Читать книгу The Metamorphoses of Kinship - Maurice Godelier - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

Kinship in the Field

The Baruya of New Guinea

Analyzing and interpreting the realm and the exercise of kinship in contemporary societies is obviously not simply a matter of theories and choosing among the different hypotheses and doctrines advanced by one or another anthropologist. One must also have tried one’s hand at conducting a systematic study of the relations and representations of kinship and the family in a real society. This holds not only for anthropologists, but for sociologists and other social scientists engaged in the study of contemporary societies.

THE TOOLBOX

It is also obvious that, before undertaking such a study, anthropologists cannot clear their head of everything they have previously read, heard, learned or understood about kinship. Deliberate amnesia of this sort is impossible. What is possible, however, and even to be recommended, is to adopt a stance of critical vigilance or awareness so as to be ready, if necessary, to revise or abandon concepts one previously considered to be analytically founded or field methods one had held to ‘pay off’, etc. In the meantime, one must begin to work with the theories and methods at hand and which seem useful for doing what one has set out to do.

This was, of course, true in my own case when in 1967 I decided to study kinship relations in the Baruya society, a New Guinea Highlands population with whom I had chosen to live and ‘do fieldwork’, as we said then. How did I proceed? What results did I obtain and what shifts did my observations prompt in my theories? This is what I will now attempt to describe.

In 1967, as mentioned above, Lévi-Strauss’ theoretical work in kinship held sway in France and had already won a large following in Great Britain and the United States. To be sure, Leach had already formulated his first criticisms in Rethinking Anthropology, but the stage was still largely occupied by the debates and disputes between those for whom descent was the primordial axis of kinship relations and those for whom this role fell to alliance, in short: between Meyer Fortes, Evans-Pritchard, Jack Goody, etc., on one side, and Lévi-Strauss, Rodney Needham, Louis Dumont, Leach, etc., on the other. Of course, some in each camp had already begun to point out that there was no commonly agreed definition of family, marriage, incest, etc., and, above all, none that applied to all societies. But no one at the time seriously doubted that such institutions as descent, filiation, marriage, the family, transmission of names and ranks, relations with the ancestors, dowry, and exchange of women belonged to the field of kinship and its exercise.

Everyone was also familiar with Murdock’s categories of kinship terminologies: ‘Hawaiian’, ‘Sudanese’, ‘Eskimo’ and so on, whose construction rules and formal structures had been isolated and therefore could be identified in the field. And finally, although it was already well known (since Hocart at least)1 that in many societies in Australia, Oceania, Asia and America kin terms designated not only (or not at all) a person’s genealogical position with respect to another taken as a reference (an abstract male or female Ego), but (often) relations between ‘categories’ of individuals who were related to each other in the same way without necessarily having a genealogical tie, no one in France, by 1959, had yet formulated a radical criticism of the use of the genealogical method for the study of kinship. Novice anthropologists were merely advised not to force their informants to invent genealogies simply to please the ethnographer and to be aware that informants may have all sorts of reasons for manipulating the genealogies they recite – reasons that may be motivated by self-interest and therefore are interesting for anthropologists, as long as they realize this and can discover why.

In short, it was with this theoretical baggage and critical advice – shared by the other young anthropologists of the time – that I set out in October 1966 for New Guinea. I arrived in 1967, having stopped off in Australia to learn Melanesia Pidgin in the University of Canberra’s language laboratory, run by A. Wurm. Robert Glasse, Andrew Strathern and others had alerted me to the importance of Pidgin for anyone travelling in New Guinea. But why New Guinea? And why the Baruya, with whom, a few months later, I would decide to live and work?

WHY NEW GUINEA?

It was on the advice of Claude Lévi-Strauss that I finally chose this country for some ‘real’ fieldwork. After having studied philosophy and then economics, I had decided to become an anthropologist and to look into an as yet little-developed domain: the economic systems of tribal and peasant societies; in sum, I wanted to go into economic anthropology. I had made this choice in a Marxist perspective, for at the time I believed that studying the modes of production and circulation of subsistence goods and wealth (a topic generally neglected by anthropologists in favour of kinship or religion, with some illustrious exceptions like R. Firth, A. Richard, Herskovitz, Bohannan and a few others), was a better approach to explaining the origin and functioning of kinship and political systems. I went to Lévi-Strauss, who accepted me in his group and took me on as his assistant, giving me the task of studying the ‘infrastructures’ of the societies he was working on, while he analyzed their ‘superstructures’, kinship and religion. At the time Lévi-Strauss still readily used such Marxist vocabulary.2

An opportunity soon arose for me to involve myself clearly in the domain of economic anthropology when Unesco offered me the chance to study the effects of the implementation of a planned socialist economy on the development of village communities and ethnic groups in Mali. This move had been decided by President Modibo Keita and his Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) after Mali had broken with France and become independent. Having spent some weeks in the country, I concluded that there was indeed a ministry and a minister of the Plan, but no plan to speak of, and that what there was did not have a very positive impact on Mali’s development. And so I spent my time travelling around and reading the literature on economic anthropology I had brought with me. A year later when I returned to Paris, disappointed, I was ready for some real fieldwork.3

I first went for advice to my friend Alfred Métraux (1902–63). He suggested that, rather than returning to Africa, I go to Bolivia and work among some of the Indian groups he had visited thirty years earlier. I was tempted by the idea and discussed it with him on several occasions so as to shape the project. But on the evening of 12 April 1963, a few hours after we had talked at length, Métraux took his life. Never in the course of our conversation had he let slip a hint of his decision, if he had already made it. When, a few days later at his funeral, I told Lévi-Strauss about our idea of a site for fieldwork, he advised against it, explaining that a large number of French anthropologists were already working in Africa or America and that there was something better: go to New Guinea, the last country where one could find societies less devastated by colonialism and Western culture than elsewhere, and where a few major figures of the discipline had distinguished themselves – Malinowski, Thurnwald, Mead, Fortune, etc. I capitulated and spent the next two years preparing myself to go to New Guinea.

In January 1967, I arrived armed with a list of names of tribes or local groups that my colleagues – R. Rappaport, P. Vayda, R. Glasse, A. Strathern, R. Crocombe, etc., who had already worked in New Guinea – had suggested I visit before making my choice. These tribes were generally neighbours of those among whom my colleagues had worked, so they knew they had not yet been studied and thought it was worthwhile and would enrich the material in view of future comparisons. The Baruya were not on the list.

WHY THE BARUYA?

My encounter with the Baruya came about by chance, even if my decision to choose them for my fieldwork did not. In fact, the first name on my list of groups to visit was the Waffa, a tribe that lived several days’ walk south of the Markham River and which in 1967 no one had visited for some ten years. After various adventures (such as crossing the Markham without benefit of a ford or a bridge, being abandoned in the bush by my guides before crossing the Waffa River, the sudden emergence from the forest of three men who would, so they said, take me to the Waffa), I found myself several days later at the foot of a high cliff atop which one could make out a village whose inhabitants were observing our arrival. Among them were two Europeans. I then learned from my three guides that I had not reached the Waffa at all but the Watchakes, and that the Europeans were two sisters from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) who had been living there for years so as to learn the language, translate the Bible and convert the people to Christianity. I was furious to have been tricked, but they explained that in fact the Waffa lived too far away and they had thought it would be useful for me to meet the Best sisters since they knew the area and spoke English. Forty years later, I still thank them for their initiative.

I spent some time with the Watchakes listening to and questioning the Best sisters who were at that time collecting and translating stories about the origin of the Pleiades star cluster, cultivated plants, etc. One day when I was talking about my plans, one of the sisters pointed to the highest peak in the chain of mountains that barred the horizon and said: ‘Why not go see the Baruya? It was only in 1960 that the Administration set up a patrol post to control their region and only since 1965 that one can circulate freely there. We have a missionary couple, the Lloyds, who live in a village a few hours walk from the Wonenara patrol post. You’ll see, the Baruya still dress like the Watchakes used to. Only recently they were still at war with their neighbours.’

I let myself be tempted and, a few days later, found myself at Wonenara, on the edge of a small landing strip where Dick Lloyd met me and took me to Yanyi, ‘his’ village. I learned from him that the Baruya had been ‘discovered’ in 1951 by Jim Sinclair,4 a young patrol officer who had mounted an expedition to find out about the ‘Batia’, whose reputation as the makers of bars of salt used as a sort of exchange currency had reached the region he patrolled.5 I also learned that the Baruya belonged to a large group of tribes disparagingly called the ‘Kukakuka’, or ‘thieves’, by their enemies (a term carelessly adopted by the Australian administration to refer to them), and that the ‘Kukakuka’ had resisted the penetration of Australian patrols and European gold prospectors by killing or wounding a few, among whom was a young officer by the name of J. McCarthy,6 who, having fallen into an ambush, managed to escape and walk for several days with an arrow in his abdomen. Later McCarthy would become a district Commissioner for Papua New Guinea and relate his adventures among the ‘Kukakuka’ in his memoirs, published in 1963, four years before my arrival in New Guinea.

I left the Lloyds and the village of Yanyi for Baruya country. The Baruya live at an altitude of 2,000 meters in two valleys of a mountain chain culminating in the volcano, Mount Yelia. The mountainsides are a patchwork of grass fields deforested by fire and broad stretches of primary or secondary rainforest. I was struck by the beauty of the landscape, but I would quickly discover that New Guinea abounds in impressive landscapes. I left the Wonenara Valley, crossed the mountains and found myself in the Marawaka Valley, the part of the Baruya territory not yet directly under Australian control.

I went from village to village, sleeping in the men’s house where the young initiates lived. At that time all the men and adolescent boys carried their bows and arrows wherever they went. The women and young girls walking on the footpaths would stop and hide their faces in their bark capes whenever they met or were overtaken by married men or young initiates. In certain places there was a system of parallel paths, one for men and a lower one for women and children. Close to the waterways were fields of salt canes, with scattered constructions: these were ovens for producing the bars of crystallized salt. The population lived in villages of between 200 and 300 inhabitants, perched high on the mountainside to protect them from enemy attacks and dominated by one or several ‘men’s houses’.

Two weeks later I left the Baruya, taking with me my observations and impressions, and set out finally to visit the groups on my list. After some weeks, I found myself in the region of Mount Ialibu, blocked by a flooding river and forced to wait until the water fell sufficiently for us to cross to the Huli, a group living in the direction of Mendi, where Robert Glasse had worked. It was there that I decided to end this reconnaissance once it had become clear that nothing I had seen appealed to me as much as the Baruya.

Several rational criteria entered into this choice. One, of course, was the fact that no anthropologist had ever worked among the Baruya, and I was going to be the first.7 But at the time in New Guinea it was still easy and common for an anthropologist to be the first somewhere. Other reasons carried even more weight. The first was the Baruya’s reputation for producing a sort of salt ‘currency’. My head was full of Malinowski, Kula exchanges and so on; and I was delighted at the idea of studying another regional exchange network. The second was the fact that the Baruya initiated their boys (at the time I did not know that girls too were initiated) and that, until their marriage, these boys lived apart from the women’s world in the famous men’s houses built high on a mountainside or in the village. The third was the fact that the Baruya had the reputation of being warlike and that other tribes in the same ‘ethnic’ group (known as Kukakuka) had mounted an armed resistance to European penetration. Fourth was the fact that the Baruya lived in fairly big villages, and I would not have to spend my days hiking to little groups of ten or fifteen people dispersed in the forest, which would have been the case had I chosen to live with the highly nomadic groups to the south of Mount Hagen or Mount Bosavi, which were on my list. As my family was scheduled to join me, the fact of being able to live in a fairly well-populated village and only a few hours walking time from an airstrip also counted significantly in my choice.

In all, between 1967 and 1988, I spent, as I said, over seven years with the Baruya, usually in the same village, Wiaveu, which I left periodically to visit other Baruya villages or those of neighbouring – friendly or hostile – tribes. During my various stays, I conducted, simultaneously or successively, several major studies, among which was one on kinship (which I completed at least three times over the course of the twenty years). I should add that, in 1975, Australia granted Papua New Guinea its independence, and the Baruya, one of the last tribes to come under the control of a colonial power, found themselves willy-nilly citizens of an emerging state, which would almost immediately become a member of the United Nations. The society in which I lived and worked was thus not frozen in the past or even clinging to it. It was a society about to undergo rapid and profound changes, which were the work not only of the colonial power but of the Baruya themselves coming to grips with these new situations.

A FALSE START

During the first months of my stay, I applied myself to collecting the genealogies of the people around me. At that time, my main informants were not-yet-initiated boys and young unmarried girls, in short, youngsters for whom my presence was an unusual and continual source of entertainment and who accompanied me in packs from morning to night.

After several months, I submitted my first genealogies to some adult informants – married men and women with children. All conveyed to me that almost everything I had noted was inexact. In the sense that the young people did not know or confused the birth order of their uncles and aunts (on both sides), their grandparents’ names and places of birth, and so on.

But I had also begun to collect the Baruya terms for kin ties – father of, son of, etc. – which I had compared with a much fuller list that had been drawn up before my arrival by Richard and Joy Lloyd, the missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics.8 In spite of that, and for different reasons, my survey had gotten off to a bad start, and I decided to take time out and turn to something else I had in mind: a study of how the Baruya produced their salt money and made their gardens. This entailed measuring the areas of their sweet potato, taro and yam patches; identifying the composition of the groups of men and/or women who worked together on a given step of the production process; calculating the number and areas of the patches in each garden; getting the names of the women who worked them; and with their help, learning their kin ties with the owners of the land they tended, the names of those who had first cleared each garden, the names of those who had the right to cultivate the gardens in 1967, and so forth. All of this was necessary in order to understand the principles underpinning the ownership and use rights in the areas of tribal territory, forests, grasslands and rivers used for hunting, gardening or fishing.

