Schneider, d e Leach, e - Virgin Birth

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Virgin Birth Author(s): David M. Schneider and E. R. Leach Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 126-129Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2799418Accessed: 27-02-2015 12:35 UTC

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I26 CORRESPONDENCE

within the scope of my own assessment) is admittedly pleonastic, but as an English sentence it is certainly not 'nonsensical'; there is nothing in it, on logical grounds, to put the reader on the alert against the translation. He might disapprove the author's style of exposition, but so he might justifiably disapprove the style of thought in the rendering proposed by Mr Stewart, which is just as pleonastic and logically inferior. (In my view indeed, it is the original French sentence which might rather be reproached.) For a translator to represent one feminine noun (tendance) as the subject (elle), instead of the other feminine noun (orientation) in the same sentence, is open to dispute or correction, but it does not make the translation a bad one. It does not, that is, distort or impede an essential understanding of the progress of the argument of which the sentence forms part, and in this sense it is inconsequential.

More briefly, the second passage is clumsy but again not nonsensical or gravely inimical to the meaning. The third is a misrendering, and we may be grateful for its detection. But if this is the worst that Mr Stewart can do, by way of demonstration that the translation as a whole is patently bad, then I do not consider that he has made his case. (I assume, of course, that upon reflection he would not wish to press his even more extreme charge that he can tell that the translation is wrong 'without even referring to the French original '.) There are doubtless other mistakes and unsatisfactory renditions, but as a working translator I can only say that I have constantly been struck by the skill and fluency with which, for the most part, this exceedingly intricate and often obscure work has been put into English.

It is regrettable, of course, that there should be any mistakes at all, and that it should be possible to form such opposed views as those of Mr Stewart and myself, but even more deplorable are the circumstances in which this translation of an important work has been published. Dr Wolfram worked on a draft translation over a period of three years, and presumably the published version must owe much to her, yet she considers it to be very seriously defective. Professor Levi-Strauss has not in fact given it 'some sort of imprimatur', but has said merely that he can 'recognise' his book in the English edition; and his dismay- ingly hurtful and ungenerous aspersion upon Dr Wolfram's protracted labours on his behalf (Man (N.S.) 2, 464) cannot attach to her complete and final translation, which, to judge by her own letter, he never saw. So it is not publicly known even who is responsible for the translation, or what degree of authority it possesses.

It is most desirable that this untidy situation be cleared up. What is needed is that the

translators should be named, and their res- pective implications described; Dr Wolfram should document her dissatisfactions with the published text, against her own renderings as submitted to the publishers; and Professor Levi-Strauss might state with more precision what he thinks of the way in which his arguments have been conveyed. Critics such as Professor Geertz and Mr Stewart, and reviewers such as myself, would then be in a position to conduct a debate, not incon- clusively among themselves, but more usefully with those responsible for the work.

Rodney Needham University of Oxford

Virgin birth SIR,

Edmund Leach, in his Henry Myers Lecture on virgin birth (Leach I966), fails to mention two references which in fact support one of the points he makes there. I cannot blame Dr Leach for overlooking this since the first reference (Schneider I953) consists of a five line note and the second (Schneider i962) is of only thirteen lines.

But so that Dr Leach and any others who may find this matter of interest may have these data fully at their command when considering this vital process, and so that these data may be on record where it might do the most good, I will provide here some of the immediately relevant material from Yap.

It will be simpler if I begin by simply quoting the essentials of the aforementioned thirteen line note:

Prior to the German administration of Yap, the ideology was that coitus had no bearing on conception. Conception was the reward arranged by happy ancestral ghosts, who intervened with a particular spirit to bestow pregnancy on a deserving woman . . . Even in I947 this ideology had not been gravely altered. Despite the know- ledge imparted by Germans, Japanese and Americans, the official line on this matter had not been altered in any significant degree, partly because the Yaps themselves tended to take an attitude of indifference toward it. It was an interesting piece of information which might well be true, but it was irrelevant to any matters of significance on Yap and it was not integrated into the ideology of patrilineal relationships at the time I was there (Schneider I962: 5-6). I first came upon this information early in

my stay while working on ancestral ghosts. At this point in my work my command of the language was not at all good, the natives did not trust me, and the whole matter was side-


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stepped in various ways. One way in which this was done was to say that this was the belief held long, long ago, that the Japanese had explained everything, and that they were now quite well informed on the whole subject. The other was to withdraw from any discussion by sending me to experts-the old men.

