﹃語用論研究﹄ 第 19 号（2017 年）pp. 40-53© 2017 年 日本語用論学会[Special Contribution]

Acquiring Kilivila Pragmatics — the Role of the Children’s(Play-)Groups in the first 7 Years of their Lives on the
Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea
Gunter Senft
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Trobriand children are breastfed until they can walk; then they are abruptly weaned and the parents dramatically reduce the pervasive loving care that their children experienced before. The
children have to find a place within the children’s groups in their villages. They learn to behave
according to their community’s rules and regulations which find their expression in forms of verbal and non-verbal behavior. They acquire their culture specific pragmatics under the control ofolder members of their groups. The children’s “small republic” is the primary institution of verbal and cultural socialization. Attempts of parental education are confined to a minimum.

Keywords: Trobriand Islanders, Papua New Guinea, acquisition of pragmatics, children’s socialization, (play-)groups, biga sopa

1.

1Introduction

This paper provides a survey of how children on the Trobriand Islands acquire thepragmatic rules and regulations that are constitutive for their culture-specific forms of
verbal and non-verbal interaction. The article is based on observations and other datacollected in interviews and during the general documentation projects of the Trobriand
Islanders’ language and culture conducted in 16 longer and shorter fieldtrips between
the years 1982 and 2012. The Trobriand Islands are located within the Milne Bay
Province of Papua New Guinea. The Trobrianders belong to the ethnical group “Northern Massim”, they are a matrilineal society with patrilocal residence. Their language
Kilivila is a Western Melanesian Oceanic language belonging to the Papuan Tip Cluster(Senft 1986).
After a brief description of the first 18 to 20 months in the life of new-born children which end with the traumatic experience of abruptly weaning as soon as the child1

I express my great gratitude to the people of the Trobriand Islands, and above all my hosts, theinhabitants of Tauwema village on Kaile’una Island, and all my consultants for their friendship andpatient cooperation. Without their help, none of my work on the Kilivila language and the Trobriand
culture would have been possible.

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can walk, I report on how the children find their place and position within the children’s(play-)groups of their village. I elaborate on how the children in these groups graduallytake over specific roles and internalize them; in these groups they also learn that they
have to obey certain norms — norms which affect, for example, the understanding ofgender roles and sex differences. These norms are implicit rules that govern social life
and interaction within their community.
Between the age of about one and a half years or so and seven years the children
also learn to control their emotions in order to behave according to the rules that are
valid for the Trobrianders’ community. During this time of their life they acquire a relatively strict form of self-discipline, which is necessary to keep the balance between theindividuals within their open and very public society.
This implies that they also have to learn to laugh about themselves, even in situations when they feel deeply insulted. During this acquisition process the pragmaticconcept of the “biga sopa” — the joking language, the language which is not vouchedfor (see Senft 2010: 149ff) — plays the most important role for the overall socialization
process on the Trobriands. By gradually acquiring the basic concepts and the rules andnorms of language use that is manifest in the biga sopa concept, children realize more
and more that they can behave properly and adequately with respect to all situations
they experience not only in their everyday life, but also in the ritualized forms of life
within their community. This provides them with an important emotional security andwith a general aplomb.
The practicing of the forms of verbal and non-verbal behavior that conform to the
Trobrianders’ social norms takes place while playing with other children; it is controlled
by older members of these children’s groups. Thus, it is the children’s “small republic”(Malinowski 1929: 44f.) which provides the most important framework for their socialization into their culture. The attempts of parental education are also indispensable inthis socialization process, however they are confined to a minimum.

