114. House Traditions in the Outer Hebrides.

The Black House and the Beehive Hut

Author(s): Werner Kissling
Source: Man , Nov. - Dec., 1944, Vol. 44 (Nov. - Dec., 1944), pp. 134-140
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2791800

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 No. 11-114] MAN [November-December, 1944

to find an exceptional kind of mausoleum. It stood
in the lower reaches of the Kafirnighan River, near
a simple village south of Sha-ar-tuz. Two large
cupola-like structures built of bricks are connected by
an archway. Each of the circular rooms is illuminated
by round openings at the top and only one narrow
door leads into the interior. Each room contains
about a dozen coffins, some of them flat, more like
plinths, others more elevated, probably belonging to
the more distinguished deceased. But none of these
coffins had an epitaph. Some were covered by strips
of white linen, placed upon black polished stones,
similar in shape to irons for pressing clothes. Huge
ram's horns were fastened to the vaulted walls.
In the courtyard behind the twin-cupolas, some
trees were covered by narrow linen strips to such an
extent that their branches could hardly be seen.
These linen strips are also offerings for the deceased.
The surface of this mausoleum has been partly
damaged by earthquakes or weather beaten during
the five or six or more centuries since the completion,
but these injuries serve to reveal the ingenious
technique of the building construction in greater
detail.

HOUSE TRADITIONS IN THE OUTER HEBRIDES. THE BLACK HOUSE AND THE BEEHIVE HUT.
By Werner Kissling, Dr. Jur. (Konigsberg).

I I 4 In attempting to trace the relationships of throughout, and usually formed one main roughly
the Black House of the Hebrides it is natural rectangular long and narrow room. On the outside
to begin by comparing it with earlier forms of dwelling the walls were rounded at the corners and werb dis-
in the islands. tinctly battered.
The Black House is best known from the descrip- The low roof resting on couples had no perceptible
tions of Thomas (9) who was the first to undertake ridge and did not reach the outer edges of the walls.
scientific investigations. A typical example of a With its sloping thatched ends, the roof continued
Black House in its simplest form, such as was widely the rounded contour of the end walls, so that the house
sometimes took on an elongatQd ovate form.
The floor was of earth, often of two levels, the lower
end being used as a cow-byre, tho upper as the dwell-
ROW RO
ing for the family. The upper end was- barely sepa-
OF STONES,
BYRE-WUNDARYIJ WOODEN
rated from the part reserved for the animals, there
SCREEN,
being simply a row of stones to mark it oil. Some-
0LATER,
HERH IADDITION times the space for the family with the beds at the
further end was raised above the level of the byre
floor by a stone step (see Roussell, 7, p. 16).
_ g a \ I ' >rg The very low entrance, barely five -feet high, with a
A
flat stone serving as a lintel, opened into the byr'e.
Not far from the door, somewhere near the centre
of the house, in its upper end, was the fire. This was
made directly on the'earth floor, its place being some-
times marked off by a few stones. There was no
chimney nor window, but usually at least one small
hole at the bottom of the roof to admit light. The
door could be used in conjunction with this skylight
(Gaelic fairleus, from far=over, and lebs=light)
FIG. 1. to regulate the circulation of air and the draught to the
A, Ground plan of ,typical Black House; B, Front view of fire. The skylight also served to some extent as a
typical Black House. smoke-hole.
In the early undivided houses the people also slept
inhabited up to the middle of the last century, is sometimes in recesses in the thickness of the wall
shown in fig. 1, A and B. It was built on a rounded- beside the fireplace. These built in wall-beds, two
rectangular plan, with thick walls of stone and earth,
and a half feet wide at the head, were roofed in by
often nearly as thick as they were high, composed of overlapping stones and at the narrow end towards
two shells, the space between which was filled with the foot by lintel stones.
rubble. They were of the same height (up to six feet) It is apparent that this type of dwelling, of which
9 The references are to the ' Literature ' at the end of the more complex forms existed in Lewis, was built in
article, accordance with the nature of the country and the
[ 134 ]

