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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 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