Sex, culture, and myth / Bronislaw Malinowski.

  • Malinowski, Bronislaw, 1884-1942.
Date:
1962
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sex, culture, and myth / Bronislaw Malinowski. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    129/360 (page 119)
    Westermarck as mere terms of address, but as important indications of status. The representatives of the opposite school had also to make some con- cessions, though rather reluctantly and grudgingly. Scarcely any one nowadays would be so irreverent towards our ape-like ancestors and ancestresses as to suspect them of living in a general state of promiscuity. But there is still a formidable list of names, among them some of the most eminent representatives of modern anthropology, quoted by Prof. Westermarck (Vol. 1, p. 103 «.), who consider primitive promiscuity as not improbable, plausible, by no means untenable, and use this hypothesis constantly as a skeleton-key to open all questions of sex. Group marriage is still, though somewhat faintheartedly, affirmed to have existed, and even some savages are forced to live up to their evil reputation— in the speculations and bare assertions of some writers. The Punalua family leads an even more shadowy existence, merging into a combined polyandry and polygamy. The most tenacious survival of the Bachofen- Morgan-McLennan theories seems to be the kinship terms, themselves a most fecund breeding-place for all kinds of survival theories. Thus Prof. Westermarck in this new edition is not altogether relieved of the necessity of dealing with the hypothesis of promiscuity, and in chapters iii-ix he examines the various classes of evidence adduced in its favour. There is a number of statements affirming directly the existence of promiscuous conditions among this or that tribe or people. Some of them come from garrulous and credulous writers of antiquity and have to be discarded as pure fables; others, from modern travellers, equal them in untrustworthiness and futility. On this point no one will certainly controvert the author when he says that it would be difficult to find a more untrustworthy collection of statements. The investigation then turns to that remarkable group of ethnological facts—jus primae noctis^ licence of festive and religious character, prenuptial and orgiastic sexual intercourse—^in which the powerful instinct of sex, curbed and fettered by social regulations, takes, in its own time, revenge on man by dragging him down to the level of a beast. Prof. Westermarck fully admits the importance and extent of these phenomena; his survey indeed shows the extreme range and the often astounding perversity of these deviations. But he declines resolutely to see in any of these facts a survival of pristine promiscuity, for in all cases the facts reveal most powerful motive forces, and can be attributed to definite psychological and social causes. The theory of survival is moreover irreconcilable with the fact that we find, side by side with Hcentious tribes, savages who maintain strict chastity; that some of the most primitive ones are virtuous, whilst the most luxuri- ant growth of licence is found in more advanced communities; that, finally, civilisation instead of abolishing these phenomena only modifies them.