Every day for over six months I visited the gardens, where, respecting the customary rules for entering, I spent hours with the people working there. With their help, I made a topographical map of each garden, a study of the soil using Baruya categories, and noted the number and areas of the plots. Finally, for each of the gardens cultivated by the inhabitants of Wiaveu that year (over 180 gardens divided into at least 600 plots), I made a fairly complete file.

ANOTHER WAY IN AND THE RIGHT WAY AROUND

At that point my relations with the Baruya changed altogether, and they would subsequently include me in all their activities, including the most secret aspects of their initiation rites. For, like many Melanesians, the Baruya are enthusiastic gardeners, keen to discuss the pros and cons of different pieces of land, the origin or the flavour of a given variety of taro or sweet potato, etc. And of course, it is no time before they give you the name of their ancestor, the first one, who cleared one or another piece of the forest with a stone adze. Then they will volunteer that this was when the Baruya were at war with such and such a tribe – the Yuwarrounatche, for example – and that during this war, one of their great warriors, an aoulatta, was killed at a particular spot but that they had avenged him by killing three enemies, one of whom was a woman, and so on. It was also explained to me that, next to a certain garden, it was forbidden to cut trees or clear land, and above all not to stop there to make love because the spot was inhabited by spirits who could attack you or make off with the semen and vaginal fluids that might have seeped into the earth and who could then kill you by multiplying these substances and using them against you. In sum, the garden study constantly spilled over into kinship, war, religion and, always, the Baruya’s collective or individual history. It was at that point that I decided – while waiting for the chance to attend the large-scale initiation ceremonies planned for the end of 19689 – to resume my study of the Baruya kinship system.10

I therefore started over from scratch, but this time taking an altogether different approach. While studying the gardens, I had noticed that a fairly elderly woman, Djirinac, from the Baruya clan (the clan that gave the tribe its name and which is the ‘centre post’), had such an immense knowledge of genealogies and an ability to reconstruct series of exchanges of women between lineages that people from other clans would consult her to fill in the gaps in their memories. I therefore asked her if she would help me conduct the survey, and she agreed, at least in so far as the inhabitants of the Wonenara Valley were concerned, because she wanted to be able to go home every evening to feed her family and her pigs. Two men older than she, Warineu and Kandavatche – one the former bodyguard of a great warrior and the other a salt-maker who no longer did much gardening – joined us. For a month our little band went from village to village reconstructing the genealogies of the valley’s inhabitants.

When we had to cross the mountains to continue our work in the neighbouring Marawaka Valley, Djirinac left us, as we had agreed. As luck would have it, an elderly man from the Valley offered to take her place – Nougrouvandjereye, from the Nounguye clan, whom Djirinac would consult when he came to Wonenara if she wanted specific details on the genealogies or marriages of Baruya living in the Marawaka villages, whom she knew less well. Nougrouvandjereye’s memory was as vast and as clear as Djirinac’s, and, like her, he knew the kin ties between hundreds of people, which I would then go with him to verify. In addition to all the kin ties, Nougrouvandjereye’s memory also covered all of the wars waged on or by the Baruya, and he was able to detail the circumstances of each war, the battle sites, the names of those killed, the reprisals and compensations, etc. Djirinac had nothing particular to say on these topics, quite simply because war stories did not interest her.

I had also developed a sort of standard note card for this survey, which I obliged myself to fill in for each individual whose name I had collected and whose genealogy I tried to reconstruct – with the person concerned if he or she was living and agreeable, or with others if the person was deceased or a child. Since in the meantime I had learned many things about the Baruya’s marriage rules, descent principles and forms of hierarchy, my cards recorded the answers to such questions as: What is your mother’s lineage? What woman from your father’s lineage was exchanged (ginamare) for your mother? Since your father (father’s group) did not give a woman in exchange for your mother, which of your ‘sisters’ is going to take your mother’s place and marry your mother’s brother’s son (marriage with the matrilateral cross cousin)? Was your father an aoulatta (great warrior)? A koulaka (shaman)? Who were your father’s co-initiates? Are any still living? And so on. A number of these questions could be put to either a man or a woman. But others could not, and I had to respect this taboo strictly.

Finally, at the end of this first systematic survey (which took over six months), with one or two exceptions, I had covered practically all of the living Baruya, including the men who had left to work on the coastal plantations, the women who had married into neighbouring friendly or enemy tribes, the boys the Lutheran missionaries had sent away to continue their studies begun at the Wonenara Bible School, etc.

Having watched me go from village to village, all of the Baruya in the Wonenara and Marawaka valleys knew me, and soon I knew somewhat more than their youngsters did about their ancestors and their lineage history. Over the following twenty years, I continued to record deaths, births, marriages, moves, changes in social circumstances, etc. I even made a second complete survey of the whole population, village by village. I inquired about why, in the interval, someone had married so and so or had moved house. What did this woman die from? In childbirth? By sorcery? Killed by her husband? In short, by 1988, the date of my last prolonged stay with the Baruya,11 I had information accumulated over twenty years of observation on what, during this whole time, the Baruya had decided to do when it came to marrying, transmitting ranks to their children, etc. To make sense of this data concerning the exercise of kinship relations, it is necessary to bear in mind certain indispensable information about the Baruya’s history and the type of society in which they live, act and reproduce themselves.

WHAT ARE THE BARUYA?

What does the word ‘Baruya’ mean? It is the name of an insect with red wings speckled with black spots (baragaye), which was formerly chosen by one of the tribe’s clans to designate itself and which members of this clan are forbidden to kill. Its red wings remind them of the fiery sky-path followed by their Dreamtime ancestor, Djivaamakwe, whom the Sun had sent to Bravegareubaramandeuc to found a village and a tribe by gathering to himself everyone living there, to whom he is said to have given their clan name and their roles in the performance of the initiation rites. Today Bravegareubaramandeuc is the site of a long-deserted village perched on a hilltop near Menyamya, a few days’ walk from the Baruya’s valleys, a village that used to be inhabited by clans of the now-extinct Yoyue tribe.

This mythic account justifies the primary position the ‘Baruya’ clan holds in the male initiations and explains why this clan was destined to give its name to the territorial group that was to emerge when the Yoyue split. It is followed by a ‘historical’ account, which refers to facts on which all tribes in the area concur.

The facts are the following: toward the end of the eighteenth century (according to my calculations), certain Yoyue clans seem to have secretly arranged for the inhabitants of Bravegareubaramandeuc to be massacred by the Yoyue’s traditional enemies, the Tapatche. But, on the day, the Baruya and members of some other clans were away in the forest, and their wives and young children were with them, as happens on the large-scale hunts that precede initiations. When they learned that all of their young initiates had been massacred in the men’s house, together with a few others who had stayed behind, those who had gone hunting scattered in different directions to seek refuge with friendly tribes. A large group of refugees, including the members of the Baruya clan, reached the Andje, a tribe living in the Marawaka Valley, at the foot of Mount Yelia, where they asked for temporary refuge and protection. Their request was granted, and they moved in with their hosts – particularly with the Ndelie, a local clan that allowed them to use some of their growing and hunting lands.

After a number of years, the refugees decided, with the Ndelie’s complicity, to take over their hosts’ territory. In the meantime they had adopted their hosts’ language (very similar to their own) and had their children initiated by the Andje. One day they lured the Andje into a trap, massacred some and put the rest to flight. History was repeating itself. After a series of battles, the Andje abandoned their territory and moved to the other side of Mount Yelia. At the conclusion of these events, a new local group, new ‘tribe’, was formed which took the name of the Baruya clan – probably because the Baruya already played an important role in the Yoyue male initiations through their possession of sacred objects and powerful ritual knowledge.

Now a ‘tribe’, the Baruya pursued their expansion throughout the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth, to the detriment of the neighbouring groups. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they penetrated into the Wonenara Valley – where I was to encounter them in 1967 – drove out two groups already living there and settled on their lands. When peace was restored, certain Baruya lineages gave women to enemy lineages, thus making them affines. When wars broke out anew between the tribes, the Baruya, if victorious, would leave those of their enemies who were affines the choice of either fleeing with the rest of their tribe or coming to live with the Baruya and thus preserving their lives and their lands. Thus it was, when I arrived in 1967, that the Baruya society was composed of fifteen ‘clans’, eight of which descended from the Bravegareubaramandeuc refugees and seven from local lineages that had intermarried or joined with the Baruya. As a reward for having betrayed the Andje and helped the Baruya seize their territory, the Ndelie had been given a certain number of sacred objects and been allowed to take part in Baruya initiations. By contrast, although the six other local lineages had kept their lands and provided warriors, they played no role in these rites on the pretext (which turned out to be unfounded) that they had never owned kwaimatnie12 and were therefore not sons of the Sun like the Baruya from Bravegareubaramandeuc, but were born there from droppings left by the cassowary, a wild woman who lives deep in the forest.

WHAT IS A ‘TRIBE’?

Let us leave the Baruya for a moment, now they are a ‘tribe’, and try to define what we mean in this context by ‘tribe’, ‘ethnic group’ and, of course, ‘clan’.13

A ‘tribe’, as we just saw with the story of the Baruya, is a local group which forms when a certain number of kin groups band together to defend and share the resources of a territory they exploit individually and/or in common. This territory has either been inherited from ancestors or conquered by force. In the Baruya’s case, a tribe is also a largely endogamous territorial group, since the kin groups that comprise it prefer to marry among themselves rather than with members of neighbouring friendly or hostile tribes. We will see why, finally, everyone cooperates directly (kwaimatnie-owning clans) or indirectly (associated local clans) to initiate their boys together and make them into warriors, shamans and so forth.

It is important to note that, in the Baruya language, the word tsimiyaya (‘what tsimia do you belong to?) is used to ask someone what local group (what I here call a ‘tribe’) they belong to. Yaya means ‘name’. Tsimia designates the big ceremonial house erected by the Baruya and neighbouring tribes, who speak the same language and share the same culture, in which they perform the rites that introduce a new generation of boys into the men’s world and promote the other generations to the next initiation stage. This temporary structure is built by all of the adult men and women in the Baruya villages, whatever their clan and village. The word tsimie designates the ‘big centre post’ that holds up the roof of the ceremonial house. This post is called ‘grandfather’ during the initiations, and from its top a dangerous wild animal is thrown to its death, the meat from which is then presented to the oldest man in the valley. This gift signifies that his generation will have vanished before the next initiations are held three or four years hence, when a new generation of boys will be initiated and thus testify that the Baruya, as a tribe, continue to exist.

In short, by banding together to defend a territory, exchange women and initiate their children, the kin groups that make up the tribe act in such a way that each depends on all the others to reproduce itself, and in so doing reproduces the others. All of these kin groups share the same language and the same culture. By culture, I mean the whole set of representations of the universe, rules for organizing society, positive and negative values and behavioural standards to which the individuals and groups that make up the Baruya society refer14 when acting on other groups, themselves or the world around them. This world that surrounds the Baruya is made up of trees, rivers and streams, animals and spirits of the dead, neighbouring friendly or enemy tribes, evil underground-dwelling spirits, the Python (god of rain and menstruation) and the two shining heavenly bodies, the Sun and the Moon – two powers that govern the seasons and human destiny well beyond tribal frontiers. Of course, nowadays, the Baruya’s world also includes Europeans, the police, the army and the Administration – instruments of a new institution that is the state. Not forgetting the presence of a new god as well, Jesus Christ, and his adversary, Satan.

One very important fact will now allow us to distinguish between the realities we designate by the terms ‘tribe’ and ‘ethnic group’, and to show that a shared culture is not enough – as Schneider and his disciples had advanced – to make a set of local groups, kin groups or others, into a society; that is to say, into a whole capable of representing itself to itself as such, and which must reproduce itself as a whole in order to go on existing as such.

FROM TRIBE TO ETHNIC GROUP

Let us therefore come back to the fact that, with the exception of a single group,15 all of the Baruya’s neighbours – Wantekia, Usarumpia, Bulakia, Yuwarrounatche, Andje, etc. – speak the same language and have nearly the same customs as the Baruya. All wear the same kinds of clothing, the same insignia; all say that their remote ancestors lived in the Menyamya area.

In fact, the Baruya and their neighbours form the northwestern edge of a set of local groups that speak related languages and occupy a vast territory stretching from the high valleys in the north to a few kilometres from the shores of the Gulf of Papua in the south. Neighbouring tribes understand each other’s speech, but individuals from tribes located on opposite sides of this immense territory do not. According to linguists using glottochronology, all of these languages split off from a common trunk spoken in the vicinity of Menyamya, and their differentiation probably occurred over the span of a millennium. But it was not only the languages that diverged; the social structures also display striking differences.

