SEX AND TEMPERAMENT in Three Primitive
Societies
Author: Margaret Mead
A Review by Lipika Nath
“ the gender roles assigned to individuals are not innate,
instead, they are shape and modelled by the society we live in”
‘Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies’, a book by
Margaret Mead is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable classical contributions to the science of anthropology and anthropological fieldwork which became a major cornerstone of the feminist
movement. This ethnological account was first published in 1935.
The account primarily deals with a brilliant anthropological study of the
intimate lives of three New Guinea tribes from infancy to adulthood with main focus
on the gentle, mountain-dwelling Arapesh; the fierce, cannibalistic river-dwelling
Mundugumor and the graceful head-hunters lake-dwelling Tchambuli.
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 –
November 15, 1978)
Margaret
Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an
anthropologist, as well as an writer, curator and speaker during the 1960s and
1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree
at Barnard College in New York City and her MA and PhD degrees from Columbia
University and she is considered to be the “first woman of science”. Mead was
attributed to be the communicator of anthropology in modern American and
Western culture and was often controversial as an academician.Her
reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast
Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead lived with the tribes and shared
detailed observations of the cultures of each tribe he studied during her life,
as well as she was engaging herself in
describing how various personality types fit into each culture and managed to
bring in ground-breaking work of being one of the first individuals to
establish the importance of distinct cultures and their impact on individual
behaviours and temperaments.
To
write this novel account “Sex and Temperament”, Mead decided to explore the
lives of three tribes Arapesh,
Mundugumor and Tchambuli- all the way from their infancy to childhood to adulthood.
The book is divided into four parts with 18 chapters, including her observation
and analysing realities of the 3 tribal communities respectively with the
concluding part of the implication of the finding of her study.
Through this ethnological fieldwork based account, Mead advances the theory that many so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences but reflect the cultural conditioning of different societies.
Sex
and Temperament served as an important historical instrument that inspired and
motivated the feminist theory and movement, as well as the concept of culture. Through
Margaret Mead’s writing we can understand how the beliefs about the sexual
division of labour in society being based on the biology of men and women is a
baseless argument. Through the writing of this book readers can understand how dangerous
it could be for a society to state the definite characteristics that women and
men must possess due to their gender. It is incorrect to ascribe certain specific
characters as ‘feminine’ and others as ‘masculine’ which could be better
understood with the chapters provided in this ethnological account. It has been
observed in the book that,
With
the Arapesh, they enjoyed many recreational activities such as gardening,
hunting and some maternal-oriented activities such as raising children and
taking care of them. This tribe placed a significant emphasis on ‘mildness’ and
viewed it as an attractive, desirable quality.
The individuals within this group were peace-lovers, with no awareness
about concepts such as ‘war’ and the usage of ‘warfare.’ Among this community, men and women were equally
peaceful and this inclination towards peace and absence of warfare directly
led to a state where no individuals were required to attain leadership
positions. The most distinctive feature of this tribe was the involvement and
role of both sexes-male and female- in so called ‘maternal roles’ such as the
rearing of the child where children then grew up to be passive, content
individuals with high sense of comfort and emotional security and both the male
and female members also involve themselves in taking care of household works.
Thus the tribe depicted a sense of equality in the division of labour between
men and women. Therefore, Mead concluded that, “ Arapesh are predominantly
maternal in their paternal aspects and feminine in their social aspects.”
With
the Mundugumor, on the contrary to Arapesh, the most distinctive feature of
this tribe is the system of ‘trade’ that carries on within the family and social
levels. This meant that the men of the family, be it father or son, had the
right to trade women in their family in exchange of another ‘wife’. Thus, the
father could trade his daughter or sister and the son could trade his sister in
exchange of a wife. As a result of this, there was a sense of competition and
hostility that prevailed between the father and the son. Even, mothers often
viewed their daughters as a “sexual rival” and inhabited feelings of jealousy
towards their own daughters as the daughters were seen as allies to their
father and the sons were seen as allies to their mother. The
announcement of pregnancy within the family, led to a “spousal conflict” since
the birth of child (be it male or female) implied the commencement of a rivalry
and thus the journey of the children was also begins with negativity due to the
hostile environment that within they grew up. This situation depicts that within
this community both men and women were equally aggressive; and
With
the Tchambuli, highly contrasted with
that of both Arapesh and Mundugumor, depicted a reversal in
the roles performed by men and women, that is, the conventional sexual roles of
men and women were interchanged in this society. The dwellings that were
created by these tribal people were called “houses of women” wherein women
cooked, worked and enjoyed each other’s company. Men, on the other hand resided
in the “ceremonial houses.” the women in this tribe performed the instrumental
as well as the expression roles. They were seen as the bread-winners and
performed activities like trading, weaving an shing to sustain the livelihoods
of themselves and their families. They were also seen as providers of
emotionality and nurtures wherein they not only looked after their children but
also treated their husbands as little boys and not their counterparts. On the
other hand, the men in this tribe took to more recreational or
leisure-providing activities such as adorning an dressing up, immersing
themselves in different art forms and
making arrangements for different
ceremonial festivals. So for this community, women were more
aggressive than men.
Mead's
final chapters, with her conclusions, make for fascinating reading. She argues
that when certain traits are tied to a particular gender, people in a culture
who don't have those traits are then seen as being "unmanly" or
"unwomanly", rather than just atypical of that culture. After reading
the book, readers can understand that the purpose for working on this book was
not just to identify the stereotypical gender roles but to also observe and
analyse a culture wherein the emotions varied strongly from those in the West.
Mead's
conclusion after observing these three tribes is that personality traits that
are in some cultures considered sex-based, or assigned to a particular sex, are
in fact interpreted differently in different cultures and not necessarily
associated with one sex or another. This argues for "nurture over
nature" - each culture has its own ideas of which personality traits
it considers normal and which it considers abnormal. Children of that society
are then raised within those expectations. In some cases, traits are additionally
associated with being either male or female.
Last
but not the least, her study on these three tribes helps the readers in
understanding how the gender roles vary on several factors such as geography,
culture and conditioning. She made four conclusions from her study. First,
there is no basis or foundation for “sex-linked masculine or feminine behaviour; the differences in the sexual roles of the
men and women in these three tribes serve as a corroboration to prove that the
cultural and social conditioning of individuals had a large impact on their
behaviour as compared to their biology; different cultures lead to the
formation of different personalities (nurture) and lastly the nurture of an
individual is more important than the nature.
References :
1. Margaret Mead Biography. Retrieved 10th November 2020, from https://www.biography.com/scholar/margaret-mead
2. Mead, M. (1935). Sex and temperament in three primitive societies (3rd ed.). New York.
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