Manor House,

Hinton St. Mary,

Dorset.

2nd August 1927.

My dear Bronis,

I have just finished the reading of your "Sex and Repression in Savage Society," and it is no mere formal tribute to say that I have seldom, if ever, been more interested or stimulated than by your latest book. It is a real advance and a definite milestone in the synthetic science deriving from psychology, sociology and biology, which is anthropology. The mere fact that I find it so stimulating as well as illuminating means that it carries implications which provoke new arguments and suggest fresh questions still to be answered.

Will you bear with me if I concentrate on some of these questions which I think still need clearing up?

While you seem to me to carry your main thesis through with inexorable logic - on the real significance of the family pattern conditioned by the cultural situation which again determines the conflicts and repressions that psycho-analysis deals with - yet, if I follow you correctly, you seem to oversimplify the problem by restricting your "Nuclear complexes" to only two main contrasted types, or archetypes. Is it true, or do you intend to suggest, that the family-constellation-sentiment must either be of one mother-right pattern or one father-right pattern? The mother-right or 'matriarchal' pattern that you deal with always has in the background the maternal uncle as the father substitute. But you are only dealing with matrilineal-patrilocal communities. How would a matrilineal-matrilocal family situation fit in? The Aua type for instance? There the mother's brother is on the spot, and the real father almost a stranger living in another family group, probably in another village. Or again, in another community, the family might be matrilocal but the father, instead of being a comparative alien and stranger might be the familiar inmate and protector of the household where the maternal uncle plays little or no part? Or you may have the father-right community, where the maternal uncle still plays a certain part, as among the Mekeo, where he bestows the perineal band. Then when you take our European patriarchal family system, do not the personal father-mother relationships sometimes reverse the normal child-parent orientation

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in such a way that, despite the father-right status which distinguishes the culture, the mother yet plays the role of matriarch. It would seem that a dominating and power-usurping mother in a patriarchal community provokes especially strong resentment on the part of the children, especially the daughters. This latter tendency seems to me very frequent in the English speaking countries. I know several such families intimately. The daughters and sometimes the sons too, hate the mother, often quite openly and pity or despise the father. You do not deal with the daughter-father orientation under mother-right, and under father-right you say that the 'Electra complex situation' is much rarer than the Oedipus, but are we sure of this? On page 76, you lay the blame of the greater conflict-producing repressions in our Society to the institution of father-right, compared to mother-right Societies. Are there greater repressions in Melanesian father-right societies than in Melanesian mother-right societies? Is not the reason for the greater conflicts in our society to be found in the general sex-repressive taboos of puritanism, which actually tend at the same time to weaken patriarchy? How would you compare an advanced father-right community like the Chinese? The writings of Richard Wilhelm of Berlin (vide e.g. his monograph on Chinese marriage and the family in Keyserling's collection) do not suggest the possibility of the same type of conflicts.

Dealing with incest on pp. 249, 251, 253, how do you distinguish the mechanism of father-daughter and mother-son incest? Are not the two incest situations entirely different, both as regards relative difference of temptation and cultural consequences. Is not father-daughter incest not only far more frequent where it is forbidden by the culture, but is the only type which among ancients or savages is actually condoned, approved of, and sometimes institutionalized? (I have given examples in C. of C.) Of such sayings as the Malayan one "it is right that a man should pluck the first fruit of the tree he has planted." The gerontocratic pattern of society, with the sexual appropriation of the young women by the old men is common enough, but the reverse situation has not been found, not including of course the situation where the young men can only have access to the old women because of gerontocratic selfishness. There is more temptation to father-daughter incest than to mother-son.

P.225 "Monogamous marriage is a prevalent type," and your footnote p. 184. I am very anxious that you should expose the weak links in my "sex-ratio in relation to mating" theory, but I cannot honestly discover any flaw in it. It took me five years before I discovered the correlation significance of:-

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Sex-ratio-variation: decrease of population: mating system: miscegenation. A four term correlation should surely be very easily exposed if not valid?

More work must admittedly still be done both in zoology and anthropology, but meanwhile my hypothesis stands unless it can be shown that it is false to claim:

(1) That by changing polygynous mating habits normal in a species (rats, rabbits etc.) into polyandrous ones the quota of monandrous females diminish and the population dwindles.

(2) That demographic observations show that in man the same law regulating monandry, sex-ratio and dwindling populations apply.

(3) That mating and marriage systems (polygyny, polyandry, monandry, monogyny) are affected by sex-ratio of adults, though effect may be delayed or complicated by cultural influences - i.e. customs regulating postponement of male nuptial age, etc.

(4) That miscegenation affects population by stimulating increase or decrease, i.e. miscegenated groups may show either superior or inferior survival value to the full blood groups, according to the adaptation or maladaptation of the population, and that the effective-mating sex ratio varies consistently with the tendency of the groups.

Various other consequences are also discovered. I did not invent the theory and then try to find facts to fit in with it, the facts gradually came together and discovered the theory for me at the end.

I am sending you a copy of "C. of C." with my very sincere appreciation. I fear it is still full of silly little misprints (On p. 115, the word 'males' instead of 'females'.) I found only one in your book, the word 'maternal' for 'paternal' on p. 216.

Yours,

P.S. Please let us know

When you are returning. I have been asked to attend the World Population Conference at Geneva, but am uncertain whether to go. No reviews of my book so far.