The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

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      WEALTH FOR PERSONS

      To illustrate this change of logic in marriage practices and in the way societies function, we will take the example of the Melpa, a widely dispersed set of tribes whose territories lie around Mount Hagan in the heart of the New Guinea Highlands. The Melpa are famous for their system of competitive ceremonial exchanges known as moka, in which clans and tribes from an entire region used to face off on the occasion of large-scale redistributions of pigs and goldlip pearl-shells, which would be exchanged for pigs, marsupial furs and so forth with tribes further to the south, who had procured them through exchange with tribes living along the Gulf of Papua. Moka, like the Kwakiutl potlatch, consisted in giving more than the other clan could give in return, or returning more than had been given, the aim being to make the others your debtors and force them to recognize their inferiority when it came to accumulating and redistributing wealth. As one might guess, this escalation of generosity was driven by political interests. It glorified the name of the richest and most generous clans, it spread far beyond their tribal boundaries the renown of their Big Men who had managed to amass such wealth by their ability to produce it and/or to convince their kinsmen and their affines to engage their own pigs and shells in the same venture.

      In these Big Men societies of New Guinea, direct sister exchange, while theoretically known, was not practised and was even explicitly forbidden by the Mendi. The general rule for concluding a marriage alliance was to exchange wealth for a woman. For example, in the Melpa society, when two lineages agreed to unite two of their children, negotiations to set the amount of the marriage payments were conducted in several stages. We will summarize this process, referring to Andrew and Marilyn Strathern’s remarkable analyses.21

      In the first phase, the bridegroom’s lineage presents the bride’s lineage with a number of goods they plan to give them. In the second phase, these goods are formally given to the woman’s family, which gives other goods in exchange. The men make long speeches, while the pork from a certain number of pigs brought by the groom’s family is redistributed and eaten. The woman’s family gives the couple a number of live pigs to start the herd they will later raise and which will enable the couple to present the woman’s lineage with pigs.

      FOR THE WOMAN’S HEAD AND VAGINA

      In the course of these ceremonies, a number of shells are exchanged between the two groups, while others are presented to the bride’s family as a one-way gift. Several of these shells are called peng pokla, which means ‘to cut off the (girl’s) head’, in other words separate her from her lineage; but this separation is never complete. A number of pigs are also given with no expectation of reciprocity. Several of these pigs are described as kem kng, ‘for the girl’s vagina’. A particularly large pig is called mam peng kng, ‘the pig for the (girl’s) mother’s head’. Another is given to the bride’s father as a present from the groom’s family.

      If we analyze these exchanges, we see that they have three components. Reciprocal exchanges of shells and pigs – approximately equivalent in quantity and quality (before the Europeans arrived, a living pig exchanged for two pearl-shells) – between the two parties designed primarily to seal their alliance. A second series of shells and pigs are given to partially detach the woman from her own lineage and from that of her mother, and to transfer rights to her sexual services and reproductive capacities to her husband’s lineage. Last of all, the woman’s family presents the couple with a number of pigs that constitute the beginnings of a herd whose eventual size depends primarily on the labour of this woman, but the product of which will be used by the husband to take part in moka and to fulfil his responsibilities in various situations (funerals, initiations, etc.) which require contributions of pork. By endowing their daughter with this ‘productive capital’, the members of her lineage establish themselves as the future couple’s primary moka partner.

      This third component is not a dowry, in the sense of having been given by the bride’s lineage to ensure her material autonomy in her new family and which she could take with her in the event of divorce, as was the case with dowries in societies around the Mediterranean Basin. Lastly, it is to be noted that land never features in these endowments. Lineage land is indivisible. When land is divisible and part of a family’s land is detached and included in a daughter’s dowry when she marries, we are dealing with an altogether different logic and other marriage strategies, as shown by Jack Goody and S. J. Tambiah in their work on dowry and devolution of goods in Europe and the East22 as well as by the discussions23 sparked by their hypotheses.

      Two remarks are called for here. It is clear from the Melpa example that the circulation of goods entailed in a marriage alliance can be imbedded in much broader exchange systems based on competition for prestige and renown, in short, on winning status in a political configuration. The intention behind some of these gifts is not only to repay the gift of a woman with wealth, but to make affines into moka partners. The Melpa marriage is actually fully concluded only when the groups and individuals involved become partners in the moka and enter into competition with each other even as they cooperate. Marriage alliances and kinship relations are therefore subordinated to the perpetuation of a far-flung network of competitive political-ceremonial exchanges, following a potlatch logic, and made to serve the expansion of this network, which entails many dozens of clans and thousands of individuals. In short, these relationships are of another order than kinship: they are political.

      This example tells us why, with a few exceptions, marriage in potlatch societies cannot be based on the direct exchange of women. Such a system would risk short-circuiting the competition between groups in the exchanges of wealth that give access to titles, ranks and functions – whose number is limited – as well as to power and renown.24

      More important still, the equivalence between the terms of exchange in the case of wealth for a person has nothing in common with the equivalence postulated when exchanging a person for another person. Even though societies may strive to limit the amount of wealth given for a woman (or a man) and to set an average exchange rate, there is no objective criterion that can justify giving six big pearl-shells and three pigs for a woman’s ‘vagina’ rather than four shells and two pigs. The nature and the quantity of the ‘things’ given are primarily indicative of the rank and status of the groups contracting a marriage alliance. Today in New Guinea, marrying the daughter of a Big Man or of a regional member of the National Assembly can entail dowries and redistributions of several hundred live or slaughtered pigs (some of which are bought from industrial pig farms with money from the sale of coffee25), to which are often added a Toyota or Nissan truck and tens of thousands of kina in cash.

      The inflation of dowries, observed not only in Oceania but also in Africa and Asia, is the direct consequence of the growing involvement of these societies in the local and global market economy. This inclusion results in the generalization of the use of money in traditionally non-economic social exchanges (e.g. rituals) and accentuates and multiplies the differences of wealth between individuals and between kin groups, which are still an important component of local territorial groups’ social structure. In this shift, we see the development of a genuine traffic of women, a phenomenon that did not exist in the case of sister exchange between two men and their lineages.26

      A dowry payment at the time of the wedding does not mean that the debt of the wife-taking lineage is extinguished at the end of the ceremony, if there is one. Other ‘payments’ will come due, for example, each time the couple has a child. This is the case among the Wiru and the Daribi of New Guinea, societies that do not take part in regional competitive systems like the moka, but where the bride’s father and her lineage are supposed to exercise ritual control over their daughter’s fertility throughout her life. Each child she bears is seen as a new gift made to her husband’s lineage, which is added to the initial gift of its mother. Based on this (imaginary) representation of the process of reproducing life, a flow of gifts thus accompanies the birth, marriage and death of all individuals. The dowry in this case is merely the first of a series of gifts inaugurated by a marriage alliance, which will punctuate the life of the individuals that will СКАЧАТЬ