[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]
ECONOMIC LIFE 173 rejunction, according as the kinship groups owning them swell or diminish} Within every such plot each adult man has a patch of cultivated ground which, it is said, is “ his own ". When a boy grows up and if there be a scarcity of land, his father will divide up his own garden ground and give a portion of it to his son for the latter to till and tend. But if the population be small, and there is a sufliciency of unused land, the man will clear some of the bush and bring it under cultivation for his son, who afterwards takes it over as his own garden. No woman can be said to own land or even to hold it. Before marriage a girl will help in her father's or brother's gardens ; after marriage she will work in the garden of her husband, but after his death she cannot claim any right to continue to raise crops on it. Even a man has only a life interest in his garden. There is nothing to suggest that he has any power to alienate it either by gift or sale. When he dies his son, or if he have no son, some other member of his kinship group, inevitably takes it over. We are not told whether in the event of his leaving seveml sons, they would work this garden together or whether they divide it among themselves, leaving each to till his own part. Where there is a considerable amount of bush land in the plot owned by one of these indeterminate kinship groups, and where therefore a man has in the past cleared a new garden for his son instead of ionlygiving him a portion of his own, the father's land may on his death be passed On not to his son, who is already well provided for, but to his son‘s son. In this way gardens will sometimes be held by people of alternate not successive genera- tions in the male line. This arrangement may, however, break down at any time owing to the vicissitudes of births and deaths in the family. It is certainly more usual and regarded as the rule for cultivation rights to pass from father to son. But though it is not possible to alienate land permanently a rnan.can give another temporary rights of tillage, and in return he receives at harvest time one-half of the produce of the patch thus loaned. Generally, if not always, such leasing of land is only for the period of the agricultural year. 1 This statement is not clear. We do not know whether it means that the plots are subdivided according to the number of men in the kinship groups which own them, or according as these kinship groups themselves increase in number, which they will inevitably bend to do except where the population is stationary or on the decrease.—C. H. W.
