small boy also learns that he must not
eat in the presence of his married sister's husband, or
his older brother's fiancee. The onlooker, the brother-
in-law, the sister-in-law to be, gives the same signs of
confusion, uneasiness, embarrassment which his parents
gave when he micturated in public. The act of eating
before certain relatives joins the category of those things
which are shameful. His embarrassment over his fu-
ture marriage is also intense. A boy of fourteen will
flee from the house, like a virgin surprised in her bath,
if one attempts to show him a picture of his sister-in-
law. He will scuttle away if he sees the conversation
is even turning upon his fiancee's village. All of these
things are of course equally true of girls. To the boys'
tabus they add the ubiquitous tabu cloak and the shamed
concealment of menstruation. But with girls there is no
pause — ^the girl is ever more restricted, more self-con-

[205]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

sdous, more ashamed. It is a steady progression from
the first day she wears a scrap of cloth over her head
to the day she is married and sits in the bridal canoe,
inert and heavily ornamented, with her head drooping
almost to her knees.

But with the boys there is an interval. By thirteen
or fourteen all these early lessons are learned and they
are given no new ignominies to get by heart. As in
the old days of war and rape, so in the more recent
adventure of working for the white man, the standards
of adult life are not pressed more firmly upon them.
But the old embarrassments are there, grown almost
automatic through the years.

Now comes the time when the young man must
marry. The payments are ready. The father or
brother, uncle or cousin, who is assuming the principal
economic responsibility for his marriage is ready to
make the final payment, ten thousand dogs' teeth, and
some hundred fathoms of shell money. And in no
way is the bridegroom ready. He has no house, no
canoe, no fishing tackle. He has no money and no
furniture. He knows nothing of the devious ways in
which all these things are obtained. Yet he is to be
presented with a wife. Not against his will, for he
knows the lesser fate of those who marry late. He has
been told for years that he is lucky to have a wife al-
ready arranged for. He knows that wives are scarce,
that even on the spirit level there is a most undignified
scramble for wives and the spirit of a dead woman is
snapped up almost before it has left her body. He

[206]

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ADULTS

knows that men without wives are men without prestige,
without houses of their own, without important parts
in the gift exchange. He does not rebel at the idea of
marriage, he cannot rebel in advance against his fiancee
for he has never seen her. He knows there will be less
fun after marriage. Wives are exacting, married men
have to work and scarcely ever come to the boys* house j
still — one must marry.

But as plan follows plan, he gets more nervous. So
Manoi, the husband of Ngalen, listened to the plans
made by his two uncles, his mother's brother and his
mother's sister's husband. He preferred the latter's
house J here he had always chosen to sleep when he
didn't sleep in the boys' house. From his babyhood
he has slept where he liked and screamed with rage if
his preferences were opposed. But suddenly a new
factor enters in. Says Ndrosal, the uncle whom he
doesn't like, "You will live in the back of my house
and fish for me. I am busyj your other uncle has al-
ready a nephew who fishes for him. You will bring
your wife, the granddaughter of Kea, and you two will
sleep in the back of the house." Embarrassment fills
Manoi — never before have his future relations with
his wife been referred to. He accepts the arrangement
in sullen silence. After the wedding he finds his whole
manner of life is altered. Not only must he feed his
new wife, but also be at the beck and call of the uncles
who have paid for her. He has done nothing to pay
for his privileges. They have found him a woman —
shameful thought — he must fish for them, go journeys

[207]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

for them, go to market for them. He must lower his
voice when he talks to them. On the other hand his
uncles have not completed the marriage payment. So
he must go ashamedly before all his wife's male rela-
tives. Not even to her father does he show his face.
His wife's family are making a big exchange. He is
expected to help them, but he cannot punt his canoe
in the procession for his father-in-law is there.

On all sides he must go humbly. He is poor, he has
no home J he is an ignoramus. His young wife who
submits so frigidly to his clumsy embrace knows more
than he, but she is sullen and uncooperative. He en-
ters an era of social eclipse. He cannot raise his voice
in a quarrel, he who as a small boy has told the oldest
men in the village to hold their noise. Then he was
a gay and privileged child, now he is the least and most
despised of adults.

All about him he sees two types of older men, those
who have mastered the economic system, become inde-
pendent of their financial backers, gone into the gift
exchange for themselves, and those who have slumped
and who are still dependent nonentities, tyrannised over
by their younger brothers, forced to fish nightly to keep
their families in food. Those who have succeeded have
done so by hard dealing, close-fisted methods, stingi-
ness, saving, ruthlessness. If he would be like them,
he must give up the good-natured ways of his boyhood.
Sharing with one's friends does not go with being a
financial success. So as the independence of his youth
goes down before the shame of poverty, the generous

[208 ]

THE TRIUMPH OF THE ADULTS

habits of his youth are suppressed in order that his in-
dependence may some day be regained.

Only the stupid and the lazy fail to make some bid
for independence and these can no longer be friendly
or generous because they are too poor and despised.

The village scene is accordingly strangely stratified
— ^through the all-powerful, obstreperous babies, the
noisy, self-sufficient, insubordinate crowd of children,
the cowed young girls and the unregenerate undisci-
plined young men roistering their disregarding way
through life. Above this group comes the group of
young married people — meek, abashed, sulky, skulking
about the back doors of their rich relations' houses.
Not one young married man in the village had a home
of his own. Only one had a canoe which it was safe
to take out to sea. Their scornful impertinence is
stilled, their ribald parodies of their culture stifled in
anxious attempts to master it j their manner hushed and
subdued.

Above the thirty-five-year-olds comes a divided
group — the failures still weak and dependent, and the
successes who dare again to indulge in the violence of
childhood, who stamp and scream at their debtors, and
give way to uncontrolled hysterical rage whenever
crossed.

As they emerge from obscurity their wives emerge
with them and join their furious invective to the clatter
of tongues which troubles the waters daily. They have
learned neither real control nor respect for others dur-
ing their enforced retirement from vociferous social

[209]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

relations. They have learned only that riches are power
and that it is purgatory not to be able to curse whom
one pleases. They are as like their forebears as peas
to peas. The jolly comradeship, the co-operation, the
cheerful following a leader, the delight in group games,
the easy interchange between the sexes — ^all the traits
which make the children's group stand out so vividly
from the adults' — are gone. If that childhood had
never been, if every father had set about making his
newborn son into a sober, anxious, calculating, bad tem-
pered little businessman, he could hardly have suc-
ceeded more perfectly.

The society has won. It may have reared its chil-
dren in a world of happy freedom, but it has stripped
its young men even of self-respect. Had it begun
earlier, its methods need have been less abrupt. The
girl's subjection is more gradual, less painful. She is
earlier mistress of her cultural tradition. But as young
people, both she and her husband must lead submerged
lives, galling to their pride. When men and women
emerge from this cultural obscurity of early married
life, they have lost all trace of their happy childhood
attitudes, except a certain scepticism which makes them
mildly pragmatic in their religious lives. This one
good trait remains, the others have vanished because
the society has no use for them, no institutionalised
paths for their expression.

[210]

PART TWO

REFLECTIONS ON THE EDUCATIONAL

PROBLEMS OF TO-DAY IN THE LIGHT

OF MANUS EXPERIENCE

XIII

BEQUEATHING OUR TRADITION GRACIOUSLY

BECAUSE Manus society is so like our own in its
aims and values, we may compare its methods of edu-
cation with ours, put current theories to the test of
Manus experience. American children are as a rule
very lightly disciplined, given little real respect for
their elders. This increasing lack of discipline has been
hailed by some enthusiasts as the type of what all edu-
cation should be. There are theorists to-day who, pro-
ceeding upon the assumption that all children are natu-
rally good, kind, intelligent, unselfish and discriminat-
ing, deprecate any discipline or direction from adults.
Still others base their disapproval of disciplinary meas-
ures upon the plea that all discipline inhibits the child,
blocks and mars his development. All of these educa-
tors base their theories on the belief that there is some-
thing called Human Nature which would blossom in
beauty were it not distorted by the limited points of

[211]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

view of the adults. It is, however, a more tenable at-
titude to regard human nature as the rawest, most un-
differentiated of raw material, which must be moulded
into shape by its society, which will have no form worthy
of recognition unless it is shaped and formed by cul-
tural tradition. And the child will have as an adult
the imprint of his culture upon him whether his society
hands him the tradition with a shrug, throws it to him
like a bone to a dog, teaches him each item with care
and anxiety, or leads him towards manhood as if he
were on a sight-seeing tour. But which method his
society uses will have far-reaching results in the atti-
tudes of the growing child, upon the way he phrases
the process of growing up, upon the resentment or en-
thusiasm with which he meets the inevitable social pres-
sure from the adult world.

The Manus teach their children very young the things
which they consider most important — ^physical skill,
prudery and respect for property. They teach them
these things firmly, unrelentingly, often severely. But
they do not teach them respect for age or for knowl-
edge j they enjoin upon them neither courtesy nor kind-
ness to their elders. They do not teach them to work;
they regard it as quite natural if a child refuses to rescue
a lost necklace from the sea, or retrieve a drifting canoe.
When a new house is thatched the children clamber
over the scaffolding, shouting and useless. When they
catch fish they do not bring them home to their parents;
they eat them themselves. They are fond of young
children and enjoy teaching them, but refuse to take

[212!

BEQUEATHING TRADITION GRACIOUSLY

any responsibility for them. They are taught to con-
trol their bodies but not their appetites, to have steady
hands but careless tongues. It is impossible to dose
them with medicine for all their lives they have spat
out anything which they disliked. They have never
learned to submit to any authority, to be influenced by
any adult except their beloved but not too respected
fathers. In their enforced servitude to their older
brothers and uncles, they find neither satisfaction nor
pride. They develop from overbearing, undisciplined
children, into quarrelsome, overbearing adults who
make the lagoon ring with their fits of rage.

It is not a pretty picture. Those things which the
children learn young, which they are disciplined into
accepting, they learn thoroughly and well. But they
are never taught participation in adult life nor made
to feel themselves an integral part of adult life. When
participation is thrust upon them, they resent it as
slavery. They are never taught to respect age or wis-
dom, so their response to their elders is one of furious
inferiority. They have learned no humility while they
were younger j they have little dignity when they are
older. Manus elders have climbed to a place of au-
thority upon the unwilling shoulders of resentful young
men J they strut, but they have no peace there.

In many ways this picture is like our society to-day.
Our children are given years of cultural non-participa-
tion in which they are permitted to live in a world of
their own. They are allowed to say what they like,
when they like, how they like, to ignore many of the

[213]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

conventions of their adults. Those who try to stem
the tide are derided as **old fogies," "old fashioned,"
"hide bound" and flee in confusion before these magic
words of exorcism. This state of discipline is due to
very real causes in American society. In an immigrant
country, the children are able to make a much better
adjustment than have their parents. The rapid rate
of invention and change in the material side of life has
also made each generation of children relatively more
proficient than their parents. So the last generation use
the telephone more easily than their parents j the pres-
ent generation are more at home in automobiles than
are their fathers and mothers. When the grandparent
generation has lived through the introduction of the
telegraph, telephone, wireless, radio and telephotog-
raphy, automobiles and aeroplanes, it is not surprising
that control should slip through their amazed fingers
into the more readily adaptable hands of children.
While adults fumbled helplessly with daylight saving
time, missed appointments and were late to dinner, chil-
dren of six whose ideas of time had not yet become
crystallised rapidly assimilated the idea that ten o'clock
was not necessarily ten o'clock, but might be nine or
eleven. In a country where the most favoured are the
ones to take up the newest invention, and old things
are in such disrepute that one encounters humourless
signs, which advertise, "Antiques old and new" and
"Have your wedding ring renovated," the world be-
longs to the new generation. They can learn the new
techniques far more easily than can their more culturally

[214]

BEQUEATHING TRADITION GRACIOUSLY

set elders. So the young in America seize their material
world, almost from birth, without any practice in humil-
ity, and their parade of power becomes a shallow jug-
glery with things, phrases, catchwords.

To this rapidly changing material world, we have
added one other phenomenon which makes it easy for
the veriest babe to outbid experience and training. This
is the money standard. The result is a society very
like Manus, an efficient, well-equipped, active society
in which wealth is the only goal, and what a man has
is substituted for what he is. Respect for the old has
no logical place in such a scheme of values. In a world
in which individuals are pigeon-holed among a multi-
tude of possessions in which the very personality is de-
fined in terms of clothes, it is the pigeon-holes which
count, not the individuals. And our pigeonholes are
very dull ones, houses, automobiles, clothes, all turned
out wholesale. These define a man's position in the
social scheme, and it takes nothing but money to buy
the way from one cranny to the next. The people in
one pigeonhole are too like the people in the next one.
The variations which occur in this money defined cul-
ture are very slight and unimportant. Differences be-
tween social groups are like differences between apart-
ments in the same building. Our ideas of individuality
are like those of the woman living in apartment 1 8a in
a large apartment house, who accused her poorer neigh-
bour living in apartment 2a, of having "put the bed in
the wrong place." Wealth is separable from age, from
sex, from wit or beauty, from manners or morals. Once

[215]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

it becomes valued as a way of life, there is no respect
for those things which must be learned, must be ex-
perienced to be understood.

It is idle to talk about disciplining children, about
inculcating a, respect for authority which will give them
a sense of proportion, as if it were a matter which could
be settled by the purchase of a leather strap or its equiv-
alents. The difficulty is much more deeply rooted in
the very organisation of our society. Much has been
written about the disappearance of the craftsman and
his supercession by the machine which can be manned
by an eighteen-year-old boy with a week's training.
This is significant of the whole trend of modern Ameri-
can ideals. In the past there have been societies in
which the elders have been craftsmen in life, wise in its
requirements, loving in their use of precious materials.
The young men have felt they had something very
precious, which must be learned slowly, carefully, with
reverence. Their voices have been lowered in real re-
spect and their children's voices were hushed also, not
merely muted sullenly as in Manus. But in Manus as
in America, life is not viewed as an art which is learned,
but in terms of things which can be acquired. Those
who have acquired them can command those who have
not. And in Manus and in America it is not with re-
spect that youth views age. Youth grants the aged
neither greater wisdom nor greater prowess. They vote
them richer and therefore in the saddle.

We may tighten up here and there in America, force
our children to salute or courtesy, but we can expect

[216]

BEQUEATHING TRADITION GRACIOUSLY

to have no real discipline and hence no real dignity
until we shift our valuations from having to being.
When the emphasis of a society is upon what people
are — as individuals — even though It be only good
hunters, clever swordsmen, or skilled horseback riders,
much more so if it be as artists, scholars or statesmen,
then discipline is in that people. The young are taught
not only the rudiments of techniques and avoidances,
how to handle a canoe or a telephone, judge the dis-
tance between houseposts or dodge an oncoming auto-
mobile, bargain over dogs' teeth or over preferred
stocks, but are taught to value beauty of speech and
gesture, the understanding of fine arts which can come
only with age and experience. When the Samoan child
said "o le ali'i" "the chief," he means some one who
possesses certain qualities of leadership, of dignity or
wisdom, for which he has been singled out above his
fellows. But the Manus child who says: "He Is a
strong man for he has many dogs' teeth," the American
child who says, "Gee, he's a rich guy," is speaking not
of the man but of his possessions. They do not con-
ceive the man as in any way better than themselves.
They give his wealth envious admiration, to him they
give only the lip service which is accorded one who
accidentally and through no particular merit is in a
strategic position. Hilaire Belloc has counted It a vir-
tue that in America a rich man Is never worshipped
slavishly as he Is In Europe. But a deeper probing
reveals this as really symptomatic of a loss. In Europe
rank and breeding and responsibility have for so long

[217]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

been the accompaniment of wealth, that the European
who bows before the rich men, thinks that he is honour-
ing those things. In America, where wealth has be-
come disassociated from any standard of behaviour,
youth looks, not at the possessor that he may admire,
but at the wealth, that he may covet it.

We can never discipline our children into respecting
us as the owners of things, we can only keep them in
temporary subjugation by withholding those things
from them. By lashing them, essentially undisciplined
as they are, with the whip of economic inferiority, as
the Manus do, we can make them conform. Ashamed
of being poor they will work, day in and day out — as
the Manus do — that they or at least their children may
have the things which gave power to their elders and
"betters." And we have as a result a dismal spectacle
like "Middletown," with each economic class working
desperately to push its children into the next class j a
frantic driven climb through a series of pigeonholes
which are essentially alike.

In such a picture there is little discipline and less dig-
nity. The children take and take from the parents, of
their effort, their health, their very lifej take it as
their due, accepting their parents' valuation that the
child's rise to the next economic pigeonhole is the
greatest good in life. Taking this tribute from the older
generation, they do not respect the givers of the tribute.
And yet the arrangements of life are such that the
mature in years will always be in possession of those
things which the society values, whether they be wealth

[218]

BEQUEATHING TRADITION GRACIOUSLY

or knowledge, printing presses or the engraver's art.
We may thrust the very old from their seats, an occa-
sional youth may climb to a place far beyond his age
mates, but there still remains a vast adult body who
are the possessors, while the majority of the young are
the unpossessing. From the conflict between those who
have mastered the culture and those who have yet to
master it, there comes a kind of strain which seems so
germane to the whole course of human development as
to be inevitable. Only if a culture lacks intensity in
every respect, as does Samoa, can this strain be elim-
inated. Where to the conflict between the old and the
young is added the conflict between an old way and a
new, as in a complex rapidly changing modern culture,
the difficulties are greatly increased. It will not change
this condition to relax all discipline, or to lower the age
of marriage without parental consent. The age at
which the conflict comes may be varied j the form which
the conflict takes may be varied, but it will be present
in some form whether the individual accepts his society
with enthusiasm, with reluctance or only when coerced.
All attempts to blink this fact fail as did the mother
who abhorred the idea of status Implied in the word
mother and taught her child to call her "Alice," only
to find the child referring to the other children's
mothers as their "Alices." The parent-child situation
is not so easily evaded.

But if it cannot be evaded, it can be met. We can
so phrase the process of growing up that it will have
graciousness and dignity. If we can teach our children

[219]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

admiration for their elders, concentrate their attention
upon what their elders have that is worthy of praise,
we can equip them to feel humility, that fortunate feel-
ing in which the virtues of the other person are in the
foreground and the self in the background. If we
can give them no attitudes other than envy and neg-
ligence towards those who are in power we develop
in them instead only a feeling of inferiority, the mis-
erable emphasis not upon what others are^ but upon
what they, themselves, have not. Without admiration
for their elders they can give them no homage; their
attention is turned back upon themselves and they, the
unpossessing, feel inferior.

In modern America, the shift in techniques, the
changes in material culture, the great immigrant inva-
sions whose descendants are inevitably better adjusted
than were their parents, the emphasis upon the posses-
sion and control of a fluid undifferentiated material like
money, have all undermined the respect for the aged as
such. It would probably be impossible and equally
undesirable to return to an attitude which bows to grey
hairs and gives deference to parents no matter what
their character or just deserts. Once the myth of the
innate superiority of age is overthrown, no matter how
irrelevant the agents of its downfall — in America these
agents have been different language groups, the sudden
growth of mechanical invention and the money dictated
fluidity of class lines — it cannot easily be reinstated. It
is because they do not realise this that parents and
teachers who insist upon respect to-day are met with

[ 220]

BEQUEATHING TRADITION GRACIOUSLY

mocking eyes and shrugging shoulders. They insist
upon respect given to status and the young people have
tested the quality of status based upon the possession
of wealth and found it wanting. If we wish to re-
establish some sort of discipline which will make it pos-
sible for our young people to grow up less ungraciously,
we must sacrifice the old insistence upon respect for all
parents, all teachers, all guardians. We cannot deceive
the perspicacity of present-day youth, but we can utilise
it. The acumen which has been displayed in finding
out some of its elders, may be turned to honouring
others of them if only the elders will change their line
of battle. The adult world to-day is like a long and
straggling battle line, weekly defended by the advocates
of an old fashioned respect for those in authority. The
defenders of this line are too few, too scattered. Too
many of those who would once have stood beside them
have gone over completely to the young invaders, ad-
mitting miserably that they have no bulwark worth de-
fending. The remainder stretch their depleted ranks
along too long a line, a line the defences of which are
all known to the enemy. In defending all the bulwarks
they lose the entire battle. It is time to admit the
worthlessness of the present claims, to admit that
neither age nor status nor authority are capable of com-
manding real respect unless they are joined with def-
inite qualities worthy of admiration. Then those who
have deserted the battle line — in laziness, desperation,
or real humility — can return to defend a modified and
more exacting dogma of superiority.

