The Fijians Part 16

_Tuaka_--Elder brother, sister, or cousin (not concubitant).

_Tathi_--Younger brother, sister, or cousin-german (not concubitant). _Luve_--Child.

_Tuka_--Grandfather.

_Mbu_--Grandmother.

_Mak.u.mbu_--Grandchild.

_Tumbu_--Great-grandparent.

(2) _Ngane_(reciprocal form, _vei-nganeni_)--The relationship of a male and female of the same generation between whom marriage is forbidden, _i.e._ brother and sister, both real and artificial.

_Ndavola_ (reciprocal form, _vei-ndavolani_)--The relationship of males and females of the same generation between whom marriage is right, and even obligatory--consequently sister-in-law.

_Tavale_ (reciprocal form, _vei-tavaleni_)--Male cousins who would be concubitant if one were a female, consequently a man's brother-in-law.

_Ndauve_ (reciprocal form, _vei-ndauveni_)--Female cousins who would be concubitant if one were a male--consequently a woman's sister-in-law.

_Vungo_--Nephew, _i.e._ son of a man's sister or woman's brother, also son-in-law or daughter-in-law, also used reciprocally.

_Ngandina_--Maternal uncle or father-in-law; vocative form in the case of father-in-law, is _ngandi_ or _momo_.

_Nganeitama_--Paternal aunt or mother-in-law; vocative form in the case of mother-in-law, is _nganei_.

[Pageheader: THE CONCUBITANT RELATIONSHIP]

Besides these there are compound names for some of the more remote relationships, and names for certain connections, such as _karua_ (_i.e._ "the second," reciprocal form, _vei-karuani_), used of wives of a bigamous household, and also of children of the same father by different mothers.

I propose to call the Ngane (reciprocal form, _vei-nganeni_) tabu, because marriage between them is forbidden. _Vei-ndavolani_ I call "concubitants," because marriage between them is right and proper.

The tabu relationship occurs--

(1) Between the son and daughter of the same parents.

(2) Between children respectively of two brothers or the children respectively of two sisters, such children being male and female.

From a Fijian point of view, in both these cases the relationship is exactly the same. The father's brother and the mother's sister share with the father and the mother an almost equal degree of paternity. Thus a man or a woman, referring to his or her father's brother calls him _Tamanku_ (my father), and if he is asked _Tamamu ndina?_ (your real father?) he will answer _A Tamanku lailai_ (my little father). The same applies to the mother's sister. The tabu relationship also occurs artificially between the children respectively of concubitants who have broken through the system, and have not married, but to this I will refer in its proper place.

_Concubitants._--This relationship occurs between persons whose parents respectively were brother and sister. The opposition of s.e.x in parents not only breaks down the barrier of consanguinity, but even const.i.tutes the child of the one a marital complement of the child of the other. The young Fijian is from his birth regarded as the natural husband of the daughters of his father's sister and of his mother's brother. The girls can exercise no choice. They were born the property of their male concubitant if he desire to take them. Thus the custom, if generally followed, would enclose the blood of each family within itself, and obstruct the influx of a new strain at every third generation. The natural tendency towards the renovation of the blood would be checked, and its stagnation be continued. Thus--

A. (m) marries B. (f) | ------------------ E. (f) = C. (m) tabu D. (f) = F. (m) | | G. (f) Concubitants H. (m)

[Pageheader: INTOLERANCE OF THE SYSTEM]

A. and B. were concubitants, their children tabu. G. and H. being the children of tabu relations are concubitants. They marry, and of course their children being brother and sister are again tabu. But if D. had been a male who had married F. a female, G. and H. would have been tabu.

It will thus be seen that the concubitant and the tabu alternate generation after generation. The children of concubitants must be tabu, and the children respectively of tabu must be concubitant.

It must of course happen that persons who are concubitant have a mutual dislike to one another and do not marry, or, since a man cannot marry all his concubitants, or a woman all her concubitants, the system is dislocated by some of them marrying persons who are in no way related to them. Thus--

(m)A. = B.(f) | -------------------- | | W.(f) = C.(m) D.(f) = X.(m) | | Y.(f) = G.(m) Concubitant | with H.(f) = Z.(m) | | L.(m) tabu J.(f)

G. and H. are concubitant, born husband and wife, as were their grandparents A. and B., but they grow up and take a dislike to one another and each marries some one else. Yet the system takes no account of such petty interruptions as likes and dislikes. They were born married, and married they must be so far as their children are concerned. They have each married outside the tribe, yet their children L. and J. are tabu just as much as if G. and H. had married and they were the offspring of the marriage. G. and H. have in fact dislocated the system for all posterity, but the system goes on, refusing to admit the injury done to it. The most striking feature in the system is this oppressive intolerance. It is so indifferent to human affections that if a man dares to choose a woman other than the wife provided for him his disobedience avails him nothing. His concubitant is still his wife, and her children are his children. It will, it is true, give way so far as to recognize as his wife the woman he has chosen, but only on the condition that she becomes his fict.i.tious concubitant, and that all her relatives fall into their places as if she had actually been born his concubitant.

