The father is responsible for enhancing the beauty of his child from the time when a child is only a few months old. The first thing that a father does is decorate the baby with shells in order to make "socially beautiful", and it also provides the child with its first political step in life. After the father decorates his child with shells, if he intends to give his child a necklace, he must first provide them with tortoise earrings. The male and female earrings vary by decoration, but are almost the same. Like everything else in the Trobriand culture, there is a way to tell the families stature by the earrings. It depends upon the amount of shells that are in the child's ear, so the more tortoise shells a child has, it shows that the child's family is of that much greater wealth or
The father is responsible for enhancing the beauty of his child from the time when a child is only a few months old. The first thing that a father does is decorate the baby with shells in order to make "socially beautiful", and it also provides the child with its first political step in life. After the father decorates his child with shells, if he intends to give his child a necklace, he must first provide them with tortoise earrings. The male and female earrings vary by decoration, but are almost the same. Like everything else in the Trobriand culture, there is a way to tell the families stature by the earrings. It depends upon the amount of shells that are in the child's ear, so the more tortoise shells a child has, it shows that the child's family is of that much greater wealth or