The Manaeba

The Sciences

A Place In The Manaeba

The Polynesian Society has

recently republished as a memoir,

H. E. Maude’s paper bn “The Evolution of the Gilbertese Boti”. This was originally pub lished in the Society’s journal earlier this year after it had been presented at the 10th Pacific

Science Congress.

The paper is an attempt to analyse the complex cultural traits (which the Gilbertese themselves lump together under the term boti), by the critical use of Gilbertese historical narratives and by field notes made by Govern ment officials in the 20 years between 1918 and 1938.

The historical sense of the Gilbertese is better developed than ours, says Maude in his introduction.

“Whereas we can lead satisfactory lives without so much as knowing the names of our grand-parents, the Gilbertese cannot, or more correctly could not, since the very title deed of his lands and his place in the social and economic life of the com munity was dependent on his know ledge of his ancestry”.

The literal meaning of the word boti is “a place in the maneaba reserved for the members of the clan”; and a maneaba, in physical fact, is the huge meeting house that dominates the community life.

The maneaba, to a Gilbertese, however, has a spiritual function beyond a mere meeting place; it was “a tabernacle of ancestors in the male line; a sort of social map where a man’s group or clan could be recognised the moment he took his seat. . . .”

In plain layman’s language, the memoir is an attempt to trace the evolution of the Gilbertese clan. (Available from the Polynesian Society, Box 5195, Wellington, NZ, at 6/3 NZ, posted.)

Pacific Botany:

The Pacific Scientific Information Centre of the Bishop Museum has issued a list of persons working on, or actively interested in, the plants of the Pacific area. Called Pacific botanists, 1963, it gives the names, addresses and special interests of about 1,250 people interested in some phase of Pacific botany. The

list is followed by an index to the scientists’ subjects and areas of in terest.

The project has been under the direction of the manager of the Centre, Mr. E. H. Bryan, Jr. The book is available from the Centre at/SI, post paid. /Also for botanists is Woody Flora aiwan, by Dr. Hui-Lin Li, of the University of Pennsylvania. This is a major work of 974 pages, with 370 drawings. It is of interest to Pacific botanists as many of the species on Taiwan (Formosa) are also widespread in the Pacific. It is published by the Livingston Pub lishing Co., Narberth, Pennsylvania, at $1£.75.

Bibliography:

ANEW bibliography on Pacific Islands matters has been pub lished by The Scarecrow Press Inc., 257 Park Avenue South, New York 10. It is produced offset and it makes a strongly-bound book of more than 424 pages, and sells for $lO.

The bibliography, by Floyd Cam

mack and Shiro Saito, is based on a selection of materials in the Pacific section of the University of Hawaii, and it’s a book for real students of the Pacific. It covers a great deal of ground and pays much attention to sources in manuscript, typescript and microfilm. It lists copies of corres pondence, government and missionary documents and such things as con sular dispatches and ships’ logs— material normally available only to scholars able to dig it out in various archives.

Most of the entries for printed works are from titles published since the completion in 1948 of C. R. H.

Taylor’s A Pacific Bibliography. Du plication of Taylor’s entries has been avoided where possible, and the bibliography concentrates primarily on Pacific matters in the social sciences including education and

languages.-

SI.