168 president's address — section f. 



which customs you should preserve, and which you should abolish, 

 unless you are in a position to form some idea of what customs 

 there are, what is their real nature, and how far they extend. 



This seems an obvious truism, but it is a strange thing that, 

 though I have read, I suppose, without exaggeration, scores of 

 criticisms, mostly very hostile, of my administration in Papua, I 

 have never, I think, seen one that betrayed the slightest conscious- 

 ness even of the existence oif such a problem as I have indicated. 



Interdependence of Ideas Among Scuuige Races — Result of 

 Interdependence — Head -hunting — Cannihalisni. 



In dealing with native' customs it must be remembered that, 

 among savage races, the different departments of thought and 

 action are not clearly distinguished as with us ; even among our- 

 selves the interdependence of ideas is greater than appears on the 

 surface, but we do keep our ideas and our customs in more or less 

 water-tight compartments, and we can change one set of opinions 

 without altering others — for instance, we can change our politics 

 without changing our religion, while a savage cannot do anything 

 of the kind. His ideas are. as is to be expected, less highly 

 specialized — they are all interwoven and jumbled up together — 

 so that, in suppressing a practice which seems to you simply silly 

 and useless, you are at the same time perhaps affecting a dozen 

 other practices which may be in many ways desirable. Of course, 

 there are some things that must be suppressed, whatever the result 

 may be — as, for instance, head-hunting. This is a custom which 

 the most sympathetic administrator could net be expected to pre- 

 serve, however great his devotion to the science of anthropology, 

 though in its suppression he will probably influence all sorts of other 

 things of which he knows nothing. In such a case as this, he must 

 take the risk, and perhaps the best thing he can do is to induce 

 the head-hunters to substitute a pig's head for that of a human 

 being, or to persuade them, as I think has been done in Borneo, 

 to put up with old heads and to make believe that they are new. 

 So with cannibalism. If you tell a cannibal that he must not eat 

 human flesh, he will probably reply, " Why not?" — a question 

 to which I myself have never been able to find an answer, except 

 the rather unsatisfactory one, " Because you mustn't." You can, 

 however, get them to give up the practice without so much diffi- 

 culty as one might imagine. Savages are just as great snobs as we 

 are; and if you appeal to their snobbery yom can get them to do 

 a great deal. So. if you can get it into their heads that canni- 

 balism is not good form, and is rather looked down upon by the 

 " nicest " people of Papua, and that a cannibal can hardly be 

 received in 'the best villages, they will give it up quickly enough. 

 At least, that was our experience in the country of Namau, m the 

 Purari Delta; they gave up cannibalism and, so far as we could 

 see, substituted a pig for the human body. 



