Page 5
members. Most of these came into being just after the cash settle;
ment, and reflects, I think, a call upon traditional rules of
supplies
of
scarcity
which
in
situation
new
organization to meet the
Of particular
and possible inequities of distribution threatened.
the
retails,
additional
5
of
interest is the subseouent formation
was
interest
investment
the
last one in June 1957, in which
restricted to the membership of a primary family with no suggestion
This is the direction of change on Kili at
of lineage association.
present. No restriction of sales was noted, each retail being open
to anyone on the island, but in practice the goods seemed to be
consumed almost entirely by members of an investment group, and few
managers were able to report a profit.
We come back now to the house groups as residence units.
Some are large,
comprising several nuclear families,
others are
more limited. These are many instances where house groups located
next to each other have close lineage or affinal ties for potential
cooperation.
But by no means all of this potential was realized
in 1957, in fact, much less than I had observed earlier in 1949 on
Kili and the year before that on Rongerik Atoll.
The activities we
have reviewed this moming involve contiguity of residence as an
important basis for cooperation, in some
importantly by lineage ties.
The degree
become important to Kilians is best seen
into land holdings for the production of
instances supplemented
to which residence has
in their division of Kili
copra.
In 1954 the Council under the leadership of Juda, elected
magistrate and hereditary leader of the community, decided to allot
land parcels to house groups on the basis of membership size and
acreage planted to coconut trees by foreign management prior to
world war II.
Certain inequities of land-ownership by lineages on
bikini were noted by the Council, where size of lineage membership
had grown too large for inherited acreage and where other lineages
were land rich.
Agreement was reached by the Council on the new
method which would equalize things.
A date was chosen for making
the allotment, and on that day all occupants of each house were
vested with an equal interest in a certain parcel of land.
The
head of the house (in several instances, of a complex of such house
groups) was named the alab, an old term on Bikini for headman status,
and he was accorded the right to $1.00 as the alab share on every
100-pound sack of copra produced on that land.
The remainder of the
money from the sale, usually four times that amount was to be
divided equally among the house occupants associated with the land,
regardless of who produced the copra.
Included in such land-owning
groups, according to actual residence, were spouses and the children
of males who ordinarily would not be included in lineage membership.
In those houses (or cooperating groups of houses) where the lineage
principle had contributed to the existing residence pattern, the
lineage was represented in ownership.
In many, if not most, houses
however, the lineage principle was beclouded by one of bilateral
relationship.
Persons who subsequently married or for other reasons
changed residence did not change their land association. New members
by birth were arbitrariby assigned by the Council.
The inheritance
or land rights and the succession to alab-ship is confused.
Some
Kilians would try to follow the traditional matrilineal rules, but