2. The first months in a child’s lifetime until it is weaned
During the first 13 to 20 months of their life, children receive the utmost loving
care and attention imaginable — not only from their parents, but also from all their relatives. The few weeks-old sucklings spend most of the day on their mothers’ lap or in
their arms. As soon as the child starts to whimper, its mother gives the baby the breastand nurses it. The fathers tenderly deal with their babies very often, too; they cradle
them in their arms, play with them and sing songs for them. As soon as the babies canhold their head by themselves, they are carried around by their elder siblings, cousins
and other children of the neighborhood.
Both adults and older children are very much interested in the baby’s learning totalk. After having established eye-contact, the Trobriand Islanders interact with theirbabies using elements of “baby talk” like rhythmical elements of talking, imitations of42

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the baby’s vocalizations, raising the pitch, grimacing with the mouth, smiling, laughing
and producing the so-called “greeting face” by raising the eyebrows and opening themouth. These forms of interactional behavior have strong bonding functions (see EiblEibesfeldt 1989: 207; 234). However, despite the many contacts with other adults andchildren, a Trobriand infant is not brought up collectively. The mother is the most important and significant person for the child and its development.
When the toddlers can walk, they are abruptly weaned and the parents — especiallythe mothers — dramatically reduce the amount of pervasive care and attention that theirchildren experienced before this traumatic moment in their lives. For the children thetime of weaning is characterized by all kinds of bitter; grievous frustrations. Up till thispoint of their lives, by their faintest whimper children were comforted by their mothers’
offering them their breasts, but now — at a moment’s notice — all access to this sourceof consolation and comfort is denied to them. Weaned children often cry out their pain,
their frustration and their fury for days without being comforted whatsoever. To compensate for this deficit in their experience of intimate social bonding, the children haveto find a place within the children’s groups — usually the one of the village sector inwhich their family lives. For the next five years the children’s (play-)group will be thesocial institution that is primarily responsible for their socialization process. The groupwill become “their own little community” (Malinowski 1927: 45).

3. The children’s socialization into the Trobriand community
Children with older siblings relatively easily find access to and are soon accepted
as members of such a children’s group, if their elder brothers or sisters are already established group-members. They do not always participate in the games played by theolder children, but they find a new emotional foothold in this group, and with increasing
age they also get recognized as a group member by the older children. The groups
have a heterogeneous age structure. We can differentiate between young children that
seek access to the groups, children whose position within the group is established as afully-fledged group member and older group leaders. Mary Martini (2009: 158f.) madesimilar observations with respect to Marquesan children and their playgroups. She observed that the Polynesian children… occupy one of four roles or positions in this group …
1. the peripheral toddler position …
2. the initiate member position …
3. the quiet leader position …
4. the noisy leader position …
Peripheral toddlers … join the group at about two years of age … under thewing of a three- or four-year old sibling … Initiate members: children remain
peripheral to the group until they can keep up with the play … Children move

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on to leadership roles when (a) they master emotional self-control …; (b) theoldest children in the group leave to attend school, creating a need and openings
for leaders; and (c) their own toddler siblings join the group. Children become
either “quiet” or “noisy” leaders, dependent on their personalities …
Martini (2009: 165) summarizes these four roles and the relationship and interaction between the children occupying them as follows:
Noisy leaders introduce activities, direct group play, and keep players on track.
Quiet leaders invent new play, monitor the bossiness of noisy leaders, and carefor peripheral toddlers. Initiate members follow the leaders and support eachother… They also care for peripheral toddlers and generally hold the group together from the inside. Peripheral toddlers are interested observers. Their incompetence highlights the skill of the older children. Older children gain status
by helping and teaching dependent toddlers.
Like the Marquesan children, the Trobriand children take over specific roles and responsibilities within their groups when they gradually grow into these positions. However,
we could not observe a distinction between the roles of noisy and quiet leaders in thechildren’s groups of Tauwema. Whether one of the group leading children took over
one of these roles was dependent on his or her form of the day and current mood.
During this period of the children’s lives, “the child’s dominant activity [is] play”(Whiting and Whiting 1975: 48). The games played can be differentiated into
• dance, song and rhythmic games,• games with objects and materials,• role-playing games,• construction games,• fighting and competition games, and• hunting games (see also Sbrzesny 1976).
These games have three main functions:
1. testing and developing motor skills and physical abilities;
2. getting acquainted and familiar with various materials; and3. preparing children for their future roles in their social world.
The first two functions are rather basic and more or less self-evident. It goes without
saying that they are important for the life of every child: they enable the child to meet
its environment with its manifold phenomena without fear and reservation and to act inthis environment in a way that is adequate with respect to its specific conditions. Dueto space constraints, and given the importance and the complexity of the third functionof play and its importance for our topic, I will only discuss the third function in moredetail.

