Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/187

Rh, are handled, are given to one party and then to another, until at last they come to a final rest. And what makes the whole performance most disconcerting is the absence of the real protagonist — Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. For the spirit of the dead man knows nothing about all that happens to his body and bones, and cares less, since he is already leading a happy existence in Tuma, the netherworld, having breathed of the magic of oblivion and formed new ties (see ch. xii, sec. 5). The ritual performances at his twice-opened grave and over his buried remains, and all that is done with his relics, are merely a social game, where the various groupings into which the community has re-crystallized at his death play against each other. This, I must add with great emphasis, represents the actual contemporary view of the natives, and contains no hypothetical reference to the origins or past history of this institution. Whether the dead man always had his spiritual back turned on the Trobriand mortuary ritual, or whether his spirit has gradually evaporated from it — it is not for the field-worker to decide. In this context we shall have to confine ourselves to the study of mortuary practices in their barest outline only. A complete account of them would easily fill a volume of the present size. We shall, therefore, select such features as throw light on the ties of marriage, and on the ideas of kinship and relationship; and even this will have to be done in a somewhat schematic and simplified form. Rh