Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/160

Rh as we know, will stand in the inner ring facing the latter. The yam-house has a ceremonial compartment, contained between the beams of a square well, and into this the annual contribution of the wife's family is regularly stowed at harvest. At the same time the master of the new household is himself delivering a large quantity of yams to his own sister or female relatives. He keeps for himself only the inferior tubers, stowed under the thatch in the top compartment and in the inferior yam-houses, sokwaypa. He also produces his own seed yams and all other vegetables: peas, pumpkins, taro and viya.

Thus everyone keeps back a fraction of his garden-yield for himself. The rest goes to his female relatives and their husbands. When a boy is young, his duty is to provide for his nearest female relative, his mother. Later on, he has to maintain his sister when she marries; or perhaps a maternal aunt, or a maternal aunt's daughter, if these have no nearer male kinsmen to provide for them. There are several types of garden, each of a different nature and with a different name. There are the early gardens, kaymugwa, planted with mixed crops, which begin to yield new food after the last year's harvest has been exhausted. This keeps the household going until the new, main harvest has begun. And there is the taro garden, tapopu. Both of these every family makes for its own use. Then there is the main garden, kaymata, the yield of which is chiefly devoted to the supply of the female relatives. All that the man produces for his own use is called by the generic term taytumwala; what he Rh