§ 6. Social Ranks, Taboo

Socially the Marquesans were divided into chiefs or nobles and commoners; but the chiefs seem to have possessed very little authority, and to have received few outward marks of deference and respect. A monarchical government in any proper sense of the word was unknown.[57] The power of the chiefs, such as it was, rested mainly on their superior wealth, particularly on their landed property; for the larger their estates, the greater the number of the tenants whose services they could command. Hence the government has been called aristocratic and compared to the feudal system.[58] In a fruitful season the chiefs had a right to a fourth part of the produce, and in other seasons a share according to circumstances. Their dignity was hereditary.[59] There was no general government of the archipelago as a whole. Each island was quite independent of all the rest; and in every island there were several independent tribes, which were generally at war with each other.[60]

A powerful instrument in the hands of the nobles was the taboo or tapu, which, though it seems to have been originally a religious institution,[61] was turned to political and economic account by the chiefs and priests acting in conjunction. One of our best authorities on the Marquesans describes the institution as a tool of despotism for the gratification of the passions and caprices of such as could wield it.[62] But this is a somewhat one-sided and imperfect view to take of its scope. There is no doubt, as other good authorities on the Marquesans have pointed out, that in the absence of a strong government which could maintain order and protect life and property, the taboo to a great extent served the purposes which in more civilised society are fulfilled by laws.[63] The taboo was a sacred interdiction, a breach of which was believed of itself to entail disastrous consequences on the transgressor. The interdiction might be either public or private. To give examples of public interdictions, when the quantity of breadfruit, on which the people depended for their subsistence, was from any cause seriously diminished in a district, the chief had the right to impose a taboo on bread-fruit trees for twenty months, during which no one might gather the fruit. This close time allowed the trees to recover their strength and fertility. Similarly, if fish were scarce, the chief might pronounce a taboo on the neighbouring bay, or a part of it, in order to allow the fish to multiply undisturbed and replenish the sea in the neighbourhood of human habitations. Again, in the prospect of a great festival, a chief might lay an interdict on pigs for two or three years in advance, in order that, when the time came, there might be plenty of pork for the multitude at the banquet. Similarly, when the paper-mulberry, from which the Marquesans made their bark-cloth, threatened to give out, the chief might lay the trees under an interdict for five years, at the end of which the crop was sure to be magnificent.[64] In these and similar cases the taboo was of public utility by ensuring a proper supply of the necessaries of life. However, its imposition was not always guided by rational considerations, and hence it sometimes failed of its purpose. For example, so long as the bread-fruit was unripe, almost all kinds of fish were taboo and therefore might not be eaten, and this interdiction, instead of alleviating, tended naturally to aggravate the scarcity of food. The reason for the taboo was a curious superstition that if any one were to eat fish while the bread-fruit was unripe, the fruit would fall from the trees.[65]

But the taboo also served a useful purpose by ensuring respect for private property, which is a fundamental condition of social prosperity. "The priests only," we are told, "can impose a general taboo, but every individual has a right to pronounce one upon his own property: this is done by declaring, if his wish be to preserve a breadfruit, or a cocoa tree, a house or a plantation, from robbery and destruction, that the spirit of his father or of some king, or indeed of any other person, reposes in this tree, or house, which then bears the name of the person, and nobody ventures to attack it. If any one is so irreligious as to break through a taboo, and should be convicted of it, he is called kikino; and the kikinos are always the first to be devoured by the enemy, at least they believe it to be so, nor is it impossible that the priests should so arrange matters as that this really happens."[66] Again, if a man's pig had been stolen, and he suspected who had done the deed, he would lay a taboo on the swine or other property of the thief by giving his own name, or the name of somebody else, to the animals or the trees or whatever it might be. After that, in the opinion of the people, the property so named was bewitched or haunted by the spirit of the person, whether alive or dead, whose name it bore; and this belief sometimes sufficed to compel the thief to abandon his possessions and to settle elsewhere.[67] A wreath of leaves or a strip of white cloth attached to a house, a canoe, a fruit-tree, or other piece of property, was the symbol of taboo, and in ordinary circumstances was enough to protect it.[68]

But the taboo was an instrument which could be used capriciously to thwart, as well as to further, the course of justice. Thus we read how, under the French government of the islands, a wife set out for the police-office to complain of the ill-treatment to which she had been subjected by her husband. But scarcely had she put her foot outside the door, when her husband, aware of her intention and determined to frustrate it, called out after her, "The road from here to the police-office is your father." On hearing that, the woman at once stopped short, for under no circumstances would she dare to trample on the author of her being. On the contrary, she immediately roasted two little pigs and carried them to the tomb of her father as an offering to appease his ghost, which might reasonably be supposed to fret at the mere thought of being trodden under foot by his own daughter.[69] This instructive example shows how closely the taboo was associated with the fear and worship of the dead; by bestowing the name of a dead person on a thing you rendered the thing inviolate, since thereby you placed it under the immediate protection of the ghost.

Among the multitude of taboos which were religiously observed by the Marquesans it is perhaps possible to detect a trace of totemism. Thus the sting ray fish was taboo to the tribe of Houmis. Not only would they not eat the fish, but they fled in horror if it were even shown to them. Their horror was explained by a tradition that once on a time a great chief of the tribe had been out fishing with his people, when a gigantic sting ray upset their canoes and gobbled them all up.[70] This aversion to eating and even looking at a certain species of animal, together with a traditionary explanation based on an incident in the past history of the tribe, is very characteristic of totemism.