Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/31

Rh chief dispenser of authority is not the father, but the mother's brother, the social position occupied by this relative corresponding very closely with that taken among ourselves by the father. Again, the social organisation with its many communistic features brings the child into intimate relations with a much larger number of senior persons than among ourselves. There is reason to believe that, in many parts of Melanesia at least, the place of the father is taken by the old men of the community in general. The old men occupy a commanding position of authority, and are so intimately related to the whole of the small community they dominate that they count as much as, if not more than, the father or the mother's brother as the wielders of authority and influence.

This wide relation of a child to its elders would almost certainly tend to enhance the potency of the childhood-ideal in the production of a conservative attitude, or at least of an attitude which would tend to lead men to act in the same way as their elders. The smallness of the community, and consequent influence of the general body of the old men upon each child, would tend to produce a uniformity of social behaviour far greater than could be expected in such a society as our own in which individual differences among fathers and differences in family life would assist the occurrence or acceptance of innovation. The fact that the father-ideal of our own society is replaced in savage society by the ideal imposed by the elders of the community will help to explain the fact, to which I have already referred, that the force of custom is far stronger among peoples of rude culture than it is among ourselves.

Among many peoples, of whom the Melanesian is a striking example, the influence of the old men is greatly strengthened by the nature of the religious cult, a cult of ancestors. The ghosts of the father and grandfather are beings as real to the Melanesian as were their human representatives when alive. The ghosts of these relatives