So I dropped the matter and only took it up again some months later when my command of the language was much better and when the people I worked with knew that I was anxious to learn and could be trusted neither to make trouble for them, or to laugh at them. For the Germans had explained to them that they were primitive people, fixed at a very early, matrilineal, stage of development and that they needed much instruction before they could be brought anywhere near the German level of civilisation, if this were ever possible. The Japanese had not bothered much with explanations, but had merely derided their stupidity, ignorance and backwardness and had exploited them all the more for it. Nor were these experiences lost on the natives, for many felt it imperative that they should not betray ignorance or be found adhering to beliefs or customs which had been so effec- tively denigrated by so many foreigners.

Not only the older people, but many of the younger ones too held the belief cited. But here I must repeat for the benefit of Dr Leach, since it so clearly supports his position, that they viewed the whole matter in a context radically different from the context of western European thought which I, of course, unconsciously followed, and that their view of the whole matter was one of indifference biased toward the position that it was probably not true that coitus had anyt-hing to do with pregnancy, but that it did not matter much in any case.

But I pursued the matter in my own way, guided, as I have said, by my own version of the forms of western European thought.

There was first the simple question of whether coitus did or did not result in pregnancy. The answer of some of the sharper older men and of the knowledgeable younger men was to draw up a list of those women whom everyone knew to be promiscuous but who were childless. And, they added, quite properly too, for women as promiscuous as they could never be rewarded for such behaviour. This clearly took care of one quadrant of the two-by-two table which I unconsciously used to guide my questions. The list of promiscuous but sterile women was, I had to admit, rather impressive.

The opposite quadrant was not so well populated, but was clearly there. There was one young woman whose face was so badly disfigured by yaws that I conceded that she was far too repulsive and too horrible for

anyone even to think of having sexual relations with her. Part of her nose was gone and a section of her upper lip as well, ex- posing her teeth in a sort of perpetual snarl, while the wet pink of the raw tissue glistened in a way which we all (we were all men in that discussion) agreed was repulsive beyond words. We all agreed on another point; she was a good woman. She worked hard, cared for her old mother and father, never said a mean word to anyone-and she had two thriving children.

I did what I could with that case, but the facts were all against me. Surely, I suggested, the children came before the yaws. No, the children followed the yaws. Well, I coun- tered, if she was not married, and she was not, how could her husband's ancestral ghosts appreciate her goodness and reward her? They didn't because she had no husband. But her own ancestral ghosts did. Normally, of course, it is the husband's ghosts who get the spirit to bestow the pregnancy; but if there are no husband's ghosts, a woman's own ghosts attend to this matter. Neither could I argue that this was the only case, for I found two others like it.

So I explored ghosts, the meaning of sexual relations, restrictions on sexual relations, and a host of subjects which I felt were related. But in the end matters stood essentially as I have stated them.

One fine day, walking along a path I did not often take, I came upon four large men removing the testicles of a small pig. Always the anthropologist, I did not assume that I knew why; I asked. Makes the pig grow much bigger, they said. But, said I slyly, could a sow ever get pregnant from such a boar? Not from that one! they affirmed. It needed a boar whose testicles had not been removed.

I was unnerved, I admit. So I went back over the whole matter slowly and carefully. Castrate the pig and he grows larger than if he is not castrated. Right! But a castrated pig cannot get a sow pregnant. Right! And then they added once again, if you want a sow pregnant you must get her to a boar which has not been castrated. They copulate, the sow gets pregnant, the pigs are bom.

But, I protested, everyone has been telling me that coitus does not make women pregnant. That is correct, they said. But they were puzzled, and so was I. We did not under- stand one another. I had presented them, I felt, with logically inconsistent statements that fairly cried out for some explanation. They could not see what my problem was since they had provided me with the full array of necessary, correct facts and to them there was no problem.

So we kept at it until I again put the contradiction to them; if you castrate a pig


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he cannot get a sow pregnant. Surely that proved that copulation causes pregnancy! But suddenly one mani saw what my problem was, for he put it plainly and emphatically: 'But people are not pigs!'. Once that point was made, the rest followed in happy, logical order. I had obviously assumed that biological processes operate for all animals and had included man among them. But they had assumed that no one but a fool would equate people and pigs, for there were innumerable differences of which the fundamental one was simply that people have ancestral ghosts and pigs do not. I should have known this, for I had had a nasty row with the young man who did my cooking. I had picked up a stray, unwanted pup and named her Maria. This, he said, was a person's name even though it was not a Yap name. Person's names are for people and it is 'very bad' to give animals people's names. But he could not explain why, or he would not, and so I agreed not to call the dog Maria-at least in his hearing.

