Kinship in the Admiralty Islands

Daniel Elazar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780765807649
• eBook ISBN: 9781351309660
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Manus of New Guinea's Pere village were Margaret Mead's most favored community, the people to whom she returned five times before she died in 1978. Kinship in the Admiralty Islands is the classic and only thorough description of their complex rules of marriage and family relations. It draws on Mead's 1928-1929 field work, conducted with her second husband, New Zealander Reo Fortune, and benefits by her being able to cross-check her data with his. Written in 1931, Kinship followed Mead's first and very popular book on the Manus, Growing Up in New Guinea, which was criticized by other anthropologists for being too general in scope. In Kinship Mead succeeded in demonstrating her thorough knowledge of this Melanesian group in the specific terms prized by her scholarly colleagues, while also describing in depth Manus social structure.Kinship in the Admiralty Islands describes an intricate system of social restraints and kinship ties and their impact on the local economy. The Manus' predilection for adoption, for example, allows surrogate fathers to make extended marriage payments, while in the next generation their adopted sons will take on the same responsibility for other young men in the new kin network. Mead reviews other kinship rules, such as avoidance behavior between in-laws of the opposite sex, early betrothals, other forms of adoption, and a range of deference behavior and joking relations among kin. In this work, Mead walks a fine line between functionalist kinship analysis of the British school of Radclife Brown and the cultural-and-personality orientation of Americans in the school of Franz Boas.Jeanne Guillemin's new introduction provides a lively in depth description of Margaret Mead's career in the early days of anthropology, the sometimes negative reactions of her contemporaries to her work, and her reasons for writing Kinship in the Admiralty Islands, as well as Mead's later reactions to how "her Manus" entered the modern world.Margaret Mead was noted for directing her writings to both scholar and laymen alike. Kinship in the Admiralty Islands will be of interest to anthropologists and general readers interested in the peoples of the South Pacific.Margaret Mead was curator of ethnology of the American Museum of Natural History. She was the author of many books including Continuities in Cultural Evolution (available from Transaction), The Study of Culture at a Distance, The Mountain of Arapesh, and From the South Seas: Studies of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies. Jeanne Guillemin is a professor of anthropology at Boston College and editor of Anthropological Realities: Readings in the Science of Culture, also available from Transaction.

The Manus Tribe

Sketch of Manus Culture

The Manus people are a fishing and navigating group who build their houses in the shallow lagoons adjacent to the south coast of the Great Admiralty and to a series of small islands off the south coast. They construct their own houses and canoes, the materials for which, however, they must obtain by trading fish with the land peoples. For all raw materials and for vegetable foods they are entirely dependent upon these neighboring tribes. Due to their superior seamanship and determined efforts they have succeeded in dominating the sea on the south coast. Their large two-masted, single-outrigger dug-out canoes are the carriers for the various artifacts manufactured on the southern islands. With the exception of the Manus settlement near the island of Mbuke, on which pottery vessels are made, the Manus manufacture nothing for trade but depend entirely upon fishing and marine transportation to obtain all the other manufactured products of the archipelago. They supplement their fish diet with taro, sago, coconuts, yams, papayas, and mud hens’ eggs. They depend upon trade for bast for thread, string, and rope, for wood, for obsidian for knives and spears, for paraminium nut which they use as a caulking and binding material, for betel nut, for carved wooden bowls, for the paraminium gum covered basketry used as everyday utensils, and for the more elaborate objects of ornament and ceremonial such as the frigate bird war charms with the carved wooden heads, the tortoise shell breast ornaments and delicately worked ornaments of gold lip shell, elaborate combs carved of wood and ornamented with bas relief in paraminium nut, carved daggers with sting-ray points, lime gourds with burned-in designs, and the carved lime spatulas. The carved dancing poles, sometimes as much as thirty feet in length, the slit gongs with carved ends, the large table-like beds with carved legs—all these must be obtained by trade. Their position of dependency upon the manufactures of other tribes, the extreme meagerness of their natural resources and the day-by-day nature of a continuous traffic in fish are all important factors in understanding the general orientation of the Manus culture towards trade and the accumulation of material wealth. The Manus are essentially middlemen in a complicated system of intertribal exchange; they are ever under the necessity of being alert, active, unremittingly industrious and enterprising.

