The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
with the menstrual blood running down their thighs. They will learn that the women’s sexual organ and sexual relations with women are a constant threat to men, who risk being deprived of their strength, their good looks and their superiority.
During this all-male period, which lasts for years,23 the boys will be secretly ‘re-engendered’ by the men, but his time without the help of women. The older boys in the last two stages of initiation – young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty or twenty-two, who have not yet had intercourse with a women – often give the young boys their semen to drink, through homosexual relations that grow up between the older initiates and the newcomers. Later, these boys will in turn give their semen, equally free of all female defilement, to those boys who follow them into the men’s house.
Little by little, these young boys and adolescents come to see it as right and proper that Baruya women are not allowed to inherit their ancestors’ land, bear arms, make salt money, have contact with the sacred objects, and so on. Little by little, too, the physical, psychological and social violence the men do to women, or at least to their wives – never to their mothers or their sisters – appears as being justified. For during the long lessons they are subjected to, the masters of the initiations also teach them that women, too, have rights, and that it is their duty to know and respect them. That is why the men’s domination is not based only on the violence they inflict on women and which the latter often resist in a variety of ways. It also rests on the fact that, up to a certain point, women consent to this domination in so far as they share with the men the same mythical-religious representations which blame women for the disorder that threatens the reproduction of the social and cosmic orders and which they do not want to inflict on their kinsmen or their children.
It is from the setting in motion of this formidable machinery for differentiating the social nature of the sexes, for growing men in the Baruya imaginary but also for (really) elevating them socially above women, that the second cross-cutting division takes its origin and its meaning. This time the line runs not between individuals according to their gender but between the kin groups into which these individuals were born and according to their genealogical position in these groups.
For only the representatives of the clans that descend from the Bravegareubaramandeuc refugees as well as from the Ndelie clan, which helped them seize their hosts’ territory, have the right to initiate the tribe’s boys, on the pretext that only their ancestors received from the Sun the sacred objects and secret formulae enabling them to sever the boys from the female world and make them into men, warriors, shamans, etc. For this reason, the native clans that joined with the Baruya are excluded from leading the political-religious activities which cement the unity of all the kin groups and all the generations, and affirm their common identity in front of neighbouring tribes. Moreover, whenever initiations are held, these neighbours are invited to come and admire the number and strength of the young Baruya warriors as they leave the tsimia, which the Baruya call the ‘body’ of their tribe. The initiates will then dance around the tsimia and sing for hours, adorned in their feathers, wearing their new bark capes, and armed with their weapons, under the admiring gaze of their mothers, sisters and fiancées massed together in the front row. The reason invoked for excluding these autochthonous tribes from leading the ceremonies is the claim that their ancestors came from forest creatures and never possessed kwaimatnie or secret knowledge (something these representatives vehemently deny when questioned).
It is thus the Baruya’s history that explains the hierarchy among those clans that have the right to initiate the boys and those that do not. On the top rung of this social ladder stands the Baruya clan, which gave the tribe its name, and in particular one of the clan’s two lineages, the Baruya Kwarrandariar, who are in charge of passing the initiates from the second to the third stage, when they will be considered warriors and will be prepared for marriage as soon as their fiancée reaches menarche and is in turn initiated by the women. This political-religious ranking of the clans also creates a hierarchy among individuals in so far as the clan representatives who exercise the various functions in the male initiations are considered ‘Great Men’, a status they acquire at the same time as their function and the sacred objects and formulae that allow them to carry it out.
The male and female initiations are not the Baruya’s only cycle, however. There is another, which concerns only shamans and gives rise to ceremonies performed every ten or twelve years, during which the training of the men and women who have shown exceptional personal powers is completed. At the close of these ceremonies, their ability to attend to victims of evil-spirit attacks and to visit death or sickness on their enemies is publicly validated or invalidated. Shamanism is also the only area of social life in which men and women can test their capacities directly, without mediation. But the functions of the ‘master’ of the shaman initiations belong exclusively to a clan that stems from the Bravegareubaramandeuc refugees, the Andavakia, and are always transmitted through the men of one of this clan’s lineages.
Alongside these very few inherited functions and ranks, there are others that can be acquired by showing exceptional talent and merit. Being at war with some neighbouring tribes and at peace with others, then making an alliance with the first to fight the second, means that the Baruya live in a constant state of war. This explains the fact that all men are trained from childhood in the arts of warfare and hunting, and never go anywhere without their weapons. Yet only certain men are considered to be ‘great’ warriors, aoulatta, because they have killed several enemy warriors in single combat, with their axe after having issued a public challenge. The rest are considered (ironically) by the Baruya themselves as merely wopai, ‘sweet potatoes’, ordinary warriors who make a lot of noise but are content to shoot their arrows from a distance and then duck behind their shield when the volley is returned.
In a society where warfare is given so much importance, the representatives of the clans that own the sacred objects indispensable for initiating boys or shamans do not go to war, in order to avoid being killed before having passed on their powers to their eldest son. For their untimely death would deprive the tribe of some of the spiritual forces that ensure its existence and reproduction. (The names of the kwaimatnie owners are also concealed from neighbouring tribes.) This is also the case of the tanaka, men considered by one and all to be ‘great’ horticulturalists, because they clear big gardens and place their harvests at the disposal of those who go to war and therefore cannot look after their own plots.
Some distinguish themselves in other domains and they, too, can become Great Men: certain shamans and a few expert trappers of cassowary, the wild woman who lives deep in the forest and whose flesh – forbidden to the hunters and to women – is eaten by the initiates in the men’s house. Last of all, far behind the rest, a few expert makers of the salt-bars used by the Baruya as a currency before the Europeans arrived can also acquire certain renown.
Furthermore, in each generation, some women are promoted to the rank of ‘Great Women’, without this calling into question the official ideology that men are in principle superior to women. ‘Great’ women are those who have a large number of living children whom they succeed in raising, those who are inured to the tasks of making fine gardens and raising many pigs, those who as shamans have worked spectacular cures, etc. These women are allowed to express themselves when the members of their village meet to discuss problems of general import – the consequences of an act of adultery, the threat of armed conflict with a neighbouring tribe, and so forth.
In the case of women, however, everything must be won by merit; nothing or almost nothing is inherited.24 Men alone inherit functions and ranks that automatically set them apart. This is just one more proof of male dominance, and of the control men exercise over the way this society works. We should remember that the inherited functions and ranks are divided among the eight clans of refugees from Bravegareubaramandeuc, to which must be added the Ndelie, one of the seven native clans that joined the Baruya and who were granted a kwaimatnie and a role in the initiations.25 Apart from these reserved ranks, all of the positions an individual could acquire through his own qualities were open to men and women from any of the clans.
We see, then, that despite a political-religious division between refugees and natives, which lasted until 1967 and was carefully nurtured, the structure of Baruya society made it impossible for any one clan, and even less for a person of renown, to have the monopoly