Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education

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 

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 philosophy of life which viewed 

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 

[ea | 

us, 2 few remain. Isolated on small Pacific islands, in 

- 

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; 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 I, “Ethnographic Notes on the Manus Tribe.” 

ea 

dense African jungles or Asiatic wastes, it is still pos- _ 

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BRED MOVE aS EA 
Every child has his own small canoe 

Even pigs have learned to swim and the children have 
learned to ride the pigs 

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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; 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.” 

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; 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 

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 play; they are taught to bridle 
neither their tongues nor their tempers. They are 
taught no respect for their parents; 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 réle 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; a fifty per cent 
infant death rate accomplishes that. Only the most fit 

survive. They are intelligent children; there are only 
three or four dull children among them. They have 
perfect bodily co-ordination; 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 réle, 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 réles, as some enthusiasts suggest, but 
in their playing different ones. 

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; 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; obstreperous truthfulness is the greater virtue. 

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; 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 

and uninterrupted field work. From a thatched house 
on piles, built in the centre of 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. 

pen

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; 
here the children come for a fresh water swim, and the 

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 

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.

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. 

“TI don’t want to.” The fat little girl wriggles and 
pouts. 

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

“T don’t want to.” 

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

“T won’t.” Alupwa purses her lips into ugly de- 
flance. 

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

“I won't.” 

“Tf 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- 

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. 

“Tt 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.

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 

against the light cast by a fan-shaped torch of palm 
leaves. It isa 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 séance 
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. THis lips form the words: “Wife of 
Pokanas is conducting the séance.” 

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.” 

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.

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 
gum; 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. Inthe mouth 
of the gourd is thrust a wooden spatula, the end carved 

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. 

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

“T 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.

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 

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?” 

“Ts she dead yet?” asks the small boy, wriggling to 
the edge of the verandah. Nobody answers him. 
“Took.” 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.

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 salt; the descent into its depths is sud- 

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 away; her 
attention is never wholly diverted from the child. She 
is out the door, down the ladder, and into the sea in 
a twinkling; 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 

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 with 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; 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 

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 

L 26 | 

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 them; really it is simply a quiet insistence 

[a7] 

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-footedness 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; 
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. 

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 log; 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 
isina 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 

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; too am- 
bitious projects are gently pushed out of the picture; 
small errors are simply ignored but important ones are 
punished. Soa child who, after having learned to walk, 
slips and bumps his head, is not gathered up in kind, 

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 do; he will nervously hope that 
no one has noticed his faux pas. 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 

1s) 

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- 
Jance: 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; a good child is one who never touches any- 

(ge. 

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 

E 33°] 

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 

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 

Lage 

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 ga 
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 

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 
house 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 

of earshot. Little girls are usually addressed as “Ja,” 
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 

C38] 

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. Allinthe water. Other boats in the water. Get 
the paddle. Yes. I get the paddle. Dll paddle. No, 
I won’t paddle. IT’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: 

“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. Allright. 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.” 
“T 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- 

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; 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. 

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 incited to dance at 
home while the mother taps onthe 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 

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 

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 

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 of 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. 

Smali 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 

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; they know how to tie a rat- 
tan strip so that it will remain fast; 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, 

L 46 ] 

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 walk; 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- 

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; 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 

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. 

Undoubtedly this tremendous social freedom rein- 
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 anxicus pan- 
dering love of the parents, a pandering which is allowed 
by the restricted ideals of the culture.

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, 

st | 

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 husbands 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 
elder; 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- 
ates. Month after month she stayed in the house 

say 

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 affairs, always busy and always needing her brother’s 
help. When the baby became ill, she took the other 
child, so both of Ndrosal’s 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 body; 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 

Psi 

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 Negat- 
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; 
one he gave away to his brother, three were at home. 
Ngamel was ageing, a quiet man who loved to sit on 

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 Ngamel’s 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. 

