The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ then progressively harvesting while starting new gardens well before the old ones are exhausted. These are relentless tasks that mobilize every able man and woman to produce this essential portion of their material means of existence, their means of subsistence. No one is exempted from these tasks without an exceptional reason.

      It was only when I spent months with the Baruya in their gardens, taking down the names of the ancestors who had first cleared the land and those of their descendants who had inherited the right to use it today, listing the names of the men who had worked together to cut the trees and build the fences around each garden to keep out the wild pigs, the names of the women – the wives, sisters, sisters-in-law, eldest daughters, etc. – among whom the plots had been divided, that a path opened up enabling me to gradually approach what the domain of kinship and ties to the land meant for the Baruya, the women’s ties to the plants they grew, the presence of the spirits, the history of their wars and so on. Little by little I learned the kin ties that allowed given groups of men and women to cultivate such and such a plot, which of them held the right to make the garden, and which affines or maternal kin were invited to join them on this occasion, which would be reciprocated.

      Over these months, day after day, I got to know dozens (and even hundreds) of Baruya personally. And they in turn formed their judgement of me and almost always accepted my presence with them in their gardens or on their hunting grounds. Some were reluctant, though, and I did not press them.

      It became increasingly easy to question them on their genealogy. It was they who volunteered their ties of consanguinity or affinity with those who shared the use of the land. All adults had direct knowledge of these ties, but many were incapable of going back very far, no more than two generations. When someone was in doubt or admitted ignorance, they readily appealed to someone else, generally an elderly man or woman, known for remembering old alliances or the names of ascendants who had died young or gone to live in neighbouring friendly – or even hostile – tribes. These knowledgeable persons were not necessarily members of the questioner’s lineage. But the size of the Baruya tribe and the fact that, in virtue of the ban on repeating marriages from the preceding generations, each lineage was ultimately allied with six or seven others, together with the need to keep all these marriages straight so as to know when they could be repeated, meant that people like old Djirinac or Nougrouvandjereye had to remember the genealogies of almost all of the tribe’s members over several generations.

      But the memory of even the most knowledgeable and reliable informants is always skewed by the (unconscious) interference of the patrilineal descent rule – in the Baruya’s case – which meant that in the generations farthest from Ego (G+3 or G+4), the first names cited were always those of men, as though all of the firstborn of these generations had been male. The women’s names were generally forgotten or mentioned only in second or third position in their generation. Reciting genealogies was not only an exercise in ‘kinship’; the sound of certain names spontaneously elicited copious comments on such and such a personality, famous for his deeds or misdeeds, the memory of bloody clashes between brothers over such and such a woman or garden.

      I remember one time when Nougrouvandjereye, who had spent the day with other Baruya constructing for me the genealogies of certain lineages in the Marawaka Valley, went home to his village, where he was attacked and wounded on the arm by a man wielding a machete. The aggressor had heard – probably from one of the (many) Baruya usually at my house – that sometime that day Nougrouvandjereye had voiced doubts in my presence about the aggressor’s lineage’s rights in a certain number of pandanus trees (which produce highly appreciated berries), whereas Nougrouvandjereye had told me that it was not one of his own ancestors who had planted the trees.

      GENEALOGIES: MADE-UP STORIES FOR THE WHITE MAN?

      In short, genealogies did indeed exist for the Baruya, and they involved many stakes and interests. Asking the Baruya to reconstruct their genealogies, therefore, did not amount to imposing a Eurocentric vision of kinship. Nor was it a matter of projecting our vision of consanguinity, our notions of fatherhood and motherhood. The Baruya taught me two things in this regard, which kept me from projecting my own representations of paternity, consanguinity, etc., onto theirs. The first was that the Baruya have only one word for father and father’s brothers, and another for mother and mother’s sisters; as a consequence, their children are brothers and sisters. The notions of father, mother and siblings therefore cannot mean the same thing for a Baruya as for a Western European born into a kinship system centred on the nuclear family and which places in the same category (that of uncle) father’s brother and mother’s brother, following the terminology known as Eskimo, which characterizes the Western European and American kinship systems.

      Second, and above all, for the Baruya a child is made from its father’s sperm, which makes its blood, its bones, its skin and even the milk with which its mother nourishes it. But the child is also the work of the Sun, which as I have said makes the foetus in the woman’s womb into a human child. In short, when one understands how the Baruya envision the process of making a baby, and the respective roles played by the man, the woman and the Sun, it is impossible to project one’s own concept of consanguinity onto their way of thinking and living, and to affirm that for them, too, ‘blood is thicker than water’. For the Baruya – to parody Schneider – sperm is thicker and stronger than blood, milk and so forth, which come from what the Baruya call ‘penis water’ (lakala alieu).

      Lastly, and this is the weightiest argument against Schneider’s criticisms, just as questioning people about their genealogies in no way prompts the anthropologist to project onto them the Western notion of consanguinity and thus to put both maternal and paternal kin in the same category, so too discovering the importance of kinship relations and the associated norms and values for the Baruya in no way compels the anthropologist to conclude that theirs is a ‘kin-based society’.

      We have seen that, in the Baruya’s case, the existence of kin groups and kin ties between individuals and between the groups they form is not enough to make a society, in the sense of a territorial group that exists and must reproduce itself as a whole, that represents itself to itself as a whole and acts as such at the political-religious level. In sum, no one is obliged to conclude, after having reconstructed genealogies, that kinship is the universal basis of societies that have no classes or castes. No one is compelled to overrate the importance of kinship and its real functions in the production and reproduction of a given society. On this point I agree with Schneider. But I go further, for I maintain that there is no such thing as kin-based societies, on the one hand, and, on the other, societies based on other kinds of social relations – classes, for instance. To my mind, no society as a social group that presents itself to its members as a whole and is reproduced as such by them can be kin based. That kinship is the basis of societies is an axiom of social anthropology that does not seem to me to have been demonstrated and which I now reject after having accepted it for years.

      To conclude this chapter, I would like to step back from the Baruya and place their case in a broader context. We have seen how a young anthropologist had no difficulty discovering that the Baruya’s kinship terminology belongs to what is called the Iroquois type. Of course, the Baruya were unaware of this, and their ignorance had no effect on the way they led their lives. They lived their relationships as they found them, striving to reproduce them if it suited them; but to compare their relationships with those existing in other societies, about which they ignored everything down to their very existence, would have been meaningless to them.

      And yet the fact that a number of societies with very different languages, cultures and structures never having had any historical contact with each other possess kinship terminologies with the same structure raises a whole series of questions. What is an Iroquois-type terminology? How many variants of this type are there? Where in the world are other examples found? Is there a connection between this type of terminology and the Baruya marriage rule of direct ‘sister’ exchange? Is there a connection between this type of terminology and the existence, in Baruya society, of a patrilateral descent principle? The Iroquois that Morgan studied followed СКАЧАТЬ