The economic organization which provides for the exchange and accumulation of a very considerable amount of property for a primitive people to possess, is threefold. It consists of a system of daily markets in which a Manus village and a group of land-dwellers meet and barter fish for vegetable products of the land; a system of affinal exchanges within each tribal group which binds one village to another and serves a double purpose in stimulating the production of the objects required for the extensive systems of validation of births, marriages, deaths, etc., and also provides for the distribution of foreign products within a tribe; and a system of trade partnerships sometimes between members of quite distant tribes through which agency large articles of trade such as dugong, turtle, carved beds, large drums, etc., pass from one tribe to another. There is a double currency in Manus, dogs’ teeth and strings of shell money; this currency in large amounts forms the principal permanent element in the Manus affinal exchanges and is also used in the major transactions between trade partners. In the daily market, barter, rather than money purchase, is the rule. The affinal exchanges among the Manus require the collection of large amounts of pots, grass skirts, sago, pigs, and oil, to meet the advances of dogs’ teeth and shell money which are made by the kin group of the husband to the kin group of the wife. Either the raw materials, or the finished products of the wife’s kin’s share of the exchange must be obtained in the local market. Because about twenty-five per cent of the marriages are intervillage, these products then find their way to villages far distant from the point of manufacture. The knowledge that neighboring tribes provide a ready outlet for surplus manufactures combines with a desire to make a fine display in the affinal exchanges at home to encourage surplus production. Whenever there is a scarcity of any kind of manufacture, or in those cases where an intermittent failure of supply is to be feared, as in the supply of fish or of betel nut, compulsive barter,—that is, a refusal to sell a desired article for any valuable except a particular desired one—becomes the rule.

The Manus man has then a continuous call to commercial activity; he must fish for his family and for a surplus to trade at the market, he must plan for and accumulate sufficient native property for the large affinal exchanges (which often necessitates long overseas trips and elaborate negotiations with his trade partners in distant parts). This whole system has become too complex and too difficult to be handled by every adult male in Manus society. Instead, all the important planning is carried out by a few entrepreneurs, men of means, intelligence, and leadership. For these men, their young and dependent relatives fish and trade and undertake long journeys. The affinal exchanges them-selves have been keyed to an individual emphasis. They do not represent the pooled wealth of the entire kinship group involved in a particular marriage, or ear-piercing, or birth ceremony, but the aggregate of individual contributions, each one of which is made to an individual recipient on the opposite side of the exchange, and returned precisely. Thus efficiently have the Manus eliminated the familiar type of communism within a kin group which permits the lazy and the inept to batten upon the intelligent and the vigorous in so many primitive societies.

The religious system of the Manus is a special variant of ancestor worship, combined with a system of communication with the spirits of the dead through two sets of oracles—female mediums and male diviners. Each house is guarded by a guardian ghost of a recently deceased male relative; the householder gives shelter and honor to the dead man’s skull and renders him lip service on festival occasions; the ghost in return protects his ward’s family, guards its health and safety and prospers its fishing. Mr. Fortune has designated the guardian ghost of a man, (whom the Manus refer to as Moen Palit) as Sir Ghost while all other ghosts, from the standpoint of any given individual are merely ghosts, often malicious and never actively enlisted in the interests of other than their own wards. The Sir Ghost acts in a disciplinary rôle towards his wards, extending help and protection to them only so long as they are free from sin. The principal sin is any violation of the rigid sexual code which supports the child betrothals and the stability of marriage; sins also are failure to pay debts, failure to use one’s economic resources wisely, failure to provide for the betrothal and marriage of young relatives, failure to assist other relatives in economic matters, failure to obey the economic dictates of the head of the family, failure to keep one’s house in repair, etc. In other words, the spirits enforce, by a withdrawal of aid and by punitive measures which are felt in failure of fishing devices, hurricanes, and, most particularly, in sickness and accident, a stern puritanical moral code of saving, working, and abstinence from all unlawful fleshly indulgence. The ward in his turn expects his Sir Ghost to chasten for sin, but not to kill, and to protect all the members of his household from death at the hands of revengeful and malicious ghosts. The death of a householder usually results in the destruction of his house, which has sheltered an unfaithful Sir Ghost, the expulsion of the Sir Ghost by throwing his skull in the sea, and the installation of the recently deceased householder as the Sir Ghost of his heir. Deaths of women and children result in strained relations between Sir Ghosts and wards, but usually not in eviction, as neither women’s nor young children’s ghosts would make satisfactory substitutes. Every illness results in a searching for sin, for full confession and expiation is believed to mitigate ghostly wrath. The cautious will also seek, through divination and seance, the advice of their Sir Ghosts before entering on any important undertaking or making any momentous choice. Another religious cult, the cult of the male ancestors in the male line and the female ancestors in the female line, is administered by the women, and is principally directed towards the regulation of pregnancy, the conferring of moral and spiritual blessings upon the young at various occasions of crisis, and the release of individuals from periods of ritual segregation. This cult which Mr. Fortune has described under the head of the tandritanitani cult will be discussed at greater length later as it is most intimately integrated with the kinship system.

