•  
  •  

16. IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH


Primitive medicine, in the minds of many people in industrialized countries, is associated with magic mutterings, wild dancing, medicine men and general mumbo-jumbo. These clichés are even more misleading in the case of the Andamanese than they are in other cases. The Andamanese did have medicine men but their role was limited, there were few charms and there was little obvious ritual. Disease was regarded as the work of evil spirits to be fought by remarkably down-to-earth methods, helped along by some quiet ritual.

The early observers reported rational remedies against sickness and injury and noted the absence of ritual but they hardly ever looked (and given their times and circumstances, could not look) into the system of beliefs that was behind the rational practices that they saw. Only after the 1950s when Indian scientists started to investigate the beliefs and practices of the Onge did it become clear just how complex the beliefs were that governed so much of Andamanese behavior. It is a sobering thought, no less chastening for being well-known in theory if not in practice, that we may all observe things that take place before our eyes but see only the part we want to see or that our upbringing allows us to see.

If we set aside the religious beliefs hovering in the background, much of the traditional Andamanese medical practices are strikingly rational and curiously modern. No doubt, the observant Andamanese knew as much about the human body as they knew about the medicinal plants around them. Snakebite, for example, was treated in what has been called an incipient immuno-biological approach or anti-body therapy: the affected limb was tied with a tourniquet of lianas and the site of the bite cut out. A snakeskin was then applied to the wound together with some snake fat, followed sometimes by scarification and burning out of the wound.

Cruel and barbarous as Andamanese attitudes often were towards strangers, towards members of their own local group relations were marked by kindness. Old people, the incurably sick and children were all looked after with great care and attention. They did not recognize "useless" members of their society and no-one was neglected or left alone to die as long as they stayed within their own local group.

Medicine as practiced by one of he world's most technologically primitive people could not be other than simple. Portman in the late 19th century recognized this when he reprinted an early description by Mr. Corbyn of Andamanese medicine with comments of his own (here marked in italics) added:

They suffer most from coughs and cold, ague, fever, and severe headache. It is thought that their "tattooing" is for a sanitary purpose, for they always wish to do it to their People when they are suffering form any illness. (Mr. Corbyn confounds the "bleeding" which is done in sickness to relieve inflammation, and "tattooing" which is for ornament only - M.V.P.). As a remedy for illness it is a very barbarous and cruel one. (No doubt, but what would the doctors in Europe fifty years before have said to Mr. Corbyn for this remark - M.V.P.).

We have mentioned that charms were rare. In fact, there was only one, the necklace made of human, occasional animal, bones called chauga-ta.

Among Great Andamanese ancestral skulls, among Onge lower mandibles were carried around tied to the wearer's neck with string. According to the Andamanese themselves, such a necklace was a sign of respect towards their ancestors but they also thought that the bone ornaments gave protection against evil spirits and disease. While the jawbone among Onge had an important medical function (besides much else), the function of the skull among Great Andamanese is much more obscure. It is difficult to believe that the Great Andamanese, who otherwise regarded human bones as a major defense against disease and treated animal skulls with considerable reverence, should have carried around ancestral skulls merely as decorative souvenirs without any practical medical or spiritual function as has been claimed. In view of the role that human bones played among the much better documented Onge, it is likely that they had a similar role among the Great Andamanese.

The Onge exhumed the bodies of buried relatives after all flesh had decayed to make ornaments of the remaining bones. These were kept in a special basket and moved with the family as it ranged seasonally over the hunting territories. In case of sickness, the bones were taken out of their basket and worn by the sick person. Among Onge a human jawbone was taken out of its basket at a death. From the funeral feast until the following full moon, the chief mourner wore such a jawbone. Unlike the Great Andamanese, however, the Onge did not wear their ancestral jawbones without a specific reason and did not give them away as gifts, retaining a much clearer distinction between decorative and magic functions.

With all this evidence for at least some magic and protective powers, not to mention ancestral significance, thought to reside in human bones, the Great Andamanese custom of wearing ancestral skulls for decoration and giving them away as gifts in such rapid succession that many wearers had no idea whose skull they were carrying, strikes non-Great Andamanese as peculiar. The bones of important food animals we regarded as equally efficacious as human bones. Nor need human bones be those of an adult or of someone recently deceased. The bones of children were thought to heal as efficiently as those of the long-dead. However, dead strangers were cut up and burnt, thrown into the sea or thrown into the bushes or at best buried in unmarked shallow graves:

the body of an enemy, stranger, or captive child would be thrown into the sea or buried sans cérémonie, as the bones would never be in request.

We find the well-developed Andamanese sense of "we" and "them" wide awake, in life as in death.

Whether the contradictory reports of the early observers regarding the significance of human bone ornaments is a result of the Andamanese sense of privacy, their sense of mischief or whether it had other reasons, we shall probably never know with final certainty.

Isolated from the outside world, the Andamanese lived, if not lives free from disease and accident, so at least lives menaced by only a few of the major killer diseases that humanity as a whole is heir to. It would be interesting to know what diseases were endemic in the Andamans before around 1800 as his could provide us with an important clue about when major diseases reached Southeast Asia. The fact that malaria was widespread among Andamanese, to the point even that they seem to have developed a certain degree of immunity against it, implies a very ancient lineage of this scourge. Diseases known to have been common in the Andamans before 1800 are, with their Aka-Bea names, (1) malaria diddirya, (2) catarrh ngirib, (3) coughs odag, (4) rheumatism mol, (5) tuberculosis, (6) pneumonia, and (7) heart disease. Oddly enough, among the Onge, the only Andamanese group that had almost certainly known some contact with the outside world before the arrival of the British, tuberculosis was unknown.

The remedies available to traditional Andamanese were widely known and could be applied by anyone. There were no specialized healers or shamans with secret knowledge. Children learnt from their parents what herbs to use in what way against what ills. Some were more skilled and talented at healing than others but all but the youngest could offer help against the aches, pains and accidents of a primitive existence.

There were nevertheless medicine men - and rarely women - known in Aka Jeru as oko-jumu and in Aka Bea as oko-paiad. They were credited with powers and influence over the spirits that produced and cured disease. Their role in medicine and in healing does not seem to have been a central one, which does not mean that they were not important. They were thought capable of crippling and even killing people which laid them open to the vengeance of those who thought that they had been affected by evil magic and who might plot revenge on them. There was no clear line, nor any sort of structured education, leading to the "position" of oko-jumu. It was more in the nature of a talent that some possessed and others did not. The status of a medicine man or woman depended on how many people he or she could convince of his or her special talents. As usual in the Andamans, the matter is confused; as one observer noted around 1907:

​​​​​​​

image-7879605-0402spa21.jpg
image-7879614-0402spa23.jpg