[221 ]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

In so doing, in rewriting the relationship between
youth and age so that some of the aged will always out-
rank the finest youths, while admitting that many of
the aged have earned no guerdon of respect, the elders
will serve youth more than themselves. In offer-
ing them nothing they do them only injury. If chil-
dren were moved by great internal drives which drove
them into manufacturing a new heaven and a new
earth, then the elders might benefit them by standing
aside and letting the experiment have free play. But
the children have no such creative gift. They have no
stuff to build with except tradition. Left to themselves,
deprived of their tradition or presented with no tradi-
tion which they can respect, they build an empty edi-
fice without content. And come to maturity, they must
make terms with the culture of their adults, live on
the same premises, abide by the same values. It is no
service to them to so rear them that they take over the
adult life sullenly, with dull resentment. The per-
petuation of the given culture is the inevitable fate of
the majority of any society. We who cannot free them
from that fate may at least give them such a phrasing
of life that it may seem to them important and dig-
nified. To treat our children as the Manus do, permit
them to grow up as the lords of an empty creation, de-
spising the adults who slave for them so devotedly, and
then apply the whip of shame to make them fall in line
with a course of life which they have never been taught
to see as noble or dignified — this is giving a stone to
those who have a right to good bread.

[ 222 ]

XIV

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

ALTHOUGH education can not alter the fact that
the child will be in most important respects like the cul-
ture within which he is reared, methods of education
may have far-reaching effects upon the development in
the child of that sum total of temperament, outlook,
habitual choice, which we call personality. Because the
Manus have carried the development of personality to
such extreme limits for a people bound within the nar-
row walls of a single tradition, the way in which each
Manus baby is differentiated from each other Manus
baby throws vivid light upon the problem. Within a
homogeneous culture the problem of personality is seen
stripped of all the trappings and superficial elabora-
tions which a complex culture inevitably gives each in-
dividual born into its hybrid tradition. The result of
these secondary elaborations we often take for person-
ality differences when they are nothing of the sort. Let
us compare for a moment the possible cultural varia-
tions permitted to a Manus adult male with those varia-
tions which are part of the individuality of every man
in our society. Taking first the minor matters of ap-
pearance, a Manus man may wear his hair long and
arranged in a knot, or short j he may wear earrings or
not, similarly he may or may not wear a thin pearl shell

[223]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

crescent or an incised bone in his nose. But in any case
ears and nose will be pierced to receive these ornaments.
His breech clout is of brown breadfruit bark, or of trade
cloth. His jewelry is dogs' teeth, shell money and bead-
work. The dogs' teeth may be strung with beads in be-
tween, they may be strung single or double j the shell
money may have red beads in it, or red and black beads
— very minor variations at best. Compare this with
the variations implied in our range from the overalls
of the working man through the important nuances de-
scribed in the Theatre Programs as "What the well
dressed man will wear." And when it is a question of
possible tastes, beliefs, opinions, the contrast is over-
whelming. The most aberrant man in Peri, and he is
yet a young man, proclaimed his difference from his
fellows as a boy by the unique act of hanging a charm
on the back of a cousin whom he had seduced so that
the spirits could not punish her. In later life, he used
a vocabulary filled with obsolete words carefully col-
lected from old men in different villages, and he
laughed aloud at his sister's funeral. In all other re-
spects he was very like his fellows, he married, his
wife left him, he married again. He fished and traded
for garden products, he engaged in economic exchanges,
he observed the name tabus of his affinal relatives, as
did all the other men in Peri. Another man in Peri
was conspicuous on a different count j he had wept sin-
cerely and lengthily for his wife when she died and
he had kept her skull and occasionally talked to it.
This made him a marked individual, unique in the ex-

[224]

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

perience of his kinsmen and neighbours. But in the
bulk of his beliefs and practices he differed not at all
from all the other men of the village.

Now let us consider a brief sample of the kinds of in-
dividuals which we find among ourselves. Among two
men of the same general personality traits — i.e., both
may be dominant, aggressive, originative, self-confident
— one may believe in the Trinity and the Doctrine of
Original Sin, the other be a convinced Agnostic; one
may believe in free trade, state's rights, local option;
the other in tariffs, big navies, national legislation on
social questions; one may be interested in collecting
prints of early New York, the other in collecting but-
terflies; one may have his house done in Queen Anne
furniture, the other have a house with furniture as-
sembled from half a dozen sources; one an ear trained
to distinguish the most elaborate fugues, the other a
knowledge of Picasso which enables him to date every
Picasso painting; one a preference for Cabell, the other
for Proust. And so one could go through the entire
range of possible tastes and to complete the picture
compare either of these men with a young clerk in a
small city, whose only amusements are driving a Ford,
going to the movies, reading the comic strips; whose
house has been furnished in standard ugliness on the
instalment plan and who is a Republican because his
father was. Both antithetical tastes of the same kind,
and the difference between complex and simple tastes,
serve as a background against which the individual can
stand out far more sharply than would ever be pos-

[225]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

sible to any one in a simple culture. In Manus musical
taste consists in being able to play a pan pipe or a nose
flute, well or badly j artistic interest in carving or not
carving perfectly traditional forms which have been de-
veloped by neighbouring peoples. But within this nar-
row range of cultural choices and possibilities there is as
much difference in actual personality traits among
Manus children as there is among American children,
the recessive and the dominant, the calculating and the
impetuous, the originative and the imitative types, can
be seen quite clearly. And just because complex dif-
ferences in tradition, training, reading, are not present
to blur the picture, Manus is a good place to study the
way in which these fundamental asoects of personality
are developed in the young child.

This is a problem that has as much significance for us
as it has for any primitive people. How are these spe-
cial tendencies to make one kind of choice rather than
another developed in the growing individual? A super-
ficial survey of present day civilisations reveals the
immediate relevance of the relationship between cul-
ture and temperament. The meditative person con-
cerned with other world values is at a complete discount
in America where even a parson must be a go-getter
and the premium is always to the energetic. Conversely,
the active-minded type which sees no fascination in
thought and scoffs at philosophical perplexities would
have been at a disadvantage in a society like that of
ancient India. Among the Zuni Indians the individual
with undisguised initiative and greater drive than his

[226]

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

fellows is in danger of being branded as a witch and
hung up by his thumbs. The man who sought all his
life for a vision and could not obtain one even by
tearing his muscles from his back was helplessly
handicapped among those fundamentalist Plains Indian
tribes who had not yet adopted the device of buying
and selling religious experience. Each society approxi-
mates in its chief emphasis to one of the many pos-
sible types of human behaviour.* Those individuals
who show this type of personality will be its leaders
and its saints. Those who have developed the dom-
inant traits to a slighter extent will be its rank and filej
those who have perversely seized upon some perfectly
alien point of view, it will sometimes lock up In asylums,
sometimes imprison as political agitators, burn as her-
etics, or possibly permit to live out a starveling existence
as artists. The man who Is said to have been "born at
the right time" or "born for his age" Is simply one
whose personality Is thus in tune with the dominant note
of his society and who has also the requisite endow-
ment of intellect. Societies are kept going, are elab-
orated and expanded by those whose spirit is akin to
their own. They are undermined and superseded by
the new faiths and new programmes worked out In pain
and rebellion by those who find no spiritual home In the
culture In which they were born. Upon the former
group lies the burden of perpetuating their society and
perhaps of giving it even more definite form. Upon

* For a theoretical development of this point of view, see Bene-
dict, Ruth. "Psychological Types in the Culture of the South
West." Proc. XXIIl International Congress of Americanists.

[227]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

the gifted among the misfits lies the burden of build-
ing new worlds. Obviously upon the balance of these
three types depends part of the fortune of the culture.
Without creating enthusiasts for the present regime or
new forms of the same regime, a society or a section
of social life will be leaderless, will sink into dulness
and mediocrity. An example of this Is to be found in
American political life to-day which is neither led by
the best type of American, that is, the personality type
which best embodies American em^phasis, nor given
vigour and vitality by the presence of forceful individ-
uals whose temperament makes them unsympathetic
to correct American ideals. The fortunes of any so-
ciety are influenced by the type of material its misfits
feed upon, whether they build their philosophies of
change from Ideas sufficiently congruent with their cul-
ture so that real change can be brought about or whether
they feed from sources so alien that they become mere
Ineffectual dreamers.

Any society, therefore, even if it be islanded from
all contact with other cultures, is dependent at any mo-
ment upon the personality trends which the new born
babies will eventually develop. In the case of the few
really gifted individuals born Into each generation, it
will be of the utmost importance whether they have
an enthusiasm for the continuation of present condi-
tions or spend their lives in a restless driven search for
something different. So the fate of any culture may
be said to be dependent upon the calibre of Its people,
not in the sense that the Intelligence of one people dlf-

[228]

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

fers from another, but in the way in which its ideals
appeal to the gifted in each generation, either stunning
them into acquiescence or firing them with a violent zest
for change.

Yet of the mechanisms by which one child becomes
an enthusiast within the pattern, another responds with
apathy, a third with positive aversion, we know very
little. Perhaps the most fruitful attacks upon the prob-
lem have come from the psycho-analysts whose un-
wearied desire to subsume the whole of life under one
rubric has led them to attempt the solution of problems
which the orthodox psychologists have left strictly
alone. One of their most useful conceptions is the idea
of Identification, the way in which one individual iden-
tifies himself so strongly with another personality, either
known, read about or imagined, that he makes the
choices, the attitudes of that person his own. The
psycho-analysts have used this concept to explain dozens
of situations varying from identification with characters
in a play or a book, to the process by which an identifica-
tion with a parent of the wrong sex can produce in-
verted sex attitudes.

Among ourselves, the possibilities of variation
through identification are many and contradictory.
Either parent, the teacher, the favourite movie actor,
the baseball player, a character in a book of play, a hero
of history, a favourite playmate or God himself may be
the point of focus. The asylums are filled with those
who have carried these identifications beyond the bor-
ders of sanity and firmly believe themselves to be Na-

[229]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

poleon or Jesus Christ, maltreated by a blind and hostile
world. And that this process in its more extreme forms
is not merely a phenomena of our own society is proved
by its occurrence in Samoa, where I found a man who
held firmly to the delusion that he was Tufele, the high
chief of the island, and demanded that he, a poor com-
moner, be addressed in the terms reserved for the high-
est chiefs. In its less pathological forms, the tendency
to identify is found in every fan, every ardent follower
of an individual leader, every one who seeks to repro-
duce, meticulously although in little, the behaviour of
some immensely admired person.

In Manus the child has no such range of choice.
Without important differences in rank, without religious
leaders, without great characters of history or myth, the
child has no gallery in any way comparable to that from
which our children can choose their models. Further-
more the culture and the willingness, perhaps one may
say tendency, of a child to pick a model has fitted closely
in Manus into the pattern of the father-son relation-
ship. The reader will remember how close is the com-
panionship between father and young son, how the child
follows his father through every phase of his daily rou-
tine, watches him as he schemes, quarrels, works,
lounges, entreats his ancestral spirits or harangues his
wife. We have seen how the children of older success-
ful men can be distinguished from the children of
young or unsuccessful ones. And most significant of
all, we have seen how the correspondence between the
personality of father and adopted son is as great as that

[230]

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

between father and own son, and greater than that be-
tween a man and his blood son who has been adopted by
a man of different temperament or status in the com-
munity. This evidence suggests that whatever the
hereditary disposition — a factor which we at present
have no means of measuring — it is greatly influenced
by this close association with a mature personality. In
the close fostering care of adult men for their children,
the Manus have an excellent social mechanism by which
personality traits may be perpetuated in the next genera-
tion.

Nor is this merely a way of preserving in the next
generation the balance of the last between decisive and
undecisive, aggressive and meek. If a strong man has
five sons, they will be born to him at different stages
of his career. The child of his youth will be of a
milder temperament than the child of his assured ma-
turity. This may be one of the reasons why primogeni-
ture has so little practical effect in Manus, why younger
brothers so often definitely dominate older ones. (A
difference of intelligence is of course the alternative
explanation in any particular case.) The proportion of
each temperament may shift slightly from generation to
generation, according to accidents of birth or adoption.
Paleao, the aggressive, has only one sonj Mutchin, his
brother, mild, unaggressive, conservative, has four.
Paleao has now adopted one of Mutchin's sons, but too
late to appreciably alter the child's personality. Where
only ten or fifteen men decide the fortunes of the com-

[231]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

munity, three or four aggressive and initiating people
more or less can make a great deal of difference.

It is interesting to compare these Manus methods,
not only with our own, but also with those used by an-
other South Sea Island people, the Samoans.* In
Samoa, the idea of rank serves as a stimulus to children,
but they receive little individual stimulus because men
of importance never permit children to come near them.
Children are shooed away from the presence of their
elders and turned over to the care of immature chil-
dren or old women. There is no guarantee that a strong
man's son will have a personality in any way like his.
But the idea of rank has some Influence In forming the
child's personality. If he is the son or the nephew of
a chief, higher standards are enjoined upon him and
he responds by making somewhat greater efforts than
do his playmates. But "You are the son of chiefs" is
an incentive to effort, not like our fatal emphasis upon
the success of the father which frightens and stunts the
development of the son. The effect upon the Samoan
child's personality Is relatively slight j small boys differ
only slightly from one another, much less than Manus
children. When they become young men, the chiefs
take more interest in their possible successors and the
young men have a chance for imitation after their char-
acters are pretty well formed. But for sixteen or seven-
teen years the principal human determinant of a young
Samoan's behaviour has been the standard of his age

* For a discussion of Samoan conditions, sec "Coming of Age in
Samoa." Morrow, 1928.

[232]

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

group, not the personality of any adult. So strong is
the tradition of conformity to the age standard, that
the idea of rank and the late association with men of
maturity and habits of command makes little headway
against it. Samoan men are very much alike when
compared with Manus men. The carefully fostered
habits of moderated impersonal behaviour appropriate
to status rather than to natural tendencies or shades of
endowment, have fitted them far more into one mould.
In Manus the age group is of little importance among
children. As individuals they respond to the distinc-
tions among their fathers, the distinctions based im-
mediately upon age, economic status and success, the
last of which is dependent in some measure upon intel-
ligence, but more upon aggressive initiative and energy.
So in Manus we find three main types of personality,
the aggressive, violent, overbearing type found in older
rich men and in the children whom they are fostering
and who have not yet reached marriageable age, the
definitely assured but less articulately aggressive type
found in young men who have not yet attained economic
security but who were given a good start in childhood
and the immature children of these men; and the mild
unaggressive meek type — the older unsuccessful men
who were presumably given a bad start or who have
very little natural ability, and their children. The
community is assured of having a certain number of
successful men with drive and force in each generation.
As in over half of the cases the successors of successful
men are their own sons or at least blood relatives, this

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system creates a sort of aristocracy of personality which
is certain of perpetuating itself. It produces strong in-
dividual differences between the men of even very small
villages, and makes for a dynamic atmosphere absent
in Samoa, even though personality there is bolstered up
by chieftainship. This alert restless people are alive
to the cultures with which they come in contact, quick
to take advantage of the white man's ideas and use them
to their own advantage. The Samoan use of white
civilisation has been based, not upon the action of par-
ticular individuals but upon the flexibility of a pattern
of life in which the individual counts for very little
and there are no strong passions or heavy prices to be
paid. In Manus on the other hand, there is much con-
flict, much friction between one type and another, and
the development of much stronger feelings. The
Samoan system is a very pleasant way of reducing the
rough unseemly aspects of human nature to a pleasant
innocuousness. The Manus is a device by which per-
sonality may be capitalised and used by the society.

In America we follow neither the one system nor the
other. The degeneration of the father's role into that
of a tired, often dreaded, nightly visitor has done much
to make his son's happy identification with him impos-
sible. "When the child does attempt to identify with
his father he usually has to seize upon the more con-
spicuous, more generic aspects of his father's character,
his clothes, his physical strength, his deep voice, the
very aspects which a small boy of five has the most dif-
ficulty in imitating successfully. As one small boy once

[234]

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

told me dolefully, he could never be a big man like his
father because he couldn't make a big noise when he
blew his so much smaller nose. A father is the man
who can lift one in his arms, who comes home at night,
who is home on Sunday, who drives the car, who makes
money, who has to shave every day, who has a bass
voice. Such characteristics do not distinguish among
any hundred of men in a given community. The child
is forced to identify with a lay figure in trousers. He
is not permitted the more intimate contact which would
enable him to grasp his father as an individual, rather
than as a member of a sex.

The conventions of our society are such that to an
alarming extent bringing up children is regarded as
women's work. Witness the overwhelming feminine
interest in problems of education, hygiene, etc. — ^the
almost complete neglect of such subjects by men. The
boy is his mother's province until he is six or seven,
and this produces difficulties of adjustment somewhat
like those of Manus girls. Identification with mem-
bers of the opposite sex is a precarious business in a
heterosexual world. At six or seven the boy is handed
over to other women. Mother, nurse, teacher, leader
of play group, they pass in a long procession between
him and any real contact with men. Their influence is
a smoke screen through which the father's image filters
distorted, magnified, unreal. And the child who re-
sponds strongly to a dominant father responds not posi-
tively and eagerly, as in Manus, but negatively with a
feeling of inadequacy and inevitable failure. The

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Manus would look with pity upon our long array of
failures whose fathers were famous, often indeed of
failures because their fathers were famous. Whether
one places one's faith in inheritance of native ability
or in the effect of early conditioning, a strong man's
sons should be strong, every gain made by an individual
should be conserved for the next generation, not dis-
sipated nor paradoxically allowed to poison the lives of
his unfortunate offspring. It is a very pitiable picture
to see how, in contemporary life, without either the
Manus training of young boys or the Samoan device of
rank, the gains of men in one generation are so often
unrepresented among their descendants.

The failure of children to identify with their fathers
is intensified in this country by the rapidly shifting
standards and the differences in outlook between parents
and children. The evidence in "Middletown" * is con-
firmatory of this in showing the very few children who
wished to follow their father's vocation. The child re-
sponds to a conception of his father as an unknown
force hard to reckon with, as a recalcitrant bread win-
ner who sometimes refuses to dispense the desired
amount of pocket money, as a usually indifferent mem-
ber of the household who suddenly exercises a veto sup-
ported by superior strength and economic superiority,
as an old fogey whose ideas are mocked by the new
generation. But the male child must, if he is to make
any sort of happy adult adjustment, identify himself
somewhat with his father or with some other grown

*P. 59.

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

man. No matter how close, how affectionate, how de-
serving of admiration and allegiance his mother may
be, she does not offer the male child a way of life. If
his allegiance to her is too close, it will stunt his emo-
tional development} if he identifies himself with her it
is at the risk of becoming an invert, or at best of making
some fantastic and uncomfortable emotional adjust-
ment. The heaviest prices which family life demands
from children are those which result from an antago-
nism to the father and an overdependence upon the
mother, for a boy child, and the opposite set for a girl.
Manus demands these prices of the little girl who iden-
tifies herself with her father at the expense of any at-
tachment to her mother, and who makes the pitiable
discovery at seven at eight that she has made a mis-
take, that the ways of manhood are not for her.

We arrange things equally badly for the boy, a more
serious blunder when the bulk of cultural achievement
falls to the unhandicapped male. We mufBe him in
feminine affection, and present his father to him as an
animated whip to enforce his mother's r51e of affection-
ate ruler. All through his most impressionable years
he associates with women whom he can not take as
models, interesting and admirable as they often are.
This being so, without being able to identify with the
only adults he knows, denied the stimulating compan-
ionship of men, he falls back on the age group — that
standardising levelling influence in which all personality
is subordinated to a group type. More and more in
this country the young people depend upon the applause

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

of their equals, scoffing at the judgments of those
maturer than themselves, without thought or sense of
responsibility for the younger ones. The whole finely
tempered mechanism by which the gains of one genera-
tion are transmitted to the next is being lost. The
grown men, completely uninterested in children, neither
show any concern for the children themselves nor stim-
ulate older boys into showing an interest. Each age
group becomes a little self-satisfied coterie, revolving
endlessly, dully about its own image.

