CUSTOM SHAPES OUR LIVES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 324, 7 September 1945, Page 24

CUSTOM SHAPES OUR LIVES

| "Accepted Ways of Behaviour Cannot Be Avoided"

(Condensed from a recent talk in 4Y A’s Winter Course series, by

G. W.

Parkyn

Lecturer in Education, University of Otago). :

VERY human being comes into a world of already established usages or customs, into a world where certain political institutions, economic systems, religious beliefs and so on are accepted. These accepted ways of life cannot be avoided by the newcomer, Ruth Benedict, in her fascinating book Patterns of Culture says that "the life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom." Decorating the Body Everyone recognises the part that custom plays in the superficial things of life. The art of decorating the human body is a case in point. When the Shilluk warrior from the region of the Upper Nile considers his personal charm he spares no efforts to achieve a magnificent hair-do. He twists and kneads his hair into the desired shape with grease, ashes, and manure, and then he powders it. He then sleeps with his head on a wooden headrest so that his overpowering coiffure will remain undisturbed. The young Chacabo of Bolivia dresses for the festival in a great necklace of red toucan feathers and the front teeth of a certain species of monkey. As many as 1500 front teeth go into one ornament, the lives of nearly 200 monkeys being sacrificed to his end. And the Brazilian Indian woman, to take another example, who would normally wear no clothes at all, would no more permit herself to be seen in public without an ornament in her nose, than the British male would think © of wearing a red and yellow spotted tie with his dinner jacket. In Much More Subtle Ways But these are external trappings, obvious to see, and we readily agree that in such matters custom plays tricks with us all. What is less obvious is that custom may shape us in much more subtle ways and may affect our personalities and our characters. When we are faced with the great differences found among human beings in such important things as personality and character, we tend very readily to assume that these must

be inborn. "It’s their nature," we say, and are too ready to leave it at that, as if cerfain that the nature of an individual or of a nation is a fate that cannot be escaped, no matter under what conditions life is lived. This is no more true, however, than the idea that we would be wearing the same sort of clothes as we now wear if we had been brought up among the forest tribes of New Guinea. Let us take some different ways of life and contrast them to see what vast differences in human behaviour are produced in different cultures. More Blessed to Give... . Among the American Indians who lived half-a-century ago on the west coast of Canada, the dominant motif in the pattern of living was the struggle to demonstrate one’s personal prowess by vanquishing and shaming one’s rivals. The main weapons used in this struggle were the amassing and the destruction of wealth. Indeed the economic system was turned almost completely to the service of this struggle for superiority. There were two main methods which custom permitted a chieftain to use in order to bring glory to himself and shame

upon another. The first was to give a very costly present to the other, who then was obliged to make a return present later, together with interest at the rate of two or three hundred per cent. Throughout a lifetime one would give presents, receive double in return, make larger presents, receive still more in return, and so on. The losers in these competitive exchanges would be those whose earlier gifts to others failed to return enough goods to wipe out the obligation some more powerful chiefs placed upon them. The fate of the loser was shame and misery, which could be wiped out only by murder or suicide. The second method used in this society was that of the conspicuous destruction of one’s own wealth, which obliged others to cap the performance. One of the customary ways in which this was done was to hold a great feast in the following manner. The host, about to establish his claim to fame, would invite a rival to bring his followers to a feast. A fire would be lighted, around which the guests had to recline. Then large quantities of valuable candlefish

