Relations among Generations in Time-Limited Cultures

Theodore Schwartz

Although youth and age still follow one after the other, the circle of successive generations is not unbroken, for the paths of young and old extend through time and change. When adulthood is reached, youth may find itself (or think itself to be) in new terrain. In other words, discontinuities as well as continuities of culture exist through time. Such changes are not new, but the rate of change relative to the human life span—the longitudinal effect—has accelerated. The variability, distinctiveness, and relative isolation of cultures arrayed in geographic space has diminished greatly, given worldwide interdependence and the means for rapid and massive culture transfer. As a result, cultures may now be located more in time than in space. In the new experiences and identities of successive generations lies the replacement of the lost spatial variability.

The question "What is culture?" can no longer be answered in any way that does not consider what culture is becoming. Margaret Mead, with her sensitivity to crucial issues, has been preeminent among anthropologists in suggesting answers to this question. The span of time and change encompassed by her work in many cul-

tures, particularly that of the Manus people of the Admiralty Islands of Melanesia, has contributed to her perceptiveness of the relations among cultural generations. It is now clear that the concept of generations is crucial to the understanding of the structures of cultures. Such relations range from the theoretical extremes of replication to complete discontinuity between cultural generations. In between lie the many compromises of relations among generations.

This paper discusses some aspects of the structure of generationally stratified cultures, which are seen as consisting of a set of coeval time-limited or generational cultures. The temporal structure of a culture varies with its cultural history, its historical situation, and its state or phase. All of these aspects determine the relations among coexisting generations—the bonds that unite and the gradients that differentiate their members in some degree of social and cultural integration.

A general statement on generationally stratified cultures is followed by an ethnographic example of narrower scope. The example is drawn from my research in Manus, which I began in 1953 as a participant in the longitudinal study conducted by Mead and others since 1928. The example deals with the relations between those who remain at home in their Manus village and the educated progeny of that village, now employed in all parts of Papua New Guinea. It discusses the derivation of bonds and intergenerational sanctions that continue to unite generations that otherwise appear to be markedly differentiated. The situation described is itself phase-relative, that is, subject to change in the process of culture change itself. It illustrates one of the as yet uncataloged possibilities of relations in generationally stratified cultures.

Anthropologists were not the first to focus on the importance of cultural generations. We were, perhaps, excessively concerned with the documentation or reconstruction of cultures "fixed" in time to become a part of the permanent record of human ways of being. The study of acculturation was concerned with relations between cultures from different places which had come into contact, rather than with the internal culture contact between generations. But internal acculturation may now be near in importance to enculturation in the overall cultural process. Temporal structures in the sense of age-grades or age-linked statuses and ritual transitions were,

of course, well studied and are prerequisite to understanding a more dynamic structure.

Emergent generational cultures have long been important to historians and students of art and literature who were accustomed to examining such aggregates as the Spanish poets of the 1890s or the "lost generation." Generations have been explored by philosophers, particularly those concerned with the historical relativity or emergent character of human nature and ideas. The notion is central to the work of Ortega Y Gasset and richly analyzed by Julián Marías. Several sociologists, under the stimulus of Mannheim, have considered the question of generational change, character, duration, and identity. David Riesman, a sociologist and ethnographer of generations and institutions, began by identifying generations in American culture in terms of their social character. This was seen largely as their cultural orientations—as traditionalists attuned to the past, as status or cultural migrants guided by internalized motives, or as other-directed shoppers amidst the constant turnover of current peer styles. These were modes of conformity beyond which possibilities of autonomy were envisaged. Alvin Toffler evoked wide public response to his characterization of the effects of rapid culture change on the nature of culture itself. Margaret Mead's "postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative" modes of cultural transmission parallel Riesman's types to some extent but reflect her cross-cultural perspective and the 1970s concern with commitment, perhaps the central problem of autonomy.