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 November-December, 1944] M AN [No. 114
crofter's simple needs. The lay-out and arrange-
ments seem to have been determined partly by
environmental conditions and partly by his reluc-
tance to be separated from the cow which played such
an. important part in his life. Although the custom
of the undivided house persisted throughout the Celtic
Highland zone it cannot be assumed that it originated
there (Peate, 6, p. 94). It is also apparent that the
Black House embodied features known in prehistoric
times, such as the type of wall construction, the plac-
ing of the roof upon the inner faces of the walls, and
the construction of the bed alcoves.
Conceining the thickness of the Walls; it might be
thought that at least in certain instances it far
exceeded that necessary for shelter from the wind,
protection from cold probably not having been a
factor of importance affecting building in the Black
House days. Further it may be questioned whether,
even with dry-stone walls, the extra thickness
and the in places the hutl were of bare stone and
battering wer, necessitated by the un-tied roof con-
struction. The roof was small and lightly built,
reflecting the scarcity of timber in these treeless
islands, and was generally covered with light material.
Although there was no outside chimney, its place
would have been near the centre, above the fire, which
was never put against an end wall.
Campbell (1, p. 208) in his studies of the Irish House
called this type a ' central-chimney house ' in contra-
distinction to the ' gable-chimney house.' It is the
central-chimney house which permits of rounded
corners, whereas the gable-chimney house is always
rectangular, and it is the house with rounded corners
or rounded end-walls which most readily permits of
rounded thatched roof-ends. Rounded ends of roof
and walls evidently go together. A rounded roof is
doubtless well suited to withstand the wind but not
the rain, so is no more adequately explained by the
climatic conditions than would be a high-pitched
angular one.
The rounded end-walls are likewise inadequately
explained on practical grounds, since their weight
alone was ample to secure,stability against wind. In
short, the rounded form of roof and walls, so univer-
sally concomitant in houses of the Black House type
may well have been inherited together from an earlier
circular form of building in the islands.
There existed in the Outer Hebrides down to. the
end of the Black House days-a number of small cir-
cular stone buildings of extremely archaic construc-
tion. These were made of more or less circular
courses of flat stones so arranged that each successive
course slightly overlapped the last on the inside. The
hole remaining in the middle at the top of the com-
pleted dome-shaped structure was eventually closed
by a flat stone. More often than not, there was a low
battered vertical wall (cf. below) before the corbelling
[ 135 1
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began, but the wall and roof formed one continuous
structure. The whole building was aptly termed a
beehive hut on account of its shape. If considered in
relation to the independent timbered roof construc-
tion of the Black House, the corbelled roof of the
beehive hut clearly stamps it as an earlier and funda-
mentally different type.
The remarkable fact about these stone huts is that
as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, at the
time of Captain Thomas' investigations in the islands,
a number of them were found by him to be in use as
temporary habitations or shielings, mainly in the
grassy summer herding-places in the parish of Uig in
Lewis (8, p. 135). Here these beehive huts were
called bothan (pron. bo'-un, sing. ho'h, pron. bo), mean-
ing temporary dwellings. They were not much higher
than a man, and stood either singly or joined together
in clusters of two or more as shown in fig. 2, A and B.
Though
scarcely distinguishable from their rocky background,
those inhabited seem usually to have been thickly
encased with turf, giving them a rounded contour.
Their walls were of a thickness out of all propottion to
the size of the room inside and their entrances so low
that even a child would, have had to stoop and a man
to crawl to pass through them. These features would
appear to have been necessitated by the type and
technique of the building. The thickness of the wall
was necessary to give sufficiently stable support to the
roof which, being built on the corbel system, was also
necessarily very thick and heavy. Only a compara-
tively small space could be spanned by a roof of this
type, hence the small room. The size of the entrance
was more or less limited by the height of the wall,
since it could not appreciably exceed this without
causing considerable difficulties in the construction of
the roof.. The height of the whole structure would
appear to be that best adapted to the circumstarnces in
which the huts were used. Greater height would have
rendered the shelter less storm-proof and colder,
besides adding to the labour and technical difficulties.
There would appear to be no mechanical reason for the
inward slope (batter) of the wall, since the corbelled
