Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples

Margaret Mead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351319980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In many respects, this volume is a pioneer effort in anthropological literature. It remains firmly part of the genre of cooperative research, or "interdisciplinary research, " though at the time of its original publication that phrase had yet to be coined. Additionally, this work is more theoretical in nature than a faithful anthropological record, as all the essays were written in New York City, on a low budget, and without fieldwork. The significance of these studies lies in the fact that Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples was the first attempt to think about the very complex problems of cultural character and social structure, coupled with a meticulous execution of comparative study.

CHAPTER I

THE ARAPESH OF NEW GUINEA

by Margaret Mead

The Arapesh are a Papuan-speaking people who inhabit a section of land which extends from the Pacific Coast over the triple range of the Prince Alexander Mountains down to the edge of the grass plains which are drained by the Sepik River. The people, who number some seven or eight thousand in all, are divided into three main groups in terms of geographical position and relative exposure to outside influences. The Beach Arapesh live in large villages, and have been extensively influenced by trade relationships with the Melanesian peoples of the islands adjacent to the coast. The Mountain Arapesh live a scattered, seminomadic life within narrow geographical limits in the precipitous, inclement mountains which separate the beach from the interior. The Plains Arapesh occupy the low foothills of the Sepik grass plains, living, like the Beach Arapesh, in large villages. They are most strongly influenced by the Abelem, a warlike, head-hunting people of the Sepik plain.

The bulk of this study was carried out among the Mountain people,¹ using Alitoa, the largest village in the mountain region, as a base. Eighty-seven people had a direct residence claim there which, however, they exercised only on special occasions.

The Mountain Arapesh are without any form of political organization. They have no name for themselves, nor have their neighbors any name for them. Among themselves they distinguish by name small locality groups, varying from 150 to 250 people. Each of these groups has a guardian supernatural, a marsalai, who in the form of a giant snake or reptile lives in a quicksand or water hole or steep declivity.

The most effective unit in Arapesh is the localized paternal clan, which seldom numbers more than six or seven adult male members. Each clan has either a marsalai or a share in a marsalai, the other share belonging to a clan in the opposite dual division. The clan has also hamlet ground, within which individuals own house sites; it has hunting bush, territory which is usually divided into smaller units for different lineages, and it owns gardening land, which is again formally assigned to members of different lineages but which in case of death is most likely to revert to the clan at large. All land, consequently, with the exception of the marsalai site, which is always a particularly undesirable spot, is actually owned by individuals, or pairs of individuals, but may be spoken of as belonging either to those individuals or to the whole clan, because in Arapesh terminology and feeling the emphasis of the word belong is reversed. People are conceived as belonging to the land and the trees planted upon the land; the land is not conceived as belonging to them. The land is inhabited, not only by the marsalai but by the ghosts of dead clan members and their wives.¹ The ghosts stay in the marsalai place, or wander about in the bush, and must be spoken to whenever a man comes on the land. A clan member must never fail to announce himself to his ancestors or he may expect the marsalai to punish his disrespect by a small landslide, a wind which will damage his house, or by some other minor physical disaster. And a newcomer, not a member of the clan, must be specifically introduced to the ghosts and commended to their care. The sanctity of the marsalai places is further emphasized by specific tabus against the intrusion of pregnant women, menstruating women, or people who have recently had sexual relations.

