Chapter 7----Childhood and Cultural Evolution
"The
child feels the drive of the Life Force... you cannot feel it
for him." |
----George Bernard Shaw
|
Since nearly all of the cultural evolution of Homo
sapiens sapiens has taken place during the past 100,000 years-only
about 5,000 generations-and since this time span is too short to allow
the human gene pool to mutate very much, epigenetic evolution of the
psyche-the evolution of the architecture of the brain occurring during
development in the womb and during early childhood-must be the central
source of cultural change, rather than genetic evolution. Just as
one can lift a newborn out of a contemporary cannibal culture and
bring it up in one's own culture without noticing any personality
difference, one could also, presumably, raise a Cro-Magnon baby in
a modern family without noticing any differences. After decades of
sociobiologists' claims that "social structures and culture are but
more elaborate vessels or survivor machines for ensuring that genes
can maximize their fitness,"1 there still is not a shred
of evidence that any cultural change is due to natural selection of
random variations affecting human gene pools during the past 100,000
years. The short stature of Pygmies may have been selected for during
millions of years of biological evolution as an adaptation to the
heat of the tropics,2 but even the most ardent sociobiologists
have not claimed to show that beliefs in witches or divine leaders
found in every environment have been selected for by any environmental
condition,3 since these cultural traits are solutions to
emotional, not environmental, problems. One recent study of approximately
100 major genetic human traits concluded that "no absolute differences
between populations of primitive and civilized humans are known..."4
Unfortunately, this means that the laws of the psychological and cultural
evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens remain a total mystery.
Since neo-Darwinian theory of differential genetic replication requires
massive extinctions for the robust selection and retention of random
mutations, the lack of evidence for many mass extinctions during the
past 100,000 years means neo-Darwinian theory of differential reproductive
rates has little value in explaining the relatively rapid evolution
of the psyche and culture of Homo sapiens sapiens. In addition, the
trillions of neural connections in the brain are simply far too numerous
to be determined by the limited number of genes in the gamete, so
most brain structure must be determined by epigenetic events. As Ernst
Mayr puts it, "The brain of 100,000 years ago is the same brain that
is now able to design computers....All the achievements of the human
intellect were reached with brains not specifically selected for these
tasks by the neo-Darwinian process."5 Since environmental
selection of random genetic variations is not the central mechanism
for evolution in modern human neural networks, the question is what
non-Darwinian processes have been responsible for the enormous evolution
of brain networks and cultures in modern humans?
THE FAILURE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION
That so many social scientists remain environmental determinists is
puzzling. It certainly is not because the method has any empirical
verification environment is simply assumed causal in culture change
because historical advances in human nature are so often a priori
assumed impossible. As Leslie White once put it, since it is assumed
that human nature cannot change, "we see no reason why cultural systems
of 50,000 B.C....could not have been capable of originating agriculture
as well as systems in 8,000 B.C....We must look, then, to environmental
[factors] for the answers to these questions."6 For instance,
most social scientists agree with Johnson and Earle that "the primary
motor for cultural evolution is population growth" determined by environmental
conditions,7 overlooking that population growth relies
upon the reduction of infanticide (both from murder at birth and from
later neglect) and the growth of the ability to cooperate and devise
ways to produce more food, both psychological traits dependent upon
childrearing practices. In fact, recent empirical studies have rejected
simple population growth as the mainspring of evolution, pointing
out, for instance, that many advanced chiefdoms form in areas of quite
low population density.8 As Hallpike put it, "there are
many societies with sufficient population density but which have nevertheless
not developed the state...population density is merely an index of
the abundance of a vital raw material people and has by itself no
power to determine how that raw material will be used."9
Hayden summarized recent empirical studies testing environmental factors
in evolution by saying "neither population pressure nor circumscription
appears to have played a significant role in creating inequality or
complexity."10 Hallpike rightly concluded his survey of
supposed environmental causes of cultural evolution by stating, "The
materialist belief that the environment simply causes social adaptation
is therefore quite unfounded...there are many different ways of accommodating
to the environment...."11 Environments are also opportunities,
not just straightjackets. As Kirch and Yen conclude, "men reach out
to embrace and create their ecosystems, rather than the reverse proposition."12
It is when early childrearing experiences are impaired that children
are forced to reduce their behavioral flexibility and are therefore
as adults unable to improve their environments and experience cultural
stagnation.
The psychogenic theory sees environments as presenting both the constraints
and the opportunities for cultural evolution, while the evolution
of psychological development during the fetal and childhood period
determines how these challenges are met. Since humans far more than
other species construct their environments,13 their creative
use to fulfill human needs is crucially determined by the degree of
innovation that is allowed by the level of childhood evolution attained.
This of course does not mean that environment counts for nothing.
Jared Diamond has convincingly shown how environmental differences
have raised and lowered the steepness of the ladder of cultural evolution,
demonstrating that the availability of a few good plant and animal
domesticates crucially determines the rates of evolution of cultures
in different parts of the world, with those areas which have domesticable
grains and cattle being able to evolve faster than those that did
not.14 But the evolutionary problem isn't only about the
availability of environmental resources. Obviously one cannot develop
much agriculture in the Arctic, and obviously tropical regions have
too many insects and parasites and too severe floods and droughts
that hinder their economic development.15 But environment
is only part of the answer to evolutionary differences. Environmental
change cannot explain cultural evolution since culture has often evolved
while the ecology has devolved because of soil exhaustion. The point
is that the degree of steepness of the environmental ladder doesn't
determine whether people chose to climb it you still must want to
climb and you must be innovative enough to invent or adopt ways to
conquer each rung, whether the base of the ladder is planted in the
snow, in a rain forest or in the milder climate of Western Europe.
The secret as to why England and not France or Germany spawned the
Industrial Revolution first goes back to England's advanced childrearing
in its smaller medieval households, not to any ecological advantage.16
English political freedom, religious tolerance, industry and innovation
were all psychoclass achievements, dependent upon childrearing evolution.
The most important unsolved question in cultural evolution is therefore
to explain the rate of innovation and adoption of new techniques of
exploiting what resources exist-factors that depend crucially upon
the local rate of evolution of childrearing.
Despite their advocacy of unicausal environmental determinism, anthropologists
have regularly demonstrated that similar environments have produced
quite different psyches and cultures. Even though most follow Whiting's
paradigm that environment determines childhood, personality and culture,17
others take great delight in describing quite different personalities
and cultures coming out of identical environments-one tribe that is
gentle, loving and peaceful and the other composed of fierce headhunting
cannibals-but then leave the cause of their stark differences as unexplained
as if the two groups were dropped down on earth from two different
planets.18 Obversely, others describe quite similar cultures
developing in wholly different environments. In Polynesia, for instance,
Goldman concludes that "societies can be similar in basic culture
whether they occupy atolls or high islands, relatively rich habitats
or barren islands; they cannot be regarded as having been molded by
their different material environments."19 But then he is
puzzled that he cannot explain how people in such different environments
could have evolved such similar cultures. Deprived by their evidence
of their theories of environmental determinism, anthropologists discover
that the sources of cultural evolution are simply inexplicable.
Archeologists used to accept anthropologists' theories of environmental
determinism, but now most admit that their best evidence has turned
out to be solidly against it. Social complexity and inequality used
to be thought caused by the invention or adoption of farming and herding;
but the evidence turns out to show that complexity and inequality
preceded agriculture rather than followed it: "Permanently settled
communities of more complex hunter-gatherers appear to be the norm
in many areas in the late Pleistocene..."20 Apparently
first people changed, then they managed to change their cultures and
technologies. Price asks: "what caused the adoption of agriculture?"
His answer is the one more and more archeologists are beginning to
agree with: "questions about the transition to agriculture clearly
have more to do with internal social relations than with external
events involving climate and the growth of human population."21
The "driving force behind food production," Price says, is the appearance
of new kinds of people, ones he calls "accumulators," who "emerge"
and engage in competitive feasts that require more food production.22
Johnson and Earle agree, speaking of "a new attitude toward change"
that appears in history, "though the reason for it remains obscure."23
Discovering what causes these new kinds of people and new attitudes
toward change to mysteriously "emerge" throughout history (or, as
often, not to "emerge") is therefore a central task of the psychogenic
theory of evolution.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HISTORICAL AND NEO-DARWINIAN EVOLUTION
Problems of explaining evolution are central to all sciences, including
the social sciences. Just as nothing in biology makes complete sense
except in the light of [genetic] evolution, nothing in human history
makes complete sense except in the light of epigenetic (psychogenic)
evolution. Neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution explains all
behavioral change in animals as resulting from the accretion of random
variations produced by mutation, recombination and genetic drift selected
as better adaptations to changing environments. But what is usually
overlooked is that genetic evolution only provides the capacity for
adult behavioral variations assuming a specific developmental environment.24
The road from genotype to phenotype is a long one. What trait actually
appears in the mature individual depends upon the actual course of
epigentic development, beginning in the womb and continuing throughout
childhood an extraordinarily complex and variable journey for each
individual. The most important environments are the mother's body
and behavior, and the most important competition for survival not
in the sperm or ovum but at the neural level, in the brain, with the
mother acting as the "agent of natural selection."25
What is little recognized is that recent revolutionary discoveries
in molecular biology by Gottlieb, Lipton and others have begun to
show that early environments actually change genetic structure.26
Maternal prenatal environment and even early parental care can actually
be passed down to succeeding generations through the genes, contrary
to traditional biological theory. Genes cannot turn themselves on
or off, they need a signal from their environment, so genetic structure
is wide open to environmental changes, rather than being wholly immune
from environmental input as has been thought to date. This isn't Lamarckianism;
Lamarck didn't know about gene behavior. What has changed is the discovery
that cells contain receptors that respond and adapt to environmental
signals-the mother being the main controller of genetic accessing.27
In addition, it has been discovered that only 10 percent of nuclear
genes are used to code human expression, while the remaining 90 percent-previously
thought of as useless baggage and referred to as "junk DNA"-contains
extra DNA that can rewrite genetic messages, create new gene expression
and new behavior.28 Even maternal emotions can be passed
to fetal genes and then to the next generation. Gottlieb has prenatally
stressed mice, who are as adults found to be more aggressive, and
then taken the male mice and mated them with other females and found
that their grandsons were also more aggressive than non-stressed males-thus
showing how environmental stress can be passed down genetically. Perry
and others have shown dramatically how stressed children "change from
being victims to being victimizers" because of imbalanced noradrenaline
and serotonin levels, which then can be passed down through both genetic
and epigenetic changes.29 Indeed, the ability of the genome
to respond to its environment means evolutionary change takes place
both by environmental selection of random variations and by epigenetic
inheritance systems.30 Thus a drought that starves mothers
and their fetuses or an increase in wife-beating in a society can
effect not only the first but succeeding generations' psyches and
behavior through changes in genetic structure and gene accessing.
The laws of historical evolution are quite different from the laws
of neo-Darwinism. The central hypothesis of the psychogenic theory
of historical evolution is that epigenetic neuronal variations originating
in changing interpersonal relationships with caretakers rather than
only through genetic variations originating through natural selections
are the primary source of the evolution of the psyche and society.
"The more evolved the species is...the greater the role of epigenetic
mechanisms in the structure of the nervous system."31 The
fundamental evolutionary direction in Homo sapiens sapiens is towards
better interpersonal relationships, not just the satisfaction of biological
instincts. While adaptation to the natural environment is the key
to genetic evolution, relationship to the human environment is the
key to psychological evolution, to the evolution of "human nature."
Psychogenesis is also the key to cultural evolution, since the range
of evolution of childrearing in every society puts inevitable limits
upon what it can accomplish-politically, economically and socially.
Developmental changes in the three-pound, trillion-celled human brain
have completely overwhelmed purely genetic changes as causes of psychological
and cultural evolution in the past 100,000 years. The causal mechanisms
for the evolution of human psyche and culture have more and more decoupled
from the neo-Darwinian causal mechanisms that depend solely upon outbreeding
success.32 The psychogenic theory of evolution is based
not upon Spencer and Darwin's "survival of the fittest" products of
the most ruthless parents but upon the "survival of the most innovative
and cooperative" products of the most loving parents. The processes
of historical evolution, based upon the very slow growth of love and
cooperation, are therefore the exact opposite from those of neo-Darwinian
natural selection, based overwhelmingly upon conflict and competition.
They include:
(1) The production of variations through psychogenesis is by creating
through more love different early epigenetic environments-more advanced
fetal and early childhood developmental paths-not through random genetic
mutations and recombinations-i.e., through variations in the structures
of neuronal groups achieved during post-genetic development after
inception, not through mutations in DNA prior to inception;
(2) the vehicles of transmission include neuronal groups in the brains
of individual parents and children, not solely genes in the sexual
organs of parents;
(3) the selection of variations is accomplished through changes in
a very narrow part of the human environment-the family, the main organizer
of emotional symbols, particularly the mother-rather than simply through
changes in the ecology;
(4) the preservation of emergent variations in some individuals is
often prevented from being swamped by the less developed childrearing
practices of the rest of the culture via the psychogenic pump effects
of migration;
(5) the limitations to emergent variations (psychogenic devolution)
occurs either because of conditions adverse to childrearing-such as
wars, plagues or droughts-or because sudden increased social freedom
for adults creates excessive growth panic, anxieties which are turned
against children as poison containers, thereby producing devolution
in childrearing in a portion of a given society;
(6) the main locus of epigenetic variations is the slow evolution
of the individual conscious self that looks forward to its future
and creates its own extended present, a self that evolves mainly through
the growth of love in the parent-child relationship;
(7) the rate of innovation in cultural evolution is determined by
the conditions for parental love and therefore increase in individual
self-assertion in each society, all cultural evolutions being preceded
by a childrearing evolution; and
(8) the locus of psychogenic evolution has historically been affected
far more by maternal than paternal influence-indeed, entirely maternal
in the crucial first nine months of life-rather than males and females
each contributing half of the genetic information as occurs in neo-Darwinian
evolution.
This last point will only become fully evident in the next chapter,
where it will be documented that the task of "fathering"-of playing
a real role in forming a child's psyche-is in fact a very late historical
invention. Most fathers among our closest ape relatives don't have
much to do with their children,33 and a nurturing role
during early childhood for the human father turns out to be a far
more recent historical innovation than has heretofore been assumed.
The major epigenetic changes in the structures of the brain, therefore,
have mainly been evolved by females, not males. Fathers until recently
have affected their children's psyches mainly through family provisioning
and by establishing some of the conditions for mothering, but it has
mainly been the mothers who have produced epigenetic novelty; so to
discover the laws of cultural evolution one must "follow the mothers"
through history. This is why only the psychogenic theory posits that
for most of history women and children are the ultimate source of
historical change.
THE "HOPEFUL DAUGHTER" AND THE PSYCHOGENIC CUL-DE-SAC
Since for most of history mothers raise boys who then go off and hunt,
farm, build things and fight wars rather than directly contributing
much new to the psyche of the next generation, the course of evolution
of the psyche has overwhelmingly been dependent upon the way mothers
have treated their daughters, who become the next generation of mothers.
Since early emotional relationships organize the entire range of human
behavior, all cultural traits do not equally affect the evolution
of the psyche-those that affect the daughter's psyche represent the
main narrow bottleneck through which all other cultural traits must
pass. The study of the evolution of the psyche depends more on developing
a maternal ecology than on studying variations in the physical environment.
The evolution of the psyche and culture has been crucially dependent
upon turning the weak bonds between mother and daughter of apes and
early humans34 into genuine love for daughters (and sons).
This means that historical societies that create optimal conditions
for improving the crucial mother-daughter relationship by surrounding
the mother with support and love soon begin to show psychological
innovation and cultural advances in the next generations-so that history
begins to move in progressive new directions. In contrast, societies
that cripple the mother-daughter emotional relationship experience
psychogenic arrest and even psychogenic devolution. Only in modern
times have fathers, too, begun to contribute to the evolutionary task
of growing the young child's mind.
