Inheritance, Women, Eumenides, Etc.

[Rakesh Narpat Bhandari]

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>CB: Ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski thought that the Trobriand 
>Islanders were ignorant of biological paternity in the early 20th 
>Century, but other evidence indicated he was mistaken.
Charles, I hope Maureen responds. According to Edmund Leach, 
Malinowski asserted that this professed ignorance of the connection 
between copulation and pregnancy served as a rational jutification 
for matrilineal descent. So father is not a blood relative at all but 
an affine. Yet why then did the Trobrianders maintain that every 
child should resemble its mother's jusban (i.e., its father) but that 
no child should ever resemble a member of its own matrilineal kin? 
Malinowski thought it paradoxical that both beliefs should be held at 
the same time. But is there any reason people should associate ideas 
of genetic inheritance with ideas about physical resemblance between 
people? The Trobrianders explained to Malinowski that a father 
impresses his appearance on his son by moulding the child in the womb 
while cohabitating repeatedly with the mother. But the point that 
Leach wants to make is that it matters very much whether one thinks 
of a particular male as one's father or one's mother's husband. There 
is no universal model of sociological paternity.
RB