The northern groups, to which the Baruya belong, worship the Sun, emphasize the role of sperm in making babies, and initiate their boys by isolating them in men’s houses, where they engage in ritualized homosexual practices.16 The southern groups, on the other hand, emphasize menstrual blood, their initiations do not include homosexual practices, and they separate their young male initiates from their mothers and the world of women for only a short time.17 Yet in spite of these cultural and social differences, all of these tribes recognize a shared origin, which goes back to the Dreamtime of their mythic ancestors (wandjinia), a common origin attested by the clothing and the insignia worn by the men and the women, which are nearly identical in all groups.18

But recognizing their common origins and their shared cultural identity does not stop these tribes from fighting each other, massacring their neighbours or seizing all or part of their territory – as the history of the Baruya themselves shows. This shared identity is also recognized by bordering tribes that belong to other linguistic and cultural groups. Moreover, some use derogatory terms, like kukakuka, to designate all of the groups living between Menyamya and the Gulf of Papua. Since Kuka means ‘to steal’ in Baruya, one imagines that the Baruya and their neighbours who share the same culture do not use a term for themselves or each other that evokes a society of thieves whose lethal raids once devastated enemy villages.19

By ethnic group, I mean the whole set of these local groups – Baruya, Andje, Bulakia, etc. – that recognize each other as having a common origin, speak closely related languages, and share ways of thinking and living, that is to say, representations of the universe and rules of organization which show by their very differences that they belong to one tradition within which these differences appear as possible transformations.20

It is important to stress that the fact that a Baruya or an Andje belongs to the same ethnic group and knows this does not entitle him (or her) to either land or a spouse, and does not give him any power or authority outside the boundaries of his own local group; neither does it keep the tribes belonging to this ethnic group from making war on each other. In short, the ethnic group is a social and cultural reality, but an ethnic group is not a ‘society’. Conversely, a territorial group such as the Baruya or the Andje does constitute a society. What makes the Baruya a society is first of all the fact that this group has an identity that is expressed by a ‘big name’, a single overarching name that subsumes the names of the particular groups (clans and lineages) and those of the individuals that compose them, and endows everyone with a specific all-encompassing identity they recognize and which is also recognized by the other territorial groups around them (who also have a big name, e.g. Bulakia, Andje, Wantekia, etc.).

This big name always goes with a territory whose boundaries are known, if not respected or accepted, by the neighbouring groups and over which the group exercises a sort of sovereignty, in the two senses of the term. Sovereignty in the sense that the clans and lineages that make up the Baruya society thereby have the exclusive right to appropriate and exploit parts of this territory in order to extract the bulk of their means of existence. Sovereignty, too, in the sense that the Baruya do not give groups other than themselves the right to resolve the sometimes bloody conflicts that arise between their members. No outside intervention is accepted or requested, save in exceptional circumstances.

So we see what makes the difference between an ethnic group, which is a social reality without being a society, and a ‘tribe’, which, on the other hand, is a society. The Baruya, the Wantekia, the Usarumpia, etc., speak the same language or closely related dialects, share the same culture and follow the same rules of social organization (sister exchange, male and female initiations, etc.). These facts attest that they belong to a single group of linguistically and culturally related populations, and it is this set of populations that we call an ethnic group, a social reality whose existence was recognized by these populations, who referred to it by a periphrasis: ‘those who wear the same ornaments as we’.

What thus makes the Baruya, the Wantekia, etc., different societies within the same ethnic set is that each of these groups controls a distinct territory. Because they exploit the resources and extract the bulk of their material means of existence from it, this territory is therefore the first condition for the reproduction of the social groups that make up these societies, and therefore for the reproduction of the social relations that bind them together through marriage, initiations, ritual practices, solidarity in times of war, etc. For a society to exist (as a whole able to reproduce itself), there must be in addition to the ‘mental’ components of social life (representations of the universe, rules for organizing society, values, standards of conduct), a relation of social and material appropriation to the territory from which the group’s members draw a significant fraction of their material means of existence.21

THE BARUYA ARE A SOCIETY, THE ANGA ETHNIC GROUP IS A COMMUNITY

This whole that must reproduce itself as such and which constitutes a society consists concretely of a certain number of persons of both sexes and different generations, born into distinct kin groups, often having different social, ritual or other functions, but who exercise in common what could be called a sort of ‘sovereignty’ over their natural environment which ends as soon as they step outside their territorial boundaries. Because of this, all these individuals and groups have a common identity and carry a common name that is added to their personal names (these indicate the person’s lineage, sex, etc.). In addition, all these individuals and groups entertain a certain number of connected but distinct relations – of kinship, material or ritual dependence, subordination of one gender to the other, etc. – such that, for a society to continue to exist, not only must those who die be replaced by others, but the relationships between individuals and groups which characterize this type of society (relations shaped by the kinship system or by the existence of an initiation system) must also be reproduced. And, of course, just as individuals cannot – save in exceptional circumstances – stop producing and reproducing their social relations, neither can they avoid producing their material conditions of existence, which not only ensure their subsistence but also consist in producing or assembling the material conditions necessary for exercising kinship relations, performing initiations, making war, etc.

Yet the story of the Yoyue and the Baruya shows us just as clearly that these territorial groups operate as societies, as overarching local units, only for a time. Before the arrival of Europeans, which froze the habitually unstable state of relations between neighbouring tribes, numerous conflicts of interest (over women, land, game, trading partners) opposed lineages and individuals (even close relatives) from the same tribe. Ultimately, in certain circumstances, the tacit agreement between lineages and individuals to live together breaks down, the unity of the tribe is shattered, and the tribe splits into fragments that join with neighbouring tribes or come together to create a new tribe, as in the case of the Baruya. However, it must be noted that, if, before the Europeans arrived, local groups came together, split up and joined with others, the tribal form of these groups, by contrast, did not disappear and was promptly reproduced by each of the new groups.

The fact of having shown that the Baruya existed as a society from the moment they exercised a sort of sovereignty over a territory (a sovereignty that was, if not recognized, at least known by their neighbours), and of having then applied the concept of tribe to this society because the social units sharing the territory are kin groups, still tells us nothing about the internal structure of the society, a structure that engenders distinct functions and social positions hierarchically distributed among individuals as well as among the kin groups into which they are born.

SOME INSTITUTIONS ARE BROADER THAN KINSHIP RELATIONS AND KIN GROUPS

There are other divisions running through Baruya society than those between clans or lineages. Two of these are of particular importance because they cut across the whole society: one is between the sexes and the other between clans.

Baruya gender relations were, in 1967, and indeed still are, relations of complementarity and cooperation at the same time as relations of domination and subordination. The complementarity is visible in the division of labour and in the domains of activity assigned to each sex (hunting, warfare, child-raising, weaving, etc.), ensuring that each gender makes its distinct contribution to the ongoing production of the Baruya’s material and social conditions of existence. But this cooperation works on the basis of a characteristic overarching relationship of domination, which one could describe as that of the generalized subordination of women to men.22

This gender inequality is affirmed at the child’s birth, but does not reach its fully fledged and definitive form until the moment when, around the age of nine or ten, all the boys in that age group are taken away from their mothers and sisters and, after having their noses pierced, are secluded in the ‘men’s house’ that dominates every Baruya village. Women are strictly forbidden to approach this house. The separation and the marking of the boys’ bodies are the first in a long series of initiatory ordeals that, after ten or more years and four stages of initiation, ultimately rid them of everything that tied them to the maternal world. They will now be masculine enough to cope with the world of women, and to leave the men’s house and marry a girl who has been chosen for them and for whom their lineage has given a ‘sister’.

Over the course of these years, the boys will be led deep into the forest or into the dimly lit men’s house and placed in contact with the sacred objects held by the clans in charge of the various initiation rites. They will hear the sound of the bull-roarers and will discover that this noise – which terrifies the women and the uninitiated, who have been led to believe they are hearing the voices of the forest spirits come to visit the men and the new initiates in the midst of their ceremonies – is actually man-made. It will be revealed to them – but they must not speak of it to women or children on pain of death – that it was really the women who invented the flutes, bows and many other things, and that these were subsequently stolen by the first men, and now the women can neither own them nor even look on them. It will also be explained to them that the men were compelled to take the bows from the women because they used them ill-advisedly, killing too much game and compromising the cosmic and social orders by defiling everything with the menstrual blood running down their thighs. They will learn that the women’s sexual organ and sexual relations with women are a constant threat to men, who risk being deprived of their strength, their good looks and their superiority.

During this all-male period, which lasts for years,23 the boys will be secretly ‘re-engendered’ by the men, but his time without the help of women. The older boys in the last two stages of initiation – young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty or twenty-two, who have not yet had intercourse with a women – often give the young boys their semen to drink, through homosexual relations that grow up between the older initiates and the newcomers. Later, these boys will in turn give their semen, equally free of all female defilement, to those boys who follow them into the men’s house.

Little by little, these young boys and adolescents come to see it as right and proper that Baruya women are not allowed to inherit their ancestors’ land, bear arms, make salt money, have contact with the sacred objects, and so on. Little by little, too, the physical, psychological and social violence the men do to women, or at least to their wives – never to their mothers or their sisters – appears as being justified. For during the long lessons they are subjected to, the masters of the initiations also teach them that women, too, have rights, and that it is their duty to know and respect them. That is why the men’s domination is not based only on the violence they inflict on women and which the latter often resist in a variety of ways. It also rests on the fact that, up to a certain point, women consent to this domination in so far as they share with the men the same mythical-religious representations which blame women for the disorder that threatens the reproduction of the social and cosmic orders and which they do not want to inflict on their kinsmen or their children.

It is from the setting in motion of this formidable machinery for differentiating the social nature of the sexes, for growing men in the Baruya imaginary but also for (really) elevating them socially above women, that the second cross-cutting division takes its origin and its meaning. This time the line runs not between individuals according to their gender but between the kin groups into which these individuals were born and according to their genealogical position in these groups.

For only the representatives of the clans that descend from the Bravegareubaramandeuc refugees as well as from the Ndelie clan, which helped them seize their hosts’ territory, have the right to initiate the tribe’s boys, on the pretext that only their ancestors received from the Sun the sacred objects and secret formulae enabling them to sever the boys from the female world and make them into men, warriors, shamans, etc. For this reason, the native clans that joined with the Baruya are excluded from leading the political-religious activities which cement the unity of all the kin groups and all the generations, and affirm their common identity in front of neighbouring tribes. Moreover, whenever initiations are held, these neighbours are invited to come and admire the number and strength of the young Baruya warriors as they leave the tsimia, which the Baruya call the ‘body’ of their tribe. The initiates will then dance around the tsimia and sing for hours, adorned in their feathers, wearing their new bark capes, and armed with their weapons, under the admiring gaze of their mothers, sisters and fiancées massed together in the front row. The reason invoked for excluding these autochthonous tribes from leading the ceremonies is the claim that their ancestors came from forest creatures and never possessed kwaimatnie or secret knowledge (something these representatives vehemently deny when questioned).

It is thus the Baruya’s history that explains the hierarchy among those clans that have the right to initiate the boys and those that do not. On the top rung of this social ladder stands the Baruya clan, which gave the tribe its name, and in particular one of the clan’s two lineages, the Baruya Kwarrandariar, who are in charge of passing the initiates from the second to the third stage, when they will be considered warriors and will be prepared for marriage as soon as their fiancée reaches menarche and is in turn initiated by the women. This political-religious ranking of the clans also creates a hierarchy among individuals in so far as the clan representatives who exercise the various functions in the male initiations are considered ‘Great Men’, a status they acquire at the same time as their function and the sacred objects and formulae that allow them to carry it out.

The male and female initiations are not the Baruya’s only cycle, however. There is another, which concerns only shamans and gives rise to ceremonies performed every ten or twelve years, during which the training of the men and women who have shown exceptional personal powers is completed. At the close of these ceremonies, their ability to attend to victims of evil-spirit attacks and to visit death or sickness on their enemies is publicly validated or invalidated. Shamanism is also the only area of social life in which men and women can test their capacities directly, without mediation. But the functions of the ‘master’ of the shaman initiations belong exclusively to a clan that stems from the Bravegareubaramandeuc refugees, the Andavakia, and are always transmitted through the men of one of this clan’s lineages.

Alongside these very few inherited functions and ranks, there are others that can be acquired by showing exceptional talent and merit. Being at war with some neighbouring tribes and at peace with others, then making an alliance with the first to fight the second, means that the Baruya live in a constant state of war. This explains the fact that all men are trained from childhood in the arts of warfare and hunting, and never go anywhere without their weapons. Yet only certain men are considered to be ‘great’ warriors, aoulatta, because they have killed several enemy warriors in single combat, with their axe after having issued a public challenge. The rest are considered (ironically) by the Baruya themselves as merely wopai, ‘sweet potatoes’, ordinary warriors who make a lot of noise but are content to shoot their arrows from a distance and then duck behind their shield when the volley is returned.

In a society where warfare is given so much importance, the representatives of the clans that own the sacred objects indispensable for initiating boys or shamans do not go to war, in order to avoid being killed before having passed on their powers to their eldest son. For their untimely death would deprive the tribe of some of the spiritual forces that ensure its existence and reproduction. (The names of the kwaimatnie owners are also concealed from neighbouring tribes.) This is also the case of the tanaka, men considered by one and all to be ‘great’ horticulturalists, because they clear big gardens and place their harvests at the disposal of those who go to war and therefore cannot look after their own plots.

Some distinguish themselves in other domains and they, too, can become Great Men: certain shamans and a few expert trappers of cassowary, the wild woman who lives deep in the forest and whose flesh – forbidden to the hunters and to women – is eaten by the initiates in the men’s house. Last of all, far behind the rest, a few expert makers of the salt-bars used by the Baruya as a currency before the Europeans arrived can also acquire certain renown.