roof caused no appredciable outward thrust. It is far
more likely that the battered wall is a remnant from
the roof-house in which the corbelling started at
ground level (cf. Erixon, 4, p. 134).
The bo'h shown in fig. 2, A and B consisted of two
rooms with a passage of communication between
them, the larger one irregularly round, used as a
dwelling-room, and attached to it another, more or
less square room used as a dairy. On the outside each
hut' had a rounded, dome-like appearance and was
' green with growing turf.' The larger roonm, being
approximately nine feet long and seven feet wide, was
slightly larger than the average beehive size. The
 No. 114] MAN (November-December,
height in the centre was scarcely six feet and that of
the doorway about two and a half feet. On the right-
hand side, close to the door, was the fire, the smoke
escaping through the hole in the apex of the dome,
which was apparently primarily intended as a sky-
light. In front of the fire was a row of stones, and
behind this a litter of rushes for a bed (9, p. 162).
Varieties of this type of dwelling ranged from a
simplo double bo'h to the most complex group of huts
with internal communications. They showed among
SCAtE IN Fetr
*.5 0 5 10 20 30
FIG. 2.
A, 'View of bo'h, Larach Tigh Dhubhastail, Ceann Resort; Uig,
Lewis (after Thomas); B, Ground plan of bo'h shown in A
(after Thomas); c, Ground plan of bothan, Ghlann ie Phail:
Eilean Mor, Flannan Isles, Lewis (after Thomas).
other features a raised stone bed-place (S, Plate XV)
and walls built of two facings of stone with a core of
rubble (8, Plates XIV and XV). Those surviving as
shielings were not unnaturally all of the simpler types,
but not necessarily of any great age.
The circular type of hut might be more or less rect-
angular inside. This is more clearly shown in fig. 2 c,
which is a plan of a double bo'h consisting of a some-
what more elongated rectangular room of average bee-
hive size and a smaller rounded one adjoining it. The
two rooms had dome-shaped corbelled stone roofs and
were each more or less round on the outside as would
be expected in view of this type of roof construction.
[ 136 ]
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1944
A particularly interesting combination of the same
kind occurred in another derelict hut found by Thomas
in Harris (8, p. 129) in which, however, the rectangular
compartment was roofed with timber. This part was
scarcely above the average size for a bo'h, but was more
oblong in shape. The walls were from five to eight
feet in thickness and very rudely built. The whole
presents a case in which two huts were joined together,
one of them being of the bo'htype, circular and stone-
roofed, the other oblong and timber-roofed and
belonging therefore, from the point of view of classifi-
cation, to a fundamentally different type of building.
In Thomas' view the hut must have been inhabited
to a late period, since there were remains of thatch and
rafters. The example, of which unfortunately there
is no plan, suggests that although the natural condi-
tions of the country favoured the archaic stone con-
struction for temporary dwellings of this kind in
modern times as much as in the past, timber never-
theless tended to take the place of stone if it happened
to be available. It is not strange therefore to find
that the summer shielings of the people in Lewis in
Thomas' time might be either stone or timber
roofed (8, p. 130). The timber-roofed shielings called
in Gaelic airidhean (pron. ah'-rin; sing. airidh, pron.
ah'-ry) were of oblong form, though not necessarily
larger than the bothan. Curwen (3, p. 278) has how-
ever given a description of an oval airidh in Lewis
which was as much as twelve feet long.
It might appear that the change in character of the
shieling huts from a more or less round to an ovate-
oblong form was directly traceable to the use of
timber in the place of stone, when large slabs were
scarce and timber was at hand. That the oval shape
had however made its appearance independently of
the use of timber in buildings of the beehive style is
shown in many prehistoric sites, for instance in the
corbelled cells and compartments of wheel-dwellings
and earth-houses, some of which have been found in
such' a state of preservation that the construction of the
oval domical roof could be easily distinguished. The
roof had an elongated hole in the top which was closed
over by a row of lintels instead of by a single stone.
It is this variant of the domical roof which indicates
more distinctly than the somewhat irregular outline
of the walls the essentially oval character of the build-
ing. These ruined relics at least exhibit oval as well
as circular beehive roofs, making quite obvious the
direct relation between their circular and oval beehive
structures. If in the islands no example of an oval
beehive shieling is known, it is not surprising, in view
of the very meagre evidence of dwellings of this type
in modem times and of the fact that only a few of them
have been found in a sufficiently good state of pre-
servation to shbw the roof formation. It is moreover
significant that the oval form occurred in the Irish
 November-December, 1944.] MAN [No. 114

