Damn, how do you all keep so up-to-date reading lbo postings?? I wish could just put all you interesting folk on "pause" whenever I wanted.
To Kelly's original question about peoples who might not be aware of the general connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth, myself I've never heard of any. To the more technically specific question on awareness of the exact role played by each sex in procreation, the only thing to add to points already made by Rakesh et. al. is maybe just to emphasize how complex these questions are.
It's obvious that societies that haven't had technological means to observe physiological processes involved in procreation are going to have ideas about procreation that differ from our biomedical ones. But this observation too easily slips or inverts itself into a strong form, where procreative understandings that diverge from ours are presumed to reflect technological ignorance.
But the fact that women's and men's differential biological roles in procreation aren't the base line for most peoples' understandings reflects, far more than biiological "ignorance," the universal fact that sexual intercourse and human reproduction aren't just physiological processes but are inextricably social and cultural activities as well.
It's hard to keep hold of this because the whole idea of sex as a set of biological processes existing independently of social mediation, that's of course a product of our own biomedical discourse. (And how this biomedical discourse is shot through with it's own cultural-political baggage has been taken up in everything from the Foucauldian lit, to feminist science studies - see Emily Martin's fun stuff on how a basic biology textbook's representation of the fertilization process is shot through with gendered assumptions - to stuff on American kinship and marriage beliefs, to the lit on the sociocultural controversies that have sprung up in in bourgeois western countries in the wake of new reproductive technologies, to the much broader literature about society and gender construction that's come up before on the list. )
So if human reproduction is everywhere inextricable linked to broader notions of gender, personhood, cosmological properties of the body and their relation to physiological substances, and all of these inextricably connected to social and juridical forms and processes, bla bla bla, then it's analytically impossible to look at, say, the Trobriander case, take a pruning knife and carve out the aspect of the reproduction beliefs refecting physiological ignorance.
At any rate it makes little sense in a matrilineal society like Trobriand Islanders' to attribute the denial of the father's role in procreation to scientific ignorance as opposed to ideology: in matrilineal societies all kinds of social institutions are built around that fact the father isn't socially recognized as kin but rather as an affine. So it makes sense that ideologically his role in procreation is more likely to be downplayed. He's more likely to be the mere "opener of the way" or something, whereas the mother's got the spiritual creative force. In contrast in a lot of patrilineal societies it's teh mother's role in reproduction that's downplayed: she's the child's "shelterhouse" or some such thing while the father's got the procreative force. (And matri- and patrilineal societies often live quite comfortably next to each other, intermarry etc., without any of the existential crises you'd expect if their ideas were reducible to some flawed biological model.)
In such cases I doubt that sending a bunch of matrilineal Trobrianders or patrilineal Tikopia to a western med school (and no doubt quite a few have attended) would, in itself, radically change these notions since they weren't generated by a commitment to capital-E Empiricism anyway but by very different sociocultural histories.
Maureen