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Bronislaw Malinowski's seminal work, "Sex and Repression in Savage Society," delves into the intricate dynamics of sexuality and societal control within primitive cultures. Published in 1927, this ethnographic study challenges prevailing Victorian notions of sexuality and sheds light on the nuanced ways in which indigenous societies navigate and regulate sexual behaviors. Malinowski's immersive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands enables him to provide a rich anthropological account, exploring the role of rituals, customs, and taboos in shaping sexual practices. By examining the interplay between individual desires and communal norms, the author contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between sex and repression in societies that existed outside the purview of Western moral frameworks. Malinowski's groundbreaking insights continue to influence the fields of anthropology and cultural studies, prompting ongoing discussions about the universality of sexual behaviors and the impact of cultural context on human expression.
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Bronislaw Malinowski
Sex and Repression in Savage Society
Illustrated
Bronislaw Malinowski's seminal work, "Sex and Repression in Savage Society," delves into the intricate dynamics of sexuality and societal control within primitive cultures. Published in 1927, this ethnographic study challenges prevailing Victorian notions of sexuality and sheds light on the nuanced ways in which indigenous societies navigate and regulate sexual behaviors. Malinowski's immersive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands enables him to provide a rich anthropological account, exploring the role of rituals, customs, and taboos in shaping sexual practices. By examining the interplay between individual desires and communal norms, the author contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between sex and repression in societies that existed outside the purview of Western moral frameworks. Malinowski's groundbreaking insights continue to influence the fields of anthropology and cultural studies, prompting ongoing discussions about the universality of sexual behaviors and the impact of cultural context on human expression.
TO MY FRIEND PAUL KHUNER
New Guinea, 1914, Australia, 1918, South Tyrol, 1922.
PREFACE
The doctrine of psycho-analysis has had within the last ten years a truly meteoric rise in popular favour. It has exercised a growing influence over contemporary literature, science, and art. It has in fact been for some time the popular craze of the day. By this many fools have been deeply impressed and many pedants shocked and put off. The present writer belongs evidently to the first category, for he was for a time unduly influenced by the theories of Freud and Rivers, Jung, and Jones. But pedantry will remain the master passion in the student, and subsequent reflection soon chilled the initial enthusiasms.
This process with all its ramifications can be followed by the careful reader in this little volume. I do not want, however, to raise expectations of a dramatic volte-face. I have never been in any sense a follower of psycho-analytic practice, or an adherent of psycho-analytic theory; and now, while impatient of the exorbitant claims of psycho-analysis, of its chaotic arguments and tangled terminology, I must yet acknowledge a deep sense of indebtedness to it for stimulation as well as for valuable instruction in some aspects of human psychology.
Psycho-analysis has plunged us into the midst of a dynamic theory of the mind, it has given to the study of mental processes a concrete turn, it has led us to concentrate on child psychology and the history of the individual. Last but not least, it has forced upon us the consideration of the unofficial and unacknowledged sides of human life.
The open treatment of sex and of various shameful meanesses and vanities in man—the very things for which psycho-analysis is most hated and reviled—is in my opinion of the greatest value to science, and should endear psycho-analysis, above all to the student of man; that is, if he wants to study his subject without irrelevant trappings and even without the fig leaf. As a pupil and follower of Havelock Ellis, I for one shall not accuse Freud of ‘pan-sexualism’—however profoundly I disagree with his treatment of the sex impulse. Nor shall I accept his views under protest, righteously washing my hands of the dirt with which they are covered. Man is an animal, and, as such, at times unclean, and the honest anthropologist has to face this fact. The student's grievance against psycho-analysis is not that it has treated sex openly and with due emphasis, but that it has treated it incorrectly.
As to the chequered history of the present volume, the first two parts were written much earlier than the rest. Many ideas laid down there were formed while I was engaged in studying the life of Melanesian communities on a coral archipelago. The instructions sent to me by my friend Professor C. G. Seligman, and some literature with which he kindly supplied me, stimulated me to reflect on the manner in which the Œdipus complex and other manifestations of the ‘unconscious’ might appear in a community founded on mother-right. The actual observations on the matrilineal complex among Melanesians are to my knowledge the first application of psycho-analytic theory to the study of savage life, and as such may be of some interest to the student of man, of his mind and of his culture. My conclusions are couched in a terminology more psycho-analytic than I should like to use now. Even so I do not go much beyond such words as ‘complex’ and ‘repression’, using both in a perfectly definite and empirical sense.
