The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
of the village founders. These settlements were regrouped and fortified in times of war, but in peacetime the families would disperse and often lived next to their gardens.
The Baruya find it advantageous to invite one or several of their affines to live nearby or to allow one of their own to move next to their affines. The presence of these affines lessens the conflicts that frequently crop up between two brothers or two brothers’ sons (parallel cousins). There is no lack of reasons to quarrel or clash: a man tries to bed his brother’s wife; the wife of one brother is embroiled in a quarrel with the wife of another brother or mistreats one of this wife’s children. More seriously: a man clears a garden in an area originally cleared by his father’s brother, but without telling him, and so on. Some quarrels end in murder, and in this case the murderer and his family are forced to seek refuge with affines who will protect them and perhaps even allow them to stay with them indefinitely and use their growing lands and hunting grounds. After a number of years, the murderer can even be taken into his hosts’ lineage, following a ceremony in which the host gives a considerable number of salt-bars and lengths of cowry shells to the murderer’s lineage. The lineage elder then declares that this man is no longer one of them and has lost all rights in the lands and the groves of pandanus trees (whose fruit is prized) planted by his ancestors. Henceforth his descendants will carry a double name composed of the lineage that absorbed them and the name of their original lineage. They will become, for example, Ndelouwaye – i.e. Yowaye who have become Ndelie.
A KINSHIP TERMINOLOGY OF THE IROQUOIS TYPE
The Baruya use what is called an Iroquois-type kinship terminology. What does this mean? We call ‘kinship terminology’ a fraction of the vocabulary of a language, a limited set of terms, that designates the ties a person, characterized exclusively by his or her sex, has, on the one hand, with a certain number of individuals of both sexes from whom he or she descends or who descend from him or her, and, on the other hand, with other individuals to whom he or she is related by marriage (affines) or who are related by marriage to his or her paternal or maternal kin – or sometimes are even affines of affines.
In the West we are accustomed to designate all paternal and maternal kin, together with their descendants, as ‘consanguines’, and all relatives by marriage as ‘affines’. But these terms do not have a universal definition and have the disadvantage of projecting onto kinship systems different from our own distinctions that give rise to confusion and deform or mask the actual facts. In the Baruya’s case, it would be absurd to call the ‘maternals’ ‘consanguines’, which would suggest that they share their blood with the child, whereas, as we will see, a child’s blood and bones are believed to come from its father’s sperm, while its spirit comes from a male or female ancestor (depending on the child’s sex) who also belongs to the father’s lineage. Moreover – but this will be discussed later – we know that in many kinship terminologies, Dravidian and Australian in particular, there are no specific terms for affines and that the mother’s brother is called by the same term as the wife’s father, a term that subsumes two relations which in the West are divided between the vocabulary of consanguinity (maternal uncle) and that of affinity (father-in-law). We thus understand why an observer must decentre his thinking with respect to the categories and representations of kinship used in the West.
What aspects of Baruya kinship terminology cause us to classify it as being of the Iroquois type? (Of course, the Baruya themselves are not aware that their terminology is of the same type as that collected at the end of the nineteenth century by Morgan among the Iroquois.) First, the fact that father’s brothers’ children and mother’s sisters’ children are called by the same terms used to designate Ego’s brothers and sisters. All are brothers and sisters, which is expressed in anthropological jargon by the statement: parallel cousins are (equivalent or identical to) siblings. Alternatively, father’s sisters’ children and mother’s brothers’ children – Ego’s cross cousins – are called by a distinct term. Since male and female parallel cousins are brothers and sisters, in theory they cannot marry each other. But the Baruya can sometimes marry their matrilateral parallel cousin. Cross cousins, on the contrary, are potential spouses. But, in reality, the Baruya do not marry their mother’s brother’s daughter – their matrilateral cross cousin – because it is forbidden to repeat the father’s marriage and take a wife from the mother’s lineage. The distinction between parallel and cross cousins does not carry over several generations, as in Dravidian systems. It is the outcome, in Ego’s generation, of an exchange of women in the preceding generation (G+1), but it is not the consequence of a rule obliging Ego to marry one of his cross cousins or a rule that in a less constraining manner would have him prefer her to other possible choices.
The absence of a prescriptive or preferential marriage rule explains the existence in the Baruya language of specific terms for affines, which is a second feature typical of Iroquois-type kinship terminologies that distinguishes them from Dravidian terminologies. The existence of this specific terminology means that the rule is not to marry someone who is closely related on the father’s or mother’s side, but to marry into a lineage into which your line has not yet married (or at least not for three generations). In short, a potential spouse is an unrelated or distantly related Baruya, but not an outsider, for the Baruya tribe is overwhelmingly endogamous. When someone marries an outsider, it is usually in order to seal a trading or a political alliance. In this case, depending on the context, one exchanges either a woman (in the case of a political alliance) or a certain quantity of goods (in view of trading): salt-bars, cowries, bark capes, feathers and so on, in short, wealth for a woman, or bridewealth.
Let us come back to the fact that Ego’s father’s brothers’ children and Ego’s mother’s sisters’ children are Ego’s brothers and sisters. This implies that Ego’s father’s brothers are also fathers for Ego and that Ego’s mother’s sisters are also mothers for Ego. We are dealing here with a ‘classificatory’ terminology, where the term for ‘father’ designates a category of individuals who stand in the same relation to Ego as the man who is married to Ego’s mother. The notion of paternal ‘uncle’ therefore does not exist in this language and ‘fatherhood’ does not mean the same thing as it does in French or English, since the Baruya word noumwe places in the same category people and relationships that we would distinguish. Likewise for the mother’s side, where the notion of ‘maternal’ aunt does not exist because all of Ego’s mother’s sisters are Ego’s mothers. But since not all of these ‘mothers’ are either Ego’s father’s co-wives or potential or real wives of Ego’s father’s brothers – Ego’s other fathers – we immediately see that the word noua, which I translate as ‘mother’, takes in people and relationships that are distinguished from each other in the European kinship system. Furthermore, Ego’s mother’s brothers are indeed Ego’s uncles, but owing to the fact that Baruya marriage is based on the exchange of ‘sisters’ between two men, one of my father’s sisters is likely the wife of one of Ego’s mother’s brothers (MB=FZH). Alternatively, Ego’s mother’s other brothers will be married to women from other lineages, in accordance with the rule that two brothers are not supposed to take wives in the same lineage. The notions ‘father’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’ and so on thus refer to an indefinite number of individuals who stand in the same category of relation to Ego and Ego’s siblings.
Given the existence of such classificatory terminologies designating categories of individuals standing in equivalent relationships, kinship specialists wondered whether these categories were constructed by extension, as for example when the word ‘father’ is the extension (and projection) of the father–children relationship created within the nuclear family to all of the father’s brothers, who are not part of this nuclear family and are not married to Ego’s mother. Kinship, however, as we will see, is never simply a matter of the nuclear family – or any other kind – and kin groups are never constructed by simply extending and multiplying the relationships found within the nuclear family, which some, following Murdock, insist on calling ‘primary’ kinship relations. We must therefore look for the explanation in an equivalence posited between the relations linking Ego and the class of his or her substitutes (‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’) with another class of individuals. Furthermore this equivalence can subsume genealogically very different relationships, and even link individuals who have no direct or indirect genealogical