CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR 



1459 



tions, e.g., more and more remote definitions 

 of an appropriate ''mother's brother's 

 daughter" may be permitted, other forms of 

 marriage may be permitted to exist side by 

 side (in turn producing new complications.) 

 (latniul, Bateson, 1958), or the system may 

 become completely unworkable, as in the 

 jMundugumor requirement that a man 

 marry his mother's father's mother's fa- 

 ther's sister's son's daughter's son's daugh- 

 ter, and that he give his sister in exchange 

 for this man's daughter (Mead, 1935). 

 Among a people with a very low infant 

 survival rate this reciuirement was so im- 

 possible to meet that everyone in the com- 

 munity was married incorrectly, witli cor- 

 related feelings of shame and delincjuency 

 which contributed to the social breakdown 

 of the society under culture contact condi- 

 tions. 



In most societies, especially in large com- 

 plex modern nations, conditions are such 

 that a very large number of individuals are 

 l)repared during childhood and early youth 

 for types of adult sex relations which are 

 not those into which they actually enter in 

 later life, thus reproducing on a large scale 

 with great variations in individual cases 

 the types of maladjustment which are found 

 in a limited degree in every human society. 

 The consulting rooms of modern psychia- 

 trists have been so filled with such individ- 

 uals that the contemporary climate of opin- 

 ion in the western world has placed great 

 emphasis on sexual maladjustment as a 

 cause of maladjustment in general. But, al- 

 though the change in scale and the much 

 greater degree of complexity increase the 

 difficulty of so rearing children of both 

 sexes that they will function within the 

 existing family system, all societies face 

 to some degree the sociologic problem of 

 adjusting the marriage system to the sex 

 ratio, the age distribution, etc., of their 

 population. These problems become acute 

 either through a change in the social system 

 (such as the migration of the males in 

 search of work), or a great change in the 

 sex ratio as the result of war, migration, or 

 a sex differential in the death rate. 



There is always, also, the parallel prob- 

 lem of maintaining a system of child rear- 

 ing and a set of relevant and related prac- 

 tices in other fields sucli as the arts, religious 



ceremonial, etc., which will ensure that the 

 majority of individuals born into that so- 

 ciety will be able to function within it, being 

 sexually active where activity is called for 

 and sexually inactive where such inactivity 

 is expected and prescribed. 



The problem of permitting the publica- 

 tion of literature likely to inflame the imagi- 

 nation of adolescent boys in a society which 

 makes no provision for legitimate premari- 

 tal sex activities is an example of a con- 

 temporary situation in which a legalized 

 practice may be out of step with a legal 

 prohibition (Mead, 1953). 



In considering the detailed presentation 

 which is to follow, it will be useful to keep 

 in mind two antithetical tendencies which 

 human beings display, the tendency toward 

 specificity of responses so that a sex re- 

 sponse is only possible under the most 

 highly specialized and idiosyncratic condi- 

 tions and the tendency toward generaliza- 

 tion in which the capacity to respond sexu- 

 ally may be extended to every member of the 

 opposite sex within a very wide age range, 

 or may include both sexes and even animals. 

 Thus zoolagnia may exclude all sexual re- 

 sponse to human beings and even to other 

 than the chosen type of animal and so rep- 

 resent a specialization, or it may be one 

 item in a very large range of sexually in- 

 terchangeable objects of sex desire. At the 

 level of sexual practice, specialization leads 

 to those idiosyncratic demands for rituals 

 which are stimulating only for the actor and 

 not for the partner. It is reported that 

 brothels in large cities sometimes cater to 

 these desires, which are so individual as to 

 be unresolvable in ordinary heterosexual 

 partnerships. At the level of sexual choice, 

 the same capacity for specialization dis- 

 plays itself in the phenomenon which is de- 

 scribed in English as "falling in love," a type 

 of behavior which occurs to a limited degree 

 in all societies: the obsessive concentration 

 on one individual whether or not he or she 

 is sociologically appropriate as a mate. 

 Where a whole culture assumes such concen- 

 tration on single individuals, it becomes 

 necessary to generalize the mechanism in- 

 volved. In England, a very large proportion 

 of working-class men marry (believing they 

 have fallen in love with her) the first girl 

 thev ever coui't (Oorer, 1955) ; by another 