Paralleling the term "hopeful monster" that biologists use to indicate
speciating biological variations,35 the idea that the mother-daughter
emotional relationship is the focal point of epigentic evolution and
the main source of novelty in the psyche can be called the "hopeful
daughter" concept. When mothers love and support particularly their
daughters, a series of generations can develop new childrearing practices
that grow completely new neural networks, hormonal systems and behavioral
traits. If hopeful daughters are instead emotionally crippled by a
society, a psychogenic cul-de-sac is created, generations of mothers
cannot innovate, epigenetic arrest is experienced and meaningful cultural
evolution ends.36
For instance, in China before the tenth century A.D. men began to
footbind little girls'feet as a sexual perversion, making them into
sexual fetishes, penis-substitutes which the men would suck on and
masturbate against during sex play.37 Chinese literature
reports the screaming cries of the five-year-old girl as she hobbles
about the house for years to do her tasks while her feet are bound,
because in order to make her foot tiny, her foot bones are broken
and the flesh deteriorates. She loses several toes as they are bent
under her foot, to emphasize the big toe as a female penis. This practice
was added to the many brutal practices of what was perhaps the world's
most anti-daughter culture, where over half the little girls were
murdered at birth without remorse and special girl-drowning pools
were legion, where beating little girls until bloody was a common
parental practice, and where girl rape and sex slavery were rampant.38
This vicious anti-daughter emotional atmosphere extreme even for a
time that was generally cruel and unfeeling towards daughters was
obviously not conducive to mothers producing innovations in childrearing
when the little girls grew up. Therefore China which was culturally
ahead of the West in many ways at the time of the introduction of
footbinding-became culturally and politically "frozen" until the twentieth
century, when footbinding was stopped and boy-girl sex ratios in many
areas dropped from 200/100 to near equality.39 The result
was that whereas for much of its history China punished all novelty,40
during the twentieth century rapid cultural, political and economic
evolution could resume. Japan, which shared much of Chinese culture
but did not adopt footbinding of daughters, avoided the psychogenic
arrest of China and could therefore share in the scientific and industrial
revolution as it occurred in the West.
The same kind of epigenetic arrest can be seen in the damage caused
by genital mutilation of girls among circum-Mediterranean peoples
that began thousands of years ago and continues today. Since "hopeful
daughters" do not thrive on the chopping off of their clitorises and
labias, the present cultural and political problems of those groups
who still mutilate their daughters' genitals are very much a direct
result of this psychogenic arrest.41 Much of the remainder
of this chapter will analyze the conditions for psychogenic arrest,
when childrearing has failed to evolve and culture remains in a psychogenic
cul-de-sac, static for millennia.
The historical evolution of the psyche is a process that mainly involves
removing developmental distortions, so that each psyche can develop
in its own way optimally. The evolution of childhood, as will be extensively
documented, mainly consists of parents slowly giving up killing, abandoning,
mutilating, battering, terrorizing, sexually abusing and using their
children for their own emotional needs and instead creating loving
conditions for growth of the self. The evolution of the psyche is
first of all accomplished by removing terrible abuses of children
and their resulting developmental distortions, allowing the psyche
to produce historical novelty and achieve its own inherent human growth
path. Civilization is not, as everyone including Freud has assumed,
a historical "taming of the instincts." Nor does "the evolution of
mankind proceed from bad to worse," as Roheim thought,42
with early societies being "indulgent" toward their children and modern
societies more often abusive. It will be the burden of the remainder
of this book to provide evidence that just the reverse is true, that
culture evolves through the increase of love and freedom for children,
so that when they grow up they can invent more adaptive and happier
ways of living. Because we were all children before we were adults,
childhood evolution must precede social evolution, psychogenesis must
precede sociogenesis.
LOVE AND FREEDOM-NOT COMPLEXITY-THE MEASURE OF EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS
The measure of the evolution of psyche and culture is actually quite
different from that assumed by most social theories. Social evolution
is usually defined simply as the degree of complexity-as measured
by population or social hierarchy or technology43 with
such elements as the increasing amounts of knowledge causing cultures
to grow more complex.44 But there is no evidence that modern
brains contain more knowledge than those of foragers of 100,000 years
ago. What has evolved is the self-located in the hippocampal-prefrontal
networks-not simply the amount of knowledge stored in the cortex.45
Contemporary foragers, for instance, know an enormous amount of ecological
information the forager who knows hundreds of species of plants and
animals and their characteristics probably has as many neurons in
his cortex storing knowledge as most Westerners. Similarly, their
cultural system cannot be said to be less complex, since it usually
contains some of the most complicated kinship, belief systems and
languages extant. What is less evolved is their childhoods and the
personality systems dependent upon this childrearing. Societies with
poor childrearing produce historical personalities-psychoclasses-that
have too much anxiety and conflict to maintain good object relations,
so they tend to deny their real needs-for love, for freedom, for achievement-and
their cultures oppose change and do not evolve.
The psychogenic theory defines progress in evolution as increases
in self awareness, freedom, human potential, empathy, love, trust,
self control and a preponderance of conscious decisions-rather than
as an increase in technological, economic or political complexity.
This means that some cultures on low technological levels46
could actually be further evolved in human terms than others that
are more complex technologically and politically. Because the psychogenic
theory makes the individual psyche both the source of variation and
the unit of selection, it posits that childhood is the central focal
point of social evolution. The amount of time and resources any society
devotes to its children's needs is far more likely to be an accurate
index of its level of civilization than any of the anthropological
indices of complexity or energy utilization.
The central direction of evolutionary progress, therefore, of Homo
sapiens sapiens is from personal neediness to personal independence,
from family enmeshment to family caregiving, from social dependency
and violence to social dependability and empathy. Although this progress
is extraordinarily uneven in different contemporary cultures and even
in different family lines, the general progressive direction is evident.
It will be the task of the remainder of this book to document the
hypothesis that the evolution of childhood has been from incest to
love and from abuse to empathy, and that progress in childrearing
has regularly preceded social, political and technological progress.
The main thrust of the psychogenic theory of cultural evolution is
simple: The evolution of culture is ultimately determined by the amount
of love, understanding and freedom experienced by its children, because
only love produces the individuation needed for cultural innovation.
Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful act towards children
returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stage, while
every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants
to become, every expression of love toward children heals society
and moves it in unexpected, wondrous new directions.
PSYCHOGENESIS-THE SOURCE OF EPIGENETIC VARIATION
Psychogenesis is the process of forming historically new brain networks
that develop the self and produce innovation. It is a "bootstrapping"
evolutionary process47 that occurs in the interpersonal
relationships between generations. Babies begin with the need to form
intensely personal relationships with their caretakers, who in turn
respond with ambivalent needs to (a) use the baby as a poison container
for their projections, and (b) go beyond their own childrearing and
give the child what it actually needs rather than what is being projected
into it. The ability of successive generations of parents to work
through their own childhood anxieties the second time around is a
process much like that of psychotherapy, which also involves a return
to childhood anxieties and, if successful, a reworking of them with
support of the therapist into new ways of looking at others and at
one's self. It is in this sense of the psychogenic process that history
can be said to be a "psychotherapy of generations," producing new
epigenetic, developmental variation and-because these early emotions
organize the remainder of cognitive content48 cultural
evolution.
Psychogenesis is not a very robust process in caretakers. Most of
the time, parents simply reinflict upon their children what had been
done to them in their own childhood. The production of developmental
variations can occur only in the silent, mostly unrecorded decisions
by parents to go beyond the traumas they themselves endured. It happens
each time a mother decides not to use her child as an erotic object,
not to tie it up so long in swaddling bands, not to hit it when it
cries. It happens each time a mother encourages her child's explorations
and independence, each time she overcomes her own despair and neediness
and gives her child a bit more of the love and empathy she herself
didn't get. These private moments are rarely recorded for historians,
and social scientists have completely overlooked their role in the
production of cultural variation, yet they are nonetheless the ultimate
sources of the evolution of the psyche and culture.
The generational pressure for epigenetic, developmental evolution
does not occur in a vacuum, of course. Every social condition that
impinges upon the parent-child relationship-in particular that disturbs
the mother's ability to go beyond her own childrearing and give her
child more love than she received-affects psychogenesis. Yet the crucial
study of what social conditions have been responsible for the evolution,
arrest or devolution of childrearing is a separate empirical task.
One cannot simply conclude that the more complex societies become,
the better (or worse) the conditions for parenting. Particularly crucial
are the conditions favoring the survival of nascent variations in
parent-child relationship across generations without being swamped,
paralleling the problem in neo-Darwinian theory of the swamping of
mutations by a large gene pool. The effects of other conditions upon
childrearing are not all that obvious. Material conditions are not
the most important of these; more crucial is the attitude of the society
towards women and the overcoming of maternal despair. The various
ways that family conditions, emotional attitudes, material factors,
demographic factors, culture contact and a whole range of historical
conditions change the ability of parents to achieve developmental
evolution for a series of generations will be examined in detail from
the historical and ethnographic record in the remainder of this book.
Cultural and psychological evolution is neither spontaneous nor inevitable,
as anthropologists and historians have so often assumed.49
One cannot simply posit a priori that "variation in individual cultural
practices and perceptions exists in every community at all times,
[forming] a pool of possibilities for what people will do in the immediate
future."50 There exist today many cultures whose members'
personalities have not evolved very far and whose cultures have remained
extraordinarily resistant to change for millennia. Because their ability
to give mature love to their children has barely evolved in thousands
of generations, their systems of consciousness are developmentally
arrested, and they have remained headhunters, cannibals and fierce
warriors as were our own ancestors in the Paleolithic. In fact, as
we will shortly see, even modern nations consist of groups of individuals
who are on all levels of psychogenic evolution-that is, each nation
contains all psychoclasses-because individuals are endpoints of unique
family histories of childrearing evolution and devolution over thousands
of generations. Your next-door neighbors are therefore nearly as likely
to be psychological fossils-because their parents used brutal medieval
childrearing practices-as they are to be the results of loving, helping
parenting. Those who are lucky enough to have had really loving, helping
mode parents stand on the shoulders of thousands of individual emotional
decisions of parents about how to care for their children.
Because childrearing evolution determines the evolution of the psyche
and society, the causal arrows of all other social theories are reversed
by the psychogenic theory. Rather than personal and family life being
seen as dragged along in the wake of social, cultural, technological
and economic change, society is instead viewed as the outcome of evolutionary
changes that first occur in the psyche. Because the structure of the
psyche changes from generation to generation within the narrow funnel
of childhood, childrearing practices are not just one item in a list
of cultural traits-they are the very condition for the transmission
and further development of all other cultural elements, placing limits
on what can be achieved in all other social areas. Indeed our social,
religious and political behavior, like our personal life, is very
much a part of our human search for love, so necessary for the development
of our self. Childhood must therefore always first evolve before major
social, cultural and economic innovation can occur. Little by little,
adults must refrain from routinely murdering, neglecting, tying up,
abandoning, raping, battering and torturing generation after generation
of infinitely precious children and begin instead to empathize with
their quest to grow up into independent, productive individuals.
THE EVOLUTION OF PARENTING
Most parents through most of history relate to their children most
of the time as poison containers, receptacles into which they project
disowned parts of their psyches. In good parenting, the child uses
its caretaker as a poison container-as it earlier used its mother's
placenta to cleanse its poisonous blood-the good mother reacting with
calming behavior to the cries of her baby, helping it "detoxify" its
anxieties. But when an immature mother's baby cries, she cannot stand
it, and strikes out at the child. As one battering mother put it,
"I have never felt loved all my life. When my baby was born, I thought
it would love me. When it cried, it meant it didn't love me. So I
hit him." The child is so full of the parent's projections that it
must be tightly tied up (swaddled in bandages) for its first year
to prevent it from "tearing its ears off, scratching its eyes out,
breaking its legs, or touching its genitals"51 i.e., to
prevent it from acting out the violent and sexual projections of the
parents.
The child historically is usually either experienced as a persecutory
parent ("When he screams he sounds just like my mother") or as a guilty
self ("He keeps wanting things all the time"). Either way, the child
must either be strictly controlled, hit or rejected, usually in ways
that restage the childrearing methods of the grandparent. Since the
grandmother is historically so often present in the home, strictly
controlling the childrearing, it is doubly difficult to break old
patterns.
Psychogenesis takes place when the parent experiences the needs of
the child and, instead of restaging their own traumatic childhood,
invents new ways of handling their anxieties so the child can grow
and individuate in their own way. When a mother regresses to be able
to experience her baby's discomfort and determine if it is hungry
or wet or just wants to crawl, she reexperiences her own infancy and
her own mother's fears of starving (for love) or wanting to explore
and grow, and-given some support by her husband-the mother can take
the enormous step of making a space for the child to crawl rather
than tying it up in its swaddling bands. The process is much like
the process of psychotherapy: a regression to early anxieties and
a working through of them the second time around in a better manner.
Psychogenesis occurs at the interface between caretaker and child.
It is a private, joint process, a "psychotherapy of generations" that
cures parental anxiety about growth and reduces childhood traumas...when
it occurs. Psychogenesis isn't inevitable, so the psychogenic theory
isn't teleological. There are in all modern nations many parents who
have not evolved very much and who are still extremely abusive. In
fact, there are whole cultures that did not evolve in parenting, for
reasons which we will examine. But the "generational pressure" of
psychogenesis-the ability of human parents to innovate better ways
of childrearing and for children to strive for relationship and growth-is
everywhere present, and is an independent source of change in historical
personality, allowing humans to "bootstrap"52 new neural
networks that are more evolved than those of our ancestors.
Because psychic structure must always be passed from generation to
generation through the narrow funnel of childhood, a society's childrearing
practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits. They
are the very condition for the transmission and development of all
other traits, and place definite limits on what can be achieved in
any culture. This is explicitly denied by other theories of culture
change, which can be summed up in Steward's dicta: "Personality is
shaped by culture, but it has never been shown that culture is affected
by personality."53 It is the purpose of the remainder of
this book to document that every political, religious and social trait
is sustained by specific childhood experiences and that changes in
personality through childrearing evolution determine the course of
all cultural change.
Progress in childrearing evolution may be extremely uneven, but the
trends are nonetheless unmistakable. The overall direction is from
projection to empathy, from discipline to self-regulation, from hitting
to explaining, from incest to love, from rejection to overcontrol
and then to independence. The result is a series of closer approaches
between adult and child, producing a healing of the splitting caused
by extreme traumas-historical personalities slowly evolving from schizoid
mechanisms54 and separate alters that are the results of
earlier childrearing modes. Thus unity of personality and individuation
is an achievement only attained at the end of history, after thousands
of generations of parents have slowly evolved better ways of helping
children grow.
It should be possible to even measure quantitatively-in terms of hours
per day, in terms of money, in terms of some more meaningful measure-the
amount and even the quality of parenting effort a society devotes
to its children. Just the sheer cost of raising a child in dollars
has been going up so fast that it now costs a middle-class American
family $1.5 million for each child over 22 years, up 20 percent in
the past three decades.55 The families I know in my section
of Manhattan easily devote over half of their spare time and half
their income to their children. Compare this to the small fraction
of parents' time and money given over to children in earlier centuries
with children even spending most of their lives working for adults
in various ways and one can begin to comprehend the overall direction
of childrearing evolution. Even today, child abuse is highly correlated
with income, with children in homes with incomes below $15,000 being
22 times more likely to be physically abused, 18 times more likely
to be sexually abused, and 56 times more likely to be neglected than
those with family incomes exceeding $30,000.56
Because psychogenesis is such a private process, it is rarely recorded
in historical documents. Most of the documentation of what it feels
like to go beyond one's own childrearing is found in mothers' letters
and diaries beginning in the early modern period. It was the habit
of most mothers who could afford it to send their children to wetnurse,57
where they were left for several years:
Parents of any position saw little of their children, who were taken
from their mother at birth and given in charge of a foster-mother
till the age of five, when they were sent to college or to a convent
until marriage was arranged.58
It was in England and America where well-to-do mothers first began
to experiment with nursing their own children, being well aware that
most children died at nurse because of lack of care and poor conditions.
