The following text revives a discussion that begun in 1865, when John Ferguson McLennan published Primitive Marriage. In it, he sustained ideas that were, and still are revolutionary, proposing that somewhere in our past we, human beings, were ignorant of the relationship between sexuality and procreation. Besides, McLennan was also the first to imagine that a matriarchal organization of society had preceded the patriarchal system in force today. At the time, these ideas were certainly daring.
Moreover, this author also participated in the extended debate formed around the idea that sexual intercourse in primitive societies was characterized by promiscuity, a standpoint he defended with other renowned researchers such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Johann Jakob Bachofen, and James Frazer. Supporting McLennan’s theory, Frazer concluded that there was a time when all people were ignorant of physiological paternity.
However, the interventions of Sigmund Freud and Edvard Westermarck imposed the idea that human society was, since its very beginning, structured around the father and the monogamous family. For a while, their standpoint silenced the discussion.
In 1966, Edmund Leach reawakened the debate by announcing that physiological paternity was recognized as a cultural fact everywhere in the world, and that to speak of ignorance on this topic inferred that one considered the natives as “childish, stupid, superstitious.” [Leach, 1969]
In her answer, Suzan Montague contrasted the nature-culture dichotomy of our Judeo-Christian universe with the conception of the Trobrianders (Papua New Guinea), a people who, until recently, did not know the facts of procreation as we understand them, its conception resting on a totem-rank dichotomy. Therefore, establishing physiological paternity was not of relevance for the Trobrianders, since the structure of their society did not take it into account. On the other hand, the social father – who does not exist or has a very marginalized function as a godfather in our societies – played a decisive role in theirs: around him was the relationship father-child organized. Through him, the heritage of the clan and the totem were also transmitted, determining elements for possessing land. As Torben Monberg summarized, every culture develops the logical markers that are necessary for framing its vision of the world [4].
In this first part, we go back to the time when all humans lived as nomads, completely dependent on nature that provided them with their sustenance. In the remnants of those bygone worlds, we discover which functions these populations attributed to sexuality, and how they considered their procreative role. However, the scarcity of information we possess on these people has made it necessary to approach the subject from another slant.
During the last few hundred years, travelers, explorers, missionaries, ethnologists and other scientists have described the lifestyles and customs of communities around the world that were isolated from Western civilizing currents. Some of their ancestral beliefs, kept intact and perpetuated from generation to generation, will allow us to retrace the state of knowledge of their forefathers. To this journey in time and space, this initial part is dedicated.