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“Play among humans inevitably reflects the culture in which it occurs” (Bruner etal. 1976: 21). In play children take over specific roles which they gradually internalize
and thus secure the continuance of norms that are accessible by appearance alone. In
the various children’s (play-)groups the children learn that they have to follow certain
norms which — as implicit social rules — govern social life and interaction within theircommunity. Norms which affect the understanding of gender roles and sex differencesor the social affiliation to a specific village sector are directly experienced by children
when they are playing together. However, norms that define the weltanschauung of an
ethnical group — like the one which is valid for the Trobriand Islanders — and that regulate which forms of behavior are acceptable and which are inacceptable and taboo within this community can only be learned in the course of the children’s guided socialization into the adult society and by their experiencing of reactions to their behavior not
only by their peers within their children’s groups but also by their parents and other
adults within their village community. Thus, although the children’s groups certainly
play the most important role in the everyday socialization of children after the age oftwo, the parents who — with their way of living provide the example for their childrenof how to live their lives as socially estimated and acknowledged Trobriand adults — arealso indispensable in the socialization process of their children.
In what follows I will briefly zoom in on the social roles which are conveyed andtransmitted to the children in the various forms of gender and sex-specific role-play.
Then I describe how norms that regulate life on the Trobriands are passed on and how
they are controlled. I first look at how a child is socialized with respect to its emotional
behavior and then present how it learns to deal with possession and with forms of behavior that control and regulate acts of requesting, giving and taking.
3.1.

Gender and sex-specific role play
In role-playing games girls take over the activities of adult women: they play
scraping doba-(banana)-leaves for making grass-skirts, they re-enact the gathering andthe preparation of food, and they mother their younger siblings or toddlers of relatives
or neighbors.
In many of their games boys imitate the activities which are reserved for men in
the adult Trobriand society, like for example handling bush-knives, paddling canoes, doing specific kinds of work in the gardens. Neither the role-games played by girls nor
the ones played by boys are initiated by adults.
Obviously the Trobriand Islanders’ division of roles and work which is mirrored in
the children’s play has proven reasonable and therefore is not questioned at all — notleast because of the fact that in this matrilineal society women, their work and their social status are respected in exactly the same way as men.
The Trobrianders — like any other ethnical group — have been developing their culture-specific construction of their social reality which regulates their lives. This construction encompasses much more than just gender roles. In what follows I discuss