As my reading advanced, I found myself less and less inclined to accept in a wholesale manner the conclusions of Freud, still less those of every brand and sub-brand of psycho-analysis. As an anthropologist I feel more especially that ambitious theories with regard to savages, hypotheses of the origin of human institutions and accounts of the history of culture, should be based on a sound knowledge of primitive life, as well as of the unconscious or conscious aspects of the human mind. After all neither group-marriage nor tetemism, neither avoidance of mother-in-law nor magic happen in the ‘unconscious’; they are all solid sociological and cultural facts, and to deal with them theoretically requires a type of experience which cannot be acquired in the consulting room. That my misgivings are justified I have been able to convince myself by a careful scrutiny of Freud's Totem and Taboo, of his Group-Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, of Australian Totemism by Róheim and of the anthropological works of Reik, Rank, and Jones. My conclusions the reader will find substantiated in the third part of the present book.
In the last part of the book I have tried to set forth my positive views on the origins of culture. I have there given an outline of the changes which the animal nature of the human species must have undergone under the anomalous conditions imposed upon it by culture. More especially have I attempted to show that repressions of sexual instinct and some sort of ‘complex’ must have arisen as a mental by-product of the creation of culture.
The last part of the book, on Instinct and Culture, is in my opinion the most important and at the same time the most debatable. From the anthropological point of view at least, it is a pioneering piece of work; an attempt at an exploration of the ‘no-specialist's-land’ between the science of man and that of the animal. No doubt most of my arguments will have to be recast, but I believe that they raise important issues which will sooner or later have to be considered by the biologist and animal psychologist, as well as by the student of culture.
As regards information from animal psychology and biology I have had to rely on general reading. I have used mainly the works of Darwin and Havelock Ellis; Professors Lloyd Morgan, Herrick, and Thorndike; of Dr. Heape, Dr. Köhler and Mr. Pyecroft, and such information as can be found in the sociological books of Westermarck, Hobhouse, Espinas and others. I have not given detailed references in the text and I wish here to express my indebtedness to these works; most of all to those of Professor Lloyd Morgan, whose conception of instinct seems to me the most adequate and whose observations I have found most useful. I discovered too late that there is some discrepancy between my use of the terms instinct and habit and that of Professor Lloyd Morgan, and in our respective conceptions of plasticity of instincts. I do not think that this implies any serious divergence of opinion. I believe also that culture introduces a new dimension in the plasticity of instincts and that here the animal psychologist can profit from becoming acquainted with the anthropologist's contributions to the problem.
I have received in the preparation of this book much stimulation and help in talking the matter over with my friends Mrs. Brenda Z. Seligman of Oxford; Dr. R. H. Lowie and Professor Kroeber of California University; Mr. Firth of New Zealand; Dr. W. A. White of Washington, and Dr. H. S. Sullivan of Baltimore; Professor Herrick of Chicago University, and Dr. Ginsberg of the London School of Economics; Dr. G. V. Hamilton and Dr. S. E. Jelliffe of New York; Dr. E. Miller of Harley Street; Mr. and Mrs. Jaime de Angulo of Berkeley, California, and Mr. C. K. Ogden of Cambridge; Professor Radcliffe-Brown of Cape Town and Sydney, and Mr. Lawrence K. Frank of New York City. The field-work on which the book is based has been made possible by the munificence of Mr. Robert Mond.
My friend Mr. Paul Khuner of Vienna, to whom this book is dedicated, has helped me greatly by his competent criticism which cleared my ideas on the present subject as on many others.
B. M.
Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, February, 1927.
