at the back of the houses, to make room for the new harvest. Here again we meet the typical idea that the main aim of accumulating food is to keep it exhibited in the yam houses till it rots, and then can be replaced by a new étalage.
The filling of the storehouses involves a double display of food, and a good deal of ceremonial handling. When the tubers are taken out of the ground they are first displayed in the gardens. A shed of poles is erected, and covered with taitu vine, which is thrown thickly over it. In such arbours, a circle is pegged out on the ground, and within this the taitu (the ordinary small yams of the Trobriands which form the staple harvest) are carefully piled up into a conical heap. A great deal of care is lavished on this task, the biggest are selected, scrupulously cleaned, and put on the outside of the heap. After a fortnight or more of keeping the yams in the garden, where they are much admired by visiting parties, the owner of the garden plot summons a party of friends or relatives-in-law, and these transport them into a village. As we know already, from Chapter II, such yams will be offered to the owner’s sister’s husband. It is to his village that they are brought, where again they are displayed in conical heaps, placed before his yam house. Only after they have thus remained for several days—sometimes up to a fortnight—are they put into the storehouse (see Plate XXXIII).
Indeed, it would be enough for anyone to see how the natives handle the yams, how they admire big tubers, how they pick out freaks and sports and exhibit them, to realise that there is a deep, socially standardised sentiment centring round this staple product of their gardens. In many phases of their ceremonial life, big displays of food form the central feature. Extensive mortuary distributions called sagali, are, in one of their aspects, enormous exhibitions of food, connected with their re-apportionment (see Plate XXXIV). At harvest of the early yams (kuvi) there is an offering of first fruits to the memory of the recently dead. At the later, main harvest of taitu (small yams), the first tubers are dug out ceremonially brought into the village and admired by the whole community. Food contests between two villages at harvest, in olden days often followed by actual fighting, are also one of the characteristic features which throw light on the natives’ attitude towards edible wealth. In fact, one could almost speak of a “cult of food” among these natives, in so far as food is the central object of most of their public ceremonies.
In the preparation of food, it must be noted that many taboos are associated with cooking, and especially with the cooking pots. The wooden dishes on which the natives serve their food are called kaboma, which means “tabooed wood.” The act of eating is as a rule strictly individual. People eat within their family circles, and even when there is public ceremonial cooking of the taro pudding (mona) in the big clay pots, especially tabooed for this purpose (see Plate XXXV), they do not eat in one body, but in small groups. A clay pot is carried into the different parts of the village, and men from that part squat round it and eat, followed afterwards by the women. Sometimes again the pudding is taken out, placed on wooden dishes, and eaten within the family.
I cannot enter here into the many details of what could