The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

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СКАЧАТЬ reproduction of the political-ritual relations that enable the Baruya tribe to exist as a whole, as a local society with sovereignty over its territory and governed by the men, who have taken upon themselves the right to represent this whole, of which they are only a part.

      THE PRE-EMINENCE OF POLITICAL-RELIGIOUS RELATIONS

      I will recall here a few facts that I have already stated, to which I will add others that also testify to the subordination of kinship relations to the political-ritual relations that enable the Baruya society to exist as such.

      First is the fact that the Sun is supposed to complete the foetus in the woman’s womb. But it is the men who monopolize access to the Sun, since they are the ones who possess that which the Sun gave their ancestors in the Dreamtime, namely: the sacred objects and the formulae that allow them to grow boys into men, into warriors capable of confronting their enemies and husbands capable of dealing with their wives.

      Second is the fact that, when the tsimia is constructed, each post stands for a new initiate and is prepared and brought to the site by a boy’s father. The fathers of the initiates then form a circle that marks the periphery of the future ceremonial house. They stand side by side, arranged not by lineage but by village, and all together, at a signal from the masters of the initiations, sink the poles – the new generation of initiates – into the ground. Politics is thus more important than kinship. At the same time, metaphorically speaking, kinship symbolizes politics, for the Baruya say that the tsimia is the image of the tribe’s ‘body’, and the posts are its ‘bones’, planted in the ground by the men, and the thatch the ‘skin’, brought by the women.

      A third fact points in the same direction. As soon as he is initiated, a young boy immediately becomes the elder of all his sisters, including his older sisters, who will from then on address him as ‘elder brother’ (gwagwe) destined to replace their father. This mental transformation performed on genealogical ties by virtue of the men’s political-ritual promotion clearly shows the subordination of kinship relations to the relations that organize power within the society.

      This evokes a fourth fact, which this time revises linguistic usages. In the Baruya language, once a game animal is dead it becomes feminine.

      Fifth, in the course of the first-stage initiation ceremony, a long, wide plank is brought and laid across the threshold of the men’s house, where the new initiates have just been secluded. Later they will learn that this board is the image of all the married women, a symbol the married men step on when they enter the house to join their sons. Nor must we forget that kwaimatnie come in pairs, and that the hotter one, the more powerful and dangerous of the two, is always the ‘female’ one.

      And finally, when I first arrived among the Baruya, in 1967, the mountainsides were covered with paired paths, one a few metres above the other: the higher one was for men, the lower one for women, girls and children.

      MODERN TIMES

      As the Baruya enter the twenty-first century, their gender relations have changed profoundly. There is no longer any sign of the paired, gendered paths. These disappeared quite suddenly, in the 1970s, in other words twenty years after the first contacts with Europeans, ten years after the first patrol post and the first Lutheran mission. Another thing that was quick to disappear was the habit of women and girls stopping when a group of men approached and turning their backs while hiding their faces behind a flap of their bark capes. Next the men began to shorten the duration of the taboo on eating in front of their mother before they had fathered at least two children and had gone through a ceremony to lift this prohibition. This taboo was doubled by a ban on addressing their mother or speaking to someone in her presence. By 1980 the men had decided they could lift this ban and once again eat in their mother’s presence and speak to her a few months after the birth of their first child. Men who, before the Europeans arrived, had never touched a baby, regarding it as a dirty being that soiled the netbag in which the mother carried it everywhere she went – slung on her back or across her chest – would one by one begin to hold their small children in their arms, first the boys and a year or two later, the girls as well. Meanwhile most of the women had stopped going bare-breasted and now covered their chest and shoulders with cheap cotton blouses bought at the Lutheran mission – which were soon reduced to tatters by sweat, rain and the heavy loads they carried on their back.31

      A few girls were sent to primary school, where they excelled, but their parents were unwilling to let them go away to high school, as the boys did. Nevertheless they had learned to speak Pidgin and read the Bible. The custom of newly wed girls practising fellatio to ‘swell their breasts’ with their husband’s sperm also disappeared fairly soon, and the old women still blame this disappearance for the diseases that sometimes carry off young women for no apparent reason.

      In 1981 the girls of Wiaveu, the village where the Baruya had allowed me to live in 1967, would play basketball on a court made in the centre of the village by the non-initiated boys who attended school and with the help of other boys of their age who had been initiated and lived in the men’s house. Everyone attended the games between the girls’ teams and did not hesitate to comment on the size of their breasts, their skill or their clumsiness, a scene reminiscent of village life in Europe and far removed from the sexual segregation I had found in 1967.

      Today more and more young Baruya men who have left for two or three years to work on the plantations come home with a foreign wife, taken from a group living on the coast or in one of the high interior valleys in the vicinity of the towns of Goroka or Hagen. They have sometimes had to give several thousand kina (a kina is worth slightly less than one US dollar) to their wife’s clan in order to conclude the marriage. And once these women, who are not from the area and who know nothing of the Baruya language and traditions, get to Wonenara or Marawaka, they lead a very hard life, which sometimes drives them to run away, with or without their children. The young men who brought them back from their stay in town or on the plantations are very proud to have obtained a wife without incurring a debt to their lineage, thus keeping the possibility of exchanging their ‘sisters’ for a Baruya wife.

      Last of all, men and women have begun planting and harvesting coffee as a cash crop; and the children who used to spend their days playing, especially the little boys, are now recruited for one or two hours a day to sort the coffee beans drying in the sun on bamboo mats. In short, all levels of the population now often work in order to ‘do business’, but the money earned from the sale of their harvests serves only to buy rice and tinned fish from Japan, which replace the game formerly used in ceremonies; or to purchase shoes, sunglasses, umbrellas, machetes and soap. A few Baruya have started putting their money on savings passbooks distributed by the Administration, so that they no longer see their ‘real’ money, which is collected regularly and taken away in sacks for deposit in the bank vault in Goroka. A last fact, which is important: numbers of Baruya women – more than the men – have joined one of a number of Christian denominations that send missionaries to the area – today nearly all natives of Papua New Guinea – even as far as Wonenara and Marawaka. Once the adults have been converted and baptized, they renounce their personal name – for example Gwataie, Maye, which immediately tell a Baruya that the first is an Andavakia and the second a Baruya Kwarrandariar. Henceforth they are called John, David, or Mary, followed by their clan name: John Andavakia, David Bakia. Their children are baptized, go to the mission school and are no longer initiated. For the rest of their life they will carry Old or New Testament first names. They have stopped living as the reincarnation of one of their lineage or clan ancestors.

      Before concluding, I would like to say something about my approach to Baruya kinship in the field. As we saw, it was a mistake to try to start fieldwork with a study of the kinship system without sufficient knowledge of the language and using informants who were too young. The error was due to lack of experience. It was a good decision to drop this study and start another on an aspect of Baruya life that occupies the men several months of the year and the women on a daily basis, namely: clearing large СКАЧАТЬ