The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-DayChamberlain, Alexander Francis
Science
The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought: Studies of the Activities and Influences of the Child Among Primitive Peoples, Their Analogues and Survivals in the Civilization of To-Day
Chamberlain, Alexander Francis
Child rearing; Children -- Folklore; Folklore and children
Much too little has been made of the bright side of child-life among the
lower races. But from even the most primitive of tribes all traces of
the golden age of childhood are not absent. Powers, speaking of the
Yurok Indians of California, notes "the happy cackle of brown babies
tumbling on their heads with the puppies" (519. 51), and of the Wintun,
in the wild-clover season, "their little ones frolicked and tumbled on
their heads in the soft sunshine, or cropped the clover on all-fours
like a tender calf" (519. 231). Of the Pawnee Indians, Irving says (478.
214): "In the farther part of the building about a dozen naked children,
with faces almost hid by their tangled hair, were rolling and wrestling
upon the floor, occasionally causing the lodge to re-echo with their
childish glee." Mr. im Thurn, while among the Indians of Guiana, had his
attention "especially attracted by one merry little fellow of about five
years old, whom I first saw squatting, as on the top of a hill, on top
of a turtle-shell twice as big as himself, with his knees drawn up to
his chin, and solemnly smoking a long bark cigarette" (477. 39). Of the
wild Indians of the West, Colonel Dodge tells us: "The little children
are much petted and spoiled; tumbling and climbing, unreproved, over the
father and his visitors in the lodge, and never seem to be an annoyance
or in the way" (432. 189). Mr. MacCauley, who visited the Seminole
Indians of Florida, says: "I remember seeing, one day, one jolly little
fellow, lolling and rollicking on his mother's back, kicking her and
tugging away at the strings of beads which hung temptingly between her
shoulders, while the mother, hand-free, bore on one shoulder a log,
which, a moment afterwards, still keeping her baby on her back as she
did so, she chopped into small wood for the camp-fire." (496. 498).
There is a Zuñi story of a young maiden, "who, strolling along, saw a
beautiful little baby boy bathing in the waters of a spring; she was so
pleased with his beauty that she took him home, and told her mother that
she had found a lovely little boy" (358. 544). Unfortunately, it turned
out to be a serpent in the end.
_Kissing_.
As Darwin and other authorities have remarked, there are races of men
upon the face of the earth, in America, in Africa, in Asia, and in the
Island world, who, when first seen of white discoverers, knew not what
it meant to kiss (499. 139). The following statement will serve for
others than the people to whom it refers: "The only kiss of which the
Annamite woman is cognizant is to place her nose against the man's
cheek, and to rub it gently up and down, with a kind of canine sniff."
Mantegazza tells us that Raden-Saleh, a "noble and intelligent" Javanese
painter, told him that, "like all Malays, he considered there was more
tenderness in the contact of the noses than of the lips," and even the
Japanese, the English of the extreme Orient, were once ignorant of the
art of kissing (499. 139).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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