H.— ANTHROPOLOGY i8i 



bell takes an ornamented form such as the hornbill's head,^^^ and in any 

 case this ' dumb-bell ' is not unlike a paddle in which the blade has 

 degenerated to proportions similar to those of the handle. 



F. E. Williams, writing ^^^ of the Pairama ceremony in the Purari 

 Delta in Papua, tells us that ' when a successful hum returned at evening 

 the corpse of the victim was borne from the canoe to the ravi amid great 

 enthusiasm. The men uttered that prolonged shout or roar which has 

 a singularly exciting effect upon the listener, and rattle their paddles 

 upon the sides of the canoes with the rhythm called raruki raruki. . . On 

 the following day the . . . hunter who first brings down the victim . . . 

 is paraded in triumph through the village standing astride the canoe 

 and balancing himself with a spear.' It was formerly the custom of 

 Meithei to signal across the Logtak Lake in the Manipur State in Assam 

 by beating with their poles or paddles on the sides of their dug-outs 

 as the Nagas do on a canoe gong, and I am further told by Mr. William 

 Shaw, who served many years in the Manipur State, that some Kabui 

 villages which have no canoe gongs still have the tradition of having 

 used them once, while in Kabui Khulen village a sort of boat, with a 

 high prow, is dragged in every year at the Harvest Festival ' for all who 

 have died in the past year.' The best dressed of the young men rides 

 on the boat, while there is a tug-of-war between the two clans of the 

 village, one pulling at each end of the boat by ropes attached to pierced 

 lugs left on when fashioning this dug-out, which is known as the thing- 

 khutong — the plank to which a dead body is ordinarily fastened for burial 

 in that village being called thingkhu. It must, I think, represent a boat 

 or a boat-shaped coffin and be associated again with the fertility of the 

 crops, so largely bound up both with the spirits of the ancestral dead, 

 and of dead enemies, while the riding of the boat by the young warrior 

 is reminiscent of the Pairama ceremony described by F. E. Williams. 



Boat-shaped coffins are found occasionally in several of the Naga 

 tribes, particularly in the Konyak country, where in one village at any 

 rate they are associated with a tabooed chief, and it is worth noticing 

 that a stone is put up by the Fijian ' spirit house ' for each corpse brought 

 in,22'* precisely as the Konyak Nagas put up an erect stone outside the 

 men's house for each head ; and it is also remarkable that in one case, 

 at any rate, there seems to have been a close association between the 

 Fijian war canoe and the gong known as lali, since the chief Rokona 

 named his war canoe Vatutulali, after his large gong.^^^ 



The Samoans have a similar gong known as lofigo, the sound of which 

 — according to Brown — will carry for 20 miles under favourable conditions. 

 Brown also mentions that the Samoans struck the sides of their canoes 

 with the handles of their paddles to mark time.^-® 



One more parallel is worth indicating in connection with this subject. 



"2 Vide illustration. Mills, II, 77. 



**' J.R.A.I., 53, 385, 386. He also describes with reference to the same 

 ceremony the rhythmical pounding with bamboos of an old broken canoe laid 

 along the ravi floor. 



"* Seemann, 178 ; Hutton, X, 41. -s Seemann, 197. 



226 Melanesians and Polynesians, 350. 