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how children learn and internalize some of the highly important aspects of sociality
which have been governing the Trobrianders’ life for generations and which still secure
the social cohesion of their communities.
3.2. Tradition and control of norms with respect to the expression of emotions
When a child is especially fond of another child, it can express its affection in a
number of ways. Children often share special goodies with siblings or with goodfriends, offering a banana, or a piece of coconut or papaya or the like with the prompt:“Kukwam!” — Eat! Human ethologists like Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt have pointed out thatoffering and sharing food is a friendly gesture in contact situation; it has a bonding
function helping to establish and continue good relationships with others (Senft 2014:97).
Another sign of sympathy and friendship is presenting another child with a beautiful and fragrant blossom or a wreath of flowers. This present is not accompanied byverbose explanations or ceremonial gestures, either. The child who makes the present
offers his or her friend the wreath of flowers in his extended hand, just stating: “M
bweta!” — Your wreath of flowers!
Familiarity with someone can also be expressed by directly requesting somethingfrom a friend. In such a case the requester just states “Agu bweta!” — My wreath offlowers! — pointing at the decoration which is worn by the other child. To refute thisrequest would be severely impolite and could result in the end of the mutual friendship.
Other forms of expressing sympathy like embracing, kissing or caressing someone
can only be observed in interactions of older children with sucklings; in the contact situation with peers within the playgroups these forms of friendly behavior do not occur.
Possibilities for older children to get in bodily contact with each other can arise during
body care situations, like for example during mutual lousing or during rubbing ones
hair or ones skin with desiccated coconut, the fat of which helps preventing the skin to
dry out in the sun and saltwater, or during bathing when especially the girls wash eachother’s backs.
This norm to express affection to someone else mainly with gifts and — rather
rarely — with severely restricted bodily contacts — which is the valid norm on the Trobriand Islands — is learned by the children within their children’s group. The older
children pass on this norm to the younger ones just by their behavior. The behavior of
adults with respect to the exchange of tender caresses in public is certainly of high importance for this early acquired reluctance in children to have bodily contacts with eachother. In public life the interaction between husband and wife is rather controlled aswell. Married couples do not exchange any signs of tenderness like holding hands,
kissing in public, or embracing each other, not even after some time of having beenparted from one another. The relationship between a wife and her husband seems to berather detached and sometimes even looks like avoidance behavior, at least in our eyes.
We can only speculate about why the expression of tender feelings is so severely

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restricted in this society. The Trobriand society is an extremely public one. The majorpart of an individual’s life takes place in front of the eyes of the village community.
The Trobrianders only retreat into their houses when they go to sleep or when they areill. But even within the houses there is hardly anything that resembles our idea of privacy — all members of a family sleep densely packed in the relatively small houses. If
the major part of one’s life takes place in public, the community needs to set standards
that are compulsory for everybody but not too demanding for the individuals within thiscommunity. If the Trobrianders would tolerate married couples to exchange signs oftenderness in public, people could quickly differentiate between good and bad marriages. By banning these signs of tender feelings into the strictly private sphere of a couple, all married couples are respected equally within their social community. This supports the stability and the solidarity of this community. On the basis of this consideration it seems sensible that within the Trobriand Islanders’ construction of their social
reality an individual has to learn to suppress feelings that are — at least for this community — too spontaneous and therefore possibly destructive.
Summing up we can establish that children learn at a very early age to express
their feelings of sympathy and affection for others only in the ways that comply with
the Trobrianders’ norms of behavior. We could not observe that the children violated
these norms.
The children of Tauwema express feelings of animosity and antipathy with respect
to another person usually in forms of aggressive behavior, like beating, biting, kicking,poking or pinching someone. Younger children direct forms of aggression to older children and vice versa. However, in most of these cases the aggressor is older than theaggressee. Thus, it is more likely that children act out aggressive behavior when they
are confident to be physically superior to their opponent and therefore need not expect
too many negative consequences of their behavior from the target of their aggression. A
few cases of children’s aggressive behavior were targeted at adults. This implies thatphysical superiority of an opponent need not always inhibit aggression in children.
However, adults do not react at all when children beat, bite or kick them — on the contrary, they often laugh at these aggressive acts by belligerent children. Aggressive behavior directed towards peers or older children often results in resistance, while aggression towards younger children seems to have no consequences whatsoever. However,appearances are deceiving. Usually no third person — neither a child nor an adult observing such forms of aggression — interferes in a fight between peers, but children who
attack significantly younger children will face sanctions for their behavior. One suchsanction is that an adult or a child who is older than the aggressor slaps him or her inthe face; this may be physically not too painful for the aggressive child, however, thissanction is humiliating to the core for the aggressor and usually results in a flood oftears. The other form of sanction for aggressive behavior directed towards significantly
younger children can be observed much more often than the physical punishment: Thispunishment consists in humiliating the aggressor verbally. However, this verbal humili-Acquiring Kilivila Pragmatics

