Sex and Temperament

In Three Primitive Societies

Margaret Mead

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062566140
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A precursor to Mead's illuminating Male & Female, Sex & Temperament lays the groundwork for her lifelong study of gender differences.

First published in 1935, Sex & Temperament is a fascinating and brilliant anthropological study of the intimate lives of three New Guinea tribes from infancy to adulthood. Focusing on the gentle, mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the fierce, cannibalistic Mundugumor, and the graceful headhunters of Tchambuli -- Mead advances the theory that many so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences but reflect the cultural conditioning of different societies. This edition, prepared for the centennial of Mead's birth, features introductions by Helen Fisher and Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.

part one

the mountain-dwelling Arapesh

1

mountain life

The Arapesh-speaking people occupy a wedge-shaped territory that stretches from the sea-coast across a triple range of steep mountains, and down on the grass plains of the Sepik watershed to the west. The people on the beach remain in spirit a bush people. They have borrowed the custom of canoe-building from the neighbouring islands, but they feel much happier fishing not in the sea, but in the ponds that lie sheltered among the sago-swamps. They hate the sea-sand and build little palm-leaf shelters against its invasion. Forked sticks are set up on which carrying-bags can be hung and so kept out of the sand, and many palm-leaf mats are woven so that the people will not have to sit upon the sand, which is regarded as filthy. No such precautions are taken by the mountain people, who sit habitually in the mud without any feeling that it is dirt to be avoided. The beach-dwelling Arapesh live in large houses, fifty to sixty feet in length, built upon piles, with specially enclosed verandahs and decorated gable-ends. They cluster together in large villages, and the people go daily to their gardens and sago-patches, which are situated at no great distance from the village. These beach people are plump and well fed. The rhythm of their lives is slow and peaceful; there is plenty of food; pots and baskets, shell ornaments, and new dance-forms can be purchased from the passing canoes of the coastal trading peoples.

But as one begins to climb up the narrow slippery trails that extend to definite networks over the precipitous mountains, the whole tone of life changes. There are no more large villages, but only tiny settlements in which three or four families live, clusters of ten to twelve houses, some built on piles, the others built on the ground and so slightly constructed as to be hardly worth the name of house. The land is barren and infertile, the sago rare and planted instead of growing uncultivated in great natural swamps. The streams yield little except a few prawns, which are only occasionally worth fishing for. There are great areas of bushland in which there are no gardens, areas that are set aside for hunting tree-kangaroo, wallaby, opossum, and cassowary. But in these same regions the ancestors of the Arapesh have hunted for many generations, and game is rare and not to be counted upon. The gardens perch precariously on the sides of hills, presenting an almost insoluble problem in fencing, a problem with which the natives hardly attempt to deal. They merely resign themselves to the ravages of the pigs that have run wild in the bush.

The village pigs are not plump like the pigs in the beach villages, but skinny and more razor-backed, and so ill fed that they often die. When a pig dies the woman who was raising it is blamed for her greediness in eating not only all the taro but all of the taro-skin also, and sharing none of it with her pig. Gardens, sago-patches, hunting-grounds, are farther afield than on the beach, and the people accentuate the difficulties by electing always to work in small co-operative groups, now in one man’s garden, now in another’s. This necessitates an endless amount of walking about on the slippery precipitous paths and a great amount of shouting from mountain peak to mountain peak to send messages from one member of a family to another.

Level land is so scarce that there is seldom space to build even a small village. The biggest village in the mountain region was Alitoa,^* the village in which we lived for many months. It had twenty-four houses, in which eighty-seven people had residence claims; but these claims were only sporadically exercised and there were only three families who made Alitoa their main residence. Even with so few houses, some of them were built jutting out over the steep declivity that sloped away from the village upon all sides. When a feast is held, the visitors overflow the capacity of the village, dogs and children spill over the edges, and people must sleep on the wet ground underneath the houses because there is not room enough within the houses. When an Arapesh refers oratorically to a feast, he says: “We were burned by the sun and washed by the rain. We were cold, we were hungry, but we came to see you.”