That this age group system will work is shown by the
conditions in Samoa. It is possible to let the age stand-
ard override every consideration of personality, individ-
ual gift and temperamental difference to substitute
these meagre cross sections of human life for the com-
plete picture which includes individuals ranging from
those just born to those who are on the point of death.
But this age standard is accepted at the expense of loss
of individuality. It is the type of standard most easily
diffused, most easily acquired, least productive of Initia-
tive or originality. Adult standards which have been
differentiated by years of self-conscious intense living,
can be passed on from father to son, from teacher to
pupil, but hardly distributed wholesale through the
movies, the radio, the daily press. An appeal which
must strike an answering note in thousands of listeners
or readers can seldom be intense enough to select out
certain aspects of a child's temperament and give them
form and coherence. Personal contact with mature in-
dividuals who are acutely concerned that the young

[238]

EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

people in whom they are interested shall develop per-
sonality and initiative is probably the only influence
which can stem the flood of publicity directing "How
the nineteen-year-old will feel" and "What the High
School Senior will think."

So we have the disadvantages of both the Samoan
and the Manus systems of education and we have the
advantages of neither one. In Samoa the child owes
no emotional allegiance to its father and mother.
These personalities are merged in a large household
group of fostering adults. The child unfettered by
emotional ties finds sufficient satisfaction in the mild
warmth which is the emotional tone of the age group.
So the Samoan child suffers neither the reward nor the
penalty of intimate family life. Manus children, on
the other hand, are bound so closely by family ties that
outside adjustments are not expected of them and may
well be impossible to them. But in return the boy child
receives the best that such a close association has to
offer — a living sense of his father's personality.

American boys are not, like Samoan children, free
from all demands for strong feeling, free to find con-
tentment in the diluted amiability of the approving age
group. Nor are they, like Manus children, rewarded
by the close companionship with the father and the pos-
sibility of a happy identification with him. They are
tied to a family group where the mother absorbs their
affections and yet furnishes them with no usable model,
where the mother makes too strong claims to let them
be completely happy in the age group. The shadow

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

of the father falls just far enough across their young
activities to spoil them.

Our girls often get a better time of it. When the
differences between the points of view of mother and
daughter are not too great owing to shifting social
standards, the daughter can make a first identification
with her mother which offers her a workable pattern of
life. Antagonism to the father does not necessarily
have the same blighting effect upon her that it has upon
her brother. Very often she develops less of an an-
tagonism to her father because he does not necessarily
play an absentee Roman father to his daughters also.
It may also be hazarded that possibly the daughter's
emotional life is left freer than is her brother's; where
their mother presents to the daughter a way of life she
presents to the son only an emotional obstacle which he
must overleap.

In the school as in the home, the girls are again more
fortunate than their brothers. It is not without sig-
nificance that interest in the arts and the considered use
of leisure time and the development of the personality
are all found almost exclusively among women in this
country. It is not without significance that the English
literature courses show a tendency to attract the su-
perior women and the Inferior men. The records of
other countries do not show any special aptitude of
women for the arts, In fact the exponents of the theory
of feminine Inferiority can find plenty of proof to the
contrary. But in this country the arts are discredited
as a male pursuit; and it may well be that one of the

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EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY

great causes of their low estate is that they are taught
by the sex with whom the boy students can not pos-
sibly identify themselves.

No society can afford to so neglect the ways in which
children make their choices and to deny to the sex which
has the greatest freedom to make permanent contribu-
tions, the stimulus which can be given only in close per-
sonal association. The American boy's conceptions of
manhood are diluted, standardised, undifferentiated.
His choices are as generic as his vision. He chooses to
make money, to be a success, he makes no more par-
ticularistic allegiances. The contrast between what we
might make of our boys and what we do make of them
is like the contrast between a series of beautiful objects
made by individual loving craftsmen, and a series of
objects all turned out by a machine. Whatever argu-
ments may be advanced for the enrichment of life by
the labour saving of the machine, can hardly be applied
to human beings as well as to furniture. But those who
argue that it is because this is a machine age that individ-
uals are becoming standardised in this country may be
overdrawing the analogy and seeing a complete expla-
nation in what is only a partial one. The diluted per-
sonal contacts of the American boy may well be as im-
portant a handicap as the ubiquity of the machine.

Although there are a few trends away from this in-
tensive femininity of education, more boys' schools with
men teachers, more explicit statements from social
workers and psychiatrists who plead for the child's need

[241 ]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

of a father, the bulk of our male children are still
caught in the net. Our boys are condemned to ap-
proximate to a dull generic idea of fnanhood, rather
than to a number of interesting, known men.

[ 242 T

XV

GIVING SCOPE TO THE IMAGINATION

IN the last chapter I have been discussing ways in
which the personality of normal children is built up, the
loss to the community when men who have been strong
and effective fail to produce sons with similar drives.
The identification with living people is a way of pre-
serving the strong points in the culture, of assuring to
the next generation strong captains in the causes for
which they are enlisted at birth. Of equal, perhaps
even greater importance, is the process by which those
personalities are shaped who are destined to change
their societies, to build new edifices of art or ideas,
sometimes even to embody their aberrant dreams in
new social and political forms. These temperamentally
restive persons who stand in the vanguard of new causes
or create new art forms, have not usually been given,
their drive by identification with some well understood
person of their close acquaintance (though occasionally
rebellion against a father or guardian may have directed
their choices). Instead they have built up, in their
need, fantastic and strange conceptions of lifej they
have drawn on hints from past periods and different
civilisations, and from these curious combinations they
have fashioned something new. Even the very gifted
among these innovators have been dependent upon two

[243]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

things, the socially defined lack in their own lives, and
rich materials from which to build. Without the felt
need, the imaginative potentialities will go unstim-
ulated, without the material it will go unfed. It is
therefore interesting to compare the possibilities for
these imaginative creations which Manus and America
offer their children.

By a socially defined need, I mean the presence in
the society of a special pattern of human relationships
which the child can learn about and which he can feel
is wanting in his own case. These may be of different
sorts, the society may teach the child that every one
should have a father and mother, or a nurse or a French
governess, or school teacher, or a sweetheart or a God.
The dictated needs may be of the most diverse nature,
but whatever they are, some children will respond to
their presence by building up imaginative structures.
The invisible playmate, the fabulous parent, the imag-
ined love experience are all familiar enough to us.
But what Is not always clearly recognised Is that none
of these are basic human needs. A society which de-
pends upon the manipulation of impersonal magic
power will not teach its children the need for a per-
sonal god, nor for special religious experience j a society
which does not recognise romantic love will produce no
James Branch Cabells and conversely no Aldous Hux-
leys. The children of the poor will boast of no non-
existent French governesses, nor lament their non-
existence.

One of the most frequent blank spaces which may be
[244]

GIVING SCOPE TO THE IMAGINATION

oJOfered to a child for elaboration is that afforded by
the death of a parent, occasionally by the real parent's
failure to conform to the socially dictated standards
of what a parent should be. This last happens when
a child under the influence of literature, or of other
children, finds his parent wanting and makes up myths
about being an adopted child, or a child who was stolen
as a baby. Child psychologists testify to the frequency
of such fantasies in young children among ourselves.
In Manus the child who is socially fatherless is almost
unknown. The infant death rate is so high, and chil-
dren are so loved and valued, that there are always
eager candidates to adopt orphan children. There was
just the one small boy, Bopau, in Peri, whose father
was dead and who had found no substitute. He was
the one child who claimed to talk with spirits, declaring
that his father, Sori, had talked to him. But even he
did not cling to his father's memory to the extent of re-
fusing to admit a substitute, instead, it will be recalled,
he eagerly welcomed Pataliyan's temporary adoption,
and previously he had dogged the footsteps of his older
cousin with wistful, hopeful attention. The social pres-
sure in Manus to have a devoted father is stronger than
among ourselves, but the habit of adoption and the
small number of children makes the presence of father-
less children very rare.

Similar social pressure and one harder to satisfy is
felt by fatherless children among ourselves. The most
striking case which has come to my notice is that of a
eugenic baby whose mother was demonstrating the right

[245]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

of unmarried women to bear children. The little girl
had been told nothing about her father j she had never
seen him nor heard him mentioned. Yet as soon as
she went to kindergarten and heard the other children
talking about their fathers she began an endless stream
of imagining a father for herself. She would say: "Oh,
mother, why do I have to go to bed? My father never
makes me go to bed until it's midnight." "In my
father's house they stay up all night." "My father
gives me handfuls of money to spend as I like." This
instance shows very nicely the double role which such
imaginative pictures play, it compensated her for her
sense of dijfference from the other children, and it gave
her a device for criticising her mother and her mother's
regime. But in Manus, a dead or absent parent is com-
pensated for by a new father, who fills the gap in a
solid realistic fashion and does not provide any such
lay figure to drape in imaginative trappings.

Another little girl of three was the daughter of
writers. In and out of her parents' home passed groups
of literary people j an only child, she was much with
adults and heard nothing but literary talk. In order
to take her place adequately in this exacting world, she
had to invent a whole troop of imaginary literary
friends, setting them over against her novel-writing
parents by proclaiming them poets, "uninterested in
prose." Her creations were of astonishing complexity
for a child of three. The day after her family arrived
in England, she had created an English critic named,
by a stroke of genius, "Mr. Stutts Watts" j on arriving

[246]

GIVING SCOPE TO THE IMAGINATION

in France she immediately furnished herself with a
group of French people with names eminently French
in sound and with manners to match. Because she was
such an unusually gifted child, she illustrates this fill-
ing-in process particularly well. Her social group de-
manded important literary friends j she supplied them
where other children are supplying muscular little play-
mates or nurses in uniform. And the materials for her
imaginative pictures were drawn from the brilliant talk
which went on all about her.

Another little girl had only a brother when all her
friends, all the characters in books which she read,
seemed to have sisters. She accordingly made up a
long tale of a twin sister who had been stolen at birth
by robbers, and might eventually be recovered. For
four years, the search for this twin sister occupied most
of her day dreaming and sometimes extended into the
exploration of deserted groves and tumble-down build-
ings which were thought to shelter the robber band and
the sister, so desired as a companion and confidant.

In Manus, with rare exceptions, children have no
such gaps in their social lives. There is no child with-
out a playmate, and so there are no imaginary play-
mates j the spirit children are scorned. They are less
vivid than real children j they were constructed to meet
no need, to satisfy no lack. Mothers are less important
and equally present. Nor does the group of children
feel a lack of desirable adult patterns of social life;
taught to ignore them, they feel no more need to con-
struct an adult world in miniature, than do the children

[247]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

of the rich need to make up the patterns followed by
the poor and despised. And the result is that neither
individually nor in groups do they show any signs of
building imaginative edifices. Their play, their con-
versation is quite barren. Yet this is not due to lack
of imaginative ability. A little Manus boy who was in
the employ of white people at the government station
was overheard by his mistress giving an innocent visitor
the most highly coloured account of an imagined trip to
Sydney, a job on a Burns Philps boat, wonderful clothes
and uniforms which he had been given by the people
of Sydney for his remarkable cricket playing, and his
final return to Manus because he disliked the Sydney
climate. But this child had felt the need to be an im-
portant returned work boyj working on his only island,
a few hours from his native village, he was very small
fry indeed and he seized the first opportunity to con-
vince at least one gullible visitor of his greater claims.
The tales of other work boys, returned from visits to
Sydney as white children's nurse boys, provided him
with the necessary material.

It is not until Manus boys reach their teens that any
need is felt. But after losing their fathers they do
feel definitely bereaved, socially maimed, so to speak.
And it is at this age that the only imaginative play
takes place. The young men hold long mock seances in
the boys' house. (They also give dramatic reconstruc-
tions of the adulteries which in a former golden age
they would have been permitted to commit with im-
punity.) Upon the father in the spirit world the imag-

[248]

GIVING SCOPE TO THE IMAGINATION

ination is permitted free range and here occurs what
little fantasy there is in Manus life. Their myths are
dull hand-me-downs, bits of the common stock of tradi-
tion of their race. Their everyday life is a matter-of-
course, highly practical, realistic aflFair. Their social
relations, so largely defined by economics, are equally
realistic and unimaginative. Their bare, clear language,
stripped of metaphor or analogy, provides them with
no stimulus to creating poetry. Their dance is strictly
conventionalised j it permits the innovator no interest-
ing range. Only upon the unknown world of the spirits
can their imaginations play. This play is slight enough.
To the spirits they ascribe a strong and conscientious
solicitude for the proper conduct of society, for the
honourable behaviour of their descendants. The pic-
ture of the father as an upright, moral, sin-shunning,
debt-paying person is given far greater intensity after
the father has been translated. And this ascription of
moral qualities to the spirit world is the principal source
of moral behaviour in Manus. They idealise the re-
membered personalities and endow them with super-
natural prowess to express their will. (I am not claim-
ing the origin of Manus religion in the flights of fancy
of any generation or group of men; but the peculiar
form which Manus spiritualism has taken, its individ-
ualisation among related cults which have sprung from
a common historical source, makes it reasonable to allow
this margin to individual creativeness.)

In addition to the outstanding moral vigilance at-
tributed to the spirits, the mortals engage in minor

[ 249 ]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

flights of fancy. The spirits practise the levirate, that
is, a man may marry his brother's wife, or his father's
wife J there is also a tendency for the old men spirits
to capture all the available spirit maidens. Both of
these practices are found in full swing among the land
people, but are severely disapproved of by the Manus
living. Whether these are customs which the Manus
once practised and have since given up or are merely
forms of behaviour the possession of which they envy
their neighbours is immaterial — they are known forms
of forbidden behaviour which they in imagination per-
mit to the dead. Similarly some people say that the
spirits do not have to observe the wearisome rules of
avoidance between in-laws which forms such a check
upon freedom of movement in Manus. In fact, in
the spirit world, a father can marry his son's dead wife.
(This was the alleged cause of one man's death. It was
reported by the medium that his dead wife objected
to his senile father as a spouse and killed her former
husband in order to rid herself of his father as a hus-
band.) The absence of these tabus between in-laws
is known to the Manus to occur among the Matankor
people of the near-by island of Balowan, where en-
gaged people may meet each other face to face and
chatter amiably and parents-in-law are present at the
public consummation of the marriage of their children.
So, members of the Manus community, irked by their
tabus, imagine their dead as unhampered by them.

Similarly the contact with the white man which
nearly always leaves the native worsted and often leaves

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GIVING SCOPE TO THE IMAGINATION

him humiliated, takes on a different colour in the spirit
world. There is one large family group in Peri which
has as guardian spirits the spirits of dead white men.
As each new male member of the family grows to man-
hood, the original white spirit, a white man killed years
ago on the island of Mbuke, is ordered to recruit an-
other well-behaved, quiescent, anonymous white man
who does the native's bidding with all of the white
man's superior efficiency but without any of his ar-
rogance. Members of other families also sometimes
have white men's spirits. Still others have fabricated
for their satisfaction white wives for their dead native
guardians. The unsatisfactory contact with white cul-
ture is rewritten in the spirit world.

Women similarly compensate for their complete ab-
sence of claim upon their male children. Little boys
who in life stuck out their tongues at their mothers, spat
and pouted and sulked, or struck fiercely at their
mothers' slightest attempts at discipline or constraint,
become immediately they enter the world of the spirits,
subservient, meek, tireless at errand running. And also,
the spirits of dead women do not live In the houses of
their blood kin, who claim their bodies and perform
their burial rites, but with their spirit husbands. The
marriage tie which is so weak and unsatisfactory on earth
is given a place in heaven.

Compared with the amount of elaboration of un-
known worlds permitted to us, these are slight indeed.
They are entirely the work of adults, not of children.
It is upon the Manus adult, not upon the Manus child

[251]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

that the culture presses in such a way as to stimulate his
imagination. These slight imaginative attempts serve
to illustrate how this blank space, this undetailed life
of the dead, is used by the Manus for putting down
borrowed or compensatory ideas. And it is reasonable
to suppose that the continued ascription to the spirits
of a puritanical and exacting morality is one of the most
potent mechanisms by which the Manus cultural ideal
has been built up. The neighbouring peoples whose
culture resembles the Manus in so many respects, do
not share this puritanism. Their dead care only about
the proper performance of funeral ceremonies. So the
Usiai maidens before their marriage to old and power-
ful men who could afford to buy young girls as their
second or third wives, were given first a year of license
and leisured dalliance in institutional houses for young
people of both sexes. And from the light-laughtered
island of Balowan, our boys brought back just one
phrase in the Balowan language, "Come into the bush
and lie with me." The neighbouring peoples who have
heard of Christian teachings about sex call the Manus
"all the same missionary" and laugh at their puritanism.
The Manus see their puritanism as a new development.
Their golden age, just before the memory of each
oldest generation, was the time when the spirits felt
less keenly on the subject. But, they explain, when
men once began to die for adultery, their hearts were
hardened after death, and they took care to punish the
next offenders. And so, by projecting this very human
desire for revenge upon the dead, the tradition of stern

[252]

GIVING SCOPE TO THE IMAGINATION

morality is stiflFened and extended. Similarly the
anxiety over unpaid debts and financial obligations
which must be met, has been ascribed to the spirits,
who thus become a force for the enforcement of com-
mercial honesty. (And the high commercial standards
of the Manus would compare favourably with those of
almost any other known people in the world j there is
a great deal of disagreement as to the amounts of debts,
due to the absence of a system of records, but remark-
ably little attempt to evade or falsify economic obliga-
tions.) Upon the emptiness which is death, the Manus
have written a new chapter which shapes their lives
and makes them so different from their neighbours.

By a similar but infinitely more complex process are
the dreams of civilised man sometimes engendered.
Where the Manus can draw only upon the few differ-
ences between their culture and that of their neighbours
or that of their new and little understood white con-
querors, we can draw upon the history, the literature,
the art of centuries. The Manus can endow his dead
father and through him, the spirit world, with the in-
tensification of qualities developed among the Manus
themselves or with the daring and exotic customs of
the Usiai and Balowan peoples. But the fatherless or
motherless child among ourselves, the child disgruntled
with its parents, the lonely child who desires a play-
mate, or the man who finds no human being who will
fit into our culturally dictated patterns of romantic love,
may reconstruct the unknown parent or lover from the
lives of Napoleon or Christ, the Iliad or Shakespeare,

[ "-52 ]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

the paintings of Michael Angelo and the operas of
Wagner, or the poetry of Keats. He can have a father
as beautiful as the Apollo Belvedere, a mother like
Raphael's madonna or one of Leonardo's angels. His
father may be given the heroism of William Tell or
Robert the Bruce, the gentle asceticism of Saint Francis
or the prowess of Csesar or Alexander. Where the
genius of generations has gone to creating an image of
Christ, he may borrow it to fill in his father's face.
And he may set this idealised figure in a world made
up from reading Greek history, Irish epics, Arabic
poetry, or Veddic legend. The most discrepant con-
cepts, the most impossible dreams, the records of cul-
tures that have been and the work of creative artists
who have tried to escape from them, may all be jum-
bled together to fill in the place left vacant by a father
or a mother J in adult years to fill the gap felt between
the society in which he lives and the world which his
imagination has engendered. When such dreams make
the real world seem too unbearably drab in contrast
they may lead to madness or suicide. They are always
dangerous, but upon them can be built visions of such
power as to startle or transfix the imagination of a peo-
ple— if only the complex and shining vision be dis-
covered by one who has the gift of the artist or of
the leader of men.

Any social frame which calls for the fulfilment of
certain requirements, whether they be those of a father
and mother, companions, or lovers, will not always be
able to meet the demands which it has created. There

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GIVING SCOPE TO THE IMAGINATION

will be gaps in the lives of some, gaps which they will
seek to fill in so that they may live in the sense of
peaceful completion which their society has defined as
the proper estate of man. The Manus have but slight
material from which to rebuild the estate of their dead,
the only serious gap which is offered them by a society
which provides parents and playmates for all and has
no idea of vivid friendship or romantic love. But we
have the most diverse and varied materials for building
new conceptions, and upon them, upon these pictures
built by man which have the power to make him for-
ever homesick for the land of his own dreaming, lies
the burden of bringing important changes into our pat-
terned existences.

