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It was 1957 before I could return again to Kili, intending
to conduct research on this matter by identifying family groups of
the more extreme convictions and comparing the youngsters in each
group as to their developing attitudes, at the same time trying to
learn something of the innovative process involved.
Before I had
been on Kili two days I could see that much had happened to the
community since 1949, and that my first problem would be to identify
and relate groups of Kilians to my remembrance of them a decade
earlier, and to try to comprehend the nature of new groups which
had emerged around new activities which constituted part of the
community's total adjustmmt to Kili in that period. I must say
that this job took the entire summer, and I still have to guess at
what happens to the younger generation.
My principal task in 1957, apart from reconstructing the
sequence of events since 1949, was to conduct a household survey:
a series of intensive interviews with the occupants of the thirty
house groups that made up the community.
In this survey I reviewed
systematically a number of topics, namely, the nature of use or
other participation in activities relating to water supply, personal
bathing, fishing canoes, copra driers, cooking hearths, livestock,
retail stores which depended on a central wholesale outlet, household composition, and an emerging land tenure system. The material
when analyzed confirms my general impression at the time that a
number of profound and persistent changes are taking place in the
social organization of the ex-bikini community, and that some of
these changes are completely unsuspected by the people themselves
as revealed in conversations which I had with the council of elders
shortly before my final departure from Kili.
I intend now to present some features of this change.
I do
not have time this morning to explain the reasons for the change
which I have observed;
in fact,
I am not quite sure in some cases
just what has happened, and will have to go back eventually to ask
more questions of the people of Kili. When they lived on Bikini
they operated within a system which gave priority to matrilineal
lineage status in regard to residence, economic cooperation, distribution and consumption of food and other resources, and inheritance
of real property rights. Male representatives of some 11 lineages
acted together, although with some ranking of position, to provide
an effective community organization.
In other words the matrilocal
household, representing usually two or three house groups, and the
property-holding matrilineal lineage were basic for Bikini social
interaction.
On Xili in 1957 I found 30 occupied houses strung out in a
line generally paralleling the beach on the north-central side of
the island.
Two of these wnere used by a resident Marshallese
churchman, and fall outside the <ilian village system in most
matters.
The remainder were nearly equally divided between a
western and an eastern district which has little relevanee for our
analysis here.
The first question I asked had to do with water
supply.
On 4 coral island such as Kili the only water for human
use is rainwater or well water.
The people had three cisterns,
one Of them in poor condition and not suitable for drinking or