Papers in Honor of Melville J. Herskovits: Gossip and Scandal

IT HAS TAKEN the development of anthropological interest in the growth and break-up of small groups to put gossip and scandal into their proper perspective, as among the most important societal and cultural phenomena we are called upon to analyse. Perceptive anthropologists dealt with these phenomena from the early days of field observation. Paul Radin, in his Primitive Man as a Philosopher (1927:177-8), described the way in which primitive p ople are indeed among the most persistent and inveterate ofgossips. Contestants for the same honours, possessors of the sacred rites of the tribe, the authorized narrators of legends, all leave you in little doubt as to the character and proficiency of their colleagues. "Ignoramus," "braggart," and not infrequently " iar" are liberally bandied about. Radin commented that therefore "some observers have drawn the conclusion that not love, kindness, and forbearance, but envy, slander and hate are the dominant atmosphere of a primitive community." He argued that this was incorrect, because the "unkind and slanderous remarks o frequently bandied about do not engender feuds and that often the principals concerned are on very good terms." Radin dismissed the idea that this contradiction was to be explained by "suppression or sublimation"; but he fell back on a meagre psychological thesis, that tribal society has a theory of freedom of expression which gives "every