[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

134 MALEKULA
to a single clan, marry two women of Teleleu who are not
apparently related. The same is true of two rnen of Maur village
and two women of Iumloor; and of two men, one of them
belonging to the village of Nembiirii, the other to its “ offspring "
village Looriet, who both married women of Loormbarap.
Summing up the prohibitions, therefore, we may say that
they are based both upon genealogical relationship and member-
ship of a clan. The latter prevents a man taking as wife any
woman of his own or his mother's clan ; the former prevents the
marriage of all who are by birth close kin, and of those who are
allied through the marriage of one with whom they are closely
related. This necessarily implies that marriage with such relatives
as the cross—cousin (of both the ï¬Årst and second degree) or the
child of the cross-cousin, unions which in some parts of Melanesia
are socially approved, are not here permitted.
It is clear from the genealogies, however, that a man is at
perfect liberty to take a woman from the clan into which a
woman of his onm clan has married, and there is even the phrase
isar mbwiv used to express a brother-sister exchange marriage,
which type of marriage is shown by the genealogies to be not
uncommon. “ 1
The rule prohibiting the selection of a wife from a clan into
which a. close male relative has married, does not apply to the
remarriage of widows. If we may judge from the genealogies,
there is not to-day, nor has there been for some little time past,
any strict rule as to the fate of a woman after her husband’s
death. Nevertheless, it is clear from the statements of the
natives that formerly a widow was as a rule taken either by her
husband's younger brother, o_r by her husband's sister's son,
and, if we may trust Tota’s evidence, marriage with the latter
was the more common or more approved form for the levirate to
take. Actually, however, there is in the recorded genealogies
only one example of marriage with the maternal uncle's widow.
There are, on the other hand, several instances of women having
been married to two brothers (real and classiï¬Åcatory), and
though we have no clear evidence that the marriage with the
second brother took place after the death of the ï¬Årst, it is probably
justifiable to suppose that, in the majority of cases this was so.
In the genealogy pf Amanrantus there is clear evidence of true
junior levirate, for his mother, Viloor of Iumloor, was married
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