If we generalise human relations too much, demand
too little of them, we will lose the sense of gaps and
deficiencies which set some children to dreaming. We
may lose the valuable imaginative creations of those
who must search the whole of history for materials
to build up an absent father or an ideal love. For
this is not an automatic matter, as some theorists be-
lieve. The child is not born wanting a father, he is
taught his need by the social blessedness of others.
No Samoan child, in a society where the parent-child
relationship is diffused over dozens of adults, would
dream of creating an ideal father j nor do the Samoans,
finding such quiet satisfaction among their uncritical
equals, build a heaven which reverberates on earth.
Neither does the Manus child or adult build pictures
of the ideal wife or mother, for his society does not

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

suggest to him that it would be possible to find one.
If we substitute for father-to-child, teacher-to-child
relationships, only contacts with adults of the opposite
sex and the applause of the age group, if we erect
standards of casual relations between the sexes, rela-
tionships without strength or responsibility, we have
no guarantee of so stimulating individuals to use im-
aginatively in new ways, the rich and diverse materials
of our cultural inheritance.

Furthermore the Manus material suggests the need
of giving children something upon which to exercise
their imagination for it shows that they do not produce
rich and beautiful results spontaneously, but only as a
response to material provided them by the adult world.

With the automatic nature of this basic education
taken for granted, and greater proficiency in teaching
the three "r's," the schools are faced by increasing
amounts of unfilled time. Just as we realise that it is
not necessary to teach children the history of the Ameri-
can Revolution every year for five years, and that time
spent in learning the conventional grade subjects can
be enormously shortened by proper methods, we also
realise that the time spent under school supervision Is
tending to need extension rather than curtailment. City
life makes unsupervised play dangerous and virtually
impossible. City apartments offer children no proper
playgrounds. The increasing urbanisation of the coun-
try, the increasing number of families who live in
apartments instead of houses and the greater employ-
ment of married women — these and numerous other

[256]

GIVING SCOPE TO THE IMAGINATION

factors are contributing to make the role of the school
more important because of the ever larger number of
hours of the child's life which must be spent under
school supervision. Progressive schools are trying to
fill these gaps left vacant by improved teaching of the
old routine requirements with materials from other so-
cieties— Greece, Egypt, Medixval Europe. The teach-
ing of the necessary techniques is sandwiched into play
activities centred about building a Greek house or mak-
ing papyrus. Whatever popular objections to this type
of education, it has recognised one important point, the
need of content in the children's lives. It is in sharp
contrast to such tendencies as those described in "Mid-
dletown," where content is being increasingly neglected
in favour of instrumental courses which simply bind the
children more firmly to life as it is lived in "Middle-
town." It is not enough to give children American cul-
ture as it is to-day and the details of its necessary tech-
niques. American culture is too levelled j the conflict
between alien groups bringing in contrasting and only
partly understood European traditions, has neutralised
the contribution of each. If art and literature and a
richer, more creative culture is to flourish in Ajnerica,
we must have more content, content based, as all new
ideas have always been based, upon the diverse experi-
ments of older, more individualised cultures.

If the children's imaginations are to flourish, they
must be given food. Although the exceptional child
may create something of his own, the great majority
of children will not even imagine bears under the bed

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

unless the adult provides the bear. The long years
during which children are confined in school can be
crammed full of rich, provocative materials upon which
their imaginations can feed. Those children who find
life to their liking will be the better perpetuators of
their own culture for their greater understanding of
the riches of other societies. Those who find a need
to build over some aspects of their lives, to fill in places
which have been left vacant, can use this material to
create visions which will leave their culture richer than
it was when they received it from the hands of their
forebears.

[258]

XVI

WE have seen how the Manus, like ourselves, give
their children little to respect and so do not equip them
to grow up graciously, how bringing up children to
envy and despise their elders is doing those children
scant service. We have seen how well the Manus de-
velop personality in their children, especially in their
boys, and how we neglect our boys and give them no
intimate association with men whom they can take as
models. And we have seen how infinitely richer we
are in the traditional materials upon which the temper-
amentally restive, the specially gifted child may drawj
realising at the same time that we are in danger of so at-
tenuating and standardising human relationships that
no one will feel a need to draw upon this rich material.
All of these are special points, points upon which Manus
has seemed to offer special illumination. But what of
education as a whole? What does the Manus experi-
ment suggest?

We have followed the Manus baby through its for-
mative years to adulthood, seen its indifference towards
adult life turn into attentive participation, its idle scof-
fing at the supernatural change into an anxious sounding
of the wishes of the spirits, its easy-going generous
communism turn into grasping individualistic acquisi-

[259]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

tiveness. The process of education is complete. The
Manus baby, born into the world without motor habits,
without speech, without any definite forms of behaviour,
with neither beliefs nor enthusiasms, has become the
Manus adult in every particular. No cultural item
has slipped out of the stream of tradition which the
elders transmit in this irregular unorganised fashion
to their children, transmit by a method which seems to
us so haphazard, so unpremeditated, so often definitely
hostile to its ultimate ends.

And what is true of Manus education in this respect,
is true of education in any untouched, homogeneous
society. Whatever the method adopted, whether the
young are disciplined, lectured, consciously taught, per-
mitted to run wild or ever antagonised by the adult
world — the result is the same. The little Manus be-
comes the big Manus, the little Indian, the big Indian.
y When it is a question of passing on the sum total of a
simple tradition, the only conclusion which it is possible
to draw from the diverse primitive material is that any
method will do. The forces of imitation are so much
more potent than any adult technique for exploiting
them J the child's receptivity to its surroundings is so
much more important than any methods of stimula-
tion, that as long as every adult with whom he comes
in contact is saturated with the tradition, he cannot es-
cape a similar saturation.

Although this applies, of course, in its entirety, only
to a homogeneous culture, it has nevertheless far-reach-
ing consequences in educational theory, especially in the

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CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

modification of the characteristic American faith in edu-
cation as the universal panacea. All the pleasant op-
timism of those who believe that hope lies in the future,
that the failures of one generation can be recouped in
the next, are given the lie. The father who has not
learned to read or write may send his son to school
and see his son master this knowledge which his father
lacked. A technique which is missing in one member
of a generation but present in others, may be taught,
of course, to the deficient one's son. Once a technique
becomes part of the cultural tradition the proportions
to which it is common property may vary from genera-
tion to generation. But the spectacular fashion in which
sons of illiterate fathers have become literate, has been
taken as the type of the whole educational process.
(The theorists forget the thousands of years before the
invention of writing.) Actually it is only the type of
possibilities of transmitting known techniques — the type
of education discussed in courses in the "Teaching of
Elementary Arithmetic," or "Electrical Engineering."
When education of this special and formal sort is con-
sidered, there are no analogies to be drawn from primi-
tive society. Even if, as sometimes happens, a new
technique may be imported into a tribe by a war cap-
tive or a foreign woman, and a whole generation learn
from one individual, this process is of little compara-
tive interest to us. The clumsy methods and minute
rules of thumb by which such knowledge is imparted,
has little in common with our self-conscious, highly
specialised teaching methods.

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

It must be clearly understood that when I speak of
education I speak only of that process by which the
growing individual is inducted into his cultural inherit-
ance, not of those specific ways in which the complex
techniques of modern life are imparted to children ar-
ranged in serried ranks within the schoolroom. As the
schoolroom is one, and an important, general educa-
tional agency, it is involved in this discussion j as it
teaches one method of penmanship in preference to a
more fatiguing one, it is not. This strictly professional-
ised education is a modern development, the end result
of the invention of writing and the division of labour,
a problem in quantitative cultural transmission rather
than of qualitative. The striking contrast between the
small number of things which the primitive child must
learn compared with the necessary educational attain-
ments of the American child only serves, however, to
point the moral that whereas there is such a great quan-
titative difference, the process is qualitatively very
similar.

After all, the little American must learn to become
the big American, just as the little Manus becomes the
big Manus. The continuity of our cultural life depends
upon the way in which children in any event receive
the indelible imprint of their social tradition. Whether
they are cuddled or beaten, bribed or wheedled into
adult life — they have little choice except to become
adults like their parents. But ours is not a homogeneous
society. One community differs from another, one so-
cial class from another, the values of one occupational

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CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

group are not the values of those who follow some
different calling. Religious bodies with outlooks as
profoundly different as Roman Catholicism and Chris-
tian Science, claim large numbers of adherents always
ready to induct their own and other people's children
into the special traditions of their particular group.
The four children of common parents may take such
divergent courses that at the age of fifty their premises
may be mutually unintelligible and antagonistic. Does
not the comparison between primitive and civilised so-
ciety break down? Does not education cease to be an
automatic process and become a vital question of what
method is to be pursued?

Undoubtedly this objection is a just one. Within
the general tradition there are numerous groups striving
for precedence, striving to maintain or extend their
proportionate allegiances in the next generation.
Among these groups, methods of education do count,
but only in relation to each other. Take a small town
where there are three religious denominations. It
would not matter whether Sunday School was a com-
pulsory matter, with a whipping from father if one
didn't learn one's lesson or squandered a penny of the
collection money, or whether Sunday School was a de-
lightful spot where rewards were handed out lavishly
and refreshments served by each young teacher to the
admiring scholars. It would not matter, as long as
all three Sunday Schools used the same methods.
Only when one Sunday School depends upon parental
intimidation, a second uses rewards and a third employs

[2653

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

co-educational parties as its bait, does the question of
method become important. And at the same time the
process under discussion has ceased to be education and
become — propaganda.

So, if education be defined as the process by which
the cultural tradition is transmitted to the next genera-
tion, or in exceptional cases to the members of another
culture — as is the case when a primitive people is sud-
denly brought within the sway of the organised forces
of civilisation — propaganda may be defined as methods
by which one group within an existing tradition tries
to increase the number of its adherents at the expense
of other groups. Outside both these categories falls
the conscious teaching of techniques, reading, writing,
riveting, surveying, piano playing, soap making, etch-
ing.

America presents the spectacle of all three of these
processes going on in great confusion. The general
stream of the tradition—language, manners, attitudes
towards property, towards the state, and towards re-
ligion— is being imparted effortlessly to the growing
child, while the complex of minute and exacting tech-
niques are being imparted to him arduously, through
the schools. Here and there the propagandists range.
Christian Scientists, Communists, vegetarians, anti-
vivisectionists, single taxers, humanists, small compact
groups in respect to religious or social philosophies,
mere participators in the general American cultural
stream in most other respects. And the rapid assimila-
tion of thousands of immigrants' children through the

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CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

medium of the public schools, has given to Americans
a peculiar faith in education, a faith which a less hybrid
society would hardly have developed. Because we have
turned the children of Germans, Italians, Russians,
Greeks, into Americans, we argue that we can turn our
children into anything we wish. Also because we have
seen one cult after another sweep through the country,
we argue that anything can be accomplished by the
right method, that with the right method, education
can solve any difficulty, supply any deficiency, train in-
habitants for any non-existing Utopia. Upon closer
scrutiny we see that our faith in method is derived from
our assimilation of immigrants, from the successful
teaching of more and more complicated techniques to
more and more people, or from the successful despoil-
ing of one group's role of adherents by some other
group of astute evangelists. In both of these depart-
ments method counts and counts hard. Efficient teach-
ing can shorten the learning time and increase the pro-
ficiency of children in arithmetic or bookkeeping. A
judicious distribution of loUypops, badges, uniforms,
may swell the ranks of the Baptist Sunday School or
the Young Communists. The parent who rigorously
atones for his own bad grammar by tirelessly correct-
ing his son may rear a son who speaks correctly. But
he will speak no more correctly than those who have
never heard poor English. By method it is possible
to speed up the course of mastering existing techniques
or increase the number of adherents of an existing faith.
But both of these changes are quantitative not qualita-

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

tivej they are essentially non-creative in character.
Nor is the achievement of making Americans out of
the children of foreign parents creating something newj
we are simply passing on a developed tradition to them.

Those who believe in the changes which have been
wrought by education point proudly to the diffusion
of the theory of evolution. But this is a mere quantita-
tive comment again. The gradual change in human
thought which produced Darwin's type of thought in-
stead of Thomas Aquinas' took place in the library
and the laboratory, not in the school room. Mediseval
schoolmen and their deductive approach had first to
be ousted from the universities before the inductive
method could be taught in the schools. And meanwhile
whether induction or deduction was taught with a whip
or a sweet smile or not consciously taught at all, made
relatively little difference in the accuracy with which the
mental habits of children conformed to the mental
habits of their teachers and parents.

Those who would save the world by education rely
a great deal upon the belief that there are many ten-
dencies, latent capacities, present in childhood which
have disappeared in the finished adult. Children's nat-
ural "love of art," "love of music," ^'generosity," "in-
ventiveness" are invoked by the advocates of this path
of salvation in working out educational schemes through
which these child virtues may be elaborated and stabil-
ised, as parts of the adult personality. There is a cer-
tain kind of truth in this assertion, but it is a negative
not a positive truth. For instance, children's *4ove of

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CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

music," with the probable exception of those rare cases
which we helplessly label "geniuses," is more likely
simply an unspoiled capacity to be taught music. Manus
children under the age of five or six could hear a melody
and attempt, clumsily, to reproduce It. But children
above that age were to all intents and purposes what we
would call tone deaf. In the same melody which the
small child would sing with a fair degree of success, the
older children and adults heard only a changing empha-
sis. They would repeat it with great stress upon the syl-
lables denoting the high notes, but without any change
in tone, and believe quite ingenuously that they were
reproducing all that there was in the song. Only one
Manus native could really sing melodies and he had
been away at school continuously for six years.

So that if by "natural to children" we mean that a
child will learn easily what an adult, culturally defined,
and in many ways limited, will not learn except with
the greatest difficulty, it is true that any capability upon
which the society does not set a premium, will seem
easier to teach to a child than to an adult. So our chil-
dren seem more imaginative than adults because we
put a premium upon practical behaviour which is strictly
oriented to the world of sense experience. Manus chil-
dren, on the other hand, seem more practical, more mat-
ter-of-fact than do the Manus adults who live in a
world where unseen spirits direct many of their activi-
ties. An educational enthusiast working among Manus
children would be struck with their "scientific potenti-
alities" just as the enthusiast among ourselves is struck

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

with our children's "imaginative potentialities." The
observations in both cases would be true in relation to
the adult culture. In the case of our children their im-
aginative tendencies nourished upon a rich language
and varied and diverse literary tradition will be dis-
counted in adult life, attenuated, suppressed, distorted
by the demands for practical adjustment j while the
Manus children's frank scepticism and preoccupation
with what they can see and touch and hear will be over-
laid by the canons of Manus supernaturalism. But the
educator who expected that these potentialities which
are not in accordance with the adult tradition could be
made to flower and bear fruit in the face of a com-
pletely alien adult world, would be reckoning without
the strength of tradition — tradition which will assert its
rights in the face of the most cunning methodological
assault in the world.

Let us take a Manus example of one of the things
which we attempt to develop by special systems of edu-
cation— drawing. Individual educators who feel that
our culture is lamentably deficient in artistic interest or
achievement, take groups of American school children,
provide them with materials, give them leisure and en-
couragement and bid them draw. On the walls of the
school room, in their books, the children see copies of
the famous paintings of the European tradition. After
their initial struggles with problems of perspective,
they settle down to draw within the rules worked out
by the concentrated attention of gifted adults in ages
which valued painting and gave it high rewards. Set-

[i68]

CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

ting aside the accidental good effects which are so fre-
quent in the drawings of children, good effects based
on freshness, naivete and fortuitous but happy arrange-
ments of lines, there will be found good work among
the efforts of such a group of children. The teacher
will point proudly to what can be done as soon as the
artistic impulse is allowed to flower under favourable
conditions.

In contrast, take the drawing which was done by my
Manus children within a culture which had no tradition
of drawing or painting. The children were given per-
fect freedom. I provided them with pencil and paper
and smooth surfaces upon which to do their work.
They were neither praised nor blamed j the very small
children were sometimes encouraged but only in the
most general terms. For months these children avidly
covered sheet after sheet of paper, throwing themselves
whole-souled into this new and amusing occupation. In
their work most of the tendencies which we find highly
developed in the arts of different people were present
in the efforts of individuals, conventualisation, realism,
attempted perspective, symbolism, arbitrary use of de-
sign units, distortion of the subject to fit the field, etc.
But, and this is the decisive point, there was no work
produced which could be called art. On the canoe
prows, on the betel spatulas, on the rims of bowls were
carvings of real beauty made by neighbouring tribes.
But the children had no precedent for drawing, and
their work shows this lack. Working without a guiding
tradition their efforts are interesting but they lend no

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

support to the theories of those who hope for great
things when the potentialities of children are pitted
against the adult world. And yet there is no reason to
argue from any racial theory of ability that these people
simply lacked an artistic gift, because the wood carving
of their neighbours of the same race ranks with the
finest work of its kind. Had every child been set to
work with a penknife the results would in all probabil-
ity have been far higher.

To return now to the group of child artists within
an American experimental school: Under the stimulus
of a good tradition, given leisure to draw, an oppor-
tunity to master the mechanics of the technique at an
early age, and social recognition of success such as is
accorded no artist in our adult national life, it may be
possible to develop artists who will have to battle mis-
erably with non-recognition in their own communities
or flee to live as half aliens in Europe. Because of the
accessibility of other traditions, traditions which have
so much body and vitality that they can be transplanted
from their own countries and set down among a group
of school children, it is possible for us to bring children
up in sympathy with a culture other than our own.
This would be almost impossible among a primitive
people. But the teacher who develops a child's sym-
pathies with another tradition at the expense of the
child's adherence to its own culture is not creating some-
thing new. She is simply diverting the stream of tradi-
tion so that the child drinks with complete unconscious-
ness from an alien source. The child is muiBed in the

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CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

material trappings, the ideology, the standards of a
different world until it comes to belong to that world
rather than to the tradition of its own country. This
child grown to manhood and looking about him with
no recognition upon the culture in which he has no part
will seem to point vividly the moral that education can
accomplish anything.

But this is only partly true. Had the Manus chil-
dren been shown the work of good artists, encouraged
to admire and imitate this work, condemned for failure,
praised for success, the work of children whose parents
knew nothing of drawing or painting might show the
discipline, the style, the conventions of an art — the art
to which they had been exposed. Proficiency and in-
terest in graphic art would not necessarily carry with it
a complex of associated ideas which would make the
artist socially acceptable in Manus. If his absorption
in the execution of his work could be cultivated to the
point where he refused to fish or trade, build canoes or
houses, he would probably become a cultural misfit.

When we look about us among different civilisations
and observe the vastly different styles of life to which
the individual has been made to conform, to the de-
velopment of which he has been made to contribute,
we take new hope for humanity and its potentialities.
But these potentialities are passive not active, helpless
without a cultural milieu in which to grow. So Manus
children are given opportunity to develop generous
social feeling; they are given a chance to exercise it in
their play world. But these generous communistic sen-

[271]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

timents can not maintain themselves in the adult world
which sets the price of survival at an individualistic
selfish acquisitiveness. Men who as boys shared their
only cigarette and halved their only laplapy will dun
each other for a pot or a string of dogs' teeth.

So those who think they can make our society less
militantly acquisitive by bringing children up in a world
of share and share alike, bargain without their hosts.
They can create such a world among a few children
who are absolutely under their control, but they will
have built up an attitude which will find no institu-
tionalised path for adult expression. The child so
trained might become a morbid misfit or an iconoclast,
but he can not make terms with his society without re-
linquishing the childhood attitudes for which his so-
ciety has no use.

