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But and the more you study the Polynesian, the subtler are his strange laws and taboos the main provision in the Arioi constitution was undoubtedly conceived in the desire to prevent over-population. Pepe, the woman of Tuatini, had returned to the ways of the Arioi because her husband had adopted the white convention of jealousy and monogamy.
Frida felt the conversation was beginning to travel beyond her ideas of propriety, so she checked its excursions by answering gravely: "Oh, Mr. Ingledew, you don't understand our code of morals. But I'm sure you don't find your East End young ladies so fearfully particular?" "They certainly haven't quite so many taboos," Bertram answered quietly. "But that's always the way in tabooing societies.
Aside from their propensity for sharp trading, their bigoted refusal to regard anybody not of their creed as more than half human, and the maze of dietary and other taboos in which they hid from social contact with others, made them generally disliked. After their ship had gotten into orbit, three of them came down to do business.
The red lights went out and Mryna was imprisoned again in the crushing darkness. A terror of the taboos she had defied swept her mind. She began to scream, but the sound was lost in the roar of the motors. Suddenly it was over. The god-car lurched into something hard. Mryna was thrown against the ceiling and she hung there, weightless.
When we consider the enormous amount of suffering and disease, both of mind and body, arising from the sex-suppression of which I have just spoken, especially among women, we see that mere unreasoning taboos which possibly had their place and use in the past can be tolerated no longer.
"Before we can undertake the calm and impartial investigation of any social problem, we must first of all free ourselves from all those sexual prejudices which are so vehement and violent and which so completely distort our vision of the external world. Society as a whole has yet to fight its way through an almost impenetrable forest of sexual taboos."
Nothing dynamic holds the recommendations together the mass of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito and ignore the marsh. The evils of prostitution are seen as a series of episodes, each of which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and jailed.
Among the Nandi some men are forbidden to hunt, make traps, or dig pits for game; these men, it would seem, are supposed to be, for ceremonial reasons, antipathetic to the animals to be hunted, as, on the other hand, there are men who attract game. The taboos of food and other things imposed are doubtless intended to guard against malefic spirits or mana.
These restrictions and elaborate rituals which surround marriage and family life may appropriately be termed institutional taboos. They include the property and division of labour taboos in the survival forms already mentioned, as well as other religious and social restrictions and prohibitions. The foundations of family life go far back of the changes of recent centuries.
The modern preaching concerning woman's sphere, for example, is an obvious descendant of the old taboos which enforced the division of labour between the sexes. Just as it formerly was death for a woman to approach her husband's weapons, so it has for a long time been considered a disgrace for her to attempt to compete with man in his line of work.
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