In this paper, the term "generation" is not being used in the traditional genealogical sense appropriate only to particular lineages. As obvious as it seems, we often have had to be reminded that, as P. T. Barnum put it (although he had something else in mind), "There's one born every minute." To which we must add that one dies every minute. The flow of cultural generations is a continuum to which each individual born contributes and from which each individual passing subtracts. But to classify and to segment is human, and to classify in particular ways depends on human motives and models. We must be reminded that cultural generations, usually conceived of as sequential, do not disappear as predecessors give rise to their successors, but that different generations are coeval and must relate, communicate, exchange, and otherwise interact to constitute a society.

If generations are segments perceived or imposed on a continuum, a "generation" may be defined as those individuals in the flow of population through time who see themselves or are seen by others as culturally distinguished from others who preceded or followed them. Bennett Berger has pointed out that we may all too avidly distinguish and name generations, and that the seeming acceleration of generational turnover may depend as much on this avidity as on real change. He correctly notes that even for the same age group, there exists a plurality of "generations" or cultural styles. We may term these "complementary generations"—that is, an age cohort may be divided among alternative generational cultures covering various time spans. At the same time, these complementary generations coexist with all predecessor and successor generations that still have living members. All such segments taken together—whether in the relations of complement, predecessor, or successor to each other—constitute the generation-stratified culture.

There are both objective and subjective boundary markers of cultural generations. Boundaries may be subject to various numerologies—decades and centuries being most obvious in the perceptions of Western historians. Such boundaries would seem totally arbitrary unless, perhaps, we have attuned our expectations for change to such units as the "sixties" or "twenties," as the current nostalgia fad might indicate. We have become a generation of generation watchers with the bumper-sticker motto, "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be." Less arbitrary is the delimitation of generations by natural and historic events marking discontinuities of experience for the members of sequent generations. Calamities—wars, droughts, depressions—make good generational watersheds, although paradoxically, perhaps, because they evoke nostalgia for the solidarity of adversity. (Italians say it another way: "We had it better when we had it worse.")

Boundaries may often seem vague and generations may intergrade or overlap, so that the span of a generation seems indeterminate or as arbitrary as it may be when reckoned in decades. Even so, most individuals will still have an anchor point. One's generation is not coterminous with one's life span. Halcyon days may serve as well as societal traumas as anchor points. In our culture, anchorage seems to occur in late adolescence and early adulthood.

In a school-centered culture, "class-years" occur at a suitable rate to serve as labels in the rapid turnover of academic "generations." For most, high school, physical and sexual maturity, dating or courting, and life in extrafamilial society among friends and peers are at their height. This period may be prolonged by extended education, perhaps even by war, or terminated by commitments to work or marriage. Adhering to each individual's generational anchor point is a cluster of emblematic traits much like those of space-bounded cultures (Schwartz 1975b )—food preferences, songs and musicians, language with its generational slang, clothing styles, causes, and culture heroes.

Of particular concern here is the question of the relations between coeval generations—of the bonds, gradients, sanctions, and conflicts among contemporaries who are members of differing generations. For this paper, Manus will be considered as a representative of those societies in which the repetitive cycle of generations has only recently and partially been broken, leaving certain transitional features in evidence.

Mead's first study of Manus was in 1928. Her books Growing Up in New Guinea and Kinship in the Admiralty Islands tell us more than we deserve, for that period of our science, of kinship behavior and of the relations of authority, nurturance, competition, obligation, and support that made up the circle of intergenerational relations. In a specialized culture of fishermen who lived on pile houses over the shallow lagoons within the reefs of the Admiralty Islands, we follow toddlers encouraged to independence, venturing into a mixed-age play group, exercising constantly their early competence in a hazardous marine environment. And in this play group, they stayed through childhood and youth until in marriage they reluctantly assumed the full burdens of adult responsibility. By at least eight years of age, girls served as child nurses. But even with their younger siblings on their hips or backs, they were not severed from the play group. Boys played at fishing, joined the expeditions of their elders, and contributed substantially as they got older. They played an important but passive cultural role, providing the occasions for the economy of ceremonial exchange that would revolve around the repeated validation of their future, their present, and their past marriages, the birth of their children, their deaths, and their later commemoration. The younger men began their adult