The spectacular experiment in Russia had first to
be stabilised among adults before it could be taught to
children. No child is equipped to create the necessary
bridge between a perfectly alien point of view, and
his society. Such bridges can only be built slowly,
patiently, by the exceptionally gifted. The cultivation
in children of traits, attitudes, habits foreign to their
cultures is not the way to make over the world. Every
new religion, every new political doctrine, has had first
to make its adult converts, to create a small nuclear cul-
ture within whose guiding walls its children will flour-
ish. "Middletown" illustrates how art and literature
and music, history and the classics are taught in the
schools, but completely neglected in adult life by the

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CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

male members of the community. They are undoubt-
edly taught by teachers sadly lacking in real knowledge
or enthusiasm, but even given the best possible teachers,
the results of the teachings would not be able to hold out
against the contrasting pressure of "Middletown" life.
The little groups of painters and writers who cluster
forlornly together in out of the way spots in America
or gather in the cafes in Paris are earnest of this. Ex-
posure to the ideas of other cultures has given them
an impetus towards the artist's life which they cannot
live out within their communities. And although the
production of gifted artists who must flee the tradition
which has but half nourished them, is better than the
production of no artists at all, it is but a sorry cultural
result when compared with what can be accomplished
within the walls of a rich and vital tradition.

So, although it is possible to induct a few children
into a cultural tradition to which they are not the lineal
heirs, this is not a process by which the children are
educated above their cultural background in its widest
sense. The tradition of Italian painting is exchanged
for the tradition of commercial success in Des Moines,
Iowa J the canons of German musical life substituted
for the canons of jazz. But the children have not de-
veloped a new thing j they have taken that which some
adult wished to give them out of his cultural richness.
Only by the contributions of adults are real changes
brought about J only then can the enlistment of the
next generation have important effects.

The truth of this conclusion has vivid illustration in

[273]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Manus, where although the society neglects so many
of its educational problems until manhood, and per-
mits rebellious youths to mock at its sanctities, or sulk
at its commands, the youth has no resource in the end
except conformity, because his culture has become, in
spite of himself, woof and web of his being. The child
will receive the general content of his culture no mat-
ter how it is transmitted to him j he will absorb the con-
tent in any event, but he is hopelessly dependent upon
the quality of that content.

Our general neglect of content for method, our blind
trust that all we need is a mechanical formula, is illus-
trated sharply in the kind of courses taught in teachers'
training colleges as compared with courses in the Liberal
Arts. The prospective teachers are taught how to teach
everything under the sun, but they are taught very
little about the art, literature, history, themselves. A
slight, ill-comprehended body of material is transmitted
from teacher to pupil in a most elaborate and unreward-
ing fashion. In the training colleges, the "value of
teaching with dates," "the use of charts" takes the place
of actually reading history. And thirty hours of ped-
agogy, courses in how to teach history or biology, are
regarded by school boards as more valuable than aca-
demic distinction in these subjects. Prospective teach-
ers, often coming from homes with a very slight cul-
tural tradition, enter a college where they are given
nothing to make up for their deficiencies. And yet we
continue to depend upon the individual teacher to trans-
mit the rich content of literary and scientific tradition

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CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

which is available to us to-day. If we are to use these
materials, if we are to have a richer culture, we must
either abandon the dependence upon the individual
teachers or give them a far better background during
their years of training. If the teachers are to be the
advance guard of civilisation they must first be given
a genuine feeling for and understanding of that civilisa-
tion.

An alternative course is to relinquish our dependence
upon the teachers and turn to other methods of diffus-
ing cultural content. This method is symbolised by a
recent educational plan of a large museum in an East-
ern city. The museum sends out sets of slides to a
series of city high schools. The children in each high
school are then shepherded into the school auditoriums
at a given hour, and a highly trained expert on the
museum staff gives a radio talk which is illustrated by
the slides. Even the signal for change of slides is given
over the radio. Methods such as these, using the radio,
the lantern, the motion picture and a far larger and
more available supply of books, could be used to place
great masses of good material before children. A com-
paratively small body of highly intelligent educators
could direct the content prescribed and administered to
millions of school children. Unlike the old text book,
these new methods would teach themselves. The
teachers would have to be little more than good disci-
plinarians and good record keepers. A dependence upon
good material diffused mechanically, impersonally from
remote but reliable centres is preferable to the present

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GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

method in which a teacher who knows nothing of
poetry herself is expected to interpret Shakespeare to
her students. Such mechanical methods may be neces-
sary to adopt as emergency measures, until we can re-
vise the course of training in teachers' colleges and pro-
vide for our schools teachers who can combine knowl-
edge of rich materials with personal leadership.

In either case, those who wish to alter our traditions
and cherish the Utopian but perhaps not impossible
hope that they can consciously do so, must first muster
a large enough body of adults who with them wish to
make the slight rearrangements of our traditional atti-
tudes which present themselves to our culturally sat-
urated minds. This is equally true of those who wish
to import part of the developed tradition of other so-
cieties. They must, that is, create a coherent adult cul-
ture in miniature before they can hope to bring up chil-
dren in the new tradition — even if they expect them to
be brought up by radio. Such changes in adult attitudes
come slowly, are more dependent upon specially gifted
or wise individuals than upon wholesale educational
schemes.

Besides encouraging a most unfounded optimism,
this over-valuation of the educational process and un-
der-valuation of the iron strength of the cultural walls
within which any individual can operate, produces one
other unfortunate result. It dooms every child born
into American culture to victimisation by a hundred
self-conscious evangelists who will not pause long
enough to build a distinctive culture in which the grow-

[276]

CHILD'S DEPENDENCE UPON TRADITION

ing child may develop coherently. One such group
negates the eflForts of another and the modern child is
subjected to miseries which the Manus child never
knows, reared as it is with unselfconscious finality into
a Manus adult. Not until we realise that a poor cul-
ture will never become rich, though it be filtered
through the expert methods of unnumbered ped-
agogues, and that a rich culture with no system of edu-
cation at all will leave its children better off than a
poor culture with the best system in the world, will
we begin to solve our educational problems. Once we
lose faith in the blanket formula of education, in the
magic fashion in which education, using the passive
capacities of children, is to create something out of noth-
ing, we can turn our attention to the vital matter of
developing individuals, who as adults, can gradually
mould our old patterns into new and richer forms.

[277]

APPENDICES

THE ETHNOLOGICAL APPROACH TO
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

THIS investigation was conducted upon the hypoth-
esis that it is impossible to study original nature di-
rectly except in such very simple and undifferentiated
terms as those studied in the basic experiments con-
ducted by Watson. It is based upon the assumption
that the original nature of the child is so subject to
environmental influences that the only way to arrive
at any conception of original nature is to study it as
modified by different environmental conditions. The
repetition of such observations will in time give us a
far better basis of generalisation than can be obtained
by the observation of individuals within the confining
walls of one type of social environment. Observations
may be made upon thousands of children within our
culture; tested and re-tested within our society, they
may hold good, but once taken beyond those bounds
they will often be found to fail.

It is realised that in transferring an investigation
from within our society where all the instruments of
research, particularly language, are under perfect con-
trol, to a primitive society where controlled conditions
are practically impossible and a new language has to

[279]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

be learned, certain sacrifices of methodological exact-
ness are necessarily made. But it is felt that such dis-
advantages in method are more than compensated for
by the advantages which result from a homogeneous
culture. In our society we can study large numbers
of cases of a known chronological age but we have con-
stantly to make allowances for a cultural background so
heterogeneous that no investigator can hope to control
it. In a primitive society, the student has fewer cases,
their chronological age, age of parents at their birth,
order of birth, method of delivery, etc., are relatively
unattainable. But the manners and morals, beliefs,
avoidances, repugnances, enthusiasms, of their parents
all conform very closely to the cultural norm. For
studies of personality, social adjustment, etc., that is,
for all those investigations where the social environ-
ment is the most important factor, research in primitive
society is rich in its rewards. The religious beliefs, sex
habits, methods of discipline, social aims, of those who
constitute the child's family, can all be arrived at by
an analysis of the culture itself. The individual within
that culture does not differ importantly in these mat-
ters from others of his age or sex. For it must be
remembered that in a culture like Manus, with only
a sex division of labour between individuals (division
of labour between localities does, of course, occur),
without any priesthood with a great body of esoteric
knowledge, without any method of keeping extensive
records, the cultural tradition is simple enough to be
almost entirely contained within the memory of an
average adult member of the society. An investigator
who enters such a society with ethnological training

[280]

APPENDIX I

which makes it possible to refer the phenomena of
Manus culture to convenient and well understood cat-
egories, and with the immense superiority over the na-
tive of being able to record in writing each aspect of
the culture as it is learned, is in an excellent position
for research in a comparatively short time. The fact
that my husband was working on Manus ethnology
made it possible to still further reduce this preliminary
time period. A primitive culture is therefore less per-
plexing as social background than would be even the
most isolated of rural villages in our society, for into
these drift echoes and fragments from a hundred dif-
ferent kinds of complex cultural elaboration.

The study of human development in a primitive so-
ciety has then these two advantages: contrast to our
own social environment which brings out different as-
pects of human nature and often demonstrates that be-
haviour which occurs almost invariably in individuals
within our own society is nevertheless due not to orig-
inal nature but to social environment j and a homoge-
neous and simple social background, easily mastered,
against which the development of the individual may
be studied.

The anthropologist submits the findings of the
psychologist who works within our society to the test
of observation within other societies. He never seeks
to invalidate the observations of the psychologist, but
rather, in the light of wider sodal data, to test the in-
terpretations which may be placed upon those observa-
tions. His is a special technique for the rapid analysis
of primitive society. In order to acquire this technique,
he has devoted a great deal of time to the study of dif-

[281]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

ferent primitive societies and the analysis of the social
forms which are most characteristic of them. He has
studied non-Indo European languages so that his mind
will adjust easily to linguistic categories which are alien
to our own. He has studied phonetics so that he may
be able to recognise and record types of sound difficult
for our ears to distinguish and even more difficult for
our organs of speech to pronounce, accustomed as they
are to different phonetic patterns. He has studied
diverse kinship systems and gained speed in handling
kinship categories so that the Manus scheme, which
results, for instance, in individuals of the same genera-
tion addressing each other by grandparent terms, is not
a perplexing obstacle but falls readily into a clear and
easily comprehended pattern of thought. In addition,
he is willing to forsake the amenities of civilised life
and subject himself for months at a time to the in-
conveniences and unpleasantness of life among a people
whose manners, methods of sanitation, and ways of
thought, are completely alien to him. He is willing
to learn their language, to immerse himself in their
manners, get their culture sufficiently by heart to feel
their repugnances and sympathise with their triumphs.
In Manus, for instance, it was necessary to learn a very
real horror of the meeting of two tabu relatives, to
guard one's tongue against ever uttering a tabu word
and feel embarrassed contrition if one had made a slipj
to learn to greet every news of illness or misfortune
with the question of what spirit was involved. Such
investigations as these involve a fairly drastic rearrange-
ment of thought and daily habit. The willingness to
make them, and the knowledge of the special tech-

[282]

APPENDIX I

niques necessary to ethnological research, are the equip-
ment which the ethnologist brings to the solution of
psychological problems. He says to the psychologist
who has made long and careful investigation within
our society, from which he may or may not have drawn
conclusions which he regards as final, "Let me take
your results and submit them to a new test. You have
made such and such generalisation about the thought
content of young children, the relationship between
mental and physical development, the connection be-
tween a certain type of family life and the possibility
of happy marital adjustment, the factors which go to
the formation of personality, etc. These results I find
significant and important. Let me therefore submit
them to the test of a different social environment, and
in the light of such observation, on the basis of our com-
bined research, on the basis of your initial definition of
the problems and observations within our society, and
my check observations in a different society, come to
conclusions which will successfully withstand the ac-
cusation that the effect of social environment has not
been properly allowed for. It will then be possible for
you to divide your observations upon individuals within
our culture into two parts: data upon the behaviour of
human beings modified by present-day culture, which
will be of the utmost importance in handling educa-
tional and psychiatric problems of individuals with the
same cultural background, and second: theories of the
original nature, the potentialities of man, based upon
your observations and mine."

To the psychologists who are genuinely interested
in the solution of fundamental theoretical problems

[283]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

such an offer cannot but make an appeal. The psychi-
atrist, the social worker, the educator, whose concern is
with the immediate adjustment of individuals, may pos-
sibly say, with justice, "I accept your evidence that
many of the phenomena of human nature in our so-
ciety which we treat as biologically determined, are
really socially determined. Theoretically, I think you
are right. Actually, I have five cases of maladjustment
which I must deal with to-day. The bulk of accu-
mulated data upon the kind of behaviour of which these
cases are a sample, even though it is based upon individ-
uals in our society, in fact just because it is so local in
rime or space, is just what I need. The first case I
have is a case of exhibitionism. It is very interesting to
know that exhibitionism could hardly develop in Samoa,
where our habitual tabus are not observed. But mean-
while John is an exhibitionist and must be dealt with
in the light of other case material on exhibitionistic chil-
dren in our society." With the comment of such hard
pressed practical workers, one must have the greatest
sympathy. But the same thing does not apply to those
who stand behind these workers, those who evolve
theories of human nature upon which educational
schemes and schools of psychology are built up.

It is most important that the psychologist should be
fully aware of the possibilities of research in other cul-
tures, that he should be in intimate contact with modern
ethnological research. For ethnology is in a peculiar
position.

In many sciences the neglect of a field of research
by one generation of investigators is not ultimately im-
portant. The research neglected by one generation may

[284]

APPENDIX I

be taken up with equal and perhaps greater advantage
by the next. This is the case, for instance, with experi-
ments in animal psychology, on white rats reared in
captivity. Presumably the supply of available rats will
be as great in the next generation as it is nowj the rapid
rate of multiplication of the rats will make them equally
good subjects for experiment. But if the animal psy-
chologist were to find that experiments upon primates
in a wild state were very valuable at the same time
that he found that progressive invasion by civilisation
of the wild parts of the world was diminishing their
number and threatening to extinguish these primates
altogether, he would have great cause for alarm, cause
for urging other psychologists and scientific institutions
to undertake the study of primates in the wild state
before it was too late. And even so, his predicament
would not be as serious as that of social psychology,
for from one pair of wild apes the numbers of wild apes
might be again recruited.

But in social psychology this is not the case. Be-
cause we must study, not only human beings, but human
beings as modified by environment, a variety of check
social environments is of the greatest importance. With
the rapid diffusion of Western civilisation over the sur-
face of the earth, societies are coming to conform more
and more closely to the same cultural type, or if they
are too divergent from the reigning type, to die out
altogether. Good test cases are being eliminated week
by week, as Western civilisation with its Christian
ideology and industrial system penetrates Japan and
China, and into the hitherto railless interior of Afghan-
istan, or on the other hand, as the last remaining Mori-

[285]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

ori or Lord How Islander dies, the only remnants of
one-time living cultures which could not withstand the
shock of white contact. It is of course idle to expect
that the mores of the whole human race will become
so standardised that differences between local groups
will not always exist, but it may be that with improved
methods of transportation and communication, com-
paratively isolated human societies will never again
occur. No one small group of people may ever again
be permitted to develop a unique culture, with little
or no outside contact, over a period of hundreds of
years, as has been the case in the past. No continent
will be permitted to solve its own environmental ad-
justment problems, without outside influence, as the
American aboriginals solved the problem of the cultiva-
tion of maize. The cumulative nature of our material
tradition is such that we may well be coming to the end
of an era which will never be repeated. Meanwhile,
in New Guinea, Indonesia, Africa, South America, and
parts of Asia, there are still in existence groups which
can be used as invaluable checks upon all scientific at-
tempts to understand human nature. The social psy-
chologist of five hundred years from now will have to
say: "If we could submit this conclusion to the test of
investigating people brought up within a completely
different social framework, we might get different re-
sults. That, however, is now impossible. There are
no such societies where the problem could be studied j
we cannot, if we would, create test societies and pro-
duce these necessary conditions of contrast experimen-
tally. Our hands are tied." But we are in no sense
so handicapped. The different contrasting societies are

[286]

APPENDIX I

there ready for study. There are an increasing number
of ethnologists with the necessary techniques for in-
vestigating them. Upon the co-operation of psychol-
ogist and ethnologist, the success of any such venture
depends. If the training of the ethnologist is to be
utilised to the full, he should spend most of his time,
at least during his early years, in the field collecting as
fast as possible this rapidly vanishing, priceless evidence
of human adaptability and potentialities. Upon the
psychologist in the laboratory and in the library de-
velops the posing of problems to which the ethnologist's
contribution will be important.

The student of human society to-day looks back
hopelessly upon the beginnings of culture, realising
that such problems as the origin of language can never
be solved, that one guess is as good as another and that
they must all remain in the realm of speculation. To
the curious minded this is felt as a definite handicap,
but hardly a point upon which our scientific progenitors
of the stone age need our forgiveness. It is an incon-
trovertible assumption that they could not record these
important and interesting experiments in speech which
differentiated early man from his less accomplished an-
cestors. But we have no such alibi to offer. There are
now in existence social experiments which we have only
to study and to preserve. There are now in existence
laboratories for research such as future ages will not
have. Only by the co-operative effort of psychologist,
psychiatrist, geneticist, can the problems be posed for
which these societies offer laboratory methods of solu-
tion. Without the stimulation of the psychologist, the
work of the ethnologist is far less valuable than it might

[287]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

otherwise have been. If the psychologist will take ac-
count of ethnological data, if he will familiarise him-
self sufficiently with ethnological material so as to
realise its potentialities, if he will formulate his theories
with regard for the influence of cultural environment,
the ethnologist's task will be immensely simplified. He
does not wish to confine himself to the negative activity
of exploding theories which have been framed within
one society and collapse when submitted to a check, nor
has he the time nor the training to retire into the library
and the laboratory and frame new psychological theories
for himself. This, moreover, he cannot do without dis-
loyalty to his own science. His first obligation is to
use his training to record data of primitive society be-
fore these societies disappear. Field work is arduous
and exacting. The ethnologist should do his field work
in his youth and his theorising after his fitness for active
work is diminished. Meanwhile the psychologist
should ofFer suggestions for research. Many field trips
which are now only historical investigations, of extreme
value in adding to our knowledge of human society
and the lengths to which it can influence human be-
haviour, are only half as valuable as they might have
been if definite psychological problems could be at-
tacked simultaneously.

I present this study as a sample of the kind of con-
ditions which exist in primitive society and a suggestion
of their bearing upon problems of education and per-
sonality development. I am far more anxious that the
fertile thinkers in other fields should examine this
material in the light of possible problems which data
of this kind could solve, than that they should agree

[288]

APPENDIX I

with my particular conclusions. Social psychology is
still in its infancy. It is of the greatest importance that
every available approach, especially those approaches
which are only temporarily available, should be utilised
to the fullest extent.

Background of This Study

This investigation of Melanesian children was un-
dertaken to solve a special problem which is but lightly
touched upon in this book: i.e., the relationship between
spontaneous animism and thinking characteristic of men-
tally immature persons, especially children under five
or six. The results of this research were negative, that
is, evidence was found to support the view that animism
is not a spontaneous aspect of child thinking nor does
it spring from any type of thought characteristic of
Immature mental development j its presence or absence
in the thought of children is dependent upon cultural
factors, language, folk lore, adult attitudes, etc., and
these cultural factors have their origin in the thought
of individual adults, not in the misconceptions of chil-
dren. These results will be presented with full discus-
sion in another place.

Melanesia was chosen for this study because it is an
area which contains many relatively unspoiled primitive
groups and has been conspicuous in ethnological discus-
sions as a region filled with the phenomena usually sub-
sumed under the head of "Animism." The choice of
a local area was made on the basis of what regions were
relatively unknown, thus narrowing it down to the re-
gion of the Bismarck Archipelago, later narrowed to the
Admiralties as the part of that territory about which

[289]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

we had the least information. The Manus tribe were
chosen for a multitude of chance reasons, because a dis-
trict officer recommended them as easy to deal with, be-
cause a missionary had published some texts in the lan-
guage, and because we were able to get a school boy in
Rabaul to act as interpreter at the beginning. Where
nothing was known of any of the many diverse tribal
groups in the Admiralties, the choice was at best a blind
one. I document this matter because the peculiar rele-
vancy of Manus attitudes and the Manus language to
my results is the more striking. I did not choose this
culture because of its attitudes towards children, be-
cause of its bare non-metaphorical language, because of
the kind of results which I attained. I simply chose a
Melanesian culture in a primitive state in which I could
study the education and mental development of young
children.

