people live in village communities whose members appear to be
more or less inter-related. There are no priests and no hereditary
chiefs, though among the more advanced tribes rank is
hereditary. Totemistic clans have been observed in Torres
strait, and on the Finsch and west coasts. Chiefship is quite
unrecognized, except on the Keriwina Islands. Possessions,
such as gardens, houses, pigs, &c., belong to individuals and not
to the community, and pass to the owner’s heirs, who differ in
relationship in different districts. The land within certain
boundaries belongs to the tribe, but a member may take possession
of any unappropriated portion. There are certain degrees
of relationship within which a man may not marry. In some
districts he may not marry into his own village, or into his
mother’s tribe; in others he may select a wife from certain
tribes only. Payment, or a present, is always made for a wife
to her father, brother or guardian (who is generally her maternal
uncle). Presents are also often made to the bride. Polygamy
is practised, but not frequently, and from the wife (or wives)
there comes no opposition. The child belongs sometimes to
the mother’s, sometimes to the father’s tribe. The Papuan
woman, who is, as a rule, more modest than the Polynesian, is
the household drudge, and does the greater part of the outdoor
work, but the man assists in clearing new gardens and in digging
and planting the soil.
In western New Guinea, according to the Dutch missionaries, there is a vague notion of a universal spirit, practically represented by several malevolent powers, as Manoin, the most powerful, who resides in the woods; Narwoje, in the clouds above the trees, a sort of Erl-König who carries off children; Faknik, in the rocks by the sea, who raises storms. Spirit-worship. As a protection against these the people construct—having first with much ceremony chosen a tree for the purpose—certain rude images called karwars, each representing a recently dead progenitor, whose spirit is then invoked to occupy the image and protect them against their enemies and give success to their undertakings. The karwar is about a foot high, with head disproportionately large; the male figures are sometimes represented with a spear and shield, the female holding a snake. They observe omens, have magicians and rain-makers, and sometimes resort to ordeal to discover a crime. Temples (so called) are found in the north and west, built like the houses, but larger, the piles being carved into figures, and the roof-beams and other prominent points decorated with representations of crocodiles or lizards, coarse human figures, and other grotesque ornamentation; but their use is not clear. Neither temples nor images (except small figures worn as amulets) occur among the people of the south-east; but they have a great dread of departed spirits, especially those of the hostile inland tribes, and of a being called Vata, who causes disease and death.
All Papuans believe that within them resides an invisible other self, or spirit, which may occasionally leave the body in the hours of sleep and after death hovers for some period at least round the scenes of its embodied life. This ghost acquires supernatural powers, which at any time it may return to exercise inimically to relations or acquaintances who offend it. In the dark, and in the depths of forests or mountains, malevolent—never embodied—spirits love to be abroad. These are the spirits which, taking up their abode in a village, cause disease and death; and to escape from such attacks the inhabitants may fly the village for good, and, by dwelling scattered in the recesses of the forest for a time before choosing a new site, they hope to throw their enemy off their trail. Spirits of evil, but not of good, therefore require to be propitiated. The powers of nature—thunder, lightning and storm, all supposed to be caused by evil and angry spirits — are held in the greatest dread. Under the category of religious observances may perhaps come those held previously to the departure of the great trading or lakatoi fleet: their taboo-proclaiming customs, their ceremonial and sacred initiation ceremonies for boys and girls on reaching puberty, when masks are worn and the “bull-roarer” swung, as also the harvest festivals, at which great trophies of the produce of field and forest are erected, preparatory to a big feast enlivened with music and dancing. In the north and north-east of New Guinea ancestor-worship is widely practised. Amulets are worn to ensure success in buying, selling, hunting, fishing and in war, as well as for protection against evil. Circumcision is practised in some regions. Although some of the coast peoples are nominally Mahommedans, and some few converts to Christianity have been made, the vast majority of Papuans remain pagan.
The dead are disposed of in various ways. The spirit is supposed not to leave the body immediately, and a corpse is either buried for a time, and then disinterred and the bones cleaned and deposited in or near the deceased’s dwelling or in some distant cave; or the body is exposed on a platform or dried over a fire, and the mummy kept for a few years. Sometimes the head, oftener the jaw-bone and portions of the skeleton are preserved as relics. Little houses are frequently erected over the grave as a habitation for the spirit. Soon after death food is offered to the departed—with an infant a calabash of its mother’s milk—and that he may have no wants, his earthly possessions, after being broken, are laid near his resting-place. A path through the jungle from the grave to the sea is often made so that the spirit may bathe. A widow must shave her head, smear her body with black and the exudation’s of the corpse, and wear mourning for a long time. The dead are referred to by some roundabout phrase, never by name, for this might have the dangerous result of bringing back the spirit. These dwell chiefly in the moon, and are particularly active at full moon. The houses which they haunt, and beneath or near which their bodies are buried, are deserted from time to time, especially by a newly-married couple or by women before child-birth.
