The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