The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
ties with the owners of the land they tended, the names of those who had first cleared each garden, the names of those who had the right to cultivate the gardens in 1967, and so forth. All of this was necessary in order to understand the principles underpinning the ownership and use rights in the areas of tribal territory, forests, grasslands and rivers used for hunting, gardening or fishing.
Every day for over six months I visited the gardens, where, respecting the customary rules for entering, I spent hours with the people working there. With their help, I made a topographical map of each garden, a study of the soil using Baruya categories, and noted the number and areas of the plots. Finally, for each of the gardens cultivated by the inhabitants of Wiaveu that year (over 180 gardens divided into at least 600 plots), I made a fairly complete file.
ANOTHER WAY IN AND THE RIGHT WAY AROUND
At that point my relations with the Baruya changed altogether, and they would subsequently include me in all their activities, including the most secret aspects of their initiation rites. For, like many Melanesians, the Baruya are enthusiastic gardeners, keen to discuss the pros and cons of different pieces of land, the origin or the flavour of a given variety of taro or sweet potato, etc. And of course, it is no time before they give you the name of their ancestor, the first one, who cleared one or another piece of the forest with a stone adze. Then they will volunteer that this was when the Baruya were at war with such and such a tribe – the Yuwarrounatche, for example – and that during this war, one of their great warriors, an aoulatta, was killed at a particular spot but that they had avenged him by killing three enemies, one of whom was a woman, and so on. It was also explained to me that, next to a certain garden, it was forbidden to cut trees or clear land, and above all not to stop there to make love because the spot was inhabited by spirits who could attack you or make off with the semen and vaginal fluids that might have seeped into the earth and who could then kill you by multiplying these substances and using them against you. In sum, the garden study constantly spilled over into kinship, war, religion and, always, the Baruya’s collective or individual history. It was at that point that I decided – while waiting for the chance to attend the large-scale initiation ceremonies planned for the end of 19689 – to resume my study of the Baruya kinship system.10
I therefore started over from scratch, but this time taking an altogether different approach. While studying the gardens, I had noticed that a fairly elderly woman, Djirinac, from the Baruya clan (the clan that gave the tribe its name and which is the ‘centre post’), had such an immense knowledge of genealogies and an ability to reconstruct series of exchanges of women between lineages that people from other clans would consult her to fill in the gaps in their memories. I therefore asked her if she would help me conduct the survey, and she agreed, at least in so far as the inhabitants of the Wonenara Valley were concerned, because she wanted to be able to go home every evening to feed her family and her pigs. Two men older than she, Warineu and Kandavatche – one the former bodyguard of a great warrior and the other a salt-maker who no longer did much gardening – joined us. For a month our little band went from village to village reconstructing the genealogies of the valley’s inhabitants.
When we had to cross the mountains to continue our work in the neighbouring Marawaka Valley, Djirinac left us, as we had agreed. As luck would have it, an elderly man from the Valley offered to take her place – Nougrouvandjereye, from the Nounguye clan, whom Djirinac would consult when he came to Wonenara if she wanted specific details on the genealogies or marriages of Baruya living in the Marawaka villages, whom she knew less well. Nougrouvandjereye’s memory was as vast and as clear as Djirinac’s, and, like her, he knew the kin ties between hundreds of people, which I would then go with him to verify. In addition to all the kin ties, Nougrouvandjereye’s memory also covered all of the wars waged on or by the Baruya, and he was able to detail the circumstances of each war, the battle sites, the names of those killed, the reprisals and compensations, etc. Djirinac had nothing particular to say on these topics, quite simply because war stories did not interest her.
I had also developed a sort of standard note card for this survey, which I obliged myself to fill in for each individual whose name I had collected and whose genealogy I tried to reconstruct – with the person concerned if he or she was living and agreeable, or with others if the person was deceased or a child. Since in the meantime I had learned many things about the Baruya’s marriage rules, descent principles and forms of hierarchy, my cards recorded the answers to such questions as: What is your mother’s lineage? What woman from your father’s lineage was exchanged (ginamare) for your mother? Since your father (father’s group) did not give a woman in exchange for your mother, which of your ‘sisters’ is going to take your mother’s place and marry your mother’s brother’s son (marriage with the matrilateral cross cousin)? Was your father an aoulatta (great warrior)? A koulaka (shaman)? Who were your father’s co-initiates? Are any still living? And so on. A number of these questions could be put to either a man or a woman. But others could not, and I had to respect this taboo strictly.
Finally, at the end of this first systematic survey (which took over six months), with one or two exceptions, I had covered practically all of the living Baruya, including the men who had left to work on the coastal plantations, the women who had married into neighbouring friendly or enemy tribes, the boys the Lutheran missionaries had sent away to continue their studies begun at the Wonenara Bible School, etc.
Having watched me go from village to village, all of the Baruya in the Wonenara and Marawaka valleys knew me, and soon I knew somewhat more than their youngsters did about their ancestors and their lineage history. Over the following twenty years, I continued to record deaths, births, marriages, moves, changes in social circumstances, etc. I even made a second complete survey of the whole population, village by village. I inquired about why, in the interval, someone had married so and so or had moved house. What did this woman die from? In childbirth? By sorcery? Killed by her husband? In short, by 1988, the date of my last prolonged stay with the Baruya,11 I had information accumulated over twenty years of observation on what, during this whole time, the Baruya had decided to do when it came to marrying, transmitting ranks to their children, etc. To make sense of this data concerning the exercise of kinship relations, it is necessary to bear in mind certain indispensable information about the Baruya’s history and the type of society in which they live, act and reproduce themselves.
WHAT ARE THE BARUYA?
What does the word ‘Baruya’ mean? It is the name of an insect with red wings speckled with black spots (baragaye), which was formerly chosen by one of the tribe’s clans to designate itself and which members of this clan are forbidden to kill. Its red wings remind them of the fiery sky-path followed by their Dreamtime ancestor, Djivaamakwe, whom the Sun had sent to Bravegareubaramandeuc to found a village and a tribe by gathering to himself everyone living there, to whom he is said to have given their clan name and their roles in the performance of the initiation rites. Today Bravegareubaramandeuc is the site of a long-deserted village perched on a hilltop near Menyamya, a few days’ walk from the Baruya’s valleys, a village that used to be inhabited by clans of the now-extinct Yoyue tribe.
This mythic account justifies the primary position the ‘Baruya’ clan holds in the male initiations and explains why this clan was destined to give its name to the territorial group that was to emerge when the Yoyue split. It is followed by a ‘historical’ account, which refers to facts on which all tribes in the area concur.
The facts are the following: toward the end of the eighteenth century (according to my calculations), certain Yoyue clans seem to have secretly arranged for the inhabitants of Bravegareubaramandeuc to be massacred by the Yoyue’s traditional enemies, the Tapatche. But, on the day, the Baruya and members of some other clans were away in the forest, and their wives and young children were with them, as happens on the large-scale hunts that precede initiations. When they learned that all of their young initiates had been massacred in the men’s house, together with a few others who had stayed behind, those who had gone hunting scattered in different directions to seek refuge with friendly tribes. A large group of refugees, including the members of the Baruya clan, reached the Andje, a tribe living in the Marawaka Valley, at the foot of Mount Yelia, where they asked for temporary refuge and protection. Their request was granted, and they moved in with their hosts – particularly with the Ndelie, a local clan