The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ permission and will never step over the hearth set in the middle of the floor. For her vulva might open over the fire where she cooks the food that goes into her husband’s mouth, and that would pollute it. It would be sorcery on her part, and, if her husband were to catch her in the act, he would beat her or even kill her on the spot. A woman may resist her husband physically, but she must never strike him in the face – and even less on the nose, which is pierced and adorned with his initiation insignia. Husband and wife do not address each other by name but by using the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’. And they never touch each other or make intimate gestures in public.

      The fact that the man and the woman have usually not chosen each other, the existence of all these bodily constraints, and the affirmation of male domination and the fear of sexual relations, do not prevent numerous couples from feeling deep affection for each other, and it is not uncommon for a man or a woman to hang him- or herself when the spouse dies. It is also not unusual for a widower or a widow to wear on a necklace for the rest of their life their spouse’s hair or certain bones removed at the time of the second funeral for the deceased, when the bones are collected and placed in a tree in the ancestral forest.

      WHAT IS A CHILD FOR THE BARUYA?

      The Baruya’s view of child conception testifies to the dominant status of men in the kinship system and more broadly in the society as a whole. For the Baruya, it is the man’s sperm that makes the better part of the child in its mother’s womb – its bones, blood and skin. The woman’s uterus is simply a ‘bag’ in which the foetus develops, nourished for the first months by the sperm of the husband, who increases his sexual relations with his wife once she discovers she is pregnant. The woman’s vaginal fluids (and not her blood) play their role in the child’s identity. If they are ‘stronger’ than the sperm, it will be a girl, if the sperm prevails, it will be a boy.

      Nevertheless, the sperm, which makes the foetal body and nourishes it, does not suffice to bring it to its final form. It still does not have fingers and toes, and especially a nose, which will be pierced when the future boy or girl is initiated. The Baruya believe that the Sun ‘completes’ the embryo in the woman’s womb. Each Baruya man and woman thus has two fathers: the first engenders three quarters of the child with his sperm and gives it a social identity as a male or female member of a lineage; the second is a heavenly power which completes the foetus with a nose, the seat of intelligence and understanding, as well as hands and feet to move about and act with. Later, when the child has survived for at least a year, the father’s lineage presents the mother’s with a series of goods during a ceremony at the close of which the child will receive its first name, the name it will carry until it is initiated and which is the first name of a male or female lineage ancestor.

      But it seems that the child receives more than just the ancestor’s name. Something like part of this ancestor’s spirit (in the sense of soul, anima, which is associated with the Sun) is transmitted along with the name. Sperm is therefore the life force. It is what justifies male domination in society. Even the milk that swells the new mother’s breasts is, according to Baruya men, their sperm changed into milk. And it is to work this transformation that, during the first weeks of marriage, the young man has his young wife drink his sperm every day so that she will later have plenty of milk to nourish their children. On several occasions, however, I observed that not all of the women entirely shared this representation of the male origin of their milk, and in particular almost none of the younger generation, who have gone to school and been Christianized, any longer believe this.

      The sperm concealed in the woman’s womb becomes life, but at the expense of a mortal threat to the men’s strength and even to the reproduction of the cosmos. To make love is to take risks, and to put society and the universe at risk as well. When a married couple makes love, they cannot work in the gardens that day, and the man cannot make salt or go hunting. In short, sexuality (heterosexuality) must be tightly controlled because it is a threat to the social and cosmic orders. This is, in the final analysis, because heterosexuality entails a man uniting with a woman whose menstrual blood periodically runs down her thighs and threatens to deplete not only the force and strength of the men, but also that of the plants or the game that feed them. Alternatively, the sperm that the initiates give the younger boys in the men’s house, in so far as it is free of any contact with a woman’s vagina, contributes to their rebirth as stronger and more handsome men.

      It is therefore understandable that the Baruya forbid a married man to give his sperm to a boy. Once a penis has entered a woman’s vagina, it can no longer enter a boy’s mouth. It is similarly understandable that a woman is forbidden to straddle the man during coitus, for her vaginal fluids would run out onto his abdomen and pollute it, and so on.

      In sum, in this society as in many others (and not only in Oceania), ‘sexuality-as-desire’ is subordinated to ‘sexuality-for-reproduction’, and the heterosexual nature of the latter is seen as a threat to the reproduction of society and the cosmos. Women in particular are the bearers of this threat, and because they are responsible they are therefore guilty. Their menstrual blood is seen as the opposite of sperm, an anti-sperm, as it were. The ambivalence of all these representations is glaring. For the first flow of menstrual blood, the arrival of a girl’s first period, is also the sign that one day she will bear children, will enable a lineage to reproduce itself by providing descendants, sons who will inherit their ancestors’ lands and powers, and daughters who will procure wives for their brothers. Furthermore, it was the Moon, the Sun’s wife (in the exoteric, popular version) or his younger brother (in the esoteric version of the shamans) who one day opened the path in the girl’s body that enables the menstrual blood to flow. At the heart of these myths and practices lies the men’s fear of women, a sort of constantly denied envy of women’s life-giving power, and the desire, too, to appropriate a share of this power for themselves.

      For a Baruya woman has the right to kill her newborn child – at least during the time she is isolated in the birthing hut she has built. This hut stands downhill from the village in a space strictly off-limits to men. When a man sees his wife coming home without a baby in her arms, he immediately accuses her of having killed their child and suspects that it surely must have been a boy, a son his wife deprived him of. To be sure, a certain number of children die at birth. But it also happens that a woman gets rid of the child, either because she already has too many or because of births too close together; she thinks she will not be able to feed this child and raise it. But some women also told me they had killed their baby because they did not want to give any more children to a loathsome husband who beat them, or to a man who wanted to take a second wife. By killing their child, the women offer men one more proof that, if they can give life, they can also take it back. And it was precisely this power that the first men had been trying to appropriate when they stole the women’s flutes (whose secret name designates both the foetus and the new initiate).

      This explains why the sacred objects (kwaimatnie) come in pairs and why the more powerful, or ‘hotter’, of the two is a ‘female object’, which the masters of the initiations grasp and use to strike the chest of the initiates after having held the object up to the Sun. The word kwaimatnie is a compound of kwala (‘man’) and nyimatnie (‘to cause to grow’). It is with the women’s power to give life that the men are confronted even as they claim to have appropriated it for themselves in the imaginary workings of the myths they mime in the symbol-laden enactment of the secret male initiation rites, in the course of which they cause the boys to be reborn independently of a woman’s womb. To engender themselves – such seems to be the men’s secret desire, present at the heart of these myths and rites. But could such a wish come true other than in the imaginary? – and by means of purely symbolic practices.30

      In conclusion, I would like to stress that it is not enough to show that the sphere of kinship, in Baruya society, is a domain of social practice that enacts the domination of one gender over the other, of men over women. The entire social division of labour illustrates this reality. It is equally important to show that, above and beyond women’s individual and collective subordination to men, there is the impersonal, structural subordination СКАЧАТЬ