VII. The Law of Marriage
This brings us to the subject of marriage, extremely important for the understanding of native law. Marriage establishes not merely a bond between husband and wife, but it also imposes a standing relation of mutuality between the man and the wife’s family, especially her brother. A woman and her brother are bound to each other by characteristic and highly important ties of kinship. In a Trobriand family a female must always remain under the special guardianship of one man — one of her brothers, or, if she has none, her nearest maternal kinsman. She has to obey him and to fulfil a number of duties, while he looks after her welfare and provides for her economically even after she is married.
The brother becomes the natural warden of her children, who therefore have to regard him and not their father as the legal head of the family. He in turn has to look after them, and to supply the household with a considerable proportion of its food. This is the more burdensome since marriage being patrilocal, the girl has moved away to her husband’s community, so that every time at harvest there is a general economic chassi-croisi all over the district.
After the crops are taken out, the yams are classified and the pick of the crop from each garden is pat into a conical heap. The main heap in each garden plot is always for the sister’s household. The sole purpose of all the skill and labour devoted to this display of food is the satisfaction of the gardener’s ambition. The whole community, nay, the whole district, will see the garden produce, comment upon it, criticize, or praise. A big heap proclaims, in the words of my informant: „Look what I have done for my sister and her family. I am a good gardener and my nearest relatives, my sister and her children, will never suffer for want of food.” After a few days the heap is dismantled, the yams carried in baskets to the sister’s village, where they are put up into exactly the same shape in front of the yam-house of the sister’s husband; there again the members of the community will see the heap and admire it. This whole ceremonial side of the transaction has a binding force which we know already. The display, the comparisons, the public assessment impose a definite psychological constraint upon the giver — they satisfy and reward him, when successful work enables him to give a generous gift, and they penalize and humiliate him for inefficiency, stinginess, or bad luck.
Besides ambition, reciprocity prevails in this transaction as everywhere else; at times, indeed, it steps in almost upon the heels of an act of fulfilment. First of all the husband has to repay by definite periodical gifts every annual harvest contribution. Later on, when the children grow up, they will come directly under the authority of their maternal uncle; the boys will have to help him, to assist him in everything, to contribute a definite quota to all the payments he has to make. His sister’s daughters do but little for him directly, but indirectly, in a matrilineal society, they provide him with his heirs and descendants of two generations below.
Thus placing the harvest offerings within their sociological context, and taking a long view of the relationship, we see that every one of its transactions is justified as a link in the chain of mutualities. Yet taking it isolated, torn out of its setting, each transaction appears nonsensical, intolerably burdensome and sociologically meaningless, also no doubt ’communistic’! What could be more economically absurd than this oblique distribution of garden produce, where every man works for his sister and has to rely in turn on his wife’s brother, where more time and energy is apparently wasted on display, on show, on the shifting of the goods, than on real work? Yet a closer analysis shows that some of these apparently unnecessary actions are powerful economic incentives, that others supply the legal binding force, while others, again, are the direct result of native kinship ideas. It is also clear that we can understand the legal aspect of such relations only if we look upon them integrally without over-emphasizing any one link in the chain of reciprocal duties.