This brings us to a fresh starting-point from which the concubitous relationship is established. Since a man who is the concubitant of a woman is necessarily also the concubitant of all her sisters, by a natural evolution, if he marries a woman unrelated to him by blood, and _ipso facto_ makes her his concubitant, all her sisters become his concubitants also. In the past they would have been his actual wives, for a man could not take one of several sisters--he was in honour bound to take them all. In the same way a woman and her sisters became the concubitants of all her husband's brothers, and upon his death, she pa.s.sed naturally to her eldest brother-in-law if he cared to take her.

This does not imply polyandry or community among brothers, but rather what is known to anthropologists as Levirate, a woman's marriage to her brother-in-law being contingent on her husband's death.

_Tabu Relationships._--Hitherto we have dealt with persons sprung from the respective marriages of a brother and sister, and have not touched upon the offspring respectively of two brothers or two sisters. These are tabu to one another, being, as I have said, regarded as being as closely consanguineous as actual brothers and sisters.

A. B. brothers | | X.(m) = C.(f) tabu D.(m) = Y.(f) | | G.(f) = H.(m) Concubitant.

C. and D., being the offspring of two brothers, are tabu. They marry respectively their concubitants, and their offspring G. and H. are concubitant. Thenceforward the concubitant and tabu relationships occur in alternate generations. It must not be understood, however, that in these remote occurrences the tabu relationships are always strongly tabu, or that the concubitant relationships always entail marriage. The fact is remembered, that is all. "They are _vei-nganeni_!" "But they are married!" "Yes, but their _vei-nganeni_-ship is remote." (_Ia ka sa yawa nondrau vei-nganeni._)

[Pageheader: CONCUBITANT MARRIAGE IS DECREASING]

It will be well at this point to examine the exact nature of the obligation existing between concubitants. The relationship seems to carry with it propriety rather than obligation. Concubitants are born husband and wife, and the system a.s.sumes that no individual preference could hereafter destroy that relationship; but the obligation does no more than limit the choice of a mate to one or the other of the females who are concubitants with the man who desires to marry. It is thus true that in theory the field of choice is very large, for the concubitant relationship might include third or even fifth cousins, but in practice the tendency is to marry the concubitant who is next in degree--generally a first cousin--the daughter of a maternal uncle. A very good ill.u.s.tration of this occurred a few years ago among the grandchildren of the late king Thakombau. The concubitant of his granddaughter Audi Thakombau was Ratu Beni, chief of Naitasiri, but for various rascalities he had been deported to the island of Ono. Meanwhile her relations proposed an alliance with the powerful chief family of Rewa, and she was formally betrothed to the young chief Tui Sawau. But just before the marriage Ratu Beni was liberated, returned home, and at once laid claim to his concubitant. The claim was allowed by her relatives, the match broken off, and for some time the relations between Mbau and Rewa were so strained that the chiefs went in bodily fear of one another.

I have always been a.s.sured by the natives that the practice of concubitancy has greatly decreased since the introduction of Christianity and settled government. From the fact that thirty per cent, still marry their concubitants, it may be guessed how universal the custom must formerly have been. Now that free communication exists between the islands, and men have a far larger field of selection, they are said to choose rather not to marry their concubitants. Ratu Marika explained this by saying: "One has no zest for one's _ndavola_. She is too near. When you hear man and wife quarrelling, one says, 'What else?

Are they not _vei-ndavolani_?'" The result is curious. They do not marry as they did formerly, but they commit adultery either before or after marriage. No sooner is a girl married than her concubitant comes and claims her, and so strong is custom that she seldom repulses him. It is said that about fifty per cent of the adultery cases brought before the criminal courts of the colony are offences between concubitants, but a number never come before the courts because the husband does not care to prosecute. There are few prosecutions for fornication between concubitants, because the complainants, the parents of the girl, do not feel themselves to be aggrieved.

_Vei-tavaleni._--It is natural to expect some peculiarity in the relations between males, who would, if they were male and female, be concubitants. This relationship is called _vei-tavaleni_. To break through for once the rule of not using European terms, I may remark that _vei-tavaleni_ must of necessity mean both cousin and brother-in-law, and the reason is sufficiently obvious. Your _tavale_ is a brother of the woman to whom you were born married; _ergo_, your brother-in-law.

