STRANGE CUSTOMS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 49, 26 August 1933, Page 8

STRANGE CUSTOMS

NEW GUINEA TRIBE

Many of the strange customs of th* natives of the Wiwiak Mountains, ia New Guinea, were described in Sydney recently by Dr. Margaret Mead, of th# American Museum of .Natural History, New York, in a lecture to members ofthe Anthropological Society of New South Wales (states . a Sydney ex» change). She described how. growth—* both of children and of food—had be« come a central factor in their lives, dominating their tabus and other be« liefs. The natives lived in a mountainous district, Dr. Mead said, where food was scarce. They practised infanticide, and had rigorous rules for the conduct of their women. Particularly rigorous were their food tabus. A man was forbidden to eat his own kill—the hunter who ate the animal he had killed was looked upon as a criminal. Similarly, the meagre produce of the gardens was shared among the community. The families worked small garden patches in conjunction with other families, but they had several of these patches, and though their method of working mads for companionship, it also compelled them to walk four or five miles from one garden to the other. The available firewood had long ago been, cleared from near the small Tillages in which they lived, and the women had to go several miles to fetch, fuel. Contrary to what one would expect in the tropics, they lived in a cold, misty, bone-racking climate, where often at 3 a.m. they would arise because it was too cold to sleep,' and huddls around their fires until daybreak.'