Collecting enough food and firewood to maintain any number of people in one place is also difficult. The hills surrounding a village have been combed for firewood for generations; the gardens are far away, and the women must toil for days to carry in supplies for a single day’s feasting. Men carry nothing on these occasions except pigs and other heavy loads of meat and the large logs that are used for cigarette-lighting fires in the centre of the village. When they carry pigs, many relays of men combine, because the carrying-pole chafes their unaccustomed shoulders. But the women plod up and down the mountain paths with loads of sixty and seventy pounds suspended from their foreheads, sometimes also with a suckling baby in a bark sling at the breast. Their jaws are shut like rat-traps beneath the pressure of the headbands, giving their faces a grim forbidding expression that is seen at no other time and which contrasts with the gay, festive pig-carrying of the men, who go whooping and singing through the bush. But then it is appropriate that women should carry heavier loads than the men do, because women’s heads, they say, are so much harder and stronger.

The manners of the mountain people proclaim at once that this is no country accustomed to the raids of head-hunters. Women go about unattended; pairs of tiny children stray along the paths, hunting lizards with their miniature bows and arrows; young girls sleep alone in deserted villages. A party of visitors from another locality asks first for fire, which their hosts immediately give them; then a low-voiced excited conversation begins. Then men cluster about an open fire; the women cook near by, often in the open, supporting their tall black cooking-pots on huge stones; the children sit about in sleepy contentment, playing with their lips, sucking their fingers, or sticking their sharp little knees into their mouths. Someone relates a slight incident and everyone laughs uproariously and happily, with a laughter that stirs easily at the slightest touch of humour. As the night falls and the chill of the damp mountain evening drives them all closer to the fire, they sit around the embers and sing songs imported from far and wide, which reflect the musical canons of many different peoples. A slit gong may sound far away and the people speculate happily and irresponsibly upon its message: someone has killed a pig or a cassowary; visitors have come and an absent host is being summoned; someone is dying, is dead, has been buried. All the explanations are offered as equally valid and there is no attempt made to sift their relative probabilities. Soon after sunset hosts and guests retire to sleep in small houses in which the fortunate sleep next to the fire and the unfortunate “sleep nothing.” It is so cold the people often push too close to the burning logs on the earthen fire-place, only to awaken with a burned grass skirt or a shower of spark-burns on the baby’s skin. In the morning, the visitors are always pressed to stay, even though this means that the host family will go hungry on the morrow, as the supply of food is running low and the nearest garden is a half-day’s walk away. If the visitors refuse the invitation, the hosts accompany them to the edge of the village and with laughing shouts promise an early return visit.

In this steep, ravine-riddled country, where two points within easy shouting distance of each other may be separated by a descent and an ascent of some fifteen hundred feet, all level land is spoken of as a “good place,” and all rough, steep, precipitous spots are “bad places.” Around each village the ground falls away into these bad places, which are used for pigs and for latrines, and on which are built the huts used by menstruating women and women in childbirth, whose dangerous blood would endanger the village, which is level and good and associated with food. In the centre of the village, or sometimes in two centres if the village straggles a little, is the agehu, the feasting and ceremonial place of the village. Around the agehu stand a few stones that are vaguely associated with ancestors and whose names share the masculine gender with all the words for men.^* When the divinatory oven is made to discover the location of the sorcery that is wasting someone away, one of these stones from the village agehu is placed in the fire. But the agehu is a good rather than a sacred place; here children tumble and play, here a baby may take its first steps, and a man or a woman sit threading opossum-teeth or plaiting an arm-band. Sometimes the men build small palm-leaf shelters on the agehu, under which they can sit during a shower. Here people with headaches, their sad state proclaimed by a tight band about the forehead, come to parade up and down and console themselves with the sympathy that they receive. Here yams are piled for feasts, or rows of the great black feast-plates and the smaller brightly painted clay bowls are set out filled with the beautiful white coconut croquettes, the preparation of which is a recently imported art of which the mountain people are very proud.

All such luxuries and refinements of life, songs and dance-steps, new-made dishes, a different style of doing the hair and a new cut of grass skirt, are imported by slow stages from the beach villages, which have previously purchased them from the maritime trading peoples. The beach stands, in the minds of the mountain people, for fashion and for light-heartedness. From the beach came the idea of wearing clothes, an idea that had not yet penetrated the most inland of the mountain villages, and which still sits lightly upon the mountain men, who fasten their bark-cloth G-strings with a carelessness and disregard of their purpose that shocks the more sophisticated beach people. The women have imported their fashions piecemeal and in a haphazard manner; their grass aprons hang slackly from a cord that encircles the stoutest part of their thighs, and tight, unrelated belts, with nothing to support, girdle their waists. The men have imported the beach style of head-dress, a long psyche knot, drawn sharply back from the forehead and passed through a deep basketry ring. This way of doing the hair accords very badly with hunting in the thick bush and is periodically abandoned and resumed by individuals as their enthusiasm for hunting rises or wanes. Hunting is an occupation that a man may follow or not, at will; those who make it their main pursuit wear their hair cut close.