responsibility deeply obligated to the kinsmen entrepreneurs who had financed their marriages. Their choice was either to contend for prestige at some level or to be regarded as rubbish, a man without a name, perhaps an unimportant supporter of a lesser "big man." From the freedom and comradeship of the play group and the youth group, the young man moved on to the prestige treadmill upon which his interests and values were to become focused. The woman was not exempt. She would be involved in exchange on behalf of her brothers, and her husbands; in recent times at least, she might herself be a party in exchange.

A further aspect of this discontinuity between youth and adulthood was the relatively late recruitment of the young to the full weight of the moral-religious system. In this system they had often provided the occasion (in their serious illnesses, for example) for their elders to invoke the ghosts of the lineage to diagnose the adult sins that had provoked the theft of their soul stuff. Not until early adulthood did their own behavior become a moral concern of the ghosts. In yet another pioneering paper, Mead (1932) discussed as an early counter-Piagetian argument (see Langness, Shweder, and LeVine in this volume) the relatively nonanimistic perceptions of causal relations by children in comparison with the explanations of adults. Again, this seems to indicate a delayed induction into the full adult culture.

If these observations had represented only a monographic fossil in the anthropological record, they would nevertheless have been of great interest as depicting one possibility in the process of enculturation. But in the context of another series of studies that Mead began in 1953, twenty-five years after her initial work in Manus, these discontinuities take on a greater importance in our understanding of the process of rapid culture change. Within the limits of their means, the Manus made a remarkably vigorous and in many ways successful adaptation to the challenge of seemingly overwhelming culture contact. Various aspects of Manus culture may have preadapted them to seek to acquire and master European culture, wealth, and knowledge. Contributing to the process was their adaptation to seafaring, fishing, trade, and ceremonial exchange in a prestige system that motivated so many to strive for renown. Mead states in New Lives for Old that delayed induction into the full adult traditional culture was one of the factors that

enabled the immediately post-World War II generation of young men to chose entry into the European culture (or at least into a native version of it) rather than to take up the adult roles and ceremonial responsibilities that awaited them in their own culture.

In the initial phase of what was to become known as the Paliau Movement (named after its leader; see Mead 1956, and Schwartz 1962, 1975a ), this Hamlinesque defection by an entire generation was at first resisted by the leaders of the parental generation. It seems likely that the sanction of ideological and physical withdrawal from the villages would have brought them around. While the question was still unresolved, all were swept into commitment to the movement by the tidal wave of a "cargo cult" that promised them immediate parity with the Europeans through the supernatural intervention of Jesus, who would lead their own modernized ancestors to a wealth-laden reunion with the living. The cult subsided, leaving the movement with an assimilative program and an increasingly routinized native separatist church in its place. The history of the next twenty-five years cannot be offered here. The movement accomplished much; a new way of life, in many ways disappointingly (to its followers) more native than European, was instituted. Intermittent plateau phases led to cult revivals, each more restricted in spread than those before it. The movement became acceptable to the Australian administration and then was increasingly absorbed into district and emerging national politics. While the Manus moved to the beaches and built more "European"-shaped thatch and scrap metal houses and reorganized their lives around new village routines, they still made their living by fishing from their outrigger canoes. Their incomes allowed only very limited access to the goods that would enable them to live in a more European manner.

