The Father in Primitive Psychology

Bronislaw Malinowski

Description

This vintage text contains Bronislaw Malinowski's seminal treatise, "The Father in Primitive Psychology". It is an analysis of the relationship of society and psychology in tribal communities, and explores ideas of sex and procreation, kinship, myth, social organisation, and more. This fascinating text will appeal to those with a keen interest in psychology, and it would make for a great addition to collections of allied literature. The chapters of this book include: "Kinship and Descent in a Matrilineal Society", "The Male and Female Organism and the Sexual Impulse in Native Belief", "Reincarnation and the Way to Life from the Spirit World", "The Ignorance of Physiological Paternity", "Words and Deeds in Testimony", etcetera. Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski (1884 - 1942) was a Polish anthropologist, commonly hailed as one of the most influential of the twentieth-century. This volume is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition, complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité
• Anthropology
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Social Science

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 10 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781473393264
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE FATHER IN PRIMITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
BY
BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI
P H .D., D.S C .
Author of Myth in Primitive Psychology
Copyright 2013 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski was born in Krak w, Austria-Hungary (in present day Poland) in 1884. Both his parents were academics, and as a child he excelled academically. Malinowski received his Ph.D. in philosophy, physics, and mathematics in 1908 from the Jagiellonian University in Krak w He graduated sub auspicious Imperatoris , the highest honour in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Malinowski spent the next two years at Leipzig University, where he was influenced by Wilhelm Wundt, and his theories of folk psychology. He had become acquainted with Sir James Frazer s The Golden Bough , which stimulated his interest in primitive people and a desire to pursue anthropology. At the time, Frazer and other British authors were amongst the best-known anthropologists, and so in 1910 Malinowski travelled to England to study at the London School of Economics.
In 1914, Malinowski travelled to Papua (later Papua New Guinea) where he conducted fieldwork at Mailu and then, more famously, in the Trobriand Islands. He made several field trips to this area, some of which were extended to avoid the difficulties of emigrating from an Australian colony during the First World War. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on Kula.
By 1922, Malinowski had earned a doctorate of science in anthropology and was teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE). In that year his most famous work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), was published. Universally regarded as a masterpiece, the book saw Malinowski became one of the best known anthropologists in the world. For the next three decades Malinowski established the LSE as one of Britain s greatest centres of anthropology. He trained many students, including those from Britain s colonies who went on to become important figures in their home countries.
Malinowski taught intermittently in the United States, and was a lecturer at Cornell University in 1933 and for several years after that. When World War II broke out during one of these trips he remained in the country, taking up a position at Yale University, although he remained actively identified with the Polish partisan cause during the war.
His career at Yale was less spectacular than previously, but it gave him the chance to study peasant markets in Mexico in 1940 and 1941. Bronislaw Malinowski died in 1942, aged 58. Aside from his Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), his best-remembered works are Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926), Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929).
CONTENTS
I NTRODUCTION
I.
K INSHIP AND D ESCENT IN A M ATRILINEAL S OCIETY
II.
T HE M ALE AND F EMALE O RGANISM AND THE S EXUAL I MPULSE IN N ATIVE B ELIEF
III.
R EINCARNATION AND THE W AY TO L IFE FROM THE S PIRIT W ORLD
IV.
T HE I GNORANCE OF P HYSIOLOGICAL P ATERNITY
V.
W ORDS AND D EEDS IN T ESTIMONY
VI.
F ATHERLESS C HILDREN IN A M ATRILINEAL S OCIETY
VII.
T HE S INGULAR C LAIMS OF S OCIOLOGICAL P ATERNITY
INTRODUCTION
The dependence of social organization in a given society upon the ideas, beliefs, and sentiments current there is a fact of which we should never lose sight. This refers especially to savage races, where we find quite unexpected and far-fetched views about natural processes, and correspondingly extreme and one-sidedly developed forms of social organization in kinship, communal authority, and tribal constitution. In particular the views held about the function of sex and procreation, about the relative share of father and mother in the production of the child, play a considerable part in the formation of kinship ideas. The respective contributions of the male and of the female parent to the body of the off spring, as estimated in the traditional lore of a given society, form the nucleus of the system of reckoning kinship .
THE FATHER IN PRIMITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
THE FATHER IN PRIMITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER I
KINSHIP AND DESCENT IN A MATRILINEAL SOCIETY
T HE detailed study of a concrete example will show the social and psychological mechanism better than any speculations. In the Trobriand Islands 1 we find a matrilineal society, where descent, kinship, and all social relations are reckoned by the mother only, and where women have a considerable share in tribal life, in which they take the leading part in certain economic, ceremonial, and magical activities. This influences very deeply the erotic life as well as the institution of marriage.
The idea that it is solely and exclusively the mother who builds up the child s body, while the man does not in any way contribute to its production, is the most important factor of the social organization of the Trobrianders. The views about the process of procreation entertained by these natives, coupled with certain mythological and animistic beliefs-a subject with the details of which we shall subsequently become acquainted-affirm, without doubt or limitation for the native mind, that the child is of the same substance as its mother, and that between the father and the child there is no bond of union whatever.
The mother s contribution to the new being to be born, a fact so open to observation, is clearly expressed by the natives: The mother feeds the infant in her body. Then, when it comes out, she feeds it with her milk. The mother makes the child out of her flesh. Brothers and sisters are of the same flesh, because they come of the same mother. These and similar expressions describe the attitude of the natives towards this, their fundamental principle of kinship. This attitude is also to be found embodied in a more telling manner in their rules of descent, inheritance, succession in rank, chieftainship, hereditary offices, and magic-in fact, in every rule of transmission according to kinship. In all these cases, the social position is handed on in the mother-line from a man to his sister s children. This exclusively matrilineal conception of kinship is of paramount importance in the restrictions and regulations of marriage and in the taboos of sexual intercourse. The native ideas of kinship also come to light with a dramatic suddenness and extreme intensity at the death of an individual. For the social rules underlying burial, lamentation, mourning, and certain very elaborate ceremonies of food distribution are based on the principle that people united by the bond of maternal kinship form a closely knit unit bound by identity of feelings, interests, and flesh; while all the others, and even those united by marriage and the father-to-children relation, stand sharply outside and have no natural share in the bereavement or grief at death.
As these natives have a well-established institution of marriage, but are quite ignorant of the man s share in the begetting of children, the father has for the Trobriander a purely social definition: he is the man married to the mother, who lives in the same house with her and forms part of the household. A father, in all discussions about relationship, was pointedly described to me by the natives as Tomakava , a stranger, or even more correctly, an outsider. This expression would also be frequently used in conversation when the natives argued about some point of inheritance, or tried to justify some line of behavior, or when in a quarrel the position of the father was to be belittled. I have used the word father so far to indicate the relationship as found in the society of the Trobriand Islanders, but it must have been clear to the reader that this word must be taken, not with the various legal, moral, and biological implications that it has for us, but in a sense entirely specific to the society with which we are dealing. It would have been best, in order to avoid introducing a real misconception, not to have used our word father, but the native one tama , and to have spoken of the tama relationship instead of fatherhood. But this would have proved too unwieldy to repay the gain in exactness, and so the reader, when he meets the word father in these pages, should never forget that the word must take its definition, not from the English dictionary, but from the facts of native life described in these pages.