All of these importations from the beach are grouped into dance-complexes, which are sold from village to village. Each village, or cluster of small villages, organises through a long preliminary period to collect the necessary pigs, tobacco, feathers, and shell rings (which constitute the Arapesh currency) with which to purchase one of these dances from a more seaward village that has wearied of it. With the dance they purchase new styles of clothing, new bits of magic, new songs, and new divining tricks. Like the songs that the people sing, songs which are remnants of long-forgotten dances, these importations have very little relationship to each other; every few years a new sort of diving trick, a new style of head-dress or arm-band, is imported, enjoyed enthusiastically for a few months and then forgotten—except as some material object, lying neglected on a dusty house-shelf, may recall it to mind. Behind these importations lies the belief that all that comes from the beach is superior, more sophisticated, more beautiful, and that some day the people of the mountains, in spite of their poor land and miserable pigs, will catch up, will acquire a ceremonial life as gay and intricate as that of the coastal peoples. But always they remain far behind the beach people, who shrug their shoulders when they import a new dance, and remark that parts of the complex—this handsome tortoise-shell forehead-plate, for instance—will never leave the beach because the miserable mountain people will never have enough to pay for it. And still, generation after generation, the mountain people save to import these lovely things, not as individuals but as villages, so that every member of the village may sing the new songs and wear the new styles.

Thus the Arapesh regard the country towards the sea as a source of happiness. There are, it is true, traditions of hostile encounters with more warlike beach people in former days when the mountain people went down to obtain sea-water for salt. But more often the emphasis is upon the dances, and the beach villages are referred to as “mother villages” and the lines of mountain villages that stretch directly back of them are called their “daughters.” Mother villages and daughter villages are connected by intertwining paths that constitute three main systems of roads, called the “road of the dugong,” the “road of the viper,” and the “road of the setting sun.” Along these roads the dance-complexes are imported, and along the paths that make up the roads individual travellers walk in safety from the house of one hereditary trade-friend to another. Between these friends there is an informal gift-exchange that supplies the mountain people with stone axes, bows and arrows, baskets and shell ornaments, and the beach people with tobacco, bird-feathers, pots, and net bags. All of this exchange, even though it involves the supply of tools and utensils that are absolutely essential to the life of the people, is phrased as voluntary gift-giving. No exact accounting is kept, no one is ever dunned or reproached, and in the whole period that we spent among the Arapesh I never heard, or heard of, an argument over these exchange gifts. Because the mountain people have no surplus tobacco or manufactures of their own, beyond a few wooden plates, unornamented net bags, crude coconut-shell spoons, and wooden pillows that are inadequate even for their own use, a return for the objects that they receive from the beach has to be made in tobacco and manufactured objects which they receive from the Plainsmen^* beyond the mountains. The profit of the transaction, out of which the mountain man obtained his own stock of necessities, lies theoretically in the carriage; a mountain man will walk one day inland to receive a net bag from a Plainsman friend, and two days back towards the sea to present the bag, which now possesses a scarcity value, to a beach friend. This the Arapesh call “walking about to find rings,” an occupation in which men show varying degrees of interest. But so casual, informal, and friendly is the system that as often as not a man walks in the wrong direction for profit, as when a beach man goes up into the mountains to receive a net bag rather than waiting for his mountain friend to bring it to him.

As the beach stands for gaiety and new and colourful things, so the plains country beyond the last mountain range has a very definite meaning to the mountain people. Here live a people of their own speech but possessed of a very different character and physical appearance. While the mountain people are slight, small-headed, and only sparsely hairy, the Plains people are squatter, heavier, with huge heads and definite beards, which they wear in a fringe below grim clean-shaven chins. They fight with spears, and do not use the bow and arrow that the mountain people share with the beach. Their men are naked and their women, whom they guard jealously, are naked until marriage, and then wear only the most diminutive aprons. As the mountain people look to the beach for all their new inspirations, the Plains Arapesh look to the neighbouring Abelam tribe, a gay artistic head-hunting people, who occupy the great treeless grass plains of the Sepik basin. From the Abelam the Plains Arapesh have borrowed the style of their tall triangular temples, which rise seventy or eighty feet above the square plaza of the big villages, temples with sharply sloping ridge-poles and brilliantly painted facades. And with the Abelam and other plains people, the Plains Arapesh share the practice of sorcery, through which they terrorise their mountain and beach neighbours.

