"People Who Act like Dogs": Adultery and Deviance in a Melanesian Community

Authors

  • Dorothy Ayers Counts University of Waterloo
  • David R. Counts McMaster University

Abstract

Sociological studies of deviance, especially labelling theory, are concerned with the labels used by society to identify deviants and with the long term effect of labelling for the people who are thus categorized (see Becker 1966; Lemert 1967). These studies have focussed primarily on large-scale societies, with little attention being paid by anthropologists to labelling of deviance in small-scale communities (but see Edgerton 1966, 1976). This essay is a study of the way in which the people of a small-scale, horticultural community in Papua New Guinea identify and respond to people who engage in deviant acts. We focus on the act of adultery and the range of responses to it, and we argue that the analysis of deviance in small-scale societies must discriminate between behaviour that merely breaks the rules and behaviour that causes conflict which may not readily be resolved and, consequently, may lead to the permanent disruption of social relationships.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Downloads

Published

2022-05-30

How to Cite

Counts, D. A., & Counts, D. R. (2022). "People Who Act like Dogs": Adultery and Deviance in a Melanesian Community. Anthropologica, 33(1/2), 99–110. Retrieved from https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/view/1834

Issue

Vol. 33 No. 1/2 (1991): The Anthropology of Deviance

Section

Thematic Section:

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors contributing to Anthropologica agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.

Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.