The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult*

It is a common observation of anthropologists that the field worker will recognize intuitively a series of character types among his informants, types which correspond closely to the people who surround the worker at home. It is not so common, but perhaps equally important, to notice that there are forms of behavior among other peoples which have been worked up, traditionally patterned and consolidated for which the emotional background is also present in our own society. It is as through one recognized at home the raw material which has been elaborated into public and well recognized norms of behavior abroad. For example, in our society, a friendship may exist as a spontaneous optional relationship between two men. Among the Dahomey,1 on the contrary, such a relationship will appear as a feature of the “best friend” pattern, and it will be defined that every man has routinely a best friend who performs certain well recognized services for him and receives a return in kind. What is a sporadic invention in the one case, appearing and dying with its instigators, is a patterned affair in the other. Psychotics in American hospitals display disorders of perception which are individual variants from our social practices; whereas in Tanino society as Murdock2 has found, medicine men must (unconsciously) falsify their experience in a somewhat similar way in order to qualify for their craft. So, also, the “joking relationship,” familiar to students of primitives, sometimes exists between Americans as a personal invention in human relations.

I have seen a joking relationship arise between two friends in exactly this spontaneous way; indeed these two men are noted for