Furthermore, in each generation, some women are promoted to the rank of ‘Great Women’, without this calling into question the official ideology that men are in principle superior to women. ‘Great’ women are those who have a large number of living children whom they succeed in raising, those who are inured to the tasks of making fine gardens and raising many pigs, those who as shamans have worked spectacular cures, etc. These women are allowed to express themselves when the members of their village meet to discuss problems of general import – the consequences of an act of adultery, the threat of armed conflict with a neighbouring tribe, and so forth.

In the case of women, however, everything must be won by merit; nothing or almost nothing is inherited.24 Men alone inherit functions and ranks that automatically set them apart. This is just one more proof of male dominance, and of the control men exercise over the way this society works. We should remember that the inherited functions and ranks are divided among the eight clans of refugees from Bravegareubaramandeuc, to which must be added the Ndelie, one of the seven native clans that joined the Baruya and who were granted a kwaimatnie and a role in the initiations.25 Apart from these reserved ranks, all of the positions an individual could acquire through his own qualities were open to men and women from any of the clans.

We see, then, that despite a political-religious division between refugees and natives, which lasted until 1967 and was carefully nurtured, the structure of Baruya society made it impossible for any one clan, and even less for a person of renown, to have the monopoly of armed violence – which would have enabled them to impose their desires on the rest of society and to work for their own interests. Thus, for example, decisions having an impact on everyone – clearing a large garden, collecting the materials needed to build the ceremonial house, preparing to make war on a neighbouring group and securing the help of allies, or, today, planting large tracts of forest in coffee – were taken in the course of public debates in which male voices predominated, to be sure, in which young people and ordinary women did not intervene publicly, but in which the Great Women voiced their opinions and were listened to.

Against this backdrop of unequally shared sovereignty, the other more visible forms of authority and power stand out: those of the ritual masters, great warriors, shamans, etc.

One of the first theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from this analysis is that the existence of kin groups is not enough to make a society or to make this society a ‘tribe’. These groups, or most of them, must also – and above all – exercise a sort of political and ritual sovereignty over the population as a whole and over a territory defended by everyone, whose boundaries are known (if not recognized) by their neighbours. And if this is true, we can already see how erroneous it is to affirm – as the majority of anthropologists continue to do – that societies without classes or castes, ‘primitive’ societies, etc., are kin based.

A PLURAL BARUYA IDENTITY

The second theoretical conclusion that can be drawn from these analyses is that a person’s identity – Baruya, Wantekia, etc. – never comes down to the common, overarching identity he or she has by virtue of being a member of his or her tribe or society. Identity is always multiple. A person has as many identities as the social groups he or she belongs to simultaneously through his or her different aspects. He is a man and not a woman. He is the co-initiate of . . . She is a woman, she is the co-initiate of . . . He or she is a shaman. He is a master of the initiations who inherited his role and status from his father. He is the son of, the brother of . . . She is the sister of, the mother of . . . All of these identities are crystallizations within the individual of different relationships with others, with roles and ranks, which either end with this person and stamp themselves in him or her or start with this person and stamp themselves in others. An individual draws the content and shape of all of his or her identities from the specific social relationships that characterize his or her society, from the particularities of its structure to the way it functions. All of these make up the concrete multiplicity of social identity, which is never a simple addition of distinct identities or particular relationships. An individual’s personal, private identity is always the product of a singular life history, which is reproduced nowhere else and is constructed amid life circumstances that are never the same for any two individuals, however closely related they may be.

Even before Europeans set foot in Wonenara in 1951, a Baruya’s identity was made up of aspects of him- or herself that were broader than his or her society. He or she was aware of belonging to a group of tribes related by language and customs, what we have called an ethnic group, and which constituted a community26 that encompassed the Baruya society and was linked to it through a shared distant past. But the ethnic group did not function for the Baruya individual as ‘his’ or ‘her’ society. This feature – engendered by an individual’s belonging to groups that were broader than and that encompassed the birth society – would grow in importance after 1951.

THE WEST ARRIVES, AND THE BARUYA LOSE SOVEREIGNTY OVER THEIR TERRITORY AND THEMSELVES

It was in that year, without having either requested or foreseen it, that the Baruya received a new common identity by becoming ‘subjects’ of His Majesty, the King of England, and were placed under the authority of a colonial state created and governed by Europeans of Australian origin, assisted by other Continental or North American Europeans. In 1975, again without having desired it, the same Baruya were informed that they had become ‘citizens’, this time of a post-colonial state whose independence and constitutional regime had not been their own work but had been granted them by Australia, their former colonial guardian. And so they found themselves embarked on an accelerated process of multicultural nation-building which had to succeed at all costs in order to flesh out a state that had been created wholesale by foreigners and forced on all inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, whatever their tribal or ethnic origin, as the obligatory framework for their future life.

In this new historical context, Baruya children (at first only the boys) went to the Lutheran mission school to go on to become policemen, or aid-post orderlies, or church pastors or professors at the Lutheran university in Lae. More recently, beginning in 1981, many of the adults – especially the women – began turning to Christianity and joined one of the various Protestant churches, which have vied for decades to teach the Baruya the message of Christ and root out their old beliefs, which were held to come from Satan. The number of shamans declined, as did their prestige. The Great Warriors have all died. Now when war sporadically erupts with a neighbouring tribe, it is no longer waged by the same rules or with the same weapons. Only men are killed. The women and children are often spared because there is more risk of police intervention if news gets out that women and children have been killed in the clashes.

Of course, the articulation of these old and new identities does not occur without conflict, especially in so far as some claim to exclude others. For a Baruya, becoming a citizen of Papua New Guinea meant losing the right to bear arms and to use one’s own laws to settle the offences and crimes committed by individuals or groups from the tribe. It meant trusting unknown policemen and judges who cited other laws for securing compensation and justice. In another vein, being baptized and becoming a Christian meant joining a universal community that affirmed the equality of all – white, black, yellow – before a god who had come to save humankind; but it also meant abandoning polygamy and initiations, and giving up the rites for driving away evil spirits or ensuring a good harvest.

In short, all those Baruya who became aid-post orderlies or health officers or converted to Christianity ceased, one after the other, individually or as a group, to produce certain social relations that had characterized their society before the Europeans arrived – or, if they continue to reproduce these relations, they only do so partially while deeply altering their meaning. Pre-colonial relations did not thus vanish of their own accord, but as a consequence of certain individuals and groups refusing to reproduce them in their dealings with other members of their society. This was not only a question of private, personal choice. It was often also an act of submission to external constraints, such as the ban on war, on exposing the dead on platforms, etc. In short, it was the effect of a power struggle between the former society that had once had sovereignty over its territory and the new society that had deprived it of this sovereignty in one fell swoop, which was then appropriated by a hitherto unknown institution, the state.

Little by little, through these deliberate or forced choices, a new society emerged which extended over and into the local societies. For to become a policeman or an aid-post orderly, to produce coffee for the market or work as a bank clerk, is not only to become part of these new ‘communities’; it is also to enable these institutions to live and develop. The latter now play an active role throughout the territory of the state of Papua New Guinea and impose themselves on all groups – local, tribal, urban, etc. Furthermore, all of these institutions – the police, hospitals, the university, the market – did not come about by accident and are not unconnected with each other. They are the components of a new world society, imported and imposed from outside, and they combine two familiar formulae: the development of a market economy and the creation of a multi-party parliamentary democracy. To which must be added the effects of the spread of a militant religion also imported from the West: Christianity, which emphasizes individual and personal salvation, and casts discredit on ancestral religions. Ultimately these new global societies will probably supplant the different local societies that existed in New Guinea at the time of the European arrival. For this to happen, however, the former societies would have to lose or refuse their capacity to go on affording their members non-commercial access to the land and other forms of mutual aid rooted in kinship or other social relations implying solidarity and sharing among those bound by these relationships. Such an outcome is perfectly plausible, but in the meantime, at the time of this writing (2004), these two types of ‘societies’ – local and national – rely on each other to function and to keep on reproducing themselves for a certain time to come – albeit in a context of a process of globalization ever more closely tied to the capitalist economy and to institutions that arose in the West.27

Finally, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Baruya live or are being born into a hybrid society that has been deeply altered by the direct or indirect interventions of powerful outside forces – the colonial and then post-colonial state, the market, Christianity – which, though they will no doubt be even stronger tomorrow, will not completely obliterate whole swathes of the old social organization and ancestral ways of thinking, even if in preserving them the Baruya have had to adapt and reshape them.

We have seen that the Baruya’s history, their sovereignty over their territory, the political-ritual hierarchy among kin groups and, finally, the distinction between Great Men and Women, on the one hand, and the rest of the people, on the other, did not originate in the world of kinship relations, although they encompass this world and fashion it from within. Yet it would be completely erroneous to conclude that, in Baruya society, kinship is a minor – or even marginal – aspect of social life. For, while the Baruya exist as a ‘society’ because they exercise shared sovereignty over their territory, this territory is distributed among the kin groups; therefore what actually gives individuals access to the material conditions of their social existence – land for gardens and a territory for hunting – is the fact of being born into and thus belonging to one of these groups.

But land is not the only resource that falls to an individual by virtue of belonging to a lineage or a clan. Such belonging also means that the individual can count on the solidarity and support of the members of the group and of his or her affines in the event of a serious conflict with members of another lineage. It also implies that, in the event of conflict with a member of his (or her) own lineage, he submits to internal arbitration by the lineage elders. In addition, everyone is entitled to the help and participation of his or her lineage in finding a spouse. Lastly, for those kin groups having a hereditary role in the performance of the male initiations, the eldest sons of the representatives of these lineages know that, if they are not handicapped in some way, they will inherit these functions together with the sacred objects and ritual formulas that give the right to exercise them. Functions, objects and inherited statuses circulate through certain kin ties binding persons of the same sex and different generations.

KINSHIP AND SOCIETY AMONG THE BARUYA

The universe of kinship, that world which receives and surrounds each individual at birth, is comprised of intimacy, affection, protection, authority and respect. It is from this world that the little Baruya boys will suddenly be torn when they are around ten, and placed not under their father’s authority but under that of older boys who are not yet married but soon will be. And it is from their ingested sperm that these boys will be reborn to full manhood, rid of any remaining vestiges of having come from a woman’s womb and having until then been raised in a primarily female world. A girl’s destiny, on the other hand, is not to be reborn outside the world of kinship. Until puberty, and beyond, she will live at home and will leave her family only to marry and found a new one. At this time, nothing will prevent her from becoming a Great Woman, a shaman or the mother of many children. When she marries she does not cease to belong to her birth lineage, however, even if she is now under her husband’s authority and her children belong to their father’s lineage.

In Baruya society, kin groups are formed according to a rule of descent that passes exclusively through the male side and creates patrilineal lineages and clans. This does not mean that a child’s maternal kin do not matter or have no rights in relation to the child. It means that the names, lands, ranks or statuses a child will receive over his lifetime come from his ancestors through his father and his father’s brothers (who are also fathers for him and are designated by the same term, in accordance with the Iroquois-type kinship terminology used by the Baruya). Genealogical memory does not go back more than three, sometimes four, generations above Ego. Beyond that only a few names escape oblivion. These are the names of Great Men, legendary heroes – Bakitchatche, for example, the ancestor of the Tchatche, who while still young killed a great many Andje with the help of supernatural powers and enabled the Baruya to seize the territory of the Andje, who had taken them in and protected them. In addition, the patrilineal principle skews the lists of the most remote ancestors an individual remembers.

All of these lists begin with a man, sometimes several, listed by order of birth. Rarely is the name of a woman – a sister of one of these men – given at this level (G+5, G+4), and this woman is never the eldest. The memory of kin ties is therefore doubly marked by the patrilineal principle, which results in the almost general forgetting of the names of the women of the lineage in the great-grandparents’ generation and, furthermore, the systematic attribution of the position of eldest to a man.

I would add that people’s names (and perhaps their spirits) are passed on in alternate generations – from grandfathers to grandsons, from paternal great-aunts to their grand-nieces. These names go in twos, a first name is given when the child is born; it will be replaced by a second name when the child’s septum has been pierced and he or she has been initiated. From then on it is forbidden to call this person by the former name, which would be a grave insult and require compensation.

HOW DO THE BARUYA TALK ABOUT KINSHIP?

Sometimes we have called the Baruya’s kin groups clans and sometimes lineages. What do the Baruya call them? They use two terms, which underscore different but related aspects of these groups. The first term, navaalyara, comes from avaala, which means ‘the same’ and foregrounds the fact that all members of these groups share the same identity. The second term, yisavaa, refers to a tree, yita, and emphasizes the descent rule, the ramification of the tree’s branches from its trunk and the growth of the trunk from the roots. Both terms can be used to designate either a particular lineage or several lineages with the same name. The term yisavaa is favoured in the second case to designate a set of lineages sharing the same overarching name, a group we have, with numerous precautions, called ‘clan’. To give an example, the name ‘Bakia’ turns up in several lineage names: Kuopbakia, Boulimmanbakia, etc. But what is the impact of these realities in practice?

Let us take the kin group that calls itself the Baruya. It is made up of two lineages, which bear the names of two toponyms in the Marawaka Valley (where their ancestors, having fled Bravegareubaramandeuc, settled upon reaching the Andje). One of the lineages now calls itself the Baruya Kwarrandariar, and the other, the Baruya Wombouye. Both know they are Baruya, but they are unable to trace the ties connecting them to a common ancestor. This ancestor is said to have been a certain Djivaamakwe, a Dreamtime hero. It is he who is said to have received the first kwaimatnie from the Sun, established the initiations and assigned each of the other clans a specific role in their performance.

