89. The Couvade
The couvade is a custom to which the peasants of the Pyrenees adhered until a century or two ago. When a couple had a child, the wife got up and went about her daily work as well as she might, while the husband went to bed to lie-in in state and receive the visits of the neighbors. This was thought to be for the good of the baby.
The same custom is found among the Indians of Brazil. They believe that a violation of the custom would bring sickness or ill luck upon the child. They look upon the child as something new and delicate, a being requiring not only physical nurture but the superadded protection of this religious or magical practice.
The Basques of the Pyrenees and the Indians of Brazil are of different race, separate origins, and without any known historical contacts. The substantial identity of the custom among them therefore long ago led to its being explained as the result of the cropping out of an instinctive impulse of the human mind. Tylor, for instance, held that whenever a branch of humanity reached a certain hypothetical stage of development, namely, that phase in which the reckoning of descent from the mother began to transform into reckoning of descent from the father, the couvade tended to appear spontaneously as a natural accompaniment. The Basque peasants, of course, are a more advanced people than the cannibalistic Brazilian natives. But they are an old and a conservative people who have long lived in comparative isolation in their mountainous district; and thus, it might be argued, they retained the custom of the couvade as a survival from the earlier transitional condition.
According to this method of explanation, the occurrence of almost any custom, art, or belief among widely separated and unrelated peoples is likely to be the result of the similar working of the human mind under similar conditions. The cause of cultural identities and resemblances, especially among primitive or “nature” peoples, is not to be sought primarily in historical factors, such as common origin, migrations, the propaganda of religion, or the gradual diffusion of an idea, but is to be looked for in something inherent in humanity itself, in inborn psychological tendencies. This explanation is that of “Independent Evolution.” It is also known as the doctrine of “Elementary Ideas.”
Contrasting with this principle is that of borrowing—one people learning an institution or belief from another, or taking over a custom or invention. That borrowing has been considerably instrumental in shaping the cultures of the more advanced nations, is an obvious fact. People are Christians not through the spontaneous unfolding of the whole dogma and ritual of Christianity in each of them, nor even within their nation, but because of the historically documented spread of Christianity which is still going on. As a heathen people is converted by missionaries to-day, so our North European ancestors were converted by Romans, and the Romans by the Apostles and their followers. When historical records are available, cultural borrowing of this sort is generally easy to establish.
Borrowing can sometimes be shown as very likely even where direct evidence is lacking. If two peoples that possess an institution in common are known off-shoots one from the other, or if they have had numerous trade relations, it is hardly necessary to demonstrate the specific time and manner of transmission between them. Supposing that a religion, an alphabet, and perhaps a number of arts have passed from one nation to another, one would normally ask for little further evidence that a custom, such as the couvade, which they shared, had also been originated by one and borrowed by the other.