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Bodies, kinship and power(s) in the Baruya culture

2011; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau1.1.013

2575-1433

Maurice Godelier,

Migration, Identity, and Health

Previous articleNext article FreeBodies, kinship and power(s) in the Baruya culture*Maurice GodelierMaurice GodelierEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Search for more articles by this author Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences SocialesPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe themes developed in the present text, written in 1998, appeared in conclusion to an earlier piece of work on the relationship between the sexes and the different forms of power and hierarchy among the Baruya, a population living in the interior highlands of New Guinea (Godelier 1982; 1986). This was the theme of the "sexed" body, which functions as a ventriloquist's dummy, constantly invited to speak about and to testify for (or against) the prevailing social order. The idea was that the way the body is represented stamps each person's innermost subjectivity with the order or orders that prevail in his or her society and which must be respected if the society is to be reproduced.A body is made of flesh, blood, bone, breath and one or more spirits, all of which are possessed by everyone, male or female; but there are also organs - a penis, a clitoris, a vagina, breasts - and substances - semen, menstrual blood, milk - which not all people have and which make individuals different or alike. All cultures have answers to the questions of where the bones, the flesh, the blood, the breath or a person's spirit come from: from the father, from the mother, from both, from neither and in that case, from where? But not all cultures bother to account for every component of the body: some say nothing about semen, others pass over blood, or bone, … and these silences speak volumes.Among the many representations of the body, those having to do with the making of children - conception, intra-uterine growth, development after birth -occupy a strategic position because it seems that they usually fulfill two important functions for a society. First of all they legitimize the appropriation of each child that is born by a group of adults that regards itself as the child's kin. And secondly, they assign this child a future destiny and position in society according to its sex, male or female, which it has from birth. It is specifically this category of representations that we will address in the following pages.We have therefore left to one side a whole series of details about the body which enable the Baruya explain the nature and origin of disease, death, accidents and so forth, in sum to account for evil, misfortune, illness and bad luck, which are usually interpreted as the doings of evil spirits or the results of sorcery between Baruya or on the part of enemy tribes. In this line we would have to analyze what the Baruya think about vomited blood, urine, feces, mucus, nail parings, pieces or flakes of skin, hair and so on. But we will not be doing this here.Of course everything anthropologists place under the heading of "bodily substances" is a series of fantasized ideas and images, which refer to imaginary concepts, causes or effects, but which are important in determining the way people behave and society works. The analysis presented here must therefore be understood as part of a vast anthropological effort over the last twenty years to come to grips with the relationship between gender, forms of kinship, initiation practices, ritualized (homo- and hetero-) sexuality, found in the many social configurations encountered in New Guinea, and more generally throughout Oceania.1I will proceed in two stages. First, I will attempt to review the information we have on these themes, and then move on to an analysis which brings out the relations of appropriation, of domination, or simply of tribal and ethnic membership that are signified through the Baruya's representations of the body and which are instilled into the body of every Baruya from birth. The first part therefore reiterates a good deal of information contained in earlier publications. But this has been summarized and references provided for further information. I have also added a number of new elements concerning blood, bone and Baruya names.So we will begin with the question:What is a child for the Baruya?For the Baruya, children are the product of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, combined with the intervention of the Sun, the cosmic power which, by disengaging himself from the Earth from which he had originally been indistinguishable and rising into the sky above her, followed by the Moon, brought the first period of the Universe to a close and established the cosmic order as we now know it. Moon, in the exoteric versions of the Baruya myth, is the wife of Sun; but in the esoteric versions of the shaman master, Moon is Sun's younger brother. Both are at the origin of the alternation of the seasons and the success or failure of crops. If the sun comes too close to the earth, all growing things are scorched and they wither; and if the moon comes too close, the world grows cold and wet.In the beginning, man and woman each had a sexual organ and an anus, but these were not pierced and could not be used. One day Sun took pity on them and tossed a flint stone into the fire. The stone exploded and pierced the sexual organs and the anus of the man and the woman, who ever since have coupled and had children. During one of the opening rituals of the male initiation ceremonies, all of the fires burning in the villages are extinguished, and the "first fire" of the big ceremonial house, the tsimia, is lit by striking two sacred flint stones together. These flint stones once belonged to a special clan, whose ancestor received them from Sun himself together with the spell for their use. In everyday life, the Baruya light their fires by friction, never by striking.In another version, it is not Sun, but the woman, who - indirectly - pierced the man's penis. She stuck the bone from the wing of a bat into the trunk of a banana tree at the height of the man's genitals, and he accidentally impaled himself. Enraged with pain, and guessing that it was the woman who had put the bone there, the man seized a sharp piece of bamboo and, with one swipe, slashed her sexual organ. Today a few old Baruya women still wear this kind of very thin bone -normally used as an awl or a needle - in the septum of their nose, like a dart. Moon is also the one who pierces young girls at puberty and makes their menstrual blood flow for the first time. According to some informants, Sun helps Moon in this task. When a girl has her first period, a man, her mother's brother as a rule, pierces her nose without any ceremony, in broad daylight and in the village. Menstrual blood is dangerous for men. It is a constant threat to their strength and health, and sometimes a woman who wants to kill