Janet B. Montgomery McGovern

“ And as for the question of the old man; how could women who lived so have strong sons and daughters? I thought of all the painted women of all the great cities of the world—those flaunting their silks and furs and jewels under the electric glare of the great thoroughfares, inviting with smiles and glances; and those others, shivering, wrapping their rags about them in dark corners, croaking, cackling, and clutching desperately, hoping to earn, in an ancient profession of civilization, enough to buy food and drink sufficient to keep life a little longer in unclean, diseased bodies. ”

“ The dancing becomes wilder and more frenzied as it goes on, the gesticulations with the knives—thrusting and slashing at imaginary figures—more violent; the priestesses cry or chant in a threatening manner, while the people, both men and women, standing about, howl and wail. Often the priestesses foam at the mouth in their excitement, their eyes look as if they would start from their heads, and this knife-dance usually ends with their falling exhausted in a swoon, throwing their knives from them as they fall. ”

“ I think, however, that anyone who has lived among a head-hunting tribe will realize how closely this custom is interwoven with the fabric of their whole social organization. It regulates the social and political standing of the men of the tribe; it is directly connected with marriage—no head, no wife; and is reflected in the games, the songs, and the dances of the people. Moreover head-hunting is regulated by a code as rigid as the code of “an officer and a gentleman” in so-called civilized society—and is rather less frequently broken. ”

“ To one who has never been in the Orient, it may seem a matter of course that courtship should precede marriage. This, however, is very far from being the case in most Oriental countries, as all know who have been “east of Suez.” Certainly both in China and Japan, marriages are arranged entirely by the parents of the young people, often with the aid of a professional “go-between,” the bride and bridegroom-to-be sometimes not even knowing each other. The idea that a young woman should express any preference on her own part as to the choice of a husband would be considered most indelicate. ”

“ I soon realized that in seamanship the Formosan aborigines could not compare with the Hawaians, the Filipinos, or with most of the peoples of the South Seas; perhaps for one reason, because their canoes carry no outrigger. Or is this effect, rather than cause? Is it because of their lack of seamanship at the present time that they venture into the waves in outriggerless canoes?
At any rate, whatever they lack in skill in the navigation of sea-craft, the Ami at least are not lacking in personal bravery, or in a sense of responsibility. ”

“ Whencesoever derived, the customs of a people have an ascertainable worth here and now for those who live by them. The first business, I should even venture to say, of any [12] anthropologist, be his sphere the study or the field, is to seek to appreciate a given culture as the expression of a scheme of values. Every culture represents a set of means whereby it is sought to realize a mode of life. Unconsciously for the most part, yet none the less actually, every human society pursues an ideal. ”

“ Would it be more agreeable to know that battle, murder, and sudden death were ever-present possibilities, if one happened to be a man and a warrior (and to be one meant being the other) , yet to know that while life lasted it would ever be a merry one; that if by chance old age or illness overtook one, one would be cared for, not as a matter of charity, but again—as in the case of widows and orphans—as a matter [208] of course; or to cower before what old age and illness and out-of-work days mean for the poverty-stricken in present-day civilization? ”

“ What sort of civilization would have been evolved, had culture progressed—as in Europe, for example, in the matter of learning, of arts, and of sciences—yet had the standards of right and wrong remained as they are with the primitive folk among whom I spent two years, and if the fundamental conception of government had remained the same—that of a matriarchal theocracy, which is yet, in a sense, communistic. ”

“ But the Ami and the Yami, and also the Paiwan and Piyuma, have not the excuse that applies to the tribes of the interior. Before these tribes lies the open sea, over which their ancestors navigated. That they should have lost the art of building and of navigating seaworthy craft is strange; as strange as is the fact that many of the tribes have lost the art of successful pottery-making, which according to tradition—and also judging from the few ancient specimens preserved among the Tsarisen—their ancestors seem to have possessed. ”

“ Meanwhile, head-hunting has for these wild-folk a function and significance that are not to be understood so long as we consider it as a thing apart. The same canon of interpretation holds good of any other outstanding feature of the social life. Customs are the organic parts of a body of custom. To use a technical expression, they are but so many elements composing a single “culture-complex.” Modern research is greatly concerned with the tracing out of resemblances due to the spread of one or another system of associated customs. ”

“ Up to this time I had always supposed that only among the “upper classes” in China were the feet of the women bound; those of the class who could afford to go always in ricksha or sedan-chair. But all the women of the Chinese-Formosans—except those of the despised Hakkas—bind their feet; rather, have them bound in infancy. A woman with unbound feet is regarded as a sort of pariah, and her chances of a “good marriage”—that goal of every Chinese woman—are almost nil. ”

“ This bird cannot, I think, in spite of the reverence in which it is held, be regarded as the totem of the Taiyal people. Rather, the tribes-people seem to regard it as the spokesman of some ancestor—one who was in his day a famous warrior, and who thus, through the medium of the bird, continues to guide his descendants, and all members of the tribal group to which during his lifetime he had belonged. Sometimes it is the spirit of a priestess which is supposed thus to continue to guide and guard her people. ”

“ None of the people of this tribe—or “nation”—seem to hold a belief in creators of the universe, such as is held by the Ami. The only deity—other than deified ancestors—whom the Taiyal apparently take into account is the rain-god, or rather, rain-devil. He, however, is a being very much to be taken into account [144] in a country like that in which the Taiyal live—the mountainous part of the island—where torrential downpours of such violence sometimes occur during the rainy season that the bamboo and grass huts of the people are washed away. ”

