Note 18.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

The use of the word “devil,” universal in and around Melanesia when speaking in pigeon English of the native mysteries and the objects of the native cult or fear, illustrates one of the pitfalls in the path of the anthropologist. The native ideas do not coincide with ours. The history, the environment, the social and intellectual condition of peoples in the lower culture are as diverse from ours as their geographical situation. Consequently their speech contains no equivalent for many of our words, even of words that seem to us to convey ideas elementary and simple. No Australian language possesses a word which is the exact equivalent of our word “mother.” The word we roughly equate with “mother” includes a host of other women beside her who has given birth to the child. Some of these women we should designate as “aunt,” or as “stepmother”; but many of them stand in no relation of kinship according to our reckoning. Yet they are all addressed and spoken of by the same term as the veritable mother. Kinship, in fact, is counted in the lower culture along lines quite different from ours; and though it is probable that our degrees of kindred have evolved from a rudimentary condition similar to that which we find among savages, we have so far outgrown it that their reckoning is often unintelligible to us, and only a very few of the terms in use among European nations remain to point back to an earlier stage of development. If we have this difficulty in finding equivalents for terms expressive of the simplest relationships of our social life, how much greater must be our difficulty when we come to terms expressive of the mysterious and supersensual relations of man to the unknown and dimly conceived powers of the universe about him! We have no word to render the Fijian mana, the Siouan wakan, the Malagasy andria-manitra. Conversely, scarce a savage language can render our word “God.” Over and over again missionaries have sought, and sought in vain, for a native word for the purpose. When they have fixed upon one, as often as not they have had to confess a blunder; and many times in despair they have invented a word. The idea embodied in the acts by which the mysterious relations between man and the supernatural are emphasized and knit together is equally incapable of translation by any one vocable. A Roman Catholic missionary, speaking of the religious assembly of the Creeks of North America, says: “The mitewewin represents the highest expression of magic (maeghiw or maskikiy) among the nations of the Algonkian stock. The word, in fact, signifies at the same time labour, occupation, judgement, adoration, and sacrifice. It is a religious act addressed to the powakans, or animal fetishes, and a sort of Illinoian freemasonry requiring initiation and inviolable secrecy; it is a camp-meeting…; it is the grand council of an entire nation.”18.1 These sentences afford an excellent example of the difficulty of translating the native ideas into English words. They unite a brave and more or less successful attempt to convey the notion of mitewewin, with incidental but none the less certain failures in the cases of maeghiw or maskikiy and powakan. For none of them would a single English word, or even a phrase, be adequate.