STOW COLLEGE MANAGEMENT & GENERAL EDUCATION
PDA Women’s Studies

CULTURAL DIVERSITY (2): LEARNING SEX ROLES

Margaret Mead’s book Growing Up In New Guinea examines the isolated community of the Manus of the Admiralty Islands, north of New Guinea. This extract includes her reflections on family life among the Manus and in particular the role of the mother and father in bringing up children. It highlights the very different relationships that girls and boys have with their mothers and fathers.

If a long line of devoted biologists had been breading guinea-pigs or fruit flies for a hundred years and recording the results, and some careless vandal burnt the painstaking record and killed the survivors, we would cry out in anger at the loss to science. Yet, when history, without any such set purpose, has presented us with the results of not a hundred years’ experiment on guinea-pigs, but a thousand years’ experiment on human beings, we permit the records to be extinguished without a protest.

Although most of these fragile cultures which owed their perpetuation not to written records but to the memories of a few hundred human beings are lost to us, a few remain. Isolated on small Pacific islands, in dense African jungles or Asiatic wastes, it is still possible to find untouched societies which have chosen solutions of life’s problems different from our own, which can give us precious evidence on the malleability of human nature.

Such an untouched people are the brown sea-dwelling Manus of the Admiralty Islands, north of New Guinea, In the vaulted thatched houses set on stilts in the olive-green waters of the wide lagoon, their lives are lived very much as they have been lived for unknown centuries. No missionary has come to teach them an unknown faith, no trader has torn their lands from them and reduced them to penury. Those white men’s diseases which have reached them have been few enough in number to be fitted into their own theory of disease as a punishment for evil done. They buy iron and cloth and beads from the distant traders; they have learned to smoke the white man’s tobacco, to use his money, to take an occasional dispute into the District Officer’s Court. Since 1912 war has been practically abolished, an enforced reformation welcome to a trading, voyaging people. Their young men go away to work for two or three years in the plantations of the white man, but come back little changed to their own villages. It is essentially a primitive society without written records, without economic dependence upon white culture, preserving its own canons, its own way of life.

The manner in which human babies born into these water-dwelling communities gradually absorb the traditions, the prohibitions, the values of their elders and become in turn the active perpetuators of Manus culture is a record rich in its implications for education. Our own society is so complex, so elaborate, that the most serious student can, at best, only hope to examine a part of the education process. While he concentrates upon the method in which a child solves one set of problems, he must of necessity neglect the others. But in a simple society, without division of labour, without written records, without a large population, the whole tradition is narrowed down to the memory capacities of a few individuals. With the aid of writing and an analytic point of view, it is possible for the investigator to master in a few months most of the tradition which it takes the native years to learn.

From this vantage point of a thorough knowledge of the cultural background, it is then possible to study the educational process, to suggest solutions to educational problems which we would never be willing to study by experimentation upon our children. But Manus has made the experiment for us; we have only to read the answer.

I made this study of Manus education to prove no thesis, to support no preconceived theories. Many of the results came as a surprise to me. This description of the way a simple people, dwelling in the shallow lagoons of a distant South Sea island, prepare their children for life, is presented to the reader as a picture of human education in miniature. Its relevance to modern educational interest is first just that it is such a simplified record in which all the elements can be readily grasped and understood, where a complex process which we are accustomed to this of as written upon too large a canvas to be taken in at a glance can be seen as through a painter’s diminishing glass. Furthermore in Manus certain tendencies in discipline or accorded licence, certain parental attitudes, can be seen carried to more drastic lengths that has yet occurred without our own society. An finally these Manus people are interesting to us because the aims and methods of Manus society, although primitive, are not unlike the aims and methods which may be found in our own immediate history.

