THE SEA EAGLE AND OTHER HEROIC BIRDS OF NIDULA MYTHOLOGY Michael W. Young Australian National University

Ralph Bulmer will long be remembered for posing one of the most fruitful questions in cognitive or symbolic anthropology. At once modest and outrageous, it was a question that flew in the face of (Western) common sense. I refer, of course, to the celebrated article published prominently in Man over twenty years ago: “Why Is the Cassowary Not a Bird? ” This remarkable essay established Bulmer’s reputation as a keen student of natural history as well as a foremost scholar of ethnozoological classification, a reputation which he later consolidated by a uniquely collaborative work with Saem Majnep (1977). The Cassowary article directly inspired the thinking of many anthropologists (e.g. Tambiah 1969, Maddock 1975, Gardner 1984); the “dialogical” ethnography of Birds o f My Kalam Country provided a model which, despite much lip-service, has been emulated by all too few. In this brief contribution I take as my theme the place of certain birds in Goodenough Island (Nidula) folklore and mythology, focussing particularly on the status of the most majestic of its birds, the sea eagle Manubutu sometimes referred to as the chief (kaiwabu) of birds. Although not as “anomalous” as the cassowary, the sea eagle plays an imposing figurative role in Nidula thought, as conspicuous as its natural, hierarchical position in the skies. First, however, the cultural and ethno-omithological context of Manubutu’s habitat must be sketched. Goodenough is one of the three main continental islands of the D’Entrecasteaux group in Milne Bay Province (the Massim) of eastern Papua New Guinea. Although marginally the smallest of the three in area, Goodenough is by far the highest and thrusts awesomely to over 8,500 feet. Its ecological diversity permits an avifauna correspondingly rich and diverse, with a number of endemic species in addition to a large proportion of the mainland genera. The cassowary is absent, however, and so too are all but one (Manucodia) of the birds of paradise. The human population of Goodenough numbers about 15,000. Villages are found mainly on the coast and in the lower foothills, though traditionally people also dwelt further inland on defensible spurs and ridges. Birds were and on occasion still are hunted for their meat and their feathers, but fortunately for them the traditional sling-shot marksmanship of the islanders has long since atrophied and shotguns have always been few in number. In contrast to the extravagantly decorated headdresses of mainland Papua there was in Nidula only a modest use of plumes for self-decoration. Oddly enough, one of the most important items of dance apparel was a switch of cassowary feathers which were traded from the mainland. A common decoration still to be found is a single hornbill feather, trimmed and bent so that it bobs over the wearer’s ear. This is an explicit threat display, and the man with a hornbill feather in his hair means trouble: it is the aggressive signal of the food-fighting man intent on an abutu contest (cf. Young 1971 and 1983b:408). Neither as decoration nor as meat, however, are birds on Goodenough as important as for their cognitive “uses” in magic, folklore and mythology. More so than any other class of creature, birds are in Ldvi-Strauss’s well-worn dictum “good to think”. Most of the information I recorded about birds was contingent, haphazard and incomplete. My research interests did not extend to exhaustive indigenous taxonomies, and I investigated local knowledge of natural species only as it intruded upon my attention. The material I possess on birds, therefore, is unsystematic as well as incomplete, though I believe it represents a broad sample of what Nidula people know and believe about the various birds of their island. What follows would be better characterised as “the language and lore of certain birds” than as ethno-omithology (as Ralph Bulmer’s infinitely more systematic information can claim to be). Unless indicated otherwise, the vernacular terms are those of Kalauna, the hill village of 550 people situated in eastern Goodenough where I have spent my longest terms of fieldwork. All flying creatures (i.e. birds, bats and flying foxes) are classed as manuya. Of the 60-odd birds (or “terminal taxa”) I recorded, only a couple of dozen appear to have any particular salience in Nidula thought and ideology ("cosmology” seems too pretentious a word in this context). That is to say, about two dozen species are important as “totemic” emblems, or as possessing magical, mythological or other folkloristic significance. In talking about manuya, Kalauna people appeared to assess them in terms of a tacit, informal classification based on their social or cultural uses. This was not an ethnozoological ordering, but rather an ordering of discourse about birds, one indicative of culturally constructed perceptions concerning their social value or cultural status. Thus, most birds can be said to belong to one or more of the following “discourse” classes: (1)