Two Years Among New Guinea Cannibals / A Naturalist's Sojourn Among the Aborigines of Unexplored New Guinea

Chapter 24: CHAPTER XVI BURIAL, WITCHCRAFT, AND OTHER THEMES

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About This Book

The narrative recounts two years of scientific fieldwork in New Guinea, combining natural-history collecting with ethnographic observation. The author describes arduous inland travel, coastal settlements and village life, local crafts and watercraft, dialectal diversity, ceremonies, and everyday material culture while recording birds, insects, and new species. Chapters detail camps, transport challenges, encounters with various tribes, and practical arrangements for collection and study; appendices present specimen records and scientific notes. Illustrations and a map accompany practical accounts of landscape, wildlife, and indigenous technologies.

CHAPTER XVI
BURIAL, WITCHCRAFT, AND OTHER THEMES

A Short-lived Race—An Aged Man a Curiosity—Burial Customs—The Chief Mourner painted Black—Period of Mourning brief except for the Chief Mourner—No Belief in Natural Death—Poison always Suspected—Religion all but absent—Vague Belief in Magic—Fi-fi a Form of Divination—How practised—Its Utter Childishness—No Idea of Number—Forest Warnings—“Wada,” another Form of Sorcery—Mavai’s Hideous Magical Compounds—A People seemingly without History or Legends—Pictures understood—Fear of the Stereoscope—The “Bau-bau” or Social Pipe—How Made and Smoked—Incidents of Travel—The Stinging Trees—Ideas of Medicine—Sovereign Remedies—Bleeding—How practised—Hunting—The Corral—A Strange Delicacy—Story of Native Trust in Me—A Loan of Beads—Children and their Sports—Thirty Ways of Cat’s-Cradle.