CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR 



1437 



male orgasm, and no word could he found 

 for it; one woman described sex experience 

 in such a way that it suggested that she had 

 herself experienced orgasm, but she had no 

 vocabulary for discussing it" (Arapesh, 

 Mead, 1935). One may not say, "Oral stim- 

 ulation invariably accompanied coitus 

 among the Trukese" (Ford and Beach, 

 1951 ( , or "The sexual performance of the 

 mature woman results regularly in complete 

 and satisfactory orgasm" (Ford and Beach, 

 1951). (Italics mine.) 



A skilled investigator can get a reliable 

 account of the known sex behavior to which 

 each individual in the tribe relates his own 

 behavior (either negatively or positively) 

 and can make an estimate of frequency and 

 probably kinds of deviation in terms of the 

 pattern of distribution of other kinds of 

 behavior which it is possible for him to ob- 

 serve. At a generous estimate, there are per- 

 haps two dozen field workers who have both 

 the necessary skills to do work on sex be- 

 havior as such and who have done such 

 work. Comparative discussions thus have a 

 choice between treating reports by the 

 skilled and unskilled as comparable — the 

 method chosen by Ford and Beach (1951) 

 and Ford (19451 — and placing the wide- 

 spread material we can trust (for instance, 

 the explicit formulation of a taboo for- 

 bidding intercourse during lactation ) with 

 the few reliable studies which are available. 

 The latter method would be equivalent to 

 discussing nest building, knowing for many 

 species of birds only that they build nests 

 (with no details of the role of each sex, the 

 stage in courtship when the nest was com- 

 menced, the conditions which would cause 

 a mated pair to abandon the nest, etc.) 

 and interpreting this sparse knowledge in 

 the light of well described nest-building 

 sequences for a few species. Although it 

 would not be possible to extrapolate directly 

 from the known detailed pattern to a species 

 about which the details were unknown, it 

 would be possible to construct hypotheses 

 about the sorts of behavior one might ex- 

 pect to find in these other nest-building 

 species (the way in which activities of the 

 mating pair might be expected to have been 

 triggered by internal stimuli, related to 

 temperature and rainfall, etc.). 



In what follows I shall attempt to pro- 



vide a bridge between the specificity and 

 detail of the Hampson and Hampson and 

 the Money material and our own by dis- 

 cussing first the light cross cultural ma- 

 terials throw on psychologic sex gender and 

 sex role assignment.^ Intrasocietal studies, 

 such as those which compare the behavior 

 of middle class and lower class members of 

 our own society, or behavior characteristic 

 of various periods of our own history will 

 only be introduced for theoretic purposes, 

 where the cross cultural materials suggest 

 a different interpretation from that which 

 has been placed on them. The discussion 

 will be introduced with a description of 

 the materials, i.e., the selected cultural pat- 

 terns to which reference is made most fre- 

 quently. 



III. Materials (Selected Cultural 

 Patterns) 



An adec^uate treatment of the sex pattern 

 of any human society, even the classless 

 primitive society of a few hundred individ- 

 uals, would involve a whole monograph. It 



^In attempting to adjust existing cross cultural 

 information on the patterning of sex behavior to 

 the frame of reference provided by the Money and 

 Hampson and Hampson chapters, two limitations 

 must be borne in mind. These authors liave con- 

 fined themselves to the discussion of sex beliavior 

 as primarily copulatory behavior, with parental 

 behavior subsumed as an aspect of psychologic sex, 

 or learned sex role, and with early childhood ex- 

 perience bearing an acknowledged but unspecified 

 relationship to later sexual functioning. Field work- 

 ers who have attempted studies of primitive sex 

 behavior have worked in a broader context; 

 puberty rituals and pregnane}', birth and lactation 

 behavior, at the least, have been specifically in- 

 cluded within the studj' of sex behavior, and in 

 most recent work the specific functions of types 

 of child -rearing have also been included. 



The second difficulty is that nowhere in primi- 

 tive studies do we have determination of chromo- 

 somal, gonadal, and hormonal sex, or of somato- 

 type constitutions of the individuals in the society 

 whose sex behavior has been studied. Reports on 

 transvestites can carry only impressionistic state- 

 ments of mien and stance. The le\-els of hormonal 

 functioning, the range of anatomic variation, and 

 the specific characteristics of deviants cannot be 

 provided. The single exception to these statements 

 is the collection of somatotypes made on my last 

 expedition among the Manus, in which the impres- 

 sionistic impression of masculinity among the wo- 

 men is supported by analyses of the somatotypes 

 (Tanner, Heath, Mead, Schwartz and Shargo, to 

 be published; reference in Tanner and Inhelder, 

 Vol. 3.) 



