The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

      CHAPTER ONE

      Kinship in the Field

      The Baruya of New Guinea

      Analyzing and interpreting the realm and the exercise of kinship in contemporary societies is obviously not simply a matter of theories and choosing among the different hypotheses and doctrines advanced by one or another anthropologist. One must also have tried one’s hand at conducting a systematic study of the relations and representations of kinship and the family in a real society. This holds not only for anthropologists, but for sociologists and other social scientists engaged in the study of contemporary societies.

      THE TOOLBOX

      It is also obvious that, before undertaking such a study, anthropologists cannot clear their head of everything they have previously read, heard, learned or understood about kinship. Deliberate amnesia of this sort is impossible. What is possible, however, and even to be recommended, is to adopt a stance of critical vigilance or awareness so as to be ready, if necessary, to revise or abandon concepts one previously considered to be analytically founded or field methods one had held to ‘pay off’, etc. In the meantime, one must begin to work with the theories and methods at hand and which seem useful for doing what one has set out to do.

      This was, of course, true in my own case when in 1967 I decided to study kinship relations in the Baruya society, a New Guinea Highlands population with whom I had chosen to live and ‘do fieldwork’, as we said then. How did I proceed? What results did I obtain and what shifts did my observations prompt in my theories? This is what I will now attempt to describe.

      In 1967, as mentioned above, Lévi-Strauss’ theoretical work in kinship held sway in France and had already won a large following in Great Britain and the United States. To be sure, Leach had already formulated his first criticisms in Rethinking Anthropology, but the stage was still largely occupied by the debates and disputes between those for whom descent was the primordial axis of kinship relations and those for whom this role fell to alliance, in short: between Meyer Fortes, Evans-Pritchard, Jack Goody, etc., on one side, and Lévi-Strauss, Rodney Needham, Louis Dumont, Leach, etc., on the other. Of course, some in each camp had already begun to point out that there was no commonly agreed definition of family, marriage, incest, etc., and, above all, none that applied to all societies. But no one at the time seriously doubted that such institutions as descent, filiation, marriage, the family, transmission of names and ranks, relations with the ancestors, dowry, and exchange of women belonged to the field of kinship and its exercise.

      Everyone was also familiar with Murdock’s categories of kinship terminologies: ‘Hawaiian’, ‘Sudanese’, ‘Eskimo’ and so on, whose construction rules and formal structures had been isolated and therefore could be identified in the field. And finally, although it was already well known (since Hocart at least)1 that in many societies in Australia, Oceania, Asia and America kin terms designated not only (or not at all) a person’s genealogical position with respect to another taken as a reference (an abstract male or female Ego), but (often) relations between ‘categories’ of individuals who were related to each other in the same way without necessarily having a genealogical tie, no one in France, by 1959, had yet formulated a radical criticism of the use of the genealogical method for the study of kinship. Novice anthropologists were merely advised not to force their informants to invent genealogies simply to please the ethnographer and to be aware that informants may have all sorts of reasons for manipulating the genealogies they recite – reasons that may be motivated by self-interest and therefore are interesting for anthropologists, as long as they realize this and can discover why.

      In short, it was with this theoretical baggage and critical advice – shared by the other young anthropologists of the time – that I set out in October 1966 for New Guinea. I arrived in 1967, having stopped off in Australia to learn Melanesia Pidgin in the University of Canberra’s language laboratory, run by A. Wurm. Robert Glasse, Andrew Strathern and others had alerted me to the importance of Pidgin for anyone travelling in New Guinea. But why New Guinea? And why the Baruya, with whom, a few months later, I would decide to live and work?

      WHY NEW GUINEA?

      It was on the advice of Claude Lévi-Strauss that I finally chose this country for some ‘real’ fieldwork. After having studied philosophy and then economics, I had decided to become an anthropologist and to look into an as yet little-developed domain: the economic systems of tribal and peasant societies; in sum, I wanted to go into economic anthropology. I had made this choice in a Marxist perspective, for at the time I believed that studying the modes of production and circulation of subsistence goods and wealth (a topic generally neglected by anthropologists in favour of kinship or religion, with some illustrious exceptions like R. Firth, A. Richard, Herskovitz, Bohannan and a few others), was a better approach to explaining the origin and functioning of kinship and political systems. I went to Lévi-Strauss, who accepted me in his group and took me on as his assistant, giving me the task of studying the ‘infrastructures’ of the societies he was working on, while he analyzed their ‘superstructures’, kinship and religion. At the time Lévi-Strauss still readily used such Marxist vocabulary.2

      An opportunity soon arose for me to involve myself clearly in the domain of economic anthropology when Unesco offered me the chance to study the effects of the implementation of a planned socialist economy on the development of village communities and ethnic groups in Mali. This move had been decided by President Modibo Keita and his Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) after Mali had broken with France and become independent. Having spent some weeks in the country, I concluded that there was indeed a ministry and a minister of the Plan, but no plan to speak of, and that what there was did not have a very positive impact on Mali’s development. And so I spent my time travelling around and reading the literature on economic anthropology I had brought with me. A year later when I returned to Paris, disappointed, I was ready for some real fieldwork.3

      I first went for advice to my friend Alfred Métraux (1902–63). He suggested that, rather than returning to Africa, I go to Bolivia and work among some of the Indian groups he had visited thirty years earlier. I was tempted by the idea and discussed it with him on several occasions so as to shape the project. But on the evening of 12 April 1963, a few hours after we had talked at length, Métraux took his life. Never in the course of our conversation had he let slip a hint of his decision, if he had already made it. When, a few days later at his funeral, I told Lévi-Strauss about our idea of a site for fieldwork, he advised against it, explaining that a large number of French anthropologists were already working in Africa or America and that there was something better: go to New Guinea, the last country where one could find societies less devastated by colonialism and Western culture than elsewhere, and where a few major figures of the discipline had distinguished themselves – Malinowski, Thurnwald, Mead, Fortune, etc. I capitulated and spent the next two years preparing myself to go to New Guinea.

      In January 1967, I arrived armed with a list of names of tribes or local groups that my colleagues – R. Rappaport, P. Vayda, R. Glasse, A. Strathern, R. Crocombe, etc., who had already worked in New Guinea – had suggested I visit before making my choice. These tribes were generally neighbours of those among whom my colleagues had worked, so they knew they had not yet been studied and thought it was worthwhile and would enrich the material in view of future comparisons. The Baruya