a small, swift bird, the wings of a bat, coco-nut husk and the twigs of an extremely light mimosa tree are employed.
It is easy to see that, not less than the words, the substances here used are associated with the aim of the magic, that is, with lightness, with swiftness and with flying.
In the magic of the Kula we find betel-nut, crushed with lime in a mortar, used to redden the tip of the canoe. Betel-nut is also given to a partner, after it has been charmed over with a seducing spell. Aromatic mint, boiled in coco-nut oil and ginger root are also used in the mwasila. The conch-shell, and the cosmetic ingredients, charmed over on Sarubwoyna beach are really part of the outfit, and so is the lilava bundle. All the substances used in this magic are associated either with beauty and attractiveness (betel-nut, cosmetics, the mint plant) or with excitement (conch-shell, chewed betel-nut). Here therefore, it is not with the final aim—which is the obtaining of valuables—that the magic is concerned, but with the intermediate one, that is that of being agreeable to one’s partner, of putting him into a state of excitement about the Kula.
XIV
I wish to close this chapter by adducing a few texts of native information. In the previous chapters, several statements and narratives have been put into the natives’ mouths and given in quotations. I wish now to show some of the actual linguistic data from which such quotations have been derived. Numerous utterances of the natives were taken down by me as they were spoken. Whenever there was a native expression covering a point of crucial importance, or a characteristic thought, or one neatly formulated, or else one especially hazy and opalescent in meaning—I noted them down in quick handwriting as they were spoken. A number of such texts, apart from their linguistic importance, will serve as documents embodying the native ideas without any foreign admixture, and it will also show the long way which lies between the crude native statement and its explicit, ethnographic presentation. For what strikes us at first sight most forcibly in these texts is their extreme bareness, the scantiness of information which they appear to contain. Couched in a condensed, disjointed, one might say telegraphic style, they seem to lack almost everything which could throw light on the subject of our study. For they lack concatenation of ideas, and they contain few concrete details, and few really apt generalisations. It must be remembered, however, that, whatever might be the importance of such texts, they are not the only source of ethnographic information, not even the most important one. The observer has to read them in the context of tribal life. Many of the customs of behaviour, of the sociological data, which are barely mentioned in the texts, have become familiar to the Ethnographer through personal observation and the direct study of the objective manifestations and of data referring to their social constitution (compare the observations on Method in the Introduction). On the other