Human Universals

by Donald E Brown

  Nonetheless, the tie between father and children was warm. Compared to the Trobriand father, the European father was brutal. A Trobriand woman’s son would inherit property and position not from his father but from his mother’s brother. Relations between a boy and his mother’s brother—who possessed authority over the boy that was the matrilineal counterpart of patria potestas—were comparatively cool. Relations between a boy and his sister were also strained, since a rigid taboo required their separation at an early age and the utmost propriety in their subsequent interactions.

  As an additional contrast, Trobriand youth were allowed to experiment freely with sexuality—barring, of course, any contact between brother and sister.

  Under these conditions, which do indeed differ markedly from conditions in the West, Malinowski found that the counterpart of the Oedipus complex in the Trobriands was a boy’s desire to possess his sister and eliminate his mother’s brother. Malinowski’s finding became “the cornerstone for the thesis propounded by relativists of all persuasions—anthropological and nonanthropological, Freudian as well as anti-Freudian—that…the Oedipus complex…is a product of Western institutions and, more particularly, of the Western ‘patriarchal’ family structure” (Spiro 1982:x).

  Thus, the Trobriand case is offered as disproof of the universality of the Oedipus complex not only in anthropology textbooks (Beals 1979:345; Ember and Ember 1973:322–323; Hoebel 1972:43; Honigmann 1967:273–274; Kottak 1978:19; Richards 1972:228), but also in the works of psychological…and psychoanalytic… anthropologists, as well as of classical…and neo-Freudian… psychoanalysts (Spiro 1982:1; citations partially omitted).

  There were those who were skeptical. Kathleen Gough (1953), for example, who worked with the matrilineal Nayar, reported that they had a normal Oedipus complex. And the first anthropologist to restudy the Trobriand Islanders, H. A. Powell (1957; 1969), disputed Malinowski’s analysis of the Oedipus complex. But Malinowski’s analysis, according to Spiro (1982:174ff), had become a “scientific myth,” repeated endlessly and very rarely questioned. Powell was ignored on the point. Had Malinowski’s analysis not achieved mythical status, Spiro argues, it would have been questioned, for Malinowski’s logic and evidence were far weaker in the case of the Oedipus complex than in other matters on which his claim to fame was based.

  Spiro stresses that for Freud the Oedipus complex is triangular: the boy’s hatred of his father and desire to possess his mother are connected, in that the two males are rivals. The boy is sexually jealous of the father. Malinowski treated the complex as two dyads: the boy desired his mother for the usual reason but hated his father because of the authority he exercised over the boy. If the father exercised little authority, and was warm and loving, as in the Trobriands, then the boy would hate his mother’s brother who did have authority over him. This formulation, says Spiro, has many difficulties, but because of it Malinowski ignored lines of investigation that would have borne more directly on whether there was an Oedipus complex among the Trobrianders.

  First of all, Malinowski himself said that a little Trobriand boy has an intense passion for his mother. This is quite understandable, because for the first two years of his life he has virtually exclusive possession of her. He sleeps with her at night, she nurses him on demand, and since the Trobrianders have a lengthy postpartum sex taboo, his father is no rival for two full years. The father, Spiro says, goes to sleep elsewhere during this period.4 Without a sexual outlet it is understandable that—whether consciously or not—the mother may be specially “seductive” to her son during the period of the postpartum sex taboo.

  This pleasant period in the Trobriand boy’s life is interrupted when the father resumes sexual relations with his wife—more or less in full view of the child, for the Trobrianders live in one-room houses. At about this time, or a year or two later, the child is weaned, too.

  Spiro asks, sensibly enough, is it not likely in these circumstances that a little boy would be jealous of his father, no matter how warm and loving the father might be? There is, unfortunately, no direct evidence on the point.5 Malinowski asserted that the boy’s attachment to his mother dissipates spontaneously and smoothly—childhood sexuality being free and easy—but he provides no supporting evidence, other than the observation that adult Trobriand males have no conscious sexual interest in their mothers. As Spiro rightly observes, this tells us nothing about a repressed interest: unless they are abnormal, adult males in the West have no conscious sexual interest in their mothers either.

