Richard Thurnwald · 1912
Richard Thurnwald’s documentary ethnographic monograph presents songs and legends collected principally in Buin, southern Bougainville, during his 1906–1909 expedition. Its central claim concerns the evidence ethnology needs: oral compositions disclose judgments, emotions, and social relationships that an observer’s descriptions cannot adequately replace. The volume moves from a methodological introduction through men’s and women’s songs to legends and interpretive discussions of ritual and thought. Vocabulary, grammar, and broader sociological investigations belong to companion volumes; here, recorded verbal expression supplies the principal route into social life.
Also nicht Urteile über die Eingeborenen, sondern solche von ihnen selbst brauchen wir, um exakte Ethnologie treiben zu können.
English translation: Thus, to practise exact ethnology, we need not judgments about the indigenous people, but judgments from them themselves.
This distinction establishes the collection’s documentary purpose. Songs and stories matter not simply as illustrations of customs already described by the ethnographer, but as evidence of what people themselves notice, value, condemn, and explain. Thurnwald nevertheless remains an active intermediary. The texts alternate with attribution, informant testimony, and extensive interpretation, while the song titles are his own inventions based on their contents. The reader therefore encounters local expression through an editorial apparatus that organizes its meanings. The demand for indigenous judgments does not eliminate ethnographic interpretation; it changes the material on which that interpretation should rest.
The men’s songs address political relationships, friendship, and sexual relationships. The women’s songs extend the corpus through initiation, marriage, courtship, fidelity, disputes, and mourning. Together, these divisions make oral composition a record of relationships under pressure: attachment and obligation, conflict and disappointment, and the public consequences of conduct. Their significance lies less in furnishing a seamless account of customary rules than in preserving particular situations in which such rules and expectations become emotionally consequential.
Den Liedern kommt darum eine Funktion zu als Ausdruck und natürlich auch als Beeinflussung „öffentlicher Meinung“.
English translation: The songs therefore have a function as an expression of, and naturally also as an influence on, “public opinion.”
The formulation gives songs a double role. They reveal collective assessments, but they also intervene in those assessments. A composition can make conduct known, direct attention toward an offender, or shape the audience’s response. Thurnwald’s concluding discussion makes this disciplinary dimension explicit:
Das Verfassen und Mitteilen solcher Lieder dient häufig der Publizierung einer als ungehörig empfundenen Handlung und soll den Betreffenden öffentlich brandmarken.
English translation: Composing and communicating such songs often serves to publicize an action perceived as improper and is intended to publicly stigmatize the person concerned.
Oral expression is thus part of the social action being studied, rather than a detached commentary upon it. Publicizing an incident can change the position of those involved. This is especially important for interpreting songs about intimacy and conflict: their accounts express situated judgments, not necessarily a community-wide consensus. Their evidentiary force comes partly from the fact that someone has chosen to communicate a grievance, attachment, or accusation in a form others can hear and repeat.
Wir erhalten dadurch Aufschluß über das Gefühlsleben und über Situationen, die wir durch bloße Beobachtungen oder direkte Befragungen gar nicht oder nur verzerrt erfahren können.
English translation: Through this we gain insight into emotional life and into situations that we cannot learn about at all, or can learn about only in distorted form, through mere observation or direct questioning.
This passage explains why collecting songs is a methodological necessity, not merely an enrichment of observational research. Their mediated form can disclose what straightforward questioning misses. Thurnwald treats emotional life as ethnographically consequential: feelings illuminate relationships and expectations that visible behaviour alone may leave obscure. At the same time, the songs’ capacity to influence opinion means that their testimony must be understood in relation to their purposes and occasions.
The legends turn from interpersonal situations toward explanations of death, celestial phenomena, and the origins of landscape features. The later tales, ritual analysis, and synthesis broaden the inquiry from what people say about one another to how they render events and forces intelligible. Thurnwald connects symbolic expression with the formation of concepts:
Deshalb scheint mir, daß die Symbolisierungen die Schwelle zur Bildung von abstrakten Ausdrücken bilden.
English translation: It therefore seems to me that symbolizations constitute the threshold to the formation of abstract expressions.
Symbolization, in this account, is a productive operation of thought. Concrete representations provide a means of articulating relationships that are not yet expressed abstractly. Thurnwald’s vocabulary places these practices within a developmental interpretation, but his analysis also seeks to identify their internal intelligibility rather than simply dismiss them as error. He accordingly disputes a familiar description of explanations of natural phenomena:
Nicht um eine „Personifikation“ der Erscheinungen handelt es sich, sondern um eine egozentrische Angleichung der die Erscheinungen hervorrufenden Kräfte.
English translation: What is involved is not a “personification” of the phenomena, but an egocentric assimilation of the forces that bring about the phenomena.
The distinction shifts attention from the apparent human form of a story to the reasoning that makes unfamiliar forces comprehensible through the subject’s own frame of reference. Across the volume, songs and legends consequently offer complementary evidence: one corpus exposes emotional relationships and public judgment, while the other reveals explanatory and symbolic operations. The work’s lasting methodological relevance lies in joining these domains through carefully contextualized oral texts. Its central tension is equally instructive: Thurnwald calls for judgments voiced by indigenous people themselves, yet arranges and interprets those voices within his own ethnological categories.
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