Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/343

 Rh couple do not regularly complete the marriage ceremony, and omit that important part the payment of the price, they are not allowed to eat or drink in the house of the girl's parents till the price is paid to the last farthing. Here, at least, there is no natural repulsion between those who have been brought up in close intercourse. Marriage is the fact which for ever after keeps them apart.

All their gennas or communal rites are accompanied by special food tabus, followed by communal feasts at which men and women eat and cook apart. The little society is thus temporarily resolved into its primal elements, which are reaggregated at the end of the ceremony, when their normal commensality is resumed. Nervous exaltation is conspicuous on these occasions. I have often wondered whether savages such as these are more sensitive than civilised men to nervous crises and physical changes. They brood on them, and by anticipation enhance their intensity. They augment their sensibility by sudden alternations of fasting and feasting. These festivals (gennas, as, after Davis, they are specially termed in Assam), are characterised by temporary food tabus, by temporary disturbances of the normal social relations, commensal and conjugal. They are the means by which all events possessing social importance are celebrated. I shall have to recur presently to this aspect of their life, but now seek to draw your attention to the permanent food tabus which mark the lines of social structure. In emphasis of the sexual solidarity of these communities, we find that, among the Tangkhul Nāgas, women and girls are not allowed to eat dog. In other villages pork is forbidden to them and allowed to the men. As a general rule, the food regulations are relaxed for young children and for the aged. Unmarried but marriageable girls are not