2.1. Desarrollo de la encuesta
2.1.1. Resultados de la encuesta
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Malinowski as “Reluctant Sexologist”
I
n The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia () Bronis-law Malinowski deridesth-century sensationalism concerning prim-itive sexuality and emphasizes the stable marital relations that succeed youthful promiscuity among Trobrianders.1His work appealed greatly to Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell, who were endeavoring to develop the foundations of a new secular sexual morality. This chapter discusses the uses made of anthropological data by the pioneering advocates of companionate marriage, contraceptives, and sex education and assesses the degree to which their views were shared by Malinowski. It also explores the limits of any new“objectivity” concerning “primitive” sexuality.
Malinowski, in a witty essay written during thes but not published until years after the author’s death, remarks upon the tendency of an-thropologists to report data concerning primitive behavior in such a way as to transform primitives into models of “an ideal human state” (:).
In this essay, which was intended as a statement of the role scientific an-thropology might play in debates of thes concerning sexual reform, Malinowski dismisses as “junk” attempts to assimilate psychology and be-havior to modes of existence advocated by apologists for diverse ideolo-gies (:–). He gave as an example the discovery of a “puritanically chaste” primitive by Father Wilhelm Schmidt, Elliot Smith, and William J. Perry, while W. H. R. Rivers had “advanced Socialism in England be-cause he imagined that Melanesian savages were Communists” (Malinowski
:). “One or two quite intelligent writers on feminism,” Malinowski chides, “have based their reformatory conclusions on the fact of primitive mother right, while . . . [f]ree love has been advocated for the last fifty years all over the world by pious references to primitive promiscuity” (:–
).
Despite this vociferous rejection of distortions of the data to fit
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con-temporaries a number of very specific prescriptions for sexual reform. The
“stratified morality” advocated by Malinowski would involve the retention of marriage, said to be universal among primitives, as a central social in-stitution. Those married couples who willingly and responsibly take on the role of parents are to be suitably rewarded with both the “greatest human happiness” and “special social privileges.” Bachelors and spinsters are to be tolerated, even permitted sexual expression, but might be subjected to deterrents imposed by the system of taxation (Malinowski:). Ho-mosexuals, Malinowski suggests, should be provided with some “arrange-ments” by which they may gratify their desires without risk of persecution and without the danger that they might “infect” others (:). In the article, which was published under the title “Aping the Ape” (although the draft copy in the Yale University library indicates that he had not selected a title for it), Malinowski mentions a number of contemporary advocates of sexual reform as persons who have been misused by defenders of free love and argues that their positions are really more compatible with his own. These figures include Havelock Ellis, Bertrand and Dora Russell, and Judge Ben Lindsey, an American famous at the time for his advocacy of
“companionate marriage.” Marie Stopes, the English birth control crusader, is not mentioned by name but figures in the essay as “The Sensible Woman (Birth Control Expert).” Malinowski further argues that the true facts of primitive sexuality are much closer to the state of affairs he advocates than to the ways of life championed by either traditionalists or advocates of free love. Thus, Malinowski believed, the reforms he proposed were dictated not by utopian vision but by objective science.
It is perhaps unfair to hold a scholar to opinions expressed in an article he chose not to publish during his lifetime. We shall, however, attempt in this essay to demonstrate that “Aping the Ape” is merely an unusually clear and forthright statement of positions taken by Malinowski elsewhere in published sources and public statements, a statement particularly valuable because it is explicit in its acknowledgment of the common ground shared by Malinowski with leading sexual reformers of his day. We hope that by examining Malinowski’s work, especially The Sexual Life of Savages, in the context of the ideas of some of these thinkers, particularly Ellis and Russell, we can understand better the importance of contemporary political and social debate in shaping the thinking of this staunch advocate of empiricism.
