Cultural Structuring of Tactile Experience in a Borneo Society

Abstract

THIS discussion is based on detailed observation and discussion with specific informants concerning the cultural definition and use of the sense of touch in a native Borneo society. Each statement made about the culture and tactile experience is derived from records made in the course of research conducted according to standard ethnographic field techniques and methods. These data are therefore part of the general framework of anthropological research which rests upon careful observation and interview of well identified individuals in specified cultural environments. This account is offered as an ethnographic review concerned primarily with defining categories and specifying types of touch experiences available to individuals in one Borneo society. This discussion focuses on the problem of one type of sensory exploration by a native people, rather than on a more conventional anthropological topic such as social organization, subsistence, etc. The fact that the subject has not generally been attended in ethnographic studies and in analyses of cultural records, except for comments of Mead (1946a, 1946b, 1951, 1953, 1954a, 1954b, 1958, 1961), and Frank (1931, 1951, 1956), does not place it beyond legitimate anthropological concern, since the cultural structuring and functioning of any sensory experience is obviously within the scope of modern anthropology. To maintain that these data could better be treated within more usual categories of cultural analysis ignores the fact that except as they may occasionally incorporate essentially psychophysical data (c.f., Murdock, et al., 1961, categories 151, 827, 828) these conventional categories do not provide generally for detailed attention to the manner in which a people culturally define and use their sense of touch, or other sense modes, and transmit these definitions and uses to the next generation. The fact that some data presented here (land tenure, incest, etc.) are usually considered in more conventional categories of cultural analysis should not prevent their inclusion in any other style of inquiry; it may be useful to consider such data as dependent on cultural factors other than those to which they have been assigned previously. I have considered some of these data in the usual forms of cultural analysis (1960, 1961a, 1961b, 1962a, 1962b, 1963a, 1963b, 1965). I do not intend to provide here a theory of relations between the sense of touch and other anthropological categories for analysis of data. It is useful to note at the outset of the discussion that this study has revealed a specific need for attention to the special problem of the ways in