Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/317

is represented by those who have it, and by those who do not. By the local men it was obviously caricatured as a shameful and savage habit; the men's derisive laughter and amused exaggerations were a clear indication of how superior they felt to the benighted heathen who practised it. But the southern visitors, some of whom had come from Okayaulo and Bwadela, the home of the yausa, took, in a later conversation, a different view, showing no embarrassment whatever. They told me boastfully that no stranger ever dared to enter their district at that time, that they themselves were the only people free to walk about, that their women were the best garden-weeders and the most powerful people in the island. The two districts have been in contact for centuries, they speak the same language and have an identical culture. Yet neither the custom of yausa nor the mental attitude which characterizes it have begun to diffuse. The mental attitudes are correlated and fit into each other, but each district adheres to its own prerogative of superiority, which consists in contradicting the other's point of view.