But the Kwarrandariar claim Djivaamakwe as their own ancestor, and if they give the Wombouye a role in their ritual tasks, it is a minor one. Therefore, if we use the word ‘clan’ to designate these two lineages that bear the same big name, Baruya, we see that it has no true existence outside the political-religious sphere, since the two lineages also sometimes exchange women and otherwise behave like exogamous units. If we compare these practices with the way certain anthropologists have defined the clan (as an ‘exogamous’ group), we see that, if the fact that the Kwarrandariar and the Wombouye both carry the name Baruya gives the impression that the two form one clan, either this clan is not ‘exogamous’ or what is covered by this shared name is not a ‘clan’. I lean toward the first interpretation. They are a ‘clan’ in the sense of a set of lineages that have retained the memory of a shared origin and name, but this clan is not exogamous. Lineages which are physically separated or which have only a very remote genealogical tie with each other contract marriages that they do not repeat before at least three generations, as we will see when we analyze Baruya marriage practices.

In principle, when sons marry, they are supposed to build their house next to their father’s, if he is living, or next to the site of his old house if he is deceased. But if this rule were systematically applied, we should find whole villages inhabited by all of the male descendants of a group of brothers who lived in the same place three or four generations before. This is not the case, however, because one or several of a man’s sons frequently choose to live near one of their brothers-in-law and so move to another village. Similarly, a brother-in-law may decide to come and live near one of the sons, the one to whom he ‘gave’ a sister as a wife. The result of these comings and goings is that villages and hamlets28 are comprised of several lineage segments gathered around the lineage of the village founders. These settlements were regrouped and fortified in times of war, but in peacetime the families would disperse and often lived next to their gardens.

The Baruya find it advantageous to invite one or several of their affines to live nearby or to allow one of their own to move next to their affines. The presence of these affines lessens the conflicts that frequently crop up between two brothers or two brothers’ sons (parallel cousins). There is no lack of reasons to quarrel or clash: a man tries to bed his brother’s wife; the wife of one brother is embroiled in a quarrel with the wife of another brother or mistreats one of this wife’s children. More seriously: a man clears a garden in an area originally cleared by his father’s brother, but without telling him, and so on. Some quarrels end in murder, and in this case the murderer and his family are forced to seek refuge with affines who will protect them and perhaps even allow them to stay with them indefinitely and use their growing lands and hunting grounds. After a number of years, the murderer can even be taken into his hosts’ lineage, following a ceremony in which the host gives a considerable number of salt-bars and lengths of cowry shells to the murderer’s lineage. The lineage elder then declares that this man is no longer one of them and has lost all rights in the lands and the groves of pandanus trees (whose fruit is prized) planted by his ancestors. Henceforth his descendants will carry a double name composed of the lineage that absorbed them and the name of their original lineage. They will become, for example, Ndelouwaye – i.e. Yowaye who have become Ndelie.

A KINSHIP TERMINOLOGY OF THE IROQUOIS TYPE

The Baruya use what is called an Iroquois-type kinship terminology. What does this mean? We call ‘kinship terminology’ a fraction of the vocabulary of a language, a limited set of terms, that designates the ties a person, characterized exclusively by his or her sex, has, on the one hand, with a certain number of individuals of both sexes from whom he or she descends or who descend from him or her, and, on the other hand, with other individuals to whom he or she is related by marriage (affines) or who are related by marriage to his or her paternal or maternal kin – or sometimes are even affines of affines.

In the West we are accustomed to designate all paternal and maternal kin, together with their descendants, as ‘consanguines’, and all relatives by marriage as ‘affines’. But these terms do not have a universal definition and have the disadvantage of projecting onto kinship systems different from our own distinctions that give rise to confusion and deform or mask the actual facts. In the Baruya’s case, it would be absurd to call the ‘maternals’ ‘consanguines’, which would suggest that they share their blood with the child, whereas, as we will see, a child’s blood and bones are believed to come from its father’s sperm, while its spirit comes from a male or female ancestor (depending on the child’s sex) who also belongs to the father’s lineage. Moreover – but this will be discussed later – we know that in many kinship terminologies, Dravidian and Australian in particular, there are no specific terms for affines and that the mother’s brother is called by the same term as the wife’s father, a term that subsumes two relations which in the West are divided between the vocabulary of consanguinity (maternal uncle) and that of affinity (father-in-law). We thus understand why an observer must decentre his thinking with respect to the categories and representations of kinship used in the West.

What aspects of Baruya kinship terminology cause us to classify it as being of the Iroquois type? (Of course, the Baruya themselves are not aware that their terminology is of the same type as that collected at the end of the nineteenth century by Morgan among the Iroquois.) First, the fact that father’s brothers’ children and mother’s sisters’ children are called by the same terms used to designate Ego’s brothers and sisters. All are brothers and sisters, which is expressed in anthropological jargon by the statement: parallel cousins are (equivalent or identical to) siblings. Alternatively, father’s sisters’ children and mother’s brothers’ children – Ego’s cross cousins – are called by a distinct term. Since male and female parallel cousins are brothers and sisters, in theory they cannot marry each other. But the Baruya can sometimes marry their matrilateral parallel cousin. Cross cousins, on the contrary, are potential spouses. But, in reality, the Baruya do not marry their mother’s brother’s daughter – their matrilateral cross cousin – because it is forbidden to repeat the father’s marriage and take a wife from the mother’s lineage. The distinction between parallel and cross cousins does not carry over several generations, as in Dravidian systems. It is the outcome, in Ego’s generation, of an exchange of women in the preceding generation (G+1), but it is not the consequence of a rule obliging Ego to marry one of his cross cousins or a rule that in a less constraining manner would have him prefer her to other possible choices.

The absence of a prescriptive or preferential marriage rule explains the existence in the Baruya language of specific terms for affines, which is a second feature typical of Iroquois-type kinship terminologies that distinguishes them from Dravidian terminologies. The existence of this specific terminology means that the rule is not to marry someone who is closely related on the father’s or mother’s side, but to marry into a lineage into which your line has not yet married (or at least not for three generations). In short, a potential spouse is an unrelated or distantly related Baruya, but not an outsider, for the Baruya tribe is overwhelmingly endogamous. When someone marries an outsider, it is usually in order to seal a trading or a political alliance. In this case, depending on the context, one exchanges either a woman (in the case of a political alliance) or a certain quantity of goods (in view of trading): salt-bars, cowries, bark capes, feathers and so on, in short, wealth for a woman, or bridewealth.

Let us come back to the fact that Ego’s father’s brothers’ children and Ego’s mother’s sisters’ children are Ego’s brothers and sisters. This implies that Ego’s father’s brothers are also fathers for Ego and that Ego’s mother’s sisters are also mothers for Ego. We are dealing here with a ‘classificatory’ terminology, where the term for ‘father’ designates a category of individuals who stand in the same relation to Ego as the man who is married to Ego’s mother. The notion of paternal ‘uncle’ therefore does not exist in this language and ‘fatherhood’ does not mean the same thing as it does in French or English, since the Baruya word noumwe places in the same category people and relationships that we would distinguish. Likewise for the mother’s side, where the notion of ‘maternal’ aunt does not exist because all of Ego’s mother’s sisters are Ego’s mothers. But since not all of these ‘mothers’ are either Ego’s father’s co-wives or potential or real wives of Ego’s father’s brothers – Ego’s other fathers – we immediately see that the word noua, which I translate as ‘mother’, takes in people and relationships that are distinguished from each other in the European kinship system. Furthermore, Ego’s mother’s brothers are indeed Ego’s uncles, but owing to the fact that Baruya marriage is based on the exchange of ‘sisters’ between two men, one of my father’s sisters is likely the wife of one of Ego’s mother’s brothers (MB=FZH). Alternatively, Ego’s mother’s other brothers will be married to women from other lineages, in accordance with the rule that two brothers are not supposed to take wives in the same lineage. The notions ‘father’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’ and so on thus refer to an indefinite number of individuals who stand in the same category of relation to Ego and Ego’s siblings.

Given the existence of such classificatory terminologies designating categories of individuals standing in equivalent relationships, kinship specialists wondered whether these categories were constructed by extension, as for example when the word ‘father’ is the extension (and projection) of the father–children relationship created within the nuclear family to all of the father’s brothers, who are not part of this nuclear family and are not married to Ego’s mother. Kinship, however, as we will see, is never simply a matter of the nuclear family – or any other kind – and kin groups are never constructed by simply extending and multiplying the relationships found within the nuclear family, which some, following Murdock, insist on calling ‘primary’ kinship relations. We must therefore look for the explanation in an equivalence posited between the relations linking Ego and the class of his or her substitutes (‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’) with another class of individuals. Furthermore this equivalence can subsume genealogically very different relationships, and even link individuals who have no direct or indirect genealogical tie with each other.

English and French kinship terminologies, which are of the Eskimo type, also use classificatory terms that subsume under the same word individuals who stand at equivalent distances and in equivalent relations to Ego, whereas their relationship with Ego is distinct. The term ‘aunt’, for instance, designates both father’s and mother’s sister; the term ‘nephew’, a brother’s and a sister’s son; each time one has to clarify the relationship by adding ‘on my father’s side’, ‘on my mother’s side’, and so on. Likewise for the Baruya. To distinguish mother’s brothers from all of the men who belong to the same lineage and who are their ‘brothers’ and therefore Ego’s classificatory uncles, the Baruya say that they are api aounie – ‘mother’s brothers’ (api) ‘of the breast’ (aounie) – and their children are called migwe aounie – ‘cross cousins’ (migwe) ‘of the breast’ – to distinguish them from all other cross cousins. In the same manner, father’s sisters’ children are called migwe kale – ‘cross cousins of the liver’ (kale) – to distinguish them from the children of all of the father’s classificatory sisters. Likewise, father’s brothers are called ‘little’ fathers, to distinguish them from the father who is the mother’s husband; and mother’s sisters, ‘little’ mothers, to distinguish them from the mother who is the father’s wife.

When it comes to attitudes, rights and duties, all of Ego’s fathers (father and father’s brothers) have authority over Ego. And if Ego does not have a sister to exchange for a wife, he is entitled to expect his other fathers to give him one of their daughters (who are his classificatory ‘sisters’) for the exchange. In addition, as we will see, all of these fathers and all of their children were made from the same sperm as that of Ego’s father and as that of Ego (in the case of a male Ego). Which explains why, even though he also calls the daughters of his mother’s sisters, ‘sisters’, he cannot use them to exchange for a wife: they were not made from the same sperm that made the women of his lineage whom he calls ‘sisters’. Likewise, even though Ego’s mother’s sisters are mothers too, when he addresses his mother, he says Nouaou and when he addresses her sisters, he says Amawo. Finally, grandparents and grandchildren use reciprocal terms, ate (grandfather, grandson) and ata (grandmother, granddaughter). And if your great-grandfather is living and you are a boy, he will call you Gwagwe (‘little brother’) and you will call him Dakwe (‘big brother’). This means that beyond three generations, individuals who carry the same name ‘merge’, and that this merging begins with the third generation, when the grandson carries the same name as his paternal grandfather, the grandmother the same name as her paternal great-aunt, etc. This is direct evidence that for the Baruya an ancestor’s spirit does not die, and to give his or her name to a newborn child is the same as giving this spirit a body in which to reincarnate.

Baruya kinship terminology is thus characterized by three principal features: first, it is a ‘classificatory’ terminology that makes a distinction between cross and parallel kin, the latter being assimilated to siblings; this distinction is present only in Ego’s generation (G0) and not in the ascending and descending generations, as in Dravidian systems. Second, this terminology also possesses specific forms for designating affines, which is also a feature of Iroquois-type systems and distinguishes them from Dravidian systems. Third, the terminology does not carry any indication of the kind of descent rule at work in this society, which is patrilineal. It should be recalled that the Iroquois Indians described by Morgan were matrilineal and that some Iroquois-type terminologies are also associated with undifferentiated, non-lineal descent rules, which we term cognatic. We can already conclude from the above that there is therefore no necessary connection between the existence of a particular terminology and the presence of a particular descent rule.

Finally one last remark: children learn to use these kin terms at a very early age. They are usually taught by their mothers, in concrete situations, and they are quick to grasp that they are supposed to call a given man, distinct from their father, by the same term as they use for their father, noumwe, and that they are supposed to call this man’s children ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, and so on.

MARRIAGE RULES

What are the principles governing Baruya marriage alliances? The first rule is a negative one: one does not marry in one’s own lineage. This is regarded as behaving like a dog, which mates with his siblings, and is regarded as incest, and incest is usually punished by death. It is also forbidden for a man to marry his matrilateral cross cousins, in other words his mother’s brothers’ daughters, even though he is allowed to make blatantly sexual jokes with them in public. He enjoys the same joking relationship with his patrilateral cross cousins, his father’s sisters’ daughters, but these he can marry. And this is precisely what the Baruya do each time a wife-taking lineage has not given a woman in exchange. In this event, one of the woman’s daughters will come and marry one of her mother’s brothers’ sons (a patrilateral cross-cousin marriage).

