Rather than risk overwhelming you with dozens more examples of this community-building, conflict-reducing human sexuality, we’ll conclude with just one more. Anthropologists William and Jean Crocker visited and studied the Canela people—also of the Brazilian Amazon region—for more than three decades, beginning in the late 1950s. They explain:
It is difficult for members of a modern individualistic society to imagine the extent to which the Canela saw the group and the tribe as more important than the individual. Generosity and sharing was the ideal, while withholding was a social evil. Sharing possessions brought esteem. Sharing one’s body was a direct corollary. Desiring control over one’s goods and self was a form of stinginess. In this context, it is easy to understand why women chose to please men and why men chose to please women who expressed strong sexual needs.
Recognized as a way to build and maintain a network of mutually beneficial relationships, nonreproductive sex no longer requires special explanations. Homosexuality, for example, becomes far less confusing, in that it is, as E. O. Wilson has written, “above all a form of bonding ... consistent with the greater part of heterosexual behavior as a device that cements relationships.”29
Paternity certainty, far from being the universal and overriding obsession of all men everywhere and always, as the standard narrative insists, was likely a nonissue to men who lived before agriculture and resulting concerns with passing property through lines of paternal descent.
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In a personal communication, Don Pollock makes an interesting point about the notion of multiple fatherhood, writing, “I have always found the Kulina notion that more than one man may be a ‘biological’ father to a child to be, ironically, similar to the genetic reality: in a small, genetically homogeneous population (or close to it, after many generations of in-marrying), every child has close genetic similarities to all of the men with whom his or her mother had sexual relations—even to those the mother was not involved with.”
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The diffused sense of parental responsibility resulting from these intersecting webs of sexual interaction extends to mothers as well as fathers. Anthropologist Donald Pollock tells us that while the Kulina believe the fetus to have originally been formed of accumulated semen
Recalling his childhood among the Dagara, in Burkina Faso, author and psychologist Malidoma Patrice Some remembers how freely children wandered into houses throughout the village. Some explains that this “gives the child a very broad sense of belonging,” and that “everybody chips in to help raise the child.” Apart from the many obvious benefits to parents, Some sees distinct psychological advantages for the children, saying, “It’s very rare that a child feels isolated or develops psychological problems; everyone is very aware of where he or she belongs.”
Though Some’s account may sound like idealized memory, what he describes is still standard village life in most of rural Africa, where children are welcome to wander in and out of the homes of unrelated adults in villages. Though a mother’s love is no doubt unique, women (and some men) the world over are eager to coo over unrelated babies, not just their own—an eagerness common to other social primates, none of whom, by the way, are monogamous. This deeply felt, broadly shared willingness to care for unrelated children lives on in the modern world: the bureaucratic ordeal of adoption rivals or exceeds the stress and expense of childbirth, yet millions of couples eagerly pursue its uncertain rewards.
Scientists focused only on the nuclear family miss the central
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