Bronisław Malinowski - Sex and Repression in Savage Society

Malinowski altered the whole mode and purpose of ethnographic enquiry.

Edmund Leach

The present essay attempts to put Freuds theories to the test by examining them in the light of the mental habits of the harmless Trobrianders. Several years contact with Melanesians, backed by the power to converse with them freely, gives Malinowski the best right to be heard as a reporter of facts which, it must be admitted, would escape nine trained observers out of every ten.

The Times Literary Supplement

This work is a most important contribution to anthropology and psychology, and it will be long before our textbooks are brought up to the standard which is henceforth indispensable.

Saturday Review

Bronislaw

Malinowski

Sex and Repression in
Savage Society

First published 1927
by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trbner & Co. Ltd
First paperback edition published 1960
by Routledge and Kegan Paul

First published in Routledge Classics 2001
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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ISBN 0-203-16678-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26151-8 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-25554-6 (Print Edition)

TO

MY FRIEND

PAUL KHUNER

New Guinea, 1914, Australia, 1918,
South Tyrol, 1922.

1 The Rift Between Psycho-analysis and Social
Science

The doctrine of psycho-analysis has had within the last ten years a truly meteoric rise in popular favour. It has exercised a growing influence over contemporary literature, science, and art. It has in fact been for some time the popular craze of the day. By this many fools have been deeply impressed and many pedants shocked and put off. The present writer belongs evidently to the first category, for he was for a time unduly influenced by the theories of Freud and Rivers, Jung, and Jones. But pedantry will remain the master passion in the student, and subsequent reflection soon chilled the initial enthusiasms.

This process with all its ramifications can be followed by the careful reader in this little volume. I do not want, however, to raise expectations of a dramatic volte-face. I have never been in any sense a follower of psycho-analytic practice, or an adherent of psycho-analytic theory; and now, while impatient of the exorbitant claims of psycho-analysis, of its chaotic arguments and tangled terminology, I must yet acknowledge a deep sense of indebtedness to it for stimulation as well as for valuable instruction in some aspects of human psychology.

Psycho-analysis has plunged us into the midst of a dynamic theory of the mind, it has given to the study of mental processes a concrete turn, it has led us to concentrate on child psychology and the history of the individual. Last but not least, it has forced upon us the consideration of the unofficial and unacknowledged sides of human life.

The open treatment of sex and of various shameful meanesses and vanities in manthe very things for which psycho-analysis is most hated and reviledis in my opinion of the greatest value to science, and should endear psycho-analysis, above all to the student of man; that is, if he wants to study his subject without irrelevant trappings and even without the fig leaf. As a pupil and follower of Havelock Ellis, I for one shall not accuse Freud of pan-sexualismhowever profoundly I disagree with his treatment of the sex impulse. Nor shall I accept his views under protest, righteously washing my hands of the dirt with which they are covered. Man is an animal, and, as such, at times unclean, and the honest anthropologist has to face this fact. The student's grievance against psycho-analysis is not that it has treated sex openly and with due emphasis, but that it has treated it incorrectly.

As to the chequered history of the present volume, the first two parts were written much earlier than the rest. Many ideas laid down there were formed while I was engaged in studying the life of Melanesian communities on a coral archipelago. The instructions sent to me by my friend Professor C. G. Seligman, and some literature with which he kindly supplied me, stimulated me to reflect on the manner in which the dipus complex and other manifestations of the unconscious might appear in a community founded on mother-right. The actual observations on the matrilineal complex among Melanesians are to my knowledge the first application of psycho-analytic theory to the study of savage life, and as such may be of some interest to the student of man, of his mind and of his culture. My conclusions are couched in a terminology more psycho-analytic than I should like to use now. Even so I do not go much beyond such words as complex and repression, using both in a perfectly definite and empirical sense.

As my reading advanced, I found myself less and less inclined to accept in a wholesale manner the conclusions of Freud, still less those of every brand and sub-brand of psycho-analysis. As an anthropologist I feel more especially that ambitious theories with regard to savages, hypotheses of the origin of human institutions and accounts of the history of culture, should be based on a sound knowledge of primitive life, as well as of the unconscious or conscious aspects of the human mind. After all neither group-marriage nor tetemism, neither avoidance of mother-in-law nor magic happen in the unconscious; they are all solid sociological and cultural facts, and to deal with them theoretically requires a type of experience which cannot be acquired in the consulting room. That my misgivings are justified I have been able to convince myself by a careful scrutiny of Freud's Totem and Taboo, of his Group-Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, of Australian Totemism by Rheim and of the anthropological works of Reik, Rank, and Jones. My conclusions the reader will find substantiated in the third part of the present book.

In the last part of the book I have tried to set forth my positive views on the origins of culture. I have there given an outline of the changes which the animal nature of the human species must have undergone under the anomalous conditions imposed upon it by culture. More especially have I attempted to show that repressions of sexual instinct and some sort of complex must have arisen as a mental by-product of the creation of culture.

The last part of the book, on Instinct and Culture, is in my opinion the most important and at the same time the most debatable. From the anthropological point of view at least, it is a pioneering piece of work; an attempt at an exploration of the no-specialist's-land between the science of man and that of the animal. No doubt most of my arguments will have to be recast, but I believe that they raise important issues which will sooner or later have to be considered by the biologist and animal psychologist, as well as by the student of culture.