a purely aesthetic motive. In the Hawaiian Islands, however, a man who personated a deity fashioned his hair in a manner called niheu.[1] Red clay was mixed with his hair to which was sometimes added that of another person. Decoration of the head, especially with a red pigment specially prepared, was also prominent in the men’s societies of the Banks Islands,[2] and this suggests the connection of decoration of the hair with the belief in the sanctity of the head. It should be noted in this connection that in Fiji, where the cutting of the hair into strange shapes was very highly developed, the hairdresser’s hands were tabu from touching his food whenever he was following this occupation.[3] It is possible that the hats of the Sukwe and Tamate societies of the Banks Islands and the various modes of altering the appearance of the hair are only different expressions of religious ideas connected with the head.
This may also be true of the wigs of Fiji and Samoa. The Samoans used three different kinds of wigs as head-dresses in war and at their dances,[4] but we know too little about their function, both here and in Fiji, to allow more than a suspicion that they may have had a religious motive.
I cannot conclude without a brief reference to the statues without crowns which occur on the roads and in isolated situations in Easter Island. The argument of this paper points to the absence of a crown on these statues as being due to their less sacred nature, or at any rate to the absence of the function possessed by the statues of the ahu as abiding-places of the ghosts of the dead. It may be noted that the standing statues of Rano Raraku[5]
- ↑ David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities. Honolulu, pp. 215, 235.
- ↑ History of Melanesian Society, i. 137.
- ↑ Thomas Williams, Fiji and the Fijians. London, 1858, vol. i. p. 157.
- ↑ J. B. Stair, Old Samoa. London, 1897, p. 121.
- ↑ The Mystery of Easter Island, p. 182.