With these few introductory remarks concerning the economic and religious aspects of Manus life,¹ I can proceed to a detailed consideration of the social organization. The peculiar nature of Manus society necessitates a somewhat special division of the discussion of the social organization. This paper will deal with the structure of Manus society, the village organization, gentile organization, the kinship system, and the way in which this structure functions in the community. Those periods in the life history of the individual, birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, and death, which are usually regarded as an aspect of social organization assume a particular cast in Manus because they are the pivots upon which the economic activity of the society is balanced. They therefore belong more accurately in the discussion of economics and will be reserved for a future publication.

The Manus Tribe

The Manus all speak one language with a single slight phonetic variation in the medial r-1 sound between two different sets of villages. They also recognize themselves as members of one tribal group, speaking of themselves as yoya Manus (we, plural exclusive, Manus), in contradistinction to the peoples of the Great Admiralty of whom they speak collectively as ala Usiai (they, plural, people of the land), and to the land-dwelling people of the surrounding islands they also apply a collective term, ala Matankor (which literally translated is “they, the eye of the land,” more generally as “the face of the land”). Parkinson² followed the Manus usage in discussing the people of the Admiralties. This division is, however, hardly an ethnographic one, but is rather a reflection of the typical sea-dwellers’ point of view towards people land-bound and wholly without canoes, the Usiai, and those who live on land but who use canoes with more or less frequency, the Matankor. As a matter of fact, those Matankor peoples who live near the Manus use canoes very infrequently, while the Matankor of the north coast seem to be as habitual and fearless sailors as are the Manus themselves.

The Manus are distinguished also by common custom. There are slight variations in behavior between settlements; the method of possession of a medium in Papitalai, the only Manus settlement on the north coast, has more in common with extra-Manus practice; the Taui bride may not sit beside her husband as may the brides from other settlements, but must remain with her back to him; the Mbuke widow is not permitted to face a stranger during mourning, but must present her buttocks to him. With the exception of a few such minor points which are conspicuous because of their rarity, the Manus people may be regarded as they regard themselves, as one people.

This unity of custom and language does not however indicate any sort of political unity. There is no indication that the Manus ever acted as a body and there is abundant evidence of inter-village wars, raids, and reprisals. Each Manus village has a regular trading relationship with some gardening land people. The Peri¹ people, for instance, speak of “our Usiai” as distinguished from the Mbunei or Pomatchau Usiai; and between these different groups of Usiai there was not only frequent hostility, but also considerably greater apparent divergence in language and custom. If reports are to be trusted, Manus and landspeople sometimes joined in war against another similar combination of Manus and neighboring landspeople.

There are some two thousand Manus natives living at the present time in eleven villages: Papitalai, Pomatchau, Mbunei, Tchalalo, Peri, Patusi, and Loitcha are all coastal lagoon villages; there are also Manus settlements near the islands of Mok, Mbuke, Taui, and Rambutchon. Parkinson’s map shows several more villages in the Mok, Balowan, and Lou region. Although all of these villages are not remembered today, there is one circumstance which would seem to confirm this suggestion of a previous larger population in this region. The present Mok people, the only Manus left in that locality, are of a very distinct local physical type. It is possible to identify Mok people almost unfailingly in an assembly of Manus from other villages. This peculiar physical type owes part of its individuality to greater height and weight, which may alternatively be attributed to the superior quality of the foods whi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION
• PREFACE
• THE MANUS TRIBE
• NOTES ON OTHER ADMIRALTY ISLAND SYSTEMS
• CONCLUDING STATEMENT
• GLOSSARY