Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/36

24 to another social group. It would take too long to attempt to defend this position here. I believe it can be justified, even by evidence from our own society, and that the individual transference of the psycho-analytic school is only a specialised case of a concept of wide application. I must be content to point out here that in the case of Melanesia we are dealing with a people whose group or communal life is far more highly developed than our own, while individual relations bulk less largely in the social life. If the Melanesians show the process of transference at all, we might expect it to be predominantly of the social kind. And the simple nature of their society would only allow transference from group to group under such special circumstances as those attendant on external influence.

Before I leave the subject of transference it may be worth while to consider a little more closely the mechanisms by which we may suppose that the strangers would succeed in modifying customs, such as those connected with death, to which native conservatism might be expected to offer the utmost resistance. In the first place, the strangers would bring with them religious beliefs very different from those of the people among whom they settled. If the attitude of our own migrants to-day gives any guide to that of migrants in the past, the visitors would have shown a contempt for the religious beliefs and rites of the natives which must have seriously undermined any support given by religion to the indigenous ancestor-ideal or other influence of the group. Moreover, we can be confident that when one of the immigrants died his fellow migrants would deal with his body according to their own beliefs and rites, and the more imposing these rites, the more would they impress the native population. If we take the spread of European culture at the present time as a guide to the past, we find that one of the earliest effects of the spread of