Page:The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia.djvu/40

Rh But the erotic phase, although the most important, is only one among many in which the sexes meet and enter into relations with each other. It cannot be studied outside its proper context, without, that is, being linked up with the legal status of man and woman; with their domestic relations; and with the distribution of their economic functions. Courtship, love, and mating in a given society are influenced in every detail by the way in which the sexes face one another in public and in private, by their position in tribal law and custom, by the manner in which they participate in games, and amusements, by the share each takes in ordinary daily toil.

The story of a people's love-making necessarily has to begin with an account of youthful and infantile associations, and it leads inevitably forward to the later stage of permanent union and marriage. Nor can the narrative break off at this point, since science cannot claim the privilege of fiction. The way in which men and women arrange their common life and that of their children reacts upon their love-making, and the one stage cannot be properly understood without a knowledge of the other.

This book deals with sexual relations among the natives of the Trobriand Islands, a coral archipelago lying to the north-east of New Guinea. These natives belong to the Papuo-Melanesian race, and in their physical appearance, mental equipment, and social organization combine a majority of Oceanic characteristics with certain features of the more backward Papuan population from the mainland of New Guinea.

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