The greatest discontinuity stemmed from the secular, government schools established in the mid-1950s which were part of a crash program to prepare for self-government in the near future. In each village within the area of the Paliau Movement, children left the free-form life of the play group at the age of six to spend long disciplined days reciting and being recited at in English; in the afternoons they returned to their home, language, and play. For at least fifteen years, most of these children went on to high school, vocational, technical, and agricultural schools, to the military or

police service, or to jobs. Each of these destinations removed them from the village for most of the year, and their adolescence was filled with intensive training unrelated to their traditional cultures and the continuing activities of their parents. Recently other ethnic groups are catching up with the Manus. The job market has become more saturated and an increasing number of young people do not go beyond the village primary school or are returned to the village after a year or two of secondary school. The result, however, is that young men and women from Manus are disproportionately represented in the educated work force all over Papua New Guinea, which became self-governing in 1973. There are many Manus students at the University of Papua New Guinea and among its early graduates. Others hold government positions or are clerks, teachers, mechanics, or members of the police or armed forces.

During my four research visits of almost five years' duration over a twenty-year period, changes were seen in the lives of those who remained in the village. Many adults had grown up within the contact culture and the new way of the Paliau Movement but they had done so prior to the opportunity for modern education. The changes were far less than the adherents of the Paliau Movement had hoped for in 1946. During our visit in 1953, it seemed that so much of traditional practice was gone forever, having been deliberately discarded. This was initially disappointing to me, steeped as I was in the classic ethnographies. There were church services, village meetings, and court cases, but the drums, the dancing, the ceremonial seemed gone—looked upon with disdain as the "stinking ways of our ancestors."

On later visits, I learned to distinguish better between change in the "state" of the culture, responsive to changes in the perceived situation, and change in the culture itself. The past is not so easily extirpated. Expectations were gradually recalibrated as hope dwindled for the instantaneous or imminent achievement of a European way of life or, perhaps more precisely, a European (including American and Australian) standard of living. This hope was shifted back and forth from the cult to the movement, then to cooperatives, to local government councils, and to the schools and the careers they promised. But for adults, life went on increasingly as before, selectively reactivating core elements of the premovement past.

During this time, some exchanges were initiated on the occasion of marriages in the village. At first, there was embarrassment about these exchanges, which defied the attempts of Paliau, who had targeted them for extinction as dissipative of wealth and energy. But by 1963, they were being celebrated with "native" costumes and a revival of the older style dancing and drumming—without the traditional phallic exposure but with great hilarity over the gestures that once accompanied it. To my amazement (thinking back on earlier rigidities), Paliau staged such a dance in 1973 in which he, wearing the dog's teeth ornaments of a traditional "Big Man," was the featured dancer. The renascence of the exchanges was not a simple revival. There were new elements. Prestige was attached especially to the exchange of imported goods (such as clothing, bicycles, outboard motors, and watches) and imported foods (such as bags of sugar, flour, and rice) against large amounts of Australian currency, which had replaced the dog's teeth and shell money of old. The hope of wealth was displaced upon the exchange system that, as in the past, assembled large amounts of wealth momentarily in the name of the principals to the exchange, only to distribute it for reassemblage over other nodes in the network of exchange.

A revival of another updated form of the old ceremonial exchanges had begun in 1953. From that date through 1967, at least ninety instances of the "mother's teeth" exchange (explained later) had taken place in the Manus village, Peri. Each involved many participants and considerable amounts of wealth and consumables. These exchanges were continuing as a major focus of adult interest in 1973.

During a field period from 1963 to 1967, I conducted an ethnographic survey of all the peoples of the Admiralty Islands. It was then that I began to pick up instances of another "survival" among the Manus and others of the traditional belief in the power of the father's sister, her children and, more extensively, of the father's matrilineage to curse (or bless) the members of his patrilineage (Mead, 1934). In 1953, informants had discussed this as if it were a defunct custom. It was especially thought that they could strike the wives of men of the patrilineage with barrenness, or that the curse could cause a man or woman to lose interest in food and work, perhaps to the point of death. But usually long before this time, the cause of the disease would be diagnosed and separated from other

causes, such as ghostly wrath or an encounter with bush spirits, and the father's sister would have been placated. By another incantation, she could remove the curse.

