Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ENVY 79
Among the Sioux Indians of the North American prairies, an adult
Sioux was heard to vaunt the number of years his mother had allowed to
elapse between his birth and that of her next child, thus showing how
greatly she had preferred him as a child to the delights of sexual
intercourse. 2
A tribe of Dakota Indians in Canada went to great pains to counteract
jealousy between twins. These were considered to be one person. They
had to be treated with absolute equality, for otherwise sibling jealousy
would assume such immoderate proportions that one twin might do away
with the other. 3
A ritual performed by some Indians of Guatemala, when a new child
is born into the family, consists in beating a fowl to death against the
body of the previously born child. This is held to absorb, as it were, the
hostility which would otherwise be directed against the new-born child. 4
A field worker reports the belief held in an Arab village that an elder
child's jealousy might be so intense as to cause the death of the younger. 5
Among the Dobuans, in the Pacific, whom we have already encountered
as an envy-ridden society, the avoidance of sibling jealousy plays a
special role. From puberty onwards, brothers are not allowed to sleep
side by side. It is believed that poisonous blood would pass from one to
the other and thus lead to fratricide. In point of fact, as Fortune
supposes, the brothers' incompatibility springs from jealousy over primogeniture.
The Dobuan father never passes on his magic powers and
methods to more than one of his sons; if he has six sons, five receive
nothing. But the right of primogeniture may be over-ridden on the
grounds of preference. Hence brothers are violently jealous of each other
because of the unpredictability of inheritance and are therefore kept
apart by the norms of their culture. 6
2 G. Devereux, Reality and Dream, Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, New York,
1951, p. 66.
3 Ruth Sawtell Wallis, 'The Changed Status of Thrins among the Eastern Dakota,'
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 28 (New Series, Vol. 3),1955, p. 117.
4 B. D. Paul, 'Symbolic Sibling Rivalry in a Guatemalan Indian Village,' American
Anthropologist, Vol. 52, 1950, pp. 205-18.
5 H. Granqvist, Child Problems among the Arabs. Studies in a Muhammedan Village in
Palestine, Copenhagen, 1950, p. 8l.
6 R. R Fortune, SorcerersofDobu, New York, 1932, pp. 16 f.