(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; 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 lap 

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 Jailai 
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 séance 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 

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. 

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; 
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 

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; 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. Muffled from 
hand to foot, she climbs hastily into her grandmother’s 
house. Her grandmother is very old, the muscles in 

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 smal] 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 
cighteen-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 2 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 2 violent quarrel ensues 

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 bidding; 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, 
ina corner. Immediately all of her betrothed’s pater- 
nal aunts and female cousins fall upon her; 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- 

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 home; most of them will stay 
to sleep with her. They will offer her food which she 
will refuse to eat; the fires will die low and they will 
sleep. No one will have spoken to her; 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. 

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 

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 her; 
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 

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 effort 
at the hopeless task of getting along well with her hus- 
band. For her marriage her face was tattooed, her 

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- 

ond 

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, 

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 
smal] 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 wng, 
and two kinds of leaf puddings. One of these called 
tchutchw is nine or ten 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; all 
this is finery, not heavy money for her husband’s rel- 

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; the mother returns to her 
baby; 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, 

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 

[e7z.] 

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- 

ze] 

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 home; 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 

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; 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 

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; 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, /és 
child shall not. 

ea 

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 

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 

Eoval 

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’ silver 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 
Panaw’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- 

L 78 J 

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; 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 went 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. 

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.

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 life; 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”; 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 kawas, “exchange.” He has no other 
word for friend, naturally friendship too falls under 

[ 8: ] 

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 kawas.” 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 guid pro quo, 
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; when 
that landsman will bring the promised and paid-for-in- 

advance sago; 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 property. 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. 

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; 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 

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 

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; how 
Pomasa smugly refused 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 metcha, every betrothal, every mar- 
riage, has reverberations through many villages, affects 
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- 

pak’s future wife. This brings the question of Kilipak’s 
one-day marriage before the minds of the other chil- 
dren. They chaff 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 kimekin feast for a preg- 
nant woman the packs of sago are stacked in threes, 
while for a pimpuaro 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. 

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 off 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 

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 

canoe” will elicit more sympathy than “I wanted to 
make cat’s cradles and he didn’t”; 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; 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 

few wailing or sulking individuals. In five minutes all 
is fair weather again unless some child feels so affronted 
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 arriére pensée. 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 

[or] 

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; their husbands are tabu to her. 

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: “Pimkaiyo” (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 

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. d 

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; 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. 

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 use; 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. 

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; 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 

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 Kutan’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, 

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.

MANUS 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 

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 

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; 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 afflicting 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 réle as upholders of a moral order, the 
spirits engage in various activities which may be said 

[ ror | 

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 
séances, 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. 

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 
séance 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; 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; their very faces are still fresh in the memory of 
the living. But this spirit world is a world in which 

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 werevstill 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 

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 séances is a long, 
tedious business; 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, séances usually turn upon the economic arrange- 
ments of adult life, which they do not understand and 

in which they take no interest. The occasional séance 
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 séance 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. 

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; 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 “¢tchinals”—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 

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; 
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. 

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- 

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 

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; 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 1s 
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 delightful dependence upon the devoted father 
determine the child’s pattern response. This is over- 

[ rx ] 

Jaid 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 
astranger. 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. 

[ rr2] 

Even lonelier was little Bopau, the son of the dead 
Sori. Sori had been a gentle, firm man, respected by 
every one, peaceful, unageressive. 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, unageressive. 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 him 
“Big-mouth.” Matawei imitated his father’s every 
gesture. But Bopau remained faithful to Sori’s per- 

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 séances 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 

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 
idea; 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 

L115 ] 

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 réle 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 

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. 

feneg

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- 
jections 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. 

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 it; 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, 

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 

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- 

iat, 

noon; 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; 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: 

Iam a man. 

I have no wife. 

Iamaman. 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 

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 out; we’ll give her another can of 
the same kind to-morrow. If she eats them all, ?m 
right; if she doesn’t, you are.” 