PART I. THE FORMATION OF A COMPLEX
1. THE PROBLEM
Psycho-analysis was born from medical practice, and its theories are mainly psychological, but it stands in close relation to two other branches of learning—biology and the science of society. It is perhaps one of its chief merits that it forges another link between these three divisions of the science of man. The psychological views of Freud—his theories of conflict, repression, the unconscious, the formation of complexes—form the best elaborated part of psycho-analysis, and they cover its proper field. The biological doctrine—the treatment of sexuality and of its relation to other instincts, the concept of the ‘libido’ and its various transformations—is a part of the theory which is much less finished, less free from contradictions and lacunæ, and which receives more criticism, partly spurious and partly justified. The sociological aspect, which most interests us here, will deserve more attention. Curiously enough, though sociology and anthropology have contributed most evidence in favour of psycho-analysis, and though the doctrine of the Œdipus complex has obviously a sociological aspect, this aspect has received the least attention.
Psycho-analytic doctrine is essentially a theory of the influence of family life on the human mind. We are shown how the passions, stresses and conflicts of the child in relation to its father, mother, brother and sister result in the formation of certain permanent mental attitudes or sentiments towards them, sentiments which, partly living in memory, partly embedded in the unconscious, influence the later life of the individual in his relations to society. I am using the word sentiment in the technical sense given to it by Mr. A. F. Shand, with all the important implications which it has received in his theory of emotions and instincts.
The sociological nature of this doctrine is obvious—the whole Freudian drama is played out within a definite type of social organization, in the narrow circle of the family, composed of father, mother, and children. Thus the family complex, the most important psychological fact according to Freud, is due to the action of a certain type of social grouping upon the human mind. Again, the mental imprint received by every individual in youth exercises further social influences, in that it predisposes him to the formation of certain ties, and moulds his receptive dispositions and his creative power in the domains of tradition, art, thought, and religion.
Thus the sociologist feels that to the psychological treatment of the complex there should be added two sociological chapters: an introduction with an account of the sociological nature of family influences, and an epilogue containing the analysis of the consequences of the complex for society. Two problems therefore emerge for the sociologist.
First problem. If family life is so fateful for human mentality, its character deserves more attention. For the fact is that the family is not the same in all human societies. Its constitution varies greatly with the level of development and with the character of the civilization of the people, and it is not the same in the different strata of the same society. According to theories current even today among anthropologists, the family has changed enormously during the development of humanity, passing from its first promiscuous form, based on sexual and economic communism, through ‘group-family’ based on ‘group-marriage’, ‘consanguineous family’, based on ‘Punalua marriage’, through the Grossfamilie and clan kindred to its final form in our present-day society—the individual family based on monogamous marriage and the patria potestas. But apart from such anthropological constructions which combine some fact with much hypothesis, there is no doubt that from actual observation among present-day savages we can see great variations in the constitution of the family. There are differences depending on the distribution of power which, vested in a varying degree in the father, give the several forms of patriarchy, or vested in the mother, the various sub-divisions of mother-right. There are considerable divergencies in the methods of counting and regarding descent—matriliny based on ignorance of fatherhood and patriliny in spite of this ignorance; patriliny due to power, and patriliny due to economic reasons. Moreover, differences in settlement, housing, sources of food supply, division of labour and so on, alter greatly the constitution of the human family among the various races and peoples of mankind.
The problem therefore emerges: do the conflicts, passions and attachments within the family vary with its constitution or do they remain the same throughout humanity? If they vary, as in fact they do, then the nuclear complex of the family cannot remain constant in all human races and peoples; it must vary with the constitution of the family. The main task of psycho-analytic theory is, therefore, to study the limits of the variation; to frame the appropriate formula; and finally, to discuss the outstanding types of family constitution and to state the corresponding forms of the nuclear complex.
With perhaps one exception,[1] this problem has not yet been raised, at least not in an explicit and direct manner. The complex exclusively known to the Freudian School, and assumed by them to be universal, I mean the Œdipus complex, corresponds essentially to our patrilineal Aryan family with the developed patria potestas, buttressed by Roman law and Christian morals, and accentuated by the modern economic conditions of the well-to-do bourgeoisie. Yet this complex is assumed to exist in every savage or barbarous society. This certainly cannot be correct, and a detailed discussion of the first problem will show us how far this assumption is untrue.
The second problem. What is the nature of the influence of the family complex on the formation of myth, legend, and fairy tale, on certain types of savage and barbarous customs, forms of social organization and achievements of material culture? This problem has been clearly recognized by the psycho-analytic writers who have been applying their principles to the study of myth, religion, and culture. But the theory of how the constitution of the family influences culture and society through the forces of the family complex has not been worked out correctly. Most of the views bearing on this second problem need a thorough revision from the sociological point of view. The concrete solutions, on the other hand, offered by Freud, Rank and Jones of the actual mythological problems are much sounder than their general principle that the ‘myth is the secular dream of the race’.
