433 Chapter Seven Cosmos For the Matsigenka of Shimaa, kameti ...

Commands are issued over and over without any sign of compliance, yet everyone continues to
delight in the essential charm of a small child that, enthusiastically and without embarrassment,
expresses itself and seeks gratification rather than do what it is told.
The Matsigenka seem not at all dismayed by the grandiosity of small children, the ways
in which they keep pressing to do what they want, straining at the leash both figuratively and
literally, and issuing demands like imperial majesties while barely able to stand on two legs.
Adults do not automatically gratify willfulness: Some of the child’s wishes would put it in danger
while others would greatly inconvenience the operation of the household. But the child is seen
as entitled to want what it wants, and much effort is expended in keeping it happy. When the
inevitable frustration comes, it takes the form, “You can’t have that,” rather than the more
destructive form, “Who are you to want such a thing?”--or still worse, “Why do you pain me so
by always wanting things you cannot have?”
Even when this period ends in the storm of the temper tantrum phase, the child’s
outrage is understood and accepted--one might say, forgiven. Earlier, the child was not
rebuked for wanting too much, although often enough it was simply ignored and expected to do
without. Now, the child’s grandiose effort to control mother and father is thoroughly frustrated.
But the child is allowed to rage against the offending parents without too severe consequences.
Matsigenka culture, in the form of tolerant parents, is both accepting the child’s right to be angry
at its loss, and encouraging the child to give up its outmoded dependence and accept the
autonomy that lies before it.
This amounts to a cultural acceptance of a high degree of individual integrity. There is,
for example, a cultural acknowledgement of the intrinsic impulsiveness of human desire,
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