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ation is not done in form of a verbose preachment — the punishment just consists of thecontemptuously mumbled sentence: “Kugisi avaka kuvagi!” — Look what you havedone! The child humiliated in this way also always immediately starts to cry as if it
was beaten.
During the process of learning to control their aggressive emotions the children often have to severely struggle with themselves. This becomes most obvious with 6 to 7
year old children who have almost completed this learning process. When they fly intoa passion, they often pick up a piece of wood, a stone or a handful of sand, stretch theirarm to the back and — exactly at this moment the learned and internalized norm interferes and inhibits the children’s urge to throw something at their opponent. Often thesechildren are standing there for seconds with their arm lifted and prepared to throw, staring at their adversary — but after some of these crucial seconds they drop their arm andrun away, having won this fight with themselves, according to the valid norm of emotion control.
What is the benefit for the Trobriand society when children learn at an early age tosuppress aggression? As already mentioned above, it is reasonable to not burden a small
village community with problems in the relationships between its individual members.
Although the Trobrianders have established with their “council of chiefs” an authoritythat regulates disputes, it is sensible if every member of the community learns to restrain him- or herself to prevent the eruption of assaults which could destroy ties between different families and their sophisticated economic networks within this community.
However, there is one form of aggression which is not suppressed on the Trobriand
Islands, namely schadenfreude which can be acted out without any fear of sanctions.
To give just one example: When Weyei, a man in his early 60s, pursuing his grandsonat the beach to slap him in the face, stumbled and was rolling in the sand, all spectatorsof this scene — be it toddler or a venerable old woman — roared with laughter so that
good old Weyei had no other choice but to join in their laughter. Some women havedeveloped genuine pantomimic talents to perform such mishaps of others before an audience, making the spectators laugh their heads off. Besides the schadenfreude, verbal
mocking, teasing, tricking and hoaxing someone are popular and even respected formsof expressing aggressive behavior.
There is a lot of laughter in Tauwema — but this is no wonder: The Trobrianders
differentiate and metalinguistically name varieties or registers of Kilivila that they use
in specific situations with various intentions (Senft 2010a: 149f.). The default register
they use in everyday interactions is called “biga sopa” which can be translated as “thejoking language” — but also as “the lying language”. This variety is absolutely characteristic for Trobriand forms of talk. It is based on the fact that Kilivila, like any othernatural language, is marked by features that include ‘vagueness’ and ‘ambiguity’. Boththese features are used by its speakers as stylistic means to avoid possible distress, confrontation, or too much and — for a Trobriand Islander at least — too aggressive direct-