When the Arapesh go beyond their own locality, whether toward the Beach, the Plains, or the tribes beyond, each man must follow an inherited path. There are three networks of such paths along which the members of different lineages walk from hamlet to hamlet. The people using these paths have their safety guaranteed under the pledge of safety given by the presence in each hamlet of a hereditary trade friend who is called “brother.” Along these roads all the articles which are traded in to the Arapesh come—bows and arrows (they themselves know only how to restring a bow and to retip the simplest arrow), stone tools (they themselves know only how to haft a stone adz when the hafting has decayed or the handle is broken), baskets (they themselves plait only the simplest and least efficient form of palm-leaf baskets), and ornaments of shell and dogs’ teeth. These come from the Beach. From the Plains come pots, net bags (they themselves make only a few small coarse unadorned ones), shell rings (which are used as currency and in marriage exchanges), spears, more stone tools, cassowary daggers and knives, lime gourds, and lime spatulas. All this importation is phrased as gift giving between devoted friends. The Mountain people only manufacture a few objects, and these—simple net bags, wooden plates, coconut shell spoons, * wooden pillows, taro pounders, * grass skirts, * bark-cloth loincloths, * belts, arm bands and leglets, hair bands, simple cassowary bone daggers, a simple kind of spear—are none of them, with the exception of the few objects starred, sufficient for their own use. For their tools, their weapons, their cooking utensils, their currency, their ornaments, they are entirely dependent upon importation. Without manufactures of their own, and without an agricultural surplus, their only possible contribution to this trading chain is labor, the labor (trade) of “walking about to find rings.” A Mountain man will go a day’s journey in one direction, receive the gift of a locally manufactured object, walk two days in the opposite direction and present this object to a friend in a region where it has a scarcity value. He receives a gift in payment, part of which he keeps, part of which, or its equivalent, must eventually be passed along to the Beach friend. This is the general principle of Arapesh trade, but because of the absence of any attempt to keep accounts, and the absence of direct exchange on the spot, the emphasis is upon the friendliness and kindness of the giver, and the joy and gratitude of the receiver. It is often a most uneconomic procedure; people even walk in the wrong direction and so obtain no profit. Along these hereditary paths also pass puppies, little pigs, bits of magic, and personal body leavings which are used for sorcery.

From the Beach the Mountain Arapesh receive also the elaborate dance complexes—songs, steps, masks, costumes, charms, tabus, etc.—to purchase which many people band together, sometimes all the hamlets of a locality. Their whole association with the Beach is one of pleasant anticipation of the luxuries and refinements of life, the only unpleasantness arising when the Beach people come into the mountains following the trail of some bit of personal leavings which has been sent into the Plains to be used for sorcery. Although individual trading is usually in manufactured objects—including shell rings—it is occasionally in tobacco, feathers, little pigs, little dogs, and sago worked in the mountains; of the last, however, the Mountain people have a most inadequate supply. For the purchase of large dance complexes, pigs are taken down from the mountain villages to the Beach.

The Plainsmen are hedged in between the mountains and the Abelam-speaking people. Their land is very limited. They are exposed to the forays of warlike neighbors. They have a desperately inadequate food supply, little timber for building, and only a small amount of game. The only manufactures which they can use for trade are shell rings which they make by laboriously grinding down giant clam shells. These shells come from the beach and in order to obtain them the Plainsmen either have to pay high trade rates, or walk through the unfriendly Mountain people—this, however, they do by virtue of their reputation as dangerous sorcerers.

The territory of the Mountain people is thus threaded through by roads upon which individuals walk by virtue of a hereditary right, which is reinforced on the part of the Beach people by the benefits they bring, on the part of the Plains people by the threat of death which they carry with them.

Although this mountain country has no definite borders which may be defended, it nevertheless offers the Mountain Arapesh fair sanctuary from any large invasion. The region is damp and cold; the soil is thin and subject to landslides; and there is hardly any level land. The game—cassowary, tree kangaroo, wallaby, follanger, bush pigs (escaped domestic pigs), bandicoot, and rats-is scarce and scattered. The roads are slippery. The streams are many and often impassable. The bush is inhospitable and yields little vegetable food upon which a hostile and invading group could feed. Furthermore, this territory of theirs is Hot coveted by their neighbors, who prefer walking through inhabited country so that they will not have to carry food.

The energies of the Mountain people are devoted to obtaining food, building shelter, and walking about from Beach to Plains to obtain tools, implements, utensils, and the refinements of life. The chief emphasis is upon food. The Arapesh place their major dependence on taro, which is predominantly women’s work, and is a continuous crop, many varieties having to be planted back from the green tops as soon as they are harvested. Taro, however, is not a crop which can be kept and is not so suitable for feasts as yams and sago. Yam cultivation is men’s work, and throughout this part of New Guinea is closely associated with the men’s cults. Only a very inferior variety of yam can be grown in the mountains, but yams are relied upon for feasts and as food that can be stored. Sago is scarce, and is planted in one generation for the next. It is used only for feasts, forming a part of the average family’s diet about one tenth of the time. Yams appear in the diet about one sixth of the time. The people also plant banana gardens, and raise various forms of greens which they use to season their carbohydrate diet in the absence of meat, and for both meat and greens they use the same general term, meaning a garnish. Coconut palms are also planted near hamlet sites but they are scarce and are under tabus most of the year in order to save enough coconuts for feasts. After a feast the nuts form part of the diet of the community for some weeks. The government of New Guinea, in working out a minimum diet for laborers on plantations, has specified as the minimum seven pounds of taro or yams per day, and a pound of meat a week. The Arapesh adult consumes on an average about three pounds of taro or yams a day, and four to five ounces of protein a week, which includes grubs, caterpillars, small rats, lizards, etc. They are conspicuously undernourished; the children show marked rachitic signs and a great number of the people are actually emaciated. Their economic scarcity, however, is of a different order from that of a hunting people like the Ojibwa—while they face years of undernourishment, they do not face the possibility of actual death through starvation.