Why don’t the Baruya marry their matrilateral cross cousins, since they treat them like potential spouses? In order not to take a wife from the same lineage in two successive generations, in other words so as not to repeat their father’s marriage and not to immediately reproduce the same alliance. At least three generations must pass before repeating an alliance with the same group. It is also forbidden for two brothers to take wives in the same lineage. Over generations and depending on the number of male and female members, each lineage thus finds itself allied with five or six different lineages. This multiplication of marriages and the refusal to reproduce them before several generations have elapsed means that Baruya kinship practices resemble what are called ‘semi-complex’ systems. What differentiates the Baruya system is that their form of marriage is based fundamentally on the direct exchange of (close or distant) ‘sisters’ between two men and two lineages, which is typical of what are called ‘elementary’ systems.

But, if a man cannot marry his matrilateral cross cousins even though they are potential wives, he nevertheless sometimes marries a matrilateral parallel cousin, a ‘sister’, since her mother is also his mother. Why can he marry these ‘sisters’ whereas his own sister is forbidden? Because, unlike his sisters on his father’s side (siblings and female parallel cousins), his sisters on his mother’s side are not made from the same sperm as that which made him and his (real) sisters. This is clearly not the case with the mother’s sisters’ daughters – in virtue of the rule that dictates the dispersal of alliances in each generation, they cannot marry a man from their father’s lineage and thus repeat their sister’s marriage. They therefore marry into other lineages and bear children made from a different sperm and who are therefore potential spouses.

THE FIVE MARRIAGE TYPES

The Baruya distinguish five types of marriage. The basic rule is direct exchange of women between two lineages or segments. This rule has a name: ginamare. The exchange can be organized by the families either at the time of the children’s birth or at the time of puberty if the girl has not yet been promised. The boy’s family always makes the first move, and the mother of the small or adolescent girl has a great deal of say in deciding whether or not to promise her daughter to the lineage seeking her for one of its sons.

The second type of marriage derives from the first. It is practised when a boy’s father has given one of his sisters in marriage without receiving – for himself or someone in his lineage – a woman in exchange. In this case he has rights over one of his sister’s daughters – usually the eldest – who will marry his son as a counter-gift for her mother. This is patrilateral cross-cousin marriage; it is therefore not a general rule but complementary to the rule of direct ‘sister’ exchange. This rule, too, has a name: kouremandjinaveu. The term evokes the shoot that grows at the base of the banana tree (koure), which will replace the old tree when it stops bearing fruit.

The third type takes the form of a staged abduction. Two young people who want to marry against the will of their families, who have already chosen other spouses for them, simulate an abduction with the help of the young man’s co-initiates. This is a serious matter, for many interests are compromised and many promises of alliance are left in tatters. The men of the girl’s family pursue the young man, who allows himself to be struck until blood flows. If he can then mark the girl, whom his accomplices have brought along, with his blood, marriage becomes necessary as a compensation for the blood spilled. In this case, either the young man’s lineage gives one of their daughters to the lineage to whom the reluctant girl had been promised or, when the couple is married, they promise one of their daughters to the wife’s lineage. This brings us back to the second type of marriage. Marriage by abduction or capture also has a name: tsika, a term that evokes the fact that the young man makes a show of twisting one of the girl’s fingers and then drags her along behind him, pretending to tighten his grip if she struggles.

The fourth type of marriage is very rare. A young orphan with no sister to exchange, no father to help him, and no father’s brother who will come to his aid by allowing him to exchange one of his daughters, marries the daughter of a couple who has no son to help them in their old age. Last of all, sometimes the Baruya marry women from tribes with whom they trade but never fight. In this case, they make a compensation payment of a large quantity of goods – salt-bars, cowries, weapons, etc. This type of marriage, which implies a bridewealth, is never practised between Baruya themselves.

Of the more than 1,000 marriages I recorded, covering four generations, only eleven took place between a Baruya man and a woman from a neighbouring tribe. All of the other marriages were between Baruya and, with the exception of fewer than ten cases, all had involved an immediate exchange of women (ginamare) or an exchange deferred to the following generation (kouremandjinaveu). A prime example of an endogamous society.

The Baruya thus follow two rules when it comes to marriage: exchange of a woman for a woman, and exchange of wealth for a woman; in other words, one rule which, according to Lévi-Strauss, is typical of elementary kinship structures, and another which is typical of complex structures. The principle of exchanging wealth for women is forbidden in Baruya society but is occasionally practised with outsiders (their trading partners). In other parts of New Guinea, where we find a form of society characterized by Big Men instead of Great Men, who amass women and wealth and win their renown and their authority through the ceremonial competitive giving of gifts and counter-gifts, the practice of ‘direct’ sister exchange is, on the contrary, known but forbidden. The reason alleged is that direct exchange of women would encourage lineages to be content with equivalent exchanges, without rivalry, without competition, and therefore to forsake the network of ceremonial exchanges that reaches beyond the village and the local group to encompass an entire region, bringing face to face in a giving-war the representatives of clans from a great number of tribes that, in other circumstances, might fight over land or for other reasons.

Thus we see that, in Big Man societies, the principle of direct sister exchange has become purely abstract, known but forbidden, and that the practice of giving wealth for a woman – bridewealth – is the very rule that the Baruya apply only exceptionally in their relations with more or less remote tribes with whom they entertain friendly trade relations. Alternatively, the Baruya occasionally exchange women with neighbouring tribes, and we have seen why. In making brothers-in-law among their former enemies, they hope that, the next time war breaks out, these affines will forsake their own tribe and join with the Baruya in exchange for protection of their lands, their goods and, of course, their lives. The Baruya rule is that a Baruya will not kill enemies who are at the same time affines. But he can kill his sister if she has run away to an enemy group and married there without the consent of her lineage and without compensation for the marriage – in the form of a woman or wealth. Cleverly managed alliances thus serve not only to divide groups but also to unite and bring them closer together.

GIFTS AND COUNTER-GIFTS: DEBTS THAT CANNOT BE CANCELLED

We need to come back here to a very important point, one that is not always easy for a Westerner to understand. When a Baruya (lineage) gives a woman and receives another in return, the two parties are not even, their debts are not cancelled.29 The debts balance out and are the raison d’être for many exchanges of goods and services between the two men and their lineages. And these exchanges will continue throughout their lives. By giving, one makes the other one’s debtor and by receiving, one becomes the debtor of the one who has given. At the close of these reciprocal exchanges, each lineage is at the same time ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ to the other: superior because it has given a woman and inferior because it has received one. Their debts are now equal, but on the basis of a double inequality that will fuel a flow of reciprocal prestations over a lifetime.

Several features must be clarified here concerning marriage and alliance between two lineages. First of all, a girl who wants to break a marriage that has been forcibly arranged for her (and that will enable her brother to marry) can use other means than getting herself abducted by the man she wants to marry. She can also wait for the onset of her first menstrual period and then refuse the gifts and the game her fiancé, with the help of his brothers and other men from his and her lineages, has gathered for her and has had delivered to the menstrual hut where she is fasting while waiting to undergo the puberty rites. This supposes a great deal of courage on the girl’s part, but it does happen (and increasingly often today). A great deal of courage because, in refusing to marry the man to whom she was promised, she prevents her brother from marrying this man’s sister, who was promised to him. She breaks the ties that were contracted between the two lineages when she was promised as a child, ties that translated over the years into exchanges of services, pork and so on.

A girl is not absorbed into her husband’s lineage when she marries. She keeps her identity and remains a life-long member of her own lineage. But this lineage has ceded its authority over her. It is not unusual to see a man beating his wife in the presence of her brother, who remains silent. For her brother is the husband of the man’s sister. In the course of a secret ritual that takes place at the base of a giant tree in the forest, the future husband, at the time of his fiancée’s menarche when she undergoes the initiation performed for girls, calls upon the Sun and declares that this woman is no longer under her father’s authority but under his own. At the same moment, in another part of the forest, hundreds of women surround the girl, shouting and pounding her head with their digging sticks, telling her that the time for playing is over, that from now on she will have to obey her husband, not try to seduce his co-initiates – otherwise he will beat her and kill her.

This is proof that the exchange of women concerns not only the two men involved but their lineages as well, which have a collective right over the women they give, in that when a man dies his wife is inherited by one of his brothers or uncles, who may be scarcely older than the deceased. Furthermore, the Baruya forbid divorce. A man can repudiate a wife and give her to one of his brothers, but he cannot send her back to her family or agree to let her leave and make a new start elsewhere.

THE FAMILY

Up to now I have not said much about families. Yet families are what I see everyday in the field. It is rare that the men and women of a lineage get together; the sisters live in their husband’s house, since residence is virilocal. It is rarer still that the village meets to discuss matters concerning everyone – initiations, building an airstrip for the mission planes, etc. The family is a living unit, and also a production and consumption unit. In Baruya, the word for family is kuminidaka, which designates the group formed by the man, his wife and his children. Kumi means ‘everyone/all’. The family is thus all of these people together. Married men sleep in the men’s house when their wives are menstruating or have just given birth. Their wives must purify themselves before resuming life with their husband and cooking for him once more. Theoretically, a married man should not cook his own food and, in the event of conflict with his wife, if she takes the risk of refusing to cook for him or if she takes his children and goes to stay with her mother for several weeks, the man – somewhat embarrassed – gets his sisters to invite him by turns. Polygamous families are not unusual, but a young man who wants to marry two women will marry them on the same day so that neither can claim to be the first wife and mistreat the other. This is not the case with widows inherited together with their children by a man. They are usually subjected to harassments and humiliations by the first wife or wives.

Let us now come back to the moment of the marriage and look at the role played by several types of social relations and groups – the future spouse’s lineages, their age groups, the inhabitants of the village where the couple is going to live, and who will build their house. A week or two before the ceremony, the groom’s father comes to the men’s house where the young man has been living since he had his nose pierced and tells him to get together the different kinds of wood needed to build the floor and the walls of his future house. He will have to gather the materials discreetly and hide them in the forest on the village outskirts. I never obtained an explanation of the reasons for this discretion, which in no way prevents the whole village from being in the know.

The day the house is to be built, all of the young men in the groom’s age group arrive to frame the house and lay the floor. The mood is festive. Meanwhile the village girls, especially those of the same age as the bride, file to the site with bundles of grasses for the roof. The future couple watch the others work but do not participate. In general the house is raised in a day. The next day, the men of the husband’s lineage arrive to construct the hearth, using flat stones and clay they have carried to the site. The groom is not present. His father and his uncles light the first fire and chew betel around the brand new hearth while telling stories about their ancestors and talking about current events. The day after, a member of the Bakia clan comes to affix the four sharpened sticks, called ‘the Sun’s flowers’, on the peak of the roof. They will henceforth connect the house and those who live in it with the Sun, the father of all Baruya.

The wedding takes place the following day, in the presence of the members of the allied lineages and their kinfolk and guests. The two young people are seated side by side and listen in silence to the speeches addressed to them, usually by men reputed for their rhetorical skills. They address the bride and the groom successively, exhorting them to remember that they must not commit adultery, must work hard in the gardens, and must raise and protect their children. They are also publicly reminded of their shortcomings, or of certain childhood incidents – thefts, quarrels, etc.

At the end of the day, the young groom spends the night in his new house surrounded by the not-yet-initiated village boys, who come to sleep beside him. Next evening, it’s the bride’s turn to spend the night with the village girls. From then on, the couple sleeps in the house, but they are theoretically forbidden to make love before soot from the fire in their new fireplace has blackened the walls of their house. This can take several weeks. During this time, though the couple abstains from actual intercourse, the young man has the young woman drink his sperm so that her breasts will fill out and she will later have plenty of milk to nourish the children she will bear. From this time on, the young man can no longer have homosexual relations with the young initiates living in the men’s house.

We can thus see how a number of factors come into marriage: kinship relations (for example the husband’s lineage, which constructs the fireplace); the age groups linked to initiation, which build the house; ritual relations; the intervention of a clan, the Bakia, which owns the sacred objects and ritual formulas that will allow this new house and family to be connected to the Sun, father of all Baruya.

Inside the family home, the man sleeps with his sons at the back of the house, on the other side of the central fireplace, while his wife or wives sleep next to the door with their daughters and babies. A woman will never enter the male space without permission and will never step over the hearth set in the middle of the floor. For her vulva might open over the fire where she cooks the food that goes into her husband’s mouth, and that would pollute it. It would be sorcery on her part, and, if her husband were to catch her in the act, he would beat her or even kill her on the spot. A woman may resist her husband physically, but she must never strike him in the face – and even less on the nose, which is pierced and adorned with his initiation insignia. Husband and wife do not address each other by name but by using the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’. And they never touch each other or make intimate gestures in public.

The fact that the man and the woman have usually not chosen each other, the existence of all these bodily constraints, and the affirmation of male domination and the fear of sexual relations, do not prevent numerous couples from feeling deep affection for each other, and it is not uncommon for a man or a woman to hang him- or herself when the spouse dies. It is also not unusual for a widower or a widow to wear on a necklace for the rest of their life their spouse’s hair or certain bones removed at the time of the second funeral for the deceased, when the bones are collected and placed in a tree in the ancestral forest.

WHAT IS A CHILD FOR THE BARUYA?

The Baruya’s view of child conception testifies to the dominant status of men in the kinship system and more broadly in the society as a whole. For the Baruya, it is the man’s sperm that makes the better part of the child in its mother’s womb – its bones, blood and skin. The woman’s uterus is simply a ‘bag’ in which the foetus develops, nourished for the first months by the sperm of the husband, who increases his sexual relations with his wife once she discovers she is pregnant. The woman’s vaginal fluids (and not her blood) play their role in the child’s identity. If they are ‘stronger’ than the sperm, it will be a girl, if the sperm prevails, it will be a boy.

