''The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia: An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life Among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea'' is a 1929 book by anthropologist
Bronisław Malinowski
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (; 7 April 1884 – 16 May 1942) was a Polish-British anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research have exerted a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropol ...
. The work is his second in the trilogy on the
Trobrianders, with the other two being ''
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
''Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea'' is a 1922 ethnological work by Bronisław Malinowski, which has had enormous impact on the ethnographic genre. The bo ...
'' (1922) and ''
Coral Gardens and Their Magic
Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and sec ...
'' (1935).
Summary
In the preface Malinowski says that sexuality "dominates in fact almost every aspect of culture".
Malinowski gives a detailed description of the social organisation of sexuality (social rites, partner choice, etc.) "tracing the Trobriand lifecycle from birth through puberty, marriage, and death".
[Notes for sessions six and seven on the background and world of Malinowski](_blank)
by William W Kelly
Children do not submit to a system of "domestic coercion" or "regular discipline": they "enjoy considerable freedom and
independence
Independence is a condition of a person, nation, country, or state in which residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory. The opposite of independence is the statu ...
". The idea of a child being "
beaten
Battery is a criminal offense involving unlawful physical contact, distinct from assault which is the act of creating apprehension of such contact.
Battery is a specific common law offense, although the term is used more generally to refer to ...
or otherwise punished in cold blood" by a parent is viewed as unnatural and immoral and when proposed by westerners (like the anthropologist) is "rejected with resentment". Things are asked "as from one equal to another; a simple command, implying the expectation of natural
obedience, is never heard from parent to child in the Trobriands". The event of a person getting angry and striking another person "in an outburst of rage" sometimes happens, as often from parent to child as from child to parent.
In later chapters, the parent-child relationship of the Trobrianders is described with details of their complex
matrilineal
Matrilineality is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which each person is identified with their matriline – their mother's Lineage (anthropology), lineage – and which can in ...
relationship structure in which the biological parentage is ignored.
Based on
ethnographic data, Malinowski argues that the
Freudian Oedipus complex
The Oedipus complex (also spelled Å’dipus complex) is an idea in psychoanalytic theory. The complex is an ostensibly universal phase in the life of a young boy in which, to try to immediately satisfy basic desires, he unconsciously wishes to have ...
is not universal.
Analysis
The book discussed sexuality in matrilineal society, debunking some myths about sexual promiscuity of primitive people. It has also contributed to scientific study of sex, previously restricted due to Euro-American prudery and views on morality; something that has been attributed to Malinowski's Slavic background which made him less concerned with "Anglo-Saxon Puritanism".
Reception
While the book is a scholarly study, upon its publication its provocative title and contents have been said to "provide enough erotic titillation for booksellers to keep it under the counter wrapped in cellophane."
Malinowski's argument that the Oedipus complex is not universal has been questioned by
Ernest Jones, and later
by anthropologist
Melford E. Spiro
Melford Elliot Spiro (April 26, 1920 – October 18, 2014) was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and psychological anthropology. He is known for his critiques of the pillars of contemporary anthropological theory†...
in his book ''
Oedipus in the Trobriands
Oedipus (, ; grc-gre, Οἰδίπους "swollen foot") was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. A tragic hero in Greek mythology, Oedipus accidentally fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby ...
'' (1982).
See also
* ''
Coming of Age in Samoa''
References
External links
*
* Bronislaw Malinowski (1929)
The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia' Book text from
Google books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...
.
* Melford E. Spiro
Oedipus Redux' Ethos, Vol. 20, No. 3 (September 1992), pp. 358–376
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia
1929 non-fiction books
Anthropology books
Books about Oceania
Books by Bronisław Malinowski
Melanesia
Non-fiction books about sexuality
Trobriand Islands