Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/169

Rh heavily for all these things. He has to give great feasts and finance all enterprises by feeding the participants and rewarding the chief actors. Power in the Trobriands is essentially plutocratic. And a no less remarkable and unexpected feature of this system of government is that, although the chief needs a large revenue, there is nothing of the sort directly attached to his office: no substantial tributes are paid him by the inhabitants as from subject to chief. The small annual offerings or tribute in special dainties — the first fish caught, vegetable primitiæ, special nuts and fruits — are by no means a source of revenue; in fact the chief has to repay them at full value. For his real income he has to rely entirely on his annual marriage contribution. This, however, in his case, is very large, for he has many wives, and each of them is far more richly dowered than if she had married a commoner.

A statement of the specific conditions will make matters clearer. Each chief has a tributary district comprising several villages — a few dozen in the case of Kiriwina; a dozen or so in Luba or Tilataula; one or two in the cases of some minor chiefs — and this district is tributary through marriage. Each subject community renders a considerable contribution to the chief, but only and exclusively in the form of a dowry, paid annually in yams. Each village — and in the case of a compound village each constituent part of it — is "owned" by a sub-clan (see ch. i, sec. 2) and ruled by the headman of that sub-clan. From every one of these sub-clans the chief takes a wife and she is, as it were, perpetual, since on her death another wife, her substitute (kaymapula), is immediately wed to Rh