Michel Foucault argued that sexuality is an area in which scientific dis-course can be seen with particular clarity to have been shaped, indeed
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El-lis in the scientia sexuaEl-lis he examines in his History of Sexuality but does not consider any empirical research among primitives under that category. To what degree, we shall ask, do Foucault’s characterizations of sexual scholar-ship accurately describe the work of some of Malinowski’s contemporaries, and how well do they apply to Malinowski’s own work?
Anthropology was and is, or so we were all once told, a science based on participant observation. Malinowski has been regarded as the pioneer of this technique, although he was not, in fact, its first practitioner (see Hinsley
; Stocking ). Now what, precisely, is participant observation? The anthropologist gains entry to the stranger community, sits, watches, and, above all else, listens to what the strangers tell him or her about themselves.
Confession, Foucault () informs us, emerged as a technique of power during theth century. Employed for centuries by the Catholic Church, the technique later entered the secular realm. The lawyer, doctor, social worker, and alienist all hear confessions. The manifest aim of such procedures is the eliciting of truth and the remedying of disease or disorder; their latent func-tion is to reinforce the unequal power structure that compels and conducts discourse.
It is a paradox of modern civilization, Foucault asserts, that the need to tell the other(s) about oneself is perceived as a mechanism of individua-tion, whereas it is, in fact, a method of socialization and subordination.
In other words, the confessional strategy is embedded in mystification. A patient with a sexual problem discusses it with a psychiatrist, who judges, consoles, reconciles the patient perhaps to this situation, and, having elicited the requisite number of statements, converts them into a truth useable by patient and interlocutor and compatible with the ideology of the power structure. The patient’s behavior is triply determined by outside forces: () there is a personal secret that results, in fact, from an implicit or explicit injunction to hide things so that () a satisfaction is gained from “self-revelation” and “self-discovery,” which are perceived to be voluntary but, in fact, emerge out of a social compulsion to confess, and () a truth is elicited and a cure effected by a socially approved agent. Malinowski’s anthropology is surely a confessional art, but does it accord with Foucault’s description of confession?
From his Trobriand informants, Malinowski gained detailed knowledge
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behavior. His very claim to fame rested on his ability to elicit detailed and reliable information. Confession is not absent from primitive praxis. We find it associated with curing and witch-finding cults, for example, often with considerable sexual content in the confessed material. The Trobriand practice of exhumation and examination of corpses for signs of sorcery, followed by general discussion concerning the sorcerer’s possible motives, often led to the revelation of significant sexual misconduct. Misconduct, thus confessed, would normally have been broadcast to all interested parties, typically an entire village. Margaret Mead, writing about the introduction of Christianity to Peri Village (Manus), notes that villagers chose Catholicism over Protestantism partly because of the attraction of auricular confession:
the confession of sin to a single individual promised a desirable gain in privacy to a community that, like the Trobriands, was used to public ex-posure of private indiscretion (:, –). If similar pressures were at work in the agrarian village communities served by the early Catholic Church, Christian confession might well have helped to establish the value placed on privacy in Europe, whatever it may have done later to threaten its achievement. Of course, it is a paradox of privacy that a good deal of it is necessary to create a guilty secret so burdensome that one feels a compulsion to confess.
At any rate, Malinowski was not collecting Trobriand secrets in the pri-vacy of the confessional. His express purpose was to share them with the world, a purpose that critics of social science have long insisted is more easily accomplished with the secrets of those who wield little power – primitives, the poor, women, and children. Malinowski seized upon indigenous com-pulsions to confess as a source of data in The Sexual Life of Savages (:–
) and elsewhere.