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ness of certain speech situations. If hearers signal that they may be insulted by a certain speech act, speakers can always recede from what they have said by labelling it as
sopa, as a ‘joke’, a ‘jest’, ‘fun’, ‘nonsense’, as ‘something they did not really mean tosay’. Thus sopa signals the speakers’ unmarked non-commitment to truth. Trobriand
etiquette then prescribes that hearers must not be offended at all by those utterances thatwere explicitly labelled as sopa. If they feel offended and display this feeling publicly,
then they lose “face”.
The Trobriand Islanders employ this variety in everyday conversation, in small talk,in flirtation, in public debates, in admonitory speeches, in songs and stories as a meansof rhetoric to avoid possible conflicts and to relax the atmosphere of the speech situation. The biga sopa variety also contributes to put forward arguments because it allows
speakers to disguise their thoughts verbally and to disagree in a playful way without thedanger of too much personal exposure. Moreover, the biga sopa variety is used formocking people. As a means of irony and parody it can be used to criticize certain
forms of sociologically deviant behavior, relatively mildly asking for immediate correction. Finally, the biga sopa variety offers the only license for the verbal breaking of taboos and thus for the licensed use of insults and swear words — not only for adults but
also for children.
The biga sopa serves the function of a so-called “safety valve custom” (Heymer
1977: 187). This ethological concept needs some explanation: Every society puts someof its realms, domains and spheres under certain specific taboos. However, the stricter
the society is in regard to its observance of these taboos, the more these taboos are ignored. But a society can secure its members’ observance of certain taboos, especiallyof taboos that are important for its social construction of reality by allowing the discussion of its taboos — especially of the sociologically less important ones — as topics of
discourse. It may even allow its members to imagine the ignorance of taboos — in a
fictitious way, of course. And this is exactly how and why ‘safety valve customs’ develop. Genres of biga sopa — including insults and swear words — are first of all classified as sopa — as play, as something fictitious in Trobriand society. The biga sopa
thus generates a forum where the breaking of taboos is allowed, if it is done verbally!
This forum permits a specially marked way of communication about something ‘one
does not talk about’ otherwise.
In sum, the ‘biga sopa’ variety channels emotions, it keeps aggression under control, and it keeps possibilities of contact open. This concept with it tension releasing
functions secures harmony in the Trobriand society and contributes to maintaining the
Trobriand Islanders’ social construction of reality.
Acquiring Kilivila and getting familiar with the concept of the biga sopa, the children also have to learn to laugh about themselves, even in situations when they feel
deeply insulted — because, as pointed out above, the Trobriand norm of verbal interaction requires that hearers of the biga sopa must not be offended at all by utterances thatwere explicitly labelled as sopa — otherwise they will be mocked by all and lose face.

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Like the adults the children cherish sopa as a source of amusement. Children at an early age actively practice the use of the biga sopa within their children’s groups. And as
just mentioned, the first step in learning how to use sopa requires that children learn tolaugh about jokes older children make about them. The ability to actively produce
jokes and to amuse other children within the peer group develops at about the age offive years.
Another reason for communal laughter is provided by the “butusi” — the mocking
songs. The village youth compose catchy melodies and come up with lyrics that caricature someone with a specific vice or virtue. Children join in singing these songs, andsometimes even intoning just the first line of such a mocking song results in roaring
laughter.
Children not only have to learn how to deal with their personal joy all by themselves, they also have to learn how to cope with grief, pain and disappointment allalone. Soon after our arrival in Tauwema we noticed that children often cried heartbreakingly for a relatively long time without taken care of by playmates or adults. And
to our great surprise these children completely ignored attempts made by us to comfort
them; that is, they could not cope with our ways of consoling. To understand the behavior of these children we have to look at the development of crying in children.
Sucklings and toddlers who are breastfed hardly ever cry. If they are with their mother,
they are immediately breastfed. Calming words are unnecessary. Fathers react to thecrying of their youngest children by taking them into their arms, rocking them and singing a lullaby or another song. The young children who sit on the village ground in theafternoon are comforted by their elder siblings or children who are their relatives when
they start to cry. Verbal means are only sparsely used for consoling — the exceptions
being “Desi, desi” — “Enough, enough” or the production of the adequate kinship term
like, for example “O bwadagu” — “Oh my little brother”. Instead, the older children
take the little ones in their arms or put them in their lap and rock and pat them until
they stop crying. These attempts to console a child abruptly cease with the weaning of
the child. If a weaned child cries, nobody cares: the reason for their crying is added up
with their frustration of being let alone all by themselves.
Why does the crying of these young children no longer function as a comfort appeal to peers and adults? We have pointed out above that self-discipline is important for
the Trobrianders’ control of emotions, because this ability contributes to the social balance within their community. Children have to acquire this quality — the earlier the
better — because the early period of their integration into the children’s group requests
the children’s acquisition of this character trait. In crying out their grief and anger, thechildren find a temporal outlet for these emotions; however, they soon learn that — withthe exception of their personal relief — this strategy has no effect whatsoever in theirenvironment and they realize that as soon as their time as a suckling has come to an
abrupt end, crying has lost its function to elicit care. Therefore children at the age ofabout 5 years can hardly be observed crying publicly.

