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some thick patch of bush near the village, where a certain 

 portion is always reserved for the women and another for 

 the men. In Mailu those places are so sheltered by rocks 

 and bushes that they are invisible either from the village or 

 from any of the main approaches to it. Similar arrange- 

 ments were said to exist in all villages. At night, when 

 anybody would be too frightened to venture any distance 

 from the houses, the sea is chosen. 



Village Community as Social Unit. — As said at the begin- 

 ning of this chapter, the village community is a most 

 important social unit in the tribal life of the Mailu. As a 

 matter of fact, the village community is a body of people 

 living perpetually, and normally, in very close contact, to the 

 exclusion of all others — at least under ordinary conditions, 

 feasts, trading visits, etc., being the exceptions. They see 

 each other constantly, they co-operate in many ways, they 

 are all on permanently friendly, and fairly intimate, terms, 

 though the bonds between clansmen and kinsmen and those 

 of personal friendship were very prominent within the 

 village, and were by no means verged in the broader and 

 looser ties of village solidarity. 



Strangers are not often to be seen in the villages, even 

 at present, and in olden days they must have been quite 

 exceptional. 



The difference between such a closely-linked village com- 

 munity, bound by permanent local proximity and by constant 

 contact, and a community, even such as that of the Southern 

 Massim who live in scattered hamlets, is undoubtedly very 

 prominent, and although I had but a short time in which 

 to study the Southern Massim, the effect of this difference was 

 apparent. 



Thus the village community is the local unit of the 

 Mailu. It is also the real jjolitical unit. Both in aggressive 

 and defensive warfare fellow-villagers would, of course, always 

 fight on the same side, and in raids the whole male popu- 

 lation would very likely take part as a single unit, though 

 the war canoes were separately allotted to the various clans 

 and subclans (see below next section, also chap, iii., sec. 6). 

 Again, in the economic sense, the village community was the 

 joint owner of land as far as certain rights were concerned ; 

 it was also the joint owner of fishing rights, and, though 

 the hunting rights were subdivided among the clans, it was 

 the village, as a whole, that possessed the final economic 

 benefit of those rights, as far as actual consumption of the 

 goods is concerned (comp. chap, iv., sees. 1, 2, and 3). In 

 the legal arrangements and institutions the village very often 



