Charles, I agree that we need someone like Maureen to inform us where anthropological research is today. So don't know whether the Trobianders did deny link between copulation and pregnancy. Leach seems to have a point that what Malinowski found to be paradoxical may not have been so the Trobianders themselves. And his general point that there is no universal model of fatherhoold seems obvioulsy correct. Leach dismissed those sociobiologists who thought there were just a couple of fatherhood "strategies" which could be explained in in terms of some highly stylized selfish gene model as simple country boys who had never left their little part of the world. I think he found EO Wilson as amusing as Sahlins found these theorists annoyingly ignorant. RB
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>Charles
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>>>> 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