Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/217

Rh born infant, and that this again becomes reincarnated into a human being, yet no consciousness of personal identity-is preserved through the process. That is, no one knows whose incarnation the infant is—who he was in his previous existence. There is no remembrance of past life in Tuma or on earth. Any questioning of the natives makes it obvious that the whole problem appears to them irrelevant and indeed uninteresting. The only recognized rule which guides these metamorphoses is that the continuity of clan and sub-clan is preserved throughout. There are no moral ideas of recompense or punishment embodied in their reincarnation theory, no customs or ceremonies associated with it or bearing witness to it.

The correlation of the mystical with the physiological aspects in pregnancy belief—of the origin of the child in Tuma and its journey to the Trobriands with the subsequent processes in the maternal body, the welling up of the blood from the abdomen to the head and down again from the head to the womb—provides a co-ordinated and self-contained, though not always consistent, theory of the origin of human life. It also gives a good theoretical foundation for matriliny; for the whole process of introducing new life into a community lies between the spirit world and the female organism. There is no room for any sort of physical paternity.

But there is another condition considered by the natives Rh