The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

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СКАЧАТЬ married there without the consent of her lineage and without compensation for the marriage – in the form of a woman or wealth. Cleverly managed alliances thus serve not only to divide groups but also to unite and bring them closer together.

      GIFTS AND COUNTER-GIFTS: DEBTS THAT CANNOT BE CANCELLED

      We need to come back here to a very important point, one that is not always easy for a Westerner to understand. When a Baruya (lineage) gives a woman and receives another in return, the two parties are not even, their debts are not cancelled.29 The debts balance out and are the raison d’être for many exchanges of goods and services between the two men and their lineages. And these exchanges will continue throughout their lives. By giving, one makes the other one’s debtor and by receiving, one becomes the debtor of the one who has given. At the close of these reciprocal exchanges, each lineage is at the same time ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ to the other: superior because it has given a woman and inferior because it has received one. Their debts are now equal, but on the basis of a double inequality that will fuel a flow of reciprocal prestations over a lifetime.

      Several features must be clarified here concerning marriage and alliance between two lineages. First of all, a girl who wants to break a marriage that has been forcibly arranged for her (and that will enable her brother to marry) can use other means than getting herself abducted by the man she wants to marry. She can also wait for the onset of her first menstrual period and then refuse the gifts and the game her fiancé, with the help of his brothers and other men from his and her lineages, has gathered for her and has had delivered to the menstrual hut where she is fasting while waiting to undergo the puberty rites. This supposes a great deal of courage on the girl’s part, but it does happen (and increasingly often today). A great deal of courage because, in refusing to marry the man to whom she was promised, she prevents her brother from marrying this man’s sister, who was promised to him. She breaks the ties that were contracted between the two lineages when she was promised as a child, ties that translated over the years into exchanges of services, pork and so on.

      A girl is not absorbed into her husband’s lineage when she marries. She keeps her identity and remains a life-long member of her own lineage. But this lineage has ceded its authority over her. It is not unusual to see a man beating his wife in the presence of her brother, who remains silent. For her brother is the husband of the man’s sister. In the course of a secret ritual that takes place at the base of a giant tree in the forest, the future husband, at the time of his fiancée’s menarche when she undergoes the initiation performed for girls, calls upon the Sun and declares that this woman is no longer under her father’s authority but under his own. At the same moment, in another part of the forest, hundreds of women surround the girl, shouting and pounding her head with their digging sticks, telling her that the time for playing is over, that from now on she will have to obey her husband, not try to seduce his co-initiates – otherwise he will beat her and kill her.

      This is proof that the exchange of women concerns not only the two men involved but their lineages as well, which have a collective right over the women they give, in that when a man dies his wife is inherited by one of his brothers or uncles, who may be scarcely older than the deceased. Furthermore, the Baruya forbid divorce. A man can repudiate a wife and give her to one of his brothers, but he cannot send her back to her family or agree to let her leave and make a new start elsewhere.

      THE FAMILY

      Up to now I have not said much about families. Yet families are what I see everyday in the field. It is rare that the men and women of a lineage get together; the sisters live in their husband’s house, since residence is virilocal. It is rarer still that the village meets to discuss matters concerning everyone – initiations, building an airstrip for the mission planes, etc. The family is a living unit, and also a production and consumption unit. In Baruya, the word for family is kuminidaka, which designates the group formed by the man, his wife and his children. Kumi means ‘everyone/all’. The family is thus all of these people together. Married men sleep in the men’s house when their wives are menstruating or have just given birth. Their wives must purify themselves before resuming life with their husband and cooking for him once more. Theoretically, a married man should not cook his own food and, in the event of conflict with his wife, if she takes the risk of refusing to cook for him or if she takes his children and goes to stay with her mother for several weeks, the man – somewhat embarrassed – gets his sisters to invite him by turns. Polygamous families are not unusual, but a young man who wants to marry two women will marry them on the same day so that neither can claim to be the first wife and mistreat the other. This is not the case with widows inherited together with their children by a man. They are usually subjected to harassments and humiliations by the first wife or wives.

      Let us now come back to the moment of the marriage and look at the role played by several types of social relations and groups – the future spouse’s lineages, their age groups, the inhabitants of the village where the couple is going to live, and who will build their house. A week or two before the ceremony, the groom’s father comes to the men’s house where the young man has been living since he had his nose pierced and tells him to get together the different kinds of wood needed to build the floor and the walls of his future house. He will have to gather the materials discreetly and hide them in the forest on the village outskirts. I never obtained an explanation of the reasons for this discretion, which in no way prevents the whole village from being in the know.

      The day the house is to be built, all of the young men in the groom’s age group arrive to frame the house and lay the floor. The mood is festive. Meanwhile the village girls, especially those of the same age as the bride, file to the site with bundles of grasses for the roof. The future couple watch the others work but do not participate. In general the house is raised in a day. The next day, the men of the husband’s lineage arrive to construct the hearth, using flat stones and clay they have carried to the site. The groom is not present. His father and his uncles light the first fire and chew betel around the brand new hearth while telling stories about their ancestors and talking about current events. The day after, a member of the Bakia clan comes to affix the four sharpened sticks, called ‘the Sun’s flowers’, on the peak of the roof. They will henceforth connect the house and those who live in it with the Sun, the father of all Baruya.

      The wedding takes place the following day, in the presence of the members of the allied lineages and their kinfolk and guests. The two young people are seated side by side and listen in silence to the speeches addressed to them, usually by men reputed for their rhetorical skills. They address the bride and the groom successively, exhorting them to remember that they must not commit adultery, must work hard in the gardens, and must raise and protect their children. They are also publicly reminded of their shortcomings, or of certain childhood incidents – thefts, quarrels, etc.

      At the end of the day, the young groom spends the night in his new house surrounded by the not-yet-initiated village boys, who come to sleep beside him. Next evening, it’s the bride’s turn to spend the night with the village girls. From then on, the couple sleeps in the house, but they are theoretically forbidden to make love before soot from the fire in their new fireplace has blackened the walls of their house. This can take several weeks. During this time, though the couple abstains from actual intercourse, the young man has the young woman drink his sperm so that her breasts will fill out and she will later have plenty of milk to nourish the children she will bear. From this time on, the young man can no longer have homosexual relations with the young initiates living in the men’s house.

      We can thus see how a number of factors come into marriage: kinship relations (for example the husband’s lineage, which constructs the fireplace); the age groups linked to initiation, which build the house; ritual relations; the intervention of a clan, the Bakia, which owns the sacred objects and ritual formulas that will allow this new house and family to be connected to the Sun, father of all Baruya.

      Inside the family home, the man sleeps with his sons at the back of the house, on the other side of the central fireplace, while his СКАЧАТЬ