The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