The family picture in Manus is also strange and revealing, with the father taking the principal role, the father the tender solicitous indulgent guardian, while the mother takes second place in the child’s affection. Accustomed as we are to the family in which the father is the stern and distant dictator, the mother the child’s advocate and protector, it is provocative to find a society in which father and mother have exchanged parts. The psychiatrist have laboured the difficulties under which a male child grows up if this father plays patriarch and his mother Madonna. Manus illustrates the creative part which a loving tender father may play in shaping positively his son’s personality. It suggests that the solution of the family complex may lie not in the parents assuming no roles, as some enthusiasts suggest, but in their playing different ones.

This account is the result of six months’ concentrated and uninterrupted field work. From a thatched house on piles, built in the centre of the Manus village of Peri, I learned the native language, the children’s games, the intricacies of social organisation, economic custom, and religious belief and practice which formed the social framework within which the child grows up. In my large living room, on the wide verandas, on the tiny islet adjoining the houses, in the surrounding lagoon, the children played all day and I watched them, now from the midst of a play group, now from behind the concealment of the thatched walls. I rode in their canoes, attended their feasts, watched in the house of mourning and sat severely still while the mediums conversed with the spirits of the dead. I observed the children when no grown up people were present, and I watched their behaviour towards their parents. Within a social setting which I learned to know intimately enough not to offend against the hundreds of name taboos, I watched the Manus baby, the Manus child, the Manus adolescent, in an attempt to understand the way in which each of these was becoming a Manus adult.

Manus Attitudes towards Sex

The father treats his young children with very slight regard for differences in sex. Girls or boys, they sleep in their father’s arms, ride on his back, beg for his pipe, and purloin betel from his shoulder bag. When they are three or four he makes them small canoes, again regardless of sex. Neither boys nor girls wear any clothing except tiny bracelets, anklets, necklaces of dogs’ teeth, and beaded belts. These are usually worn only on state occasions, as continued wear chafes the skin and produces an ugly eruption. The adults emphasise sex differences from birth in their speech – a boy is a nat, a girl is a ndrakein, at an hour of age. Before birth only is the term nat used to denote child. These terms are used so frequently by women – who are likely to was voluble about ‘boy of mine’, or ‘girl of mine’ – that a child of three will gravely correct the misapplication of a term to the baby of the house.

But before three, no other distinctions are made between the sexes. At about three maternal pride makes a new bid for the small girl. A tiny curly grass skirt is fashioned with eager hands and much comment, and the solemn-eyed baby arrayed in it for a feast day. The assumption of this costume units the daughter with the mother in a way that has never happened before. Her mother is addressed as pen, woman, but she is a ndrakein, similarly her father is called a kamal, and her brother is a nat. The differences between her body and her brother’s are obvious, as both sexes go naked. But as adults are clothed and most prudish about uncovering, and her undeveloped breasts are more like her father’s than her mother’s, mere anatomy does not give her nearly as good a clue to sex ad does clothing.

The children were asked to draw pictures of men and women, or of girls and boys; where differences were shown – far more often they were ignored – the male anatomy was drawn correctly and the female was indicated by drawing a grass skirt.

From the moment when the baby girl and her slightly older sisters are dressed identically with their mother, although it is only for an hour, the girls begin to turn to their mothers more, to cling to their older sisters.

Little girls are not forced to wear grass skirts until they are seven or eight; they put them on, go swimming, get them wet, put on green leaves instead, lose the leaves, run about naked for a while, go home and put on dry skirts. Or they will take their grass skirts off and wade through the water at low tide, grass skirts high and dry on top of their curly heads. Not until twelve or thirteen is the sense of shame at being uncovered properly developed.

At about the age of three little boys begin to punt their fathers to the lee of the island which all the men of the village use as a latrine. Girls and women never go there, and the boy child learns thus early to slip apart from the women to micturate.