These mothers wrote to each other letters about the joys of nursing
themselves, how babies during breastfeeding "kisseth her, strokes
her haire, nose and eares [causing] an affection" to grow between
mother and infant.59 If the husband objects, saying his
wife's breast belongs to him, he should be asked to hold the baby
and he'll be delighted too. By contrast, in France, as late as 1780
the police chief of Paris estimated that only 700 out of the 21,000
children born each year in his city were nursed by their mothers,60
most being sent out to French wetnurses, termed "professional feeders
and professional killers."61 Since England led the rest
of Europe in ending swaddling, wetnursing and battering their children,
it is no accident that soon after it also led the world in science,
political democracy and industrialization.
THE SIX CHILDREARING MODES
In The History of Childhood,62 I proposed six modes of
childrearing which societies unevenly evolve. As the graph below indicates,
most modern nations today contain all six stages in varying proportions.
Outside of moving the dates somewhat forward when I found first evidence
of the mode in the West, I continue to feel that these modes are accurate.
They have been empirically confirmed by five book-length historical
studies63 in addition to the over 100 scholarly articles
on the history of childhood during the past 26 years in The Journal
of Psychohistory.64 The following chart summarizes the
historical evidence on childrearing modes presented in this and the
next four chapters of this book.
1a. Early Infanticidal Mode (small kinship groups): This mode
is characterized by high infanticide rates, maternal incest, body
mutilation, child rape, tortures and emotional abandonment by parents
when the child is not useful as a an erotic object or as a poison
container. The father is too immature to act as a real caretaker and
is emotionally absent. Prepubertal marriage of little girls is common,
similar to cults like The Children of God.65 The schizoid
personality structure of the infanticidal mode is dominated by alters,
in which adults spend much of their time in ritual and magical projects,
so they are not able to evolve beyond foraging and early horticultural
economic levels nor beyond Big Men political organization.66
1b. Late Infanticidal Mode (chiefdom to early states): Though
infanticide rates remain high and child rape is still often routine-particularly
royal and pedagogic pederasty67 the young child is not
as much rejected by the mother, and the father begins to be involved
with instruction of the older child. Child sacrifice as a guilt-reducing
device for social progress is found in early states as the use of
children as poison containers became more socially organized. Infant
restrictions devices such as swaddling and cradle boards begin, sibling
caretakers replace child gangs and sibling incest is widespread. Various
institutionalized schemes for care by others become popular, such
as adoption, wetnursing, fosterage, and the use of the children of
others as servants.68 Beating is now less impulsive and
used as discipline, and because the child is now closer emotionally
and used more for farming chores, discipline becomes more controlling
and brutal, leading to complex societies whose innovations are paid
for by genocidal slaughter and the enslavement of women and children.69
2. Abandoning Mode (beginning with early Christianity): Once
the child is thought as having a soul at birth, routine infanticide
becomes emotionally difficult. Early Christians were considered odd
in antiquity: "they marry like everybody else, they have children,
but they do not practice the exposure of new-born babes."70
These Christians began Europe's two-millennia-long struggle against
infanticide, replacing it with abandonment, from oblation of young
children to monasteries, a more widespread use of swaddling, wetnurses
if one could afford them, fosterage, wandering scholars and child
servants. Child sacrifice was replaced by joining in the group-fantasy
of the sacrifice of Christ, who was sent by his father as a poison
container to be killed for the sins of others. Pederasty continued,
especially in monasteries, and girl rape was widespread. The child
was thought to be born full of evil, the parent's projections, so
was beaten early and severely. Abusive child care was not mainly due
to economics, since the rich as well as the poor during the middle
ages had high infanticide, abandonment, sexual molestation and physical
abuse rates.71 The borderline personality structure of
Christianity stresses clinging to authority figures as defense against
emotional abandonment and constant warfare against enemies to punish
others for their own imagined sinfulness for deserving abandonment.72
3. Ambivalent Mode (beginning in the twelfth century): The
twelfth century ended the oblation of children to monasteries, began
child instruction manuals, began to punish child rape, expanded schooling,
expanded pediatrics, saw child protection laws, and began to tolerate
ambivalence-both love and hate-for the child, marking the beginnings
of toleration of a child's independent rights. The child was seen
less as a sinful poison container and more as soft wax or clay that
could be beaten into whatever shape the parent wished. The reduction
of splitting defenses of the late medieval narcissistic personality
structure produced the advances in technology and the rise of cities
associated with the period and eventually the rise of the early modern
state.73
4. Intrusive Mode (beginning in the sixteenth century): The
intrusive parent began to unswaddle the child and even the wealthy
began to bring up the infant themselves rather than sending it elsewhere
or at least have the wetnurse come in to the home thus allowing closer
emotional bonds with parents to form. The sixteenth century particularly
in England represents a watershed in reduction of parental projections,
when parents shifted from trying to stop childrens' growth to trying
only to control it and make it "obedient." The freedom of being allowed
to crawl around rather than being swaddled and hung on a peg and the
individuation of separate child beds and separate child regimens meant
parents approached closer to their children and could give them love
as long as they controlled their minds, their insides, their anger,
their lives. The child raised by intrusive parents was nursed by his
or her mother, not swaddled, not given regular enemas but toilet trained
early, prayed with but not played with, hit but not battered, punished
for masturbation but not masturbated, taught and not sent out as servants
to others and made to obey promptly with threats and guilt as often
as physical means of punishment.74 True empathy begins
with intrusive mode parents, producing a general improvement in the
level of care and reduced child mortality, leading to the early modern
demographic transition to later marraige, fewer births and more investment
in each child. The end of arranged marriages, the growth of married
love and the decline of domestic violence also contributed to the
child's ability to achieve emotional growth.75 A healing
of splitting and an increase in individuation produced the scientific,
political and economic revolutions of the early modern period, so
much so that some British and American parents were often called "strange"
by visitors because they "pampered" their children so much and hit
them so little.76 Men didn't cling to their hypermasculine
social alters as much and discovered they had a "private self" that
was emotionally involved with their family life.77
5. Socializing Mode (beginning in the eighteenth century):
Obviously something new had entered the world when society could claim
that "God planted this deep, this unquenchable love for her offspring
in the mother's heart."78 During this period the number
of children most women had dropped from seven or eight to three or
four, long before any medical discoveries were made in limiting reproduction,79
because parents now wanted to be able to give more care to each child.
Their aim, however, remained instilling their own goals into the child
rather than producing individuation: "Is there not a strange fullness
of joy in watching the reproduction of your traits, physical, mental
and moral, in your child?"80 The use of mainly psychological
manipulation, along with spanking of little children, remains the
most popular model of "socialization" of parents in Western European
nations and the Americas today, training the child to assume its role
in the parents' society.81 The socializing mode built the
modern world, and its values of nationalism and economic class-dominated
representative democracy represent the social models of most people
today.82
6. Helping Mode (beginning mid-twentieth century): The helping
mode involves acknowledging that the parents' main role is to help
the child reach at each stage of its life its own goals, rather than
being socialized into adult goals. Parents for the first time consider
raising children not a chore but a joy. Both mother and father are
equally involved with the child from infancy helping him or her become
a self-directed person. Children are given unconditional love, are
not struck and are apologized to if yelled at under stress. The helping
mode involves a lot of time and energy by parents and other helpers
during the child's early years, taking their cues from the child itself
as it pursues its developmental course. Birth rates tend to drop below
replacement as each child is recognized as requiring a great deal
of attention. The helping psychoclass, though few in number today,
is far more empathic toward others and less driven by material success
than earlier generations. Though Dr. Spock's child care book was late
socializing mode,83 some of the "Spock generation" adolescents
after the mid-century were actually products of helping mode parents
and felt empowered to explore their own unique social roles and go
beyond nationalism, war and economic inequality.
Parents from each of the six childrearing modes co-exist in modern
nations today. Indeed, much of political conflict occurs because of
the vastly different value systems and vastly different tolerance
for freedom of the six psychoclasses. Cyclical swings between liberal
and reactionary periods are an outcome of a process whereby more evolved
psychoclasses introduce more innovation into the world than less evolved
psychoclasses can tolerate. The latter try then to "turn the clock
back" and reinstate less anxious social conditions to reduce their
growth anxiety, and when this fails, the nation attempts to "cleanse
the world of its sinfulness" through a war or depression.
THE PSYCHOGENIC PUMP
The psychogenic pump effect is how evolving parents can avoid the
swamping of variety in childrearing. A mother who wants to try to
leave her child unswaddled after only a few months rather than after
a full year finds her own mother and every other mother around her
is vigorously opposed to her innovation. Sometimes opposition can
actually be lethal. I once asked Arthur Hippler, the Editor of my
Journal of Psychological Anthropology, if he had ever met a more evolved
Athabascan mother than the generally infanticidal mothers he had been
interviewing in Alaska. He said he had; she was far more empathic
than the other mothers. He said the other mothers shunned her and
shut her out of activities, which would in earlier times have been
tantamount to death in such a severe environment. But most more evolved
Athabascans migrated south, with the result that those who settled
along the northeast coast of America had better childrearing and more
advanced cultures than those that remained in Alaska.84
The effects of the psychogenic pump in preserving variety can be seen
in a variety of similar historical migration patterns of parents practicing
more advanced childrearing modes:
1. The migration of colonists into New England contained more advanced
parents and more numerous hopeful daughters than those in families
who stayed behind, since the most advanced childrearing -the intrusive
mode-was being practiced by the Puritans who were chased out of England
or who emigrated to escape "unreasonable authority."85
The result was, as Condorcet put it, Americans seemed to have "stepped
out of history," because they had less infanticide, less wetnursing,
shorter swaddling and better parent-child relations than European
parents at the time. The psychogenic pump, however, mainly applied
to New England parents those who migrated further south usually did
not do so as intact families and contained far more bachelor latter-born
sons, servants and others who were not escaping from religious persecution.86
Therefore, the South lagged the North in their level of childrearing,
a condition that eventually led to the American Civil War.
2. The migration of more advanced parents in Europe in general took
place from east to west, as migrating farmer populations moved from
Asia to Western Europe,87 displaced foragers and tried
innovative living arrangements compared to those that stayed behind.
This is the ultimate reason why Eastern Europe even today remains
far behind Western Europe and the United States in childrearing and
in democracy and industrialization.
3. The same principle of "those who emigrate contain the more advanced
parents" applies to why Central and South American Indians had more
advanced childrearing and more evolved cultures than those of North
America.
4. Jews who had immigrated into Europe were more advanced in childrearing,
so much so that they had to be sacrificed in the Holocaust as representatives
of too much innovation and growth. Jews since antiquity didn't just
"disperse" (diaspora), they differentially migrated, with those with
more advanced parenting modes striking out to new homes, where their
success made them scapegoats for the growth fears of others.
5. The psychogenic pump favors extremities, peripherally isolated
areas that capture late arrivals, the most innovative parents and
the most hopeful daughters. (Biological speciation, too, favors peripherally
isolated communities.)88 The most advanced childrearing
in Europe was in England and the most advanced in Asia was in Japan,
both large islands at the extreme western and eastern ends of the
Eurasian land mass, both settled late by immigrant farmers. Japan,
in fact, developed agriculture extremely late, only two thousand years
ago,89 when the most advanced families in Asia migrated
from Korea. "Those that stayed behind" in China, in Eastern Europe-were
swamped by less evolved childrearing modes and were therefore more
subject to psychogenic arrest or even devolution. In contrast, many
of the world's most advanced cultures-such as the Hawaiians or the
ancient Greeks-were products of late-arriving migrants, more advanced
parenting styles, who turned unpromising peripheral evironments into
distinctive, innovative civilizations.
PSYCHOGENIC DEVOLUTION
One of the hardest thing to understand in studying childhood history
is how parenting can stay the same for millennia or sometimes even
get worse. How can a Balkan peasant mother today as in antiquity kill
their newborn or tightly bind her baby to a cradle and keep it isolated
in a dark room for a year or more, oblivious of its screams?90
How can most fathers today still batter their little kids? Is empathy
for children so fragile? Why does psychogenic evolution not take place,
even devolve? Why have a portion of parents in every society remained
at the infanticidal and abandoning modes? What happened in previous
generations that extinguished the evolution of parental love so thoroughly?
People throughout history defend against their despair by finding
poison containers to restage their early traumas. Men do so mainly
by going to war and torturing, enslaving and killing sacrificial victims.
But women only have their children to torture, enslave and kill. One
thing is clear: the cause is not merely economic since the rich tortured
and killed their children just as the poor did. Indeed, the most massive
genocide in the world-never recognized as such because children are
not considered human by historians-has been the parental holocaust,
the killing, binding, battering, raping, mutilating and torturing
of children throughout history, numbering billions not just millions
of innocent, helpless human beings. It is this untold story of the
genocide of a whole class of human beings that will be fully told
for the first time in this book. But just as there are few good psychological
studies of Nazis during the Jewish Holocaust-because it is so difficult
to empathize enough with victimizers to understand their motives-so
too there are few good studies of parents in history who murdered,
beaten and tortured their children, since it is hard to identify enough
with them to analyze their motives. Determining the psychodynamics
of parents who have stayed the same for thousands of generations while
others around them have been evolving is doubly difficult, since one
must deal with both the paucity of the historical record of the parental
cruelty and also the denial and anger stemming from one's own feelings.
The key to understanding psychogenic arrest and devolution must lie
in comprehending the historical relationship of mothers to their daughters-a
totally unresearched area, even for feminist historians. Sometimes
men who oppose all social change instinctively recognize they must
kill off all hopeful daughters-as today when Islamic fundamentalists
drag out of class all the girls they find in schools and slaughter
them.91 The study of the multigenerational effects of trauma
is just beginning.92 But usually the conditions that maim
the psyches of hopeful daughters are simply part of the cultural practices
of the society and go unrecognized as crippling evolution. When thirty-year-old
men in antiquity insisted on marrying prepubertal girls because they
were afraid of women their own age, when medieval mothers prostituted
their daughters either to the local priest or to the whole community,
when mothers fed their daughters less or gave them less medical attention
than boys because girls who grew up needed dowries, when brothers
in Eastern European zadruga routinely used each others' daughters
sexually, when Chinese men bound the feet of little girls to use as
sexual objects or circum-Mediterranean mothers chopped off the genitals
of their little girls, psychogenic devolution was the inevitable result.
Using children as poison containers can reach intolerable limits,
either as a result of intolerable conditions such as war or drought
or even as a result of social progress, when parents react with extreme
growth panic and use their children to relieve their anxieties. Sometimes
historical tragedies like these are evident, as when children were
abandoned by the millions in revolutionary Russia and were forced
to live as prostitutes and criminals for decades after, many even
today living abandoned in Russia's main cities.93 Psychogenic
devolution is often a result of attempts to "leap forward," as when
China killed 30 million people as a result of the famine caused by
the Great Leap Forward-in fact, some areas of China devolved so far
that they regressed to cannibalism.94 But sometimes the
"war on children" resulting from too much change can be documented
in more specific detail.
When serfdom ended in Hungary in the 1840s, women in rural areas responded
by concluding that at last they were to be free. But, they feared,
women cannot be free if they have so many children, so "there was
a panic reaction and a brutal, drastic reduction of family size was
put speedily into practice, first by simple infanticide and crude
abortion techniques and later by the one-child system."95
Although poverty was not a problem in the area, for a full century
mothers became baby killers, so that "families shank into non-existence,
leaving house and farm vacant" to adhere to a norm that "became irrational
and, indeed, suicidal for entire families, villages and ethnic groups..."96
In what has been called "a Terrible Matriarchy," killing mothers established
a "dark belt of one-child-system villages,"97 by crude
abortion techniques with sharp objects and winding ropes tightly around
the mother's body and soaking them in water, by strangling or freezing
babies, even by mothers-in-law "sleeping with the young couple to
ensure they did not have intercourse..."98
Growth panic from progress being turned against children is an everyday
phenomena, only no one recognizes it because no one sees children
as poison containers for adult anxieties. Times of prosperity and
progress are often times when poor children are used as scapegoats.
