Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/56

 THE FATHER'S SISTER IN OCEANIA.

BY W. H. R. RIVERS, ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

(Read at Meeting, November 17th, 1909.)

a visit last year to Polynesia and Melanesia I found in three different places a very close relationship between a person and his or her father's sister, very few special duties and privileges connected with this relative having hitherto been recorded. The first place where I found the close relationship to exist was Tonga, and the fact surprised me greatly by its contrast to what I had found in other parts of Polynesia, where duties connected with kinship are neither numerous nor important. My surprise was, however, still greater when I found very similar customs in the New Hebrides and the Banks' Islands, among communities with matrilineal descent where one hardly expected to find the most intimate relationship between persons who, though of common blood, have by previous writers been regarded as not even kin to one another.

In Tonga a man honours his father's sister more than any other relative, more even than his father or his father's elder brother. In the old time it was believed that, if he offended her, disobeyed her, or committed any mistake in the regulation of his conduct towards her, he would die. The father's sister or mehikitanga usually arranged the