Crime and Custom in Savage Society - Bronisław Malinowski (co można czytać .txt) 📖
Crime and custom in savage society to rozprawa naukowa autorstwa Bronisława Malinowskiego. Została napisana po wyprawie badacza na Wyspy Triobrandzkie.
Uchodzi za podstawowe dzieło dotyczące antropologii prawa — Malinowski opisuje mechanizmy warunkujące prawo wśród społeczeństw pierwotnych oraz różne podejścia wśród osób nim objętych. Krytykuje funkcjonujące do tej pory w antropologii przekonania, bazujące na interpretacjach odwołujących się do cywilizacji Zachodu i próbach kontrastowania społeczeństw pierwotnych jako wprowadzających prawo oparte na strachu i innych zachowaniach insynktownych. Rozprawa daje nowe spojrzenie na system norm w różnych społeczeństwach, a Malinowski sprzeciwia się w niej badań nieuwzględniającym kontekstu.
Bronisław Malinowski był polskim antropologiem i socjologiem publikującym w pierwszej połowie XIX wieku. Prowadził badania społeczeństw pierwotnych w różnych zakątkach świata.
- Autor: Bronisław Malinowski
- Epoka: Współczesność
- Rodzaj: Epika
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This brings us to the subject of marriage, extremely important for the understanding of native law. Marriage establishes not merely a bond between husband and wife, but it also imposes a standing relation of mutuality between the man and the wife’s family, especially her brother. A woman and her brother are bound to each other by characteristic and highly important ties of kinship. In a Trobriand family a female must always remain under the special guardianship of one man — one of her brothers, or, if she has none, her nearest maternal kinsman. She has to obey him and to fulfil a number of duties, while he looks after her welfare and provides for her economically even after she is married.
The brother becomes the natural warden of her children, who therefore have to regard him and not their father as the legal head of the family. He in turn has to look after them, and to supply the household with a considerable proportion of its food. This is the more burdensome since marriage being patrilocal, the girl has moved away to her husband’s community, so that every time at harvest there is a general economic chassi-croisi all over the district.
After the crops are taken out, the yams are classified and the pick of the crop from each garden is pat into a conical heap. The main heap in each garden plot is always for the sister’s household. The sole purpose of all the skill and labour devoted to this display of food is the satisfaction of the gardener’s ambition. The whole community, nay, the whole district, will see the garden produce, comment upon it, criticize, or praise. A big heap proclaims, in the words of my informant: „Look what I have done for my sister and her family. I am a good gardener and my nearest relatives, my sister and her children, will never suffer for want of food.” After a few days the heap is dismantled, the yams carried in baskets to the sister’s village, where they are put up into exactly the same shape in front of the yam-house of the sister’s husband; there again the members of the community will see the heap and admire it. This whole ceremonial side of the transaction has a binding force which we know already. The display, the comparisons, the public assessment impose a definite psychological constraint upon the giver — they satisfy and reward him, when successful work enables him to give a generous gift, and they penalize and humiliate him for inefficiency, stinginess, or bad luck.
Besides ambition, reciprocity prevails in this transaction as everywhere else; at times, indeed, it steps in almost upon the heels of an act of fulfilment. First of all the husband has to repay by definite periodical gifts every annual harvest contribution. Later on, when the children grow up, they will come directly under the authority of their maternal uncle; the boys will have to help him, to assist him in everything, to contribute a definite quota to all the payments he has to make. His sister’s daughters do but little for him directly, but indirectly, in a matrilineal society, they provide him with his heirs and descendants of two generations below.
Thus placing the harvest offerings within their sociological context, and taking a long view of the relationship, we see that every one of its transactions is justified as a link in the chain of mutualities. Yet taking it isolated, torn out of its setting, each transaction appears nonsensical, intolerably burdensome and sociologically meaningless, also no doubt ’communistic’! What could be more economically absurd than this oblique distribution of garden produce, where every man works for his sister and has to rely in turn on his wife’s brother, where more time and energy is apparently wasted on display, on show, on the shifting of the goods, than on real work? Yet a closer analysis shows that some of these apparently unnecessary actions are powerful economic incentives, that others supply the legal binding force, while others, again, are the direct result of native kinship ideas. It is also clear that we can understand the legal aspect of such relations only if we look upon them integrally without over-emphasizing any one link in the chain of reciprocal duties.
