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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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the object of maternal solicitude is intentionally adopted offspring. That feature, universal in the animal kingdom, is particularly marked in the quadrumana, which frequently steal one another's offspring, and are invariably eager to adopt any young.
That definite character of maternal behaviour is one which it is important to bear in mind in regard to the human manifestations of maternal functions. It may at once be definitely stated that whatever is instinctive in human maternal behaviour, its relation to natural kinship is not. The passionate sentiments of the human mother for her own offspring, her own son, owe that association with true kinship wholly to conceptual factors, and not to any instinctive reaction.
There is in several parts of the world, more especially in Polynesia and Micronesia, in Celebes, Torres Straits, and among the Dayaks, but also in some parts of India, Africa, and South America an extraordinary prevalence of the strange practice of adoption or fosterage without any apparent reason or cause except the force of traditional custom. In Nukohiva, for example, it is the first care of a woman when she becomes pregnant to make arrangements for another woman to adopt her child. Such is the generality of the custom in some regions that it is impossible to ascertain the true relation of mother and offspring from the social relation and to ascertain it by enquiry. In some districts of Australia and Melanesia the communal suckling of children by various mothers is carried out as a ritual observance[1].
There is no obvious explanation, in existing social conditions, for those customs. It has been suggested that they have originated in a desire to emphasise the impersonal character of motherhood in primitive groups, and that they are, like many of our educative customs which are intended to cultivate opposite family sentiments, designed to cultivate the communal character of the relation and to obliterate the fact of individual kinship as represented by the fact of motherhood. It is impossible to prove that such an explanation is correct; but it is equally difficult to suggest any other. If such customs are survivals of usages arising from the intention suggested, they are entirely in accordance with the actual undifferentiated operation of maternal behaviour in primitive societies, as also in animal groups, and with the fact that individual motherhood is not denoted by the terms of "kinship" used.
As regards the sentiments of males in the lower cultures towards the children, observation bears uniform testimony to the marked
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 368. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/50&oldid=- (Version vom 7.6.2022)
- ↑ The Mothers, vol. II, p. 598-605.
