Читать книгу Sex and Repression in Savage Society - Bronislaw 1884-1942 Malinowski - Страница 11

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We enter now on the third stage of childhood, commencing between the ages of five and seven. At this period a child begins to feel independent, to create its own games, to seek for associates of the same age, with whom it has a tendency to roam about unencumbered by grown-up people. This is the time when play begins to pass into more definite occupations and serious life interests.

Let us follow our parallel at this stage. In Europe, entrance into school or, among the uneducated classes, some sort of preliminary apprenticeship to an economic occupation removes the child from the influence of the family. The boy or girl lose to some extent their exclusive attachment to the mother. With the boy, there frequently takes place at this period a transference of sentiment to a substitute mother, who for the time being is regarded with some of the passionate tenderness felt for the mother, but with no other feelings. Such transference must not be confused with the much later tendency of adolescent boys to fall in love with women older than themselves. At the same time, there arises a desire for independence from the all-possessive intimacy of maternal interest, which makes the child withhold its absolute confidence from the parent. Among the peasants and lower classes, the process of emancipation from the mother takes place earlier than in the higher, but it is similar in all essentials. When the mother is deeply attached to the child, especially to the boy, she is apt to feel a certain amount of jealousy and resentment at this emancipation and to put obstacles in its way. This usually makes the wrench only more painful and violent.

The children on the coral beaches of the Western Pacific show a similar tendency. This appears there even more clearly, for the absence of compulsory education and of any strict discipline at this age allows a much freer play to the natural inclinations of infantile nature. On the part of the mother there is in Melanesia, however, no jealous resentment or anxiety at the child’s new-found independence, and here we see the influence of the lack of any deep, educational interest between mother and child. At this stage, the children in the Trobriand archipelago begin to form a small juvenile community within the community. They roam about in bands, play on distant beaches or in secluded parts of the jungle, join with other small communities of children from neighbouring villages, and in all this, though they obey the commands of their child-leaders, they are almost completely independent of the elders’ authority. The parents never try to keep them back, to interfere with them in any way or to bind them to any routine. At first, of course, the family still retains a considerable hold over the child, but the process of emancipation progresses gradually and constantly in an untrammelled, natural manner.

In this there is a great difference between European conditions, where the child often passes from the intimacy of the family to the cold discipline of the school or other preliminary training, and the Melanesian state of affairs where the process of emancipation is gradual, free and pleasant.

And now what about the father at this stage? In our society—here again excluding certain modern phases of family life in Britain and America—he still represents the principle of authority within the family. Outside, at school, in the workshop, at the preliminary manual labour which the child of peasants is often set to do, it is either the father in person or his substitute who wields the power. In the higher classes at this stage, the very important process of conscious formation of paternal authority and of the father ideal takes place. The child begins now to comprehend what it had guessed and felt before—the father’s established authority as the head of the family, and his economic influence. The ideal of his infallibility, wisdom, justice, and might is usually in varying degrees and in different ways inculcated in the child by the mother or the nurse in religious and moral teaching. Now the rôle of an ideal is never an easy one, and to maintain it in the intimacy of daily life is a very difficult performance indeed, especially for one whose bad tempers and follies are not repressed by any discipline. Thus no sooner is the father ideal formed than it begins to decompose. The child feels at first only a vague malaise at his father’s bad temper or weakness, a fear of his wrath, a dim feeling of injustice, perhaps some shame when the father has a really bad outburst. Soon the typical father-sentiment is formed, full of contradictory emotions, a mixture of reverence, contempt, affection and dislike, tenderness and fear. It is at this period of childhood that the social influence due to patriarchal institutions makes itself felt in the child’s attitude towards the male parent. Between the boy and his father the rivalries of successor and superseded, and the mutual jealousies described in the previous section, crystallize more distinctly and make the negative elements of the father-to-son relation more predominant than in the case of father-to-daughter.

Among the lower classes, the process of the idealization of the father is cruder but not less important. As I have already said, the father in a typical peasant household is openly a tyrant. The mother acquiesces in his supremacy and imparts the attitude to her children, who reverence and at the same time fear the strong and brutal force embodied in their father. Here also a sentiment composed of ambivalent emotion is formed, with a distinct preference of the father for his female children.

