Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/167

Rh more than this: if we examine the roundabout methods of native economy more closely, we see that they provide a powerful incentive to industrial efficiency. If he worked just to satisfy his own immediate wants, and had only the spur of directly economic considerations, the native, who has no means of capitalizing his surplus, would have no incentive to produce it. The deep-rooted motives of ambition, honour, and moral duty have raised him to a relatively high level of efficiency and organization which, at seasons of drought and scarcity, allows him to produce just enough to tide over the calamity.

In this extraneous economic endowment of households, we see again the dual workings of father-right and matriliny. The husband is only partially the head of the household; he is also only partially its provider. His wife's brother, who according to tribal law remains the guardian of the wife and her children, has heavy economic duties towards the household. Thus there is an economic counterpart to the wife's brother's interference with household affairs. Or in other words, the husband, through his marriage, acquires an economic lien on his male relatives-in-law, while they, in exchange for their services, retain a legal authority over the wife and her children. This, of course, is a formulation in abstract terms of the state of affairs as the sociologist sees it, and contains no hypothesis as to the relative priority in time or importance of father-right and mother-right. Nor does it represent the point of view of the natives, who would be incapable of producing such an abstract formula. Rh