The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
marriage. And once these women, who are not from the area and who know nothing of the Baruya language and traditions, get to Wonenara or Marawaka, they lead a very hard life, which sometimes drives them to run away, with or without their children. The young men who brought them back from their stay in town or on the plantations are very proud to have obtained a wife without incurring a debt to their lineage, thus keeping the possibility of exchanging their ‘sisters’ for a Baruya wife.
Last of all, men and women have begun planting and harvesting coffee as a cash crop; and the children who used to spend their days playing, especially the little boys, are now recruited for one or two hours a day to sort the coffee beans drying in the sun on bamboo mats. In short, all levels of the population now often work in order to ‘do business’, but the money earned from the sale of their harvests serves only to buy rice and tinned fish from Japan, which replace the game formerly used in ceremonies; or to purchase shoes, sunglasses, umbrellas, machetes and soap. A few Baruya have started putting their money on savings passbooks distributed by the Administration, so that they no longer see their ‘real’ money, which is collected regularly and taken away in sacks for deposit in the bank vault in Goroka. A last fact, which is important: numbers of Baruya women – more than the men – have joined one of a number of Christian denominations that send missionaries to the area – today nearly all natives of Papua New Guinea – even as far as Wonenara and Marawaka. Once the adults have been converted and baptized, they renounce their personal name – for example Gwataie, Maye, which immediately tell a Baruya that the first is an Andavakia and the second a Baruya Kwarrandariar. Henceforth they are called John, David, or Mary, followed by their clan name: John Andavakia, David Bakia. Their children are baptized, go to the mission school and are no longer initiated. For the rest of their life they will carry Old or New Testament first names. They have stopped living as the reincarnation of one of their lineage or clan ancestors.
Before concluding, I would like to say something about my approach to Baruya kinship in the field. As we saw, it was a mistake to try to start fieldwork with a study of the kinship system without sufficient knowledge of the language and using informants who were too young. The error was due to lack of experience. It was a good decision to drop this study and start another on an aspect of Baruya life that occupies the men several months of the year and the women on a daily basis, namely: clearing large gardens in the forest, planting sweet potatoes or taros, tending them and then progressively harvesting while starting new gardens well before the old ones are exhausted. These are relentless tasks that mobilize every able man and woman to produce this essential portion of their material means of existence, their means of subsistence. No one is exempted from these tasks without an exceptional reason.
It was only when I spent months with the Baruya in their gardens, taking down the names of the ancestors who had first cleared the land and those of their descendants who had inherited the right to use it today, listing the names of the men who had worked together to cut the trees and build the fences around each garden to keep out the wild pigs, the names of the women – the wives, sisters, sisters-in-law, eldest daughters, etc. – among whom the plots had been divided, that a path opened up enabling me to gradually approach what the domain of kinship and ties to the land meant for the Baruya, the women’s ties to the plants they grew, the presence of the spirits, the history of their wars and so on. Little by little I learned the kin ties that allowed given groups of men and women to cultivate such and such a plot, which of them held the right to make the garden, and which affines or maternal kin were invited to join them on this occasion, which would be reciprocated.
Over these months, day after day, I got to know dozens (and even hundreds) of Baruya personally. And they in turn formed their judgement of me and almost always accepted my presence with them in their gardens or on their hunting grounds. Some were reluctant, though, and I did not press them.
It became increasingly easy to question them on their genealogy. It was they who volunteered their ties of consanguinity or affinity with those who shared the use of the land. All adults had direct knowledge of these ties, but many were incapable of going back very far, no more than two generations. When someone was in doubt or admitted ignorance, they readily appealed to someone else, generally an elderly man or woman, known for remembering old alliances or the names of ascendants who had died young or gone to live in neighbouring friendly – or even hostile – tribes. These knowledgeable persons were not necessarily members of the questioner’s lineage. But the size of the Baruya tribe and the fact that, in virtue of the ban on repeating marriages from the preceding generations, each lineage was ultimately allied with six or seven others, together with the need to keep all these marriages straight so as to know when they could be repeated, meant that people like old Djirinac or Nougrouvandjereye had to remember the genealogies of almost all of the tribe’s members over several generations.
But the memory of even the most knowledgeable and reliable informants is always skewed by the (unconscious) interference of the patrilineal descent rule – in the Baruya’s case – which meant that in the generations farthest from Ego (G+3 or G+4), the first names cited were always those of men, as though all of the firstborn of these generations had been male. The women’s names were generally forgotten or mentioned only in second or third position in their generation. Reciting genealogies was not only an exercise in ‘kinship’; the sound of certain names spontaneously elicited copious comments on such and such a personality, famous for his deeds or misdeeds, the memory of bloody clashes between brothers over such and such a woman or garden.
I remember one time when Nougrouvandjereye, who had spent the day with other Baruya constructing for me the genealogies of certain lineages in the Marawaka Valley, went home to his village, where he was attacked and wounded on the arm by a man wielding a machete. The aggressor had heard – probably from one of the (many) Baruya usually at my house – that sometime that day Nougrouvandjereye had voiced doubts in my presence about the aggressor’s lineage’s rights in a certain number of pandanus trees (which produce highly appreciated berries), whereas Nougrouvandjereye had told me that it was not one of his own ancestors who had planted the trees.
GENEALOGIES: MADE-UP STORIES FOR THE WHITE MAN?
In short, genealogies did indeed exist for the Baruya, and they involved many stakes and interests. Asking the Baruya to reconstruct their genealogies, therefore, did not amount to imposing a Eurocentric vision of kinship. Nor was it a matter of projecting our vision of consanguinity, our notions of fatherhood and motherhood. The Baruya taught me two things in this regard, which kept me from projecting my own representations of paternity, consanguinity, etc., onto theirs. The first was that the Baruya have only one word for father and father’s brothers, and another for mother and mother’s sisters; as a consequence, their children are brothers and sisters. The notions of father, mother and siblings therefore cannot mean the same thing for a Baruya as for a Western European born into a kinship system centred on the nuclear family and which places in the same category (that of uncle) father’s brother and mother’s brother, following the terminology known as Eskimo, which characterizes the Western European and American kinship systems.
Second, and above all, for the Baruya a child is made from its father’s sperm, which makes its blood, its bones, its skin and even the milk with which its mother nourishes it. But the child is also the work of the Sun, which as I have said makes the foetus in the woman’s womb into a human child. In short, when one understands how the Baruya envision the process of making a baby, and the respective roles played by the man, the woman and the Sun, it is impossible to project one’s own concept of consanguinity onto their way of thinking and living, and to affirm that for them, too, ‘blood is thicker than water’. For the Baruya – to parody Schneider – sperm is thicker and stronger than blood, milk and so forth, which come from what the Baruya call ‘penis water’ (lakala alieu).
Lastly, and this is the weightiest argument against Schneider’s criticisms, just as questioning people about their genealogies in no way prompts the anthropologist to project onto them the Western notion of consanguinity and thus to put both maternal and paternal kin in the same category, so too discovering the importance of kinship relations and the associated norms and values for the Baruya in no way compels the anthropologist to conclude that theirs is a ‘kin-based society’.
We have seen that, in the Baruya’s case, the existence