The method followed was primarily one of observa-
tion of the children under normal conditions of play,
in their home, with their parents. For the study of
the special problem, I collected the children's spon-
taneous drawings, asked them to interpret ink blots, col-
lected interpretations of events and posed problem
questions which would throw light upon their animistic
conceptions. The children had never held a pencil be-
fore j I began by giving the fourteen-year-olds pencils
and paper and suggesting that they draw, leaving choice
of subject to them. The next day the next younger
group were provided with drawing materials and this
went on until the three-year-olds were enlisted. I felt
that this was the closest approximation to normal meth-
ods of learning which I could make without permitting

[290]

APPENDIX I

the adults to draw, which would have changed the
terms of the investigation. The drawings were pre-
served with name, date, and interpretations when there
were any. Their detailed analysis is a problem for
future work.

This study has also as a background a detailed knowl-
edge of the culture, of the social organisation, the eco-
nomic system, the religious beliefs and practices. All
current events in the village were followed with care-
ful attention to their cultural significance and the r51e
which they played in the lives of the children. The
relationship between parents and children was noted
and recorded in the light of detailed knowledge of the
paternity and history of the child and the social status
and personality of the parent. In each case, the child
was studied with his social background, that of his own
home and kin being known in detail, that of his culture
being known also. This may be said to be a study in
which the total situation approach is arrived at in the
sense that a simple culture, a population of two hun-
dred and ten people formed a background which could
be controlled as a larger community in a complex civi-
lisation could never be.

The native language was used throughout, although
I was of course also familiar with pidgin English and
so able to follow the conversation and play of the boys
in both tongues. With the women and girl children,
and with the very little ones, all communication was
in the native language. Records of conversations, in-
terpretations, etc., were all taken down in the Manus
language. Translations when necessary were checked
through our school boy interpreter, who understood

[291]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

a good deal of English and spoke perfect pidgin, and
cross-checked between my husband and myself.

This book presents the aspects of my study which
I feel bear directly upon educational problems. A de-
scription of the educational methods pursued consist-
ently by an entire people and the results in adult per-
sonality should be of use to educators who must formu-
late theories of the inherent potentialities of human
beings and the way in which these potentialities may
best be developed by society through education.

I should like to add an explanatory note about the
terminology which I have used. I have avoided as
much as possible the use of technical terms. This is
not because I do not realise that a science may have
much to gain by the use of special and exact terminol-
ogy. But I do not feel that there is any one terminol-
ogy among the many in use by different psychological
schools which has established itself sufficiently so that
one may predict its survival at the expense of all the
others. In the meanwhile such a study as this has a
certain finality. In a few years the village of Peri will
be invaded by missionaries j schools will be introduced;
it will no longer be a primitive culture. It therefore
seems advisable to couch this description in the language
which has been developed outside the realm of con-
troversy— in the field of the novelist — in order that it
may be intelligible when some of the present dialectic
points and their terminological disputes have been out-
moded. Such a course has the additional advantage of
making the material more accessible to students from
other fields.

[292]

II

ETHNOGRAPHIC NOTES ON THE MANUS PEOPLES

A COMPLETE ethnology of the Manus culture is
being written by Mr. Fortune. Those who wish to
place the observations in this book in a more detailed
cultural setting will be able to do so by referring to
his monograph. I shall only give here a brief sum-
mary discussion in order to make the material in this
book more immediately intelligible to the Oceanic stu-
dent.

The Admiralty Islands include about forty islands
near the Bismarck Archipelago, north of New Guinea.
They lie between i° and 3° S. and 146° and 148° E.
The Great Admiralty which forms the centre of the
archipelago is about sixty miles long. All the islands
of the archipelago, taken together, have an estimated
area of about six hundred square miles. The popula-
tion is estimated at about thirty thousand. The in-
habitants are divided for convenience of classification
into three main groups: the Manus, or sea-dwelling
people, the Usiai, who inhabit the Great Admiralty,
and the Matankor peoples who live on the small islands
and build their houses on land but make some use of
canoes. The Manus people are the only homogeneous
group among these three j both Usiai and Matankor
peoples include tribes speaking many mutually unintel-
ligible dialects and showing great divergences in cus-
tom. This blanket classification is one which the Manus

[293]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

people make J as the most enterprising group in the
archipelago they have imposed their terminology upon
the white man.

The Manus build their houses on piles, in the lagoons
near the Great Admiralty or in the lee of small islands.
Their some two thousand people are divided among
eleven villages: Papitalai on the North Coast, Pamat-
chau, Mbunei, Tchalalo, Pere (Peri for purposes of
this study as the latter spelling is misleading to those
not familiar with Oceanic languages), Patusi and Loit-
cha, in the lagoons along the South Coast, and settle-
ments near the islands of Mbuke, Taui, Mok, and
Rambutchon, all islands off the South Coast. The lan-
guage spoken is divided into two dialects, one in which
the 1 sound is used exclusive of the r, the other which
uses both 1 and r. (The latter is spoken in Peri.) This
is a mere phonetic shift and the two dialects are mu-
tually intelligible. The villages which speak a common
dialect have, however, a vague feeling of unity as over
against those which speak the other dialect. There are
no political connections between any of the Manus vil-
lages, although Government has recently placed a
Mbunei man of outstanding leadership in nominal
charge of the relations of all these villages to the Ad-
ministration. The different villages met as units in two
ways — in very rare inter-village feasts, only one or two
of which were held in a generation, and in occasional
warfare. In some cases women of one Manus village
were carried off by another Manus village as prosti-
tutes. But the usual form of inter-village relationship
was neither the large feast, which, with its ritual of
challenge and competitive display, partook somewhat

[294]

APPENDIX II

of the nature of war, nor war itself, but rather a net-
work of interrelations between individuals and fam-
ilies in the different villages. There was much inter-
village marriage and each new marriage contract set
up a host of economic and social obligations between
the affinal relatives involved.

The Manus peoples, with the exception of the people
of Mbuke who are too far away from the main island,
live by fishing and trading their fish for the garden
products of their Usiai or Matankor neighbours. Daily
markets are held for the exchange of foodstuflfs and
the purchase of other necessities such as bark for cord,
baskets, spears, etc. Each local group among the non-
Manus peoples specialises in some particular manu-
facture which is traded to the nearest Manus village for
fish, or pots in the case of Mbuke, and then carried
far and wide to other Manus villages and their neigh-
bours, by Manus canoes. The large, single outrigger
canoes, which carry two lug sails and a snug little
house, distribute the material culture far and wide.
The Manus people control the trade of the South Coast.
Except for the Mbuke people who make pots, they
make nothing beyond houses and canoes for their own
use, cord for their own beadwork, and part of their fish-
ing apparatus. Their finer fish nets, however, are made
in Lou and other more distant Matankor settlements.
They depend upon the daily markets and the less reg-
ular overseas trade for everything else which they use.
With the Usiai they trade for sago, yams, taro, taro
leaves, betel nut, pepper leaves, lime gourds, lime spat-
ulas, paraminium nut used as gumming material, bark
for rope and string making, paraminium nut-covered

[295]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

baskets, oil strainers, carrying bags, etc. From their
own people of Mbuke they get pots. From the people
of Balowan and Lou their Manus neighbours get yams
("mammies"), carved bowls, and other fine woodwork,
fish nets, lime gourds, oil containers, spears, and tools
of obsidian. From Rambutchon and Nauna they get
carved beds, from Pak war charms of carved heads and
frigate bird feathers, from all of the islands coconuts
and coconut oil. Peri is the largest of the villages
near the mainland j the inhabitants have the additional
advantage of having sago swamps of their own, ob-
tained from the Usiai by marriage and conquest, so
they are less immediately dependent upon the local
market than most of the other Manus peoples. The
shell money used by all the Admiralty Island peoples
consists of strings of shallow white shell disks, resem-
bling the shell necklaces in use among the Southwest
Indians to-day. It is made by the Matankor people
of Ponam on the North Coast and traded all over the
island. The North Coast Matankor also have a monop-
oly of dugong fishing and excellent turtle fishing. In
the old days, wars used to be fought between them and
the Manus because the Manus poached on their fishing
rights. The North Coast has its own pottery centre at
the island of Hus, where a white pottery is made, while
the South Coast depends upon the black ware made on
the island of Mbuke.

While the Manus practically control the trade of the
South Coast, they have rivals on the North Coast who
build good canoes and are excellent fishermen. In their
own part of the Admiralties, however, they are the
middlemen J they control the fishing, the traffic on the

[296]

APPENDIX II

seas, and they are the carriers between Usiai and the
island Matankor. Although a few individuals have
learned to carve from some relative in another tribe,
the Manus as a group produce no single item of art
except beadwork nor, with the exception of Mbuke
pots, any articles for export. Neither are they collec-
tors j although their shelves are loaded with a greater
variety of articles than any Usiai or Matankor house
can boast, these are all there for purposes of trade.
They will sell the most beautiful Balowan bowl, the
finest bit of Usiai carving, with alacrity. After they
have sold all the fine work which they have bought
from their neighbours they will offer a white man the
bones of their dead, or the beaded hair of the dead,
for a price.

Although money is perfectly understood, and the
shell money and dogs'" teeth are in constant use, barter
is frequently resorted to both in the daily markets and
in the overseas trade. It is used primarily to compel
the production or sale of the kind of article desired.
So a canoe from Mok will load up with coconuts from
the trees of the Matankor peoples on the near-by islands
and sail into Peri, demanding sago and refusing to take
either money or any other valuable in exchange. The
burden of turning money into sago is thus shifted to
the Peri people 5 the Mok people who have made the
voyage simply wait until their demands are met. Or
the people of Balowan who furnish mud hen eggs to
the South Coast trade will give three eggs for two dogs'
teeth, but ten eggs for a bundle of sago which can be
bought for two dogs' teeth on the mainland.

With this traffic in material objects which results in

[297]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

the distribution of the products of all the different
localities all over the archipelago goes also a traffic in
charms J charms to produce or cure disease, charms to
make one's debtors anxious to discharge their debts,
charms to induce one's relatives to contribute generously
to some undertaking, charms to make a husband come
home on time for meals or think lightly of his other
wife. (Polygamy is unusual, but does occur.) These
are traded from people to people and seem to be the
more valued the more times they have changed hands —
for a profit. Aspirant mediums from one village will
go to a famous medium of another village to be trained.
The canoes which are carrying people and trade articles
and charms, gossip of births and of deaths, tales of the
latest seance, are constantly coming and going from one
Manus village to another.

Occasionally one of the loosely organised paternal
clans splits in half and the disgruntled section moves
to another village. When this occurs a nominal rela-
tionship is kept up between the members in the two i^l-
lagesj the kinship is claimed if it is desirable in arrang-
ing a marriage, etc. But the rule is for the clans to
be confined to one village. The clans are small, a few
have as many as ten adult members, others only two
or three. If they become reduced to as few as two
adult male members, however, the clan is either merged
into another small clan or vanish entirely in a large
one. So in Peri at the present time, Malean Is the
only survival of the clan of Kapet, and he has been
adopted by Ndrosal and will probably always function
as a member of Peri. Pokanas and Poli are the only
two surviving members of Lopwer, and Kea is the only

[ 298 ]

APPENDIX II

male member of Kamtatchauj all three of these men
act with the small clan of Kalo and people are begin-
ning to speak of them as belonging to Kal5. Where
the clan names could be explained at all in Peri they
were found to be taken from various types of fishing
apparatus which the members of that clan had the
hereditary right to make. Theoretically the members
of a clan build their houses close together, but the cus-
tom of moving a house after a death breaks into this
localisation (this can be seen on the map).

The whole attitude towards clan membership and to-
wards kinship is very loose in Manus. Kinship is
counted bilaterally, but a child usually belongs to his
father's clan, unless, as is often the case, he is adopted
by his mother's own or clan brother. The children of
two sisters call each other by the same term as do the
children of two brothers, adding, if it is necessary to
be explicit, "of a different house." House is regarded
as the equivalent of "father's line" and "place" is re-
garded as the equivalent of "Father's clan." This well
reflects the feeling that the important point is residence.
Difference in age is reflected in the kinship system:
older siblings are classed with the parent generation,
younger siblings with the child generation. The whole
kinship system is organised around the relationship of
brother and sister relationships between their descend-
ants. The father's sister and her descendants in the
female line are joking relatives and have the power
of cursing or blessing the descendants of the brother.
Male cross cousins are regarded as potential business
partners through the preferential marriage of their chil-
dren. Although the system is rigid, every fiction is

[299]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

permitted in order to fit an individual into the proper
category to arrange or contract a marriage. So a man
may be conceived as being sister's son to the clan of his
father's second wife or his older brother's wife, and
thereby having a right to return there to that clan to
demand a wife for his son. Only first marriages are
arranged in terms of the kinship system and these are
the marriages which, having the least regard to the per-
sons concerned, have the least duration. Discrepancies
in intelligence are the commonest reasons for the dis-
ruption of a marriage, especially by the man's kin.
Occasionally, however, they will influence a man to
divorce a stupid wife, if he himself is stupid, so that
he may marry an intelligent one, in order that she may
advise him and enable him to play some role in the
community. It is worth noting also that the richest
and most influential men in the community have all
been married for a long time to the same wife. There
are various interpretations to put upon this. One may
argue that they have stayed married because they were
of equal high intelligence and that the high intel-
ligence and drive has produced their success. (This
would be borne out by the fact that there are occasional
men who have been married a long time and had many
children by one wife, but who are stupid and timid
and play no role in the community.) Or it may sug-
gest that constant change of marriage partners is a ter-
rific economic drain on a man. A marriage which ends
in a death is then decently liquidated in the death ex-
changes, but marriages ending in divorce leave a great
many loose ends and result in a good deal of loss to
the individuals who have contributed to the affinal ex-

[300]

APPENDIX II

changes. A man who is frequently divorced becomes
a bad investment and people prefer to put their prop-
erty into the exchanges centring about marriages which
have proved stable.

There are faint echoes of rank in the privileges
claimed by certain families who are called la^pan in con-
tradistinction to other families which are called Icm.
Both classes may occur within one clan. The privileges
of the lapan are largely ornamental: the right to hang
shells on his house, his canoe and his belt 3 the right to
string one hundred dogs' teeth instead of fifty on a
string, the right to build his house near to one of the
little islets, and most importantly the right to boast of
his lapanship and insult the lau in the course of quar-
rels. From one lapan family in each village, a war
leader, known as the luliuii is chosen j he is the man
of most prestige within that family. He also rep-
resented the village in the occasional inter-village feasts.
Aside from these functions and the prestige of his title,
he had no power to control the members of his village
or to demand anything from them. The village unit
is a loose democracy, characterised ably by one inform-
ant in pidgin as a place where "altogether boy, he talk."
It is an aggregate of loosely organised paternal exoga-
mous clans, all bound together by mutual economic
obligations incurred through marriages between their
members, obligations which are enforced by the spirits
of the dead acting through the mediums. A single
puberty ceremonial may agitate all the inhabitants of
a village, but each one is acting as the member of a
family or a clan, not as a member of the village.

[301]

Ill

CULTURE CONTACT IN MANUS

A GOVERNMENT station was established in the
Admiralties in 19 12. Since that date the archipelago
has been under government control, taxes have been
collected, war, head hunting, capturing foreign women
for purposes of prostitution, the maintenance of a pub-
lic prostitute in the men's house, are all banned by law
and offenders subject to punishment by imprisonment.
Government officers make patrols several times a year,
sometimes for purposes of medical inspection, once a
year for tax collecting, and at other times. Civil cases
are heard during patrols. A native is furthermore per-
mitted to take complaints either criminal or civil to
the district officer at any time.

Administration is represented in the native villages
by appointed officers, a kukeral (or executive), a tultuly
interpreter and assistant to the executive in dealing with
government, and a doctor boy. The village of Peri was
divided into two administrative units, owing to civil
strife which arose some ten years ago because the young
men of one section carried off an Usiai woman who was
related by marriage to the kukeral of the village. Sep-
arate administrative units were subsequently formed
so that Peri has two kukeraisy two tultulsy and two doc-
tor boys. These native officials are presented with
policemen hats and exempted from the itn shilling tax.
As men of personality are usually chosen, the govern-
ment appointment increases their influence in the vil-

[302]

APPENDIX III

lage. But village life is not appreciably altered through
this agency, although if they are clever politicians they
can often turn their positions to their own advantage.
Native theories of disease and its cure are as heartily
subscribed to by the doctor boys as by any one else in
the community. The wearers of hats have simply
added a few touches of elaboration to the social scene.
When a "boy he got hat" dies, all other wearers of
hats mourn for him by observing some tabu, such as
a pledge not to smoke Capstan tobacco until after his
final death feast is made by his relatives. Important
kukerais give feasts known as kan fati yapy the **feast
belonging to the foreigner," at which tables are made
from planks spread out on logs, pieces of calico are
spread as tablecloths and whatever enamelware or
cutlery the village possesses is called into service; the
feast is principally of rice and "bullamoocow" (bully
beef). These feasts are however a rare occurrence and
represent the final ceremonial effort of the natives to
represent symbolically the connection between native
officials and the august administration of the white man.
The tendency of New Guinea natives to symbolise white
culture by tablecloths and flowers on the tables, which
has been remarked in Papua also, is the result of the
frequent contact of bush natives with civilised domestic
arrangements in their capacity of house boys.

The elaboration of the positions of boys with hats,
their tendency to regard themselves as a fraternity with
mutual interests and ambitions, their pride in their hats
and desire to surround them with an aura of political
piety and ritual are all fertile soil upon which adminis-
trative effort can work. The Manus have the idea of

[303]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

rank, of hereditary leadership in war, of blood carry-
ing certain prerogatives of dress and privilege. Unfor-
tunately this tradition of rank has nothing to do with
ordinary everyday government in the village. As a
result village life is anarchic, held together only by
the stream of economic exchanges which bind all the
families loosely together. This system is not suited
to any sort of communal undertaking. But the idea
of officialdom, instituted by the government, therefore
falls on good land. The old ideas of rank and war
leadership, the respect accorded certain families, can
easily be mobilised under this new system, and a more
coherent and efficient system of local government en-
couraged with very little disruption of the native life.
In speeches on important occasions prominent natives
refer solemnly to the passing of warfare, the present
peace and prosperity of the country since the "hat" de-
scended upon them. Traders to the core, the Manus
people have welcomed the government regime which
made intertribal trade safer and more frequent j liti-
gious and legalistic of mind, they delight in the oppor-
tunity to take disputes to the district officer's court. The
endless circumlocutions of pidgin English combined
with the exceedingly complex nature of native economic
affairs often leads, however, to unfortunate misunder-
standings in court. A dispute will be taken to the dis-
trict officer's about a pig for which one man claims he
has never received compensation. This said pig, which
A paid to B as part of a marriage exchange, has since
changed hands some thirty times, each party in the ex-
change passing on the obligation rather than eat the pig
and have to replace him in the currency system. For

[304]

APPENDIX III

until a pig is eaten he is virtually currency. The de-
fendant B tries to explain that he is waiting for the
value of the pig to be returned to him along this chain
of thirty creditors, all of whom have had transitory
possession of the pig. "Now me sell 'em along one
fellow man, he man belong one fellow sister belong me
fellow. All right. This fellow man he sell him along
one fellow man, he belong Patusi, he like marry him
one fellow pickaninny mary * belong 'em. He no pick-
aninny true belong 'em that's all he help 'em papa
belong this fellow mary. All right. Now this fellow
pig he go along this fellow man. This fellow man he
no kaikai pig, he sell 'em along one fellow man, he
sister belong mary belong 'em. All right. This fellow
man he got one fellow brother, liklik brother belong
'em, he work along one fellow station belong Malay.
Close up now he like finish 'em time belong 'em. Sup-
pose he finish 'em time now he catch 'em plenty fellow
money, 3 fellow pound, he bring 'em along this big
fellow brother belong 'em, one time along plenty fel-
low altogether something. Now this fellow sister be-
long mary belong man belong pickaninny mary belong
sister belong mary belong me he no — " f At this point

* "Mary" means any native woman.

f This being translated is: "Now I gave the pig to a man, a man
who is my sister's husband. This man gave the pig to a man in
Patusi who was planning to marry a daughter of his. She was not
his own daughter, but he had inherited her father's position. This
pig was accordingly given to this man. This man did not eat the
pig but gave him to the brother of his wife." ("Sister" in pidgin
means sibling of the opposite sex; "Brother," sibling of the same sex.
This distinction which we do not make is felt by the native as essen-
tial and he has distorted our kinship terminology to preserve it.)
"Now this man has a brother, a younger brother, who is working on

[305]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

many a harassed district officer is likely to break in
with, "Maskie, brother belong mary belong brother be-
long mary, this fellow pig be belong whose that?" If
the conception of pigs as currency which changes hands
in the same way as does a bank note were more vivid
to officials they would not feel such righteous resent-
ment over the unlimited peregrinations of mere pigs.
Similarly, cases are taken to court where a man has
paid a large betrothal fee, and now that the marriage
arrangements have been for some reason upset, wishes
to recover his fee. In the normal course of events this
debt would have been liquidated by the bride's family
over a number of years, the dogs' teeth and shell money
in the bride price being scrupulously returned in terms
of pigs, oil, and sago. The disappointed bridegroom,
however, wants no slow return with which he is power-
less to initiate negotiations for a new wife, but his orig-
inal payment back. The district officer, if new to the
territory and untrained in anthropology, attempting to
follow this payment through its subsequent trips to
Mok, Rambutchon, back to Peri, etc., is likely to ex-
claim, "You fellow throw away plenty too much money
along mary. This fellow fashion he no good. More
better you catch him mary straight all the same fashion
belong white man." * Here again a more detailed

2 plantation which belongs to a Malay. Soon he will finish his time
of indenture. When he finishes his time, he will receive a lot of
money, he will receive three pounds, together with many other
things. Now this brother of the wife of the fiance of the daughter
of the brother of my wife, he — "

* "You people pay too much for your wives. This is a bad way to
do. It would be better if you simply got married the way the white
men do."