Their houses are very simple. They are built on piles, walled with plates of sago bark and thatched with sago leaves, which are sewn by the men, though this is women’s work in many localities. Smaller huts are built on the ground. With the exception of raising the ridgepole of a large house thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, of which there will be but three or four in any given area, housebuilding is a task which a man can perform for himself. A man makes his own bark-cloth G-string, and a woman makes her own pair of aprons from shredded sago palm leaves. In gardening the big trees are not cut down, the branches are merely lopped off to let in light, so that in preparing a garden plot there is no need for more than one man to do the work; similarly, fencing is done with saplings which an adolescent boy can cut. In sago working, a well-grown boy can cut down the tree, and an adolescent girl can quite adequately work the sago. Hunting is usually practiced in pairs for companionship, but the most successful hunter in the locality hunted either alone or with his nine-year-old son. The methods of hunting consist in trapping and snaring, the use of hunting bags, and finding animals in hollow trees or asleep in trees. The various traps and pitfalls can be constructed by one man. There is no hunting in which a group drives the animals. Rather the emphasis is upon waiting in the right place, and game will fall into one’s traps, get caught in one’s snares, or appear before one’s eyes, when it can be killed with spear or bow and arrow. Nowhere is there a technological need for more than one person’s labor.

The division of labor between the sexes is an artificial one. Women cook, except for feasts; men hunt because the reproductive capacities of women are inimical to hunting. Women tend the taro gardens, men the yam. These roles represent not so much an adjustment to environmental conditions as a cultural expression of beliefs concerning the different kinds of potency in men and women.

The Arapesh, like the rest of the tribes in this region of New Guinea, have clans, dual divisions, infant betrothal, and formal economic obligations which must be observed between families related in marriage. Though the Arapesh have modified the functioning of these formal units in their own way, it is necessary in order to understand their life to have a clear idea of these items of their social structure.

The social organization provides that groups of patrilineally related kin live together in a clan-owned hamlet, in which each has a house site. On this site coconut palms, betel palms, medicinal, culinary, and magical herbs, herbs used in dyeing, etc., are grown. Gardening is carried on in clan-owned garden land which is so extensive that rotation of crops is possible over fifteen- to twenty-year periods. Hunting is carried on in clan-owned bush which is left undisturbed by gardening, and is presided over by the clan marsalai. The clan has certain powers over its members. The ancestral ghosts that inhabit the marsalai places are subject to the importunities of elder clansmen, male or female, and may be invoked against younger and recalcitrant members of the clan, and also against the children of women of the clan who have married out of it, to bring about barrenness or death of children, if it is women who are cursed. The clan holds other rights, also, over the women whom it permits to marry into other clans; each child who is born is made of the blood of its mother’s clan, and must be paid for, and for any of its blood that is shed—the cutting of a boil, a girl’s blood when she is scarified at puberty, a wound in battle—a payment must be made to the men of the mother’s clan.

