The Dodo Cults like the famous cargo cults of Melanesiaa are an indigenous response to social charlges which indirectly have been fostered by Western social and cultural ageilcies. However, unlike some cargo cults in Melanesia, the Dodo Cult, at least as manifest irl Irigwe, is not an attempt to attain the political power and material glories of the western world. Instead, one of the Dodo Cult's principal aims is explicitly that of assuring the health and well being of cultists, particularly of their infants and small children. A secondary, but crucial, function of the cult is to decrease the tendency for wives to shift residence to other husbands, therely increasing marriage stability. Irigwe men, when discussing the importance of the Dedo Cult universally view it as a way of helping control disease, and some of them also say it helps keep wives in residence.2 The Irigwe, an agricultural tribe of around I7,000 people, with its own distinctive language and culturey was first pacified by the British in I905. The tribe has been increasingly exposed to European contact since then, and as of I965 about 3 per cent of the Irigwe regard themselves as Christians. Nevertheless) the large majority of the Irigwe, male and female, young and old, still pass most of their everyday lives guided and fully engaged by the circle of agricultural, domestic, and ceremonial activities prescribed by the traditional Irigwe calendar and by their time-honored notions of social responsibility and the '<good life. Irigwe traditionally had no tribal chief, and lacked any formalized political hierarchy as such. Instead the tribe was subdivided into 25 ritual units or sections' f rekla;). Each section had responsibility for one or another ritual specialty of importance to the entire tribe. The 25 Irigwe ritual sections openly competed with one another, bothin taking wives from other sections in secondary marriage, and also in trying to have the greatest number of heroes, i.e., men who had gained recognition for killing dangerous animals classed as ('big game, or for taking the head of an enemy tribesman in a headhunting expedition. Thus it is striking that prolonged inter-sect;on squabbles were rare, and that inter-sectior feuding and homicide w-ere unheard of. Two factors were, and have remained until recently, crucial to this traditional tribal unity and freedom from feuding. Firstn the 25 sections are
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Jul 1, 1979
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