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But the most Fundamental Phase of a People's Culture
is its Social Order and its Relationship to Land;
and here there is evidence in polynesia not
merely of adaptation to environment, but of
Inter-mixture of Race

(11) It is not in ceremonial customs alone that the social life shows signs of stratification. They are evident in the constitution of the Polynesian societies. The fundamental feature of these is the village community, which has been found among the Aryan Hindoos, the Slavs and the Teutons, and has been proved to be a primitive feature of most of those races that have for long ages spoken Aryan languages. Amongst Aryan-speaking peoples it consists of the division of the district surrounding the village into belts or zones, one held in common by the village for pasture, another split up into meadows for culture, each of which had a strip or strips apportioned to each family in the village; and these strips had to be cultivated in a fixed order of crops, so that all of a meadow should be in fallow at once, or in wheat or rye at once, and the village council, generally consisting of the elders, but in India of representatives, decided all questions of possession and culture of land. Now in Polynesia this method of constituting the relationship of the people to land is as evident, with adaptations made necessary by the environment. In islands where there are no mammals and no cereals there could not be the same distribution. There is no pasturage; but instead of it there is a belt of wild fruiting trees, where berries may be gathered, and birds and rats may be snared by all the people of the village, but under certain restrictions as to seasons, times and methods carefully prescribed, partly by long custom, partly by the chief or priest of the village, guided by the men of the village in council. Then there is the patch or belt of cultivated fruiting trees, page 73the cocoanut or breadfruit in the tropical groups, the karaka and other berried trees in New Zealand; and here the family that plants the trees is allowed the use of them, so long as it keeps them in order, even if the patch on which it plants them belongs to some other family, but has been left waste by it. Effective occupation is the true claim to land in Polynesia, and especially in New Zealand. Then close to the village are the patches cultivated from year to year. But, as there are no cattle to graze and no cereals to sow, there is no rotation of crops. It is always the taro or yam or sweet potato; and the root crop does not seem to exhaust the soil of a special element like some of the cereals, yet it manifestly did in time impoverish the ground, for from time to time the cultivated patch or belt was changed. Near the villages there are frequent signs of sections of cultivated land having been abandoned.

(12) And now come in the features that differentiate the Polynesian from the Aryan system. First of all there are clear proofs of the Polynesian and most of his ancestry being a maritime and fishing people. For every village has a sea frontage, or if too far inland, then a lake or river frontage, where it can find a variation in diet in the fish and other products of the water. Its canoe life is one of its most predominant features, and hence it must also have the rights to a section of forest, in which it can cut down trees to hollow into canoes. It is this necessity that caused the Maori soon after he came to New Zealand to make far inland in many parts, although by nature and tradition a sea-haunting people. On the other hand, he retained from some previous continental ancestry the traces of land nomadism, and even of the hunting stage. For the Maori never abandoned the right and the duty to migrate by land to some other part of New Zealand, even if he had to fight for it. And wherever he settled he took care that he had a considerable tract of hunting-ground, page 74chiefly forest. He had no large mammals to kill, until Captain Cook's pigs multiplied, and then he took to pighunting as if "to the manner born"; but he had rats and birds to snare. This hunting habit was doubtless resurrected or at least emphasised in him by his intermixture with aborigines who had not reached the agricultural stage. His abhorrence of manure he probably got from these pre-agricultural predecessors. Another strange predilection seems to point back to a riding ancestry, though it might be attributed to the squatting attitude. He admired knees slightly bent outwards, and a common occupation of the grandmother when she had the baby on her knee was to massage the little legs in this direction.

(13) There are other differentiating features that cannot be due to the new environment. There is, for example, something of the old patriarchal system that must have preceded in many races the village or localised community. It is the family that is the unit in the Maori clan or tribe as far as the possession of land is concerned; the family has its section carefully defined, and hunts and fishes and cultivates by itself, and can dispose of it by common consent, provided the approval of the tribal chief and council of elders is obtained; it stores its food in common, and acts generally as if it were an individual; within its own community it practises socialism; in the tribe it is an individual, with its ariki or tohunga to act for it. And, in spite of this internal socialistic democracy, it has the germs of aristocratic oligarchy, and even of monarchy in it; the council of elders or representatives is the final appeal in all matters of dispute, and has great influence over the actions and decisions of the ariki or chief. On the other hand once war has begun the chief is supreme, although when it is over he lapses into not more than the member of the oligarchy, or even the common member of the democracy. He has no more right to the page 75land than any other in the family. If he is a priest, or in any way sacred, he has first-fruits given to him as the representative of the gods. And, though primogeniture prevails, it has its limitations, for lack of character or courage or hospitality may depose the eldest son or heir from his rights. There was scope left for the rise of a minor, and the council of elders and the general community had as much to do with the selection for the chiefship as heredity; and the beginnings of modern property were seen in the permission to individuals to acquire land by marriage and other means.

(14) In the larger areas like New Zealand, where great forests and mountains allowed scope for the development and escape of aboriginals, and for conquest, there are the germs of feudalism; for there had been growing up, probably from the time of the great migration from Polynesia, a system of vassalage of varying character. A tribe that had been conquered was often allowed, instead of being reduced to slavery, to occupy its old territory on condition of contributing, as rental to the conquering tribe, a certain proportion of the products, or a certain amount of assistance in war. So an allied tribe was often given a piece of land as reward for assistance in warfare on condition that they returned every year a proportion of the fruits or game. Nay, there was an incipient feudalism in the constitution of the tribe itself. For every family in it that had land was expected to contribute all its available warriors in time of war. This might easily have passed into that military tenure of land which was the essence of mediaeval European feudalism, as of Japanese feudalism, if the service had been to the individual chief, instead of to the tribe, if, as occurred after the introduction of firearms, the capable leader, like Hongi or Rauparaha, had acquired permanent power by making war a profession, and had grown into the divider of conquered lands amongst his followers. In Hawaii and in Tonga this actually occurred page 76even before the coming of Europeans. A monarchy as the head of a feudalistic aristocracy had arisen.

(15) Thus we see in the social order and in its relationship to land not merely an evolution produced by new environment, but an intermixture of primitive and more advanced systems, the patriarchal and the village-communal, the family and the tribal, the socialistic and the feudal, the oligarchic and the monarchic.