Nevertheless, the sperm, which makes the foetal body and nourishes it, does not suffice to bring it to its final form. It still does not have fingers and toes, and especially a nose, which will be pierced when the future boy or girl is initiated. The Baruya believe that the Sun ‘completes’ the embryo in the woman’s womb. Each Baruya man and woman thus has two fathers: the first engenders three quarters of the child with his sperm and gives it a social identity as a male or female member of a lineage; the second is a heavenly power which completes the foetus with a nose, the seat of intelligence and understanding, as well as hands and feet to move about and act with. Later, when the child has survived for at least a year, the father’s lineage presents the mother’s with a series of goods during a ceremony at the close of which the child will receive its first name, the name it will carry until it is initiated and which is the first name of a male or female lineage ancestor.

But it seems that the child receives more than just the ancestor’s name. Something like part of this ancestor’s spirit (in the sense of soul, anima, which is associated with the Sun) is transmitted along with the name. Sperm is therefore the life force. It is what justifies male domination in society. Even the milk that swells the new mother’s breasts is, according to Baruya men, their sperm changed into milk. And it is to work this transformation that, during the first weeks of marriage, the young man has his young wife drink his sperm every day so that she will later have plenty of milk to nourish their children. On several occasions, however, I observed that not all of the women entirely shared this representation of the male origin of their milk, and in particular almost none of the younger generation, who have gone to school and been Christianized, any longer believe this.

The sperm concealed in the woman’s womb becomes life, but at the expense of a mortal threat to the men’s strength and even to the reproduction of the cosmos. To make love is to take risks, and to put society and the universe at risk as well. When a married couple makes love, they cannot work in the gardens that day, and the man cannot make salt or go hunting. In short, sexuality (heterosexuality) must be tightly controlled because it is a threat to the social and cosmic orders. This is, in the final analysis, because heterosexuality entails a man uniting with a woman whose menstrual blood periodically runs down her thighs and threatens to deplete not only the force and strength of the men, but also that of the plants or the game that feed them. Alternatively, the sperm that the initiates give the younger boys in the men’s house, in so far as it is free of any contact with a woman’s vagina, contributes to their rebirth as stronger and more handsome men.

It is therefore understandable that the Baruya forbid a married man to give his sperm to a boy. Once a penis has entered a woman’s vagina, it can no longer enter a boy’s mouth. It is similarly understandable that a woman is forbidden to straddle the man during coitus, for her vaginal fluids would run out onto his abdomen and pollute it, and so on.

In sum, in this society as in many others (and not only in Oceania), ‘sexuality-as-desire’ is subordinated to ‘sexuality-for-reproduction’, and the heterosexual nature of the latter is seen as a threat to the reproduction of society and the cosmos. Women in particular are the bearers of this threat, and because they are responsible they are therefore guilty. Their menstrual blood is seen as the opposite of sperm, an anti-sperm, as it were. The ambivalence of all these representations is glaring. For the first flow of menstrual blood, the arrival of a girl’s first period, is also the sign that one day she will bear children, will enable a lineage to reproduce itself by providing descendants, sons who will inherit their ancestors’ lands and powers, and daughters who will procure wives for their brothers. Furthermore, it was the Moon, the Sun’s wife (in the exoteric, popular version) or his younger brother (in the esoteric version of the shamans) who one day opened the path in the girl’s body that enables the menstrual blood to flow. At the heart of these myths and practices lies the men’s fear of women, a sort of constantly denied envy of women’s life-giving power, and the desire, too, to appropriate a share of this power for themselves.

For a Baruya woman has the right to kill her newborn child – at least during the time she is isolated in the birthing hut she has built. This hut stands downhill from the village in a space strictly off-limits to men. When a man sees his wife coming home without a baby in her arms, he immediately accuses her of having killed their child and suspects that it surely must have been a boy, a son his wife deprived him of. To be sure, a certain number of children die at birth. But it also happens that a woman gets rid of the child, either because she already has too many or because of births too close together; she thinks she will not be able to feed this child and raise it. But some women also told me they had killed their baby because they did not want to give any more children to a loathsome husband who beat them, or to a man who wanted to take a second wife. By killing their child, the women offer men one more proof that, if they can give life, they can also take it back. And it was precisely this power that the first men had been trying to appropriate when they stole the women’s flutes (whose secret name designates both the foetus and the new initiate).

This explains why the sacred objects (kwaimatnie) come in pairs and why the more powerful, or ‘hotter’, of the two is a ‘female object’, which the masters of the initiations grasp and use to strike the chest of the initiates after having held the object up to the Sun. The word kwaimatnie is a compound of kwala (‘man’) and nyimatnie (‘to cause to grow’). It is with the women’s power to give life that the men are confronted even as they claim to have appropriated it for themselves in the imaginary workings of the myths they mime in the symbol-laden enactment of the secret male initiation rites, in the course of which they cause the boys to be reborn independently of a woman’s womb. To engender themselves – such seems to be the men’s secret desire, present at the heart of these myths and rites. But could such a wish come true other than in the imaginary? – and by means of purely symbolic practices.30

In conclusion, I would like to stress that it is not enough to show that the sphere of kinship, in Baruya society, is a domain of social practice that enacts the domination of one gender over the other, of men over women. The entire social division of labour illustrates this reality. It is equally important to show that, above and beyond women’s individual and collective subordination to men, there is the impersonal, structural subordination of a whole set of social relations – kinship relations – to the reproduction of the political-ritual relations that enable the Baruya tribe to exist as a whole, as a local society with sovereignty over its territory and governed by the men, who have taken upon themselves the right to represent this whole, of which they are only a part.

THE PRE-EMINENCE OF POLITICAL-RELIGIOUS RELATIONS

I will recall here a few facts that I have already stated, to which I will add others that also testify to the subordination of kinship relations to the political-ritual relations that enable the Baruya society to exist as such.

First is the fact that the Sun is supposed to complete the foetus in the woman’s womb. But it is the men who monopolize access to the Sun, since they are the ones who possess that which the Sun gave their ancestors in the Dreamtime, namely: the sacred objects and the formulae that allow them to grow boys into men, into warriors capable of confronting their enemies and husbands capable of dealing with their wives.

Second is the fact that, when the tsimia is constructed, each post stands for a new initiate and is prepared and brought to the site by a boy’s father. The fathers of the initiates then form a circle that marks the periphery of the future ceremonial house. They stand side by side, arranged not by lineage but by village, and all together, at a signal from the masters of the initiations, sink the poles – the new generation of initiates – into the ground. Politics is thus more important than kinship. At the same time, metaphorically speaking, kinship symbolizes politics, for the Baruya say that the tsimia is the image of the tribe’s ‘body’, and the posts are its ‘bones’, planted in the ground by the men, and the thatch the ‘skin’, brought by the women.

A third fact points in the same direction. As soon as he is initiated, a young boy immediately becomes the elder of all his sisters, including his older sisters, who will from then on address him as ‘elder brother’ (gwagwe) destined to replace their father. This mental transformation performed on genealogical ties by virtue of the men’s political-ritual promotion clearly shows the subordination of kinship relations to the relations that organize power within the society.

This evokes a fourth fact, which this time revises linguistic usages. In the Baruya language, once a game animal is dead it becomes feminine.

Fifth, in the course of the first-stage initiation ceremony, a long, wide plank is brought and laid across the threshold of the men’s house, where the new initiates have just been secluded. Later they will learn that this board is the image of all the married women, a symbol the married men step on when they enter the house to join their sons. Nor must we forget that kwaimatnie come in pairs, and that the hotter one, the more powerful and dangerous of the two, is always the ‘female’ one.

And finally, when I first arrived among the Baruya, in 1967, the mountainsides were covered with paired paths, one a few metres above the other: the higher one was for men, the lower one for women, girls and children.

MODERN TIMES

As the Baruya enter the twenty-first century, their gender relations have changed profoundly. There is no longer any sign of the paired, gendered paths. These disappeared quite suddenly, in the 1970s, in other words twenty years after the first contacts with Europeans, ten years after the first patrol post and the first Lutheran mission. Another thing that was quick to disappear was the habit of women and girls stopping when a group of men approached and turning their backs while hiding their faces behind a flap of their bark capes. Next the men began to shorten the duration of the taboo on eating in front of their mother before they had fathered at least two children and had gone through a ceremony to lift this prohibition. This taboo was doubled by a ban on addressing their mother or speaking to someone in her presence. By 1980 the men had decided they could lift this ban and once again eat in their mother’s presence and speak to her a few months after the birth of their first child. Men who, before the Europeans arrived, had never touched a baby, regarding it as a dirty being that soiled the netbag in which the mother carried it everywhere she went – slung on her back or across her chest – would one by one begin to hold their small children in their arms, first the boys and a year or two later, the girls as well. Meanwhile most of the women had stopped going bare-breasted and now covered their chest and shoulders with cheap cotton blouses bought at the Lutheran mission – which were soon reduced to tatters by sweat, rain and the heavy loads they carried on their back.31

A few girls were sent to primary school, where they excelled, but their parents were unwilling to let them go away to high school, as the boys did. Nevertheless they had learned to speak Pidgin and read the Bible. The custom of newly wed girls practising fellatio to ‘swell their breasts’ with their husband’s sperm also disappeared fairly soon, and the old women still blame this disappearance for the diseases that sometimes carry off young women for no apparent reason.

In 1981 the girls of Wiaveu, the village where the Baruya had allowed me to live in 1967, would play basketball on a court made in the centre of the village by the non-initiated boys who attended school and with the help of other boys of their age who had been initiated and lived in the men’s house. Everyone attended the games between the girls’ teams and did not hesitate to comment on the size of their breasts, their skill or their clumsiness, a scene reminiscent of village life in Europe and far removed from the sexual segregation I had found in 1967.

Today more and more young Baruya men who have left for two or three years to work on the plantations come home with a foreign wife, taken from a group living on the coast or in one of the high interior valleys in the vicinity of the towns of Goroka or Hagen. They have sometimes had to give several thousand kina (a kina is worth slightly less than one US dollar) to their wife’s clan in order to conclude the marriage. And once these women, who are not from the area and who know nothing of the Baruya language and traditions, get to Wonenara or Marawaka, they lead a very hard life, which sometimes drives them to run away, with or without their children. The young men who brought them back from their stay in town or on the plantations are very proud to have obtained a wife without incurring a debt to their lineage, thus keeping the possibility of exchanging their ‘sisters’ for a Baruya wife.

Last of all, men and women have begun planting and harvesting coffee as a cash crop; and the children who used to spend their days playing, especially the little boys, are now recruited for one or two hours a day to sort the coffee beans drying in the sun on bamboo mats. In short, all levels of the population now often work in order to ‘do business’, but the money earned from the sale of their harvests serves only to buy rice and tinned fish from Japan, which replace the game formerly used in ceremonies; or to purchase shoes, sunglasses, umbrellas, machetes and soap. A few Baruya have started putting their money on savings passbooks distributed by the Administration, so that they no longer see their ‘real’ money, which is collected regularly and taken away in sacks for deposit in the bank vault in Goroka. A last fact, which is important: numbers of Baruya women – more than the men – have joined one of a number of Christian denominations that send missionaries to the area – today nearly all natives of Papua New Guinea – even as far as Wonenara and Marawaka. Once the adults have been converted and baptized, they renounce their personal name – for example Gwataie, Maye, which immediately tell a Baruya that the first is an Andavakia and the second a Baruya Kwarrandariar. Henceforth they are called John, David, or Mary, followed by their clan name: John Andavakia, David Bakia. Their children are baptized, go to the mission school and are no longer initiated. For the rest of their life they will carry Old or New Testament first names. They have stopped living as the reincarnation of one of their lineage or clan ancestors.

Before concluding, I would like to say something about my approach to Baruya kinship in the field. As we saw, it was a mistake to try to start fieldwork with a study of the kinship system without sufficient knowledge of the language and using informants who were too young. The error was due to lack of experience. It was a good decision to drop this study and start another on an aspect of Baruya life that occupies the men several months of the year and the women on a daily basis, namely: clearing large gardens in the forest, planting sweet potatoes or taros, tending them and then progressively harvesting while starting new gardens well before the old ones are exhausted. These are relentless tasks that mobilize every able man and woman to produce this essential portion of their material means of existence, their means of subsistence. No one is exempted from these tasks without an exceptional reason.

It was only when I spent months with the Baruya in their gardens, taking down the names of the ancestors who had first cleared the land and those of their descendants who had inherited the right to use it today, listing the names of the men who had worked together to cut the trees and build the fences around each garden to keep out the wild pigs, the names of the women – the wives, sisters, sisters-in-law, eldest daughters, etc. – among whom the plots had been divided, that a path opened up enabling me to gradually approach what the domain of kinship and ties to the land meant for the Baruya, the women’s ties to the plants they grew, the presence of the spirits, the history of their wars and so on. Little by little I learned the kin ties that allowed given groups of men and women to cultivate such and such a plot, which of them held the right to make the garden, and which affines or maternal kin were invited to join them on this occasion, which would be reciprocated.

Over these months, day after day, I got to know dozens (and even hundreds) of Baruya personally. And they in turn formed their judgement of me and almost always accepted my presence with them in their gardens or on their hunting grounds. Some were reluctant, though, and I did not press them.

