So we agree, no ?
Charles
>>> rakeshb at Stanford.EDU 04/12/01 04:24AM >>>
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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