Note 26 — Chapter V · THE INTERPRETATION OF ANDAMANESE CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS: CEREMONIAL (continued 2)
Reading edition
To summarise the argument, the belief in the world of spirits rests on the actual fact that a dead person continues to affect the society. As the effect is one of disorganisation, whereby the social sentiments are wounded, the dead are avoided and the spirits are regarded with fear. But as a recently dead person is still regarded with feelings of attachment by his friends, the resulting final attitude towards the spirits is ambivalent. By a simple step the spirits come to be regarded as the cause of sickness and death, and therefore as hostile to living men. Yet, as the beliefs about medicine-men show, it is possible for exceptional individuals to be on terms of friendship with the spirits. Finally, the dream-life affords a means by which the spirit-world may be represented in a simple and concrete manner. This last feature (the association of the spirits with dreams) I believe to be a secondary elaboration of the primary or fundamental belief which shows itself in the ritual of death and mourning, serving only to rationalise it and make it more concrete. This need of concrete representation of the spirit-world shows itself in other beliefs, in which may be seen the tendency to become self-contradictory that is often the mark of ideas that arise as the result of attempts to rationalise conative and affective impulses. The spirits are, on the one hand, as it were shadows or images of living men, and yet, since they are feared and disliked, they are often represented as being repulsive and inhuman, with long legs and short bodies, with long beards and ugly faces26. The spirits must be thought of as somewhere, but there is no consistency in the statements as to where that somewhere is; one man will say that they live in the sky, another that they are under the earth, a third will point to a particular island as their home; at the same time it is evident from other statements that they vaguely conceive them as being everywhere, in the forest and the sea.