BOOKS OF THE DAY
Melanesian Culture
Stone Men of Malekula. By John Layard. (Chatto and Windus. 505.
Tans is a truly magnificent book. It is over Soo pages long, and beautifully produced, illustrated, annotated and indexed. Many who handle it will feel a wave of nostalgia for the spacious old days when the skill of scholar and publisher could be lavished more often on such a microcosm of human culture as this little society of 400 people. And now, with world civilisations in travail around us, it is surely something of a rest to contemplate such a society in miniature, immobilised by its isolation, and revealing the form and beauty of a static design.
Vau island, to which this book is chiefly devoted, lies off the north-east coast of Malekula, one of the island chain of the New Hebrides archipelago which has already been described by the late Bernard Deacon, and more recently by Tom Harrisson. The whole of this area forms a patchwork of small tribes or tribelets with distinctive cultural features, so that a man walking along the coast of some of the larger islands may come across different languages every three or four miles in some instances, and may find them. spoken by groups of only a few hundreds strong. Such an area naturally sets a fascinating problem for the historian of Pacific cultures. In 1914 Rivers published his History of Melanesian Society after a great pioneer journey through the Pacific. In it he tried to unravel the different cultural strands produced by what he imagined to be a series of successive waves of immigrant peoples. Layard was a pupil of Rivers, to whom he dedicates this book, and the present volume is announced as the first of a series of detailed studies of the small islands off the coast of Malekula, in which the writer will attempt to establish the historical sequence of cultures in the area by means of Rivers's methods. For this reason the book differs from the sociological studies of primitive peoples that have been appearing recently. Layard gives us no picture of the life of the people of Vau, their ambitions, tempera- mental characteristics, day to day activities, the political system that unites them or the laws they observe. In fact, in order to establish a historical basis for his later work, he chooses for his first volume the island on which he stayed the shortest time and therefore had the least chance of making first-hand sociological observations. He also includes accounts published by other observers such as Pere Godefroy and Professor Speiser. Layard's aim is to give as com- plete an account as possible of those aspects of Melanesian culture which will enable him to reconstruct their history by means of the distribution of certain common traits. So a savant of today might reconstruct the history of the Norman conquest by means of Norman place and family names, old French legal usages and forms of local government, even if all written records of this occupa- tion of England had disappeared. The traits Layard uses are the famous stone megaliths and the megalithic mortuary ritual of the Pacific, the mosaic of patrilineal and matrilineal kinship usages, myths, and different forms of mat and fringe skirts. This work will be incomplete without the succeeding volumes, but when it is finished, it should make a monumental piece of scholarship of its kind.
For the general reader some of the elaborate analyses of kinship will form rather arduous work, but the Malekula area is one of the most fascinating and dramatic districts of Melanesia. These people have long been famous for their sacred cult of pigs, not pigs in terms-of bacon, ham or spam, but pigs with curled tusks specially trained upwards, and then downwards, by the knocking out of the upper canines, till the tusks re-enter the jaw, pierce it and grow up again. By possession of such tuskers prestige, power, and access to ancestral spirits is achieved. Malekula is also an area of human sacrifice, cannibalism, probably not yet extinct, the artificial elonga- tion of the human skull in babyhood, cults associated with split gongs, of which Layard gives valuable photographs, and the mega- liths which are now mainly composed of coral blocks. The most valuable part of the book is probably the full account of the Maki ritual of Vau, a fifteen-year cycle of ceremonies with sacrifices of tusked boars. But Layard's interests are wide and many types of reader will find useful data here and there in ;he book. There are melodies of native songs, psychological interpretations of myths, methods of canoe building, sand designs, and some linguistic data.
From the point of view of sociological theory, Layard's main contribution is a rather mystic conception of innate impulses causing human society to divide, and to subdivide into certain numerical proportions such as halves, quarters and eighths. This theory it is difficult to test without further concrete data in terms of accounts of native behaviour, legal obligations, linguistic usages and forms of settlement. Without this, the formal perfection of the interesting, but very complex kinship diagrams, raises as many queries as it solves. But the pattern will no doubt emerge more clearly in subse- quent volumes, and Layard's present comparative summary of the distribution of different forms of ceremonial in this area will be • exceedingly useful to anthropologists interested in the Pacific.
AUDREY I. RICHARDS.
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