While the average income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans
rose 72 percent between 1977 and 1994, and while the average income
of the highest-earning 20 percent rose 25 percent, that of the poorest
25 percent shrank 16 percent, throwing millions more children under
the poverty line while cutting welfare benefits.99 Yet
the question remains: why are some societies and some family lines
so far behind in improving childrearing? To begin to answer this crucial
question, we will first analyze what childhood is really like in simpler
societies.
THE IDEALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD IN SIMPLE SOCIETIES
Unfortunately for the psychogenic theory, nearly all social scientists
currently agree that there is an inverse relationship between childrearing
and social evolution, with parents becoming less loving and more abusive
as cultures move from simple to complex societies.100 Agreeing
with Rousseau and Freud, most anthropologists today see civilization
as being achieved at the expense of childhood freedom and nurturance,
with the quality of child care going straight downhill and becoming
more punitive and less nurturing as societies become more complex.
Rohner, for instance, concludes from his cross-cultural review of
parenting from the Human Relations Area Files that virtually all mothers
in simpler societies are "warm and nurturant toward their children,"101
so that "The more complex a sociocultural system is, the less warm
parents in general tend to be..."102 Whiting analyzes the
results of hundreds of anthropological studies of childhood as follows:
"children in simple cultures are high on nurturance and low on egoism,
whereas children brought up in complex cultures are egoistic and not
very nurturant."103 Stephens summarizes the current state
of academic opinion:
When one reads an ethnographic account of child rearing in a primitive
society, one will usually find some statement to the effect that the
people 'love their babies'...the ethnographer seems amazed at the
amount of affection, care, attention, indulgence, and general 'fuss'
lavished upon infants and young children...104
Now when I first discovered, in the anthropology course I took with
Margaret Mead at Columbia University over four decades ago, that anthropologists
were unanimous in thinking that childhood had evolved from nurturant
and loving to neglectful and abusive as the level of civilization
increased, I was puzzled as to how anyone could at the same time think
that childhood had any effect on adult personality, since this meant
that the cannibals, headhunters and warriors I was studying had supposedly
had wonderful loving, nurturant childhoods. I soon began to question
the accuracy of all these cross-cultural studies of childrearing,
and asked whether those who classified techniques of parenting105
could have been actually coding the degrees of distortion and denial
of the anthropologists rather than what was really happening to children.
When I found the same unanimity regarding loving childrearing in past
times among historians, equally unsupported by careful historical
evidence, I began combing primary sources myself to find out the truth
about what it must have felt like to have been a child both in the
past and in other cultures. With ethnological accounts, of course,
I was wholly dependent upon the reports of the anthropologists, since
I could not myself observe at first hand the childrearing practices
of hundreds of cultures. So rather than relying on selective Human
Relations Area File cards, I constructed my own more extensive files
over the next three decades from reports of the ethnologists who had
said anything about childrearing, being careful to separate their
glowing adjectives from the descriptions of events they actually saw
happen. I extended these files with personal contacts with many of
the anthropologists in connection with my Journal of Psychoanalytic
Anthropology.
When I began publishing the results of my research into both historical
and cross-cultural childhoods, documenting how childhood both in the
past and in other cultures had been massively idealized, both historians
and anthropologists concluded that I surely must have been mad. As
Melvin Konner put it in his book Childhood:
Lloyd deMause, then editor of the History of Childhood Quarterly,
claimed that all past societies treated children brutally, and that
all historical change in their treatment has been a fairly steady
improvement toward the kind and gentle standards we now set and more
or less meet. His 1974 book begins, "The history of childhood is a
nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further
back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the
more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized,
and sexually abused."
Now anthropologists-and many historians as well-were slack-jawed and
nearly speechless. Studies of parents, children, and the family in
cultures on every inhabited continent had turned up not a single case-with
one or two possible exceptions-of extant patterns of child care that
corresponded to the brutal neglectful approach these historians were
assigning to all the parents of the past.
On the contrary, serious students of the anthropology of childhood
beginning with Margaret Mead have called attention to the pervasive
love and care lavished on children in many traditional cultures. They
even found much Westerners could admire and possibly emulate.106
The only way to disprove this widespread opinion about parenting in
traditional cultures is to examine what anthropologists have written
and see whether their evidence actually shows something other than
"pervasive love and care lavished on children." In order that the
effects of culture contact with the West may be kept to a minimum,
I will concentrate on New Guinea, with a few forays into nearby areas,
because here Western contact was both late and minimal as compared
with Africa and other areas.
THE INFANTICIDAL MODE OF CHILDREARING IN NEW GUINEA
I have termed107 the earliest mode of childrearing the
infanticidal mode because parents who routinely resolve their anxieties
about taking care of their children by killing them without remorse
also convey this attitude to their other children by demonstrating
throughout their lives that their personal existence is not important
to them except as the children satisfy the needs of the parents.
As in most simple cultures, New Guinea mothers can be considered infanticidal
mode because they kill a third or more of their newborn-so that most
mothers have killed one or more of their children. Though the practice
is common, it is usually downplayed by anthropologists-Margaret Mead,
for instance, kept infanticide out of her published reports, but wrote
in her letters home such observations as "we've had one corpse float
by, a newborn infant; they are always throwing away infants here..."108
Some sense of its dimensions can be seen in the imbalance of males
over females at birth, ratios which run from 120-160 to 100.109
Since both male and female newborn are killed, this ratio obviously
only reflects the amount of excess female infanticide, so the combined
rate of infanticide is even higher. These high rates are common to
the culture area; Birdsell, for instance, estimated that the Australian
Aborigines destroyed as many as 50 percent of all infants110
and the first missionaries in Polynesia estimated that two-thirds
of the children were murdered by their parents."111 Another
study cites an average sex ratio of 159 to 100 for children 1-5 years,
which means most families killed at least one child.112
Anthropologists commonly pass over these statistics quickly, since
high infanticide rates do not reflect well upon their "pervasive love"
claim. For instance, Herdt claims that "Sambia love children, and
it is hard to imagine that infanticide was done except in desperate
circumstances."113 He then says that "throughout New Guinea,
males outnumber females at birth, often in high ratios...For Sambia,
the birthrate ratio is 120 male births to 100 female births." Despite
this out-of-balance birthrate ratio, Herdt claims "There was no female
infanticide,"114 a biological impossibility.
Although anthropologists commonly excuse infanticide as required by
"necessity" and don't count it as part of the homicide rate their
informants themselves report otherwise when asked why they kill their
infants, stating they killed them because "children are too much trouble,"115
because the mothers were angry at their husbands,116 because
they are "demon children,"117 because the baby "might turn
out to be a sorcerer,"118 "because her husband would go
to another woman" for sex if she had to nurse the infant,119
because they didn't want babies to tie them down in their sexual liaisons,120
because it was a female and must be killed because "they leave you
in a little while"121 or "they don't stay to look after
us in our old age."122 Infanticide by mothers can be thought
of as an early form of post-partum depression. Siblings commonly watch
their mothers kill their siblings and are sometimes forced to take
part in the murder. In many tribes, the newborn is "tossed to the
sows, who promptly devour it. The woman then takes one of the farrows
belonging to the sow who first attacked her baby's corpse and nurses
it at her breast."123 Pigs, by the way, are commonly nursed
by women at their breasts,124 then often used for sacrificial
purposes and discarded thus disproving the notion that infanticide
is made necessary because of lack of breast milk. Even when the baby
is buried, it is often found by other children: "the mother...buries
it alive in a shallow hole that the baby's movements may be seen in
the hole as it is suffocating and panting for breath; schoolchildren
saw the movements of such a dying baby and wanted to take it out to
save it. However, the mother stamped it deep in the ground and kept
her foot on it..."125
Anthropologists often report the infanticidal actions of New Guinea
mothers without noticing what they are actually doing. As a typical
instance, Willey reports in his book Assignment New Guinea that a
group of mothers were gathered outside the police station to protest
some government action, yelling, "Kill our children." Willey says,
"One woman in the front line hurled her baby at the police, shouting,
"'Go on, kill my child!' When the senior officer caught it and handed
it back to the mother, she held it up and yelled, 'Kill my baby.'"126
Invariably, these mothers are reported as very loving, not infanticidal.
In some parts of New Guinea and Australia, mothers are both child
murderers and cannibals, who commonly kill both their own and others'
children and feed them to their siblings.127 The most complete
description of the practice comes from Roheim:
It had been the custom for every second child to be eaten by the preceding
child...When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they
ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives.
Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara,
every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the
first child would be doubled...[My informants] had, each of them,
eaten one of their brothers....They eat the head first, then the arms,
feet, and finally the body. Jankitji, Uluru and Aldinga have all eaten
their siblings....Daisy Bates writes: 'Baby cannibalism was rife among
these central-western people...In one group...every woman who had
a baby had killed and eaten it, dividing it with her sisters, who
in turn killed their children at birth and returned the gift of food,
so that the group had not preserved a single living child for some
years. When the frightful hunger for baby meat overcame the mother
before or at the birth of the baby, it was killed and cooked regardless
of sex.'"128
Roheim states with great conviction though providing no evidence that
the children who were forced to eat their siblings "are the favored
ones who started life with no oral trauma,"129 that eating
one's siblings "doesn't seem to have affected the personality development"
of these children,130 and that "these are good mothers
who eat their own children."131 When I suggested in Foundations
of Psychohistory132 that it was doubtful that children
remained unaffected by being forced to join in their mother's killing
and eating of their siblings, a reviewer, Robert Paul, editor of Ethos,
the journal of psychological anthropology, was adamant that no one
may question Roheim's rosy conclusions:
Remember that the anthropologist in question here is Roheim himself,
who can hardly be accused of being psychoanalytically unsophisticated,
or of denying or resisting. Indeed, deMause readily accepts his reportage
about the facts. Why does he question his conclusion? Roheim was nobody's
fool. If deMause, sitting in New York, knows better than Roheim what
is "aboriginal reality," then once again we are back in never-never
land and not in the realm of empirical science.133
Most ethnologists avoid describing how these children feel about participating
in the killing or eating of their siblings. Lindenbaum simply says
of the Fore tribe that "cannibalism was largely limited to adult women
[and] to children of both sexes"134 but doesn't mention
that the mothers force the children to eat human flesh and doesn't
say how they reacted to this. Gillison reports that Gimi mothers feed
the flesh to their older children and say it is "the sweetest thing...'You
are still a small boy,' my mother said to me, 'so let me give you
this.' And she gave me some meat....A woman might have partaken of
her own son, some women allowed, but she left the cutting to her co-wives,
daughters, or daughters of her co-wives. 'His mother ate the penis,'
one woman said..."135 Only Poole actually reported the
reaction of one group of New Guinea children to their witnessing of
their parents eating some children:
Having witnessed their parents' mortuary anthropophagy, many of these
children suddenly avoided their parents, shrieked in their presence,
or expressed unusual fear of them. After such experiences, several
children recounted dreams or constructed fantasies about animal-man
beings with the faces or other features of particular parents who
were smeared with blood and organs.136
Since Poole's children had only witnessed their parents' cannibalism,
those children who are forced to actually join in and help kill and
then eat their siblings can be expected to show even more internalization
of murderous monsters and life-long fears of devouring witches fears
which, unsurprisingly, are common to most New Guinea cultures. These
infanticidal societies are in fact identical to contemporary cults
that force children to murder and even eat the flesh of babies, with
profound life-long traumatic effects upon their psyches-cult rituals
which in a series of articles in The Journal of Psychohistory have
been demonstrated to be well-documented, eyewitnessed, brought to
court and criminal convictions obtained from skeptical juries in a
majority of the cases studied.137
Individuals or groups who murder and eat babies are in fact severely
schizoid personalities138 who handle their own rage, engulfment
fears and devouring emotional demands by either murdering children
to wipe out the demands they project into them or by eating them in
order to act out their identification with devouring internal alters.
Indeed, anthropologists are only reflecting their own denial rather
than looking at the evidence when they conclude that the ubiquitous
infanticide in New Guinea is really a good thing for children because
then "children are desired and highly valued [because] there is no
such thing as an unwanted child."139
As one step beyond their need to murder children, infanticidal societies
are commonly found to treat children as erotic objects, again in a
perverse attempt to deal with their own severe anxieties, repeatedly
sexually abusing them in incest, pederasty and rape. It is to this
sexual use of babies and older children in New Guinea that we will
now turn.
INCEST AND THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN IN NEW GUINEA
As with infanticide, the sexual abuse of children is widely reported
by anthropologists, but in positive terms: maternal incest is seen
as indulging the infant's sexual needs, oral and anal rape of boys
is described as both desirable and as desired by the boys and rape
of both girls and boys is presented as an unmotivated "cultural" artifact.
I will begin with the use by mothers of their infants as erotic objects.
Anthropologists maintain that "the incest taboo is the very foundation
of culture"140 and that "the taboo on incest within the
immediate family is one of the few known cultural universals."141
The culturally-approved sexual use of children, therefore, must be
renamed wherever it is found as something other than incest. Ford
and Beach's widely-cited Patterns of Sexual Behavior makes this false
distinction clear: incest, they say, "excludes instances in which
mothers or fathers are permitted to masturbate or in some other sexual
manner to stimulate their very young children,"142 then
going on to call incest rare. The authoritative Growing Up: A Cross-Cultural
Encyclopedia covers 87 cultures in which it says there is no incest,
just adults playing with, stroking, masturbating and sucking their
baby's genitals: "Truk adults play with an infant's genitals...In
China, Manchu mothers tickle the genitals of their little daughters
and suck the penis of a small son...in Thailand, a Banoi mother habitually
strokes her son's genitals."143 But again this isn't incest.