Trobrianders, however, were not accustomed to making confessions to scientists, hence the need for participant observation. Much of Malinowski’s scientific evidence is drawn from the spontaneous confidences of friends (:). He also employs such projective systems as myth and dramatic performance (notably, the disparaging public imitation of white men’s sex-ual ineptitude [:]) as guides to sexsex-ual attitudes and behavior. Where self-revelation is not available, Malinowski listens to gossip or asks questions of white traders and administrators. He makes ordinary Trobriand language disclose sexual information by the careful interlinear translation of texts, verbatim transcriptions of conversations, and glosses of lexical items. These multiple methodologies are employed with such seeming ease that the skill
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the fact that, once subject to the hermeneutic operations of the ethnogra-pher, these disparate fragments assume for Malinowski’s European reader, albeit not for his Trobriand informants, something of the character of a psychiatric case history – a constructed portrait of the sexual, emotional, and familial experience of a composite Trobriander, offered to readers with an implicit invitation to compare it with their own case histories and those of their friends. If the confession as existential experience is absent from Malinowski’s fieldwork, its transformation into its characteristic literary form is certainly present in his ethnography.
If Malinowski’s informants were not offered therapy, as one presumes to have been the case with the subjects of published psychiatric reports, certainly the possibility is there that another therapeutic purpose of case histories may have been served – the “healing” of the reader or of those over whom the reader may have professional influence. Moreover, there is evidence, to be discussed later, that Malinowski intended his work to be used in this way.
Throughout two of his three periods in the field, two of them in the Trobriands and the first in Mailu, Malinowski practiced a form of self-confessional autotherapy by keeping a field diary, “keeping the diary as a form of psychological analysis” (:). There is only one diary entry for his first trip to the Trobriands, a visit that resulted in his first publica-tion on that culture, examining myths of reincarnapublica-tion and advancing the idea of Trobriand ignorance of physiological paternity (Malinowski).
The posthumously published A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term () contains very little data on Trobriand sexuality and, unsurprisingly in a per-sonal account, next to nothing on the intellectual influences that informed Malinowski’s field research. The diary’s notoriety in anthropological circles arose from Malinowski’s repeated revelations of antipathy rather than ad-miration toward his subjects, especially his use of the word “nigger,” whether in Polish or English. In such a context his reports of sexual attraction to male and female Trobrianders, including two instances in which such attraction progressed to “pawing” (Malinowski:, ), inevitably appeared ex-ploitative to readers in thes and beyond.
George Stocking has drawn attention to the noticeable link between Ma-linowski’s not infrequent periods of depression and personal sexual frustra-tion and his explosions of revulsion toward his Trobriand hosts (:).
In our own reading we have noted expressions of regret about a perceived betrayal of his fiancée that often follow Malinowski’s accounts of sexual
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strug-gling with the sexual constraints of his own culture while recording the apparently greater freedoms of another. Most of the relevant diary entries occur between mid-April and the end of May, a time when Malinowski was undergoing a conflict, reminiscent of some Victorian fiction, over the need to write a letter to a former object of his affections, Nina Stirling, so that he might be free to become engaged to Elsie Masson. A diary entry of April, in particular, reveals that he anticipated that a respectable marriage, whether to Nina or Elsie, would entail limitations on sexual expression that contrasted to the experience of the Trobrianders: “A pretty, finely built girl walked ahead of me. I watched the muscles of her back, her figure, her legs, and the beauty of the body so hidden to us, whites, fascinated me. Probably even with my own wife I’ll never have the opportunity to observe the play of back muscles for as long as with this little animal. At moments I was sorry I was not a savage and could not possess this pretty girl” (Malinowski
:). One of the “pawing” episodes took place on the evening of the same day. The next day, Malinowski was overcome with guilt, both about this incident and his rejection of Nina Stirling. His response was reminiscent of the sexual culture we discuss in earlier chapters, insofar as it incorporated both the sexualizing of a primitive woman and a vow of purity as a condi-tion of his projected engagement: “Resolve: absolutely never to touch any Kiriwina whore. To be mentally incapable of possessing anyone except E.
R. M. [Elsie Masson]” (Malinowski:). Two days later, on April , Malinowski collected information about Trobriand positions during sexual intercourse (:). Returning to his tent, he had what he described as a “flash of insight” (emphasis his): “Physical intimacy with another human being results in such a surrender of personality that one should unite only with a woman one really loves” (Malinowski:). Three days later, Malinowski was assuring himself that Elsie Masson was the only woman he
“really” loved while acknowledging that in his “sensual apperceptions” Nina Stirling “corresponded . . . better” to his “emotional longings” (:).
