[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]
ll 1 W 1 ii ‘ ;, i l 230 MALEKULA - and eating of a human being was never treated as a secular affair. In the ï¬Årst place human flesh may not be cooked inside a house, a rule which is said to be observed for fear of the ghost of the victim. Further, human flesh when cooked has a special name, timis mbal} which has about it, apparently a certain ironic humour ; and the portions of the cooked body such as the arms and legs are not spoken of by the usual words for these limbs, but as nambal um and nipwis mm. Again, before being consumed the limbs and body are freely decorated with mbwingmbwingamb leaves, and are then distributed with some ceremony to the participants in the feast, the portions being carved and presented according to the importance of the recipient, as are the portions of pig at a Nimangki feast. Actually very little of the flesh is eaten at a cannibal meal by any one person, for the portions are very small and it is said that human flesh is very “ ï¬Ålling â€ù and that to eat much of it is bad for a man. It seems that only men may eat the bodies of men, but women are not wholly deprived of the privilege of being cannibals, for they are allowed to consume the bodies of women. These, however, are not reserved for women only; although men will never eat a sow, they are not debarred from eating the female of their own species, and when once they have eaten any part of a woman’s body, that body becomes ileo (sacred) so that it is reserved for men alone, and no woman may eat of it. 1 This word timis is quite distinct from the word temas meaning a ghost.- A. B. D.
