EXPLANATIONS FOR THE INDIVIDUATION OF THE DRIVES OF SEX AND AGGRESSION

In the context of inquiries such as this anthropologists tend to use two major modes of explaining behavior. Behavior is the result of child-rearing patterns, or it is explained as the product of sociocultural models for and of behavior and their sanctions.13

The Repression, Inhibition, and Channeling of The Sexual Drive

Sociocultural Sanctions. In Rungus society the sexual drive is channelled into marriage. Its expression other than in marriage is highly prohibited by a number of sanctions both formal and informal. When cases of illicit intercourse are discovered, a village moot is held to determine who is the guilty party or parties and how to resolve the issue. This may take several meetings, and extended discussions are held concerning the degree of responsibility, when to put the two to marriage if they are unmarried, or the amount of compensation that must be paid to aggrieved spouses, the size of the pig that must be sacrificed to nullify the ritual heat, and what ritual payments must be given to the headman, witnesses, and the spirit medium who performs the ceremony to nullify the ritual jeopardy. Thus, illicit intercourse brings into play a wide variety of sanctions and involves the whole community in the resolution of this.

While fornication and adultery do occur, it is our impression that these behaviors are not a frequent feature of Rungus society. But when they do occur, they are subject to intense scrutiny and interest by the community. However, it is impossible to determine their prevalence since not all instances become public knowledge.

Thus, to channel the sexual behavior of the individual into the institution of marriage, a child as he or she matures is subjected to a number of sociocultural conditionings, models for and of behavior, and the possibility of jural sanctions that direct his behavior to this end. Women are subjected to a stricter code of behavior than men in expressing publicly any interest in sex or awareness of it. And it is difficult to judge to what degree the sexual drive of women, and perhaps men, is subject to repression or is only inhibited from expression prior to marriage as a result of these sociocultural sanctions. We will return to this issue shortly.

Location of Sexual Intercourse. The locations where sexual intercourse may take place further elucidate the nature of the relationship between males and females.

Sexual relations normally take place quietly at night in the sleeping area of the longhouse compartment after the children are asleep. If the children wake up, the parents stop intercourse as it would put the children in ritual jeopardy if they observed it. Coitus also takes place in the couple's field house during the day. At no time did we ever see or hear coitus taking place. A wife will sleep between her husband and their children.

Illicit sexual relations, when they occur, take place in the forest during the day, as women do not go out from the longhouse at night. A child born out of wedlock is called a lapau and is also referred to as having been conceived in the forest. Seldom if ever is a child born out of wedlock, however, as an unmarried couple are put to marriage immediately when discovered. No lapau appeared in any of our several censuses (see G. N. Appell 1969). No social stigma or disability is associated with being a lapau. The fault lies with the mother and father and does not accrue to the offspring.

Separation of Unmarried Females From Young Men. A young girl refrains from being seen alone in the company of a male even before she begins to wear a sarong to cover her breasts. This starts a year or so before she becomes pubescent. Girls even before this age move about in a group of several girls or with their families (see L. W. R. Appell in this volume). Maidens group in this fashion for several reasons.

First, they are afraid of being caught or constrained by men (tabpa'an), and propositioned or induced into intercourse. Second, they are afraid of the jungle, particularly the primary forest, because of it being inhabited by potentially malevolent spirits. They are also concerned that if they go about by themselves they will be gossiped about as encouraging sexual attentions from men or engaging in illicit sexual relations (miagai). A maiden who does this is scolded by her parents as they are afraid that she might meet up with a man bent on no good or that she will become loose. Women going alone are also afraid of the possibility of meeting up with headhunters, although there has been no case of this since the early days of British administration in the early 1900s when it is alleged some of the North Borneo Company native police force did engage in this.

Married women are expected to behave in a similar fashion as maidens for the same reasons.

Relations between Married Persons and Others. It is believed unseemly for a married woman to spend too much time in the longhouse away from her apartment, to go for any length of time into the forest alone, or go to the fields alone. It is because women might be accused of engaging in illicit sexual relations or soliciting attentions, which would arouse their husbands' sexual jealousies (mongivogu). A husband who also spends too much time visiting another longhouse apartment may likely arouse jealousy in his wife and will be accused of philandering.

Are There Child-Rearing Behaviors to Ensure the Segregation of the Drives of Sex and Aggression? Can we explain the lack of Rungus sexual aggression by the patterns of child rearing? Children are wanted and cared for. They are nursed for four to six years if there is no subsequent sibling. And they are closely held in sarongs to the mother's or father's body while the parent goes on with his or her daily tasks. Children are frequently carried in these sarongs even while they are asleep but particularly when they are fussing and the parent is trying to put them to sleep. This goes on until they are two and a half to three years old and want to run about the longhouse. But even older children, if sick, are put in carrying sarongs to comfort them.

