210 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



soiling her textile, but that she was providing a substitute for it 

 which she was going to keep. A pace or two brought her to the 

 other end of the bamboo seat, and there lay another textile, a 

 perfect duplicate of the one just sold to me except that it had 

 been softened, polished and made up into a skirt. Upon this 

 garment, Oleng laid the same areca-nut and the same buyo-leaf 

 that she had just before placed on my textile. Then she put my 

 textile on the bench close to her own duplicate garment, so that 

 the one touched the other. Next, she dipped the areca-nut, folded 

 in its betel-leaf, into a cup of water and made with it an unbroken 

 pass on the two textiles, beginning with the one just sold and 

 stroking toward the one to be kept. She stroked in a direction 

 away from herself, and with a sort of wiping motion in a line 

 several inches long across the textiles. Twice she made the stroke, 

 and, at the same time, repeated a magic formula to the effect 

 that this act was to keep her from being taken sick. Finally, she 

 returned to me the textile she had sold, and remarked: "Now, I 

 shall not be sick from selling my iikiIhiI, but the other, I must 

 always keep and never give it away." 



The intention of the rite was apparently to draw the spiritual 

 essence from the one object to the other; that is to say, to entice 

 the gimokud of the fabric that was leaving her into another fabric 

 which in all essentials resembled it, and which would be always 

 retained by her, in order that no evil consequences might attach to 

 the sale. 



Another illustration of magic substitution is found in the ritual 

 attending the sale of a special type of linked brass chain called 

 sinkali. Little girls among the Bagobo wear, while very young, 

 nothing but a small pubic shield, which suffices as clothing for the 

 first four or live years of life or until the child is considered big 

 enough to put on a little skirt. The pubic shield {tambibing) is in 

 the form of a triangle and made of cocoanut-shell or, rarely, of brass. 

 In two comers are holes through which passes a girdle of hemp 

 or a brass chain (sinkali) just long enough to go round the waist. 

 A mother. Siye, visiting at my house, consented to sell the shield 

 worn by her little daughter, but the linked brass girdle attached 

 she reluctantly gave up after much discussion with her friends and 

 much persuasion from me. Relinquishing her plan of taking the 



child home before removing the shield, she drew the linked girdle 



down and oil' over the feet and asked for a little water. I brought 