The fact that you do not marry her makes no difference. She is your natural wife, and he is your natural brother-in-law. Even if your _tavale_ has no sister, he is still your brother-in-law, because, potentially, a sister might be born to him, who would be your wife. At this point I thought that I had found an inconsistency in the logic of the system. As the children of _vei-ndavolani_ (concubitants) are tabu, I supposed, naturally, that the children of _vei-tavaleni_ would be tabu also; but I found, to my surprise, that this was not so. Their children became _vei-ndavolani_ (concubitants). It seemed illogical, but I supposed that it was done as a compensation. The parents could not marry because they were of the same s.e.x; therefore, to compensate the system for the loss of a concubitant marriage, their children were made to repair the accident by being concubitants.

I pointed this out to Mr. Fison, and he, looking at the system purely from the point of view that it was a development of group marriage, when the entire tribe was divided into two exogamous marrying cla.s.ses, said that he saw no inconsistency at all. We worked the problem out on paper, and discovered that, with the cla.s.s marriage as a clue, this fact became perfectly consistent and logical--

| ____________________ | | an X. woman = A.^{o} (m) B.^{o} (f) = an X. man ___________ | | | | C.^{o} (f) D.^{o}(m) = G.^{x} (f) E.^{x} (m) = F.{o} (f) | | H. (m)^{o} | | J.^{x} (f).

Let us suppose the population to be divided into two great cla.s.ses, X.

and O. Descent, in Fiji, follows the father, therefore the two _vei-tavaleni_ D. and E. belong to opposite cla.s.ses. D. O. marries an X.

woman. E. X. marries an O. woman. Their children obviously belong to two opposite cla.s.ses. They cannot therefore be tabu, and, through their relationship, they become concubitant. We thus stumbled upon an a.n.a.logy that goes far to uphold the theory that concubitancy is merely a development of exogamous group marriage.

[Pageheader: LOGIC OF THE SYSTEM]

_Vei-ndauveni._--Let us now consider the relations between females who would have been concubitants had they been of opposite s.e.xes. They are called _vei-ndauveni_, which, according to our phraseology, would mean cousin and sister-in-law, for in the concubitant system these terms are one and the same thing. As in the case of the concubitants, the _vei-ndauveni_ is curiously stretched to cover the case of a man marrying a stranger woman unrelated to him. She becomes _vei-ndauveni_ to his sister as a logical deduction from the fiction that she is concubitant with him, and as the children of _vei-ndauveni_ must be concubitant, so her children and her sister-in-law's children are concubitants.

_Ngandina._--The system extends even to the earlier generations. The _ngandina_ means in our phraseology both mother-in-law and uncle and father-in-law, for since your wife is the daughter of your mother's brother, it is obvious that he must stand to you in both those relations. A man may marry a woman unrelated to him, yet his father-in-law becomes forthwith his uncle (_ngandina_), for by the marriage he has const.i.tuted his wife concubitant with him, and this entails the fiction that her father was tabu to his mother (_i.e._ her brother), and therefore his uncle.

_Vungo._--Nephew, _i.e._ son of a man's sister or woman's brother, also son-in-law or daughter-in-law, used reciprocally, as _vei-vungoni_.

My mother's brother is my _vungo_; my sister's son is my _vungo_; my daughter's husband is my _vungo_. Under our system there seems little akin between these three relationships, but in the Fijian system they are one and the same.

D.^{x} (m) = C.^{o} (f), sister of E.^{o} = F.^{x} (f) | | A.^{x} B.^{o} (f) Concubitants.

A.'s mother's brother, A.'s _vungo_, has a daughter B., who is concubitant with A. Whether she marries him or not, A was born her husband, and he is therefore her father's _vungo_, son-in-law and nephew. It is to be remembered that marriage is never permitted between relations of different generations. Under no circ.u.mstances must _vei-vungoni_ marry, though under the rules of exogamous marrying cla.s.ses they would, unless specially forbidden, have been permitted to marry. In the above table, A. being an X., his mother's brother is an O.

On no account must the latter marry G., A.'s sister, who is an X., but if A.'s _vungo_ has a daughter B. O., the marriage between A. and B. at once becomes obligatory. Here is to be found a reason for the curious custom of the avoidance of a mother-in-law among the Australians and other tribes. Many theories have been advanced for this, but, with the exception of Mr. Fison, I believe that no one has propounded the true explanation. It is that in uterine descent a man's mother-in-law belongs to the cla.s.s from which he must take his wife. But she, being of a different generation, is tabu to him; hence he must avoid her absolutely, lest he be tempted by her charms to break through the law of the system.

This marriage system is practised generally throughout the Fiji Islands, with the following exceptions and modifications:--

In the province of Namosi the descendants of two brothers or of two sisters are regarded as tabu throughout as many generations as their parentage can be remembered, and are strictly forbidden to intermarry.