In the last two chapters, I outlined a theory of the rational conduct of thinking. In this theory, rationality is defined in terms of the setting of certain parameters. It is not defined as intelligence is usually defined, namely in terms of effectiveness or success. The factors that make thinking effective or ineffective in a given case include many abilities, knowledge, and luck, as well as rationality in the conduct of thinking. These other factors have so far been treated as extraneous to the theory, as factors that need to be taken into account in setting parameters, but not as determinants of rationality itself. (For example, the expectation of the value of further thinking reasonably depends on one's ability.) In the present chapter, I address the role of these factors in determining the success of thinking. I shall assume here that parameters are set optimally, so that rationality is not a factor. This chapter thus fleshes out some of the claims of chapter 1 concerning the relation between intelligence and narrow intelligence.

Limits on cognitive processes

I begin with what I take to be a textbook analysis of the major limits on cognitive processes. The major limits I consider are speed, selective attention, limited capacity, primary memory, and secondary memory. I try to show how each of these limits could affect thinking itself. I also discuss the problems involved in empirical study of these limits.

Bush Mekeo views of human sexuality and reproduction are closely tied to conceptualizations of the spatiotemporal order and the indigenous theories concerning food, blood synthesis, excretion, health, and illness. Conception, for example, involves transfers in and out of bodies and transformations between sweet and unsweet as well as the distinction between clean and dirty. Also, babies are conceived in the abdomens of their mothers. However, the processes of sexuality and reproduction as the Bush Mekeo know them seem initially to contradict the relations between the categories I have revealed in the contexts previously described. Oral ingestion of any hot bloody dirt is said to lead to illness and even death. Semen is one such poison and will produce the same undesired result if it is eaten. Yet, semen ingested by a woman in sexual intercourse may well have the exact opposite effect; that is, it can result in the conceiving of a child or new life, rather than illness or death. This is one further way dirt, at least in the form of male semen, may paradoxically sustain the life of a body, much as may food, even though the two are categorically opposed in the context of eating. Furthermore, the native understanding of menstruation is implicated in this particular contradiction. According to villager claims, women will not menstruate spontaneously but only as a result of sexual intercourse.

This chapter attempts to clarify these issues and resolve the apparent contradictions among them by articulating the explicit ideological tenets of the indigenous theory of human procreation.

Version Ai

One day, all the men of the village went to the bush to hunt pig, cassowary, and wallaby with their nets and spears. In the evening, they came back to the village. The women cooked the meat and took it to the clubhouse where the men were gathered. The men ate all the meat, not giving any to the women to eat. When the men ate the meat, they called their sons to eat. All their wives and daughters ate nothing. The daughters went to stay with their mothers. Inside their houses, mothers and daughters waited for their husbands and fathers to call them, but they never did.

The next day, the men went hunting again, doing it the same way, and again they ate all the meat with their sons, sharing none with their wives and daughters. Day after day they did it in the same way.

Then one day, when all the men were away in the bush hunting, the women who remained in the village held a meeting. The husbands of the married women were not kind to their wives, and the women tried to do something. That day, one small boy had remained at home in the village. The women told him to climb a coconut tree and bring down some flock or netting in order for them to make wings (panina). When all the women finished making their wings, one of them tried to fly up to the coconut tree, and she sat up there. All the women looked up and said it was not good; she should use her feet to hang upside down.

The discursive examination of the indigenous theory of human sexuality and conception contained in the previous chapter revealed a number of significant distinctions between men and women that are relevant to the systematic conceptualization of gender differences and roles in Bush Mekeo culture. In other words, the relative contributions men and women are considered to make to reproduction correspond with certain other activities and transformative capacities that are likewise differentiated according to gender. The purpose of this chapter will be to describe more fully this indigenous division of labor in terms of the categorical oppositions and analogies that characterize male and female adulthood. My argument proceeds as follows. First, I outline the cyclic ritual alternation of adult females between procreative and contraceptive states according to the opening and closing, respectively, of their bodies. I then describe how adult males, like females, alternate between procreatively opening and contraceptively closing their bodies, except that the female pattern reverses the male pattern in certain critical respects. Next, I show that the bisection of the male/female duality is homologous with the distinctions previously elicited from other contexts of the indigenous culture: village versus bush, body-inside versus body-outside, hot versus cold, sweet versus unsweet, and so on. Finally, I demonstrate that the oscillations of men and women between ritual conditions in village life are given further meaningful expression by the counterposition of two myths taken from the Bush Mekeo corpus.