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; disbelieving the results of a 
séance, they will do something which, if the séance 
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 

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 us; 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; 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 

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- 

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 

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; the ceremonial of 
war, the mechanics of séances, 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 

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; 
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; 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. 

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 

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 “4t 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; 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 “Bopau didn’t 
tie it fast enough.” This suggests that this “natural” 

[rar] 

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 girl’s 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 

brg2)] 

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; 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. 

L763] 

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.

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 réle in 
giving individuality, but in the more fundamental as- 
pects of personality,—ageressiveness, 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- 

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 dows 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 

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 

fr137] 

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- 

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 acquired 
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 

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; 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 rdle 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 

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- 

[ r4r | 

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 girl’s 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 
ageressive 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-sufficient 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 

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 

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 man; 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? Tl 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- 

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”; 
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 

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. Negalowen 
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. 

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- 
ageressive. 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; 
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; 
Piwen by stubbornness and active intractability, Salai- 

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; 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, scuffing 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 

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; 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 

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; but in active intelligent adjustment to the 
material world, they have had years of excellent train- 

ing.

THE father treats his young children with very 
slight regard for differences 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 ndrakein, at an hour of age. 
Before birth only is the term waz 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- 

fore. Her mother is addressed as pen, woman, but she 
is a ndrakein, similarly her father is called a kamal, 
and her brother is a mat. 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 boys; 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; 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 

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; fist fights 
as frequently cross sex lines as not; 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 

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 off 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; the group is too clamorous of all 
its members. 

With the child’s increased consciousness of belong- 

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 them; 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. 

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; 
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. Oniy in her own 

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; 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 séance, 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 

rsye] 

her condition from every one. Here is a new handicap 
to a free untrammelled life. The girl is not told that 
the menstruation of unmarried 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 

of childhood. Buta 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 

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. 

But the slightly older boys spend less time with their 
fathers, more time with other boys. They grow tired 
of the rdle 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; 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 

f 161 | 

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 girl’s 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; 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, 

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 

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 1s 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.” 

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 

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; 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- 

[ 166 } 

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; instead the marriage date is hastened. It is the 
concealed sin only which angers the spirits; 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 2 woman in the 

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. Ina 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 

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; 
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 
fiancée of Luwil and the fiancé 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 

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- 

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 

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 veniality 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 ot 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- 

[i924 

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 dogs’ 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 

(273 4 

drums the louder, as if to drown the aimlessness of 
their proceedings. There is no word for Jove 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 séances within doors to search out sin.

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 

er75 | 

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 tchutchu, taro, the fruit called ung, 
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 of 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 Sulwkol, 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- 

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 her; 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 Mok; 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 sago; 
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- 

L177 ] 

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 

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 piramatan, 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 bow! 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 

E794 

friendly argument between Kiteni’s paternal aunt and 
grandmother as to which one should perform the taro 
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! 
T take the taro of Paleiu—he is oa 
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 exchange. 
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 girl’s mouth.) Taking up another handful she con- 
tinues: 

“T 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.) 

as 

“T give taro to the daughter of Paleiu, 
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:) 

“T give her this food, 
I give her this taro. 
She will 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?” 

[a8] 

i, 3 ue 

& % 

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; 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 effect 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. 

The boxes of the village have been ransacked to dress all 
the small girls for the feast 

After her month’s confinement in the house, She 1s given a 
thorough washing in the sea 

4aYJOUut 
49Y Of Yinou Kjdua say skojdsip pyrys IY T, 

SaID]YIIU Y400{-SOp puv syaqg papvag ‘si1vy 
SSDAS UL 8YUD PASSAdP IAD STAIS AMY asayy []P 

SSG 

<7 

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 

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 girl’s 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 

when a girl’s 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 

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; 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. 

