CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR 



1453 



"purity" in the face of a child of either sex 

 may suggest the role of priest or nun rather 

 than of a married adult. In those societies 

 in which religious functions are marked by 

 ecstatic trance behavior and transvestism 

 for both sexes, early occurrence of states of 

 catalepsy, disassociation, or hallucinatory 

 experiences may trigger the sex role assign- 

 ment. 



The familiar situation in our own culture 

 in which a parent, disappointed in the sex 

 of a cliild, may assign the oj^posite role also 

 occurs in other cultures. In Bali, sex-typed 

 division of labor is very clear, but there is 

 no opposition to the occasional man who 

 wishes to weave or the woman who wishes to 

 play a musical instrument. In 1936 there 

 was one girl who cut her hair and fastened 

 her sarong like a boy and played in a men's 

 orchestra, who would have been identified 

 in western, semitransvestite circles as prob- 

 ably homoerotic. But there was also a case 

 of a father who, having 6 daughters and no 

 sons, had formed an orchestra of his daugh- 

 teis, who played well but conformed in all 

 other respects to a female pattern. 



In summary, it may be said that sex role 

 assignment may be far more complex in 

 other cultures than in our own, and it would 

 be a mistake to build too much of a theo- 

 retic structure on contemporary American 

 educational efforts to induct every child into 

 an active and exclusively heterosexual role 

 within the bonds of legal, monogamous 

 unions ( see below, page 1474j . 



The scattered evidence of the occurrence 

 of individuals with the behavior patterns of 

 the opposite sex in the absence of any pat- 

 terned recognition of the possibility of a full 

 homosexual role strongly suggests the pres- 

 ence of a rare constitutional factor less ex- 

 plicit than anomalies of the external genital 

 morphology. It seems safe to assume that 

 any behavior which can be institutionalized 

 in a culture and regarded as a recurrent pos- 

 sible human choice has some hereditary 

 base, and that when a society of any size 

 is found in which there are no instances of 

 the behavior, we may then regard such be- 

 havior as entirely cultural inventions. In 

 very small tribal groui)s, the absence of 

 terminology or recognition of any of the 

 other roles described here, and the absence 

 at the time of observation of any individuals 



with inverted behavior has to be treated 

 with caution, as cultural loss in the absence 

 of any individuals to fill a role may be very 

 rapid (cf. the case quoted, above, page 1452, 

 of the assignment of a berdache role when 

 there was no living berdache and warfare 

 within which the role had been meaningful 

 had disappeared). Moreover, the possibility 

 that knowledge of other sex roles may be 

 carried for a long time in vocabulary, ritual, 

 or drama nnist not be overlooked. In Bali 

 in 1936 to 1938 there were young male and 

 female dancers who, accompanied by an or- 

 chestra, traveled from village to village 

 and were ceremonially courted by the men 

 of the village, who danced with them. Since 

 that period there has been increasing recog- 

 nition in Indonesia that male behavior 

 which is transvestite or homoerotic is dis- 

 approved in the western societies which 

 supply the models for modernization. The 

 male form of this dance called gandrung 

 was disapproved in 1957. However, there 

 were many cases in which girls were now- 

 dancing in roles which had been exclusively 

 male in 1936. 



Comjiarably, among the latmul of the 

 Sepik River (Bateson, 1958), elaborate 

 transvestite ceremonies co-existed with the 

 heavy taboo on any form of male passivity 

 in actual sex relations; men dressed as 

 women, and in ceremonies, a mother's 

 brother, dressed in the bedraggled costume 

 of an old woman, would rub his anus on the 

 shin of his sister's son. Furthermore, the 

 transvestism itself changed emphases; 

 among the villages of Mindimbit, Palimbai, 

 Kankanamun, the emphasis was on males, 

 in their role as mother's brothers, dressing 

 and acting like females, and in Tambunum 

 the emphasis was on father's sisters making 

 themselves splendid in male attire, to honor 

 their brother's sons. Thus in a society in 

 which there were actually very heavy penal- 

 ties for homoerotic passive behavior, which 

 effectively prevented all forms of active 

 homoeroticism within the tribe, the possi- 

 bilities of such behavior were carried by 

 vocabulary, continuous watchful awareness, 

 and complex and explicit rituals. Such ma- 

 terial draws attention to the need for paying 

 more attention to the fantasies and rituals 

 of disturbed children and adults in our own 

 culture, which l)v their use of traditional 