counterpart of the Scottish bo'h known as the clochan. broader basis of the various features mentioned with
Particular attention is drawn to the oval form of the their European associations the possibility of close
clochan by Campbell (2, p. 180). The photographs relationship between the traditional Black House and
which he gives (2, Plates 31 and 32) show extremely the earlier circular structures in the Hebrides cannot
clearly the appearance of the oval domical roof as
seen from the interior. The construction is evidently
the same as that of the oval domical roof of ancient
beehive structuires in the islands. From these indica-
tions it appears likely that in the islands oval as well as
circular bothan existed side by side with the timber-
roofed airidhean, and that the oval airidh had its
origin in the oval bo'h.
Campbell's illustrations and descriptions (I.c.)
further appear to show that in the stone-roofed oval
clochan little more was gained by increasing the
length than was necessarily lost in the width, and that
this mode of roof construction allowed of little more
enlargement of the space enclosed in oval than in cir-
cular dwellings of this type. Evidently the size of the
oval clochan was still limited by the material of the
roof, since this could only be increased in size con-
FIG. 3. BLACK HOUSE IN SOUTH UIST.
sistently with retaining convenient proportions by the
use of stones which, even if they had been forthcom- be ignored (as by Roussell, 7, p. 33) (cf. Campbell,
ing, would have been impracticable to manipulate. 2, p. 183).
Only timber could allow any appreciable increase in The few surviving examples of the Black House
size of a reasonably proportioned hut, and it might type still show, despite various modifications, its
therefore be expected that, especially in dwellings of a original plan-that of a long single-roomed building
permanent nature, the circular or oval form of building housing the family and domestic animals under the
would give way to a more elongated one. The early same roof. In the present century thig traditional
rounded-rectangular Black House of the Hebrides, custom has almost disappeared from the islands. I
built to shelter man and animal, with its solid battered can recall only one isolated case in South Uist where
walls of stone and earth, its simple wooden roof and
central fire, differed in no important feature from the
sub-rectangular airidh, in which couples of trees and
branches had replaced the stone slabs formerly used
to make the roof. There is therefore nothing to pre-
clude the possibility that in the islands the elongated
house form may have developed from the circular
form. Seen in this light, the rounded corners of the
Black House, its rounded thatched roof and sloping
ends, keeping the fire more or less central, may
all be interpreted as adaptations from the stone
technique.
Similarly the excessive thickness of the walls, also
characteristic of the beehive huts, would point to the
persistence of a firmly established tradition, which
together with the prehistoric type of wall construction
was almost certainly inherited directly from the
FIG. 4.-BLACK HOUSE TYPE OF DWVELLING IN SOUTH UIST,
earlier form of dwelling in the islands. The raised WITH FIREPLACE INSERTED.