It became increasingly easy to question them on their genealogy. It was they who volunteered their ties of consanguinity or affinity with those who shared the use of the land. All adults had direct knowledge of these ties, but many were incapable of going back very far, no more than two generations. When someone was in doubt or admitted ignorance, they readily appealed to someone else, generally an elderly man or woman, known for remembering old alliances or the names of ascendants who had died young or gone to live in neighbouring friendly – or even hostile – tribes. These knowledgeable persons were not necessarily members of the questioner’s lineage. But the size of the Baruya tribe and the fact that, in virtue of the ban on repeating marriages from the preceding generations, each lineage was ultimately allied with six or seven others, together with the need to keep all these marriages straight so as to know when they could be repeated, meant that people like old Djirinac or Nougrouvandjereye had to remember the genealogies of almost all of the tribe’s members over several generations.

But the memory of even the most knowledgeable and reliable informants is always skewed by the (unconscious) interference of the patrilineal descent rule – in the Baruya’s case – which meant that in the generations farthest from Ego (G+3 or G+4), the first names cited were always those of men, as though all of the firstborn of these generations had been male. The women’s names were generally forgotten or mentioned only in second or third position in their generation. Reciting genealogies was not only an exercise in ‘kinship’; the sound of certain names spontaneously elicited copious comments on such and such a personality, famous for his deeds or misdeeds, the memory of bloody clashes between brothers over such and such a woman or garden.

I remember one time when Nougrouvandjereye, who had spent the day with other Baruya constructing for me the genealogies of certain lineages in the Marawaka Valley, went home to his village, where he was attacked and wounded on the arm by a man wielding a machete. The aggressor had heard – probably from one of the (many) Baruya usually at my house – that sometime that day Nougrouvandjereye had voiced doubts in my presence about the aggressor’s lineage’s rights in a certain number of pandanus trees (which produce highly appreciated berries), whereas Nougrouvandjereye had told me that it was not one of his own ancestors who had planted the trees.

GENEALOGIES: MADE-UP STORIES FOR THE WHITE MAN?

In short, genealogies did indeed exist for the Baruya, and they involved many stakes and interests. Asking the Baruya to reconstruct their genealogies, therefore, did not amount to imposing a Eurocentric vision of kinship. Nor was it a matter of projecting our vision of consanguinity, our notions of fatherhood and motherhood. The Baruya taught me two things in this regard, which kept me from projecting my own representations of paternity, consanguinity, etc., onto theirs. The first was that the Baruya have only one word for father and father’s brothers, and another for mother and mother’s sisters; as a consequence, their children are brothers and sisters. The notions of father, mother and siblings therefore cannot mean the same thing for a Baruya as for a Western European born into a kinship system centred on the nuclear family and which places in the same category (that of uncle) father’s brother and mother’s brother, following the terminology known as Eskimo, which characterizes the Western European and American kinship systems.

Second, and above all, for the Baruya a child is made from its father’s sperm, which makes its blood, its bones, its skin and even the milk with which its mother nourishes it. But the child is also the work of the Sun, which as I have said makes the foetus in the woman’s womb into a human child. In short, when one understands how the Baruya envision the process of making a baby, and the respective roles played by the man, the woman and the Sun, it is impossible to project one’s own concept of consanguinity onto their way of thinking and living, and to affirm that for them, too, ‘blood is thicker than water’. For the Baruya – to parody Schneider – sperm is thicker and stronger than blood, milk and so forth, which come from what the Baruya call ‘penis water’ (lakala alieu).

Lastly, and this is the weightiest argument against Schneider’s criticisms, just as questioning people about their genealogies in no way prompts the anthropologist to project onto them the Western notion of consanguinity and thus to put both maternal and paternal kin in the same category, so too discovering the importance of kinship relations and the associated norms and values for the Baruya in no way compels the anthropologist to conclude that theirs is a ‘kin-based society’.

We have seen that, in the Baruya’s case, the existence of kin groups and kin ties between individuals and between the groups they form is not enough to make a society, in the sense of a territorial group that exists and must reproduce itself as a whole, that represents itself to itself as a whole and acts as such at the political-religious level. In sum, no one is obliged to conclude, after having reconstructed genealogies, that kinship is the universal basis of societies that have no classes or castes. No one is compelled to overrate the importance of kinship and its real functions in the production and reproduction of a given society. On this point I agree with Schneider. But I go further, for I maintain that there is no such thing as kin-based societies, on the one hand, and, on the other, societies based on other kinds of social relations – classes, for instance. To my mind, no society as a social group that presents itself to its members as a whole and is reproduced as such by them can be kin based. That kinship is the basis of societies is an axiom of social anthropology that does not seem to me to have been demonstrated and which I now reject after having accepted it for years.

To conclude this chapter, I would like to step back from the Baruya and place their case in a broader context. We have seen how a young anthropologist had no difficulty discovering that the Baruya’s kinship terminology belongs to what is called the Iroquois type. Of course, the Baruya were unaware of this, and their ignorance had no effect on the way they led their lives. They lived their relationships as they found them, striving to reproduce them if it suited them; but to compare their relationships with those existing in other societies, about which they ignored everything down to their very existence, would have been meaningless to them.

And yet the fact that a number of societies with very different languages, cultures and structures never having had any historical contact with each other possess kinship terminologies with the same structure raises a whole series of questions. What is an Iroquois-type terminology? How many variants of this type are there? Where in the world are other examples found? Is there a connection between this type of terminology and the Baruya marriage rule of direct ‘sister’ exchange? Is there a connection between this type of terminology and the existence, in Baruya society, of a patrilateral descent principle? The Iroquois that Morgan studied followed a different rule, in which descent was calculated through the female line, thus a matrilineal principle. Furthermore, if the Baruya recognize themselves as being the son or daughter of a father and a mother, and thus represent themselves as being in a bilateral relationship of filiation with their paternal and maternal kin, what is the significance of favouring the ties that go through the men, starting from a common ancestor, to constitute the kin groups we have called lineages and, with more reserve, clans? Finally, is it because this descent rule is patrilineal and the children belong to their father’s lineage that the Baruya give so much importance to sperm in their representations of child conception? And yet we know that there are societies where the kinship terminology is of the Iroquois type and descent reckoning is patrilineal and which nevertheless do not hold sperm to be of much importance, for instance the Paici of New Caledonia. Nor should we forget that, for the Baruya, the husband’s sperm is not enough to make a child, since the Sun must intervene to complete its formation in the mother’s womb. But the Sun is a male power, which acts as a father to all Baruya, whatever their lineage.

In short, these questions take us to another level, that of the theoretical analysis of the field data, an analysis that can be carried out only by comparing the Baruya’s ways of living and thinking with those found in other human groups that are close or distant over space or in time. It is not that the Baruya do not compare their own ways of doing and thinking with those of their close or more remote neighbours – and, since 1951, with those of Europeans – but they do this by enumerating the differences, without being able actually to explain the reasons, except to say: this is how it’s been for a very long time and the ancestors (and the gods) of the various groups are the ones who made it so.

What makes the difference between the spontaneous empirical comparisons everyone can make with nearby societies and the comparisons that anthropologists construct are, on the one hand, the terms of comparison and, on the other, the breadth and diversity of the selection of cases to be compared. For when we compare Baruya kinship terminology with the neighbouring systems, we are comparing not only vocabularies but also sets of relationships engendered by a certain number of principles (descent, marriage, etc.), which structure a set of kin terms. This structure defines the system as belonging to a type, usually already identified (Iroquois, Dravidian, Sudanese, etc.). One can also compare the Baruya with other examples of the same Iroquois-type terminology found in New Guinea, America or Oceania, in societies the Baruya have never heard of. But a kinship terminology is a logical-linguistic set of some thirty words, on average, whose content is of a different order of abstraction than the Baruya representations of, say, the process of making a baby and the role played by the father, mother and Sun. This set of representations can in turn be compared with those that have been worked out in other societies, nearby or far away, with various kinship systems.

Although the comparison of representations of how a baby is made is every bit as ‘constructed’ as the comparison of terminologies, the results do not put the Baruya in as vast a category as that of Iroquois-type terminologies, but into a smaller set; that of patrilineal societies stressing the primary role of sperm. But, if we add the role of the Sun, the Baruya’s cultural singularity shifts to the fore and gives them a specific identity, though not one that is unique, since six or seven of their neighbours – who speak the same language and initiate their boys in the same way – also see the roles of sperm and the Sun in a like manner. But other groups – to the west and the south of the Baruya and their neighbours and who belong to the same big linguistic group, such as the Ankave – lay the stress not on sperm but on menstrual blood, do not go in for ritual homosexuality, and do not give the same importance to the Sun.32 Why?

In short, the global comparison of societies is clearly not a good way to start. The analysis needs to deconstruct the social relations in a society before attempting to place them in the overall dynamic configuration from which they were detached in an abstract fashion. This global configuration exists in all societies, since it is by reproducing it that societies reproduce themselves and ensure their historical existence. To be capable of creating an analytical reconstruction of these various global configurations that make each society singular is the most ambitious aim of the social sciences, of which anthropology is but one particular discipline. Successes along this path are few and far between, and a high degree of methodological rigour and prudence are called for if one wants the comparison between societies taken as a whole, defined by a few structures and values judged to be characteristic of their functioning and identity, to have any true meaning for science.

I will therefore not be comparing societies ‘globally’ in the following chapters. These caveats having been stated, I will try briefly to describe the components of the domain of social life that anthropology designates by the term ‘kinship’. But first I will recapitulate what I have learned in terms of theory and methods from my fieldwork about the nature of kinship relations and their role in the Baruya society of New Guinea.

The first lesson is that there is no assurance of carrying out a successful study of kinship if one starts by trying to resolve the questions this poses, because kinship is closely bound up with all sorts of practices and areas of life that may be much more important to the anthropologist than to the actors themselves.

The second lesson is that systematically recording genealogies does not mean that one has yielded to a genealogical vision of kinship. The Baruya themselves make a distinction between classificatory kinship and kin ties based on genealogical links. It must therefore be concluded that kinship categories are broader than genealogies without being completely separate.

The third lesson is that making a systematic survey of genealogies does not mean that one has in mind the Western concepts of consanguinity. As soon as one works from the local ideas about procreation, the conception of a child and its development in its mother’s body, and so on, one is no longer reproducing the Western concept of consanguinity as shared blood. In one society, the blood will come from the father, as will the bones; in another, the bones will come from the father and the blood from the mother. All one can say is that, in all societies, individuals have paternal and maternal kin. But that in no way dictates the content of the concepts of fatherhood, motherhood, marriage and alliance in a given society.

The fourth lesson is that an anthropologist has no difficulty rapidly identifying Baruya kinship terminology as a variety of the Iroquois type. This shows that the conceptual findings of scientific inquiry into the forms of organization of human societies and their attendant cultural representations do not coincide with the actors’ own experience; that is to say, with their own awareness of themselves and their institutions. From the moment one discovers that Baruya kinship terminology is a variety of the Iroquois type, a problem arises that is not part of the Baruya’s experience, namely: where, on the face of the earth, do we find societies using the same terminology, despite the fact that there is no historical record of contact between the groups in question? Which in turn raises other questions: can we understand, for example, the reasons why, in places so far apart and at such different times in history, terminologies having the same formal structure appear?

Fifth lesson: Baruya kinship terminology tells us nothing about the descent rule they have adopted to manage their kin ties. The Baruya principle is patrilineal, whereas descent reckoning among the Iroquois, who gave their name to the terminology, is matrilineal. There is, therefore, no necessary tie between kinship terminology and descent rule. This needs explaining.

Sixth lesson: Do the Baruya have clans? No, if we regard exogamy as a constituent principle of the existence of a clan; yes, if a clan is merely a group that sees itself as having a political-ritual identity based on a unilineal descent principle without this necessarily making it exogamous. Finally, we have seen that in the same society two types of exchange can be used to establish a marriage alliance. The Baruya exchange either a woman for a woman or wealth for a woman. According to the first rule, they conform to the category of elementary kinship structures; according to the second, they have already entered the realm of complex structures. We must ‘think’ this duality and identify in a more global manner how it appears in other contexts.

Seventh lesson: Taking several paths through some complex realities, we have come to the conclusion that kinship is not the basis of Baruya society. But we went further and affirmed more generally that, to exist as such, a society must exist as a whole that unites all of the groups that form it and at the same time encompasses them, because this whole lies at another level, the level of political-religious relations, which cement its unity in a largely (for us) imaginary and symbolic manner and ensure, by means that are not all imaginary or symbolic (e.g. warfare, access to hunting grounds, etc.), its overall reproduction. Which raises the question of the axiom reiterated throughout the past by most anthropologists, namely, that ‘primitive societies’, in other words, societies without class or caste structures, are ‘kin based’. This axiom becomes meaningless if kinship is never enough to make a set of kin groups into a society.

Eighth and last lesson, which is also important: Throughout our analysis of Baruya kinship relations, we have seen that these relationships are subject to the dynamics of the power relations in this society. And we have also seen that gender relations are a privileged site of the articulation between kinship and power. This appeared in the representations of male and female bodily substances – as well as in numerous other social and cultural facts that implement and illustrate the forms and mechanics of the domination of one sex over the other, in the present case of men over women. It is therefore not possible to understand kinship relations without analyzing the place occupied by men and women, and in a broader perspective the social attributes attaching to each, and which make them different genders.