[306]

APPENDIX III

knowledge of native custom would show that there is
no wife purchase, that in every item of bride price fixed
valuables are matched by dowry payments of food, and
that upon this constant interchange of valuables the
whole structure of Manus intra- and inter-village rela-
tions is built. Under the stimulus of these constant
showy exchanges, food is raised, pigs are purchased,
pots and grass skirts are made in large quantities, en-
suring the people a high standard of living and a firm
economic basis for their lives. Interference with this
system would have the most serious effects in disin-
tegrating and demoralising the native life. Perhaps,
however, the highest boon that formal education could
bring to Manus culture in its present form, is the knowl-
edge of arithmetic and facility in keeping accounts.
Records of each exchange which would take financial
matters out of the sphere of dispute would do much
to smooth out the present irritability and quarrelsome-
ness of village life. At present, only the contested
cases are recorded by government j if every case could
in some way be recorded by the natives there would
be far fewer court cases. For the Manus are exception-
ally honest people ridden by an anxiety neurosis on the
question of debt. We found it a far more efficient way
of ensuring a steady supply of fish to advance tobacco
against future catches rather than simply announce our
willingness to pay for fish. The natives paid back the
advances J sometimes when fishing was poor they would
bring the few shillings in their small hoards and tender
them in payment, unwilling to have the debt longer
upon their consciences. If this anxiety to be out of
debt could be coupled with an efficient method of re-

[307]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

cording debts, a most excellent economic system would
be the result.

To the native currency of shell money and dogs'
teeth, English money and tobacco have been added as
subsidiary currency. That is, their value in terms of
the old money and of goods is fully understood j money
is used to pay small ceremonial debts, as for the per-
formance of some small magical service, and also in
the ordinary trading relations between people of dif-
ferent tribes. Tobacco has been given a more defined
place in the ceremonial currency. It has become a def-
inite part of the mourning ritual j at the feast ending
mourning, each mourner who has slept in the house
of death is paid in tobacco. (These feasts were the
ones for which the natives desired to borrow tobacco
from us. Foresighted as they are, preparing for big
economic events sometimes months in advance, they
cannot foresee death, nor easily collect the tobacco neces-
sary for this ceremony which follows close on the heels
of the death itself.) Those who assist at a house build-
ing are also now paid with a stick of tobacco in addition
to the betel nut and pepper leaves which are placed
on their bowls of food. Tobacco seems to have a tend-
ency to displace betel nut on ceremonial occasions and
to be used in the same way as individual dogs' teeth in
small transactions. Shillings, on the other hand, seem
to replace strings of shell money when made in cere-
monial payments. Neither tobacco nor money have yet
gained any importance in the large affinal exchanges
when thousands of dogs' teeth change hands on one
occasion. Money smaller than a shilling the natives
have no use for. The tiny sixpences slip too easily

[308]

APPENDIX III

through their fingers. But the native contempt for
small change leads to their paying higher prices than
would otherwise be necessary. Articles priced at i/6
to a white man are sold to a native for a flat 2/. Money
is obtained through the sale of thatch and sago to trad-
ers, through occasional sales of tortoise shell and pearl
shell used in button manufacture. Returned work boys
also sometimes bring money as well as goods with them.
This is partly expended in trade with the distant stores
— all five or six hours away by canoe — ^and partly saved
for the tax — ten shillings for each able-bodied man, ex-
cept officials who are exempted from the tax. Con-
trary to the attitude present in many native communi-
ties, the Manus do not resent the tax, but boast of the
amount of taxes which they pay each year, pointing to
their tax record as successful business men may do
among ourselves as a sign of wealth and prosperity.
To a group as wealthy as the Manus the tax is not a
hardship; they reap a full return in the freedom from
war which the presence of the government ensures
them. Upon the poorer Usiai the tax sometimes falls
more heavily and many of them have to work it out
as a sort of corvee labour.

The two most important ways in which their material
culture has been altered by white contact has been
through the introduction of steel and cloth. Knives,
adzes shod with iron, augers, saws, have completely re-
placed the older, clumsier tools of stone, shell, and
obsidian. This has been accomplished without injur-
ing any basic industry. Houses and canoes are still
built in the old styles. The delicate art of making
tortoise shell filigree, worn on a round shell disk, has

[309]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

practically vanished. The introduction of knives has
not encouraged the finer carving j the large bowls which
were one of the most distinguishing marks of Admiralty
art are no longer made, and most of the smaller bowls
are made less skilfully. Although a few agate and
enamel dishes have crept into the villages, these have
not to any extent displaced the large black earthenware
pots used to hold oil and water, nor the shallow pots
used for cooking. The formal use of pots in the mar-
riage exchanges is probably a strong factor in encourag-
ing their continued manufacture. Bark cloth has prac-
tically disappeared among the Manus, although the
land people, richer in bark and poorer in purse, still
retain it for daily and ceremonial use. The bark cloth
was always of a poor quality, breadfruit bark beaten
out on the severed bit of log. It withstood the water
badly and cloth was therefore the more welcome to the
sea-dwelling people. So the man's G-string of bark
cloth is now replaced either by a G-string of cloth or a
full loin cloth, known in pidgin as a lapla-p. The
women retain their curly grass skirts, but have sub-
stituted cloth cloaks for their old clumsy tabu garment,
a rain mat, merely a stiff square mat, folded down the
centre and sewed together on the narrow edge, forming
a sort of stiff peaked head and back covering. (These
are still used as rain capes, which has mercifully pre-
vented the introductions of umbrellas to distort the ap-
pearance of native ceremonies.) The calico cloak is sim-
ply two lengths of cloth, sewed together along the edge,
and tied in a bunch at one end so as to fit the woman's
head. The sewing is of the crudest sort and the ma-
terial is usually not hemmed. A few immersions in the

[310]

APPENDIX III

water turn the vivid reds and purples into drab dull
colours, so that it is only on feast days that foreign
colours relieve the brown monotony of the village
scene. Blankets, of which each house has one or two,
are also used by women as tabu robes.

Mirrors, knives, forks, and steel combs have drifted
into the village and been seized upon as part of the
bridal costume. They are never used, but they are
stuck in the bride's armbands, or held in her arms on
ceremonial occasions. Camphorwood boxes have been
a boon to a people as interested in the care of property
as the Manus are j now on many a naked breast dangles,
suspended from the beaded headbands of the dead, a
bunch of heavy iron keys. The locks are made so that
it is necessary to give the key several revolutions and
each revolution plays a little tune which betrays a thief.
Boxes and axes are part of the conventional goods which
returned work boys bring back to the village. Some
boys also bring lanterns, soon hung up and disused for
lack of kerosene — although usually one house in the vil-
lage will have some kerosene — or flash lights which lie
about unused after the first battery has burned out.
Broken watches are sometimes flourished as ornament.

Perhaps the greatest real change, one which is more
than the mere substitution of metal for stone, or cloth
for bark cloth, has been brought about by the introduc-
tion of beads. The Manus possessed a tradition of
tying their shell money disks together with a fine cord
manufactured from bark. In this way whole aprons of
shell money were made, and the edges of armbands
and anklets were ornamented with shell money and red
and black seeds. Trade beads found a technique ready

[3"]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

for them, and among the Manus, to a less extent among
other peoples of the Admiralties who had already ab-
sorbing handicrafts of their own, beadwork has been
taken up with great enthusiasm. All the old decorative
positions once held by the shell money and seeds have
been taken over by beads, and many new ornaments
devised. The hair of the dead is sewed into the back
of a flat beaded bag, worn suspended from the shoulder
of the widow. The widow's mourning hat, the bark
cloth worn by the dead, armlets for holding the breast-
bone flaps which are also beaded, all come in for elab-
orate decoration. The patterns are geometric, non-
symbolic, and either directly derived from European
patterns imported by traders or taken from textiles.
While new, they make slight claim to any artistic dis-
tinction 5 after the salt water has faded and mellowed
the colours, they are quite attractive and lend a very
festive appearance to a village gathering. The use of
beads has centred about the elaboration of the mourn-
ing costume, the ornamentation of the bride, and in-
cidentally the groom, and the complication of the cur-
rency system. Bead belts, which are simply a number
of strands of beads joined together at intervals with
beads of another colour, have become a regular item
in the exchanges between affinal relatives. They are
a minor item, not commanding a return in pigs and oil,
as do dogs' teeth and shell money, but commanding
only raw sago or cooked food. This new feature of the
affinal system illustrates neatly the indirect influence
of foreign trade upon Manus internal economics. The
Manus buy beads and make new belts which are given
away in the affinal exchanges, swelling the amount

[312]

APPENDIX III

which the man's side proudly contributes. To meet
these bead belts, more sago must be manufactured.
This extra sago is bought up by a trader who comes
through the district every month or so. With part of
the money which they receive for the sago, the Manus
buy more beads, which are worked into belts, introduced
into the exchange system, and still further increase the
supply of sago worked. So without actually altering
the standard of living, these trade conditions do alter
the size and splendour of the display which any family
can make at a ceremony.

During the German administration, dogs' teeth from
China and Turkey were introduced in great quantities,
inflating the currency possibly eight hundred or nine
hundred percent. To some extent, this inflation re-
sulted in increased prices for commodities j in other
cases the old price was retained in the afiinal exchanges
which results in disparities between the two contracting
parties J in others it has merely increased the amount of
wealth which changes hands. Where a man once paid
one thousand dogs' teeth to his son's wife's father, now
he can pay ten thousand. The greater number of boys
working for white men and the consequently greater
amount of money with which to purchase pigs from the
white man, has of course also raised the number of pigs
in the community so that the women's side can meet
these large payments of dogs' teeth.

Where the white culture has made a really important
alteration in the native mode of life is in the prohibi-
tion of war and war-captives. This abolition of the cus-
tomary interests of the young unmarried men in a so-
ciety which permitted no love making for its young

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

girls or its married women, might have had serious con-
sequences had not the abolition of war coincided with
the growth of recruiting. The young men are taken
out of the village during these years when the com-
munity has no way of dealing with them. They be-
come an economic asset instead of a military one of
doubtful value. In some native societies where there
are rare treasures of magic lore and esoteric knowledge
to be handed down from the elders to the young men,
this removal of all the young men from the village is
a serious matter. The young men come back after their
fathers are dead and find themselves forever cheated
of their birthright. Although the matter was not in-
vestigated extensively, there seems reason to believe
that this is the case among the agricultural and more
magically dependent Usiai, of the Great Admiralty.
An agricultural people also sometimes suflFers through
the diminution in the store of seeds while the young
men are away instead of at home working their gardens.
Also all communities which rely upon an early induc-
tion of their young boys into the ceremonial and indus-
trial life of the group, suffer when the boys are sud-
denly reft away from their normal educational routine.
When this disturbance of the customary education pat-
tern is coincident with missionary attempts to disrupt the
native culture, the two factors work together to produce
social disorganisation and maladjustment. Fortunately
in Manus among the Manus sea peoples none of these
lamentable results follow the present system of recruit-
ing. By the time the boys go away to work they have
received all the training which the community ever gave
boys before marriage, except upon matters of war and

[314]

APPENDIX III

prostitution, now erased from the social scene. They
would only menace the existing moral and economic
arrangements if they remained at home. As magical
material which requires long and patient application to
memorise is not part of the Manus system, Manus boys
do not lose a magical inheritance and with it their power
of agricultural or economic or social success as do boys
who come from societies depending upon charm and
ritual. The Manus boys return to their villages rich,
and therefore in a position to command far more respect
from their elders than if they remained at home. They
begin paying ofF one of their debts at once, the debt
which they owe to those who have made funeral pay-
ments for their fathers or other close relatives. Al-
though the debt of marriage will hang about their necks
for many years, nevertheless the present system by
which a work boy's accumulated earnings are appro-
priated to a big initial payment to his creditors, is thor-
oughly in keeping with the Manus financial system. It
also brings desirable foreign goods, such as new tools
and cloth which have become a necessity, into the vil-
lage.

If Oriental labour should ever be imported into the
Mandated Territory with its probable displacement of
the far less efficient Melanesian labour, so that Manus
boys remained in the villages from puberty until mar-
riage, some readjustment of native custom would be
necessary. The present insistence upon absolute chas-
tity for Manus women could not exist side by side with
a government prohibition of prostitution and the pres-
ent custom of late marriage. The re-introduction, even
surreptitiously, of prostitution is improbable because

[315]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Manus respect for the virtue of their own women de-
mands that the prostitute be a war captive, and war
cannot be pursued without coming immediately to the
attention of government. The alternatives will be
either a marked lowering of the marriage age for both
men and women, but especially for men, or the modi-
fication of the present exacting system of morals. The
neighbouring Usiai, with whom the war prostitute was
a less frequent phenomenon, solved the problem by a
method of carefully supervised license in which young
people were given a year of freedom with the mate or
mates of their choice in a large house for both sexes
which was maintained by some rich headman for his
own daughter and others of her age group. There was
always chaperonage in the house to see that no out-
rages were committed against the unwilling, and that
behaviour was at all times decorous. This year also
served as a sort of training school in manners and social
attitudes. At the end of the year, the girls returned to
their villages to marry older men who had finally com-
pleted the payments for them, and the young men
married the widows of their deceased elder male rel-
atives. Licensed freedom before marriage, combined
with early marriages in which one partner was so much
the senior as to play the leading role in matters re-
quiring experience and wisdom, was the Usiai solution.
It was a completely dignified and serious solution, well
integrated in their whole pattern of social relationships.
It is at present unfortunately interdicted. Representa-
tions of immorality made by the missionaries to gov-
ernment were responsible for its suspension at the same
time that the Manus prostitution house, most unfor-

[316]

APPENDIX III

tunately called by the same name, "house bomak," was
forbidden.

The greatest effect which white culture has had upon
the lives of the Manus people has been, as we have seen,
in the realm of economic life. Religiously white cul-
ture has not yet touched the Manus people importantly
except in the case of the natives of Papitalai and the
very recent introduction of services by a catechist in
Mbunei. Papitalai is on the North Coast, too far away
to have any influence in the villages of the South Coast;
the beginnings of mission work in Mbunei by a native
catechist occurred while we were in Peri. A few boys
have returned from work, nominal adherents of some
religious faith, but too unversed in its ways to teach
it to their people. A few scattered phrases, as "Jesus
he like cook 'em you fellow," "Jesus will burn you"
(in the flames of Hell) — give the natives a peculiar
notion of what Christianity means. They know the
two great missions in the north of the Territory,
Roman Catholic {Lotu Pop) and the Methodist, Tda-
talaSy and have made definite choice between them upon
two reported attitudes of the missions. For the Tala-
talas they have no use, because they put a strong em-
phasis upon tithes and expose sinful church members
to public censure and confession of faults. But the
coming of the hotu Pofi they anticipate with approval
because they exact no tithes. The Roman Catholics,
having realised the magnitude of the task of converting
the hundred diverse peoples of New Guinea, have set-
tled down to a task which will last through several
generations and established large and prosperous plan-
tations, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Ltd., etc., to sup-

[317]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

port the brothers and sisters while they do their mission
work. Also they have heard of the auricular confes-
sion practised by Roman Catholics and think this will
afford them welcome relief from the present custom
by which every one's sins are proclaimed loudly to his
neighbours. They also believe that with the coming of
the Mission they will learn to read and write. The
Roman Catholic mission has purchased an island in Peri
so that it is reasonable to expect that the natives will
ultimately have the Mission among them which gossip
has made them believe to be the most desirable.

A few reflections of Christian contact also occur here
and there, as in the belief in the island of Mbuke that
the white man worships the sun because he always looks
up when he prays. But aside from such distortions of
accidental observations their religious life remains un-
touched except by the occasional comforting thought
that eventually when they have embraced the new faith,
they will be able to pitch their capricious spirits into
the sea. In the meantime the sway of the spirits is un-
disturbed.

The government regulation against keeping the
corpse for twenty days while it was washed daily in
the sea, has been enforced with very little difficulty be-
cause of the feuds between individuals and villages
which lead to any derelictions being reported. The
time for keeping the corpse has been shortened to three
days J the old requirement of killing a man to end
mourning, or at least taking a prisoner and using his
ransom in the funeral payments, has been abridged to
the requirement of killing a large turtle. The bodies
are exposed on the more remote little islands until the

[318]

APPENDIX III

bones have been washed clean, when the skull and cer-
tain other bones are recovered and installed in the cere-
monial skull bowl. Mourning custom and economic ar-
rangements have been somewhat rearranged, but in the
old pattern, to meet these conditions.

To summarise, Manus contact with the white man
has to date been a fairly fortunate one. War, head-
hunting, and prostitution have been eliminated. Re-
cruiting has prevented these prohibitions creating new
social problems, the recruiting period and its rewards
have been fitted into the social economic scheme; trade
with the white man has provided the natives with beads
which have developed a new decorative art and fur-
nished new incentives to the production of foodstuffs;
the peaceful regime has produced more favourable con-
ditions for inter-tribal trading. The Manus at the pres-
ent time are a peaceful, industrious people, coping ad-
mirably with their environment, suffering only slightly
from preventable diseases. Their ethical system is so
combined with their supernatural beliefs as to receive
great force and intensity from them. They are not
taking any measures to reduce their numbers, being ap-
parently ignorant of medicinal abortifacients (as they
are ignorant of most herbal properties owing to their
water life), and seldom resorting to mechanical meth-
ods. From the standpoint of government they are mak-
ing a most satisfactory adjustment to the few demands
which white contact makes upon them, (This is quite
aside from the type of personality which is developed by
their methods of education and their attitudes towards
family life and marriage. These are subtler points
which government will have no time to deal with.)

[319]

IV

OBSERVANCES CONNECTED WITH PREGNANCY,
BIRTH, AND CARE OF INFANTS

IT is characteristic of Manus society where all the
important ritual is cast in economic terms, that, although
pregnancy, birth, puberty, etc., are marked by such con-
spicuous festivities, the individuals concerned are sub-
ject to very slight tabus. The kind of pre-natal tabu
which depends upon imitative magic for its inspiration
and forbids a woman to eat a paired banana for fear
she will have twins, etc., is limited in Manus to the
prohibition that a pregnant woman must not cut fish
or wood with a knife or an axe for fear she will cut
off one of the limbs of the child. All other malforma-
tions, blindness, deafness, club feet, etc., they attribute
to the father's or mother's carelessly breaking one of the
property-protecting tabus. These latter tabus are called
sorosol. The owner of a tree will himself put a sorosol
upon it if he owns one, if not he will pay some one else
to do it. The sorosol carries a magically enforced pen-
alty for transgression which takes various forms. A
number of sorosol carry the penalty of causing a mis-
carriage or a stillbirth. Stillbirths are also sometimes
attributed to the malevolent action of spirits of the
dead. If a mother dies during childbirth and the infant
dies soon after, the mother will be said to have "taken
the child."

