Inheritance, Women, Eumenides, Etc.

Rakesh Narpat Bhandari rakeshb at Stanford.EDU
Thu Apr 12 01:34:54 PDT 2001


i misspelled husband below


>
>
>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 HUSBAND (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



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list