MALINOWSKI’S THEORY OF CULTURE
Malinowski’s title, Sex and Repression in Savage Society should read Sex in Savage Society and Repression in Western Society, to aptly reflect his comparative orientation. In this work Malinowski attempts to demonstrate his theory of culture, with its definite emphasis on the nuclear family, this with regard to the Oedipal Complex, the issue of the day.
Malinowski shows the Trobriand matrilineal social structure to be fundamentally different from family form in modern society. Trobrianders reckon kinship through mothers only; in fact Trobriand children do not have “fathers” as we know them. Fathers have a friendly, “dutiful” relationship to their wife’s children. Much of the authoritarian “fathering” of Western societies is accomplished by the Trobriands by the mother’s brother, with whom the child is never intimate. The child’s relationship to the mother’s husband (the “physical father”), on the other hand, is anxiety-free and friendly. As Malinowski says, “father is always there as helpful adviser, half playmate, half protector”. This “affection-without-authority” relationship contrasts strikingly with Malinowski’s understanding of the neurotic, authoritarian relationship between a Western father and child (especially a male child).
The Trobriand child grows up almost completely independent of adult authority, partly because of the pattern of patrilocal residence which has the children and mother living in a community removed from the mother’s brother. Malinowski surmises that children in this pristine condition, running around naked and free, physically distant from the primary authority figure, and whose sexual and excretory functions are treated matter-of-factly, do not think in terms of decent-indecent, or pure-impure. The pattern of Malinowski’s comparative treatment of social life and cultural form in these two groups shows them to be opposed on practically every measure. In its treatment of sexuality, Western culture is complex and veiled, but Trobriand culture is simple and direct. Western culture creates repressed persons (in a Freudian sense); Trobrianders are in touch with their sexuality and are basically un-repressed. Although Westerners are forced out of the “natural” course of development, Trobrianders are in almost total agreement with their biological systems.
Applying these findings to the original issue, that of “Oedipal conflict” in the Trobriands, Malinowski concludes that the Trobrianders do in fact have complexes, but not Oedipal complexes. Unlike the Western male child whose wishes are to destroy father and marry mother, the Trobriand desires the destruction of the maternal uncle and a marriage with his sister. Brother-sister intimacy is strictly taboo for the Trobriands, and this is the point at which the sexual energies are thwarted, not between child and parent as is the case in the West. Malinowski thus restricts “Oedipal complex” to the particular form of psychological dynamic found in the early-infancy stages in patriarchal societies. Malinowski found the Trobriands to have a different form of nuclear family complex, namely, the “matriarchal complex.” In comparison with the Oedipal complex, the Trobriand complex is formed later in life, entails fewer shocks for the child and extends in scope beyond the confines of the “family circle”. Consequently it is presumed to leave the Trobrianders practically neurosis-free.
Malinowski’s theoretical framework is evident in his response to criticisms raised by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. Jones had argued that the Trobrianders do know the facts
of paternity, but that this knowledge is unconscious or repressed. For Jones the Oedipal complex is basic; the matrilineal organization of the Trobrianders is a response to Oedipal drives, a way of dealing with the same sexual issues dealt with in the West. Culture does not create or channel the complex but rather is built in terms of the complex. The mother’s brother in the Trobriands is simply a substitute for the father, according to Jones. Likewise, the incestuous wishes toward the mother are redirected to the sister.
Note in Malinowski’s formulation that the culture structure which he views as primary and determining does not include “sexuality,” which he treats instead as a biological impulse. It was important for Malinowski to insist on this point in order to work out his comparative project, for if the biological sex drive were fundamentally different in Trobrianders and Westerners, he could not advance his cultural argument. Culture, for Malinowski, consists of institutions that satisfy biological and psychological needs in appropriate ways. Sexuality is one of those needs that is governed by culture; it is not a part of culture, even in his argument with Jones about the relative merits of psychological vis-?-vis cultural approaches to the Trobriand data. Sexuality, for Malinowski, is regulated by the institutional system; it is not part of the system. By treating something as an “instinct” or biological fact the anthropologist relegates it to an invariable unit in the analysis, one that cannot have a determining effect because institutions are different, but the biological facts are everywhere the same. Again, cultural systems work on sexuality; sexuality is not part of the system. The sad irony is that Malinowski, the anthropological thinker who had the most to say about sexuality, treated sexuality as an instinct which would never become incorporated into a cultural analysis.
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