The Plains Arapesh are entirely cut off from the sea, hemmed in by enemies and dependent upon their tobacco-crop and the manufacture of shell rings from giant clam-shell for all their trading with the Abelam, from whom they import net bags, etched cassowary daggers, spears, masks, and dance paraphernalia. The giant clam-shells come from the coast, and it is important to the Plainsmen that they should be able to walk safely through the mountain country to obtain them. They walk through haughtily, arrogantly, without fear, because of sorcery. With a bit of a victim’s exuviae, a piece of half-eaten food, a strip of worn bark-cloth, or best of all a little sexual secretion, the Plains sorcerer is believed to be able to cause his victim to sicken and die. Once a mountain man or a beach man has lost his temper with a neighbour, stolen a piece of his “dirt,”^* and delivered it into the hands of a sorcerer, the victim is for ever after in the sorcerer’s power. The quarrel that caused the theft of the dirt may be healed, but the dirt remains in the hands of the sorcerer. On the strength of holding the lives of many mountain peoples in his hands, the sorcerer walks unafraid among them, and so do his brothers and his cousins and his sons. From time to time he levies a little blackmail, which the victim has to pay for fear of the sorcerer’s putting the carefully preserved dirt back on the charmed fire. Years after the original misunderstanding, when the mountain victim dies the death is attributed to the Plainsman who was not satisfied with the blackmail, or to the malice of some new and unknown enemy who has subsidised the sorcerer anew. So the mountain Arapesh live in fear of this enemy outside their gates, and manage to forget that it was a relative or a neighbour who has delivered each one into the sorcerers’ power. Because of the possibility of sorcery, because it is so easy to pick up a half-gnawed opossum-bone and hide it in a ditty-bag, because one’s relatives and neighbours occasionally do things that arouse fear and anger, dirt passes into the hands of the sorcerers. But if there were no sorcerers, if they did not constantly pass back and forth, drumming up trade, fanning slight quarrels, hinting how easily a revenge might be encompassed, then, say the Arapesh, there would be no death by black magic. How could there be, they ask, when the people of the mountains and the beach know no death-dealing charms?

Not only illness and death, but misfortune, an accident while hunting, a burned house, the defection of one’s wife—all of these are due also to the Plains sorcerers. To bring about these minor disasters, the sorcerer need not possess the dirt of the actual victim; he need only smoke the dirt of someone else from the same locality while he mutters over it his malevolent wishes.

If it were not for the beach people, there would be no new delights, no fresh excitements, no drain upon the slender resources of the mountain people to purchase the baubles of a few days’ gaiety; if it were not for the Plainsmen, there would be no fear, people would live to grow old, and die, toothless and doddering, after a gentle and respected life. But for the influences that come from the plains and the beach, there would remain only the quiet adventure of living in their mountains, mountains so infertile that no neighbour envies them their possession, so inhospitable that no army could invade them and find food enough to survive, so precipitous that life among them can never be anything except difficult and exacting.

While the Arapesh feel their major joys and chief trials as coming to them from others, they nevertheless do not feel themselves as trapped and persecuted, victims of a bad position and a poor environment. Instead, they see all life as an adventure in growing things, growing children, growing pigs, growing yams and taros and coconuts and sago, faithfully, carefully, observing all of the rules that make things grow. They retire happily in middle age after years well spent in bringing up children and planting enough palm-trees to equip those children for life. The rules that govern growth are very simple. There are two incompatible goods in the world: those associated with sex and the reproductive functions of women; and those associated with f...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Words for a New Century by Mary Catherine Bateson
• Introduction to the Perennial Edition: A Way of Seeing
• Preface to the 1950 Edition
• Preface to the 1963 Edition
• Introduction
• Part One: The Mountain-Dwelling Arapesh
• Part Two: The River-Dwelling Mundugumor
• Part Three: The Lake-Dwelling Tchambuli
• Part Four: The Implication Of These Results
• Conclusion
• Index and Glossary
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher