Читать книгу Sex and Repression in Savage Society - Bronislaw 1884-1942 Malinowski - Страница 7

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The best way to examine this first problem—in what manner the ‘family complex’ is influenced and modified by the constitution of the family in a given society—is to enter concretely into the matter, to follow up the formation of the complex in the course of typical family life, and to do it comparatively in the case of different civilizations. I do not propose here to survey all forms of human family, but shall compare in detail two types, known to me from personal observation: the patrilineal family of modern civilization, and the matrilineal family of certain island communities in North-Western Melanesia. These two cases, however, represent perhaps the two most radically different types of family known to sociological observation, and will thus serve our purpose well. A few words will be necessary to introduce the Trobriand Islanders of North-Eastern New Guinea (or North-Western Melanesia) who will form the other term of our comparison, besides our own culture.

These natives are matrilineal, that is, they live in a social order in which kinship is reckoned through the mother only, and succession and inheritance descend in the female line. This means that the boy or girl belongs to the mother’s family, clan and community: the boy succeeds to the dignities and social position of the mother’s brother, and it is not from the father but from the maternal uncle or maternal aunt, respectively, that a child inherits its possessions.

Every man and woman in the Trobriands settles down eventually to matrimony, after a period of sexual play in childhood, followed by general licence in adolescence, and later by a time when the lovers live together in a more permanent intrigue, sharing with two or three other couples a communal ‘bachelor’s house’. Matrimony, which is usually monogamous, except with chiefs, who have several wives, is a permanent union, involving sexual exclusiveness, a common economic existence, and an independent household. At first glance it might appear to a superficial observer to be the exact pattern of marriage among ourselves. In reality, however, it is entirely different. To begin with, the husband is not regarded as the father of the children in the sense in which we use this word; physiologically he has nothing to do with their birth, according to the ideas of the natives, who are ignorant of physical fatherhood. Children, in native belief, are inserted into the mother’s womb as tiny spirits, generally by the agency of the spirit of a deceased kinswoman of the mother.^[1] Her husband has then to protect and cherish the children, to ‘receive them in his arms’ when they are born, but they are not ‘his’ in the sense that he has had a share in their procreation.

The father is thus a beloved, benevolent friend, but not a recognized kinsman of the children. He is a stranger, having authority through his personal relations to the child, but not through his sociological position in the lineage. Real kinship, that is identity of substance, ‘same body’, exists only through the mother. The authority over the children is vested in the mother’s brother. Now this person, owing to the strict taboo which prevents all friendly relations between brothers and sisters, can never be intimate with the mother, or therefore with her household. She recognizes his authority, and bends before him as a commoner before a chief, but there can never be tender relations between them. Her children are, however, his only heirs and successors, and he wields over them the direct potestas. At his death his worldly goods pass into their keeping, and during his lifetime he has to hand over to them any special accomplishment he may possess—dances, songs, myths, magic and crafts. He also it is who supplies his sister and her household with food, the greater part of his garden produce going to them. To the father, therefore, the children look only for loving care and tender companionship. Their mother’s brother represents the principle of discipline, authority, and executive power within the family.^[2]

The bearing of the wife towards her husband is not at all servile. She has her own possessions and her own sphere of influence, private and public. It never happens that the children see their mother bullied by the father. On the other hand, the father is only partially the bread-winner, and has to work mainly for his own sisters, while the boys know that when they grow up they in turn will have to work for their sisters’ households.

Marriage is patrilocal: that is, the girl goes to join her husband in his house and migrates to his community, if she comes from another, which is in general the case. The children therefore grow up in a community where they are legally strangers, having no right to the soil, no lawful pride in the village glory; while their home, their traditional centre of local patriotism, their possessions, and their pride of ancestorship are in another place. Strange combinations and confusion arise, associated with this dual influence.

From an early age boys and girls of the same mother are separated in the family, owing to the strict taboo which enjoins that there shall be no intimate relations between them, and that above all any subject connected with sex should never interest them in common. It thus comes about that though the brother is really the person in authority over the sister, the taboo forbids him to use this authority when it is a question of her marriage. The privilege of giving or withholding consent, therefore, is left to the parents, and the father—her mother’s husband—is the person who has most authority, in this one matter of his daughter’s marriage.

The great difference in the two family types which we are going to compare is beginning to be clear. In our own type of family we have the authoritative, powerful husband and father backed up by society.^[3] We have also the economic arrangement whereby he is the bread-winner, and can—nominally at least—withhold supplies or be generous with them at his will. In the Trobriands, on the other hand, we have the independent mother and her husband, who has nothing to do with the procreation of the children, and is not the bread-winner, who cannot leave his possessions to the children, and has socially no established authority over them. The mother’s relatives on the other hand are endowed with very powerful influence, especially her brother, who is the authoritative person, the producer of supplies for the family, and whose possessions the sons will inherit at his death. Thus the pattern of social life and the constitution of the family are arranged on entirely different lines from those of our culture.

