13. SINGING, DANCING, ENTERTAINMENT
Play-acting
Play-acting was widely popular among traditional Andamanese to the point where it sometimes not only supplemented but almost replaced language: instead of explaining a situation in words, it was acted out with only the odd word here and there by way of explanation. Another form of play-acting took place when, for example, hunters would return to camp looking tired, disappointed and without game. They would sit down and refuse to talk to anyone. After a while one hunter quietly told one of the youngsters who had remained back in camp that pigs could be found in such and such a nearby place. The boys immediately went out, looked for and found these and could bring them back in triumph. Women and older people would all playfully pretend immense relief at the news, all dissolving in helpless laughter. Older people, of course, could see through the hunters' pretense and knew from experience whether a hunt had been successful or not. Closer to the modern idea of sport were the competitions that took place whenever there were enough people willing to play. They would be about who could throw stones furthest or highest, could paddle his canoe fastest, swim and dive furthest, deepest or longest. Arrow shooting competitions involved rolling a soft round object (a root or tuber) down a hill with the competitors shooting at the moving object. These competitive games were limited to children and males. The women did not take part in such games but preferred the village gossip.
Children games
Children organized sham (fingiert) feasts with cooked small fish and crabs in a game called gab-maknga where the food was presented in an imitation of grown-up jeg banquets. Cat's Cradle (Fadenspiel) was widely known and toy canoes were sometimes carved by fathers for their sons who then conducted toy canoe races with them.
Rather more serious were the toy bows and arrows that all boys received from their fathers. These were toys only in size and intended not so much for playing about with (although the boys, of course, played with them most enthusiastically) than for exercise, in preparation for the coming realities of an adult hunting life. Toy bows were not just scaled-down versions of the adult bow; they seem to have had their own traditional lineage separate and different from that of adult bows. The south Great Andamanese toy bow, for instance, was of a form intermediate between the adult bow of the Onge and that of the southern Great Andamans.
No Andamanese group played board or card games or to have shown the remotest interest; the Andamanese character was not conducive to this kind of past-time. A wooden board found on North Sentinel island closely resembles a chess board with 8 x 8 squares made up from scratched dotted lines, each alternative square filled with dots, the others left empty. It is highly unlikely that this was Sentineli work and much more likely that it was made on a passing ship, fell overboard and washed ashore on the island.
The chief adult entertainment, however, has never been games, competitions or play-acting but the eating, singing and dancing of a jeg. As far as traditional Andamanese were concerned, there was nothing to beat a really good jeg.
