OBTAINING INFORMATION 105 



produced them. We could not find out where their 

 stone axes came from, nor how old they were, nor who 

 made them ; and a hundred other questions, which 

 we should have liked to put, remained unanswered. 



These limitations of our knowledge of the language 

 were particularly annoying when we tried to find out 

 the simplest ties of relationship. It may be thought 

 very unintelligent of us that we never learnt the word 

 for father, in spite of many attempts to do so. If 

 you pointed to a child and asked a man, knowing him 

 to be the father, what the child was, he would slap 

 himself on the chest and answer, " Dorota kamare" (my 

 penis) ; then if you pointed to himself he would tell 

 you his own name, but never any word that could 

 possibly be construed as father. If you tried the same 

 thing with the mother she would point to the child and 

 say, "Dorota auwe" (my breast). The child on being 

 questioned pointed to the father and always said his 

 name, the mother it would call Aina (woman), but 

 perhaps this word also means mother. 



There were two men at Parimau so much alike as 

 to be unmistakably brothers ; we learnt their names 

 and that they were Inakwa kamare (one penis), but 

 we never found out the name of their relationship. 



Seeing that some of the people have a very good 

 idea of drawing on the ground a map of the country, 

 I tried one day a graphic method of obtaining the 

 relationships of a man whose name and whose wife's 

 name and son's name I knew. I put sticks on the 

 ground to represent him and his wife and son, and then 

 in a tentative sort of way put in a stick to represent his 