Toilet training is not focused on. Mothers generally ignore urinating babies, with the exception of rinsing themselves off, and respond to a defecating child by opening up a floor board and sitting him over it. Children are never admonished or scolded in this, nor are they specifically toilet trained.

The only behaviors that might be significant in segregating the drives of sex and aggression, other than the overall patterns of expected social behavior, are the prolonged physical contact between parent and child and the permissive toilet training. However, we have no evidence that these facilitate the individuation of these drives. Nor do we have any hypotheses as to how these behaviors might account for this.

Looking at the problem from another perspective, are there any child-rearing behaviors that specifically focus on the problem of keeping the drives of sex and aggression segregated? Is it perceived that the drives of sex and aggression are being commingled as they emerge in the development of Rungus children and young adults so that specific child-training methods have to be undertaken to segregate these? We saw no evidence of the drives of sex and aggression being commingled nor any concern on the part of Rungus parents to ensure that these drives were segregated.

Are There Any Child-Rearing Behaviors That Might Foster the Conjunction of Sex and Aggression? Are there any stages in the development of a child that are handled in such a manner that male aggression toward females or female aggression towards males are fostered which later on have to be individuated?

Parents may at times play affectionately with their children's genitalia while they are still toddlers rubbing them, kissing them, mouthing them, and shaking them. Occasionally older siblings do this to their younger siblings. Sometimes young boys have their genitalia tweaked by a male or female sibling, although by the time they are four or five they get rather irritated by this attention. Thus, during the early stages of child-rearing genitalia are not given an emotional loading of being potentially dangerous.

However, the genitalia become a source of shame later on. The terms for genitalia are relevant here. Toli refers to the penis; turoi refers to female genitalia. But there is a general term to refer to both male and female genitalia, kikuman. The root of this word is ikum, which means to be ashamed, so that kikuman literally means "that which can be shameful".

The only point in child rearing where a major crisis arises that has relevance for the question of developing male aggression toward females is when another child is born. At that point, the elder child is taken from the breast and given to the father to care for. Then for a period of several weeks the child may cry for his mother's attention and breast, and may exhibit temper tantrums when she or he is unsuccessful. While this is a major rejection, we found no evidence of any specific consequences from it in later life in the relations of men with women.

L. W. R. Appell (personal communication) argues that the social life of the longhouse may account for the apparent lack of a significant psychological insult from this deprivation. A longhouse is composed of many closely interrelated families who are in continual interaction. And the children are constantly playing together and participating in the activities of these other families. Thus, a young infant deprived of the breast and maternal care as the result of the birth of a subsequent sibling sees other children treated the same way, all through his or her life; and he or she also has other care-givers to turn to for solace. It thus becomes a fact of social life and not the psychological insult that might occur if this were experienced by a child in an isolated nuclear family.

Discontinuity in Sociocultural Conditioning.14 In addition to the discontinuity that occurs at weaning, there is another discontinuity in the developing personhood of a woman that occurs at marriage. She is expected to reverse her previous behavior of disinterest in sexual matters and now engage in sexual relations.

Prior to marriage, she is to express no interest in or knowledge of sexual matters, although in reality this is hard to achieve in a small longhouse community where marital relations are going on around her, where breeding dogs run in and out of the longhouse, and where success in pig and chicken raising, in which young females are closely involved, lies in the fecundity of sows and hens and the sexual arousal of boars and cocks. Whatever the extent of her knowledge, her public persona must be that of propriety itself prior to marriage. But immediately after marriage she is supposed to engage in close and intimate relations with a man, in which she has had no practice at any level. Since childhood she has been expected to avoid any close contact with males, except when groups of boys and girls go weeding together, sit around the longhouse and gossip, or help out in preparing and serving food and drink during religious occasions. Furthermore, Rungus etiquette demands that a married woman in public continue to behave circumspectly after marriage and not engage in public discussions of sex, joke about it, or display any behavior to encourage sexual advances. If men are discussing sexual matters or joking about them, women ignore the conversation, pretending not to hear what is being said. Instead they continue to pursue their own conversations and activities.

Marriage is also a period of discontinuity for men. And a few will refuse to engage in sexual relations with their wives for a time. But it is more usual for the bride to express that she is not attracted to, does not accept or desire her spouse (amu tumutun; see L. W. R. Appell in this volume). Does this behavior represent a major psychological cost of the discontinuity in cultural conditioning? Some repression must surely be at work in the cases of those brides who refuse their husbands' sexual advances. But it is difficult to separate those situations where the problem represents repression of the sexual drive from those where it is only a public display of what a young bride is supposed to do, or from those where the bride genuinely dislikes her husband and is intent in her shunning of him to obtain a divorce.

