The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
rest of society and to work for their own interests. Thus, for example, decisions having an impact on everyone – clearing a large garden, collecting the materials needed to build the ceremonial house, preparing to make war on a neighbouring group and securing the help of allies, or, today, planting large tracts of forest in coffee – were taken in the course of public debates in which male voices predominated, to be sure, in which young people and ordinary women did not intervene publicly, but in which the Great Women voiced their opinions and were listened to.
Against this backdrop of unequally shared sovereignty, the other more visible forms of authority and power stand out: those of the ritual masters, great warriors, shamans, etc.
One of the first theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from this analysis is that the existence of kin groups is not enough to make a society or to make this society a ‘tribe’. These groups, or most of them, must also – and above all – exercise a sort of political and ritual sovereignty over the population as a whole and over a territory defended by everyone, whose boundaries are known (if not recognized) by their neighbours. And if this is true, we can already see how erroneous it is to affirm – as the majority of anthropologists continue to do – that societies without classes or castes, ‘primitive’ societies, etc., are kin based.
A PLURAL BARUYA IDENTITY
The second theoretical conclusion that can be drawn from these analyses is that a person’s identity – Baruya, Wantekia, etc. – never comes down to the common, overarching identity he or she has by virtue of being a member of his or her tribe or society. Identity is always multiple. A person has as many identities as the social groups he or she belongs to simultaneously through his or her different aspects. He is a man and not a woman. He is the co-initiate of . . . She is a woman, she is the co-initiate of . . . He or she is a shaman. He is a master of the initiations who inherited his role and status from his father. He is the son of, the brother of . . . She is the sister of, the mother of . . . All of these identities are crystallizations within the individual of different relationships with others, with roles and ranks, which either end with this person and stamp themselves in him or her or start with this person and stamp themselves in others. An individual draws the content and shape of all of his or her identities from the specific social relationships that characterize his or her society, from the particularities of its structure to the way it functions. All of these make up the concrete multiplicity of social identity, which is never a simple addition of distinct identities or particular relationships. An individual’s personal, private identity is always the product of a singular life history, which is reproduced nowhere else and is constructed amid life circumstances that are never the same for any two individuals, however closely related they may be.
Even before Europeans set foot in Wonenara in 1951, a Baruya’s identity was made up of aspects of him- or herself that were broader than his or her society. He or she was aware of belonging to a group of tribes related by language and customs, what we have called an ethnic group, and which constituted a community26 that encompassed the Baruya society and was linked to it through a shared distant past. But the ethnic group did not function for the Baruya individual as ‘his’ or ‘her’ society. This feature – engendered by an individual’s belonging to groups that were broader than and that encompassed the birth society – would grow in importance after 1951.
THE WEST ARRIVES, AND THE BARUYA LOSE SOVEREIGNTY OVER THEIR TERRITORY AND THEMSELVES
It was in that year, without having either requested or foreseen it, that the Baruya received a new common identity by becoming ‘subjects’ of His Majesty, the King of England, and were placed under the authority of a colonial state created and governed by Europeans of Australian origin, assisted by other Continental or North American Europeans. In 1975, again without having desired it, the same Baruya were informed that they had become ‘citizens’, this time of a post-colonial state whose independence and constitutional regime had not been their own work but had been granted them by Australia, their former colonial guardian. And so they found themselves embarked on an accelerated process of multicultural nation-building which had to succeed at all costs in order to flesh out a state that had been created wholesale by foreigners and forced on all inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, whatever their tribal or ethnic origin, as the obligatory framework for their future life.
In this new historical context, Baruya children (at first only the boys) went to the Lutheran mission school to go on to become policemen, or aid-post orderlies, or church pastors or professors at the Lutheran university in Lae. More recently, beginning in 1981, many of the adults – especially the women – began turning to Christianity and joined one of the various Protestant churches, which have vied for decades to teach the Baruya the message of Christ and root out their old beliefs, which were held to come from Satan. The number of shamans declined, as did their prestige. The Great Warriors have all died. Now when war sporadically erupts with a neighbouring tribe, it is no longer waged by the same rules or with the same weapons. Only men are killed. The women and children are often spared because there is more risk of police intervention if news gets out that women and children have been killed in the clashes.
Of course, the articulation of these old and new identities does not occur without conflict, especially in so far as some claim to exclude others. For a Baruya, becoming a citizen of Papua New Guinea meant losing the right to bear arms and to use one’s own laws to settle the offences and crimes committed by individuals or groups from the tribe. It meant trusting unknown policemen and judges who cited other laws for securing compensation and justice. In another vein, being baptized and becoming a Christian meant joining a universal community that affirmed the equality of all – white, black, yellow – before a god who had come to save humankind; but it also meant abandoning polygamy and initiations, and giving up the rites for driving away evil spirits or ensuring a good harvest.
In short, all those Baruya who became aid-post orderlies or health officers or converted to Christianity ceased, one after the other, individually or as a group, to produce certain social relations that had characterized their society before the Europeans arrived – or, if they continue to reproduce these relations, they only do so partially while deeply altering their meaning. Pre-colonial relations did not thus vanish of their own accord, but as a consequence of certain individuals and groups refusing to reproduce them in their dealings with other members of their society. This was not only a question of private, personal choice. It was often also an act of submission to external constraints, such as the ban on war, on exposing the dead on platforms, etc. In short, it was the effect of a power struggle between the former society that had once had sovereignty over its territory and the new society that had deprived it of this sovereignty in one fell swoop, which was then appropriated by a hitherto unknown institution, the state.
Little by little, through these deliberate or forced choices, a new society emerged which extended over and into the local societies. For to become a policeman or an aid-post orderly, to produce coffee for the market or work as a bank clerk, is not only to become part of these new ‘communities’; it is also to enable these institutions to live and develop. The latter now play an active role throughout the territory of the state of Papua New Guinea and impose themselves on all groups – local, tribal, urban, etc. Furthermore, all of these institutions – the police, hospitals, the university, the market – did not come about by accident and are not unconnected with each other. They are the components of a new world society, imported and imposed from outside, and they combine two familiar formulae: the development of a market economy and the creation of a multi-party parliamentary democracy. To which must be added the effects of the spread of a militant religion also imported from the West: Christianity, which emphasizes individual and personal salvation, and casts discredit on ancestral religions. Ultimately these new global societies will probably supplant the different local societies that existed in New Guinea at the time of the European arrival. For this to happen, however, the former societies would have to lose or refuse their capacity to go on affording their members non-commercial access to the land and other forms of mutual aid rooted in kinship or other social relations implying solidarity and sharing among those bound by these relationships. Such an outcome is perfectly plausible, but in the meantime, at the time of this writing (2004), these two types of ‘societies’ – local and national – rely on each other to function and to keep on reproducing themselves for