mundugumor

mundugumor

Mundugumor are located on the Yuat River, Papua New Guinea. Each household consisted of the male, his wife or wives, and their children. Also may be, attached unimportant unmarried men and elderly relatives too. They are very hostile feeling people. Aggressive. One might say, no nurturing or love found. It was like a burden to care for the children, however it was done. When the women would carry the children, it was either in a very uncomfortable basket or the child held on to the mother with no protection in case he or she let go.
The men achieved their positions with personal initiative, accumulation of wives, how they control their produce and livestock, leadership in warfare, to name a few. Any neighboring villages or tribes feared the Mundugumor because of how fierce they were. The Mundugumor women were taught to be weaker than the men physically.
The men preferred daughters because later they could be used in exchange for wives for themselves. The women preferred sons because it would later cause trouble for their husbands and would favor them when it came to taking care of. They would send their children to enemy groups as hostages for tokens of good faith. They sent the children because they were of lesser value then adults if harmed.
The Mundugumor were very hostile with their same sex. The men were suspicious of one another, the sons think their fathers are claiming their sisters for the exchanges in wives, and brothers were always competing for their rights to use sisters in their own marriages. A relationship from a mother to son or daughter was relaxed. Mundugumor men do not gather socially for any purpose other than for raids and fighting. Whereas the women would assist one another unless they had their own marriage obligations, but it was informal. Also if women were wives to the same man, they rarely got along and were in competition for the attention of their husbands or children.
After reading just briefly in the textbook,...