Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/308

298 the husband and the wife are put under treatment, often appear in South America. Among the Macusis of Guiana, who may stand as the example, the father after the birth of the child hangs up his hammock beside the mother's, and keeps with her the weeks of seclusion. During this time, neither husband nor wife do any work; he may not bathe nor take his weapons in hand; both may only quench their thirst with lukewarm water, and eat cassava-porridge; they are even forbidden to scratch themselves with their nails, a bit of rib of palm-leaf being hung up to use instead. The transgression of these ordinances would cause death or lifelong sickness to the child. All this agrees perfectly with the couvade being sympathetic magic, but there is no transfer of parentage from the mother to the father. Still more adverse to Bachofen's notion, is the fact that these Macusis, so far from reckoning the parentage as having been transferred to the father by the couvade, are actually among the tribes who do not reckon kinship on the father's side, the child belonging to the mother's clan. So among the Arawacs, though the father performs the couvade, this does not interfere with the rule that kinship goes by the mother. Nor is there much in these practices which can be construed as a pretence of maternity made by the father. What he does is to go through a dietetic course for the sympathetic benefit of the child, and his doing so may naturally become, as is said to be the case among the Mundrucus, a legal symbol, an act of recognition on his part that he is the father. To understand the whole circumstances, under which the couvade is practised in the world, it is evident that the original magical explanation, sound as it seems to be in itself, is incomplete, and must be supplemented by other reasons to account for the stress it often lays on the paternal, rather than the maternal relation. It is not impossible that in such cases it may have come to serve in something like the way suggested by Bachofen, as a symbol belonging to the rule of male kinship.