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In sum, children have learned to control their emotions to behave according to thenorms that are valid within their community when they are 7 years old. They have acquired a relatively strict form of self-discipline, which is necessary to keep the balance
between the individuals within their very public society. It is often difficult and sometimes even painful for the children to acquire this quality, nevertheless they all manage
to cope with the experience of being socially forced to repress and control their emotions. At the age of 7 years the children of Tauwema are quite self-confident and selfassured; therefore the early experience of the social repression of uncontrolled displayof emotions does not seem to have any negative effects on them. On the contrary, it
seems that the children’s awareness that they can behave adequately with respect to all
situations they experience in everyday life within their community provides them with
an important emotional security and with a general aplomb. The practicing of the formsof behavior that conform to the Trobrianders’ social norms takes place while playing
with other children in the playgroups; it is controlled by older members of the children’s groups.
3.3. Tradition and control of norms with respect to requesting, giving and taking
Children hardly possess anything else than their clothes. Toys are shortlived — being made out of natural materials. They are temporarily used by the children,
but not retained or ‘owned’. This relationship to personal items has resulted in a very
specific form of giving and taking. If most of the things in the environment are common property, then everybody is entitled to use them. Therefore it is superfluous to develop specific ways of politeness — like for example ways of formalized requesting, because everybody’s due can be requested by everybody else. Thus, it conforms with
Trobriand etiquette if a child who is watching a relative chewing betelnuts simply states“Mesta buva!” — Give me betelnuts! — or “Agu buva!” — My betelnuts! There is noneed for Trobrianders to cajole someone who is in the possession of something to makehim share it — everybody can request their owing share. There is no word for “please”
in Kilivila. But there is a word for the action of requesting, “-nigada-”. However,somebody who constantly makes requests is labeled a “Tonigada” — a “beggar”, andthis is an epitheton ornans that Trobrianders do not really like. It is Trobriand etiquette — which is binding upon everyone — to pass on something like a betelnut or acigarette almost immediately to someone who asks for it. If Trobrianders refuse to do
this just by saying “Gala.” — No —, there are only two explanations for this inappropriate behavior: They are either temporarily ill, and do not realize how improperly they
behave — this can be excused, if the “illness” does not last too long, or they are justmean. Meanness, however, is not tolerated in a society that is based on a generous exchange of goods, and mean persons — “Tomekita” — have to face being asked to leave
the village in which they live. Giving and taking freely and generously is one of thecornerstones of the social construction of Trobriand reality. This kind of requesting,giving, and taking can be described as a form of ritualized communication that serves

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the function of testing and monitoring in a daily routine whether all the members of thecommunity still adhere to values that are basic for the social construction of their reality. As long as these tests turn out to be positive — according to the standards of thecommunity — the society’s coherence is not endangered and need not be questioned.
Any infringement upon the few items of personal property, however, is sanctioned as asevere offence, and the malefactor is publicly scolded to be a “Tovelau” — a “thief”.
3.4. The role of the children’s “small republic”
Trobriand children indeed “enjoy considerable freedom and independence” whichgive “scope to the formation of the children’s own little community” to which Malinowski referred as “their small republic” (Malinowski 1929: 44f.).
In connection with this independence and autonomous behavior of children, the human ethologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989: 600f.) points out that in general[c]hildren learn at an early stage that they are part of a larger community, particularly in the smaller kin-based societies of village and tribal cultures. … Assoon as a child can walk he will participate in the children’s playgroup …, and
it is in such playgroups that children are truly raised. The older ones explain therules of play and will admonish those who do not adhere to them … Thus thechild’s socialization occurs mainly within the playgroup … There is a children’sculture, which is transmitted from the older children to the younger ones without
adult intervention. Distinct rank order relationships prevail in children’s groups… In the children’s group the child grows into the community, learning social
competence through the acquisition of social and technical aptitude, and ascending in rank while doing so.
The ethologist also emphasizes the importance of the fact that these children groups are
mixed age-groups. He states: “In tribal societies the child grows up in mixed age
groups and, with increasing age, experiences a change from being guided to being a
guide to the younger child. A child thus experiences (and experiments with) all possible roles” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 314). As mentioned above, in these hierarchicallystructured mixed-age groups children pass through a number of different roles which require different forms of rule-governed behavior and imply a number of different responsibilities which the children take over for themselves and for the group as a whole. As
the Whitings rightly point out, “older children can be expected to practice their newly
acquired knowledge of the rules of the culture by making responsible suggestions or
reprimanding anyone who deviates from these rules” (Whiting & Whiting 1975: 184).
Thus, younger children learn from the older children in the group — who socially control it — the culture-specific norms of verbal and non-verbal behavior which are fundamental for their society and which govern its members’ behavior. Play is decisive forthis learning process: “If the rule structure of human play and games sensitizes the childto the rules of culture, both generally and in preparation for a particular way of life,