  Malinowski also provided very little evidence for the onerousness of the demands of mothers’ brothers on their nephews. Consequently, just as the lack of jealousy of the boy toward his father is mysterious, so too is the alleged intensity of the boy’s hostility toward his mother’s brother.

  A solution to these mysteries, first argued by Ernest Jones (1925), is that the boy’s erotic fixation on his strongly tabooed sister is a displacement of his desire to possess his mother; his hostility to his mother’s brother is, likewise, a displacement of his hostility toward his father. Rather than having no Oedipus complex, the Trobriand male has a particularly strong one, one that has undergone more stringent repression than in the West. Given the loving nature of the Trobriand father, any hostility toward him would be particularly painful. Who could possibly be a better substitute target for the hostile feelings generated by the father than the fatherlike mother’s brother? Given the particularly strong attachment to the mother, when it must be repressed, who could better stand for her than her daughter?

  Without the vital information on the reaction of boys to their fathers’ resumption of sexual relations with their mothers, Spiro turns to whatever other kinds of data and lines of reasoning might substantiate his suspicions. Whereas Malinowski found no “traces” of the Oedipus complex, Spiro finds them in abundance. Indeed, it was the existence of what he deemed to be traces of the Oedipus complex that first turned Spiro to consideration of whether Malinowski might have been wrong. In addition, Spiro shows that Malinowski’s reasoning on many points was deficient.

  To illustrate the latter point, Spiro notes that easy sexual outlets among his peers does not allow the boy raised in an Israeli kibbutz6 to achieve a quick or natural extinction of his fixation on the mother, even though the kibbutz-raised boy has far less reason to be attached to her (until recent reforms, kibbutz children were reared collectively by specialists—parents were minimally involved). Malinowski was wrong to think that the availability of sexual playmates in itself would replace the infant boy’s fixation on his mother.

  The centerpiece of the traces of the Oedipus complex is what Spiro calls the “absent-father pattern”: the curious absence of the father from myths, dreams, and reproductive beliefs. Malinowski’s (1929) analysis of Trobriand reproductive beliefs, which include the startling assertion that men play no necessary part in reproduction, is anthropologically famous.

  In Spiro’s interpretation, the absence of the father from these domains is the consequence of repressed hostility toward the father, hostility rendered particularly painful because of the understandable and conscious warm regard for fathers. Given that, on the conscious level, fathers are so well thought of, their absence from myths and dreams with a family content is indeed most striking. Spiro says that in terms of a strictly structural analysis the father is present, though in disguised form. In the myth that Malinowski singled out as underpinning the matrilineal Trobriand family there are four actors: the culture hero Tudava, who was born of a virgin; his mother; his mother’s brothers; and a cannibalistic ogre. As Spiro interprets it, the ogre is the disguised father. Malinowski had himself hit upon this interpretation, but he saw it as a remnant from a patriarchal period in Trobriand history: the father had been turned into an ogre to discredit patriarchy. Malinowski chose not to pursue this bit of conjectural history (generally, by the way, he condemned conjectural history). There are further reasons to support Spiro’s interpretation. We know from other matrilin
eal societies that their mere constitution does not eliminate hostility between a boy and his father, and Malinowski at one point said that when a man dies, and the cause is not obvious, suspicion falls on his wife and children, including, presumably, his sons.

  Spiro suggests that the father is absent from Trobriand dreams for the same reason (though why he should be absent from females’ dreams is not explained). Malinowski said that the Trobrianders dreamed very little. Spiro suggests that they dream as much as anyone, but remember less because their Oedipal content is exceptionally repressed.

