Manus Religion

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Excerpt from Manus Religion: An Ethnological Study of the Manus Natives of the Admiralty IslandsThe writer lived among the Manus for six months, during most of which time he spoke the Manus language and under stood it. He had an interpreter lent him through the kind offices of mr. E. P. W. Chinnery, Director of District Services, and Government Anthropologist, of Rabaul. The interpreter was useful for the first three months for formal linguistic work. He had left home as an orphan to go to school, then entered Government employ, and therefore did not know his own culture, he knew the language however but without appreciating any reason for my learning it. Many of the natives of Peri village entered into the ethnological spirit with zest, rare among the natives of the wider area. The Manus delight in facts and argument. They will, for instance, carry a useless fish jaw for months, in the h0pe of meeting a man with whom they had an argument about the number of teeth in the jaw of that particular species. They debate heatedly whether or not a report (received by one man from a geologist) that New Guinea was once joined by a land bridge to Australia is true. The night before I left, the village argued over the water from house to house as to whether a lad who had died ten years before was older or younger than another still living. They debate questions about entirely useless matters for the love of truth. They deserve credit for their ready help in the collection of facts about their own lives and culture.To my wife, Dr. Margaret Mead, I owe all the many advantages of a collaboration in the field, as well as specific criticism of this work in manuscript.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.