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In his aptly titled book, the author provides a study of the sexual lives of the people of Mehinaku, a village of the Amazonian Xingu tribe. The well-written and readily readable book holds considerable significance for psychoanalysts as well as anthropologists, particularly for the following reasons. The book portrays a small society that not only permits extramarital promiscuity to an extent perhaps never before recorded, but the promiscuity promotes rather than disrupts the societal integration. It records how, despite the striking male dominance and the multiple liaisons in which the men are engaged, the men have an underlying fear of women and their sexuality. This work attributes the anxieties, as have other recent studies, to men's residual core feminine identity derived from the child's primary identification with the mother. Another reason, which Gregor does not emphasize or fully appreciate, is the marked similarity of a number of rather unusual beliefs and practices of these South American Indians to those of various tribes in Papua New Guinea—two peoples about as geographically remote from one another as possible, and from such different cultural lines that an explanation of the similarities by cultural diffusion would have to go back at least 25,000 to 30,000 years, almost to the evolution of Homo sapiens.
The Mehinaku are extremely open about sexuality, both in behavior and discussion. Little is hidden from children who may follow a parent out of the village to watch the sexual act; recount, not without pride, the number and identity of a parent's lovers; and themselves engage in intercourse some years before puberty. Marriage supposedly provides exclusive sexual rights to the partners, but both men and women soon engage in an extensive network of liaisons. Husbands are usually only possessive and jealous early in the marriage. Although