The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