ABSTRACT

Tikopia conceptions of symbolic action involved ideas of a great number of individual spirit personalities. I have shown in earlier chapters how these spirit personalities were not regarded simply as a kind of undifferentiated crowd of operators, but were arranged in a complex imaginative order of relationships, according to a set of standard classifying principles. Many of them were also endowed with personal identifying characteristics, and allocated specific localized material means of manifestation. This whole set of conceptualizations can be looked at in several ways. It was a kind of explanatory book of reference from which items could be cited to account for a whole range of events in daily life. It was a kind of code in which statements about basic physical and social relationships could be made. It was a medium for expression of emotional attitudes about human achievement, misfortune and fate, providing an anchor, a shield, an excuse, a cathartic in situations of human inadequacy. It was a regulator by reference to which resources of men and materials were disposed to meet ritual demands. It was both a liability and an asset, because while it provided a theory of events, it also required maintenance. To keep this large mass of spirit entities in being as intellectual constructs demanded some mechanism of transmission of information about them, and also some regular modes of demonstration of their existence—gods about whom people are never taught and who are never celebrated do not last long.