CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR 



1439 



From its earliest days, the Arapesh child 

 experiences passive adaptation to the 

 mother's body as it is carried in a string bag 

 against her back or in a sling directly be- 

 neath the breast. It receives generous but 

 increasingly unpredictable suckling, as 

 mothers alternate day-long spells of re- 

 laxation, when their infants lie in their 

 laps and are suckled almost continuously, 

 with long journeys up and down steep hills 

 carrying heavy loads suspended from their 

 foreheads, when the infants are suspended 

 in a sling beneath their breasts. If there are 

 other lactating women in any small group, 

 they will suckle the child while its mother is 

 away ; after menstrual seclusion is resumed, 

 fathers also take care of young children. 

 Children are carried a great deal and are 

 discouraged from too much activity. For 

 example, creeping is discouraged until a 

 child has several teeth, and children who 

 have learned to carry loads may still be 

 tucked into their mothers' carrying bags 

 when they are tired. 



Betrothal occurs w4ien the girl is five or 

 six and the boy in early puberty, so that the 

 girl may move into her future husband's 

 household and he and his father and bro- 

 thers may "grow" her. If age calculations 

 have l)een faulty and the betrothed children 

 are too close of an age, magic is resorted 

 to in order to check the girl's growth; if 

 this fails, she may be rebetrothed to some 

 older boy in the betrothed's household, be- 

 cause premature sex activity is believed to 

 stunt growth permanently. As feeding the 

 child establishes parental rights to obedi- 

 ence, so feeding his future wife establishes 

 for the bethrothed boy his right to exact 

 obedience and service from his wife in later 

 years. As soon as the first signs of puberty 

 appear, boys and birls become guardians of 

 their own growth, tabooing certain foods. 

 The boys learn to let blood ceremonially 

 from their penises, and following menarche 

 (which is celebrated by a ceremony in 

 which the betrothed pair ceremonially 

 divides a yam, one-half of which the hus- 

 band keeps until his wife is pregnant) the 

 girls are taught to rub themselves with 

 stinging nettles and to thrust a rolled 

 stinging nettle into the vagina. These prac- 

 tices, believed to promote growth, are pain- 

 ful and seem to act effectively as deterrants 



of masturbation. During this period of 

 pubertal growth, the antithesis between 

 growth and sex is heavily emphasized ; after 

 the girl has menstruated several times, her 

 young husband may approach her, consum- 

 mating the marriage privately without cere- 

 mony, but watching carefully to see if his 

 hunting or gardening is affected, in which 

 case he must postpone further sex relations 

 longer. A young couple who have begun 

 sex relations must protect their parents 

 from any contact with their sexuality — as 

 in giving them food from a fire by which 

 they have had intercourse — just as their 

 parents once protected them. The preferred 

 sex activity is thus with a younger wife 

 whom one has ''grown" and who has become 

 almost like a member of the family, whereas 

 seduction by stranger women is feared, be- 

 cause it is believed that they will steal some 

 of a man's semen and use it to sorcerize 

 him and, in any event, are bound to en- 

 danger him in every sort of way. Orgasm 

 for women is not recognized, but close ques- 

 tioning indicates that an occasional woman 

 seems to have had some climactic experi- 

 ence. 



Male ceremonial, which centers about 

 a cult of supernatural patrons (tamberans) 

 into which adolescent boys are initiated in 

 infrequently lield ceremonies for large 

 groups or in small ceremonies for individ- 

 uals, is an elaborate pantomine in which 

 the men make the children (who before this 

 have been made of the blood of the women) 

 into their children, feeding them on blood 

 drawn from the arms of the initiating group. 

 In the initiatory enclosure, the initiates are 

 fed, tended, and grown, the men enacting 

 ceremonially the birth sequence, which they 

 speak of as the "women's tamberan."^ 

 Women, in addition to being excluded from 

 these ceremonies for their own protection, 

 must avoid sacred places presided over by 

 serpent deities {niarsalai) ; menstruating 

 women or men who have recently engaged in 

 intercourse anger the marsalai and the 

 yams; anything connected with marsalais 

 endangers the pregnant woman, as also do 



"See Mead (1949b) for an analysis of these 

 ceremonial elaborations of womb envy in New 

 Guinea cultures. 