For most women we judged the repression of the sexual drive not to be severe. Their behavior is primarily the product of the inhibition of public displays of sexual interest, which is rewarded by positive sanctions for proper behavior and shaped by the threat of major, community-wide negative sanctions for illicit behavior. An indication of the validity of this conclusion is the ease with which sexual topics arise in the language of even young, unmarried Rungus females when startled (see A. A. Doolittle in this volume on latah among the Rungus). Furthermore, we never heard any complaints from wives over too many demands for coitus from their husbands.15 And we were rarely asked about medicine to prevent conception. When we were, it was by women who had six, seven, or eight children.

However, the question of psychogenetic dyspareunia and infertility is raised by the enculturation of the female, the expected behavior of the bride at the wedding in which she is to show no interest in any of the proceedings, the lack of instruction for the bride on sexual matters prior to marriage, and the resultant discontinuity in cultural conditioning that occurs when the bride is supposed to respond to sexual advances. We have no evidence of dyspareunia, which may not be significant due to the inhibition on talking about sexual matters. Nevertheless, we never heard any complaints from men about female frigidity. This concept just did not appear in their lexicon.

Moreover, in a sample of 57 females 77.2% produced children prior to or within the second year of marriage, and a further 12% had produced children within the third year of their marriage. These numbers are high, considering the fact that not all women have begun to menstruate at the time of marriage. And they indicate that inhibitions with respect to coitus are not deeply seated and that there appears to be an absence of psychogenic infertility or even dyspareunia as a result of the cultural imperatives with regard to fornication, adultery, and public displays of sexual interest.

Moreover, children are wanted and appreciated. Abortion does not occur. There is no term for it, nor does the concept arise in any discussion of pregnancies. And husbands and wives closely depend on each other for support and affection. In fact, sexual jealousy is very prevalent and is a major feature of the relations between men and women. Both sexes frequently display emotions of jealousy, and accusations of infidelity arising from ungrounded suspicions or even just from the fear of infidelity are common. Brides are known to engage in these even during the period when they are publicly rejecting their husbands and refusing to accept the role of wife.

Inhibition of Aggression

Aggression, even the symbolic expression of aggression, is highly inhibited by various jural and supernatural sanctions which support each other. First there is the concept of komomoli. Komomoli is a ritual delict that occurs when the action of an individual implies that someone has died. For example, a corpse can not be removed for burial by way of the entry ladders at either end of the longhouse, as it takes the corpse past other apartments implicating them in a death. It can only be removed from its apartment out the side of the working area where a special opening is made. Thus, if an individual on leaving the longhouse exits through this working area in the front of an apartment rather than by the end ladders, this is similar to the removal of a corpse, and it is komomoli to the members of that apartment. If a spouse starts repairing that side of the apartment or the roofing over it while his spouse is asleep, this suggests that she is dead and is considered komomoli. If a spouse gets up and leaves while the other is still sleeping without waking him or her, this is an implication of death, and causes komomoli.

Thus, there are various ritual acts and statements that occur only when someone has died, and for a widowed spouse these are highly elaborate. And if an individual engages in any of these ritual acts when there has been no death, the offender must give a chicken to the members of the domestic family that has been implicated. This is so they can kill the chicken and put blood on their ankles along with the proper prayers to remove the threat of an actual death occurring.

Thus, there is the possibility of expressing aggression to one's spouse by engaging in any of these various acts and thereby implying she or he is dead. And if this is done in anger and intentionally, it is viewed as a very serious delict, and ritual compensation must be paid.

Kotiguras (a form of moniguras--see Table Two) involves an act of cutting the personal possessions of an individual or those of a domestic family. It can be roughly translated as "has been threatened". If an individual finds his clothes cut, if fences of the family's swiddens are cut by someone else, particularly in anger, then the offender must give a chicken to blood the family. If this is not done, the action of using a bush knife on the property of another is considered a threat to the soul of the owner or owners so that they will fall ill. If there is no way to identify the offender, the family or the individual threatened will take one of the family's chickens for the ritual cleansing.

Thus, there is an extensive cultural pattern of inhibiting any acts of aggression. Acts of kotiguras and komomoli seldom occur both because of the fine and the ritual implications.

In addition to the inhibition of expressing aggression to another Rungus, there is an extensive cultural pattern of inhibiting illegal sexual acts. Sex and aggression are highly segregated in Rungus society, as we have also shown in linguistic behavior. The behaviors of sex and aggression do not appear in the same environment. And when there is the possibility that they might come together, there are jural sanctions to inhibit such behavior. For example, where the concepts of sex and aggression do begin to conflate as in the mentioning of genitalia to give insult or to express anger toward someone, the offended individual may sue the offender for a piece of brassware (see above). Finally, there is an attitude towards women whereby they are highly respected, which results in their volition in matters of sex remaining unimpaired.