By the existence of two dual organizations, to one or the other of which each clan belongs, the social organization provides for two further kinds of activity, the initiation of boys and exchange feasts. These dual organizations exist mainly as fictions, and the membership has become confused, but they express, structurally, the need of larger groups than the clan in the initiation ceremonies into the men’s cult, Tamberan, and in the formal exchange feasts between groups.¹

The social organization further provides for certain fixed relationships between affinal relatives which are perpetuated into the first descendant generation. Girls, at the age of six or seven, are betrothed to adolescent boys and go to live in the households of their future husbands who, with their fathers and mothers, “grow” their small wives by contributing the food which makes their bodies. This is the principal claim which the clan of the husband has upon the wife, a claim which will be invoked in case she runs away, in future attitudes toward her children, and in demanding repayment if, as a widow, she marries outside the clan of her deceased husband. The claim of the husband’s clan is further explicitly validated by the payment of a few rings to the parents of the bride, and the exchange of some eight to ten more rings for other rings of a similar value with her other male relatives, and by frequent presents of meat, in which the husband’s people should always give a little more meat than the wife’s people. This economic relationship, begun between the contracting parents-in-law, is perpetuated between brothers-in-law, who exchange presents of meat with each other, and it culminates in initiation ceremonies for the children, in which a large feast must be made to the mother’s brother in the name of the sister’s son, and in death payments by a woman’s son when she dies. At each of these, a man is said to be paying his mother’s brother and his sister’s son. Actually in each case the payment is due to only one side, and the other payment is a repayment; a man who is giving a funeral feast for his mother pays his mother’s brother, but he also pays his sister’s son, because he owes him return gifts for a feast in the past in which he—as mother’s brother—received gifts. In all such payments to the wife’s clan and the mother’s clan, a group of clan brothers are supposed to act together, each contributing from his resources for the benefit of the member concerned.

Arapesh society therefore explicitly relies upon groups of male kin who live, garden, and hunt together, pay heavily for the women whom they absorb into their organization, both by feeding them as children and by maintaining gift obligations to their kin thereafter. If such a structure were observed in practice—as it is in many primitive societies, notably Dobu—we would have an example of small, politically autonomous groups cooperating within themselves and within definite territorial limits in maintaining order, and the economic obligations of individual members to outside groups similarly organized. This cooperation would be enforced by the ancestral ghosts, a sanction which is theoretically present.

Actually the functioning of Arapesh society is of a very different order than that implied in their structural arrangements. The Arapesh minimize blood position, inalienable membership in any given group, or fixed association with any piece of land. Even in the use of kinship terms, instead of conceiving the self as occupying a fixed position in a genealogical scheme, on the basis of which kinship terms are applied to other related persons, the Arapesh make an individual choice in each instance, conceiving the application of a kinship term to be a personal matter, depending in many cases on whom one “helps, ” that is, through whom one is counting the relationship at the moment. All economic activities are conducted in small groups which work together in terms of personal ties between members and without more than lip service to the clan structure. Each man is a member of from two to six working groups—those who belong to only two are the very old, who are practically out of the active structure. An active man with two wives may have more than six groups in which he works—with relatives of his own and of both his wives.

These gardening groups consist indifferently of blood or affinal relatives; of men who count their kinship through their mothers or through their fathers. They are sometimes organized about one individual, who may or may not be the host on whose land the garden is located, or they may show a chain form of organization in which B. joins the group to be with his mother’s brother A, then C, the parallel cousin of B, will follow B, and his two sister’s sons, D and E, may come to be with him. The groups break up from year to year in the same haphazard fashion; sometimes two or three men will leave and join another constellation, sometimes two or three will drop out of a common constellation and not work together during the coming year. Occasionally an old or stubborn person will plant his major crop in one spot and, while he may welcome others, will not join them at a distance. The garden magic for these crops is sometimes performed by a member of the group, if he happens to know it;¹ otherwise some relative of a member of the group will be called in. One magical operation will do for the entire garden. Although only one of their number, himself or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface
• Cooperation And Competition Amono Primitive Peoples: Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Arapesh Of New Guinea
• Chapter 2 The Eskimo Of Greenland
• Chapter 3 The Ojibwa Of Canada
• Chapter 4 The Bachiga Of East Africa
• Chapter 5 The Ifugao Of The Philippine Islands
• Chapter 6 The Kwakiutl Indians Of Vancouver Island
• Chapter 7 The Manus Of The Admiralty Islands
• Chapter 8 The Iroquois
• Chapter 9 The Samoans
• Chapter 10 The Zuni Indians of New Mexico
• Chapter 11 The Bathonga of South Africa
• Chapter 12 The Dakota
• Chapter 13 The Maori of New Zealand
• Interpretive Statement
• Appraisal 1961
• Cooperation and Competition in Geometric-Vectorial Symbolism
• Additional Notes to Chapters and Bibliographies
• Index