Page:The disappearance of useful arts.djvu/16

 A second group of factors which may bring about the loss of useful arts are of a social nature. Many of the objects used in the every day life of Oceania are not made by any member of the community but their manufacture is confined to special groups of craftsmen. Thus, in Tonga and Tikopia canoes are only made by certain men called tufunga who are succeeded in this occupation by their sons. Though in Tikopia a man can become a tufunga through his own efforts, the obstacles in the way of his success are very great and the craftsmen thus form a body limited in number, definitely distinguished from the rest of the community. It is only necessary for such a limited body of men to disappear either as the result of disease or war or through some natural catastrophe, to account for the disappearance of an art. As we have seen, there is evidence that this dying out of skilled craftsmen has been the cause of the disappearance of the canoe in the Torres Islands, and Seligmann and Strong have recorded the dying out of skilled craftsmen as the cause of the disappearance of the art of making stone adzes in the Suloga district of Murua (Woodlark Island). The dying out of skilled craftsmen within a community is thus established as a cause of the loss of useful arts.

This factor, however, will only explain a localized loss here and there. It will explain the loss of the canoe on isolated groups of islands but it will not account for the absence of the bow and arrow or of pottery over large areas of Oceania. The skilled craftsmen would not be likely to die out simultaneously among all the peoples of an extensive area.

In certain parts of Oceania there are, however, conditions which make the extensive loss of useful arts more