But little boys’ great realisation of maleness comes when they learn the phallic athleticism practised by their elders in the dance. A child grown suddenly proficient wriggles and prances for days and the adults applaud him salaciously. This is learned at about the age of three or four. Soon after this age, the boys are given bows and arrows and small fish spears; very tiny girls and boys wander about the lagoon at low tide playing with sticks and stones, imitating the more purposeful play of the older children without regard to sex. But little girls are never given real fishing toys. They are given small canoes and are as proficient in paddling and punting as the boys, but they never sale toy canoes of their own. From the time of this differentiation in play and dress the sex groups draw apart a little. There is no parental ban upon playing together nor is there any very deep antagonism between the groups. The line is drawn more in terms of activities. Round games and water games are played by both groups; first fights as frequently cross sex lines as not: on moonlight nights boys and girls race shrieking over the mudflats of the lagoon laid bare by tide.

But as the adolescent girls are drawn more and more into the feminine activities of their households, the twelve-year-olds, eight-year-olds, five-year-olds, tend to follow in a long straggling line. When a girls reaches puberty all the younger girls down to the age of eight or nine go to sleep in her house for a month. This draws the girls closer together. There was one little island in the village reserved for the women. Here they went occasionally to perform various industrial tasks, and here on a grass plot at the peaked summit of the small steep cone, the little girls used to dance at sunset, taking off their grass skirts and waving them like plumes over their heads, shouting and circling, in a noisy revelry, high above the village.

The boys would be off stalking fish in the reedy shallows and sternly schooling the crowd of small boys who followed in their wake. Between the boys’ group and the girls’ there would be occasional flare-ups, battles with sea animal squirt guns or swift flight and pursuit. Very occasionally, as we have seen, they united in a semi-amorous play, choosing mates, building houses, making mock payments for their brides, even lying down cheek to cheek, in imitation of their parents. I believe that fear of the spirit wrath over sex prevented this play from ever developing into real sex play. Each group of children, believe that the young people who are now grown engaged in much more intriguing play when they were young. But as this golden age theme is investigated, each group pushes it back a generation further to the days just before their time when the spirits were not so easily angered. This play is always in groups. There is no opportunity for two children to slip away together; the groups is too clamorous of all its members.

With the child’s increased consciousness of belonging to a sex group and greater identification with adults of the same sex comes a rearrangement of the family picture. Up to the time a little girl is five or six, she accompanies her father as freely as would her brother. She sleeps with her father, sometimes until she is seven or eight. By this time she is entering the region of taboo. If she is not engaged herself, younger sisters and cousins may be engaged, and she will be on terms of avoidance with the boys to whom they are betrothed. If she is engaged herself, there will likely be several men in the village from whom she must hide her face. She is no longer the careless child who rode upon her father’s back into the very sanctuary of male life, the ship island. More and more her father tends to leave her at home for her younger brothers and sisters, or to go more staidly, babyless, about his business. But she is used to adult attention, dependent upon the sent of pleasant power which it gives her. Gradually deserted by her father, she comes to identify herself either with her mother or with some older woman of her kindred. It is curious how much more frequent this latter adjustment is, except where the mother is a widow. It is as if the girl had so thoroughly passed over her mother in preference to her father that she could not go back and pick up the dropped thread. These attachments to older women have nothing of the nature of a ‘crush’ in them: they are very definitely in terms of the family picture. Often a grandmother is chosen. The older women are freer to teach the girls beadwork, to start them at work for their trousseaux. The younger women are more preoccupied with baby tending, which does not interest the little girls and in which their help is not enlisted. Little girls have no dolls and no pattern of playing with babies. We bought some little wooden statues from a neighbouring tribe and it was the boys who treated them as dolls and crooned lullabies to them.

From M. Mead (1963) (1930) Growing Up In New Guinea: A Study of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 10-16, 117-20.

Questions

1. How would you describe Margaret Mead’s attitude to the Manus? What ‘evidence’ is there for your description?

2. List the main similarities and differences between the Manus’ and Western approaches to child-rearing. (Refer in particular to child- rearing and sex roles.)

3. What evidence does Mead provide to indicate that gender-specific behaviour is learned rather than innate?