Davenport's cross-cultural study similarly concludes that "Mother-son
incest is so rare that it is insignificant and irrelevant [since]
genital stimulation as a means of pacifying a child may be regarded
as nonsexual..."144 Konker reviews cross-cultural adult-child
sexual relations and finds that "the ethnographic record contains
many...examples of normative adult/child sexual contact" but said
this isn't a problem since experts have found there is "no reason
to believe that sexual contact between an adult and child is inherently
wrong or harmful."145 Korbin's Child Abuse and Neglect:
Cross-Cultural Perspectives likewise finds that mothers masturbating
children is widespread in her large sample, but she says it is not
incest since the society doesn't call it incest:
In some societies, children's genitals are fondled to amuse and please
them, calm them or lull them to sleep...This would not constitute
'abuse' if in that society the behavior was not proscribed and was
not for the purposes of adult sexual satisfaction, even if the adult
tangentially experienced some degree of pleasure.146
Since the use of infants and children as erotic objects is so common
cross-culturally,147 it is not surprising that New Guinea
adults also commonly use their children sexually. Babies in particular
are treated as if they were breasts, to be sucked and masturbated
all day long. Whenever ethnologists mention childhood in any detail,
they often begin with such comments as, "My strongest impression among
women was created by their incessant fondling of infants"148
or "As babies and small children their genitalia are fondled."149
As with most infanticidal mothers, this sexual fondling most often
occurs when the mother is nursing the baby (or even older child, mothers
nursing until the child is three to six years of age), since nursing
is highly erotic, occurring over a hundred times a day or as often
as the mother needs the stimulation to overcome her depression.150
Gillison describes the process of masturbating infants among the Gimi:
The mother insists upon continued contact, interrupting her toddler's
play repeatedly to offer the breast. Masturbation...with a baby girl
[occurs when] the mother or amau holds her hand over the vulva and
shakes it vigorously. She may kiss the vagina, working her way up
the middle of the body to the lips and then inserting her nipple (often
when the child has given no sign of discontent). With a boy, she kisses
the penis, pulls at it with her fingers and takes it into her mouth
to induce an erection. Several women may pass a baby boy back and
forth, each one holding him over her head as she takes a turn sucking
or holding the penis in her mouth. When the child then pulls at his
own organ, the women, greatly amused, offer squeezes and pulls of
their own.151
Many ethnologists in the New Guinea-Australian area notice the connection
between nursing and the erotic use of infants, first describing the
mother putting her nipple into the baby's mouth whenever it cries,
even if it is not hungry, while massaging her other breast and "caressing
the fleshy parts of its body...and implanting breathy kisses over
and over again in the region of its genital organs."152
Only Hippler, however, notices the incestuous trance the Yolngu mother
goes into while nursing and masturbating her child:
the child is sexually stimulated by the mother...Penis and vagina
are caressed...clearly the action arouses the mother. Many mothers
develop blissful smiles or become quite agitated (with, we assume,
sexual stimulation) and their nipples apparently harden during these
events. Children...are encouraged to play with their mothers' breasts,
and...are obviously stimulated sexually...153
Maternal incest, like other sexual perversions, will often also reveal
the sadism of the mother as she uses the child as an erotic sadistic
object to overcome her depression and despair-which is rooted in her
own loveless childhood. As Poole reports, "It should be noted that
these erotic acts are often somewhat rough. Mothers' stimulation of
the penis may involve pulling, pinching, and twisting in a manner
that produces struggling and crying in infant boys. Also, I have treated
many women whose nipples had been bruised and lacerated by their infants."154
Similarly, in addition to masturbation during nursing, Roheim reports
that mothers will sometimes "lie on their sons in the [female on top]
position and freely masturbate them" at night.155 That
all this masturbation of children by parents is socially acceptable
is shown by how often the mothers do it in front of the anthropologist.156
This helps explain why children in the area spend so much of their
time when playing with dolls making them repeat over and over again
the cunnilingus, masturbation, anal penetration, intercourse and other
incestuous acts which their parents had inflicted on them: "their
only, and certainly their supreme, game was coitus."157
The incestuous use of children in New Guinea and Australia extends
to the other Melanesian and Polynesian islands, although as the societies
become more complex the sexual practices become more ritualized. For
instance, in the Marquesas Islands, besides simple masturbation of
infants,158 "the mons Veneris is massaged during infancy
and girlhood...accompanied by stretching of the labia to elongate
them. This was done by the mother during the daily bath. The child
was seized by the ankles and its legs held apart while the mother
manipulated the labia with her lips."159 In Hawaii, a "blower"
is designated for each male infant, ostensibly to prepare him for
subincision of the foreskin, and "the penis was blown into daily starting
from birth. The blowing was said to loosen and balloon the foreskin
[and] continued daily...until the young male was 6 or 7."160
For infant females in Hawaii, "milk was squirted into her vagina,
and the labia were pressed together. The mons was rubbed with candlenut
oil and pressed with the palm of the hand to flatten it...the molding
continued until the labia did not separate. This chore usually was
done by the mother..."161 The Ponapé islanders "pulled
and tugged at the labia of the little girls to lengthen them, while
men pulled on the clitoris, rubbing it and licking it with their tongues
and stimulating it by the sting of a big ant..."162 This
oral manipulation of the labia and clitoris extends to many of the
other Pacific islands.163
Mothers are not the only ones to use their infants as sexual objects.
Although fathers in New Guinea are often reported avoiding their infants
during the nursing years because they say they get sexually aroused
when they watch them nurse,164 when they do handle their
infants, they too are reported as using them erotically. In the New
Guinea Highlands, Langness reports "There was a great deal of fondling
of the boys' penes by males. Women fondled infants but not older boys.
Individuals of both sexes would pick up infants and mouth their genitals..."165"
Like all other anthropologists who report the regular masturbating
and sucking of children's genitals, he calls this love: "Any adult
is apt to love and fondle any child almost at random."166
Roheim, too, describes similarly widespread oral-genital contact by
fathers: "The father...stimulates [his children] sexually at a very
early period while they are still being carried. He playfully smells
the vagina or touches it with his mouth; with the boys he playfully
bites the penis..."167 It is this common use of the child
as a breast by the father that is mistaken by so many anthropologists
as "close, loving fathering" in New Guinea and elsewhere.
Virtually all anthropologists report the long maternal nursing period
of from three to six years as "nurturant" and "loving," assuming without
evidence that this universal incessant nursing is done to satisfy
the child's needs, not the mother's. Only one, Gilbert Herdt, interviewing
the Sambia with the help of the psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller, asked
the mothers directly about their sexual feelings during nursing. The
Sambia, like most New Guinea groups, have prolonged postpartum taboos
that prohibit couples from engaging in coitus for at least two and
a half years following the birth of each child.168 Anthropologists
always portray these postpartum prohibitions as unexplained "cultural
beliefs," as though there were no personal motive for them, but in
fact they are simply practices chosen to express the mothers' desire
to use their children rather than their spouses for sexual arousal.
Since a taboo this long means women choose to have sex with their
children rather than their husbands for much of their lives, it is
obvious that they are unable to achieve the level of mature love relationships,
and instead, like other incestuous individuals, need to have sex with
children in order to counter deep feelings of depression.169
Like all infanticidal mothers, New Guinea mothers, unloved themselves
in childhood, feared as polluted by her society, devoid of intimacy
with her husband, needs her children rather than loves them.
The motive for New Guinea maternal incest is clearest in the case
of the Sambia, for the mothers in this group report regularly having
orgasms during nursing.170 Herdt's informants told him
that when they breast-fed their children they felt orgasms that were
"the same" as when having intercourse with a man,171 and
that "all the women feel that...not just me...all of them do."172
So powerful is this ability to orgasm during nursing that even thinking
about nursing can provide sexual excitement for the mother:
P: Then my baby thinks, "My mother doesn't bring back my milk quickly,
so I am crying and crying waiting for her." He cries and cries and
waits. And when he thinks that, then my breasts have to have an imbimboogu
[orgasm].
H: You're saying that at that time, that's when you're feeling imbimboogu,
when you walk about?
P: Yeah...I'm hot in the nipples, inside.173
Herdt asks Stoller what this means, saying "as she's walking back
to the hamlet, she has this experience she's calling an orgasm. I
mean, it doesn't, can't...sound believable."174 Stoller
reports that occasionally "women in our society report genuine orgasms
with suckling,"175 though this is rare compared to the
mothers in New Guinea.176
Since Poole was the only New Guinea ethnologist who interviewed both
mothers and children, he obtained the most complete reports of maternal
incest.177 Like infanticidal psychoclass mothers everywhere,
Bimin-Kuskusmin mothers consider their babies to be part of their
own bodies, "never permitting the infant to be detached from contact
with her body" and breastfeeding the baby "not only on demand, but
also sometimes by force," whenever the mother needs the stimulation.178
Mothers, Poole says, constantly masturbate the penes of their baby
boys, while trying not to let their incest get out of hand:
She is expected to masturbate him periodically to ensure the growth
of his genitalia, but she must carefully avoid the excessive development
of erotic 'infant lust' which may injure his finiik [spirit]...When
mothers rub the penes of their infant sons, the little boys wriggle
on their mothers' laps and have erections. These tiny erections bring
laughter. It is play. It will make their penes big when they are older.
But 'infantile lust' can become too strong and can damage the growing
"spirit or life-force" (finiik) of little boys. You will see mothers
and sons together in this way everywhere.179
Much of the ribald joking among mothers is for the purpose of denying
that the erotic use of the child is in fact incest-it is blamed on
the infant's "lust" only-for only "bad" mothers "are believed to stimulate
their sons beyond the bounds of 'infantile lust' in order to satisfy
their own sexual desires..."180 Those mothers who completely
give in to their own "lust" are called "witches" who are said to be
"driven...to destroy all aspects of masculinity through jealousy and
rage"181 a condition all women can fall into, particularly
when they are young, inexperienced mothers or are treated harshly
by their husband's family. In order to prove that she isn't being
too lustful,
mothers deliberately cover their breasts with bark cloth when they
are stimulating the penis in a ritually prescribed manner. Indeed,
this often highly ostentatious act of covering the breasts is a display
to an ever-watchful public that the mother is acting properly in tending
her son. On occasion, I have witnessed older women admonish a young
mother for failing to cover her breasts when rubbing her son's genitals.182
More privacy is afforded at night, however, when mothers can rub against
their children's entire bodies because they sleep naked with their
them, "together in each other's arms" and when they also can "regularly
rub" the boy's penis to erection.183
That these infants and children who are used as erotic objects function
as poison containers for the mothers' split-off and denied anxieties
and anger is quite clear. Poole interviewed one young boy, Buuktiin,
who described how when his mother was depressed or angry she often
"pulled, pinched, rubbed, or flicked a fingernail against his penis"184
until he cried, afraid it might break off. "When he struggled to escape,
she held him tightly and rubbed his penis even harder."185
Kiipsaak [his mother] had masturbated him earlier as mothers often
do...[But] now she increased the tempo and roughness of the episodes...and
he often jerked at her touch and struggled to get away, hitting her
and complaining of throbbing pain in his penis. 'It hurts inside.
It goes 'koong, koong, koong' inside. I think it bleeds in there.
I don't like to touch it anymore. It hurts when I pee."186
Like so many victims of maternal incest, Buuktiin constantly cuts
himself, both to get the "bad maternal blood" out of himself, since
he feels polluted by the constant incest, and to punish himself, since
children regularly blame themselves for the mother's sexual abuse:
Sometimes after such [incestuous] encounters, he wounded himself slightly
in the thigh and the abdomen with a sharp stick and with slow deliberation,
drawing blood and watching his penis. "Now it hurts here, outside,
not in penis. Look, blood. Feels good...Good to be a girl, no penis...Mother
twist penis, tight, tight...Hurt, hurt, inside. Cry, she not listen.
Why? She cut off father's penis? She cut off mine? Father tell her,
cut off Buuktiin's penis? Mother angry, hurt Buuktiin's penis. Mother
sad, hurt Buuktin's penis...Mother not like Buuktiin's penis, want
to cut off."187
No better description can be imagined of the infanticidal, incestuous
mother using her child as a poison container to handle her depression:
mother wants to annihilate her inner tormentors, she kills her child;
mother needs sex to counter her depression and deadness, she masturbates
it; mother is angry or sad, she twists and hurts his penis.
MATERNAL REJECTION IN NEW GUINEA
The "love" of the infanticidal mode parent is mainly evident when
the child is useful as an erotic object. When children are off the
breast or otherwise not useful, they are rejected as emotionally meaningless.
The infanticidal parents' emotional bond does not really acknowledge
the separate existence of the child, whose main function is to provide
"bodily stimulation [that] helps the mother to come alive, and she
seeks this from the child...countering her feelings of lethargy, depression,
and deadness."188 As with all pedophiles, the child is
a "sexual object...that must show a readiness to comply, lend itself
to be manipulated, used, abused [and] discarded..."189
There is never just "incest" it is always "incest/rejection."
There are many ways New Guinea parents demonstrate that when the child
cannot be used erotically, it is useless. One is that as soon as infants
are not being nursed, they are paid no attention, and even when in
danger are ignored. Anthropologists regularly notice that little children
play with knives or fire and adults ignore them. Edgerton comments
on the practice: "Parents allowed their small children to play with
very sharp knives, sometimes cutting themselves, and they permitted
them to sleep unattended next to the fire. As a result, a number of
children burned themselves seriously...it was not uncommon to see
children who had lost a toe to burns, and some were crippled by even
more severe burns."190 Langness says in the Bena Bena "it
was not at all unusual to see even very small toddlers playing with
sharp bush knives with no intervention on the part of caretakers."191
But this is good, say the anthropologists, since when "children as
young as two or three are permitted to play with objects that Westerners
consider dangerous, such as sharp knives or burning brands from the
fire, [it] tends to produce assertive, confident, and competent children."192
Children, they explain, are allowed to "learn by observations...e.g.,
the pain of cutting oneself when playing carelessly with a knife."193
As Whiting says, when he once saw a Kwoma baby "with the blade of
a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid
no attention to him," this was good for the infant, since in this
way "the child learns to discriminate between the edible and inedible."194
Margaret Mead is particularly ecstatic about the wisdom of mothers
making infants learn to swim early by allowing them to fall into the
water under the hut when crawling and slipping through gaps in the
floor or falling overboard into the sea because they were "set in
the bow of the canoe while the mother punts in the stern some ten
feet away."195
Children are experienced by mothers as extensions of their bodies,
and any separation or independence is seen as rejection of the mother,
as reminders of the severe rejection of the mothers' own childhood.
Mothers do not allow others to nurse their children, saying their
milk is "poison," and even do not allow their one- to two-year-olds
to visit their relatives for fear they would "poison" them.196
When a mother dies, often the "infant would be buried with her even
if perfectly healthy,"197 and if the infant dies, "the
mother remains secluded with it for days, wailing, attempting to nurse
it," blaming it by saying "I told you not to die. But you did not
hear me! You did not listen!"198 When infants begin to
show any sign of independence, they are either wholly rejected and
ignored or forced to stay still. Typical is the Wogeo child, who Hogbin
describes as often being "put in a basket, which is then hung on a
convenient rafter...or tree" and "discouraged from walking and not
allowed to crawl...[forced to] sit still for hours at a time [and
only] make queer noises" as he or she is immobilized to avoid even
the slightest movement of independence from the mother.199
Anthropologists regularly see these ubiquitous New Guinea baskets
and net bags in which the infants are trapped and in which they are
often hung on a tree as "comforting," even though it means that the
infants often live in their own feces and urine and can neither crawl
nor interact with others. Only Hippler describes them as a function
of the mothers' pattern of "near absolute neglect" of her child when
it is not being used erotically.200
Parental rejection in preliterate cultures is often overt it is what
Boyer found was called "throwing the child away." Boyer discovered
that "a great many mothers abandon or give children away; babies they
have been nursing lovingly only hours before," when he and his wife
were offered their babies, a practice he ascribed to the mothers'
"shallow object relations."201 Few anthropologists have
seen the high adoption and fosterage rates in the New Guinea area-some
as high as 75 percent202 as rejection, but of course that
is what it is. Child rejection is widely institutionalized in various
forms, usually after weaning, when the infant has stopped being useful
as an erotic object. In the Trobriands, for instance, "the transfer
of children who have already been weaned from true parents to other
parents is a frequent occurrence..."203 Anthropologists
usually see giving away a child as evidence of parental love. Kasprus,
for instance, says the Raum really "love and like children," but that
"although they love children they may readily give one away..."204
Mead describes the giving of a child away by her parents as a "happy"
event. The occasion is a family giving a seven-year-old girl to the
family of her betrothed, an older man:
The little girl is taken by her parents and left in the home of her
betrothed. Here her life hardly differs at all from the life that
she led at home....Towards her young husband, her attitude is one
of complete trust and acceptance....He calls out to her to light his
pipe, or to feed his dog...she becomes warmly attached...I asked her:
"Did you cry when you first went to Liwo?" "No, I did not cry. I am
very strong."205
Rejection of the child when off the breast is ubiquitous in New Guinea.
Small children are rarely looked at or talked to. Whereas in American
families an average of 28 minutes of an average hour is spent talking
to and interacting with the child (including an average of 341 utterances
per hour),206 in at least one New Guinea study mothers
were found to interact with their children only one minute out of
each hour.207 The millions of looks, communications, admirations,
mirroring and emotional negotiations between mother and child the
"emotional dialogue that fosters the beginnings of a sense of self,
logical communications and the beginnings of purposefulness"208
are simply missing for the New Guinea child. The result is that the
early self system in the orbitofrontal cortex has no chance to develop,
and since "the orbitofrontal cortex functionally mediates the capacity
to empathize with the feelings of others and to reflect on internal
emotional states, one's own and others,"209 when these
emotionally rejected children grow up they are unable to empathize
with others or have much insight into their own emotions.
