Bronislaw Malinowski spent the years 1914 - 1920 intermittently studying the culture of the Trobriand Islands, raised coral islands lying 120 miles to the east of the southern tip of Papua New Guinea. It is largely through his writings about the practice of katuyausi and related topics that the islands became known as the Love Islands. Although, among the Trobriand Islanders, chastity was an unknown concept, it was likely that the practice of katuyausi has as much to do with refreshing the gene pool as it does with free love, for the villages were of a fairly small size, averaging a mere 80 inhabitants. In addition villages were quite isolated from each other. Due to coral reefs, sailing between islands required considerable skill and was at the mercy of the vagaries of maritime weather not to mention magic mists conjured up by those sailors who had the power to do so.
Of course it could have been the premise that the Trobriand Islanders held that making love was supposed to bring fertility to the crops. That alone should have been enough encouragement for the young to be generous with their favours as if the young ever needed any encouragement at all. The girls would "live in promiscuous free-love, which gradually develops into more permanent attachments, one of which ends in marriage" (53). But before this is reached, unmarried girls are openly supposed to be quite free and to do what they like, and there are even ceremonial arrangements by which the girls of a village repair in a body to another place. Strangely enough, Trobriand women held the idea that pregnancy was caused by a spirit that visited their head and migrated to the womb. One of their traditions was that if a boy was sleeping with a girl friend and slept in he may awake to find himself a husband. Consequently boys on the owl prowl learned to be early risers.
In support of the gene pool thesis is their cultural practice of protecting the married women of the village when the men had gone on an overseas canoe expedition. The village would be guarded by men of the village who were too old to take part in the sailing expedition. When boys and men from neighbouring villages came to visit their friends, they would be banished until the sailors returned. Outside fires would be extinguished as a sign to strangers to be careful not to pass even through the outskirts of the village after sunset.
Go To Page: 1 2
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Larry Low's Folklore topic, please visit the Discussions page.