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.

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    carry out their fishing magic according to old custom. Elsewhere, it was the unsatisfactory performance of a big mortuary feast, due to the mean- ness of the headman, which had irritated the spirits and made them show their displeasure by sending a set of calamities. nil III THE SPIRIT WORLD IN MYTH AND OBSERVANCE But over and above such local minor myths there exist one or two stories referring to very ancient times and defining several of the fundamental tenets of native belief. The very existence of the other world and its place beneath the surface of the earth, in a diflferent dimension, so to speak, is established by the story which might be called the Trobriand myth of myths about the first arrival of human beings on earth. Humanity, once upon a time, led an existence similar to that which the spirits now lead underground, in a shadowy world different from the present one. From thence they ascended to earth by crawling out through places of emer- gence, ''holes or houses as they are called. The fact of broken existence, that is, the fact of death and continuance afterwards, is embodied in a tale of original immortality, of its loss, and of its partial retention in the survival after death. Originally every one was able to rejuvenate by the process now observed in snakes and other reptiles, by sloughing the skin. This might have continued up to the present, but for an original error or lapse of an innocent girl. It happened in the village of Bwadela. An old woman who dwelt there with her daughter and granddaughter went out one day for her regular rejuvena- tion trick. She took off her skin and threw it on the waters of a tidal creek, which, however, did not carry it away, as it was caught on a bush and stuck there. Rejuvenated, she came back as a young girl and joined her granddaughter, who was sitting at a distance. But the girl, instead of welcoming her grandmother, failed to recognize her, was frightened, and drove her away—a very serious insult among Trobrianders. The old woman, hurt and angry, went to the creek, picked up her old skin, donned it again, and came back in her wrinkled and decrepit form. From that moment, and in the fulfilment of the curse which the old woman put on her daughter and granddaughter, the rejuvenation process was lost once and for ever. It is characteristic here that we have, in a matrilineal society, one of the most important and dramatic occurrences in human history taking place between women of three generations. It is also charac- teristic that a small localized event has cast its blight upon the whole of humanity, even as an event happening in a small garden somewhere in Mesopotamia has blighted the life of that vast branch of humanity who