On Anthropologists on Oedipus

Anthropologists are contrarians. In this country, in this century, the type-case was Margaret Mead. Contrary to the generally accepted psychological wisdom of the day (the 1920s), Mead offered data which she saw as showing that Samoan adolescents were sexually very active but had no anxieties about this. Shortly thereafter, she found that Manus children were realistic young proto-scientists who, contrary to Piaget, did not think more primitively, even, than adult “savages.” In addition, she claimed that in at least three groups living in the Sepik River valley of what is today Papua New Guinea, sex (biological gender) was not related to temperament. In England, the best-known anthropological contrarian, Bronislaw Malinowski, expressed his most surprising views in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), where “as every school-boy knows,” he argued that what he referred to as the “doctrine” of psychoanalysis was in error in suggesting—no, in insisting—that the Oedipus complex was universal (vii).

Over the past 75 years or so, anthropological rhetoric may have softened a bit, but contrarians continue to be the norm (pseudo-paradox intended). The three papers of this anthropological panel illustrate this quite nicely. Although the data are better than Mead's by far and the stances taken are less rigid than Malinowski's, the contrarian aims couldn't be clearer given the stated topic of the meeting: “Oedipus Today.” Two of the papers seek to address Oedipus today from as distant a yesterday as one can usefully imagine, while the third takes up Oedipus, not in its “default” (positive) setting, but in its negative form.

As I see it, these papers, individually and collectively, have all four of the features of anthropology at its best. First, they are comparative, and the range of cultures and cultural materials considered is great. Second, they take seriously cross-species data and, in so doing, demonstrate that anthropology is far more than cultural studies and that Sta