  Spiro argues that Malinowski misstated and misunderstood Trobriand “ignorance of physiological paternity.” Until recently no people in the world had an understanding of this microscopic activity. What characterized the Trobrianders was an active denial of the connection between a macroscopic activity—insemination—and reproduction. The Trobriand huffiness on this point was made very clear by Malinowski: it was not, therefore, a matter of knowledge or ignorance but of ideology. If Spiro is correct, it was a matter of psychology too:

  [A]ny exception to a near-universal ethnographic belief or practice which cannot be explained as a response to ecological conditions, adaptive requirements, and other determinants of a “rational” type is most likely to find an explanation in motivational determinants of an “emotional” type. (Spiro 1982:61)

  The denial of the role of the father in reproduction is an ultimate solution to the Oedipus complex. Moreover, in place of the notion of reproduction through insemination, the Trobrianders believe that a spirit child enters the mother’s womb. Symbolically, this achieves both goals of the Oedipal boy at once: possession of his mother and elimination of his father.

  Spiro provides further evidence of a repressed wish for a boy to possess his mother. One line of evidence is provided by magic associated with the kula ring, a system of interisland exchange of valuables and other goods conducted by men. The main valuables, objects of endless fascination for men, are “female” arm bands and “male” (pendant-shaped) necklaces. Their exchange is explicitly described in sexual and marital terms (e.g., the armband “clinches” the necklace; the latter “pierces” the former; the two are “married” in exchange). As Spiro reads some of the texts of kula magic, the two partners in kula exchanges are symbolically equated with a mother and her young son, the older partner to the exchange being the mother.

  Another line of evidence is found in the pattern of adultery. When it is possible, as in the case of sons of chiefs who are polygynous, the particular target of the adulterous male is often his own father’s wives (though not the real mother). Spiro finds this an “extreme example” of the man acting out his Oedipal desires and the most serious of Malinowski’s failures to recognize the traces of the complex.

  For these and other reasons that Spiro presents, it seems safe to say that Malinowski’s famous demonstration of the mutability of the Oedipus complex has been overstated. While the structure of the complex theoretically could be different—if the boy, his mother, and her consort(s) were not constant elements—empirically it never is different (as a societal norm). Structurally, therefore, the Oedipus complex is an apparent universal.

  In two other respects, however, the complex can and does vary: in its strength and outcome. As Spiro tries to show, its strength was greater in the Trobriands than in the West. Its outcome may be that it is extinguished, that it is repressed, or that it is imperfectly repressed. Spiro goes on to show that these different outcomes have quite different repercussions for society and culture. Thus in many New Guinean societies marked by incomplete repression of the Oedipus complex, boys are either expelled from the family at puberty or earlier, or undergo severe puberty rituals that bring them firmly under elder male control and separate them from their mothers. These rites are at times terrifying and brutal, allowing men, so Spiro avers, an outlet for their own Oedipal hostilities toward their sons. Spiro also suggests that the sheer quotient of magic to knowledge in these societies is raised damagingly by the unconscious mischief of unresolved Oedipal urges.

  Spiro concludes his discussion with the comment that Malinowski’s argument was so weak, and involved such anomalies, that it could only have stood the test of time if it, like any myth, served an important function for those who believed it. The “will to believe” must have been a factor. Spiro leaves it to some historian of ideas to determine who sustained the myth and why.

  Conclusion

  The cases just summarized vary in the degree to which they successfully defend their respective theses or demonstrate universality. From the viewpoint of appropriate method and data, Berlin and Kay’s treatment of basic color terms is commendable, and it is directly relevant to universality, yet their work has not gone uncriticized. From the viewpoint of intimate familiarity with the ethnographic particulars, Freeman’s work is all but peerless, but he does not attempt to demonstrate a universal, and the critics of his work are numerous (see, e.g., Samoa Controversy 1983; Holmes 1987; and footnote 3, above).

