[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]
THE VILLAGE AND VILLAGE LIFE 25 social and religious life, centre. (See Fig. 1.)1 Outside every village there are two places for excretion, one for the men and one for the women. Concerning these matters the natives show a certain delicacy. A man saying to a brother or friend that he is going to defecate will use the word temb, but if he wishes to convey this information to an older man or to a woman he will instead use the word signifying urinate. Before the rapid depopulation of the south-west district had set in, the people of Seniang were divided into some forty clans each of which owned and occupied a principal village, and perhaps one or more subsidiary villages, all built on the land belonging to the clan. The former was regarded as the original home of the clan, where its founder was born ; the latter were offshoots from this parent village, and owed their foundation to an increase in the population, which made it necessary for certain people to move from their old home and establish themselves in a new locality. Generally these “ daughter â€ù villages were set up close to the " parent â€ù village and the bonds between them were preserved. In general no one village was ever very far removed from its neighbours, even when these belonged to a different clan. Com- munication was always kept open between them along the nahal lamp (the public highways) or the nahal amut, the latter being paths which could be closed against strangers. The place where such a path entered a village appears to have been one of some importance in the ritual as well as in the social life of the people. It is called mairm hal, which may be translated â€ù the eye of the road â€ù, but unfortunately we do not know whether it lay on the edge of the dancing ground or near the dwelling-houses.â€ù 1 In his monumental work on the New Hebrides (Ethnogragbhische Maierizzlm nus dm Nmm Hebridzw und den Banks Inseln, Berlin, 1923), Speiser gives a. plan of what he regards as a typical South Malekulan village (pl. x, No. 4). In this the dwelling-houses are scattered all round the dancing ground, many of them being behind the amel, and there is no indication oi anything corre- sponding to the naai save. It seems probable, therefore, that this plan represents a south-eastern village, and it this is so, then we have here evidence that despite many cultural similarities tl'u'oughout all the districts of South Malekula, east and west do diï¬Åer in certain aspects, which from a sociological point of view are not uniniportant.—C. H. W. “ It is clear from his notes that Deacon often confused the matam hal with the sacred place behind the amel, the nimbimb lemwenei. That the former was, however, the place where the path entered the village is implied by him in several passages and is supported by the evidence of Layard (I928, p. 207).-— C. H. W.