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then surely play must have some special role in nurturing symbolic activity in general.
For culture is symbolism in action” (Bruner et al. 1976: 19). When the children havefinished these phases of social learning in which they have internalized the norms they
are confronted with in their social environment, that is within their (play-)groups, they
have also gained social safety: Now they can predict the behavior of others within theirgroup as well as the reactions of these others to their own forms of behavior. Thus, thechildren’s “small republic” provides the most important framework for their socialization into their culture.

4.

Parental education

In this paper I have shown that the Trobriand children’s groups have a decisive educational influence and impact. Living together within these groups the children experience the tradition of values and norms and the rules and regulations that constitute thebasis for acquiring the social conventions for the adequate multimodal interaction with
their fellow human beings. After the child is weaned, the parents attempt to educate
and treat their children in such a way that they can and want to live their lives as autonomously and independently as possible. The relationship between parents and children
grants the young children a very high degree of independence and autonomy. Attemptsof parental education are confined to a minimum and affect mainly personal hygiene,social morals and norms, the leading of the children to do some work in the household
and the gardens and the passing on of intellectual cultural assets. Parents only sporadically request strict obedience from their children. The adult Trobrianders themselves
consider their function as parents primarily as a priming one. Mothers and fathers emphasize that they believe in the power of the ‘good example’, the proper ‘role model’.
If the parents lead an orderly life — a concept which is expressed in Kilivila as “kedabwena” — “good way” —, then their children will also do so.
References
Bruner, J. S., A. Jolly & K. Sylva (eds.). 1976. Play — Its Role in Development and Evolution.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. 1989. Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Heymer, A. 1977. Vocabulaire Éthologique: Allemand-Anglais-Français. Berlin: Parey.
Malinowski, B. 1927. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Malinowski, B. 1929. The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia. London: Routledge& Kegan Paul.
Martini, M. 2009. “Peer interactions in Polynesia: A view from the Marquesas”. In P. B. Smith &D. L. Best (eds.) Cross-Cultural Psychology, Volume 2: Developmental Psychology, 147168. Los Angeles: Sage. [first published 1994 in J. L. Roopnarine, H. E. Johnson & F. H.
Hooper (eds.) Children’s Play in Diverse Cultures, 73-103. Albany: State University of New
York].

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Sbrzesny, H. 1976. Die Spiele der !Ko-Buschleute unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer sozialisierenden und gruppenbindenden Funktionen. München: Piper.
Senft, G. 1986. Kilivila: The Language of the Trobriand Islanders. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Senft, G. 2010. The Trobriand Islanders’ Ways of Speaking. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Senft, G. 2014. Understanding Pragmatics. London: Routledge.
Whiting, B. & J. W. M. Whiting — in collaboration with R. Longabaugh. 1975. Children of Six
Cultures — A Psycho-Cultural Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.