What is the father’s rôle in Melanesia? Little need be said about it at this stage. He continues to befriend the children, to help them, to teach them what they like and as much as they like. Children, it is true, are less interested in him at this stage and prefer, on the whole, their small comrades. But the father is always there as a helpful adviser, half playmate, half protector.

Yet at this period the principle of tribal law and authority, the submission to constraint and to the prohibition of certain desirable things enters the life of a young girl or boy. But this law and constraint are represented by quite another person than the father, by the mother’s brother, the male head of the family in a matriarchal society. He it is who actually wields the potestas and who indeed makes ample use of it.

His authority, though closely parallel to that of the father among ourselves, is not exactly identical with it. First of all his influence is introduced into the child’s life much later than that of the European father. Then again, he never enters the intimacy of family life, but lives in another hut and often in a different village, for, since marriage is patrilocal in the Trobriands, his sister and her children have their abode in the village of the husband and father. Thus his power is exercised from a distance and it cannot become oppressive in those small matters which are most irksome. He brings into the life of the child, whether boy or girl, two elements: first of all, that of duty, prohibition and constraint: secondly, especially into the life of the boy, the elements of ambition, pride and social values, half of that, in fact, which makes life worth living for the Trobriander. The constraint comes in, in so far as he begins to direct the boy’s occupations, to require certain of his services and to teach him some of the tribal laws and prohibitions. Many of these have already been inculcated into the boy by the parents, but the kada (mother’s brother) is always held up to him as the real authority behind the rules.

A boy of six will be solicited by his mother’s brother to come on an expedition, to begin some work in the gardens, to assist in the carrying of crops. In carrying out these activities, in his maternal uncle’s village and together with other members of his clan, the boy learns that he is contributing to the butura of his clan; he begins to feel that this is his own village and own people; to learn the traditions, myths and legends of his clan. The child at this stage also frequently co-operates with his father, and it is interesting to note the difference in the attitude he has toward the two elders. The father still remains his intimate; he likes to work with him, assist him and learn from him; but he realizes more and more that such co-operation is based on goodwill and not on law, and that the pleasure derived from it must be its own reward, but that the glory of it goes to a clan of strangers. The child also sees his mother receiving orders from her brother, accepting favours from him, treating him with the greatest reverence, crouching before him like a commoner to a chief. He gradually begins to understand that he is his maternal uncle’s successor, and that he will also be a master over his sisters, from whom at this time he is already separated by a social taboo forbidding any intimacy.

The maternal uncle is, like the father among us, idealized to the boy, held up to him as the person who should be pleased, and who must be made the model to be imitated in the future. Thus we see that most of the elements, though not all, which make the father’s rôle so difficult in our society, are vested among the Melanesians in the mother’s brother. He has the power, he is idealized, to him the children and the mother are subjected, while the father is entirely relieved of all these odious prerogatives and characteristics. But the mother’s brother introduces the child to certain new elements which make life bigger, more interesting, and of greater appeal—social ambition, traditional glory, pride in his lineage and kinship, promises of future wealth, power, and social status.

It must be realized that at the time when our European child starts to find its way in our complex social relations, the Melanesian girl or boy also begins to grasp the principle of kinship which is the main foundation of the social order. These principles cut across the intimacy of family life and rearrange for the child the social world which up to now consisted for him of the extended circles of family, further family, neighbours and village community. The child now learns that he has to distinguish above and across these groups two main categories. The one consists of his real kinsmen, his veyola. To these belong in the first place his mother, his brothers and sisters, his maternal uncle and all their kinsmen. These are people who are of the same substance or the ‘same body’ as himself. The men he has to obey, to co-operate with and to assist in work, war and personal quarrels. The women of his clan and of his kinship are strictly tabooed sexually for him. The other social category consists of the strangers or ‘outsiders’, tomakava. By this name are called all those people who are not related by matrilineal ties, or who do not belong to the same clan. But this group comprises also the father and his relations, male and female, and the women whom he may marry or with whom he may have love affairs. Now these people, and especially the father, stand to him in a very close personal relation which, however, is entirely ignored by law and morality. Thus we have on the one side the consciousness of identity and kinship associated with social ambitions and pride, but also with constraint and sexual prohibition; and on the other, in the relation to the father and his relatives, free friendship and natural sentiment as well as sexual liberty, but no personal identity or traditional bonds.