b'by a high-ranking chief the decorated chiefs house is built in the bikubaku together with his yam-house, which is higher and more decorated than other yam-houses. Kiriwina society is divided into four matrilineal clans (kumula). Each clan is made up of people who claim descent from a common male ancestor. The female siblings of that ancestor are each the mother in whom a subclan or family line (dala) originated and ranking within each dala is determined by the genealogies of the women from whom they came. Legends state the birth order of siblings in each ancestral family.Marriage is exogamous and up to about World War II the marriage of two people within one clan was considered incestuous. Nowadays such marriages occasionally take place. Each clan has two or three chiefly subclans, collectively termed gweguya chiefs. Members of other subclans are collectively termed tokai commoners.The Kiriwina people are gardeners and fishermen. Central to their gardening is the production of an annual crop of yams, which are stored and used throughout the year, supplemented by other garden produce. The main variety of yam is the taitu (Dioscorea esculenta), which stores well.The annual harvest of taitu yams is made in July or August. Coastal villages have fishing rights, which vary in extent and/or nature. One of the two villages adjacent to my dwelling, the Mlosaida village of about 300 people, catches fish in the shallows and gathers other marine life exposed at low tide. The other village, Kavataria, a community of more than 1200, has rights to fish in deeper waters, and often goes out as a fleet of canoes to fish. The Kavataria people are skilled in laying long nets and in surrounding schools of fish and scooping them up with hand-nets. Sometimes an inland village will come to a fishing village and offer an advance payment of garden produce to claim the entire catch of a days fishing by the fleet.The dialects of Kiriwina The Kiriwina language is spoken not only by the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, but also by the inhabitants of the Lusancay Islands to the west, and the Marshall Bennet Islands to the east of the Trobriands. Eleven dialects (kaigila) are identified by the people. Dialect differences are mainly phonological, and all dialects are mutually intelligible. Map 1 shows the location of the eight dialects spoken in the Trobriand Islands. This dictionary records the Kavataria dialect.Although this is not the one with the most speakers (which is the Kilivila dialect spoken in the north of Kiriwina Island), yet it is the one which Kiriwina people prefer for literary use, as the first vernacular education was conducted in that dialect beginning in 1894 and continuing today.A meeting of 60 Kiriwina people from different dialect areas was held in 1970 to select the dialect they preferred for their Bible and for literary work, and that meeting voted unanimously in favour of kaigi Kavataria.10'