His reasons were provided by others. People are named after ancestral ghosts. To give the name which some ancestral ghost has to a person not only honours that ghost- for he thereby lives again, in a way, through that person-but also obligates that ghost to help the person in any way he can. To give a person's name to an animal-which must be the name of some ghost somewhere, otherwise it would not even exist-would hardly do honour to a ghost who might well make it his business to demonstrate his dis- pleasure. So animals with names had the names of things, not persons. My cook's dog, for instance, was called 'Kambess' which I leamed meant compass.

Now all was well. People, having ancestral ghosts, are not pigs. People, having ancestral ghosts and thereby access to the spirits, do not depend on the same processes that animals must. Coitus makes pigs pregnant, but with people-it is different.

But I had not really pinned down the exact processes or the physiology or theology of what went on amongst people. In point of fact, I was too busy mapping the land of the village and working out ownership and inheritance and other such matters. The absence of this information is a serious defect in this report which I hope to repair some day.

Thinking the matter settled, I put it aside again. But again I was wrong. After I left Yap, the smouldering domestic situation of one of my informants exploded. His wife left with one of their two children and went to a district quite far away. Then, some time later, her brother murdered the husband.

The brother was tried in a court run on American standards, and I was able to read the testimony of the trial. It appeared that the

husband had said publicly that the first child his wife bore had been the result of her incestuous relationship with her brother.

The accusation of incest between brother and sister was certainly the most offensive thing he could possibly have said. But what an odd way to put it, particularly for a man who had spent a good deal of time ex- plaining to me how vital ancestral ghosts were and how irrelevant coitus was. Since I read this in a transcript thousands of miles away there was no chance to follow up matters with further inquiry.

I offer a guess, however, whiclh is also consistent with Dr Leach's paper. For me and for other westem Europeans coitus plays the decisive role in conception, and the biological link between father and child (as between mother and child) is held to be, in itself, the basis for the social relationship between them. Hence it is a fundamental condition that we see coitus directly linked to conception, which is directly linked to the set of social bonds which we call the parent- child relationship.

In point of fact, of course, our thinking on this subject is quite as non-logical as is that of any other savage. Put plainly to a man of science who is expert on the subject, the proposition 'coitus causes conception' must be qualified by a long series of specific conditions regarding the fertility of the egg, the sperm, the pH of the medium at the time of fertilisation, and so forth. Yet when we think about it, to guide the questions we put to the natives, we tend to come up with simple-minded, cause-effect formulations between coitus and conception which yield us-as it plainly yielded me-incomplete and not entirely comprehensible data.

As I have shown elsewhere (Schneider I962), the father-child bond on Yap is explicitly framed in terms of reciprocal care while the mother-child bond is explicitly framed in terms of biological identity. What makes a woman a mother on Yap is that she bore the child. What makes a man a father on Yap is that he provides for his child who later provides for him. Whether the father is biologically linked to his child is quite as irrelevant as is his height, his weight or his accent.

Why, then, did my informant say that his wife's child was her brotlher's and not his? I would guess that this was one among many different ways in which he fought his war with his wife and her brother and that such phrasing was readily available to him from German, Japanese and American information and was simply one more way of affirming her infidelity to him. From all of the material I had from this informant, I have very good reason to conclude that his interest in coitus


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did not include its possible consequences in conception but focused on other consequences entirely. This question of the relationship between coitus and conception had no intellectual or practical interest for him and was, for all the time I knew him, practically a meaningless question for him.

David M. Schneider University of Chicago

Leach, E. R. I966. Virgin birth. Proc. R. Anthrop. Inst. I966, 39-49.

Schneider, D. M. I953. Yap kinship termi- nology and kin-groups. Am. Anthrop. 55, 2I7-I8.

I962. Double descent on Yap. J. Polyn. Soc. 71, 5-6.

SIR, . Professor Schneider has a point. My Henry

Myers lecture does, I think, give the impres- sion that the ideology of virgin birth can be fully 'explained' by seeing how the dicho- tomy pater/genitor fits in with the social context in which the ideology is found. But Schneider's Yap informants were presenting a different argument: 'Since men are not beasts, why should we expect human sex to function in the same way as animal sex?' i.e., the ideology of virgin birth may serve to express the dogmatic difference between animality and humanity. In another paper (still I think unpublished) Schneider has drawn attention to the fact that in English we call an illegitimate child a, 'natural child'. Now Jesus was certainly an 'Unnatural Child' but nevertheless he was legitimate!