oil would be poured on the flames. The heat might scorch the skin of the guests red, but they must not move, for to do so would be to admit the magnitude of their host’s conflagration. If the oil feast surpassed anything that the guest had ever given he would have to return home and set in train preparations for a return match. If on the other hand the oil feast was less spectacular than one of his own efforts he would derisively insult the host. The host then had to increase his bid by having canoes broken and fed ‘to the flames, or by melting down sheets of copper worth thousands of blankets. And so on it went till the end came, bringing elation to one and shame to the other, The Ideal Indian In striking contrast to the customs of these Canadian Indians which developed them into megalomaniacs, are the customs of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Among one of the Pueblo peoples, the Zuni, custom decrees precisely the opposite. No man must seek leadérship or thirst for power over his fellows. The ideal person is one who is friendly, generous, and co-operative. No one must seek offices for himself, so the annual meeting to choose office-bearers goes as follows: All the eligible men are shut up together in a room where they proceed to make their excuses, and to beat down the excuses of each other. The ones with the greatest poverty of excuses are elected. In their games and sports too they prefer the chances to be even. Outstanding runners are discouraged because they spoil the race. And if one person wins several races hé is likely to be debarred from further racing. Their economic life, too, is singularly co-operative. The commercial methods of the rest of America still leave untouched the Pueblos in some of the more isolated villages. Was It Bad Advice? Some of you may remember the following delightful anecdote from the book Little Golden America by that satirical pair of Soviet travellers, Ilf and Petrov. An Indian deciding to go into business, bought two hundred dollars worth of merchandise to sell among his people. His trade went well, but an old cowboy who was telling the travellers this story found that the Indian was selling the goods at the same price as he paid for them. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) "So," said the cowboy, "I told him that he couldn’t trade that way, that goods must be sold at a higher price than he paid for it." "Well, what do you mean by a higher price?" the Indian asked me. "Very simple. Let’s say you bought a thing for a dollar. You must sell it for a dollar twenty." . "How can I sell it for a dollar twenty when it cost me only a dollar?" "But that is exactly what trade means. You buy cheaper and you sell for more." "That's fraud,"’ he said. "You're advising me to deceive people." F "That’s not fraud. You simply earn money, don’t you understand? Make a profit." But something strange happened to my Indian friend. He suddenly stopped understanding the most ordinary things. "What do you mean, make a profit?" he asked. "Well," I said, ‘justify your expenses." "I didn’t have any expenses." "But still, you went to the city, you bought, you brought it here, you worked." "What kind of work is that?’ the Indian asked me. "To buy, to bring it here. That’s not work. No, you’re giving me bad advice." It was simply impossible to convince him. No matter how hard I tried (said the narrator), nothing came of it. He was as stubborn as a bull, and he kept repeating one and the same thing. "You’re advising me to do something dishonest." I tell him this is trade, and he tells me that in that case trade is a dishonest thing, And just imagine, he continued to trade that way just as he began. The Problem of Adolescence This anecdote illustrates how difficult it is for anyone to see things through the eyes of people from another culture. To

one brought up in a co-operative society the attitudes of the commercial world seem wicked, while to a person accustomed only to the atmosphere of competition profitless exchanges seem childishly stupid. So far I have been giving illustrations of the effect of custom upon the behaviour of people in simple cultures. It might seem that in a culture such as ours where a great variety of ways of life is permitted, the patterning effect of custom is lessened. But this is not so. The most that an individual can do in such complex cultures as our own is to choose the group that he prefers to live with, and whose customs he is willing to follow. Take the problem of adolescence. A great deal of attention has been paid in recent years, particularly in the United States, to the study of the adolescent years. By many psychologists adolescence has been described as a period of mental stresses and strains, of conflicts, and of restlessness. It has been regarded as a period of doubts and indecision, of impatience with authority, full of problems for the adolescent himself and for his equally-bewildered parents. And some psychologists went so far as to state that this turmoil was inevitable, that it was

part of the natural process of growing up, and could no more be avoided than the physical changes which take place at the same time. In contrast with some psychologists, the anthropologists familiar with the effects of the social environment upon human development thought that this was an erroneous belief, and that the psychologists, unable to see beyond the confines of their own society, were stating, as fundamental elements in human nature, certain characteristics which were due. simply to the kind of society in which they happened to be living. The question was raised whether the difficulties of adolescence were caused by being an adolescent, or by being an adolescent in America? Coming of Age in Samoa Margaret Mead’s book, Coming of Age in Samoa, answers this question, She shows clearly that in a simple culture it is possible for the period of adolescence to be passed through quite uneventfully, without doubts and fears, without stresses and strain, without serious delinquencies, without problems of sex behaviour, and without conflict between different religious creeds and political beliefs. This is achieved because a primitive society has only one customary way of life. There are few choices to be made, so conflict is rare. By contrast, says Margaret Mead, "Our children grow up to find a world of choices dazzling their unaccustomed eyes. In religion they may be Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, Agnostics, Atheists, or even pay no attention at all to religion. This is an unthinkable situation in any primitive society... . Similarly our children are faced with a dozen different standards of morality: a double sex standard for men and women, a single standard for men and women, and groups which advocate that the single standard should be freedom, while others argue that the single standard should be absolute monogamy. ~ Trial marriage, companionate marriage, contract marriage-all these possible solutions of a social impasse are paraded before the growing children, while the actual conditions in their own communities and the moving pictures and magazines inform them of mass violations of every code.... The Samoan child faces no such dilemma. Sex is a natural pleasurable thing. . . . Everyone in the community agrees about the matter; the only dissenters are the missionaries, who dissent so vainly that their protests are unimportant." And so Margaret Mead’s work shows clearly that characteristic§ which have been regarded as part of the natural course of adolescent development in America, are really only the reactions of the youth of that nation to a clash of customs which is so typical a feature of civilised society to-day. Custom is indeed a shaper of men’s lives, and there is very little that most of us individually can do to escape its influence. As John Dewey has said, the part played by custom in the behaviour of the individual as contrasted with any way in which the individual can change custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue to the number of words of his own baby talk that are taken into the vernacular of his family,