Based upon his reading of Seligmann's Mekeo ethnography, Lévi-Strauss observes:

Although there are differences between Bush and Central Mekeo social organization chiefly as a consequence of differences in scale, the “plan” in each case is, I think, virtually the same. The avowed purpose of this chapter is to elucidate as explicitly and simply as possible this subtle and complex symmetry that structures Bush Mekeo social relationships. To achieve this end, I relate the various categories of Bush Mekeo social classification to one another and to other contexts of the culture (Leach 1976; Schneider 1972, 1980; cf. Lounsbury 1965). I begin by describing and interrelating the set of kin categories in the indigenous language, the various idealized levels of unilineal clan fragmentation and residence, and the formalized interclan affinal relationships. Then I trace the logical interplay between these conceived cultural formations and the rules of marriage and marriage compensation. In anthropological jargon, the idealized system I describe is one that prohibits marriage between all first cousins while permitting (if not prescribing) marriage in alternate generations between children of first bilateral cross-cousins who belong to different patrimoieties (i.e., between classificatory second cross-cousins). In view of comparison, this formulation of the basic Bush Mekeo system in its overall structural properties resembles the classic “Aranda”-type systems of Australia except that it lacks named sections or subsections but possesses as alternatives both “Hawaiian”- and “Dravidian”-type kinterm classifications.

The ordinary and extraordinary spheres in Bush Mekeo culture are predicated upon the bisection of the inside bush and the outside village. However, every spatial transfer in either of these spheres involves the bisection of yet another inside/outside duality – the human “body” (kuma). As the world is composed of village and bush, there is an outside to the body and an inside. I suggested twice earlier that the outside and the inside of the body have inverted and everted parts – abdomen and excrement, respectively – that are homologous with the village abdomen and the adjacent bush. Thus, everything transported between village and bush either remains outside the body, goes into the body and stays there, passes to the abdomen, or comes out of the body. Moreover, bodily tissues set apart in holes of the village and bush are extracted from holes of the body. The overall purpose of the present chapter, then, is to delineate the various aspects of this homology between conceptions about space and the body in both the ordinary and extraordinary spheres of Bush Mekeo culture.

My handling of indigenous conceptualizations of bodily processes will be considerably more complex than was the case with village/bush relations. This is unavoidable because every object transfer relating to spatial distinctions also involves a corresponding transformation or change of state, and these transformations cannot be described independent of how they relate to the inside and outside of the body. Also, the body, or rather distinctive aspects of the body, is variously conceived as either the agents of transformation, the objects of transformation, or, in some cases, both.

Work skills

1. garden clearing, burning, planting, weeding, harvesting

2. carrying

3. chopping firewood

4. construction of houses, platforms, clubhouses

5. canoe manufacture

6. fencing

7. grass cutting

8. rubbish removal

9. digging

10. butchering

11. wood carving

12. boiling food

13. bark pounding

14. tool manufacture (axes, adzes, knives, weapons, drills, pounders, etc.)

15. valuable manufacture (shell armbands, feather ornaments, strings of dogs' teeth, strings of cowrie shells, etc.)

16. fire making

Nonwork skills

1. hunting with dogs, spear, shotgun, bow and arrow, nets

2. fishing with spear, bow and arrow, hook and line, nets

3. ritual for hunting, fishing, gardening, curing, peace sorcery, war sorcery, courting, mefu, pig husbandry

4. drum making

5. dancing

6. drumming

7. singing

8. roasting food

9. chewing areca and betel

10. childbirth

11. marriage-compensation exchange

12. mortuary-feast exchange

Bush Mekeo villagers comprehend their own location in the world and in the universe very differently from the way we Westerners might view either ourselves or them. Indeed, the Bush Mekeo see themselves and their world in quite distinct terms. It will be most useful, then, to begin the description of Bush Mekeo culture and society by examining their notions about the ordering of space and time and their own place in it (Durkheim and Mauss 1963; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fortes 1970). I shall introduce a number of indigenous ideas that nonetheless approximate certain familiar paired concepts fundamental to anthropological thought. “Village” and “bush,” for example, roughly parallel Levi-Strauss's opposition of culture with nature (1966b, 1969a, 1969b). Similarly, what I shall distinguish as “ordinary” and “extraordinary” corresponds in many respects to the Durkheimian separation of the sacred from the profane. I hope to show that human social life as the Bush Mekeo view it is predicated upon the transferral of certain objects between the village and the bush that surrounds it, and that there are two separate spheres of these transferences: the ordinary and the extraordinary. These two spheres are distinguished according to divergent temporal frames as well as by particular subdivisions of space that cross-cut the village/bush axis. At the end of the chapter, I shall argue that space and time for the Bush Mekeo represented as ordinary and extraordinary spheres of village/bush object transfer are fundamentally structured according to the bisection of dual oppositions. This initial conclusion will set the stage for my handling of other related contexts of indigenous cultural and social interrelationships, for in subsequent chapters I shall deduce structures of homologous form.

The foregoing chapters have been devoted to interpreting diverse contexts of Bush Mekeo social life and to building in the process a model of the total culture. With the ethnographic treatment of the indigenous conceptualizations of death and mortuary feasting, that goal is now rendered virtually complete. The structure that characterizes Bush Mekeo culture overall, as I have shown, is consistently quadripartite in form. However, the implications for comparison and culture theory that arise from this derivation have yet to be considered. It is to these complementary issues that this and the concluding chapter are respectively addressed.