It might appear that while it would be interesting to survey the family life in a matrilineal society, it is superfluous to dwell on our own family life, so intimately known to everyone of us and so frequently recapitulated in recent psycho-analytic literature. We might simply take it for granted. But first of all, it is essential in a strict comparative treatment to keep the terms of the comparison clearly before our eyes; and then, since the matrilineal data to be given here have been collected by special methods of anthropological field work, it is indispensable to cast the European material into the same shape, as if it had been observed by the same methods and looked at from the anthropological point of view. I have not, as stated already, found in any psycho-analytic account any direct and consistent reference to the social milieu, still less any discussion of how the nuclear complex and its causes vary with the social stratum in our society. Yet it is obvious that the infantile conflicts will not be the same in the lavish nursery of the wealthy bourgeois as in the cabin of the peasant, or in the one-room tenement of the poor working-man. Now just in order to vindicate the truth of the psycho-analytic doctrine, it would be important to consider the lower and the ruder strata of society, where a spade is called a spade, where the child is in permanent contact with the parents, living and eating in the same room and sleeping in the same bed, where no ‘parent substitute’ complicates the picture, no good manners modify the brutality of the impact, and where the jealousies and petty competitions of daily life clash in hardened though repressed hostility.^[4]

It may be added that when we study the nuclear complex and its bed-rock of social and biological actuality in order to apply it to the study of folk-lore, the need of not neglecting the peasant and the illiterate classes is still more urgent. For the popular traditions originated in a condition more akin to that of the modern Central and Eastern European peasant, or of the poor artisan, than to that of the overfed and nervously overwrought people of modern Vienna, London, or New York.

In order to make the comparison stand out clearly I shall divide the history of childhood into periods, and treat each of them separately, describing and comparing it in both societies. The clear distinction of stages in the history of family life is important in the treatment of the nuclear complex, for psycho-analysis—and here really lies one of its chief merits—has brought to light the stratification of the human mind, and shown its rough correspondence to the stages in the child’s development. The distinct periods of sexuality, the crises, the accompanying repressions and amnesias in which some memories are relegated to the unconscious—all these imply a clear division of the child’s life into periods.^[5] For the present purpose it will be enough to distinguish four periods in the development of the child, defined by biological and sociological criteria.

1. Infancy, in which the baby is dependent for its nourishment on the mother’s breast and for safety on the protection of the parent, in which he cannot move independently nor articulate his wishes and ideas. We shall reckon this period as ranging from birth to the time of weaning. Among savage peoples, this period lasts from about two to three years. In civilized communities it is much shorter—generally about one year only. But it is better to take the natural landmarks to divide the stages of childhood. The child is at this time physiologically bound up with the family.

2. Babyhood, the time in which the offspring, while attached to the mother and unable to lead an independent existence, yet can move, talk, and freely play round about her. We shall reckon this period to take up three or four years, and thus bring the child to the age of about six. This term of life covers the first gradual severing of the family bonds. The child learns to move away from the family and begins to be self-sufficient.

3. Childhood, the attainment of relative independence, the epoch of roving about and playing with other children. This is the time also when in all branches of humanity and in all classes of a society the child begins in some way or other to become initiated into full membership of the community. Among some savages, the preliminary rites of initiation begin. Among others and among our own peasants and working people, especially on the Continent, the child begins to be apprenticed to his future economic life. In Western European and American communities children begin their schooling at this time. This is the period of the second severing from family influences, and it lasts till puberty, which forms its natural term.

4. Adolescence, between physiological puberty and full social maturity. In many savage communities, this epoch is encompassed by the principal rites of initiation, and in other tribes it is the epoch in which tribal law and order lay their claim on the youth and on the maiden. In modern civilized communities it is the time of secondary and higher schooling, or else of the final apprenticeship to the life task. This is the period of complete emancipation from the family atmosphere. Among savages and in our own lower strata it normally ends with marriage and the foundation of a new family.

[1]	See the writer’s The Father in Primitive Psychology (Psyche Miniatures), 1927, and “Baloma, Spirits of the Dead”, Journ. R. Anthrop. Inst., 1916.

[2]	For an account of the strange economic conditions of these natives, see the writer’s “Primitive Economics” in Economic Journal, 1921, and Argonauts of the Western Pacific, chapters ii and vi. The legal side has been fully discussed in Crime and Custom in Savage Society, 1926.

[3]

I should like to mention that although under “our own” civilization I am here speaking about the European and American communities in general, I have in mind primarily the average type of continental family, as this was the material on which the conclusions of psycho-analysis were founded. Whether among the higher social strata of the Western European or of the North American cities we are now slowly moving towards a condition of mother-right more akin to the legal ideas of Melanesia than to those of Roman Law and of continental custom, I do not dare to prophesy. If the thesis of this book be correct, some modern developments in matters of sex (“petting parties”, etc.), as well as the weakening of the patriarchal system, should deeply modify the configurations of the sentiments within the family.

[4]	My personal knowledge of the life, customs and psychology of Eastern European peasants has allowed me to ascertain deep differences between the illiterate and the educated classes of the same society as regards the mental attitude of parents to children and vice versa.

[5]

Although in Professor Freud’s treatment of infantile sexuality, the division into several distinct stages plays a fundamental rôle, yet in his most detailed work on the subject (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 5th edition) the scheme of the successive stages is not lucidly nor even explicitly drawn up. This makes the reading of this book somewhat difficult to a non-specialist in psycho-analysis, and it creates certain ambiguities and contradictions, real and apparent, which the present writer has not yet fully solved. Flügel’s otherwise excellent exposition of psycho-analysis (op. cit.) also suffers from this defect, especially regrettable in a work which sets out to clear up and systematize the doctrine. The word ‘child’ throughout the book is used sometimes to mean ‘baby’, sometimes ‘adolescent’, and the sense as a rule has to be inferred from the context. In this respect I hope that the present outline will be of some use.