cause. In the Trobriands, for instance, the chief has always been the organiser of all the big, tribal festivities. He received large contributions from the commoners under various legal obligations (see Chap. VI, Division VI) but he gave away all his wealth again in the form of big, ceremonial distributions, of presents at festivities, of food gifts to the partakers in dances, tribal sports and diversions. These were the pleasures in which the natives found real zest, which largely gave meaning to their lives. Nowadays all these pursuits have greatly slackened, because of the lack of concentration of wealth and power in the chief’s hands. He can neither afford to finance the big pastimes of yore, nor has he influence enough to give the same energetic initiative to start them going. After his death, things will be worse still. There are reasons to fear, and even natives express their misgivings, that in a generation or two the Kula will become entirely disorganised.
It is a well-known fact that the resistance and health of a native depend on auto-suggestion more even than is the case with ourselves, though new developments in psychotherapy seem to indicate that medicine has up till now largely underrated the general influence of this factor. Even the old ethnographic observers, more in Polynesia perhaps than anywhere else, have reported clear, unmistakable instances in which the loss of interest in life and the determination to die brought about death without any other cause. My own experience, though I have no one very striking case to cite, bears this out fully from all sorts of corroborating types of evidence. It is therefore not going beyond what is fully granted by facts, to maintain that a general loss of interest in life, of the joie de vivre, the cutting of all the bonds of intense interest, which bind members of a human community to existence, will result in their giving up the desire to live altogether, and that therefore they will fall an easy prey to any disease, as well as fail to multiply.
A wise administration of natives would, on the one hand, try to govern through the chief, using his authority along the lines of old law, usage, and custom; on the other hand it would try to maintain all which really makes life worth living for the natives, for it is the most precious inheritance, which they have from the past ages, and it is no good to try to substitute other interests for those lost. It is easy to hand over one’s vices to a man racially and culturally different; but nothing is as difficult to impart as a keen interest in the sports and amusements of other people. Even from one European nation to another, the last stronghold of national peculiarity can be found in its traditional diversions, and without diversion and amusement a culture and a race cannot survive. The application of a heavy, indeed, crushing machinery of European law and moral regulations, with their various sanctions, simply destroys the whole delicate fabric of tribal authority, eradicating good and bad alike, and leaves nothing but anarchy, bewilderment and ill will.1
With a mere show of his former authority, therefore, poor old To’uluwa arrived with a handful of followers at Sinaketa. He still keeps to all the strict observances and onerous duties with which his exalted position was weighted in olden days. Thus, he may not partake of ever so many kinds of food, considered to be unclean for the members of the sub-clan of Tabalu. He may not even touch any defiled objects, that have been in