Man, Past and Present by Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (best young adult book series .txt) 📖

are the secret societies, occurring with certain exceptions throughout Melanesia. These are accessible to men only, and the candidates on initiation have to submit to treatment which is often rough in the extreme. The members of the societies are believed to be in close association with ghosts and spirits, and exhibit themselves in masks and elaborate dresses in which disguise they are believed by the uninitiated to be supernatural beings. These societies do not practise any secret cult, in fact all that the initiate appears to learn is that the "ghosts" are merely his fellows in disguise, and that the mysterious noises which herald their approach are produced by the bull-roarer and other artificial means. These organisations are most powerful agents for the maintenance of social order and inflict punishment for breaches of customary law, but they are often terrorising and blackmailing institutions. Women are rigorously excluded.

Other social factors of importance are the clubs, especially in the New Hebrides and Banks Islands. These are a means of attaining social rank. They are divided into different grades, the members of which eat together at their particular fire-place in the club-house. Each rank has its insignia, sometimes human effigies, usually, but wrongly, called "idols." Promotion from one grade to another is chiefly a matter of payment, and few reach the highest. Those who do so become personages of very great influence, since no candidate can obtain promotion without their permission.

Totemism occurs in parts of New Guinea and elsewhere and has marked socialising effects, as totemic solidarity takes precedence of all other considerations, but it is becoming obsolete. The most important religious factor throughout Melanesia is the belief in a supernatural power or influence, generally called mana. This is what works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of man or outside the common processes of nature; but this power, though in itself impersonal, is always connected with some person who directs it; all spirits have it, ghosts generally, and some men. A more or less developed ancestor cult is also universally distributed. Human beings may become beneficent or malevolent ghosts, but not every ghost becomes an object of regard. The ghost who is worshipped is the spirit of a man who in his lifetime had mana. Good and evil spirits independent of ancestors are also abundant everywhere. There is no established priesthood, except in Fiji, but as a rule, any man who knows the particular ritual suitable to a definite spirit, acts as intermediary, and a man in communication with a powerful spirit becomes a person of great importance. Life after death is universally believed in, and the soul is commonly pictured as undertaking a journey, beset with various perils, to the abode of departed spirits, which is usually represented as lying towards the west. As a rule only the souls of brave men, or initiates, or men who have died in fight, win through to the most desirable abode. Magical practices occur everywhere for the gaining of benefits, plenteous crops, good fishing, fine weather, rain, children or success in love. Harmful magic for producing sickness or death is equally universal[336].

Returning to the Papuan lands proper, in the insular groups west of New Guinea we enter one of the most entangled ethnical regions in the world. Here are, no doubt, a few islands such as the Aru group, mainly inhabited by full-blood Papuans, men who furnished Wallace with the models on which he built up his true Papuan type, which has since been vainly assailed by so many later observers. But in others--Ceram, Buru, Timor, and so on to Flores--diverse ethnical and linguistic elements are intermingled in almost hopeless confusion. Discarding the term "Alfuro" as of no ethnical value[337], we find the whole area west to about 120 deg. E. longitude[338] occupied in varying proportions by pure and mixed representatives of three distinct stocks: Negro (Papuans), Mongoloid (Malayans), and Caucasic (Indonesians). From the data supplied by Crawfurd, Wallace, Forbes, Ten Kate and other trustworthy observers, I have constructed the subjoined table, in which the east Malaysian islands are disposed according to the constituent elements of their inhabitants[339]:

Aru Group--True Papuans dominant; Indonesians (Korongoei) in the interior.

Kei Group--Malayans; Indonesians; Papuan strain everywhere.

Timor; Wetta; Timor Laut--Mixed Papuans, Malayans and Indonesians; no pure type anywhere.

Serwatti Group--Malayans with slight trace of black blood (Papuan or Negrito).

Roti and Sumba--Malayans.

Savu--Indonesians.

Flores; Solor; Adonera; Lomblen; Pantar; Allor--Papuans pure or mixed dominant; Malayans in the coast towns.

Buru--Malayans on coast; reputed Papuans, but more probably Indonesians in interior.

Ceram--Malayans on coast; mixed Malayo-Papuans inland.

Amboina; Banda--Malayans; Dutch-Malay half-breeds ("Perkeniers").

Goram--Malayans with slight Papuan strain.

Matabello; Tior; Nuso Telo; Tionfoloka--Papuans with Malayan admixture.

Misol--Malayo-Papuans on coast; Papuans inland.

Tidor; Ternate; Sulla; Makian--Malayans.

Batjan--Malayans; Indonesians.

Gilolo--Mixed Papuans; Indonesians in the north.

Waigiu; Salwatti; Batanta--Malayans on the coast; Papuans inland.

From this apparently chaotic picture, which in some places, such as Timor, presents every gradation from the full-blood Papuan to the typical Malay, Crawfurd concluded that the eastern section of Malaysia constituted a region of transition between the yellowish-brown lank-haired and the dark-brown or black mop-headed stocks. In a sense this is true, but not in the sense intended by Crawfurd, who by "transition" meant the actual passage by some process of development from type to type independently of interminglings. But such extreme transitions have nowhere taken place spontaneously, so to say, and in any case could never have been brought about in a small zoological area presenting everywhere the same climatic conditions. Biological types may be, and have been, modified in different environments, arctic, temperate, or tropical zones, but not in the same zone, and if two such marked types as the Mongol and the Negro are now found juxtaposed in the Malaysian tropical zone, the fact must be explained by migrations and displacements, while the intermediate forms are to be attributed to secular intermingling of the extremes. Why should a man, passing from one side to another of an island 10 or 20 miles long, be transformed from a sleek-haired brown to a frizzly-haired black, or from a mercurial laughter-loving Papuan to a Malayan "slow in movement and thoroughly phlegmatic in disposition, rarely seen to laugh or become animated in conversation, with expression generally of vague wonder or weary sadness"[340]?

