Note 2 — Music and Singing, Dancing and Toys and Games

Sir W. Macgregor, in describing (Ann. Rep., June, 1890, p. 47) the movements and actions of the Kiwai (Fly river mouth) natives prior to a canoe attack by them upon him, says: “The canoes darted hither and thither, as if performing a circus dance or a Highland reel, and all these movements were accompanied by the chant of a paean that sounded as if composed to imitate the cooing—soft, plaintive, and melodious—of the pigeons of their native forests”; and he refers to the performance as a “canoe choral dance.” It was, of course, not a dance in the sense in which I am dealing with the subject here; but the apparently imitative character of the singing is perhaps worth noticing in connection with this dancing question. See also the description (Country Life, March 4, 1911) by Mr. Walter Goodfellow, the leader of the recent expedition into Dutch New Guinea, of the dancing and accompanying singing of the Mimika natives whom he met there, and his suggestion that the final calls of these songs were derived from that of the greater paradise bird. Mr. Goodfellow has since told me with reference to these Mimika songs that he was forcibly struck by the resemblance of the termination of most of the songs to the common cry of the greater bird of paradise, and said: “They finished with the same abrupt note, repeated three times (like the birds).” Dr. Haddon has been good enough to lend me the manuscript of his notes on the dances performed in the islands of Torres Straits, which will probably have appeared in Vol. IV. of the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits before this book is published. Here again I find interesting records of imitative dancing. One dance imitates the swimming movements of the large lizard (Varanus), another is an imitation of the movements of a crab, another imitates those of a pigeon, and another those of a pelican. At a dance which I witnessed in the Roro village of Seria a party from Delena danced the “Cassowary” dance; and Father Egedi says it is certainly so called because its movements are in some way an imitation of those of the cassowary.