The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
tied to the capitalist economy and to institutions that arose in the West.27
Finally, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Baruya live or are being born into a hybrid society that has been deeply altered by the direct or indirect interventions of powerful outside forces – the colonial and then post-colonial state, the market, Christianity – which, though they will no doubt be even stronger tomorrow, will not completely obliterate whole swathes of the old social organization and ancestral ways of thinking, even if in preserving them the Baruya have had to adapt and reshape them.
We have seen that the Baruya’s history, their sovereignty over their territory, the political-ritual hierarchy among kin groups and, finally, the distinction between Great Men and Women, on the one hand, and the rest of the people, on the other, did not originate in the world of kinship relations, although they encompass this world and fashion it from within. Yet it would be completely erroneous to conclude that, in Baruya society, kinship is a minor – or even marginal – aspect of social life. For, while the Baruya exist as a ‘society’ because they exercise shared sovereignty over their territory, this territory is distributed among the kin groups; therefore what actually gives individuals access to the material conditions of their social existence – land for gardens and a territory for hunting – is the fact of being born into and thus belonging to one of these groups.
But land is not the only resource that falls to an individual by virtue of belonging to a lineage or a clan. Such belonging also means that the individual can count on the solidarity and support of the members of the group and of his or her affines in the event of a serious conflict with members of another lineage. It also implies that, in the event of conflict with a member of his (or her) own lineage, he submits to internal arbitration by the lineage elders. In addition, everyone is entitled to the help and participation of his or her lineage in finding a spouse. Lastly, for those kin groups having a hereditary role in the performance of the male initiations, the eldest sons of the representatives of these lineages know that, if they are not handicapped in some way, they will inherit these functions together with the sacred objects and ritual formulas that give the right to exercise them. Functions, objects and inherited statuses circulate through certain kin ties binding persons of the same sex and different generations.
KINSHIP AND SOCIETY AMONG THE BARUYA
The universe of kinship, that world which receives and surrounds each individual at birth, is comprised of intimacy, affection, protection, authority and respect. It is from this world that the little Baruya boys will suddenly be torn when they are around ten, and placed not under their father’s authority but under that of older boys who are not yet married but soon will be. And it is from their ingested sperm that these boys will be reborn to full manhood, rid of any remaining vestiges of having come from a woman’s womb and having until then been raised in a primarily female world. A girl’s destiny, on the other hand, is not to be reborn outside the world of kinship. Until puberty, and beyond, she will live at home and will leave her family only to marry and found a new one. At this time, nothing will prevent her from becoming a Great Woman, a shaman or the mother of many children. When she marries she does not cease to belong to her birth lineage, however, even if she is now under her husband’s authority and her children belong to their father’s lineage.
In Baruya society, kin groups are formed according to a rule of descent that passes exclusively through the male side and creates patrilineal lineages and clans. This does not mean that a child’s maternal kin do not matter or have no rights in relation to the child. It means that the names, lands, ranks or statuses a child will receive over his lifetime come from his ancestors through his father and his father’s brothers (who are also fathers for him and are designated by the same term, in accordance with the Iroquois-type kinship terminology used by the Baruya). Genealogical memory does not go back more than three, sometimes four, generations above Ego. Beyond that only a few names escape oblivion. These are the names of Great Men, legendary heroes – Bakitchatche, for example, the ancestor of the Tchatche, who while still young killed a great many Andje with the help of supernatural powers and enabled the Baruya to seize the territory of the Andje, who had taken them in and protected them. In addition, the patrilineal principle skews the lists of the most remote ancestors an individual remembers.
All of these lists begin with a man, sometimes several, listed by order of birth. Rarely is the name of a woman – a sister of one of these men – given at this level (G+5, G+4), and this woman is never the eldest. The memory of kin ties is therefore doubly marked by the patrilineal principle, which results in the almost general forgetting of the names of the women of the lineage in the great-grandparents’ generation and, furthermore, the systematic attribution of the position of eldest to a man.
I would add that people’s names (and perhaps their spirits) are passed on in alternate generations – from grandfathers to grandsons, from paternal great-aunts to their grand-nieces. These names go in twos, a first name is given when the child is born; it will be replaced by a second name when the child’s septum has been pierced and he or she has been initiated. From then on it is forbidden to call this person by the former name, which would be a grave insult and require compensation.
HOW DO THE BARUYA TALK ABOUT KINSHIP?
Sometimes we have called the Baruya’s kin groups clans and sometimes lineages. What do the Baruya call them? They use two terms, which underscore different but related aspects of these groups. The first term, navaalyara, comes from avaala, which means ‘the same’ and foregrounds the fact that all members of these groups share the same identity. The second term, yisavaa, refers to a tree, yita, and emphasizes the descent rule, the ramification of the tree’s branches from its trunk and the growth of the trunk from the roots. Both terms can be used to designate either a particular lineage or several lineages with the same name. The term yisavaa is favoured in the second case to designate a set of lineages sharing the same overarching name, a group we have, with numerous precautions, called ‘clan’. To give an example, the name ‘Bakia’ turns up in several lineage names: Kuopbakia, Boulimmanbakia, etc. But what is the impact of these realities in practice?
Let us take the kin group that calls itself the Baruya. It is made up of two lineages, which bear the names of two toponyms in the Marawaka Valley (where their ancestors, having fled Bravegareubaramandeuc, settled upon reaching the Andje). One of the lineages now calls itself the Baruya Kwarrandariar, and the other, the Baruya Wombouye. Both know they are Baruya, but they are unable to trace the ties connecting them to a common ancestor. This ancestor is said to have been a certain Djivaamakwe, a Dreamtime hero. It is he who is said to have received the first kwaimatnie from the Sun, established the initiations and assigned each of the other clans a specific role in their performance.
But the Kwarrandariar claim Djivaamakwe as their own ancestor, and if they give the Wombouye a role in their ritual tasks, it is a minor one. Therefore, if we use the word ‘clan’ to designate these two lineages that bear the same big name, Baruya, we see that it has no true existence outside the political-religious sphere, since the two lineages also sometimes exchange women and otherwise behave like exogamous units. If we compare these practices with the way certain anthropologists have defined the clan (as an ‘exogamous’ group), we see that, if the fact that the Kwarrandariar and the Wombouye both carry the name Baruya gives the impression that the two form one clan, either this clan is not ‘exogamous’ or what is covered by this shared name is not a ‘clan’. I lean toward the first interpretation. They are a ‘clan’ in the sense of a set of lineages that have retained the memory of a shared origin and name, but this clan is not exogamous. Lineages which are physically separated or which have only a very remote genealogical tie with each other contract marriages that they do not repeat before at least three generations, as we will see when we analyze Baruya marriage practices.
In principle, when sons marry, they are supposed to build their house next to their father’s, if he is living, or next to the site of his old house if he is deceased. But if this rule were systematically applied, we should find whole villages inhabited by all of the male descendants of a group of brothers who lived in the same place three or four generations before. This is not the case, however, because one or several of a man’s sons frequently choose to live near one of their brothers-in-law and so move to another village. Similarly, a brother-in-law