أولا :devil:

و سانيا و ده الأهم:

The thing that most bewildered the prudish white about the Eskimo’s connubial eccentricities—wife lending, wife swapping, polyandry, and polygyny—was the good nature with which the arrangements were made. Occasionally an Eskimo man would beat his wife for being unfaithful—not because she had had sexual intercourse with someone else, but because she had taken it upon herself to grant rights that were the husband’s privilege to bestow. The next week he himself might have lent her to the same man. Wife exchange existed to some extent in all Eskimo groups that have been studied; the explanation is that such an exchange was one of the best ways to formalize an economic partnership or a social alliance. With so few opportunities existing to create bonds between families, the Eskimo had to use ingenuity, and one of the best methods was exchanging sexual rights.

Wife lending and wife exchange must therefore be understood not as examples of sexual license but as clever social mechanisms that functioned to unify small groups. Further, wife lending was a wise investment for the future, because the lender knew that eventually he would be a borrower. Perhaps he had to go on a long journey and his wife could not accompany him because she was sick or pregnant; then he borrowed his friend’s wife. He was not a lecher who wanted a woman, but a man who needed such essential services as cooking and serving. While he was out hunting, his friend’s wife made the igloo habitable, laid out dry stockings for him, made fresh water from melted ice, and got ready to cook the game he brought back. Similarly, polyandry and polygyny were essential, for a lone Eskimo could not survive. He or she had to become attached to some family.

Wife exchange usually was an essential ritual in the formation of an economic partnership between hunters. When two men agreed to become partners, they symbolically extended the bonds of kinship to each other. They became in effect related by marriage by the act of exchanging wives for a while. In northern Alaska in particular, wives were exchanged as a sort of attestation to the formation of a partnership. The wives rarely objected, since, among other reasons, each stood to profit economically because of her husband’s new economic bond. The partnership arrangement also extended to the children. A child called his father’s partner by a special name, which freely translated means “the man who has had intercourse with my mother.” The child also used a special name- qatangun—for his father’s partner’s sons, who might, of course, be his half brothers. He knew that if he was ever in trouble he could call on his qatangun for help and his request would be honored.

Echange was a necessity of Eskimo life that applied to things as well as wives. The explorers of North America made much of what seemed to them an inordinate preoccupation by the Eskimo with gift giving. Over and over the explorers related their disillusionment when the Eskimo failed to have the “courtesy” to thank them for gifts. And the explorers also invariably expressed amazement that their unacknowledged gifts were later remembered and repaid in full. The explorers merely regarded gift giving as a quaint Eskimo custom and did not recognize it as a type of exchange.

When one Eskimo gave to another in his band, he was usually giving to a relative or to a partner. Such an exchange was not a gift, and that was why the receiver did not offer thanks. An Eskimo praised a hunter for the way he hurled the harpoon but not for the way he shared the meat from the seal the harpoon killed. Sharing was a kinsman’s due, and it was not in the category of a gift. The arctic explorer Peter Freuchen once made the mistake of thanking an Eskimo hunter, with whom he had been living, for some meat. Freuchen’s bad manners were promptly corrected: “You must not thank for your meat; it is your right to get parts. In this country, nobody wishes to be dependent upon others. … With gifts you make slaves just as with whips you make dogs!”

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/m...1968_6_65.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit





سـِلو بلدنا يا أمو سيد :10: