"While the first white fellas to see them might have considered the Motu ignorant, subsequent experience has taught us otherwise. That experience could be brought to bear on our understanding of peasants wear[ing] the bones of the ancestors through their noses, and caper[ing] around naked apart from ferret pelts and strings of ritual turnips? Especially at harvest, when they howled barely understandable spontaneous invocations to the rain gods?"

Aha Rowan, intriguing anthropological analogy. So you appear to be implying that there may perhaps be some approximation of 'meaning' and furthermore that those peasants even 'understood' themselves, the ancestral meaning contained in their naive attempts at song?
Interesting, though I'm more tempted by the theory posited below, that these hearty be-turnip'd rustics intuited their songs by direct animistic communion with the powers of nature...