The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought / Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day

by Alexander Francis Chamberlain

"In time the woman bore a son, a remarkably small child. This child incessantly cried for the moon to play with, thus—Koong-ah-ah, Koong-ah-ah ('the moon, the moon'). The spirit-chief, in order to quiet the child, after carefully closing all apertures of the house, produced the moon, and gave it to the child to play with." The result was that the raven (the child) ran off with the moon, and the people in consequence were put to no little inconvenience. But by and by the raven broke the original moon in two, threw half up into the sky, which became the sun, while of the other half he made the moon, and of the little bits, which were left in the breaking, all the stars.

In the golden age of the gods, the far-off juventus mundi, the parts of the universe were the playthings, the Spielzeug of the divine infants, just as peasants and human infants figure in the folk-tales as the toys of giants and Brobdingnagians. Indeed, some of the phenomena of nature and their peculiarities are explained by barbarous or semi-barbarous peoples as the result of the games and sports of celestial and spiritual children.

With barbarous or semi-civilized peoples possessing flocks and herds of domesticated animals the child is early made acquainted with their habits and uses. Regarding the Kaffirs of South Africa Theal says that it is the duty of the young boys to attend to the calves in the kraal, and "a good deal of time is passed in training them to run and to obey signals made by whistling. The boys mount them when they are eighteen months or two years old, and race about upon their backs" (543. 220). In many parts of the world the child has played an important role as shepherd and watcher of flocks and herds, and the shepherd-boy has often been called to high places in the state, and has even ascended the thrones of great cities and empires, ecclesiastical as well as political.

Dress.

In his little book on the philosophy of clothing Dr. Schurtz has given us an interesting account of the development and variation of external ornamentation and dress among the various races, especially the negro peoples of Africa. The author points out that with not a few primitive tribes only married persons wear clothes, girls and boys, young women and men even, going about in puris naturalibus (530. 13). Everywhere the woman is better clothed than the girl, and in some parts of Africa, as the ring is with us, so are clothes a symbol of marriage. Among the Balanta, for example, in Portuguese Senegambia, when a man marries he gives his wife a dress, and so long as this remains whole, the marriage-union continues in force. On the coast of Sierra Leone, the expression "he gave her a dress," intimates that the groom has married a young girl (530. 14, 43-49).

Often, with many races the access of puberty leads to the adoption of clothing and to a refinement of dress and personal adornment. A relic of this remains, as Dr. Schurtz points out, in the leaving off of knickerbockers and the adoption of "long dresses," by the young people in our civilized communities of to-day (530. 13).

With others the clothing of the young is of the most primitive type, and children in very many cases go about absolutely naked.

That the development of the sex-feeling, and entrance upon marriage, have with very many peoples been the chief incitements to dress and personal ornamentation, has been pointed out by Schurtz and others (530. 14).

Not alone this, but, sometimes, as among the Bura Negroes of the upper Blue Nile region, the advent of her child brings with it a modification in the dress of the mother. With these people, young girls wear an apron in front, married women one in front and one behind, but women who have already had a child wear two in front, one over the other. A similar remark applies to tattooing and kindred ornamentations of the body and its members. Among the women of the Bajansi on the middle Congo, for example, a certain form of tattoo indicated that the woman had borne a child (530. 78).

Schurtz points out that the kangaroo-skin breast-covering of the Tasmanian women, the shoulder and arm strips worn by the women of the Monbuttu in Africa, the skin mantles of the Marutse, the thick hip-girdle of the Tupende, and other articles of clothing of a like nature, seem to be really survivals of devices for carrying children, and not to have been originally intended as dress per se (530. 110, 111). Thus early does childhood become a social factor.