Why are the exchanges called "mother's teeth," and what has this to do with the father's sister's curse? Manus and other Admiralty Island societies were organized around villages composed of patrilineal lineages (grouped as clans). Depending on the ethnic group, totemic food taboos, or simply the taboos themselves without the belief in descent from the taboo species, were inherited matrilineally along with certain spiritual powers (of cursing or blessing) over the related patrilineage. Each man's exchange network depends on his "sisters": the women of his patrilineal lineage or clan who have married into other clans. These women are, in a sense, compensated and armed with sanctions to protect their rights in the patrimony of the clan they have enriched (in leaving) as well as the residual rights of their progeny. From the point of view of the patrilineal clan, its dispersed progeny through females are resources and potential recruits. These sanctions also would have supported the Manus ideal marriage, in which cross-cousins arrange for the marriage of their children. Cross-cutting ties are carefully conserved on both sides, and spiritually, the demands of the exogam and her progeny (one's cross-cousins through the father's sister) are backed by the power of cursing and blessing.

Traditionally, then, the father's sister's curse has been an intersegmental sanction. We may picture it as interlacing the vertical segments of the clan-lineage structure. With this, it is now possible to see the mother's teeth exchange as the same relationship but acting, or at least initiated, in the opposite direction, accomplishing or exploiting the same interlacing. In it, members of a clan (usually of a specific lineage of the clan) will approach some of the progeny of a woman (usually deceased) of the clan and will challenge them to pay for the teeth of their mother. This woman had been "paid for" many times over since her betrothal, but now her matrilineal descendants are reminded that she bore all of them or their parents and that she "wore out her teeth" for them, premasticating the food that she stuffed into their mouths as infants. It is interesting that it is the mastication rather than her suckling that is used to evoke a sense of obligation in her descendants. We could guess that the sense of being stuffed with food and some anxiety (manifested in

other ways) about getting it down, through, and out may be the dominant memory of the oral stage (premasticated feeding starts within the first three months after birth). We could, less speculatively, link the demand for the mother's teeth with its traditional payment in dog's teeth—an obvious homonymy.

There are many complications, of course, but the above must suffice to indicate the essence of this traditional relationship. The intergenerational significance now becomes apparent when we turn to examine how these bonds and sanctions between the vertical segments of Manus society became converted, under recent circumstances, to bonds and sanctions between differentiated generations. These generations may be viewed as horizontal segments in a generationally stratified culture.

By 1963, the cash yield of village produce had changed little. And yet, more and more expensive goods and foods were turning up at marriage and mother's teeth exchanges. It is true that the appearance of wealth was magnified by the number of times the same cash or objects could be used in different exchanges. It is also true that in gambling with cards, amounts of money were won and lost in one night which few natives could earn in many months. Both winner and losers were participants in this symbolic magnitude, and the informal but strongly felt rule was that the winnings were not to be dissipated but rather kept in the gambling circuit. Nevertheless, it was apparent that there was by now a constant flux of new wealth from a major source—the salaries of the young people of the village who were working in all parts of Papua New Guinea. In some cases, money or articles requested were mailed or shipped back to the village, but it had also become a common practice for villagers to visit their kin in the towns and outstations where they were working. Visiting relatives often stayed for many months, had their fares paid, and were sent home by their kin loaded with gifts. In 1967, there had only been a few outboard motors in native hands at our base village. In 1973, there were thirty-nine—about half of them still in working condition. Between 20,000 and 30,000 dollars had been paid for them with money derived mainly from the salaried progeny of the village.