pavement or upper end with the beds may be a vestige

of the raised sleeping platform found in some of the
circular huts (cf. Peate's discussion of the Welsh
' tyle ' or raised bed-platform (6, p. 95) and his obser-
vations on the inadequacy of a functional explanation
of the two levels in Black Houses (6, p. 94)). It is
evident from all this that in any comparison on a
a cow still shared the people's dwelling. It was
separated from them only by a half-broken-down
partition of rough pieces of wood. The house was
much dilapidated, and the survival of the custom in
this particular case was probably due to poverty.
But this may not be generally so (cf. Peate 6, p. 64).

[ 137 ]

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 No. 114] MAN [November-December, 1944

I~~~ I Ji

L-F.

SCALE IN FEET
l l l l l l I I~I
5 0 5 10 20 30 40 50 60

FIG.. 5.-SUGGESTED HEBRIDES HOUSE.

c, End view; D, Cross section of house in plane X-X (see Fig. 6, A), with washing shed; E, Front view of house.
The scale is the same as in Fig. 1.

As a rule byre and horse-stable now stand entirely
detached from the house. The example shown in
fig. 3 shows a form of grouping which is unusual in
houses with thatched ends. This house now con-
sists of two rounded-rectangular buildings with inde-
pendent roofs joined together end to end, one forming
the living-room and the other, on slightly lower
ground, the byre. The separate byre is a recent
addition built against the end wall of a typical old
Black House. The two parts have their separate
entrances and are connected by a doorway through
the wall of the original building. In this way the
crofter has retained internal access to his cows. The
entrance, formerly through the animals' portion of
the building now (1934, date of photograph) leads
directly into the dwelling-room which is undivided
through its whole length, but has the bed-places
screened off by pieces of furniture at the far end. A
board partition of the same height as the wall, which
probably used to separate the lower from the upper
end, has been put against the near end-wall, with its
doorway opening from the present dwelling into the
byre. The open fireplace, formerly somewhere near
the centre of the house, has been moved towards the
[ 138 ]
near end-wall, where it still retains its normal position
close to the byre door. It is of the simplest form
marked only by an iron chain and a hook hanging
from the rafters to suspend the pot. As usual there is
no chimney, the smoke escaping through one hole at
the bottom of the roof, another hole simply cut into
the thickness of the wall, and an unglazed window
which is a later addition. On the windward side there
is only one small hole in the wall which is always shut
at night. The wall and roof construction are as usual
in Black Houses. The walls although still up to three
and a half feet thick at the base can scarcely be
called excessive in view of the exposed position of the
croft. On the other hand they are quite sufficient to
support the roof. A point of interest in the wall
construction is that some at least of the stones in the
outer facings are definitely set slanting downwards
towards the outside. It was impossible to discover
whether this had been done on purpose so as to shed
off rain water from the roof which, placed as it was on
the inner faces of the walls only, conducted all the
water into the cores of the walls. According to
Macalister (5, p. 242) the slanting stones constitute a
feature characteristic of the Irish clochacn. The roof,

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 November-December, 1944J MAN [No. 114

HEATHER. FERN
OR BENT
THATCH

/ /// / BEDROOM

TURF4NNER WALL

. lLIVING ROOM STONE 2 ONE DEDOO STONE *

EAVES CONCRETE UNITEL

CLNCRETE NOON S CONCRETE fLOOR,M

x89 isDERI EAT s

PEAT INNER WALL
WITH HEATHER
LAYERS AT INTERVALS

WINDOW. TURF INNER WALL

BOARD

DSTONE EAVES B
\ \' S A S H EDED

FRAME

EXTERNAL FACE

BEDROOM BEDROOM I

WOOD STUDWA.

c cI
_ . , * * & -. ~PROOF COURSE |

SCALE IN FEET
SCALE IN FEET

01234 8 16 24 32 40 48 56 I 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

FIG. 6. FIG. 7.

A, B,
A, Ground floor plan of suggested Hebrides house; Vertical
First section through house in plane of window, showing
floor plan of ditto. detail; B, Plan of window.

like that of many other houses nowadays, is thatched
with straw instead of heather, fern, or bent-grass.
The thatch is covered with wire-netting and held in
place by ordinary ropes instead of heather ropes,
weighted at the ends with stones. With its rounded
thatched ends, this house, although comparatively
recent, being only about seventy years old, has
retained most of the tra;ditional features of the ancient
Black House.
All the surviving dwellings of this type retain to a
more or less marked degree the earlier rounded-rect-
angular character of the Black House in a similar
way. Some have rounded end-walls; others are not
quite so rounded but are never strictly rectangular.
All have walls of the same height throughout and
thatched roofs with more or less rounded ends. All
are of the central chimney type, even though, as
shown in fig. 4 a fireplace may have been inserted
later in the end-wall Like the ancient 'oval' Irish
houses (Campbell, 2, p. 189) and some of the Welsh
Long Houses (Peate. 6, p. 60). they may be regarded
as a link between the early circular structures and the
more developed rectangular peasants' and crofters'
houses of to-day. All these points and the general
conclusion are well supportedc by other examples
which can neither be illustrated nor described here on
account of lack of space.
The design shown in fig. 5, C, ), E, fig. 6, A, B, and
fig. 7, A, B, is an attempt to develop the local tradi-
tions to meet modern needs. It has been generously
prepared by an architect with expert knowledge of
rural building and a full appreciation of local tradi-
tion. It is intended to overcome the disadvantages
of the Black House without losing the desirable
elements of its character.
The first great evil of damp is to be overcome by the
special construction of the floor and walls. The
foundations are of concrete and a concrete raft
(fig. 7, A) is also laid under the floor. On this and over
the wall foundatigns is laid a horizontal damp-course
of heather on which are built the walls and floor. The