For the present purpose of comparison, I have chosen the cultures of Tikopia and the Trobriand Islands. These two unquestionably represent the most extensively documented and well-known ethnographic cases in the Oceanic sphere, if not in the entire anthropological record. Firth and Malinowski, the original ethnographers, are both regarded even today as among the most meticulous observers and recorders to have ever lived. Their classic functionalist descriptions have been supplemented by more modern and diverse interpretations, some but not all of them sympathetic with a general structuralist perspective like my own. And particularly in the case of the Trobriands, the original ethnographic corpus has been substantially augmented and clarified with more recent firsthand fieldwork. For these several reasons, then, Tikopia and the Trobriands each represents a preeminent challenge for structuralist interpretation along the lines of my analysis of Bush Mekeo culture.

It has taken me this long in my interpreting of Bush Mekeo death and mourning ritual to address the significance of the roles played by peace chiefs specifically at death feasts and by Akaisa Men generally in the total culture. Also, I have not as yet closely examined the definitive element of the complete death-feast pange prestation – the ikufuka meat. This chapter will be devoted to analyzing these issues, for, as I will presently show, they are not only intimately connected with one another, but they relate directly to the culture hero Akaisa and thus involve the most central mythical symbols of all Bush Mekeo culture. Furthermore, the characteristic structure of bisected dualities will become evident in this context as in the others I have discussed.

It will be remembered that ikufuka consists of the intact carcass of a dog and iungefanga (a strip of backskin and pieces of liver, stomach, and small intestine from a village pig). At final mortuary feasts, owning peace chiefs give ikufuka to each of the kofuapie peace chiefs (including their friends) and peace sorcerers of the tribe. Because senior and junior peace chiefs of the same clan ideally make their feasts together, the senior peace chief gives ikufuka meat to senior kofuapie peace chiefs and peace sorcerers, and the junior peace chief to junior kofuapie peace chiefs and peace sorcerers. Kofuapie peace chiefs of the same status level, whether they are friend or nonfriend, should return identical quantities of ikufuka meat when they make their own feasts. Ikufuka is thus precisely reciprocal between kofuapie peace chiefs and, through them, their peace sorcerers.

Not without humor, Bush Mekeo villagers will occasionally retell the story of how their ancestors first came to be known as the “Bush” Mekeo. Whenever a government patrol entered the area during the early years of contact, they say, their ancestors hid in the bush until the strangers had left. Once, upon entering a deserted village, a patrol officer remarked, “Oh, so these must be the ‘Bush’ Mekeo, because they are always hiding in the bush.” Figuratively speaking, the Bush Mekeo have remained “in hiding” ever since. In his classic study, The Melanesians of British New Guinea, Seligmann does refer to “a small but uncertain number of villages on the middle reaches of the Biaru River [which] must be considered to constitute an ethnographical annexe to Mekeo” (1910:311); but now, even after nearly a century of contact with Europeans, the Bush Mekeo are still essentially unknown to the outside world. Although there have been numerous in-depth studies of their closest neighbors, virtually nothing substantively new concerning the Bush Mekeo themselves or their culture has appeared. This book is partially intended to help fill this lacuna and bring the Bush Mekeo, as they would say, “out of hiding.”

This book, however, also attempts something rather more theoretical and, for that reason, potentially fruitful in other ways. In the course of struggling to interpret Bush Mekeo tradition in my own thought as a “total social phenomenon,” a structure of an unanticipated form gradually took shape. It became clear that the meanings of many (if not most) of the cultures diverse contexts are ordered by and through it. That structure, as it turns out, is generally fourfold or quadripartite.

This account of a Papuan culture is avowedly structuralist. In this view, ethnographic description and explanation essentially consist of translating the meanings of indigenous culture categories into our own language, and constructing in the process a model of the total culture (Schneider 1972, 1980). For non-Western cultures like the Bush Mekeo, meanings cannot be assigned or adduced either a priori or ad hoc from Western concepts. Rather, meaning, as argued by Saussure in terms of linguistic value (1959), is neither random nor piecemeal, but systematic and logical. It resides in the interrelations among indigenous categories, in their relations of difference and similarity, in the underlying structure of ideas. Moreover, the meanings of particular cultural elements are inseparable from the wider synchronic “whole” or “totality.”

The notions of meaning, indigenous category, structure, and cultural whole are thus central to my treatment of Bush Mekeo traditions.

In the current “post-structuralist” era (Kurtzweil 1980; see also Friedman 1974) there has been a tendency for these conceptions to be superseded by reemphases upon social action, history, and diachrony. Undoubtedly, the revival of Marxian approaches (e.g., among others, Friedman 1974; Worseley 1968; Harris 1968; Sahlins 1972; Bourdieu 1977; Godelier 1977) is largely responsible. Although certain elements of this development are necessary and welcome, others are premature if not regrettable – premature in that some of the most valuable and useful insights deriving from the structuralist perspective have been passed over without yet receiving adequate opportunity for empirical verification, and regrettable in that the risks have consequently increased of seriously distorting our conception and understanding of the essential nature of cultural systems and how they are constituted.