Wallace's classical description of these western Papuans, who are here in the very cradleland of the race, can never lose its charm, and its accuracy has been fully confirmed by all later observers. "The typical Papuan race," he writes, "is in many respects the very opposite of the Malay. The colour of the body is a deep sooty-brown or black, sometimes approaching, but never quite equalling, the jet-black of some negro races. The hair is very peculiar, being harsh, dry, and frizzly, growing in little tufts or curls, which in youth are very short and compact, but afterwards grow out to a considerable length, forming the compact, frizzled mop which is the Papuan's pride and glory.... The moral characteristics of the Papuan appear to me to separate him as distinctly from the Malay as do his form and features. He is impulsive and demonstrative in speech and action. His emotions and passions express themselves in shouts and laughter, in yells and frantic leapings.... The Papuan has a greater feeling for art than the Malay. He decorates his canoe, his house, and almost every domestic utensil with elaborate carving, a habit which is rarely found among tribes of the Malay race. In the affections and moral sentiments, on the other hand, the Papuans seem very deficient. In the treatment of their children they are often violent and cruel, whereas the Malays are almost invariably kind and gentle."

The ethnological parting-line between the Malayan and Papuasian races, as first laid down by Wallace, nearly coincides with his division between the Indo-Malayan and Austro-Malayan floras and faunas, the chief differences being the positions of Sumbawa and Celebes. Both of these islands are excluded from the Papuasian realm, but included in the Austro-Malayan zoological and botanical regions.

THE OCEANIC NEGRITOES.

Recent discoveries and investigations of the pygmy populations on the eastern border of the Indian Ocean tend to show that the problem is by no means simple. Already two main stocks are recognised, differentiated by wavy and curly hair and dolichocephaly in the Sakai, and so-called woolly hair in the Andamanese Islanders, Semang (Malay Peninsula) and Aeta (Philippines), combined with mesaticephaly or low brachycephaly. In East Sumatra and Celebes a short, curly-haired dark-skinned people occur, racially akin to the Sakai, and Moszkowski suggests that the same element occupied Geelvink Bay (Netherlands New Guinea). These with the Vedda of Ceylon, and some jungle tribes of the Deccan, represent remnants of a once widely distributed pre-Dravidian race, which is also supposed to form the chief element in the Australians[341].

The "Mincopies," as the Andamanese used to be called, nobody seems to know why, were visited in 1893 by Louis Lapicque, who examined a large kitchen-midden near Port Blair, but some distance from the present coast, hence of great age[342]. Nevertheless he failed to find any worked stone implements, although flint occurs in the island. Indeed, chipped or flaked flints, now replaced by broken glass, were formerly used for shaving and scarification. But, as the present natives use only fishbones, shells, and wood, Lapicque somewhat hastily concluded that these islanders, like some other primitive groups, have never passed through a Stone Age at all. The shell-mounds have certainly yielded an arrow-head and polished adze "indistinguishable from any of the European or Indian celts of the so-called Neolithic period[343]." But there is no reason to think that the archipelago was ever occupied by a people different from its present inhabitants. Hence we may suppose that their ancestors arrived in their Stone Age, but afterwards ceased to make stone implements, as less handy for their purposes and more difficult to make than the shell or bone-tipped weapons and the nets with which they capture game and fish more readily "than the most skilful fisherman with hook and line[344]." Similarly they would seem to have long lost the art of making fire, having once obtained it from a still active volcano in the neighbouring Barren Island[345].

The inhabitants of the Andaman Islands range in colour from bronze to sooty black. Their hair is extremely frizzly, seeming to grow in spiral tufts and is seldom more than 5 inches long when untwisted. The women usually shave their heads. Their height is about 1.48 m. (4 ft. 10-1/2 in.), with well-proportioned body and small hands. The cephalic index averages 82. The face is broad at the cheek-bones, the eyes are prominent, the nose is much sunken at the root but straight and small; the lips are full but not thick, the chin is small but not retreating, nor do the jaws project. The natives are characterised by honesty, frankness, politeness, modesty, conjugal fidelity, respect for elders and real affection between relatives and friends. The women are on an equal footing with the men and do their full share of work. The food is mainly fish (obtained by netting, spearing or shooting with bow and arrow), wild yams, turtle, pig and honey. They do not till the soil or keep domestic animals. Instead of clothing both sexes wear belts, necklaces, leg-bands, arm-bands etc. made of bones, wood and shell, the women wearing in addition a rudimentary leaf apron. When fully dressed the men wear bunches of shredded Pandanus leaf at wrists and knees, and a circlet of the same leaf folded on the head. They make canoes, some of which have an outrigger, but never venture far from the shore. They usually live in small encampments round an oval dancing ground, their simple huts are open in front and at the sides, or in a large communal hut in which each family has its own particular space, the bachelors and spinsters having theirs. A family consists of a man and his wife and such of their children, own and adopted, as have not passed the period of the ceremonies of adolescence. Between that period and marriage the boys and girls reside