1436 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



world. If, however, any use of the lips exists, 

 as in the sign of affection that is so frequent 

 between mother and child in Oceania, in 

 which the mother breathes lightly with 

 parted lips along the surface of the child's 

 forearm, then it may be expected that some 

 mating pairs, on some occasions, will resort 

 to related practices. This generalization has 

 to be qualified by the possibility that whole 

 areas of the body may be so involved in 

 shame that they will be completely avoided, 

 possibly in all mating for generations. A 

 taboo such as the insistence on clothing or 

 darkness (or on a rigorous separation be- 

 tween food ingestion and elimination) car- 

 ries its own associated negations. On the 

 other hand, all practices that are named and 

 described with acceptance as something 

 that everybody does, or something that 

 young lovers do, may be accepted as prac- 

 ticed. Again, considerable caution is neces- 

 sary to distinguish between formal, liighly 

 institutionalized statements of what should 

 be done, and what is really done, which is 

 often just as institutionalized in practice. 

 This is so even when elders of the tribe are 

 ritually required to supervise first inter- 

 course, a fairly wide-spread practice in 

 many parts of the world. 



For example, in Samoa, a few girls of the 

 families of highest rank (including the girl 

 who bears the title of tawpou, a titular vil- 

 lage princess) were expected to be married 

 in state, as virgins. The official chief orator 

 of the bridegroom's household takes the to- 

 kens of virginity before the marriage is con- 

 summated, and a white sheet of bark cloth 

 or a fine white mat stained with blood is 

 hung outside the house the day after the 

 wedding. The official version of this cere- 

 mony is that the bride who was thus pub- 

 licly tested and proved not to be a virgin 

 was beaten to death. The actual practice 

 seems to have been that the bride who was 

 not a virgin took pains to confess sufficiently 

 ahead of time so that a proper supply of 

 chicken blood could be provided. If she was 

 ever beaten to death, it was not for not be- 

 ing a virgin, but for not taking precautions 

 against publicly shaming her relatives. The 

 actual behavior is congruent with Samoan 

 culture in a way in which the official pro- 

 claimed behavior is not (Mead, 1928, 1960). 



Thus even positive statements given in 



detail by natives who claim to have been 

 observers of or participants in occasions 

 which the ethnographers cannot witness 

 themselves must be viewed with great cau- 

 tion and subjected to the test of congruity 

 with other aspects of the culture. This is 

 especially true of such customs as bride cap- 

 ture, which may be described as a violent 

 abduction of the bride as she screams for 

 help, followed by a pitched battle between 

 the kin of bride and groom, but which is in 

 fact a carefully pre-arranged elopement in 

 which the bride does a little ritual screaming 

 (Bali, Bateson and Mead, 1942). As a field 

 worker in areas where other westerners have 

 lived, I have frequently had situations de- 

 scribed to me in which the emotion at- 

 tributed to the natives (fear, panic, horror, 

 violence) turned out, when I had an oppor- 

 tunity to observe the same ceremony, to 

 have been an emotion felt only by the west- 

 ern observer. The foreign observer may con- 

 fuse his own and the native response, or, in 

 the case of a bizarre occasion in which he is 

 a participant, for example a postmortem 

 cesarian in an open grave, he may be so 

 horror stricken as to communicate his own 

 feelings to the natives. As an interviewer 

 he may convey by tone of voice expectations 

 or anxieties which will influence the inter- 

 view, or, through ignorance of the possibility 

 of some nuance of behavior, pattern the 

 response in such a way as to distort it. The 

 respondent may relate events as they are 

 theoretically supposed to have been, like a 

 Victorian woman lamenting the fright she 

 felt on her wedding night; the sexually im- 

 potent are notoriously good improvisors of 

 nonexperienced ecstasies. Husbands and 

 wives who have lived in close accord may 

 collaborate in myths about their sexual re- 

 lationship and repeat identical stories in 

 good faith or, as careful check-ups have 

 shown, two people who have participated 

 in the same sexual event may relate wholly 

 different stories, both of which cannot be 

 accurate descriptions. Where a sexual ex- 

 perience has had a highly negative quality, 

 extreme distortions may occur (Erickson, 

 1938). 



No negative or absolute statements about 

 practice can be made with safety. One 

 can say, "No male member of the tribe 

 questioned showed any recognition of fe- 



