ANTROPOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS ON SEXUALITY OF MEN AND WOMEN
If the meaning of a sexual act does vary in different cultures, a recent report from the New Guinea highlands demonstrates that the “same” physical act can have a different meaning and lead to different consequences within one cultural system. I refer to Berndt’s analysis of adultery among New Guinea mountain people. Berndt finds three crucial contexts for adultery: (1) within the lineage, (2) outside the village but within the district, and (3) outside the district. If the partner in adultery were a covillager, the affair would have only minor repercussions if discovered; in fact Berndt found intravillage adultery was often condoned. However, when persons from different villages were engaged in adulterous activity (context 2), the episode could lead to fighting, and in cases in which district boundaries are crossed (context 3), outright warfare could ensue.
These New Guinea people have a different tolerance for such activity, depending on these crucial contexts. Berndt finds that interdistrict adultery is generally viewed in the idiom of warfare, that is, as an act of one political unit asserting its supremacy over another. Although stealing or enticing a woman away for sexual purposes is viewed as a “legitimate” activity, it risks the retaliatory reprisal of an entire political unit, since many men in addition to the husband will feel that they have been wronged and that their sexual prowess has been questioned. When faced with adultery (or even what in our terms might better be called “forced sex,” but for which the New Guinea men nevertheless held the female responsible), men take these contextual issues into account, determining whether or not they themselves personally have been injured and assessing just what kind of an injury they have suffered.
Likewise, “rape” as a universal behavioral concept must be put into context. Gladwin and Sarason, for example, described copulation with a sleeping woman on Truk, but ethnographic evidence did not ascertain whether it was rape. A Mehinaku male might seize the wrist of a female and demand sex (Gregor), which poses the question of boundary between forceful coercion and rape. Murphy uncovered a certain case of rape when Mundurucu men gang raped a recalcitrant female who had failed to submit to male authority. Gregor reports a Mehinaku female who had been bold enough to enter a man’s house suffered a similar fate.
If Marshall is correct in stating that “rape does not carry the serious social connotation on Mangaia that it does in European society”, then what point is there to hypothesizing about rape in the Polynesian case at all? In answer to this question I refer to Carroll’s observation that the natives of the Polynesian island of Nukuoro themselves hypothesize about rape. To Nukuoro rape is important conceptually, because it marks the logical obverse of the inherent balance in sexual relationships. Additionally, rape is intrinsically unsatisfying from the male Nukuoroan point of view, since the persuasive/attractive dimension would be totally lost.
The domination of male over female symbolized by and enacted through rape in Western culture may be joined to other forms of political action elsewhere in the world. In certain South African groups a man can face vindictive charges of rape after sex with consent of the woman, should he renege on his promise to give her a gift (Laubscher). Hockings found a comparable political definition in India: “From a male Toda point of view a Toda girl who has given herself to a Badaga has probably been raped by him, and the offender is lucky if he escapes a serious beating at the hands of the woman’s husband or husbands”.
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