Social Roles

The hypotheses suggested in the preceding chapter must be tested and developed by reference to case studies of human cultures. But which ones shall we choose? The comparative method yields data both from subcultures within a given cultural area and from distinct cultural wholes. As an example of the former we might compare Virginians with Kansans; as an example of the latter, Hopi Indians with the Ba Thonga of East Africa. Though both methods are feasible, the latter will serve our purpose better.

Data already in hand from interviews, questionnaires, clinical records, and historical and sociological descriptions, indicate gross differences in ego and in attitudes in different ethnic and religious groups within the rather uniform culture area of the United States; but these studies have two great limitations in relation to our present problem:

(1) They cannot at present accurately trace the diffusion of attitude from one group to another within the larger culture. At any given time the attitudes appearing in a subcultural group may be expressions of its own situation or expressions infiltrating from another subcultural area. Historical methods of a quantitative character would have to be devised to meet this difficulty.

(2) They cannot adequately take account of cultural lag. Ego formations or ego attitudes discovered in a given context of cultural events may reflect a situation which existed some time before but has ceased to exist; the persisting expressions of lag may be either stable anachronisms, or moribund vestiges which are doomed to disappear in time. Their true relation to the subcultural situation as it is at present is indeed obscure.

Many ethnological field studies, however, have found it possible to obviate these difficulties. Isolated groups, their culture stable and practically intact, have been described in sufficient number to give at least a conception of the extraordinary diversity of ego patterns and of culturally standardized ways of regarding the self. We shall be interested chiefly in the degree of emphasis given to the experience of awareness of self, and in the self-valuing and disvaluing attitudes. We shall, then, use preliterate peoples as an empirical test of our system of hypotheses.

A suitable example indicating the relation of the self-maintenance mores to personality is found in the culture of the Manus of New Guinea. The Manus tribe consists of about two thousand people. They live as merchants; the life of the group is centered in the processes of trade. They deal in futures; a man calculates that six months hence he will have received payments with he will meet an obligation due at that time. Not only must he be competent in handling boats and overseeing production, he must be shrewd and remorseless, must allow no one to get the better of him. The physical wear and tear of fulfilling his business responsibilities resembles that experienced by an active member of the New York Stock Exchange. The Manus are as aggressive and as hard in their competitive life as any business leader in our own society.

This tribe is deliberately chosen as an extreme example of what can be "predicted" from knowledge of the self-maintenance mores, from the kind of knowledge just cited. We may predict that marriage will be a matter of cold calculation, that love will mean little; that children will be reared without affection; that because affection is lacking in sexual and maternal relationships, the people will be extreme prudes. We may predict that arts will be practical, not aimed at esthetic experience; that their politics will be unadulterated power politics, and their religion a straightforward barter with the unseen.

These "predictions" are right on every count. According to Mead, there is no religion except for mediumistic transactions that seek the aid of the dead in health and business affairs. There is little folklore; no poetry or figures of speech mar the practical-minded orientation of the Manus. The marriage institution shows the trend even more severely. The boy's family and the girl's have long since bickered over their children's futures; in early childhood a match, a contract has been made. The girl grows up in the knowledge that marriage.