Psycho-analysis, by emphasizing that the interest of primitive man is centred in himself and in the people around him, and is of a concrete and dynamic nature, has given the right foundation to primitive psychology, hitherto frequently immeshed in a false view of the dispassionate interest of man in nature and of his concern with philosophic speculations about his destiny. But by ignoring the first problem, and by making the tacit assumption that the Œdipus complex exists in all types of society, certain errors have crept into the anthropological work of psychoanalysts. Thus they cannot reach correct results when they try to trace the Œdipus complex, essentially patriarchal in character, in a matrilineal society; or when they play about with the hypotheses of group-marriage or promiscuity, as if no special precautions were necessary when approaching conditions so entirely foreign to the constitution of our own form of family as it is known to psycho-analytic practice. Involved in such contradictions, the anthropologizing psycho-analyst makes a hypothetical assumption about some type of primitive horde, or about a prehistoric prototype of the totemic sacrifice, or about the dream character of the myth, usually quite incompatible with the fundamental principles of psycho-analysis itself.
Part I of the present work is essentially an attempt based on facts observed at first hand among savages, to discuss the first problem—the dependence of the nuclear complex upon the constitution of the family. The treatment of the second problem is reserved for Part II, while in the last two parts the same twin subjects are discussed in a general manner.
2. THE FAMILY IN FATHER-RIGHT AND MOTHER-RIGHT
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.[2] 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.[3]
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.[4] 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.[5]
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 folklore, 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 psychoanalysis—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.[6] 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.
3. THE FIRST STAGE OF THE FAMILY DRAMA
It is a general characteristic of the mammals that the offspring is not free and independent at birth, but has to rely for its nourishment, safety, warmth, cleanliness and bodily comfort on the care of its mother. To this correspond the various bodily arrangements of mother and child. Physiologically there exists a passionate instinctive interest of the mother in the child, and a craving of the suckling for the maternal organism, for the warmth of her body, the support of her arms and, above all, the milk and contact of her breast. At first the relation is determined by the mother's selective passion—to her only her own offspring is dear, while the baby would be satisfied with the body of any lactant woman. But soon the child also distinguishes, and his attachment becomes as exclusive and individual as that of the mother. Thus birth establishes a link for life between mother and child.
This link is first founded on the biological fact that young mammals cannot live unaided, and thus the species depends for its survival on one of the strongest instincts, that of maternal love. But society hastens to step in and to add its at first feeble decree to the powerful voice of nature. In all human communities, savage or civilized, custom, law and morals, sometimes even religion, take cognizance of the bond between mother and offspring, usually at as early a stage as the beginning of gestation. The mother, sometimes the father also, has to keep various taboos and observances, or perform rites which have to do with the welfare of the new life within the womb. Birth is always an important social event, round which cluster many traditional usages, often associated with religion. Thus even the most natural and most directly biological tie, that between mother and child, has its social as well as its physiological determination, and cannot be described without reference to the influence exercised by the tradition and usage of the community.
Let us briefly summarize and characterize these social co-determinants of motherhood in our own society. Maternity is a moral, religious and even artistic ideal of civilization, a pregnant woman is protected by law and custom, and should be regarded as a sacred object, while she herself ought to feel proud and happy in her condition. That this is an ideal which can be realized is vouched for by historical and ethnographical data. Even in modern Europe, the orthodox Jewish communities of Poland keep it up in practice, and amongst them a pregnant woman is an object of real veneration, and feels proud of her condition. In the Christian Aryan societies, however, pregnancy among the lower classes is made a burden, and regarded as a nuisance; among the well-to-do people it is a source of embarrassment, discomfort, and temporary ostracism from ordinary social life. Since we thus have to recognize the importance of the mother's pre-natal attitude for her future sentiment towards her offspring, and since this attitude varies greatly with the milieu and depends on social values, it is important that this sociological problem should be studied more closely.