Since to the infanticidal mother, as Hippler puts it, "the child is
an unconscious representative of [her own] mother, his autonomous
actions are seen by the mother as abandonment. The response on the
part of the mother to this 'abandonment' by her infant...is anger"
and rejection.210 Mothers throughout the South Pacific
are said to "hold their small infants facing away from them and toward
other people while the mother speaks for them rather than to them."211
Obviously the infant is an extension of the mother's body, not an
independent human being at all. "No one says very much to babies,"212
and when they begin to walk, they are felt to be abandoning the parent
and are emotionally rejected. As Hippler puts it,
I never observed a single adult Yolngu caretaker of any age or sex
walking a toddler around, showing him the world, explaining things
to him and empathizing with his needs. While categorical statements
are most risky, I am most certain of this.213
This emotional rejection and lack of verbalization has been widely
noted among infanticidal mode parents in simple societies.214
When the baby stops being a breast-object, it simply doesn't exist.
In my New Guinea childhood files, for instance, I have over 1,000
photos from books and articles showing adults and children-including
one book of over 700 photos of Fore children taken randomly so as
to capture their daily lives.215 Virtually all the photos
capture the adults continuously caressing, rubbing, kissfeeding and
mouthing the children's bodies, but only two show an adult actually
looking at the child. Not a single one shows a mutual gaze between
the adult and child which Schore contends is the basis of formation
of the self. The photos illuminate Read's description of the "customary
greeting, a standing embrace in which both men and women handled each
other's genitals...hands continually reaching out to caress a thigh,
arms to encircle a waist, and open, searching mouths hung over a child's
lips, nuzzled a baby's penis, or closed with a smack on rounded buttocks."216
This emotional abandonment is further confirmed by Boram, who recorded
every detail of a typical day of one six-year-old Ok girl. Interactions
or talking to the mother were found to be rare, while the child spent
the day going about looking for food, hunting frogs and cooking them,
"fondling" babies and pretending to nurse piglets from her breast.
Boram concludes that for Ok children "most of the day is spent simply
in killing time..."217 It is not surprising that he also
mentions that tantrums are frequent and suicide is high among these
children, and that he observed many "episodes of insanity" in Ok children.218
MALNUTRITION AND THE WEANING CRISIS IN NEW GUINEA
So difficult is it for New Guinea area mothers to relate to their
children as independent human beings that they are unable to feed
them regularly once they are off the breast. Like contemporary pedophiles,
they do not so much love their children as need them, so when the
parents' needs end, the child can be emotionally abandoned. When still
on the breast, New Guinea children are constantly being force-fed,
so that nursing "becomes a battle in which the mother clutches the
child, shaking it up and down with the nipple forced into its mouth
until it must either suck or choke."219 As soon as they
are off the breast, however, the mothers no longer need them as erotic
objects, and they have difficulty understanding that their children
need three meals a day. Although there is almost always plenty of
food to eat for both adults and children, "several authors have stressed
what appears to be a nonchalant attitude toward infant and child feeding
on the part of Papua New Guinea mothers,"220 so that "over
90 percent of children under five have been measured as having mild
to moderate undernutrition."221 In one careful statistical
study, almost all children remained underweight for years, because
"none were fed three times daily as clinic sisters encourage..."222
In the New Guinea-Australian culture area, meat, in particular, is
rarely given to children, being eaten up by the adults first.223
Hippler reports that "parents eat all the substantial food...before
the child can get any. Adults...do not believe that deaths result
from anything but sorcery, they make no connection between these practices
and childhood illness and attendant death."224 In a careful
study of Kwanga child malnutrition, two-year-olds who had been weaned
were found to average only two meals a day, so that child mortality
was extremely high.225 Nurses in the clinic kept telling
the mothers, "Why don't you tell me the truth? You do not feed your
child properly!" but the mothers didn't seem to comprehend why it
was necessary to feed them regularly each day, and so the weaned children
kept losing weight and even dying.226
In her book on child malnourishment in New Guinea, Patricia Townsend
cites all the studies showing the majority of children are underweight
between age one and four, emphasizing that the toddler group-after
weaning-are most malnourished, since the mothers do not feed them
regularly.227 Children are constantly being described by
observers as throwing tantrums "for hours" trying to get food, "standing
in the middle of the house floor and shrieking monotonously until
someone stops work to cook for them."228 Anthropologists
ascribe these constant hunger tantrums to children's willfulness,
agreeing with a chuckle with the natives' saying that "young children
have only one thought/emotion, which is to eat,"229 unable
to empathize with the despair of the hungry, unloved, lonely, rejected
children they see throwing the tantrums.
Similarly, once the infant is off the breast both the parents and
the anthropologists seem unable to empathize with the feelings of
the children as they are subjected to all kinds of tortures which
anthropologists dismiss as merely "cultural practices" and therefore
consider as unmotivated. For instance, babies in many areas have their
skulls deformed, highly elongated with painfully tight bindings that
are renewed every day for months.230 Making infants crawl
over dead bodies and terrorizing little children with frightening
masks and threats of devouring witches is quite common.231
Children are also regularly described as "shouted at, jerked roughly,
slapped, shaken" bitten and hit with sticks232 yet the
standard study on child abuse in New Guinea claims they are "rarely
abused" because although "it is not uncommon for adults to strike
children...there is no such thing as a formal spanking."233
Since only formal disciplinary spankings as we administer them in
the West seem to count as child abuse, anthropologists regularly conclude
that "child abuse...is virtually unknown" in New Guinea.234
INFANTICIDAL PARENTING AND PARENTING IN OTHER PRIMATES
Most New Guinea area parenting practices from infanticide and maternal
incest to the inability to feed properly-are shared with other primate
parents, thus lending further credence to the conclusion that they
still have a childrearing mode that is rather close to that of our
earliest ancestors. The inability of most non-human primates to share
food with their children after weaning is well established. Jane Lancaster
sums up primate post-weaning behavior:
...adults are not responsible for seeing that young have enough to
eat...[even] an injured or sick youngster still has to feed itself
and get itself to water or it will die virtually before the eyes of
other group members. Individuals who would risk their own lives in
defense of the youngster are psychologically incapable of seeing its
need for them to bring it food and water. Once weaned, then, young
monkeys and apes must feed themselves...235
The primate mother nurses her infant only for the erotic pleasure
it affords, not for "love" of her child. Like the New Guinea mother,
she has difficulty conceiving that her child is hungry. After the
suckling period, primate mothers almost never give any kind of food
to their infants. "Even gorilla infants have never been seen being
given solid food by their mothers."236 In fact, primate
mothers are often observed to grab food from their offspring, who
must get by on "tolerated scrounging" of leftovers.237
Like New Guinea mothers, chimpanzee mothers are described as losing
interest in their children when off the breast, often rejecting and
punishing them.238 The result of this severe maternal rejection
is that there is a "weaning crisis" for primates when they abruptly
must learn to find food for themselves, a deadly rejection process
that kills from one-third to three-fourths of them before they reached
adulthood.239
Primates parallel human infanticidal mode parents in other ways too.
They frequently give away their infants a practice called "alloparenting,"240
which often results in the infant being abused, abandoned or killed.241
Primates are also infanticidal, cannibalistic and incestuous.242
Indeed, there appears to be only a relatively small degree of childrearing
evolution between our nearest primate ancestors and infanticidal mode
parenting such as that in New Guinea. Lovejoy243 cites
the high infant mortality of primates during weaning he places it
at around 40 percent as evidence that early hominids estimated at
over 50 percent infant mortality244 had difficulty feeding
their children once off the breast, just as New Guinea mothers still
do today.
THE FUNCTION OF CHILD GANGS IN NEW GUINEA
After the mother rejects the child during weaning, he or she must
rely on peers in child gangs for much of its needs. A cross-cultural
study of this pattern among preliterate groups concludes:
In one ethnography after another there is a description of intense
mother-infant contact...until weaning, and outright maternal hostility
and rejection afterward...
Children typically eat with other children in these groups after weaning,
often in outright scramble competition when food is scarce. The description
of this pattern usually goes with assurances by the ethnographer that
the child receives 'emotional support' from peers and from others
in the group. Our bet is that any of these kids would prefer a square
meal to emotional support. The point here is that many people in the
world do not share our American middle-class view that children need
and deserve a lot of input. They treat children much as other primate
parents treat their children...245
Throughout the New Guinea area, children are "not only turned loose
for the daylight hours but also actively discouraged from returning
to the parents" and so are forced to join "a transient gang."246
As is usual in gangs, the older children "lord it over" the younger,
often beat them and make them their servants,247 particularly
their sexual servants, since they were used to constant sexual stimulation
by their parents as studies have shown, "incestuous children are uncommonly
erotic...easily aroused...and readily orgasmic."248 Malinowsky
was one of the first to report sexual intercourse beginning at age
four in the Trobriand Islands, where "children are initiated by each
other, or sometimes by a slightly older companion, into the practices
of sex," including oral stimulation, masturbation, and anal or vaginal
intercourse.249 Others since then have confirmed the pattern:
The boys poke sticks into each others' anuses...If parents see boys
having sex with little girls they joke about it and laugh. 'Good.
You can do it. Your mothers and fathers did this...'"250
The younger children are of course raped by the older ones, although
this is never obvious in the language of the anthropologist, who usually
says some neutral phrase like "they are typically initiated into intercourse
by older and more experienced children,"251 as though the
older child was only a helpful teacher. The same misleading language
is used when describing young girls "subjected at about age eight
to ten to serial sexual intercourse by adult men...to procure sexual
fluids for rubbing on the girl's groom-to-be, to help him grow,"252
as though this weren't simple gang rape. Some anthropologists even
claim that the raping of little children by child gangs is "healthy,"
because, as Kurtz puts it, "the group seduces a child out of immaturity
by offering and imposing on that child multiple experiences of sexual
pleasure..."253
Studies of children who have been sexually abused by their parents
show they were "highly eroticized"254 and often restaged
their own seductions on other children. In New Guinea, the child gangs
often had their own houses in which to have sex, as in the Trobriand
Islands, where "young people usually do not sleep in their parents'
houses. They move to a small house next door or a few doors away...In
this way, they have the freedom of their own sleeping quarters to
which they can bring their lovers."255 Roheim says both
boys and girls are constantly sexual, even with their siblings:
Homosexuality plays a conspicuous role in the life of a young girl
[using] little sticks wound around at the end so as to imitate the
glans penis...All the virgin girls do this...One of them plays the
male role and introduces the artificial penis into her cousin's vagina...they
then rub their two clitorises together...At the age of eight or ten
boys and girls frequently have their own little houses...They do it
first to their little sisters. Sipeta says that her older brothers
every evening before they went to the girls would pet her this way.256
Boys throughout the Melanesian and Polynesian areas take great pride
in "deflowering virgins," both individually and in gangs, and often
"count coup" as to how many little girls they have deflowered."257
Parents encourage the rape; Berndt describes how "children...are invited
by a mother, older brother or sister, or some other person, to indulge
in sexual intercourse with an adult or a child of the same age..."258
Gang raping children is often done as part of rituals, as when Australian
aborigines mutilate and rape their young girls:
A most severe form of mutilation, introcism, was formerly practiced
among Australian aborigines...the vagina of a pubertal girl was slit
with a knife or torn open by the fingers of the operator, the purpose
being to enlarge the vaginal opening. This painful operation was immediately
followed by forced intercourse with a group of young men.259
Women, too, rape young boys; Firth describes how women would "cover
the child and herself with a blanket and insert his penis in her genitals.
She lies on her back, holds the child on top of her and with her hand
works his loins."260 Anthropologists occasionally admit
that child rape in New Guinea might be "sometimes associated with
violence,"261 but usually claim it is voluntary, as when
Knauft claims rape of young girls by "between five and thirteen men"
was "willingly submitted to...in the belief that it was necessary
to enhance their personal fertility as well as that of the Marind
cosmos."262
RAPE OF BOYS AS RESTAGING OF MATERNAL INCEST
When New Guinea boys begin to want to individuate at around seven
years of age, adult men, identifying with their desires to grow, begin
to experience severe growth panic and restage in various ways their
maternal incest traumas. Mainly in the less-evolved South and Eastern
Lowlands, this restaging takes the form of oral and anal rape of the
boys, as men force their penis into the boy's mouth or anus the same
way the mothers used them in forced erotic feeding as infants. Like
pederasts who have been psychoanalyzed,263 New Guinea men
fear women as incestuous, engulfing mothers whose "menstrual blood
could contaminate and kill them." By raping boys, these pederasts
reverse their own being passively used as erotic objects and instead
actively use the boys sexually. Thus the boys become sexual objects
devoid of the mother's frightening configurations, while restaging
the maternal rape of their own infancy. Both the boys and the men
recognize the rape as being like breast-feeding, rationalizing it
as necessary for growth, telling the little boys, "You all won't grow
by yourselves; if you sleep with the men you'll become a STRONG man...when
you hold a man's penis, you must put it inside your mouth-he can give
you semen...It's the same as your mother's breast milk."264
Among many groups, the fellatio of men by young boys occurs daily
and continues until puberty, when he then can begin raping younger
boys himself. The swallowing of semen is so important that men often
blame accidents on not drinking enough. As one Juvu tribesman said
about a man who had fallen from a tree, "He didn't drink semen: that's
why he fell." His friend agreed: "I still never stop thinking about
semen or eating it...[a] man who didn't [swallow semen] enough will
die quickly, like an airplane without gasoline!"265
The notion that boys must be given semen to stop them from growing
into females has a certain logic to New Guinea people. Like all maternally
incested children, they feel that being used sexually by their mothers
"pollutes their blood" and since the boys consider themselves responsible
for the seduction they feel "full of women's pollution" and need semen
to "get mother's poison" out of them. Since as infants they were used
erotically by always being rubbed against the mothers' bodies, they
were intimately familiar with her menstrual fluids, remaining with
her in the menstrual hut,266 and so an explicit association
is made between menstrual fluids and poison. Everyone therefore agrees
that women's blood is so poisonous that sexual intercourse at the
wrong time can kill men and that wives can and do kill their husbands
and children by giving them polluted food.267 Since attacks
by witches and spirits "follow the path of menstrual blood,"268
boys who remain "polluted" by mother's blood are open to death by
witchcraft, so during their whole lives this incestuous "maternal
pollution" must be constantly removed through semen ingestion and
blood-letting rituals where men make incisions in the boys' bodies
and rub sperm into the cuts.269
Anthropologists often state that orally and anally raping boys is
both chosen by and beneficial to them. Although occasionally they
reveal that the boys "fear punishment"270 and that their
"first response to doing fellatio was fear that is how most boys respond,"
they nevertheless conclude that the boys "do not just accept fellatio:
they want it."271 Like most pederasty defenders, they depict
the boys as "enthusiastically anticipating" their rape,272
and as "eager to suck" mens' penises and "enjoying" the rape with
"fine erotic enthusiasm."273 Oral and anal rapes are said
to be "grounded in personal affection rather than obligation"274
and "have a positive effect on the boy's development."275
Some of the anthropologists are open pedophile supporters, who praise
the "positive tradition of paedophilia over the last hundred years"
and term pederasty an "enormously nurturant relationship" in interviews
in Paedika: The Journal of Paedophilia,276 one even having
been prosecuted for bringing New Guinea boys back to the U.S. and
sexually abusing them.277 Of the several hundred anthropologists
whose work I have researched, I found none who said pederasty was
detrimental, agreeing instead with the New Guinea natives that it
was both desired by and beneficial to the victims.
TORTURE AND MUTILATION AS PUNISHMENT FOR GROWTH
Even in those Highland areas that do not have ritualized pederasty,
growth is psychologically felt to be dangerous to adults, and so older
children are everywhere tortured and mutilated as punishment for their
individuation and independence. Although these tortures are called
"initiation rituals" by anthropologists, they are less "initiations"
into anything than punishments for growing up. They dramatize a cleansing
of maternal poisons so boys can now be used by men for their projections.
