The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