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MAY, 1928)
REMARKS ON THE ANDAMAN ISLANDERS AND THEIR COUNTRY
91
Culture Legends : Weapons and Implements. Here Mr. Brown leaves mythology and passes on to culture. He states (p. 383) that by his Culture Legends "the Andamanese Islander expresses his sense of his own dependence on the past," and then he says:
"It is obvious that the Andaman Islander cannot regard the ancestors as being persons exactly like himself, for they were responsible for the establishment of the social order, to which he merely conforms, and of which he has the advantage. He says, therefore, that they wero bigger men than himself, meaning by this that they were bigger mentally or spiritually, rather than physically, that they were persons endowed with powers much greater than those even of the medicine men of the present time. This explains the magical powers that are attributed to many, or indeed to all, of the ancestors."
As to the meaning of magical powers he has a significant note on p. 384: "In the last chapter it was shown that the attribution of magical force to such things as foods and human bones is simply the means by which the social values of these things are represented and recognised. Similarly here the magical powers of the anoestors are simply the representation of their social value, i.e., the social value of tradition."
The Order of Nature : Moral Laws. Mr. Brown now becomes distinctly philosophical in his argument (p. 384): “Besides the social order there is another, the order of nature, which is constantly acting upon the social order.
The Andaman Islander finds himself in an ordered world, a world subject to law, oontrolled by unseen forces. The laws are not to him what the natural laws are to the scientist of to-day, they are rather of the nature of moral laws. . . . Right or wrong mean acting in accordance with the laws of the world or in opposition to them, and this means acting in accordance with or in opposition to custom. Custom and law are indeed here two words for the same
..The forces of the world, as the Andaman Islander conceives them are not the blind mechanical forces of modern science : rather are they moral forces .... (p. 385) The law of the world thon [to him) is a moral law, its forces are moral forces, its values moral values; its order is a moral order." “This view (p. 385) of the world is the immediate and inevitable result of the experience of man in society. It is a philosophy not reached by painful intellectual effort, by the searching out of meanings and reasons and causes; it is impressed upon him in all the happenings of life, is assumed in all his actions : it needs only to be formulated. And the argument of this chapter has been that it is as the expression or formulation of this view of the world as an order regulated by law that the Legends have their meaning, fulfil their function."
..-. Function of the Legends. Mr. Brown's philosophic argument continues (p. 385): "The Legends of the Andama nese then, as I understand them, set out to give an account of how the order of the world came into existence... A fundamental character of the natural order (as of the social order) is uniformity : the same processes are for ever repoated ...... (p. 386) [The Legends) express two most important conceptions, that of uniformity (or law) and that of the dependence of the present on the past. It is the need of expressing these two conceptions that gives the Legends their function. They are not merely theoretical principles, but are both most intengely practical. ... The knowledge of what to do and what to avoid doing is what constitutes the tradition of the society, to which every individual is required to oonform."
Local Motives of the Legends. "The Legends 'set out (p. 386) to express and to justify the above two fundamental conceptions. They do so by telling how social order itself caine into existence, and how also, all those-natural phenomena that have any bearing on the social well-being came to be as they are and came to have relation to the society that they posge88. One group of facts that
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