immigrants almost unmixed with the autochtons (Cf. Map II). “Indeed, while the condition actually existing in the Massim area suggests that there was no slow mingling of the invaders with a previous stock, the geographical features of the territory of the Western Papuo-Melanesians with its hills, mountains and swamps, are such that invaders could not have speedily overrun the country, nor failed to have been influenced by the original inhabitants …”3
I shall assume that the reader is acquainted with the quoted work of Dr. Seligman, where a thorough account is given of all the main types of Papuo-Melanesian sociology and culture one after the other. But the tribes of the Eastern Papuo-Melanesian or Massim area, must be described here somewhat more in detail, as it is within this fairly homogeneous area that the Kula takes place. Indeed, the Kula sphere of influence and the ethnographic area of the Massim tribes almost completely overlap, and we can speak about the Kula type of culture and the Massim culture almost synonymously.
II
The adjacent Map III shows the Kula district, that is, the easternmost end of the main island and the archipelagoes lying to its East and North-East. As Professor C. G. Seligman says: “This area can be divided into two parts, a small northern portion comprising the Trobriands, the Marshall Bennets, the Woodlarks (Murua), as well as a number of smaller islands such as the Laughlans (Nada), and a far larger southern portion comprising the remainder of the Massim domain” (op. cit., p. 7).
This division is represented on Map III by the thick line isolating to the North the Amphletts, the Trobriands, the small Marshall Bennet Group, Woodlark Island and the Laughlan Group. The Southern portion, I found convenient to divide further into two divisions by a vertical line, leaving to the East Misima, Sud-Est Island and Rossel Island. As our information about this district is extremely scanty, I have preferred to exclude it from the area of the Southern Massim. In this excluded area, only the natives of Misima enter into the Kula, but their participation will play a very small part only in the following account. The western segment, and this is the part of which we shall speak as the district of the Southern Massim, comprises first the East End of the mainland, the few adjacent islands, Sariba, Roge’a, Side’a, and Basilaki; to the South, the island of Wari, to the East the important, though small archipelago of Tubetube (Engineer Group); and to the North, the big archipelago of the d’Entrecasteaux Islands. From this latter, only one district, that of Dobu, interests us more specially. The culturally homogeneous tribes of the Southern Massim have been marked off on our map as district V, the Doubans as district IV.