  Against the thesis that the Hopi have no concept of time, Malotki’s compilation of evidence to the contrary is hard to refute, but was this really Whorf’s thesis? Against the thesis that the Hopi sense of time was fundamentally different from ours, Malotki’s data and arguments are clearly substantial, but the issues are complicated and it may take some time for the dust to settle on the debate over Hopi time. Furthermore, even if Hopi time or Samoan adolescence are much like ours, may not evidence from other societies still provide a case in support for the essential relativity of adolescence and the sense of time? The same question can be asked of facial expressions: sound as the existing research may be, are there not numerous other societies yet to be examined to test the universality of emotional expression? Other objections to the facial expression research were stated earlier.

  The evidential bases of Gewertz’s and Spiro’s works are not greatly different from those of the persons they criticize, and there is every reason to think that as many people who believe Gewertz and Spiro will persist in believing Mead and Malinowski on the relevant issues. It might be worth noting that Annette Weiner, who has done recent fieldwork with the Trobriand Islanders, and who is generally critical of Spiro’s analysis, finds the argument for the universality of the Oedipus complex to have a “convincing ring” (1985:761). A great many other anthropologists will not be so convinced because they are skeptical or hostile toward psychology in general and Freudian analyses in particular.

  In short, none of the studies above proves that something is a universal—which may be impossible anyway—nor is it certain that any of them conclusively demonstrates universality. It is also worth noting that all these cases together offer no reason to question the very notion of cultural relativity. But each of them casts serious doubt on important earlier arguments against the universality of the phenomena they treat, and they raise anew the need to look more carefully at human universals and at extremist conceptions of cultural relativity.

  The frequency with which the authors of these studies use the word “myth” to describe the views they attempt to refute indicates their awareness of a propensity in anthropology to accept purported rejections of universality on the basis of flimsy evidence. In chapter 3 I attempt to explain this propensity. But the more immediate task, taken up in the next chapter, is to define universals and examine the means available to demonstrate universality.

  Footnotes

  1. Ruth Benedict, a graduate student working with Boas when Mead began her studies with him, was a particularly potent influence. This is discussed further in chapter 3.

  2. It is called taufa’alili or taufa’ase’e. Tim O’Meara (personal communication) calls it “recreational lying,” and notes that it is one of the most common forms of humor and recreation in Samoa. Among other things, he adds, its prevalence in all age groups shows how widespread aggressive feelings are in Samoa (see also Freeman 1989).

  3. Early in 1983, the membership of the Northeastern Anthrop
ological Association voted to direct its executive board to criticize the publisher of Freeman’s book, and the New York Times, for the book’s publicity campaign. Later in the same year, the American Anthropological Association, at its annual meeting, voted to express its dismay that the magazine Science 83 had recommended Freeman’s book for holiday gift–giving (Caton 1990: 228–229). These votes were fairly direct measures of the anthropological commitment to cultural determinism and the tabula rasa view of the mind that will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

  4. Actually, Malinowski is vague on this point, and a recent fieldworker among the Trobrianders, Weiner (1985), denies that the father sleeps elsewhere.

  5. Weiner (1985:761) seems to indicate that the weaning is “traumatic.”

  6. A kibbutz is a utopian socialist commune. The kibbutz movement began in 1910. There are now hundreds of kibbutzim in Israel, but their inhabitants account for only a very small percentage of the country’s total population.

  2

  Conceptualizing, Defining, and Demonstrating Universals

  Universals may be found in the individual, in society, in culture, and in language—though in many cases it is neither useful nor reasonable to consider these phenomenal realms in isolation from each other. At the level of the individual, universals may be found in every (normal) individual—or in every individual of a particular sex and/or age range—and can often be understood from the perspective of a single individual. Some emotions and their facial expressions are examples. Features that are thought to be straightforwardly anatomical or physiological are rarely if ever included in anthropological discussions of universals, so that universals at the level of the individual are generally confined to patterns of action, thought, and feeling. Universals at this level must underlie social, cultural, and linguistic universals, since society, culture, and language ultimately have no source that excludes individuals and their capacities. Stated differently, all societies, cultures, and languages are the products of individuals and their interactions with each other and with their environments.