CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR 



145/ 



Where "logic" is regarded as male, and "in- 

 tuition" as female, little girls with a capac- 

 ity for logical thought may be pushed to- 

 ward inversion as a pr-eference, for a socially 

 perceived difference between expectations 

 for men and women, or as an identification 

 with a father whose mind corresponds to the 

 cultural stereotype. The same thing may 

 hapi^en to a boy who has a bent for music, in 

 a society in which playing the piano is seen 

 as feminine or in which his mother is the 

 musical member of the family. 



V. Intensity and Duration of 

 Sex Activity 



Experience with substitution therapy 

 (chapter by Money) has provided many ex- 

 amples of the range of capacity for erotic 

 behavior among castrated men or hysterec- 

 tomized women. Cross-cultural material 

 also presents examples of wide diversity in 

 the way in which expectations of active 

 erotic performance are institutionalized 

 (Westermarck, 1921). Erotic activity may 

 be seen as necessary or antithetical to the 

 j)erformance of other activities, so harvest 

 or warfare may be preceded by either in- 

 creased or decreased or entirely forbidden 

 erotic relationships between husbands and 

 wives. This is paralleled by the contrasts 

 among those peoples who believe that fast- 

 ing and the use of emetics will help a runner 

 in a race, compared with those who regard 

 ^'training" as a matter of nutrition. Sex ac- 

 tivity may be classified as the appropriate 

 })reoccui:)ation almost to the exclusion of 

 other interests (Truk, Goodenough, 1949) 

 of people under 30, or as dangerous to the 

 young, to be avoided until full adult stature 

 is attained (Arapesh, Mead, 1935). Hetero- 

 sexual desire may be regarded as sponta- 

 neously engendered and in need of curbing 

 (Manus, Mead, 1930), or as uncertain and 

 flickering and likely to fail altogether when 

 the strangeness of the first encounter has 

 been dispelled (Bali, Bateson and Mead, 

 1942) . Sex activity may be regarded as more 

 appropriate to certain months of the year, 

 in the winter among some Arctic peoples, 

 or forbidden during special seasons, such as 

 the salmon run among the Yurok Indians 

 (Erikson, 1950). Among the Marind Anim 

 (Wirz, 19221, where adolescents pass 

 through a culturally institutionalized period 

 of homoerotic behavior, the establishment 



of heterosexual relationships is seen as so 

 difficult that a ritual sacrifice, in which a 

 copulating youth and maiden are ritually 

 slain, is necessary to establish heterosexual 

 behavior in the other young people of their 

 age grade. Increased intercourse may be re- 

 garded as facilitative of gestation; a pair 

 wherein the female is seen to have conceived 

 have to work hard so there will be more de- 

 posits of semen essential to "feeding" the 

 child. Or intercourse during pregnancy may 

 be tabooed. Lactation taboos, which may 

 even involve the nonlactating other wife in a 

 ])olygamous marriage, are found in some 

 societies. The most conspicuous imposition 

 of taboo on all heterosexual relationships 

 that has been reported is from the island of 

 Mentawei (Loeb, 1928) where there were 

 periods of ritual abstention sometimes as 

 long as 12 years. Comparable periods of ab- 

 stention have been reported for Chinese 

 soldiers, or male Chinese abroad in com- 

 munities without Chinese women, supported 

 by a strong cultural belief that sex is de- 

 bilitating. 



Analysis of the great variety of ways in 

 which men and women are enjoined to copu- 

 late, on certain occasions, in certain situa- 

 tions, at certain periods of the life cycle, 

 will reveal how a culture may institution- 

 alize an assumed greater sexual drive or an 

 assumed lesser drive. With the expected 

 range of individual variation, the men and 

 women with greater intensity of libido will 

 find a satisfactory social situation in one 

 culture and a frustrating situation in tiie 

 other. In many primitive cultures individual 

 ability to conform to these rigidly estab- 

 lished norms of tabooed or enjoined sex be- 

 havior is shared knowledge of the entire 

 group, and although the man whose libido 

 fails to meet them may be publicly identi- 

 fied, there will also be public knowledge that 

 great variation does exist, that X is able to 

 impregnate all three wives the same week, 

 that Y's wives are always fighting among 

 themselves because none of them has been 

 visited for many days. The pressure on the 

 individual of low libido, although public 

 and personal, may still be more bearable 

 than the anxiety experienced by men and 

 women in modern societies where each in- 

 dividual is ignorant of the behavior of 

 others and may classify himself as too high 



