CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR 



1435 



there are found in almost every society 

 whole areas of sex behavior which are char- 

 acterized by gaps in awareness — taboos 

 against naming parts of the body, taboos 

 against verbalizing activities commonly en- 

 gaged in, taboos against copulation in day- 

 light or in a lighted room, etc. These gaps 

 emphasize the intricacy of the systems of 

 inhibition and expression which make up 

 learned human sex behavior. In most so- 

 cieties, these gaps also provide areas where 

 pornography, the socially disapproved stim- 

 ulation of objectless erotic desire, can be de- 

 veloped (Mead, 1953). 



The presence of unobservable areas of sex 

 activity presents certain barriers to research 

 which are very difficult to overcome. It is 

 even impossible to make objective or sys- 

 tematic observations of those areas of sex 

 activity which are approved of by a society, 

 such as festivals where sexual license turns 

 everyone into a participant and nonpartici- 

 pation means enacting a role which is so- 

 cially unacceptable. Those sex activities 

 that can be observed are in some way in the 

 class of the disapproved, i.e., because a dis- 

 approved element of voyeurism is included, 

 as when married couples make moving 

 pictures of themselves which will in turn 

 serve as sexual precipitants for further ac- 

 tivity. Re-enactment of sex positions both 

 by children among primitive peoples (such 

 as in those examples obtained by Malinow- 

 ski, 1929) and by prostitutes is likely to 

 contain elements of conscious or unconscious 

 distortion. Drawings and carvings made for 

 l)ornographic ends are equally unreliable as 

 data on actual practice. So the student of 

 sex behavior is thrown back upon verbal 

 reports by individuals of activities in wdiich 

 they participated at some previous time 

 under exciting circumstances that were ex- 

 ceedingly unconducive to rigorous obser- 

 vation and exact recording. 



Even when it is possible to set the inter- 

 viewing stage so that it seems sufficiently 

 outside the culture to render ordinary cul- 

 tural controls nonoperative, or to interview 

 in a specially privileged communication 

 pattern such as physician-patient, or to in- 

 volve the cooperation of educated members 

 of western societies who are disciplined in 

 scientific methods and will honestly try to 

 describe such matters as duration of inter- 



course or interval between intromission and 

 ejaculation, these reports, although of scien- 

 tific value as data on attitudes toward sex, 

 have a limited value as accounts of exactly 

 what does take place. Once time has elapsed, 

 the type of retrospective falsification that 

 accompanies all reports on matters of emo- 

 tional interest to the reporter enters in. 

 Studies of such reports on situations about 

 which independent verification has been 

 possible — self-reporting on dietary intake, 

 mothers' reporting on their infants' achieve- 

 ments (Burks, 1928), or womens' records of 

 menstrual rhythms, for example — have 

 demonstrated how extraordinarily unrelia- 

 ble such restrospective reporting can be. If 

 these considerations apply when we are 

 judging the responses to interviews or ques- 

 tionnaires of the positively motivated mem- 

 bers of modern western societies who be- 

 lieve the truth is essential if the physician 

 or psychologist is to be able to advise them, 

 the problem becomes much more difficult in 

 dealing with members of non-European, 

 nonliterate societies, many of whom believe 

 that courtesy demands telling a questioner 

 what he wants to hear. All statements about 

 practices among people untrained in the 

 idea that giving factual accounts of some 

 event can be a moral obligation must be 

 taken with additional caution. 



These considerations make it possible to 

 lay down some criteria for evaluating 

 statements about sexual practices among 

 any people, and particularly among people 

 to whom factual reporting is unfamiliar. 

 Denials of a practice cannot be regarded as 

 meaningful if that practice is verbally rec- 

 ognized among a given people, even though 

 a strong taboo exists against it. If a people 

 consistently and independently express both 

 amazement and disgust, or amazement and 

 amusement at the mention of some sexual 

 practice for which they have no name and 

 against which they have no taboo, the prob- 

 ability is reasonably high that it is seldom 

 practiced and then only as an individual 

 discovery, not as an institution. 



The matter of institutionalization is im- 

 portant; for example kissing (Nyrop, 1898), 

 in the sense that it is known in the modern 

 West, is relatively unknown either as a 

 salutation or as a conventional piece of 

 sexual forcplay in most of the rest of the 