Most of them restage maternal traumas in one way or another. One ritual
begins by blaming their mothers as "evil defilers" of the boys who
"have polluted and weakened their sons" with their bad menstrual blood.278
Another describes how "bad polluted maternal blood" is purged from
prepubertal Gahuka-Gama boys:
The boys, placed in the front ranks of the vast crowd, see a score
of naked men standing in the river exhibiting their erect penises
and masturbating. Then, several of the men stride into the river where
one takes two rolls of razor-sharp leaves and pushes them up and down
his nostrils until blood gushes into the water...each initiate...is
held firmly by his sponsor, while another man thrusts the leaves back
and forth in his nostrils until the boys bleeds profusely into the
river. After all of the initiates have been bled, [a man] doubles
a length of cane and thrusts it down his esophagus like a sword swallower
and draws it back and forth until he vomits into the water. The dangerous
procedure is then carried out on the initiates who are now weakened
and slack from the bleeding....
As soon as the boys are out of sight, the men verbally attack the
women for being bad mothers and delaying their sons' growth. A warrior
holds up a bunch of leaves soaked by the blood from the boys' noses,
and...two men seize one of the mothers and a warrior forces the bloody
leaves down her throat while cursing her...279
The ritual both demonstrates "we are all bleeding, polluted mothers
here" and tries to undo the feeling of being polluted by cutting the
boys with the razor-sharp leaves in their nostrils and the cane-sword
down their throats. The boys understandably "tremble, urinating and
defecating in fear" during their torture.280 Yet the feeling
of still being incested, polluted maternal sex-objects remains with
them, since so many continue to bleed their noses, tongues or penises
periodically the rest of their lives.281
Mead describes Arapesh men cutting their penises to remove bad blood
every time they experience growth anxiety: after first intercourse
with his wife, after erecting a new house, after initiating a growing
youth, etc.282 The cutting is clearly to remove the mother's
polluted blood; as one informant put it, "We say [the mother's] blood
and bad words enter our skin and lodge there, so we expel it [by bleeding]."283
Boys are told: "You [initiates] have been with your mothers...they
have said 'bad words' to you, their talk has entered your noses and
prevented you from growing big."284 Some groups additionally
purge boys by such rites as penis-bleeding and the "painful procedure
of lying with open eyes under a jet of water to cleanse the eyeballs"
of female pollution.285
That New Guinea teenage boys continue to cut themselves, often their
penises, after initiation rites shows they are self-injurious as punishment
for the incest they have endured. Clinical studies of self-cutters
show "cases of self-injurious behavior are rare in...children who
have not been physically or sexually abused."286 Case histories
of incest victims who slash themselves sound very much like how New
Guinea youth slashing their penises with crab claws:
Leigh, now 25, had been sexually abused by her father...her mother
told her that only a "whore" would accuse her father of such things.
"So here I was, 11 years old, standing in front of a mirror thinking,
'You filthy slut! You deserve everything you get!' Then I'd go into
a trance almost, and cut my arms and legs with a razor blade. Later
I cut my breast and even my genitals because I learned that those
were the parts of my body that made me a whore."287
Although fathers may use their girls sexually, they do not use their
boys although in some areas fathers rent out their boys to other men
who do use them sexually, establishing a "anus father" and "anus son"
relationship.288
Genital mutilation, which is always punishment for growing up, also
occurs in New Guinea. It is not, as Reik contends, "a punishment for
incestuous wishes,"289 but rather a self-punishment for
real maternal incest for which children blame themselves. Genital
mutilation rituals are cross-culturally correlated with exclusive
mother-infant skin-to-skin sleeping arrangements, where the father
sleeps separate, so the mother is likely to use the child incestuously.290
In the New Guinea area, they are sometimes as brutal as the infamous
Australian subincision, where the penis is cut the length of its underside
until it "splits open like a boiled frankfurter."291 The
long wound on the penis is then called a boy's "vagina,"292
and the men have intercourse in it.293 In other New Guinea
tribes who mutilate genitals, it usually involves cutting little pieces
of the penis off. Girls, too, are sometimes initiated by having their
noses bled with leaves or having stinging nettles thrust up their
vulvas before they are gang raped.294 Subincision in the
whole culture area is said to be accompanied by the mutilation of
the girls' genitals; according to Montagu, it was "once widely practiced
throughout Australia and Oceania."295 Whether in the form
of painful inch-long body incisions, "often over a hundred,"296
or genital mutilations, New Guinea girls, too, are cut as punishment
for being sexual and for purging poisonous blood.297
Other punishments during initiations for growing children include
brutal beating with sticks and stinging nettles, sometimes for months
or years, being burned over a fire, being starved and tortured, being
made to swallow lime which severely blisters the boys' mouths and
throats, shooting a miniature sharp-pointed arrow up girls' urethras
until blood is drawn, pushing barbed grass up the urethra, cutting
the glans penis with a crab claw, etc.298 Although one
anthropologist mentioned that "undoubtedly these rituals are exceedingly
painful,"299 they are usually considered as neither nor
as very traumatic to the children. Sometimes the "rebirth" of the
boys by the purgings is accomplished by first crawling through the
legs of the men and sometimes it is in the form of other death-and-rebirth
rituals. In either case, the rituals are a restaging of one of the
most powerful traumas New Guinea children must endure: watching their
infanticidal mothers strangle or drown their newborn siblings. The
ritual first restages the murder of the newborn and then undoes it
by showing that men can bring babies back to life (while mothers only
want to kill babies.)
The brutal initiation punishments are often combined with gang rape
by men-either, as in the Trans-Fly area, oral rape by all villagers
or visitors (combined with the pouring of lime down their throats
to ensure the boys do not become pregnant) or as in the Marind, where
anal rape is limited to the uncles.300 Initiations are
also often followed by war raids,301 sometimes a cannibalistic
headhunt, to demonstrate to the boys how through group violence they
can actively identify with the infanticidal, devouring mother and
kill and eat people rather than being passively killed or eaten by
her. Bloch describes this transformation from victim alter to killer
alter in his book, Prey Into Hunter:
the transformation of the initiates from victims into killers is a
typical aspect of these rituals...men shouting that they are spirits
arrive as if from the forest and chase the children, maltreating them.
The intruders are terrifying: they advance biting and assaulting...and
shouting 'Bite, bite, bite'. Meanwhile the parents beg the spirits
not to 'kill' the children. The reason that it is believed that the
ritual may very possibly lead to the death of the children [is] that
this indeed happens not infrequently....[Therefore] from having been
victims the children have become murderers...302
In addition to the brutality of persecutory initiation rituals, daily
life with parents is full of physical and psychological abuse. One
group of childhood memories tape recorded by one anthropologist regularly
features "parents harshly punishing" children, the following being
typical: "She grabbed my arm, twisted it and bit one of the small
veins..." (mother); "they beat me until I was half-dead [then] tied
me to a tree and left me there for the night" (both parents); "He
kicked me very hard and I fell over a large rock and hurt myself very
badly. 'Kill her and throw her away!' he said. When we return to Dandipe
we will still have plenty of other children to replace her." (father)303
Since empathy with children's feelings is nearly absent, gratuitous
mutilation of the children is common, such as tightly binding newborn
infants heads for months to elongate the skull or chopping or biting
off infant's fingers while mourning.304 These kinds of
brutal daily abuses, added to the various types of ritual pederasty,
torture and mutilation, are so widespread that the conclusion in the
standard anthropological work on cross-cultural child abuse that there
is a "virtual absence of child abuse in New Guinea"305
appears quite inexplicable.
SOCIAL ALTERS IN NEW GUINEA
Like all children who experience incest, torture and severe physical
abuse, New Guinea children only manage to retain their sanity by constructing
various alters as they grow up, which contain split-off identifications
and selves that are experienced as separate from their central selves.
When they are incested and raped, for instance, they split off the
horror into a victim alter and an abuser alter-which then abuses other
children when they become teenagers. Pedophiles who are in therapy
often reveal they switch into their abuser alters when raping children:
At the start of therapy, Jennifer experienced repeated flashbacks
of a gang rape at about age four...She had alters representing the
rapists as well as herself as the victim. These alters had imagined
themselves to be perpetrators in order to avoid experiencing the pain
of the rape....Jennifer's abuse...included sexual and physical abuse
at home, by all family members. There was also systematic, ritualistic
abuse by a Satanic cult in which her family was involved as well as
pornographic film-making...we went through her memories of abusing
the little boys she had baby-sat...this abuse caused pleasure to some
alters and pain to others...Jennifer's system was able to identify
that pedophilic desires belonged to alters whose only pleasant life
experience was that of sexually abusing younger children. They saw
the little boy in the shelter as vulnerable and neglected, and they
felt they cared for him. They thought their sexual abuse of him would
be a caring act, something he would find pleasant compared to what
Jennifer had been through.306
Anthropologists regularly notice that New Guinea adults regularly
switch into alters "It was as if someone had turned a switch in these
people. We thought we knew them, and all of a sudden they were acting
in ways we didn't understand at all"307 and often comment
on the natives' own descriptions of what they call their "hidden self."
It is widely recognized that the "public persona one presents to others
is not only different from, but a deliberate mask of...the divided
self..."308 But because anthropologists are unaware of
the clinical literature on multiple selves they do not call them "alters,"
saying, "In probably all Melanesian cultures...there is not one 'true'
self but rather many selves...[however] English lacks a [word for]
dual or multiple self."309
Since Poole is the only anthropologist who actually interviews children
about their inner life, his descriptions of their formation of alters
during Bimin-Kuskusmin childhood are especially valuable. This tribe
recognizes that people have hidden alternate personalities, called
finiik and khaapkhabuurien, that "temporarily depart from the body
to wander abroad...during dreams, illnesses, trances, and other forms
of mystical experience."310 One five-year-old child, whose
mother constantly masturbated him and whose father beat him, learned
that his twin had been killed by his mother at birth and constructed
an "imaginary unborn sibling" alter "as an adversary, scapegoat, surrogate,
confidant, companion, friend, and twin."311 Like all multiples,
he used this consoling alter to reduce his anxiety that his mother
might kill him too. For instance, one day after he watched his father-who
was a renowned killer and cannibal-beating his mother bloody, he "rushed
shrieking frantically to his mother, and began caressing her abdomen.
Then he began to press his mouth against her navel and to call to
Fuut'tiin, his imaginary unborn sibling."312 When he was
depressed, he took Poole into the forest and introduced him to his
many alters, including a "person-in-the-stone" and "a red bird who
told him secrets," and told him about being possessed by witch alters
that appeared both in dreams and in waking life.313
Switching into alters is the basis for all political and religious
behavior. New Guinea natives recognize this when they say things like
"the khaapkhabuurien may sometimes become detached from the body in
dreams, shadows, reflections, spirit possessions, trances, and illnesses..."314
When one becomes a sorcerer or witch, one enters a trance state and
switches into persecutory alters-called "familiars"-termed the "key
concept" for understanding New Guinea shamanistic religion.315
One of the main purposes of the various "initiation rituals" is to
coordinate individual persecutory and victim alters, substituting
shared group alters. When, for instance, young warriors go out on
headhunting raids they practice switching as a group into killing
alters through "special magic, which places the fighters in a trance-like
state of dissociation in which they became capable of extreme, indiscriminate
violence [which] made them capable of killing even their own wives
and children..."316 They are often amnestic of being in
their alter, and "speak of the aftermath of the fighting as a kind
of re-awakening or recovery of their senses. They claim not even to
have perceived the enemy corpses until the magic was removed and 'our
eyes became clear again, and we saw all the fine men and women we
had killed'."317 Thus they can be friendly to anthropologists
at one moment and vicious warriors or cannibals the next, after switching
into their murderous, devouring alters.
SOCIAL ALTERS AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION IN NEW GUINEA
New Guinea social, religious and political institutions are primarily
constructions by men to defend against maternal engulfment fears through
shared beliefs and rituals. Institutions such as war, headhunting,
cannibalism, witch scares, shamanism, and gift exchange are all made
up of dream objects and projected alters that are experienced as ghosts,
witches, shamans, warriors, enemies and magical leaders. They regularly
speak to dream-figures, both in dreams and afterwards, and regularly
hallucinate ghosts and witches. Because so much of their emotional
life is contained in their alters, they cannot for long stay out of
them-it isn't that they are just "attached to the group" as anthropologists
claim. It's that only while in a group trance can they rejoin their
split-off alters, inheritors of their developmental traumas. So complete
is the domain of their social trance and so total their struggles
with their projected fears that little energy has been available to
produce cultural innovation, so they have remained in the infanticidal
psychoclass long after most groups have evolved beyond it. Male fear
of and hostility toward women in New Guinea has been so overpowering
that routinely battered mothers have had little ability to produce
the "hopeful daughters" who could evolve childhood and psyche.
It is no coincidence that what is arguably the most anti-female culture
area in the world is also one of the least culturally evolved. Sambia
men, for instance, fear that menstrual blood may penetrate into their
urethra during intercourse,318 and are certain everything
bad that happens to them, especially any sickness, is due to contact
with dreaded women's blood. Foods that are either red or hairy are
often avoided due to their resemblance to the vagina.319
The fear of women begins in childhood:
A mother's speech and harangues have a lethal power. A woman's airstream
emitted while speaking is thought to emerge from her blood-filled
caverns. If it is directed-particularly at close range during anger-toward
boys, the boys are believed harmed: simply by inhaling those insults
and air...Likewise, women pollute boys simply by lifting their legs
in proximity to them, emitting vaginal smells that boys can breathe
in: and, for this reason, men keep their noses plugged during coitus,
avoiding incorporation of the vaginal smell they describe as most
harmfully foul...320
The resulting fear of and rage toward women lead to widespread wife-beating,321
the routine torture and execution of women suspected of poisoning
men322 and the high female suicide rates so characteristic
of small-scale societies, often reaching 10-25 percent of adult women's
deaths.323 Most anthropologists report extremely high rates
of "violence toward women, including rape, murder, and attacks upon
their genitals."324 Men's constant fears of semen depletion
by women are behind the belief that boys need to swallow semen during
fellatio to become male.325 Intercourse is often reported
as brief, ending in a minute or two, so they don't get poisoned.326
Marital fidelity is rare, one girl saying to her mother: "All the
men have intercourse with you and your cunt is wide open...I've seen
you dripping their semen about. I've seen them all have intercourse
with you."327 When a woman commits adultery, they are often
severely punished "by having burning sticks thrust into their vaginas,
or they were killed by their husbands."328 Although infidelity
is the rule, the reason is little understood, with anthropologists
resorting to such rationalizations as "frequent sexual intercourse
and sexual partner change is in fact the norm, perhaps because there
is so little else to do in one's spare time."329
Wars are called "the breath of life" and are fought to repair their
fragmented self and to restore potency, mainly through ambush, with
warriors spearing unarmed men, women and children for wholly imagined
grievances that restage their own childhood traumas. Groups decide
to go to war whenever they switch into their persecutory alters, mainly
on occasions of extreme growth panic, such as after initiations, new
tasks such as building new houses or expanding gardens, or during
leadership crises, in the fourth, upheaval leadership stage, when
the leader seems weak. Anything new can trigger a raid, though it
is usually blamed on family disputes or other rationalizations-though
studies of war usually avoid any analysis of motivation, calling it
a "psychological black box," since "nearly every man nurses a grievance
that can precipitate war."330 Estimates of deaths from
war can top 35 percent of adult deaths, the highest rates on record.331
Male homicide rates also reach the highest levels anywhere in the
world.332 Knauft, for instance, found that over 60 percent
of middle-age adult Gebusi males he interviewed had already committed
one or more homicide.333 Distrust of others in many tribes
is widespread, for good reason, since most people have killed or poisoned
someone and are liable to again.334 "Both men and women
are volatile, prone to quarreling and quick to take offense at a suspected
slight or injury."335 Shame the result of being used as
an erotic object in childhood is the central social feeling, "feeling
exposed, naked before others,"336 so that in New Guinea,
as elsewhere, imaginary humiliations are involved in most social violence.
