174 president's address — section f. 



awai"e, although a man may be anxious to win the glory and the 

 ornaments of the homicide, still he will only (except in a personal 

 quarrel) kill outside his village, and usually his object is to pay 

 back for one of his own tribe. 



But the Koiari will kill any one and anywhere ; they do not 

 kill SO' readily now, because they are invariably caught and hanged 

 or sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, but, still, murders 

 are not rare among them even now. It is generally assumed that 

 the idea which is at the root of the Heera (as in our own system 

 of decoratioais) either personal prowess or service to the tribe ; 

 but I have known the Heeira to be bestowed upon a little boy who 

 had killed his baby sister (appeasing the anger of their mother by 

 the gift of a pig), and upon a child who had done nothing more 

 than 2>lace two fingers upon another child who was dying. The 

 child was dying a natural death — he had a snake inside him, I 

 was told, which means that he was ill — and there was no sugges- 

 tion that the other child had anything to do with it. It is possible 

 that prowess or service was the original idea of the Heera, but 

 that the system has degenerated, so that the original meaning has 

 been obscured ; but it is also Dossible that th© original idea may 

 have been something quite different, and may have extended to 

 any close connexion with death, irrespective of the cause of death, 

 and irrespective of whether the dead man was a friend or an 

 enemy. In any case, I cannot help thinking that there is some- 

 thing behind it all which we do not understand, and which patient 

 and skilled research might enable us to discover. 



Importance of Discovering the Origin of A pparentit/ Meaningless 



Customs. 



It has been said that the study of anthropology induces a belief 

 that there was a time when the whole of mankind was mad, and 

 certainly many of the native customs which one finds in Papua 

 are hard to reconcile with any degree of sanity. Yet the people 

 who practise these customs are, in fact, quite sane. They go about 

 their business in the ordinary way, they make their gardens, build 

 their houses, and look after their children, just like any one else; 

 and the point which I think we ought to realize more clearly than 

 we generally do is that it is our duty to find out, so far as we can, 

 the motive of these' mad customs, for, unless we do, we can never 

 understand the inner life of the people who practise them, and 

 our progress in raising these p'eople to a higher and more whole- 

 some ideal will be all the slower. The customs may die out in 

 time, as many native customs do, but the mode of thought, or 

 mentality, or whatever you like to call it, of which the custom was 

 a symptom, may remain, and we can hardly take effective steps to 

 modify that mode of thought unless we know what it really is. 