In the foregoing we have seen a series of pictures from native life, illustrating the legal aspect of the marriage relationship, of co-operation in a fishing team, of food barter between inland and coastal villages, of certain ceremonial duties of mourning. These examples were adduced with some detail, in order to bring out clearly the concrete working of what appears to me to be the real mechanism of law, social and psychological constraint, the actual forces, motives, and reasons which make men keep to their obligations. If space permitted it would be easy to bring these isolated instances into a coherent picture and to show that in all social relations and in all the various domains of tribal life, exactly the same legal mechanism can be traced, that it places the binding obligations in a special category and sets them apart from other types of customary rules. A rapid though comprehensive survey will have to suffice.
To take the economic transactions first: barter of goods and services is carried on mostly within a standing partnership, or is associated with definite social ties or coupled with a mutuality in non-economic matters. Most if not all economic acts are found to belong to some chain of reciprocal gifts and countergifts, which in the long run balance, benefiting both sides equally.
I have already given an account of the economic conditions in N. W. Melanesia, in The Primitive Economics of the Trobriand Islanders („Economic Journal”, 1921) and in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1923. Chapter vi of that volume deals with matters here discussed, i. e. the forms of economic exchange. My ideas about primitive law were not mature at that time, and the facts are presented there without any reference to the present argument — their testimony only the more telling because of that. When, however, I describe a category of offerings as ’Pure Gifts’ and place under this heading the gifts of husband to wife and of father to children, I am obviously committing a mistake. I have fallen then, in fact, into the error exposed above, of tearing the act out of its context, of not taking a sufficiently long view of the chain of transactions. In the same paragraph I have supplied, however, an implicit rectification of my mistake in stating that „a gift given by the father to his son is said [by the natives] to be a repayment for the man’s relationship to the mother” (p. 179). I have also pointed out there that the ’free gifts’ to the wife are also based on the same idea. But the really correct account of the conditions — correct both from the legal and from the economic point of view — would have been to embrace the whole system of gifts, duties, and mutual benefits exchanged between the husband on one hand, wife, children, and wife’s brother on the other. It would be found then in native ideas that the system is based on a very complex give and take, and that in the long run the mutual services balance.7
The real reason why all these economic obligations are normally kept, and kept very scrupulously, is that failure to comply places a man in an intolerable position, while slackness in fulfilment covers him with opprobrium. The man who would persistently disobey the rulings of law in his economic dealings would soon find himself outside the social and economic order — and he is perfectly well aware of it. Test cases are supplied nowadays, when a number of natives through laziness, eccentricity, or a non-conforming spirit of enterprise, have chosen to ignore the obligations of their status and have become automatically outcasts and hangers-on to some white man or other.
The honourable citizen is bound to carry out his duties, though his submission is not due to any instinct or intuitive impulse or mysterious ’group-sentiment’, but to the detailed and elaborate working of a system, in which every act has its own place and must be performed without fail. Though no native, however intelligent, can formulate this state of affairs in a general abstract manner, or present it as a sociological theory, yet every one is well aware of its existence and in each concrete case he can foresee the consequences.
In magical and religious ceremonies almost every act, besides its primary purposes and effects, is also regarded as an obligation between groups and individuals, and here also there comes sooner or later an equivalent repayment or counter-service, stipulated by custom. Magic in its most important forms is a public institution in which the communal magician, who as a rule holds his office by inheritance, has to officiate on behalf of the whole group. Such is the case in the magic of gardens, fishing, war, weather, and canoe-building. As necessity arises, at the proper season, or in certain circumstances he is under an obligation to perform his magic, to keep the taboos, and at times also to control the whole enterprise. For this he is repaid by small offerings, immediately given, and often incorporated into the ritual proceedings. But the real reward lies in the prestige, power, and privileges which his position confers upon him.8 In cases of minor or occasional magic, such as love charms, curative rites, sorcery, magic of toothache and of pig-welfare, when it is performed on behalf of another, it has to be paid for substantially and the relation between client and professional is based on a contract defined by custom. From the point of view of our present argument, we have to register the fact that all the acts of communal magic are obligatory upon the performer, and that the obligation to carry them out goes with the status of communal magician, which is hereditary in most cases and always is a position of power and privilege. A man may relinquish his position and hand it over to the next in succession, but once he accepts it, he has to carry on the work incumbent, and the community has to give him in return all his dues.
As to the acts which usually would be regarded as religious rather than magical — ceremonies at birth or marriage, rites of death and mourning, the worship of ghosts, spirits, or mythical personages — they also have a legal side clearly exemplified in the case of mortuary performances, described above. Every important act of a religious nature is conceived as a moral obligation towards the object, the ghost, spirit, or power worshipped; it also satisfies some emotional craving of the performer; but besides all this it has also as a matter of fact its
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