Men cling to their various solidarity arrangements to counter engulfing,
poisonous women, because "Women represent an enemy, the enemy, and
aggression is based on opposition to them. At every stage of the developmental
cycle, men have an internal, united organization as reference; women
and external enemies are the target of concern, they are conceptually
equivalent."337 Recurrent group-psychotic episodes of witchcraft
poison fears are epidemic throughout the area as maternal engulfment
anxieties due to periodic growth panics peak. Retribution for imagined
magical sorcery attacks is "personal, immediate and uncompromisingly
vicious. The assailants spring on their victim from ambush, brutally
overpower him, jab poisons directly into his body, and sometimes twist
or rip out organs,"338 thereby paying back their infanticidal
and incestuous mothers for early traumatic hurts. The "witch" is in
fact simple possession, what would be diagnosed in our society as
an alter "inhabiting" the body along with one's "real" self:
"Real people" were wary of those suspected of witchcraft and desperately
afraid of convicted and confessed witches. They believed that a witch
could kill simply by staring at a person. They believed, too, that
the kum inhabiting the body of a witch could arbitrarily leave and
leap into the body of a bystander forcing him or her to perform the
actions attributed to witches. Some of the persons accused of witchcraft
admitted that they had indeed harboured a kum but that it had left
them...339
When inhabited by a violent persecutory alter, warriors join in a
social trance that acts out their need to kill, regardless of object.
Harrison writes of violence in New Guinea tribes:
Headhunting raids required special magic, which placed the fighters
in a trance-like state of dissociation and relieved them of accountability
for their actions; it was supposed to make them capable of killing
even their own wives and children. ...so long as the magic was in
effect, the capacity to kill was quite indiscriminate and turned the
fighters into a dangerous menace to all other people, including their
own families.340
THE RESTORATION OF DISINTEGRATED SELVES IN CANNIBALISM
That war among New Guinea natives-as among others-is not about anger
but about the restoration of disintegrated selves caused by growth
panic is most obvious in cannibalism, where the penis, tongue and
muscles of the enemy were often eaten "to absorb the victim's strength."341
It is good to have powerful enemies, they say, because they are good
to kill and eat.342 At the same time, all war restages
early traumas, including infanticide as the Sambia myth says, "Numboolyu's
wife, Chenchi, killed her first male child...Because she killed the
first male child, we now fight-war."343 Like contemporary
cults that kill and eat babies,344 training for killing
children in New Guinea begins early. Mead reports: "It was considered
necessary that every Tchambuli should in childhood kill a victim,
and for this purpose live victims, usually infants or young children,
were purchased from other tribes...The small boy's spearhand was held
by his father, and the child, repelled and horrified, was initiated
into the cult of head-hunting."345 Whiting says "most Kwoma
children actually experience a raid in which some acquaintance or
relative is killed and decapitated..."346 Many Fore children
died of kuru, because they were forced to eat the brains of the dead.347
The genitals, too, were choice morsels of cannibals, the victim's
penis being eaten by the women and the vagina by the men; the children
are reported to have had horrible nightmares after witnessing the
feast.348 The perverse ritual was so sexualized that Berndt
reports that during the cannibalistic feast men sometimes copulate
with the dead women's bodies they are about to eat and women pretend
to copulate with the dead men's penis before eating it.349
This is similar to the cannibalism of Jeffrey Dahmer, who also ritualized
the killing and eating of body parts of his homosexual partners, saying
"it made me feel as if they were even more a part of me."350
So powerful is this notion of internalization through cannibalism
that Meigs says among the Hua "it is feared that if a person fails
to eat the corpse of his or her same-sex parent, that person...will
become stunted and weak."351 Obviously, eating the body
of one's parent or of a friend is an extremely primitive form of repairing
emotional loss: "When a good man died our bodies ached with hunger.
We ate him and the pain cooled."352
THE PSYCHOGENIC PUMP AND EVOLUTIONARY STAGES IN NEW GUINEA
The over 700 distinct cultures in New Guinea show a definite if complex
range of evolutionary stages of childrearing, psyche and society.
The evolutionary ladder ranging from early to middle infanticidal
mode-generally runs from the more southern and eastern "semen belt"
of maternal incest and pederasty to the more evolved northern and
western highlands "Big Man" areas. 353 Over the millennia,
the more advanced parents migrated north and west, and those who did
not evolve and who preferred the more violent, pederastic, less organized
southern and eastern areas either remained there or drifted back from
more advanced groups. Childrearing patterns show a definite areal
distribution, centering on how much the mothers cling to their children:
"In eastern highlands societies, where initiation is longest and most
elaborate, boys appear to remain with their mothers and sleep in women's
houses for a longer time than do boys in the western highlands where
initiation is absent...[often in the east] men had little contact
with their sons until the boys were ten years old or older [but] in
some western highlands societies, boys left their mothers earlier
and much more gradually...boys moved to men's houses at about five
years of age..."354 This pattern follows Richman's cross-cultural
findings that "as cultures evolve, the mother holds and makes physical
contact against their infants less and talks more to them."355
Because men in the less evolved areas were so sexually aroused by
watching breast-feeding infants356 and because contact
with children was considered polluting,357 they tended
more either to avoid children, perhaps "only poking at it with a stick,"358
or just use them sexually pederasty being found in "nearly all Lowlands
cultures or groups..."359 This confirms the cross-cultural
finding that fathers tend to be more emotionally involved with children
and use them as objects less as one goes up the evolutionary level
of societies.360 Fathers in southern areas will sometimes
be described by the anthropologist as "bestowing his attentions" on
his infant children, but then when the "attention" is described it
usually turns out to be something like sucking its face or mouth,
not helping it grow: "He will take it up and...mumble its face in
the full-lipped manner which is an acknowledged form of caress...When
the child is already running about and showing its independence, however,
the father's interest seems to wane."361 Fathers in the
more evolved areas, in contrast, care more for their children from
infancy, as in the Trobrianders, whose fathers are described by both
Malinowsky and Weiner as "beloved, benevolent friends" to their children,
"loving and tender" toward them.362 Mothers in the western
highlands are somewhat less afraid of their baby's independence, so
they are allowed to crawl about more often and are in slings and cradles
less. Shame rather than sexuality or fear is the central emotion that
describes the relationship between child and parent,363
evidence of the beginnings of a stable superego.
The cultures of these two areas are described as follows: "The production
of 'men' [through pederasty and training as warriors] is seen to be
the focus of cultural attention among Lowland groups, as is the production
of "bigmen" {leaders of status] in the Highlands."364 The
former are stuck on the evolutionary ladder between foraging and primitive
horticulture, while the latter have allowed enough innovation to develop
better ways of irrigating crops and fencing pigs. Feil describes how
there is an "archetypal social structure, economic pattern and social
environment in which male initiations and sexual hostility flourish...at
the eastern end and are all but absent or attenuated in the western
highlands."365 Since mothers are less engulfing in western
highlands, fears of their pollution and hatred of women are less and
therefore women are less exploited than in the east and south.366
It is also not surprising that "In the eastern highlands, women were
targets in hostile [warfare] encounters; in the western highlands,
they were not.'367 These more evolved western Big Man groups
are able to construct more organized political and economic structures
that are far more hierarchical than in the east and south, since they
can stand more innovation without triggering growth panic, and thus
can accumulate the surpluses of pigs and other exchange goods that
their more complex societies revolve around. To actually trust a Big
Man in economic exchange or in ritual feasts only comes from reducing
the incestuous and pederastic use of children and replacing abandonment
with the beginnings of tolerance for individuation. Warfare is also
more organized and therefore more restricted in the Big Man societies,368
sometimes occurring as inoften as every decade,369 rather
than having constant headhunting, cannibalistic and other raids as
the less evolved groups do.
THE EMOTIONAL MEANING OF CEREMONIAL EXCHANGE
Ceremonial exchange is centered in the more evolved Western highlands
area, and is usually said to be the cause of the more cooperative
western highlands cultural behavior, but why gifts are given with
stingy self-interest in the east but with dramatic pride and extensive
trust in the west is never explained.370 The production
of valuables for exchange and the beginnings of inequalities that
more hierarchical social organization involves depends crucially on
men's increasing ability to form male emotional systems that are effective
in binding and reducing their fears of engulfing women, ultimately
engulfing mothers. If these fears are overwhelming, all men can do
is endlessly try to restore masculinity by raids and initiation tortures,
whereas in more evolved groups "ceremonial exchange rather than killing
is a way of asserting individual prowess."371 If they are
reduced somewhat, men begin to organize defense tactics, including
political and religious structures, marriage alliances outside the
group, ceremonial feasts and complex extra-clan trading connections,
all designed to stress that men can cling together and even innovate
and create art and more advanced agricultural economies without being
eaten up by women. Thus they willingly endure submission to Big Men
to avoid the worse fate of maternal engulfment and disintegration.
Some of the symbolism of ceremonial exchange has been already been
discussed, such as the slaughtering of thousands of pigs in rituals
that restage the infanticide of newborn babies. As mentioned, pigs
are considered "almost children" and are even nursed by women, so
when pigs are slaughtered in an exchange feast people "mourn and weep
for their 'child' when it is killed as though it were a real child."372
The ritual is an attempt to restage the infanticide in a more evolved
way, by killing pigs in feasts not people in war.
The trading of shells under the leadership of Big Men also restages
early traumas. Shells, like all fetishes, are said to give men a way
of "undoing" the "killing of the child."373 When men launch
exchanges with other men, they are said to "resurrect" the newborn
babies who were killed, to "give birth" to them and send them along
paths to keep them from "dying."374 The shells are of course
traditional vaginal symbols, reddened with ochre to indicate poisonous
menstrual blood, but they contain individuating marks that tell the
tragic personal history of the maker:
The more "history" a pearlshell can display the more valuable it becomes...Men
create pearlshells as they do the self...giving pearlshells to matrikin
is to some extent, perhaps, a sacrifice of self, a presentation of
one's own individuality to ensure a continued benevolent maternal
influence...pearlshells allow men the illusion of producing wealth
independently of women, even though, in the last analysis, it is women's
reproduction which stimulates the flow of pearlshells.375
The shells sometimes have barkcloth bases underlying a skirt, said
to be "a child attached to it," and also said to represent the "swallowing
up" of men by women.376 Gift exchanges are said to have
the ability "to restore a man's bodily integrity from female pollution,"377
and men fondle and gaze at their shells for hours, healing their hurts.
Spending much of one's life arranging the "economically senseless"378
circulation of various gifts cleansing poison containers (gift=poison
in German)-has always been a conundrum to anthropologists because
their symbolic basis in early childhood tragedies has been overlooked.
The shells are so powerful a group-fantasy of the restoration of potency
that they are said to be like semen: "the amount of semen and shells
in circulation remains the cause of much male anxiety [and] they have
to be kept hidden, tightly bound and wrapped, in the gloomy recesses
of men's houses, as if their fragile and transient vitality has to
be protected and conserved. This attribute of pearlshells compares
strongly with male fears about semen depletion..."379 Yet
ceremonial exchange systems are so effective in cleansing poisons
and restoring potency that they dominate the political and economic
life of the western highlands.
PSYCHOGENIC ARREST IN NEW GUINEA
Although New Guinea natives have evolved somewhat in the past ten
millennia, they are certainly closer to the foraging and early horticultural
cultures of our ancestors than the "peaceful" (actually pacified)
groups in Africa that are so often used as models for early human
groups. Yet the unanswered question about New Guinea remains: why
have they evolved so little in the past ten millennia? They didn't
get a late start, since agriculture began in New Guinea over 6,000
years ago, earlier than most other areas of the world that have vastly
surpassed them in psychological and cultural evolution.380
Indeed, the first foragers were in New Guinea 40,000 years ago,381
and agriculture is considered to have developed independently there,
so they actually had ecological conditions reasonably conducive to
farming. It is true that they had no cereal crops nor domesticable
large mammals (though they did have pigs and kangaroos),382
but they shared this lack with other Pacific areas such as Hawaii
and other Polynesian islands that evolved far higher levels of civilization
than New Guinea. Diamond asks the crucial question: "Why did New Guineans
continue to use stone tools instead of metal tools, remain non-literate,
and fail to organize themselves into chiefdoms and states?"
Diamond's answers are: (1) too few people (1,000,000), (2) too difficult
terrain (swamps and jungles), and (3) too much warfare (because of
fragmented groups.)383 Yet these are all conditions that
cultural evolution conquers, since innovative natives elsewhere cleared
jungle areas, introduced irrigation and created larger populations
through more advanced political institutions. If New Guinea never
reached the complex chiefdom level of Hawaii, it was because childrearing
did not evolve enough to produce psychoclasses that were innovative
enough to invent new cultural forms.
Diamond a priori rules out any variation in people's capacity for
innovation, saying "all human societies contain inventive people."384
But if, as we have been insisting here, childrearing evolution is
the clue to cultural evolution and innovation, the crux of New Guinea's
problems lie in their inability to evolve good mothers and hopeful
daughters. Certainly their early infanticidal mode parenting and the
resulting depth of their hatred and fear of women confirms this condition
currently. But how have they been able to suppress psychogenesis for
so long and why have they had so few evolving mothers and hopeful
daughters?
Unfortunately, the study of the history of childhood in New Guinea
is totally lacking, since childhood even today is considered so ideal.
Archeology and ethnohistory never mention children,385
so the basic materials needed to answer the question are simply missing.
A few informed guesses is the best one can do at the moment.
To begin with, New Guinea was part of Australia when humans immigrated
into it, so the parents were formed in one of the most arid regions
in the world,386 subject to periodic droughts that must
have had some effect in devolving parenting. This may even have been
severe enough to alter the genetic makeup of parents, thus passing
parenting down both genetically and epigenetically through the generations.
Confirming evidence for the effects of famine on the brain wiring
of fetuses is shown in the finding that babies who had prenatal exposure
to famine during the Dutch Hunger Winter at the end of 1944 had higher
rates of schizoid personality disorders,387 because migration
of brain cells through the neural subplate was disrupted, causing
the faulty connections that are usually found in schizophrenics.388
Secondly, the small size of island New Guinea may have inhibited the
psychogenic pump effect, limiting migration enough so that early infanticidal
mothering swamped the emergence of innovating mothers and hopeful
daughters (even biologists sometimes call small islands "evolutionary
traps.") And thirdly, the least evolved parenting in New Guinea is
to the south, in small pederastic societies, while the most evolved
is in the north, where the Trobrianders even managed to approach the
level of a chiefdom. Anthropologists are puzzled as to "why the Trobriand
Islanders have chiefs. They have neither exceptional population density
nor agricultural productivity."389 What is relevant to
this question is that while most of New Guinea came from the Australian
continent and speak Non-Austronesian languages, the Trobrianders and
some other nearby groups came later mainly from Tiawan via other islands
and speak Austronesian languages. Taiwan was far more advanced culturally-and
one can assume also in parenting-when people migrated from there to
New Guinea four thousand years ago, having grain crops, true weaving,
metals, the bow and arrow and even water buffaloes by 4000 B.C.390
Presumably their descendants began with a head start in childrearing
compared to the natives further south of them. In nearby Austronesian-speaking
Vanatinai, which was a stopover for those on their way to New Guinea,
women are not feared and violence against women is rare, indicating
more evolved childrearing than most of New Guinea.391
Yet these evolutionary speculations rest mainly on inferences that
have yet to generate real archeological field studies, so to answer
questions of relative rates of evolution of childhood and culture
we must turn to the only area of the world in which the history of
childhood has been studied: Europe. The evidence which I have found
over the past four decades for the evolution of childhood and culture
in Europe from its earliest days until today is contained in the final
four chapters of this book.
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