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INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY — PUBLICATION NO. 10 



a hereafter. While notions of an afterlife have 

 crept in where the Indians have had contacts with 

 the whites, these are clearly assignable to Christian 

 influence. 



Upon inquu-Lng of informants as to the fate of 

 their souls after death, I was almost always given 

 the answer that they did not know. There 

 seemed, however, to be general agreement that 

 the soul of the deceased may become an abacikwaia 

 (evil spirit) or a kurukwa (monster), but this form 

 of survival informants were reluctant to contem- 

 plate for their own souls. Out of the confusion 

 of ideas (or lack of them) that exist on the subject, 

 it vaguely appears that the soul of a "good" man, 

 i. e., one who has abided by tribal custom and has 



the respect of his countrymen, does not return in 

 the form of an evil spirit or monster to harass 

 his siu-viving relatives, but that that of a "bad" 

 man, i. e., one who breaks tribal taboos and is 

 disliked by his countrymen, may return in one of 

 these forms to cause sickness and death to the 

 living. That the souls of some of the dead can be 

 relied upon to assist the living is clearly indicated 

 by the aforementioned practice of employing the 

 skulls of some ancestors to cnre disease. Inform- 

 ants, however, were never able to supply me with 

 any clear-cut ideas as to what happens to the soul 

 of a "good" person after death. One thing seems 

 clear as regards eschatological belief: there is no 

 afterworld to which the soul departs. 



SOME PROBLEMS AND CONCLUSIONS' 



Siriono society presents any number of impor- 

 tant anthropological problems, only a few of 

 which can be mentioned here. Having presented 

 in the foregoing sections a few of the descriptive 

 data about the nature of Su'iono society, I should 

 like especially to include a few closing remarks, 

 based on the Skiono data, about the problem of 

 hunger frustration and its relation to culture. 

 In this discussion, I propose ultimately to suggest 

 a number of broad generalizations about the rela- 

 tionship between intense hunger frustration and 

 habits and customs that perhaps can and should 

 be tested in other societies where similar condi- 

 tions exist. It is beyond the scope of this paper 

 to deal with this matter cross-culturally. Before 

 turning to a consideration of this problem, how- 

 ever, it will be necessary to clarify a number of 

 concepts. 



Physiologists and psychologists are now agreed 

 that the human organism is stimulated to behave 

 by wliat are kiiown as drives. These drives are 

 the motivatmg states of an organism. They are 

 of two kmds: primary (basic or miiate) and sec- 

 ondary (derived or acquired). The primary 

 drives are those which result from the normal 

 biological processes and recur at more or less 

 regular intervals, such as hunger, thirst, sex, 

 fatigue, and pain.* These are found in all human 



' Because of absence from the United States, lack of good library facilities, 

 and exigencies of publication, I have not had an opportunity to examine 

 all of the literature pertaining to subjects here discussed. While my con- 

 clusions are based upon data from but one society, I feel that they might be 

 suggestive for work in others. It is for this reason that I am publishing them 

 now, even though incomplete. 



* For a list of primary drives, see Murdock, ]94.'>, pp. 127-128 



beings. Secondary drives, on the other hand, are 

 learned drives. They are the motivations which 

 result from particular cultural situations. The 

 secondary drives, of course, are based on the 

 primary drives and are supported by the satisfac- 

 tion of them. But unlike prunary drives they are 

 not universally the same. There are doubtless 

 some secondary drives, like prestige and appetites, 

 that arc found in all societies; but theu- intensities 

 and definitions, at least, vary widely from person 

 to person and from society to society. Among the 

 ancient Romans, for example, food preferences 

 were elaborated to a pronounced degree, wliile 

 among the Siriono there is almost no expression 

 of these secondary drives. Similarly, among the 

 Indians of the northwest Pacific coast the drive 

 for prestige is intense, while among the neighbor- 

 ing Eskimo this drive is but weakly developed.' 



Wliile it is axiomatic that every society must 

 reinforce or satisfy the basic drives of man in order 

 to sm-vive, up until recent times cultm-e has been 

 little studied from the point of view of the effect 

 of basic drives upon it. We know from the 

 ethnological literature now available that the 

 drives of man are satisfied by almost as wide a 

 variety of techniques as there are societies existing 

 throughout the world. But ethnologists have 

 focused most of their attention on describing the 

 diverse habits and customs that exist in human 

 societies and have laid little stress on the role 

 played by basic drives in shaping them. 



' For an excellent discussion of secondary drives, see Miller and DoUard, 

 1941. pp. 54-68. 