At birth, the biological patterns and the instinctive impulses of the mother are endorsed and strengthened by society, which, in many of its customs, moral rules and ideals, makes the mother the nurse of the child, and this, broadly speaking, in the low as in the high strata of almost all nations of Europe. Yet even here in a relation so fundamental, so biologically secured, there are certain societies where custom and laxity of innate impulses allow of notable aberrations. Thus we have the system of sending the child away for the first year or so of its life to a hired foster mother, a custom once highly prevalent in the middle classes of France; or the almost equally harmful system of protecting the woman's breasts by hiring a foster mother, or by feeding the child on artificial food, a custom once prevalent among the wealthy classes, though today generally stigmatized as unnatural. Here again the sociologist has to add his share in order to give the true picture of motherhood, as it varies according to national, economic and moral differences.
Let us now turn to consider the same relation in a matrilineal society on the shores of the Pacific. The Melanesian woman shows invariably a passionate craving for her child, and the surrounding society seconds her feelings, fosters her inclinations and idealizes them by custom and usage. From the first moments of pregnancy, the expectant mother is made to watch over the welfare of her future offspring by keeping a number of food taboos and other observances. The pregnant woman is regarded by custom as an object of reverence, an ideal which is fully realized by the actual behaviour and feelings of these natives. There exists an elaborate ceremony performed at the first pregnancy, with an intricate and somewhat obscure aim, but emphasizing the importance of the event and conferring on the pregnant woman distinction and honour.
After the birth, mother and child are secluded for about a month, the mother constantly tending her child and nursing it, while certain female relatives only are admitted into the hut. Adoption under normal circumstances is very rare, and even then the child is usually given over only after it has been weaned, nor is it ever adopted by strangers, but by nearest relatives exclusively. A number of observances, such as ritual washing of mother and child, special taboos to be kept by the mother, and visits of presentation, bind mother and child by links of custom superimposed upon the natural ones.[7]
Thus in both societies, to the biological adjustment of instinct there are added the social forces of custom, morals and manners, all working in the same direction of binding mother and child to each other, of giving them full scope for the passionate intimacy of motherhood. This harmony between social and biological forces ensures full satisfaction and the highest bliss. Society cooperates with nature to repeat the happy conditions in the womb, broken by the trauma of birth. Dr. Rank, in a work which has already proved of some importance for the development of psycho-analysis,[8] has indicated the significance for later life of intra-uterine existence and its memories. Whatever we might think about the ‘trauma’ of birth, there is no doubt that the first months after birth realize, by the working of both biological and sociological forces, a state of bliss broken by the ‘trauma’ of weaning. The exceptional aberrations from this state of affairs are to be found only among the higher strata of civilized communities.
We find a much greater difference in the fatherhood of the patriarchal and matrilineal family at this period, and it is rather unexpected to find that in a savage society, where the physical bonds of paternity are unknown, and where mother right obtains, the father should yet stand in a much more intimate relation to he children than normally happens among ourselves. For in our own society, the father plays a very small part indeed in the life of a young infant. By custom, usage, and manners, the well-to-do father is kept out of the nursery, while the peasant or working man has to leave the child to his wife for the greater part of the twenty-four hours. He may perhaps resent the attention which the infant claims, and the time which it takes up, but as a rule he neither helps nor interferes with a small child.
Among the Melanesians ‘fatherhood’, as we know, is a purely social relation. Part of this relation consists in his duty towards his wife's children; he is there ‘to receive them into his arms’, a phrase we have already quoted; he has to carry them about when on the march the mother is tired, and he has to assist in the nursing at home. He tends them in their natural needs, and cleanses them, and there are many stereotyped expressions in the native language referring to fatherhood and its hardships, and to the duty of filial gratitude towards him. A typical Trobriand father is a hard-working and conscientious nurse and in this he obeys the call of duty, expressed in social tradition. The fact is, however, that the father is always interested in the children, sometimes passionately so, and performs all his duties eagerly and fondly.
Thus, if we compare the patriarchal and the matrilineal relation at this early stage, we see that the main point of difference lies with the father. In our society, the father is kept well out of the picture, and has at best a subordinate part. In the Trobriands, he plays a much more active rôle, which is important above all because it gives him a far greater scope for forming ties of affection with his children. In both societies there is found, with a few exceptions, little room for conflict between the biological trend and the social conditions.