Yams, taro and sweet potatoes constitute in some districts the main food of the people, while in others sago is the staple diet. Forest fruits and vegetables are also eaten. Maize and rice—which are not indigenous—are eagerly sought after. The Papuan varies his vegetable diet with the flesh of the wild pig, wallabi and other small animals, which are hunted Food. with dogs. Birds are snared or limed. Fish abound at many parts of the coast, and are taken by lines, or speared at night by torchlight, or netted, or a river is dammed and the fish stupefied with the root of a milletia. Turtle and dugong are caught. The kima, a great mussel weighing (without shell) 20 to 30 ℔, and other shellfish, are eaten, as are also dogs, flying foxes, lizards, beetles and all kinds of insects. Food is cooked in various ways. Cooking-pots, made at various parts of the coast, form one of the great exchanges for sago; but where such vessels do not reach, food is cooked by the women on the embers, done up in leaves, or in holes in the ground over heated stones. The sexes eat apart. In the interior salt is difficult to get, and sea-water, which is carried inland in hollow bamboos, is used in cooking in place of it. Salt, too, is obtained from the ashes of wood saturated by sea-water. In the Fly River region, kava, prepared from Piper methysticum, is drunk without any of the ceremonial importance associated with it in Polynesia. As a rule the Papuans have no intoxicating drink and do not know the art of fermenting palm-sap or cane-juice. Tobacco is indigenous in some parts, and is smoked everywhere, except on the north-east coast and on the islands, where its use is quite unknown. In some few districts a species of clay is eaten.
The male Papuan is usually naked save for a loin-cloth made of the bark of the Hibiscus, Broussonetia and other plants, or a girdle of leaves. In the more civilized parts cotton garments are used. Papuans have usually a great dislike to rain and carry a mat of pandanus leaves as a protection against it. Except in one or two localities (on the Clothing and Ornaments. north-east and west), the women are invariably decently clothed. The Papuan loves personal adornment and loses no chance of dressing himself up. His chief home-made ornaments are necklaces, armlets and ear-rings of shells, teeth or fibre, and cassowary, cockatoo, or bird of paradise feathers—the last two, or a flower, are worn through the septum of the nose. With his head encircled by a coronet of dogs’ teeth, and covered with a network cap or piece of bark-cloth, the septum of the nose transfixed by a pencil of bone or shell, and perhaps a shell or fibre armlet or two, the Papuan is in complete everyday attire. On festal occasions he decks his well forked-out and dyed hair with feathers and flowers, and sticks others in his ear-lobe holes and under his armlets; while a warrior will have ovula shells and various bones of his victims dangling from ringlets of his hair, or fixed to his armbands or girdle. The Papuan comb is characteristic. This is a long piece of bamboo split at one end into prongs, while the other projects beyond the forehead sometimes two feet or more, and into it are stuck the bright feathers of parrots and other birds. The fairer tribes at the east end tattoo, no definite meaning apparently being attached to the pattern, for they welcome suggestions from Manchester. For the women it is simply a decoration. Men are not tattooed till they have killed some one. Raised cicatrices usually take the place of tattooing with the darker races. Rosenberg says the scars on the breast and arms register the number of sea-voyages made.
The Papuans build excellent canoes and other boats, and in some
districts there are professional boat-builders of great skill, the best
craft coming from East Cape and the Louisiades. These
boats are either plain dug-outs, with or without outriggers,
or regularly built by planks tightly laced and
well caulked to an excavated keel. The most remarkable of their
Boat-building.
Music.
vessels is the “lakatoi,” composed of several capacious dug-outs,
each nearly 50 ft. long, which are strongly lashed together to a width
of some 24 ft., decked and fitted with two masts, each carrying
a huge mat sail picturesquely fashioned. On the deck high crates
are built for the reception of some thousands of pieces of pottery
for conveyance annually to the Fly River district to exchange for sago.
Papuans are very fond of music, using Pan-pipes, a Jew’s harp of
the Papuans’ own fabrication, and the flute; on occasions
of ceremony the drum only is used—this instrument being
always open at one end and tapped by the fingers. To the accompaniment
of the drum, dancing—as a rhythmic but stationary movement
