The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