Rossel Island: An Ethnological Study

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University Press, 1928 - Ethnology - 274 pages
 

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Page 63 - A man may have to borrow, even though he has money of a higher value in his possession than he requires at the moment. He may have Nos. 11 and 13, but not No. 12 which he requires at the moment. He cannot get change as a rule, for No. 13 is not a simple product of any lower value
Page 64 - They have a certain sacred character. No. 18, as it passes from person to person, is handled with great apparent reverence, and a crouching attitude is maintained. Nos. 19 to 22 are proportionately more sacred, are almost always kept enclosed, and are not supposed to see the light of day, and particularly the sun.
Page 63 - amount" of money, where the values are simply related and "change" can always be given, could perform the same amount of real service (ie effect the same number of purchases) with perhapse a tenth or less of the amount of lending, necessistated by the Rossel system
Page 34 - A tribe is a social group of a simple kind, the members of which speak a common dialect, have a single government, and act together for common purposes such as warfare.
Page 64 - As a matter of fact, a peculiarity enters as soon as we reach No. 18, which is not, as a rule, repaid by a coin of higher value.
Page 197 - On the 30th September, 1858, the ship St. Paul, bound from Hong Kong to Sydney, with 327 Chinese passengers on board, was totally wrecked on this island, when all hands reached the shore. The captain and eight of the crew then left in a boat to obtain assistance, and on the French steamer Styx arriving at the spot from New Caledonia, early in January, 1859, it was found that the whole of the passengers and the remainder of the crew, with the exception of one Chinese, had been horribly massacred by...
Page 64 - ... without much change of sense. These brokers derive their income by keeping their capital in motion and by a process somewhat analogous to the activities of a London bill-broker — by borrowing at a lower rate of interest and discounting at a higher — and practise a magic by means of which they claim to act on the minds of their debtors, making them repay within the customary time, while the minds of their creditors are affected in the reverse direction. Since the series of values is finite,...
Page 80 - ... suppose a complexity of social facts, which I am not in a position to define, that determine most of the general relations of a particular pig feast. ... A particular individual provides a particular ndap. ... A certain readjustment of social relations thus results from the holding of the feast . . . though we abandon the view that the monetary operations at a feast of this nature are to be regarded merely as a collective buying from a collective seller, it still remains that this is a useful...
Page 64 - ... as agents for these transactions ; they are denoted by a special name, which may be translated by the term " broker " without much change of sense. These brokers derive their income by keeping their capital in motion and by a process somewhat analogous to the activities of a London bill-broker — by borrowing at a lower rate of interest and discounting at a higher — and practise a magic by means of which they claim to act on the minds of their debtors, making them repay within the customary...
Page 123 - The gods as snakes are dangerous to man and are supposed to swell to an enormous size and then to swallow any human being who has the temerity to approach the sacred places in which the gods reside. Man was not created by Wonajo ; for the progenitors of the Rossel race are a snake god Mbasi and a girl, Konjini,1 said to be of fair skin, whom Wonajo found on the island and whom he wooed in vain.2 Mbasi was a friend of Wonajo, 1 Bell says that some of the natives believe that they originally came from...

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