By the time Malinowski published an ethnographic account of the data on sexuality he had collected from the Trobriands, they had been con-scripted, for better or worse, into a discourse that challenged the social and cultural norms that informed the conflicts Malinowski experienced in the field. In that discourse the Trobrianders were not “niggers,” “little animals,”
or “whores” but, in many ways, admirable examples.
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Malinowski knew and corresponded with some of the leading sexual re-formers in England during thes and s, met some of their counter-parts (e.g., Margaret Sanger) in the United States, and corresponded with European members of the psychoanalytic movement, including Princess Marie Bonaparte, who was a personal friend, and Wilhelm Reich, whose work he encouraged but never endorsed. Malinowski’s English contacts included Marie Stopes, Havelock Ellis, and Bertrand Russell. The four re-formers were as unlike in personality as they were in background, yet they shared some (but not all) political aims in common.
Stopes, well known as the founder of the first birth control clinic in Eng-land, wrote a number of popular books (e.g., Married Love and Wise Par-enthood, both published in) that advocated sex education, sexual satis-faction for both marriage partners, a “spiritual” love relationship based on mutual companionship, birth control, and eugenics. No libertarian, Stopes believed that marital fulfillment, family spacing, and birth control were moral imperatives that should be implemented by education and example.
She was saddened by the failure of her gospel to penetrate to those who most needed it, the ignorant and the poor, who should be discouraged from breeding both for the amelioration of their own hardship and for the good of the race. The full title of the organization Stopes founded, the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, clearly reveals its founder’s ethos.2One of the vice presidents of Stopes’s organization in thes was Bronislaw Malinowski. At an earlier period, in thes, Bertrand Russell had also served in this capacity. However, he resigned in in protest against Stopes’s decision to support the prosecution on grounds of obscen-ity of the English distributors of Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation (Kerss
:). Russell later remarked that Stopes’s books, written in the language of the educated classes, were immune from prosecution, while Sanger’s pub-lications for working women were banned because working women could understand them (:–). Unlike Russell, Stopes loved the applause of the Establishment, and by thes, when she gained the endorsement of the Church of England’s Lambeth Conference and the Prince of Wales, she had received the support of the Establishment’s more “progressive” mem-bers.
Russell, the grandson of a prime minister, the godson of John Stuart Mill, and the heir to a peerage, could more readily afford the Establishment’s disdain and was ideologically and temperamentally inclined toward the role
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more open about his extramarital relationships than was conventional in his day. The author of Principia Mathematica noted that “societies that have been conventionally virtuous have not produced great art. Those which have, have been composed of men such as Idaho would sterilize” (Russell
:). Russell condemned the church’s traditional support of celibacy and asceticism, advocated sex education and the abolition of obscenity laws, supported the idea of trial marriage (see below), upheld the right of women to enjoy sexual and social equality within and without marriage, and favored freer divorce laws. All these opinions were lucidly and forcefully proclaimed in Marriage and Morals ().
Rebel though he was, Russell’s program for sexual reform did not differ much from those proposed by less scandalous figures of the period. He argued that casual sex that did not create an emotional bond between the partners was socially and personally detrimental; trial marriage might di-minish the need for it (Russell:). In principle, he approved of some intrusion by the state in the affairs of the household. It was desirable that the state and its agencies should enhance the health and welfare of the family by providing education and sanitation and by relieving the working-class father of much of his financial and social burden. However, Russell was
Rebel though he was, Russell’s program for sexual reform did not differ much from those proposed by less scandalous figures of the period. He argued that casual sex that did not create an emotional bond between the partners was socially and personally detrimental; trial marriage might di-minish the need for it (Russell:). In principle, he approved of some intrusion by the state in the affairs of the household. It was desirable that the state and its agencies should enhance the health and welfare of the family by providing education and sanitation and by relieving the working-class father of much of his financial and social burden. However, Russell was