Piotr wrote to Mark's post>
> It was Bronislaw Malinowski who reported, in his famous study of
the sexual life of the Trobriand islanders (The Sexual Life of
Savages), that -- keenly as the Trobrianders were interested in
lovemaking -- they didn't understand the connection between having
sex and having babies. I like to think that the Trobrianders'
confessions to Malinowski were not quite in earnest, and that they
had a jolly good laugh at the scholar's credulity behind his back.
It is interesting that early anthropologists made the same claim that
Aboriginal peoples did not understand the connection between sex,
reproduction and paternity, and yet when one studies Aboriginal
kinship systems one sees that this is not the case. Rather it is the
Victorian anthrolopogists racist attitudes of superiority that are
showing.
Regards
John