The FZD of love—

and how to get it

Would you marry your FZD? A New Guinea Fore man wouldn’t, although he might settle for his

Mbd.

What’s more, his gBW, his IBW, his step-Z or his half-Z are all tambu in the marriage sense. All this and even more fascinating informa tion is contained in a new book called Pigs, Pearlshells and Women, edited by R. M. Glasse and M. J.

Meggitt and written as a combined effort by American and Australian university anthropologists.

It thus isn’t a PhD thesis book— of which we have had a recent avalanche —but a symposium on paper about marriage in the New Guinea Highlands.

With its bright coloured cover and journalistic title it will probably get a lot of people in; people who, while they might nut out that MBD is mother’s-brother’s-daughter, will go to their graves wondering what kind of marital gymnastics could produce a FZD. A more meaningful title— that is, meaningful to anthropologists —might be The Z factor in New Guinea Highlands Marriage.

The book abounds in kinship tables and other devices beloved of anthropologists but, as this book was presumably written for academics, the havoc they cause in the layman’s mind is of small importance. How ever, apart from the jargon and the tables, even the non-academic living in the Highlands will find that a great deal of the information is interesting as background material.

The 10 areas covered vary in their contact with Europeans but all have had some. The areas range from the Kon d a Valley north of Mt.

Wilhelmina in West Irian, eastwards to the Markham Divide. Marriage customs vary as much as the country itself.—JT.

(Pigs, Pearlshells And Women.

Published by Prentice-Hall, New Jersey. $A4.45).