Could we put it this way. The English language categories are: type of child: sexual-legal status of mother: legal status of child. These give us the following: (i) no child: unsullied-unmarried: no status (ii) 'natural child': sullied-unmarried: illegi-

timate (iii) 'normal child' (human being): sullied-

married: legitimate (iv) 'unnatural child' (god): unsullied-

married: legitimate. Therefore, Mary must be an unsullied

virgin as well as a married mother. Q.E.D. This style of mythological logic is of much

the same kind as that which I proposed, but I think it is slightly different. Anyway, Schneider's material confirms my general thesis that what seems logical common sense is determined by context-by cultural cir- cumstance not scientific fact.

E. R. Leach King's Callege, Cambridge

5 + M.

Spirits and the sex war SIR,

Wilson (Man (N.S.) 2, 365-78) raises valid criticisms of Lewis's discussion of spirit possession (Man (N.S.) I, 307-29). He pur- ports, however, to suggest another explanation 'which ... fits the facts more closely ... using the same examples cited by Lewis . . .' (Wilson I967: 366). Only one example, the Kalanga, is discussed by Lewis when he writes, in his static terms, of a cult that is 'more central to the upholding of tribal morality' (Lewis I966: 3I9). Wilson does not discuss this example. Nor does he explain it, when he comments on what he rightly labels a 'vague' distinction of Lewis's.

As I have shown for Kalanga (Werbner I964), sex war simplifications or notions of female deprivation, pace Lewis, do not account for possession. I am glad to see that Wilson follows this argument. Unfortunately, he does not go far enough in discriminating various modes and contexts of possession. These are still lumped together into a single ' complex of spirit possession'. Wilson, more- over, bases his argument on the lowest common denominator-the most common category of the possessed, according to marital status and sex. Primarily stressed are married women and their domestic competi- tion. This stress leads him to present the marital relationships of wives removed from any connexion with their natal or kinship ones. Wives, married into a community not their own, are relegated to the domestic realm, excluded from relationships of cor- porate significance, admitted 'into relationships more particularly on a dyadic basis' (Wilson I967: 373). They must suffer from status ambiguity and allied tensions, especially in polygyny, because they can only derive their 'very social identity' from that of their husbands'.

For comparative purposes, Wilson relies on a reduction, the 'peripherality' of the in- marrying wife. Like Lewis, he covers the most dissimilar cases with a notion to which other writers have given a more specific reference. Faron, for example, characterised the in- marrying shaman as 'peripheral' among the Mapuche; 'She stands outside the structure of kinship and marriage in any concrete set of relationships, and she is un- important with respect to the governing principles of patrilineal descent and patri- potestality in both the worldly and other- worldly spheres of Mapuche life' (Faron I964: I30).

Such a notion of 'peripherality' is inade- quate for the comparative analysis of spirit possession which Wilson attempts. There are two main reasons for this. First it is irrelevant


Article Contentsp. 126p. 127p. 128p. 129

Issue Table of ContentsMan, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 1-170Front Matter [pp. 1-4]Digital Dermatoglyphics of a Lunana Sample from North Bhutan [pp. 5-19]Psychological, Sociological and Anthropological Explanations of Witchcraft and Gossip: A Clarification [pp. 20-34]Animal Identity and Human Peril: Some Mandari Images [pp. 35-49]Personal Networks and Musical Contexts in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia and Ecuador [pp. 50-63]Trends in Prehistoric European Caprovine Husbandry [pp. 64-75]Address, Abuse and Animal Categories in Northern Thailand [pp. 76-93]Tombs and Conservatism Among the Merina of Madagascar [pp. 94-104]Rhodesian Man: Notes on a New Femur Fragment [pp. 105-111]Validation in Ethnographical Description: The Lexicon of 'Occasions' in Cat Harbour [pp. 112-124]CorrespondenceThe Savage Mind [pp. 125-126]Virgin Birth [pp. 126-129]Spirits and the Sex War [pp. 129-131]Iban Writing Boards [pp. 131-132]Decision Models and Plural Societies [pp. 132-133]Categories, Percussion and Physiology [pp. 133-134]Ghostly Rites de Passage [p. 134]An Instance of Hyperdactyly [pp. 134-135]Mescaline and LSD [p. 135]Chinese Lineage and Society [p. 135]

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Received for Review in Man October-December 1967 [pp. 167-170]Back Matter

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Schneider, d e Leach, e - Virgin Birth