[ 139 1

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 No. 114-115] MAN [November--December, 1944

floor consists of a second raft

buildings and soof concrete,
on there eight
may be no objection to inche
thick, which can be finished to a smooth surface forfollowing the old custom, providing that the walls are
mats and rugs, or wax-polished. The walls are built also built in the old way with the stones slanting
of an outer battered facing of the local stone, laid in downwards towards the outside.
dry courses and an inner facing of peat blocks, with The whole can be constructed with local labour and
heather layers at intervals, which may be white- local materials, except possibly that the crofter wish-
washed inside to keep out any damp due to the ing to build his own house may be at present un-
natural porosity of the local stone. The walls and theaccustomed to the use of concrete, and that cement,
chimney, which is also of local stone, are built in the
doors, and window-frames would have to be obtained
most economical way possible and with all precautions from the mainland. Such importations are however
to kee,p out damp. The whole house is surrounded cut by
down to a minimum, since the Hebridean cannot
a paving of flagstones to drain away rain-water. afford to be dependent on outside labour or materials
The next great drawbacks of the existing dwellings where it can possibly be avoided.
-want of room and absence of privacy-are to be
LITERATURE
overcome in the proposed house by its larger size and
1. Campbell, Ake: 'Notes on the Irish House,' Folkliv,
two storeys, and by the division of each storey into 1937, pp. 207-234. .
separate rooms. General comfort is increased by the 2. Campbell, Ake: 'Notes on the Irish House,' Folkliv,
1938, pp. 173-196.
better floor and proper chimney and windows, both the
3. Curwen, E. Cecil: 'The Hebrides: A.Cultural Back-
ground floor rooms being heated. 'water,' Antiquity, 1938, pp. 261-289.
A shed containing a copper and a bath present 4. Erixon, Sigurd: 'Some Primitive Constructions and
'Types of Lay-out, with theit Relation to European, Rural
in the cheapest and most efficient way possible 'Building Practice,' Folkliv, 1937, pp. 124-155.
a necessary minimum of bathing facilities suitable for 5. Macalister, R: A. S.: The Archa?ology of Ireland, 1928.
general adoption'. The need for these cannot be over- 6. Peate, Iorwerth C.: The Welsh House, Honourable
Society of Cymmrodorion; London, 1940.
stressed. 7. Roussell, Aage: Norse Building Customs in'the Scottish
As seen in fig. 5 E the house remains of the central Isles, Levin and Munksgaard, Copenhagen; Williams and
Norgate, London, 1934.
chimney type and has thatched ends. The thatch
8. Thomas, F. W. L.: 'Notice of Beehive Houses in Harris
is carried over the outer walls which also carry the 'and Lewis,' Proc. Soc. Ant. III, 1857-1860, pp. 127-144.
weight of the roof, there being no apparent advantage 9. Thomas, F. W. L.: 'On the Primitive Dwellings and
'Hypogea of the Outer Hebrides,' Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot. VII,
in adhering to tradition in this respect. In small out- 1866-1868, pp. 153-195.

THE FRUSTRATION COMPLEX IN KWOMA SOCIETY. By Dr. John W. M. Whiting. Institute of Human
Relations, Yale University.

l ' 5 The purpose of this paper' is to present the
results of the application of the frustration-
aggression hypothesis2 to data gathered at Kwoma.
Before these results. are stated, however, a brief
their mothers. For approximately the first three
summary of the way in which Kwoma individuals
react to frustration from infancy through adulthood
will be made.3
The data for this paper were gathered by S. W.
Reed and myself during a field trip to New Guinea in
1936-37. The Kwoma are a small tribe situated in
the mountains just north of the Sepik River and about
250 miles from its delta. They are an agricultural,
patrilineal, polygynous group, in which political
authority resides primarily in the kin group, and in
which sorcery is both an explanation for sickness and
1 Read at the annual meeting of the American Anthropo-
logical Association, December, 1941.
2 For recent statements of this hypothesis, see bibliography,
p. 144.
3 A more complete description of Kwoma reactions to
frustration can be found in a reoent publication by the present
writer (11).
[ 140 ]
an important means of social control. Their contact
with the whites has been minimal, having been
restricted to a few government officials and traders.
Kwoma infants are cared for almost exclusively by
years of his life a Kwoma infant sits in the lap of his
mother during the day and lies by her side at night.
It is the Kwoma mother's duty to care for all the
needs of her child during this period, When, despite
this constant care, Kwoma infants suffer frustration,
crying is the response which becomes most firmly
fixed. A Kwoma mother, whenever her infant cries,
does her best to comfort him. If he is hungry she
feeds him; if he is cold she warms him; if he is sick
or in pain she tries to soothe him. Thus by removing
the source of frustration or pain the Kwoma mother
rewards crying as a response to these conditions.
Toward the end of infancy, when the child begins to
talk, he responds to frustration or pain by asking for
help, and his mother complies with his request when-
ever it is possible for her to do so. Thus during

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