“ It seems probable that under the dominance of the Japanese the aborigines of Formosa will in a few decades, or, at the longest, in a century or two, have ceased to exist as a people. Unless, indeed, their dream of being rescued from the rule of both Chinese and Japanese by “White Saviours from the West” ever come true; and of this there seems no prospect at the present time. Nor has [199] the white man—if one face the matter honestly—always proved a “saviour” to the aboriginal races with whom he has come into contact. ”

“ For even recognizing that the creative faculty—artistic and inventive—is the heritage of man rather than of woman, has it not, within historic times, in civilized countries, been ever under queen rulership that letters and art have flourished? Perhaps an unrecognized, sublimated form of sex-instinct—or so a certain school of psycho-analysts would argue—that has spurred masculine creative genius to its highest point; as it spurred, apparently, the venturous spirit of the great explorers, certainly of the Elizabethan age ”

“ To treat her as a goddess has always been accounted a sure way of winning a lady’s favour. To the cynic, therefore, it might seem that Mrs. McGovern was bound to speak well of her head-hunting friends of the Formosan hills, seeing that they welcomed her with a respect that bordered on veneration. But of other head-hunters, hailing, say, from Borneo or from Assam, anthropologists have reported no less well, and that though the investigators were accorded no divine honours. The key to a just estimate of savage morality is knowledge of all the conditions. ”

“ To return for a moment to the present chief head-hunting tribe, the Taiyal. At the time of feasting and dancing in celebration of a victory, the head of the victim is placed on the “skull-shelf” of the village—being often the last addition to a pile of others—and food and millet-wine are placed in front of it, food being sometimes inserted into its mouth. The chief (often a woman) , or high-priestess, of the village offers to the last-decapitated head an invitation to the following effect: “O warrior, you are welcome to our village and to our feast! ”

“ Among those tribes, including the Taiyal, that have come least into touch with alien culture—Chinese, Japanese, or European—the religious side of the marriage ceremony seems to consist largely in purificatory rites—rites which tend to [153] neutralize, as it were, the difference between the sexes. Sex is, to the aborigines of Formosa—as to many primitive peoples,—a thing of mystery, and one fraught with danger—danger not only to the man and woman chiefly concerned, but also to the tribal group, or whole tribe. ”

“ After death there is a difference among the tribes as to the disposition of the body. With the Taiyal—also the Saisett, the smaller tribe of the North which seems to have borrowed Taiyal customs—the dead man or woman is simply left in the house which was his, or her, abode during life. In the case of a man, the weapons which he used during life, also pipe and tobacco, are left with the body; in the case of a woman, agricultural implements—hoe or digging-stick—and tobacco are left. ”

“ I told the missionary of the visit from which I was returning.
“Disgusting heathen!” she exclaimed. “Besides, what have ‘different ways of constructing tribal lays’ to do with heathen immorality?” She frowned and looked puzzled. Then added more gently, as if explaining to a child: “‘Lays,’ you know, means poetry, and ‘constructing tribal lays’ just means writing poetry; nothing whatever to do with the heathen and their horrible ways.”
When we parted she adjured me to be more careful about wearing my sun-helmet, assuring me that it was necessary in that climate. ”

“ I do not refer, of course, only to the difference in size between these women and the Taiyal women—or the women of any of the other tribes; but to certain characteristics of physique in which they radically differ. For one thing, the shape of the head is distinctly different, that of these very small women being more negroid than Malay, and curiously infantile even for the negroid type of skull—i.e. with disproportionately bulging forehead. Also the whole shape of the body is more that of a child than is the case with most adult women, either among Formosan aborigines or others. ”

“ Whether being concerned with the raising and storing of the staples of life—millet and sweet potatoes—and with the gathering and curing of the tobacco-leaves and the making of wine—life’s luxuries—has given women the ascendancy which they undoubtedly possess is a question. ”

“ Singing, dancing, and feasting follow. The old people of the Piyuma tribe explain that in the “good days of old,” when their tribe was a large and powerful one, a prisoner, captured from some other tribe, was always sacrificed on these festal occasions, but now they—like the Paiwan, with their Mavayaiya—have to be satisfied with an inferior substitute. It seems that one of the reasons why a monkey is considered so particularly inferior a substitute for a man is that the former can at its death bear no message to the spirits of the ancestors of those who slay it. ”

“ To her Chinese coolie that formidable badge would have been enough to proclaim the wearer seban—the kind of wicked animal that defends itself when attacked. Thus, if it merely served to warn an [10] invading alien to keep his distance, this crude advertisement of a head-hunting habit would be justified, from the standpoint of the survival of the hard-pressed aborigines. Even had a threat of cannibalism been thrown in, its protective value could hardly be denied; for, much as men object to be killed, they commonly deem it worse to be killed and eaten. ”

“ Far more remarkable than the dwelling-houses or granaries of the Formosan aborigines are the long suspension-bridges, which with marvellous skill they construct of bamboo, held together only with deer-hide thongs, or occasionally with tendrils of a curiously tough vine growing in the mountains, and throw across the deep chasms and ravines which abound in the interior of the island, especially in the mountainous section inhabited by the Taiyal, Bunun, and Paiwan tribes. ”