1. garden foods

2. meat of game animals

3. houses, platforms, and clubhouses

4. weapons

5. tools of bone, wood, tooth, steel, and stone

6. clothes (loincloths for men, grass or sago-leaf skirts for women)

7. arm- and legbands

8. bark belts

9. combs

10. string bags

11. water for cooking and washing

12. mats

13. barkcloth blankets and sleeping nets

14. nets for fishing and hunting

15. dancing drums

16. flutes

17. canoes, paddles, and rafts

18. firewood

19. areca nut, betel pepper, and lime

20. tobacco

21. vegetable dyes

22. ornaments and valuables of bone, shell, feather, and tooth

23. ingredients (fuka) for ritual charms

24. medicines (mulamula), etc.

Version Fi

A long time ago in the region of Inauakina (a Bush Mekeo Village), there was a village (sic) where there were only men. No women, no girls, nothing but men. They gave birth by themselves (men to men), and upon being born they were already strong and able to search for their nourishment.

These men were savages. They did not wear clothes, lived in caves in the side of a hill, and did not even make gardens. Their only nourishment was a kind of earth called onkimo; they dried it in the sun and swallowed it that way.

The principal personages of this curious village were Foikale, Koikoipike, Kapankoupike, Maimaipike, and Ikangopo. They were very famous. Foikale was the chief.

In the same region, there was a family of which the husbands name was Oa Lope, and the wife was Oini. They had several children. Oa Lopes family completely ignored Foikale's village, and the latter had no acquaintance with Oa Lope.

One day, Foikale was going walk-about and came to a fence constructed of split and interlaced bamboos. Never had he seen such a thing. He made a tour of the border, found an opening, entered, and was stupefied at the sight of a garden of magnificent bananas. This was Oa Lope's garden. Keeping a distance, he cried, “Psh! Psh!” to see if the stalks of bananas would run away, but they did not. They stayed in place, immobile. Then he advanced and walked in the garden, wondering what this might well be.

Two kinds of interconnections have been shown in the preceding pages to ramify throughout Bush Mekeo culture, giving it both meaning and form. First, categories articulated together in one context (the body, for example) are invoked also in others (space and time, adult-male and -female ritual, social organization, death and mortuary ritual, etc.). Second, the sets of relations by which the categories of the culture are juxtaposed uniformly exhibit a structure of bisected dualities. These diverse contexts thus constitute semantic metaphors and structural homologies of one another (Levi-Strauss 1963a:83). The same may well also be ventured, on the basis of my comparative sketches, of Tikopia and the Trobriands. The purpose of this chapter is largely to explicate these findings. However, in the process of doing so, a number of collaterally important implications for cultural and social theory arise. These involve the analytical efficacy of indigenous culture categories, the nature of cultural systems as integrated, meaningfully structured totalities, and the relation of these structures to historical process. As I summarize my conclusions regarding Bush Mekeo culture, I shall directly address these issues as well.

Many of the significant semantic relations upon which this analysis is based have consisted of both kinds of “motivation” described by Gell (1975) and discussed in Chapter 1; that is, certain critical indigenous categories are either polysemous, or they are constituted of words compounded of other words. Examples of polysemy would include the systematic employment of spatial metaphors in body, waste/resource, village/bush, and clan-relationship classifications. In an identical way, the concept engama variously means procreative conception and mortuary de-conception and re-conception, as well as beginning in general.

To this day, the most authoritative anthropological treatments of the symbolism and ritual of death remain Hertz's essay “The Collective Representation of Death” (1960:27–85) and Van Gennep's study The Rites of Passage (1960). Although these classic interpretations differ widely, in one sense the two are very similar. Hertz and Van Gennep each convincingly claims to unearth a particular structure or pattern of cross-cultural if not universal validity from among the diversity of mortuary ritual in the societies they study. Where they differ is in the exact constitution of their respective structures.

Although I cannot but agree that it is possible to identify some elements of both Hertz's and Van Gennep's formulations in the ethnographic elements of Bush Mekeo mortuary ritual and feasting, my principal interest and intentions in this chapter lie elsewhere. Throughout this work, I have tried to reveal a number of structural homologies pervading all contexts of the indigenous culture, and I shall continue to do so as consistently as possible here regarding Bush Mekeo conceptualizations of death and mourning. Therefore, I shall not be explictly concerned with establishing relations between corpse, soul, and survivors, or with portraying relations between funerary and other rites of passage, except insofar as they contribute toward eliciting the structure of category distinctions found generally throughout the culture and specifically in mortuary ceremony and feasting.