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 different 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; 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- 

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 minutie 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- 

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 débutante, or the audacious technique of the 

flapper, ways of attracting the opposite sex form an ab- 
sorbing occupation. In Manus, a girl has no need to 
seek a husband; he has been found. She may not seek 
a lover; 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 ] ne

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 
laplap 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 

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; 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 2 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- 

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 

with the young men. The boys grow taller, heavier. 
They are skilled in navigation; 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 

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 lot; 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 

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 community 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. 

Different kinds of service, the relative advantages of 

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 

——_— 
. be . 

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, 

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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, 

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 tchani, for the whole 
ceremony there is only the hybrid term, “kan (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 it, 
‘Towards plentifulness, 
Towards greatness. 

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. 

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 
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. 

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.

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 réle 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 

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 fiancée. 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 fiancée’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- 

scious, 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 

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 fiancée 
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; 
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; 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 busy; 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 

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. Hes poor, he has 
no home; 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 

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; 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 

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.

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 

f[ arr | 

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; 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 

(2 | 

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; 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; 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°] 

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; 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. Ina 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 

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. Ina 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 18a 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 

[2r5 ] 

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 

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’? “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 

eres 

been the accompaniment of wealth, that the European 
who bows before the rich men, thinks that he 1s 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; 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 life; 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 

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; 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 

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 ere, 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 

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 ail 
parents, a/l 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. 

bas J 

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.

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; he may wear earrings or 
not, similarly he may or may not wear a thin pearl shell 

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; 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; 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- 

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- 

[y2a5 

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; 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 aspects 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 Zufii Indians the individual 
with undisguised initiative and greater drive than his 

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 file; 
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. XXIII International Congress of Americanists. 

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 régime or 
new forms of the same régime, 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 emphasis, 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 dif- 

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- 

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 

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 son; 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- 

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; 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, see “Coming of Age in 
Samoa.” Morrow, 1928. 

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 
unageressive 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 

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 rdle 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 

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 

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. 

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 muffle him in 
feminine affection, and present his father to him as an 
animated whip to enforce his mother’s role 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 

[aay 

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 

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 

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 

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 

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 manhood, rather 
than to a number of interesting, known men.

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 life; 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 

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; 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 

offered 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 
asa 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 

of unmarried women to bear children. The little girl 
had been told nothing about her father; 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 rdle which such 
imaginative pictures play, it compensated her for her 
sense of difference from the other children, and it gave 
her a device for criticising her mother and her mother’s 
régime. 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; 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”; on arriving 

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; 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; the spirit children are scorned. They are less 
vivid than real children; 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 

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 ona 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 boy; 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 séances 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- 

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 affair. 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; 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 

flights of fancy. The spirits practise the levirate, that 
is, a man may marry his brother’s wife, or his father’s 
wife; 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 

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 

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 

morality is stiffened 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; 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, 

253" | 

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 Czsar 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; 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 

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; 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 

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 

factors are contributing to make the réle 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, Medizval 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; 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 America, 
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 

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.

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 draw; 
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- 

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. 
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; 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 

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. 

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; as it 
teaches one method of penmanship in preference to a 
more fatiguing one, it isnot. 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 

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 

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 

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 rdle 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 lollypops, 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- 

tive; they are essentially non-creative in character. 
Nor is the achievement of making Americans out of 
the children of foreign parents creating something new; 
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. Medizval 
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 “love of 

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 

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; 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 2 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- 

ting aside the accidental good effects which are so fre- 
quent in the drawings of children, good effects based 
on freshness, naiveté 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; 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 

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 muffled in the 

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- 

Boyar: 

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 Japlap, 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 

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 cafés 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; the canons of German musical life substituted 
for the canons of jazz. But the children have not de- 
veloped a new thing; 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; only then can the enlistment of the 
next generation have important effects. 

The truth of this conclusion has vivid illustration in 

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; 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, i1l-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 

(274 

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 

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- 

ing child may develop coherently. One such group 
negates the efforts 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.