592 



act, and the violation of the taboo was believed to entail the 

 complaint of abnormally enlarged testicles. During the feast 

 he sang a special song, and he had also the right to wear white 

 cockatoo feathers at the dances — a privilege which was highly 

 valued, and which is now, in these degenerate days, impu- 

 dently assumed by many a miles gloriosus, who has not even 

 seen a man speared properly in all his life. 



CHAPTER IV. 



ECONOMICS. 

 1. Land and Gardens. 



Land Tenure. — There are two forms of land tenure in the 

 Mailu district. The Mailu islanders (Toulon Island) possess 

 only a very limited area for agricultural purposes, and they 

 have accordingly a modified form of land tenure. Their 

 gardening and their agrarian laws are of less interest to them 

 than to those of the mainland Magi, and, having exceptionally 

 good opportunities and capacity for fishing, they are also much 

 less dependent on the produce of their soil. On the mainland, 

 on the other hand, the question of land tenure is more 

 important, not only because the natives there are nearly 

 entirely dependent upon the produce of the soil, but because 

 they have to deal with the normal conditions of the 

 agricultural Papuan — abundance of land at the disposal of a 

 fairly small community. 



One has to use the legal conceptions of "ownership" with 

 extreme caution when dealing with native conditions. Owner- 

 ship in land means with us the exclusive enjoyment of all the 

 real economic rights and all the privileges and pleasures one 

 can derive from a certain portion of land, subject to a very 

 limited state of control, such as forest and game protection, 

 mining rights, etc. This form of ownership does not, of 

 course, exist in New Guinea, and it is not exact either to use 

 the term loosely or to try to find the nearest approach to the 

 European state of things in the native conditions. The only 

 correct course is to investigate all the rights enjoyed exclu- 

 sively by an individual, or by a social group, with regard to a 

 particular portion of land. As a matter of fact, in most 

 tribes those rights are not all concentrated in one and the 

 same "legal person" (social body or individual man). Some 

 of them are vested in social groups (village community, clan), 

 others are apportioned to individuals. 



This is the reason why the problem of native land tenure, 

 so extremely interesting from the sociological point of view, 

 and so important for the administration of the country, has 



