“NICE SWEET” PEOPLE

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 December 1933, Page 4

“NICE SWEET” PEOPLE

SONGS BOUGHT FOR PIGS

Sonic of the “nicest, sweetest” people Dr. Margaret Mead knows strangle superfluous babies and marry their daughters off at eight years of age. She emphasised in an interview at the American Museum of Natural History, however, that these practices grow out of tribal customs and necessity and give an entirely false impression of the general “temperament” of the aborigines of New Guinea, says the “New York Times.” . Dr. Mead, whose studies and books have brought her prominence both as ethnologist and author, spent the last two years with her husband, Dr. R. F. Fortune, living with the Arapesh of the Prince Alexander Mountains, the Mundugumor tribe on tile Yuat River and the Tchambuli tribe on Aiboni Lake in what was formerly Kaiser Wilhelm Land and is now the Australian mandate of New Guinea. She has just returned to her duties as assistant curator of ethnology at the museum. “Strangulation of unwanted babies —and the girl babies are the ones that are unwanted —sounds awfully harsh until you know that it is a questitn of strangulation or starvation,” she said. “It is simply a case of there not being enough food to go around.”

The reason for keeping boy babies in preference to girls also has a humane foundation, she explained. The girls are married outside the tribe, whereas the boys stay at'home, and, since there is only a limited amount of food, the “-gentle savages- prefer to rear children who will not leave them. The marriage of girls at an early age merely means that the little girl goes to live in the home of her future husband so that she will grow up with him and his relatives and know how to get along with them by the time she is of age to become a wife and mother. “There is no such thing as romantic love.” Dr. Mead went on. “They simply have no notion of the meaning of such a term. But there is a sweetness. a. loyally, and affection within the family group that is charming. “The little boys and the mon have the best, of everything. A little g'irl cannot cry after she is five years old, and she is taught to bear burdens almost from the time she can walk. “A little boy, on the other hand, can cry and have tantrum fits and expect all sorts of indulgences until he is thirteen or fourteen years old. The women do the work and the men are dandies. The women shave their heads and bear burdens, while the men decorate their long hair with peacock feathers and strut about like lords. Beauty is distinctly a male attribute rather than a female.” She went on to describe a system of barter whereby Murik, a village on the coast, sells songs and fashions to inland villages, receiving payment chiefly in pigs, which are the principal item of currency. Murik sells a song or a new style of dress to the nearest inland village, the next village in line buys the rights from the second village and so on.

“If a. village did not pay' its tribute before singing tho ‘new’ song—which is apt. to be from five to twenty years old—a. war might follow,” she declared.

Dr. Mead and her husband mastered Hie native language, she said, but only with some difficulty, “because it has thirteen genders and twenty-six personal pronouns; it is so complex that it. takes tho natives many yea’’s to teach it to their children.” The natives led a communal life, in which every one’s property belonged to every one else and in which it was considered 'outrageous for a. man to cat what he had grown himself without sharing it. The- reason that pigs constituted the chief currency, she said, was that a, pig v,as one thing that was infinitely divisible.