I had a discussion with one young Manus man, a university graduate who now held an important government position. We discussed his father, whom I had known for twenty years—an impor-

tant figure in the Paliau Movement. The old man had spent about six months visiting with his son's family about a year before. In spite of the son's generosity—it took all his son could manage to provide for his father's trip and gifts—the old man had returned home dissatisfied with his treatment. Now the father kept writing for an outboard motor that would cost at least 800 dollars—a powerful motor commensurate with his prestige. The son complained bitterly to me that other relatives made demands on him as well, and that he never could save any money or, for that matter, stay out of debt. He felt that he should be able to use his money to live at a level commensurate with his needs and status as a highly educated government official living in the capital, but he saw no hope that he would be able to buy even a car. I asked him why he didn't resist the demands of his relatives: "Oi kembule mamachi ?" (Is your forehead ashamed?) "No," he replied, "Yo kwinyol ." (My buttocks are afraid.) He told me that his father had cursed him (though he was not at the time aware of it) when the old man had returned dissatisfied to his village. As a result, the son had failed an examination and missed a job opportunity.

All the instances of the father's sister's curse I have heard of since 1963 have been similar to this one. They seem not to be based on grievances toward the young person's parents; instead, they are directed toward the young persons themselves as retaliation for some slight or for some unfulfilled request. The alleged effects of the curse were in every case a setback to the career of the young person. Failure of a school examination, being fired unjustly from a job, loss of interest or motivation in a job or school that leads the young person unaccountably to leave without explanation to return to the village, an impulse to steal from an employer that led to being fired or to a jail term—all of these were immediately recognized as the results of cursing. The slighted relative is found, the grievance is assuaged, and the situation is remedied if it is remediable. It also became apparent that the cursing power was no longer specific to the father's sister's line. The young people thought of it as something that older people of the parental generation will do when their wishes are denied. I encountered no instance in which a sibling or cousin considered of one's own generation used the curse. There were other sanctions as well applying generally between those who stayed at home—the noneducated and the nonemployed school leavers, and those who were away at work. One could not

avoid making appropriate contributions to mother's teeth exchanges, affinal exchanges, or exchanges in the same social form occasioned by death and mourning. The absentee is not merely a donor. He is entitled to his part of the reciprocal distribution; but if he was not there, his kin were recipients on his behalf.

This situation, with perhaps widely differing kinship rationales, is a well-known phenomenon in developing countries that are making the transition from a kinship-based to a cash-based contractual society. In West Africa, it has often been discussed under the name of "parasitism." A gradient of wealth, knowledge, and power seemingly develops with the educated, salaried class at the high end of the gradient. And yet, in Manus at least, this gradient is nullified so far by the effective operation of what we may call "forward sanctions" operating from the older upon a younger generation and the ineffectiveness of "black sanctions" operating from the younger upon the older generation. The sanction of withdrawal, an effective back sanction under some circumstances (as in the early stage of the Paliau Movement), is nullified by the father's sister's curse, which can act over any distance, and by the practice that brings relatives to your door at your most distant posting.

In summary, what had been a sanction operating between lineages (cross-generational, or vertical segments) has been adapted as a generational sanction (operating between generations, or horizontal segments). There has been a corresponding shift in the set of kin who may use the sanction from the father's matrilineage to "the old people"—a generation. A branching of the younger generation is developing between stay-at-home and away-at-work complementary generations. The relation between the two is comparable to the relation between the endogamic and exogamic sexes—those who remain resident in the clan and those who marry out—in the traditional social structure. But the sanctioning power is reversed: it is the stay-at-home generation that has the compensatory sanctions to enforce their claims on the resources of the dispersed wage earners. Whether the younger stay-at-home generation will succeed to the use of the cursing sanction as they get older remains to be seen. They are able to make other claims based on less drastic kinship sanctions on the away-at-work generation.

It appears that the sanctions will remain effective as long as the generations remain a part of a single community of belief in spite of the educational gradient that separates them. They will continue

to pay indefinitely for their mother's teeth and to ward off their father's sister's curse. All of those with whom I spoke shared these and comparable beliefs. In spite of their having been kidnapped by an alien culture, perhaps the early years, the afternoons, and the school holidays sufficed for their induction at the deeper levels of their culture.

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