The nature of physical paternity is understood} the

[320]

APPENDIX IV

child is believed to be a combination of semen and
menstrual blood. The men believe that they cause
menstruation in their wives and then, by making their
wives conceive, cause the blood to clot. There is some
obscure belief among the women that their fertility is
dependent upon the spirits of their husband's houses.
If the spirits wish descendants they will declare that
the women shall become pregnant. They exercise this
power in the same way that spirits control the supply
of iish, that is, by working in co-operation with natural
forces. A man expects only that his guardian spirit
should drive the already existent fish into the near-by
lagoon. Similarly, he believes vaguely that the spirits
can facilitate the matter of conception, but he does not
think the spirits could make an unmarried girl preg-
nant without the intermediary of intercourse. Inter-
course is not forbidden during menstruation nor during
pregnancy. It is forbidden for thirty days after birth,
but as the wife is not allowed to even see her husband
during this period, this prohibition follows naturally.

Women count ten moons to pregnancy, counting from
the last menstruation. They keep little bundles of
sticks as counters. The date is kept in mind by every
one concerned because of the large economic prepara-
tions which have to be made. A few days before the
expected birth, the "brother" of the woman divines or
has divined the proper place for the delivery. In this
case the "brother" is the male relative who is taking
the financial responsibility for the economic exchanges
with the husband. He may actually be the woman's
father or cousin or uncle, etc. As every individual has
to plan all his economic activities so that they dovetail,

[321]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

so that he gives sago and pots to-day and receives bead-
work to-morrow, it does not always suit the same rel-
ative to handle the exchanges surrounding a birth.
Some women have had their feasts made by different
relatives for each of four or five children; in other
cases, two men will alternate the responsibility. The
divination for the place of birth decides whether the
husband shall move out of his abode and let his brother-
in-law and his wife and family move in, or whether
the pregnant woman shall be taken to the brother's
house. This is supposed to depend upon the will of the
spirits, actually it often conforms to the exigencies of
the brother's immediate plans.

Only women who have borne children are present at
the delivery. Men, young girls and children are ex-
cluded. The feeling against the presence of a woman
who has not had a child is so strong that I was unable
to break it down. To fly in the face of such feeling
would have prejudiced my work severely, so I did not
see a birth in Manus and the following information
comes from informants.

The women is said to squat and support herself by
a bamboo rope which is suspended from the ceiling.
The cord is cut with a piece of bamboo. The cord is
considered to be good and the afterbirth a bad and un-
lucky object. The cord, katcJiaumbotoiy is cut into
small pieces J one piece is wrapped, together with the
afterbirth, mbuty in a small pandanus mat. The rest
of the cord is smoked and preserved for good luck.
No customs of disposal of the cord in order to influ-
ence the future of the child were discovered. The
mother is placed in a small log framed square on the

[322]

APPENDIX IV

floor, with mats under her, a mat hung up to screen
her from the rest of the house, and a fire right beside
her. This is her personal fire and she has also personal
cooking vessels in which only her food can be cooked.
The little mat containing the afterbirth and bit of cord
is stuck up on the wall back of her. Afterwards it is
thrown away.

The child is washed and tended by the older women
of both the mother's and father's kin. The mother is
fed a mixture called bulokoly made of coconut milk
and taro. The child is not fed until twenty or twenty-
four hours after birth, when it is given milk by other
nursing mothers and a bit of taro which its own mother
has chewed fine. The mother doesn't suckle the baby
herself until three or four days after birth. The other
women suckle it in turn and are all rewarded for this
service afterwards. If the mother is ill and cannot en-
tirely nurse her baby for some time, then she is ex-
pected to return milk to these wet nurses' babies if she
gets her health back.

Barrenness is believed to be accomplished by resort
to the supernatural cursing power of a father's sister
or a father's sister's daughter. This power to make the
line of one's brother, or one's mother's brother, fail is
essentially a curse, but a husband and wife who wish
no more children may invoke it as a blessing. This
paternal relative also ceremonially blesses the new
mother and decrees that she shall have no more chil-
dren until this one is old enough to walk and swim.
A barren woman is called a plalokes; the Manus group
together women who have never had children and
women who have not had any children for many years.

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Such women are said to be fastened wp. The meno-
pause is described by a word which means "she can do
nothing more." A married woman is said to be "fin-
ished." She will not grow any more.

Miscarriages, ndranirol, are treated as real births j
the child is named and all the economic ceremonies are
gone through. The women distinguish the time when
they first feel life: "It has become a human being. Its
soul is there."

Twins occur occasionally. They have never heard
of triplets, and one woman on being told of one of our
freak births of five, gasped out in the little pidgin
which she knew (Manus was inadequate to the occa-
sion) : "Oh, you number One."

Children are fed taro from the beginning. The ab-
sense of coconuts in any great plenty is a serious handi-
cap to feeding children. Sugar cane is also not plenti-
ful. Papayas are regarded as good when they can be
obtained, but taro is the mainstay. Sago is too heavy
and fish is regarded as indigestible until a child is about
three. They are given cigarettes and the outer skin of
the betel nut from the time they are two and a half
or three. A child is seldom weaned before this age un-
less the mother is pregnant again. If the second child
dies, the older one often resumes suckling. Mothers,
in order to wean their children, tie bundles of human
hair to their breasts.

The death rate among little babies is enormous.
Genealogies are at best an unreliable method, especially
where the mother tends not to distinguish between mis-
carriages, stillbirths, and death a few days after birth.
But in many cases the assertion that the child died be-

[324]

APPENDIX IV

fore the thirty day feast was made is probably correct.
This feast involves the return of the wife to her hus-
band, or his return to her, and is a sufficiently marked
and invariable event to afford some basis for dating.
I give a sample of the births reported by the women
in one end of Peri, whose reports I was able to re-check
with other informants.

The genealogical evidence suggests that the highest
mortality is within the first few months after birth, and
between thirty and forty years of age. In both cases
there is a high differential death rate for males. Among
adults this can be accounted for by the greater exposure
which the men have to undergo in all-night fishing
and at sea. A certain number of the early deaths in
the older genealogies were due to war.

Malarial fever is a constant drain upon the natives'
health. In some cases this develops into cerebral
malaria with resulting death j in other cases pneumonia
sets in. The Manus have no conception of medicine.
All curing is in supernatural terms, either by placating
the spirits or by the recitation of set charms, usually by
the person whose charm is believed responsible for the
illness. Broken bones are treated by keeping the In-
jured member in a natural position and by the applica-
tion of heat. Heat is also applied to cuts, bruises, etc.,
and to girls at first menstruation and women after de-
livery.

I believe the high death rate among young children
can be laid especially to insufficient and unwise feeding
(the mother's milk is depleted after years of nursing
older children), no sunlight, and no protection against
changes of temperature. The houses with slat floors

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

admit continual draughts, and a drop of a degree in
temperature sets the whole community shivering.
They have no adequate clothing for a change of weather.
Little babies are also subject to bad sores. On the other
hand, the children who survive the first year of life,
seem to be fairly strong. There is relatively little ill-
ness among the children's group, with the exception of
attacks of malaria and occasional tropical ulcers. The
high infant death rate and the numerous deaths in mid-
dle life all serve to focus the attention of the anxiety-
ridden Manus upon their sins. Each slight illness
means confession and propitiatory payments, and
hardly a night passes that the medium's whistle is not
heard in some house where there is illness. Malaria
is particularly well suited to stimulating recurrent
anxiety over small sinsj amends are made and the pa-
tient usually recovers, proving that the spirits' wrath
is appeased.

1326]

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[ 330 ]

APPENDIX V

Comment

In the residences of the younger men there is a dis-
tinct cleavage between the rich successful lines whose
young men live with the father or adopted father or
elder brother, and the members of the poorer families
who live where they can. Among the poor or the irreg-
ularly married (e.g., Sisi, House 27, who had stolen his
wife from another man and not yet paid for her prop-
erly. He had fallen out with his older brother over
this match and so had no house to go to in his own vil-
lage of Loitcha), there is often a tendency towards mat-
rilocal residence, a system which makes the man's posi-
tion very difficult as the mother-in-law tabu can never
be obviated. In discussing the marriage system I have
adhered to the conditions which are regarded as usual,
for in these irregular and poorly financed marriages so
many different factors enter in to complicate the picture.

[331]

VI

VIEWS OF THE VILLAGE AS SEEN BY TWO CHILDREN,
AGED FIVE AND ELEVEN, AND EXPLANATORY COMMENTS

NEITHER boys nor girls can tell the exact clan
affiliations of the owners of each house. They all rec-
ognize the houses of Kalat because they stand off by
themselves and Kalat is used as a definite place name.
Pontchal is also known to them, used to designate the
part of the village where the houses of the members
of the clan of Pontchal and Matchupal stand. Pontchal
has been made an administrative unit by the govern-
ment, with its own officials, and it is in this light that
the children see it. They do not know who owns
houses, nor do they know the clan affiliations of women.
They do not know the guardian spirits of other houses
than their own and sometimes, if their own houses have
several guardians, they do not know their names.

The preceding map shows the village as a mature
man or woman is able to describe it. It is impossible
to show what role self-interest or attention plays in an
adult's view of the village because the adult will re-
port many things in which he is not interested. He
views the clan locations and memberships in his village
in much the same formal fashion as we think of states
and their capitals.

[332]

APPENDIX VI

Views of the Village *

Table showing the village of Peri as it appeared to
Kawa, aged five (House i2)j the way these same
houses appeared to Ngasu, aged eleven (House 22),
and some accompanying notes upon the households in
question.

* The records of girls are given in both cases. It will be under-
stood that boys give little of this type of comment; spending less
time with the women they know less of what is going on.

[333]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Way in which Ngasu, a girl
aged eleven, sees the same
part of the village. She is the
daughter of Panau, who is
dead. She and her sister,
Salikon, have been adopted
by Paleao, Panau's adopted
father's adopted son. {See
Chapters II and VI.)

House of Paleao's
brother Luwil.
Luwil's part of
the house is in
front. Kalowin
and Piwen live
there. Saot lives
in back. "The
wife of Luwil"
and "the wife of
Saot" run away
from Paleau.
They are his
tabu relatives.

1

<3

I . Refers to Molung, wife of Luwil.
Molung was adopted by Ngandi-
liu, Kawa's father's older broth-
er. She is really the daughter of
Kali, an uncle who financed
Ngandiliu's marriage. Selan,
Kawa's father, calls her "sister,"
and Kawa calls her patieieUy
"father's sister."

2. Piwen is a small girl of three,
Molung's adopted daughter. Mo-
lung's son Kalowin of nine Kawa
doesn't mention.

Kawa's View. Kawa is
the daughter of Selan, a
tnember of tlte clan of
Pontchal.

1. Father's sister
lives here

2. Piwen lives
here

•

[334]

APPENDIX VI

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[335]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

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[338]

APPENDIX VI

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[340]

APPENDIX VI

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[342]

APPENDIX VI

C u, u^

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a speaks,
daughter
er's dead

pwen and
pwen had
sa of Pat-

;irls, all of
and then
. married
led child-
. Ngaten,
isly mar-
itusi. To
hildren, a
horn died
and mar-
was his
ond hus-
she bore

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53

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men, has never marri

I. Alupwa, of whom K;

is a little girl often, t

of Melen's dead bro

son.
This is the house of Ka
his wife Ngaten. Ka
in his youth married i

usi, who bore him foui
whom died as infant
died herself. He th
Aluan of Mok, who
less. Then he marri
who had been previ
ried to Talikotchi of
him she had borne tw(
boy and girl, both of
as infants. She left hi

ried Kampwen, so s
third wife, he her s
band. To Kampwe

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[344]

APPENDIX VI

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[346]

APPENDIX VI

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[348]

APPENDIX VI

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[350]

APPENDIX VI

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[352]

APPENDIX VI

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[354]

APPENDIX VI

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[355]

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[356]

APPENDIX VI

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[357]

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[358]

APPENDIX VI

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[359]

VII

A SAMPLE LEGEND
THE STORY OF THE BIRD "nDRAMe"

NDRAME married Kasomu.* He wanted to go
and work sago. He said, "Kasomu, a little sago to-
wards the mouth, give it to me, that I may eat."
Kasomu said, "Ndrame, I have become ill." Ndrame
put the food in his mouth. He ate. He took sago
cutter, sago strainer, rope bag for sago. He went to
work sago. The sun went down. He came here to
the village. He said, "Kasomu, a little sago towards
the mouth, I will eat." Kasomu lied that she was ill.
She painted herself with ashes. Ndrame he put food
in his mouth. He ate. He went to work sago. Kasomu
stood up. She put on a good grass skirt. She took
her shoulder bag. She took lime, betel nut, pepper
leaf. She went to the mangrove swamp. She called
Karipo.f ^^Kailo fish never mind! Mwasi fish never
mind! Paitcha fish never mind! Ndrame has gone.
Come here, we two will stop together." Karipo he
came here. They two stopped together. They two to-
gether. They two together. Kasomu, she said: **This
is the time that Ndrame will be returning here to the
village. You fly away and I will go to the village."
She came here to the village. She bound fast her fore-
head. She bound fast her belly. She bound fast her

* Fresh water clam,
t A bird.

[360]

APPENDIX VII

wrists. She painted herself with ashes. She sleeps in
the men's house. Ndrame he came here. He said:
"Kasomu, a little sago to the mouth, I will eat."
Kasomu she said: "Ndrame, I have become ill. Who
is it who wishes to work a little sago for the mouth,
to be eaten?" Ndrame he put food in his mouth. He
ate. He sleeps. At dawn he took sago cutter, he went
to work sago. Kasomu breaks the rope away. She
washed. She puts on a grass skirt. She takes shoulder
basket, betel, pepper leaf, and lime. She goes down
to the mangrove swamp. "Karipo, kailo fish never
mind! Mwasi fish never mind. Paitcha fish never
mind! Ndrame has gone away. Come here to me."
They two stop. Ndrame, he returned here. He took
his sago cutter. He took the shell of the hollowed-out
sago palm. He came here to the village. He here
looked for Kasomu. She was not there. He went
down to the mangrove swamp. He saw down there
Kasomu and Karipo they two together. He took a rope
of mangrove. He struck Karipo on the neck. Karipo
became long necked. He broke Kasomu. Now there
are clams in plenty along the mangrove shore.

This is the type of myth which the Manus share
with many other Melanesian peoples and to which they
attach little importance. Such myths are not invoked
in discussions of natural phenomena. The identity of
the principal characters as birds and a clam is prac-
tically lost as it is customary for human beings to be
so named. Children who have heard scraps of such
stories tend to think of the characters as human beings
who once lived. The monotonous reiteration of adul-

[361]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

tery in the tales does not interest the children. If the
adults ever stimulated their interest by prefacing a tale
with, "Do you know why the karipo has such a long
neck?" or "Do you know why there are so many shells
in the mangrove swamp?" and then told the tale to
the children, the results in children's interest in tales
would presumably be quite different.

[362]

VIII

ANALYSIS OF THE COMPOSITION OF THE PERI
POPULATION

2IO people
44 married couples
87 children under or just at puberty

9 young people past puberty, unmarried
20 widows

6 widowers

1.9 children per married couple

^2 households

1.6 children per household

Of the 87 children, 24 or 26% are adopted

Sex ratio for people under 40, 100%
Sex ratio for entire population, 86.92

(due to excess of aged widowed females)

RECORDS OF FIFTEEN PERI WOMEN *

Children

Order 0/
Woman Marriages Births

Sex Age of Death

Age now
Alive

gasaseu i 0

2 I

f

2

m Under i mo.

3

f

3 yfs.

4

f

2 mos.

* These I have checked so extensively as to consider them reliable.

[363]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

Children

Woman

Ilan

Pwailep
Indalo

Indole

Ngalen

Mateun

lamet

Melen

Order of
Marriages Births Sex

O
I

3

4

5
6

7
8

I

2

3

4
5
I

3

4
I

o

3
4
5
I
I

2

3

4

5
6

I

m
f

f

m

f

m

m

f

f

m

m

m

f

f

m

m

m

m

f

m

f

f

m

m

m

m

m

m

rti

m

m

f

[364

Age of Death

Under i
Under i
Under i
Under i
At birth
At birth

mo.
mo.
mo.
mo.

Under i mo.

Under i mo.
Under i mo.

At birth

Stillbirth
Stillbirth
Under a yr.
Under a yr.
Under a yr.
Under a yr.
Under a yr.
Under i mo.

Age now
Alive

3 yrs.
6 mos.

4
I

12

10

7

5
5

yrs.

yr.

yrs.

yrs.

yrs.

yrs.

yrs.

yrs.

7 yrs.

5 yrs.

lyi yrs.
infant

]

APPENDIX VIII

Children

Order of

Age

«ow

Woman

Marriages

fiir/Aj

r Sex

Age of Death

Alive

2

f

3

yrs.

Patali

I

I

f

8

yrs.

2

2

m

Under i mo.

3

f

3

yrs.

Sain

I

I

f

I month

Main

I
2

3

I

f

I month

4

5

Ngakam

I

o

2

I

f

13

yrs.

2

f

II

yrs.

3

m

Under i mo.

4

f

Under i mo.

5

f

Under i mo.

3

6

7

f
m

Under 3 mo.

6

yrs.

8

m

2^

yrs.

9

f

3

mos.

Ngakume

I

I

m

Miscarriage

2

2

m

Under 3 mos.

3

3

m

Under i yr.

4

m

2K

yrs.

Ngatchumu

I

I

2

3
4
5

m
m
m
m
m

Under 3 mos.
Under 3 mos.
Under 3 mos.
Under 3 mos.
Under 3 mos.

6

m

8

yrs.

7

f

5

yrs.

8

m

3

yrs.

9

f

i>^

yrs.

[365]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA
Analysis of These Results Shows

1 5 women still of childbearing age

30 marriages

65 births

34 died under three years old, 31 under 3 months

Of these births 40 were males, 25 died; 25 were females,

9 died
Result: 15 males, 16 females

[366]

•T3

XI

H
M
W
X

Q
Pi
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[367]

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA

(L) a>

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[368]

-^ -t!

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APPENDIX IX

P. -c

IB

o

O

u

*H

oi

W)

'u

o

*&

C!
U

S9 cfl

<U <u

*~~|

^ CJ

oi

o c

a

CO

C OS

CO

C/5

JJ

■M

^

C -13

p

Pi

a,

&

«-i-H

ci

u.

<U CJ

(U

4->

U

il

o

(X ^

CJ

(L)

3

4->

CO

'""'

C^

s

CO

•> C

-t-i

4-> .t:;

• .— (

c

3 »-<

^

D

C/2

Oh

bO

at

^ O

pj

o

CO

eo

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4^ ^

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13

^ 4^ ^ > -^

(L) '-•-I

25 -^ J >.

<u ►— ' o

_^ 'S. c box! /Tr" ^

c«coco ^^(U-f^c^^Cco^a-^^^^J

J|l i 11 i III 11 ^a -31

<S C^ Tt

[369]

APPENDIX X

<

a

<

w

X

o
o

o

o

?

o

<

[370]

APPENDIX XI

X

[371]

GLOSSARY

hulukol — a soup given to invalids and women during
ceremonial retreats.

kawas — the exchanges which occur to validate mar-
riages, births, etc.; trade.

kinekin — the feast before child birth and before final
feast for adolescent girl.

kuskerai — government-appointed headman.

lailai — pearl shell.

luluai — headman of village.

memandra — the feast immediately preceding marriage.

metcha — the feast given after many years of marriage.
(A silver wedding.)

pinkaiyo — sister-in-law.

pinpuaro — pregnant woman.

piramatan — woman who is the center of a feast.

laplap — loin cloth.

tchinal — a devil, a mischievous inimical spirit.

tchutchu — a ceremonial pudding.

ung — a fruit eaten by women on ceremonial occasions.

[372]

o

VXD

UNIVERSITY OF Cfi ■ LOS fiNGELES

00764 3645

3 1158

University of California Library
Los Angeles

This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

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