Dress, drinks, and drums : further studies of savages and sex / by Ernest Crawley ; edited by Theodore Besterman.

  • Crawley, A. E. (Alfred Ernest), 1869-1924.
Date:
1931
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Dress, drinks, and drums : further studies of savages and sex / by Ernest Crawley ; edited by Theodore Besterman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    women, and of confiscating all a maiden's ornaments and finery when she became a wife. But it does not explain the origin of the small apron worn in very early stages, or of the mere thread in the earliest, and we cannot deny these articles a place in the category of dress. A frequent corollary of such views is that modesty is a result, not a cause, of clothing (so Sergi). But, as Havelock Ellis observes, many races which go absolutely naked possess a highly developed sense of modesty. ^ Andamanese v/omen are so modest that they will not renew their leaf aprons in the pres- ence of one another, but retire to a secluded spot for this purpose ; even when parting with one of their Z>^^/-appendages [tails of leaves suspended from the back of the girdle] to a female friend the delicacy they manifest for the feelings of the bystanders in their mode of removing it almost amounts to prudishness ; yet they wear no clothing in the ordinary sense.^ The Guiana Indians, when they want to change their single garment, either retire from sight or put the new over the old, and then withdraw the latter.^ Modesty is in its origins independent of clothing ; . . . physiologi- cal modesty takes precedence of anatomical modesty; and the primary factors of modesty were probably developed long before the discovery of either orna- ments or garments. The rise of clothing probably had its first psychic basis on an emotion of modesty already compositely formed of these elements. * This last statement, of course, cannot hold of the * H. H. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897), i. 5. ' E. H. Man, The Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, Journal of the Anthropological Institute (1883), xii. 94, 331. ' Sir E. F. Im Thurn, op. cit.^ p. 194. * H. H. Ellis, op. cit., l 37.