her husband by sorcery will sneak some into his food.When a young man and a girl get married, the men of the husband's lineage build the hearth that stands at the center of the house and which will be used for cooking. For several days, or even weeks, until the walls of the house have become blackened with soot from the fire, the young couple is supposed to abstain from making love. The young man fondles his wife's breasts and gives her his semen to ingest. The semen is supposed to nourish the woman and give her strength for bearing children and working in the fields, but above all it is stored in the young woman's breasts and will turn into milk when she becomes pregnant and bears a child. Semen, then, is nourishment for the woman and, when it changes into milk, for the children she will bear. Then, when the time comes, the man and the woman have intercourse. This is performed with the man lying on top of the woman. The inverse is forbidden, since the woman's vaginal fluids would run out onto the man's stomach and sap his strength and his health. Sexual relations take place in the women's part of the house, between the central hearth and the door. On the other side of the hearth, the man sleeps alone or with any sons he may have. A woman must never step over the hearth on which she is cooking the family's food, for fluids from her vagina or dirt from her skirt might fall into the fire and defile the food that goes into the man's mouth. Were this to happen, she would be accused of practicing sorcery on her husband; he would beat her and, in some cases might even kill her.A couple does not make love when the woman is menstruating. During these few days, the wife does not live with her husband, but stays in a hut some ten meters from the house or more often on the outskirts of the village, in a place forbidden to men, where all the women go to give birth. A menstruating woman is not allowed to prepare food for her husband; he is given food by his sisters or daughters, or he cooks sweet potatoes for himself.A couple does not make love when pigs are to be killed or their meat distributed, when the forest is to be cleared for the big taro fields, when the men are preparing for war, when salt is being crystallized or when the initiation ceremonies are about to begin, and so forth. In short, one does not simply make love anywhere, anytime (and with anyone), for the sexual act affects not only the reproduction of society but also the order of the universe (if sexual taboos are violated, nothing grows in the gardens, the pigs' flesh turns to water, etc.). Sexual relations are thought and experienced as dangerous by their very nature, and they are even more dangerous when they are illegitimate, performed in secret, in forbidden places (gardens, the bush…).A child is conceived when the man's semen enters a kind of pouch, tandatta, in the woman's womb and is retained. Semen makes the child's bones, its skeleton. The blood normally comes from the man and "grows" as the embryo develops. But the Baruya say that, in some cases, the mother's blood passes into the child, and this child will look like its mother or some member of her lineage. During the pregnancy, Sun intervenes in the woman's womb and gives the embryo its final shape. He completes the child by causing its fingers and toes to grow, and by fashioning its nose, mouth and eyes. In other words, he completes the four limbs and the head.2 The sun is called Nila in standard Baruya, but in more familiar language it is known as Noumwe, the term of affection used for addressing one's father and one's father's brothers.The Baruya consider the nose and the prominent part of the forehead to be the seat of intelligence and "wisdom." It is also the passageway for the breath of life. A boy's nose is pierced at the time of the initiations, and the hole is subsequently enlarged over the years to hold the objects symbolizing the changes in the man's status (signs of the different initiation stages, the insignia of shamans, warriors, cassowary hunters, etc.).The body also means the liver. The liver is the seat of strength and life. The heart, on the other hand, does not have the same importance for the Baruya. The liver is gorged with blood. Enemy shaman-sorcerers feed on livers. The Baruya are of the opinion that their own shamans do not devour the liver intentionally (that would be sorcery). When they do, it is thought that they are driven to this extremity by hunger and are unaware of what they are doing (witchcraft). Formerly, in times of war, the Baruya used to torture some of their enemies, primarily famous warriors they had succeeded in capturing. After breaking their arms and legs, they would deck them in their best feathers. Then a band of young warriors would come running down a hill, brandishing ceremonial bamboo knives wrapped in a strip of beaten bark, died red, the color of the sun, and would plunge the knives into the prisoner's chest. The blood from the wounds was collected in bamboo tubes and rubbed onto the spectators - men, women and children. Finally someone would slit open the victim's abdomen and tear out his liver, which would be divided among the men in attendance and eaten raw or cooked. Nowadays, during male initiations, the men kill a marsupial with very long teeth, which is dangerous to catch barehanded; the animal is then cut open with a ceremonial knife and the liver extracted. It is cut into thin strips, which are placed between the halves of an areca nut and given to third- and fourth-state initiates to chew. They are not told what they are chewing.Finally, the human body is inhabited by one (or more) spirits. For the Baruya, the spirit is something that dwells at the top of the head, inside the skull. Apparently a person's spirit needs some time to take up residence. Sometimes this spirit belonged to an ancestor and re-embodies itself in one of his or her descendants. About a year after a child's birth, when everyone is more confident that it will live and the father has presented a ritual gift to the child's maternal kin, that is to his wife's lineage, the child is given its first name, while the second name, or the "big" name he or she will bear after being initiated, is kept secret for the time being. This name is that of the grandfather or great uncle, or grandmother or great-aunt, depending on the child's sex. Names are handed down to individuals of the same lineage in alternate generations.Let us pause for a moment here to take a closer look at the nature of Baruya personal names; after all, it is when a person receives a name that he or she becomes a true member of society. An analysis of over four hundred Baruya names shows that half of them (49.5%) refer to the names of trees or wild plants, especially flowers, to which must be added the names alluding to cultivated plants (8%) and those which designate different types of soil or heavenly bodies, stars and meteorological phenomena such as wind, rain and so forth (10%). Also mentioned are many species of birds and a few insects. In all, 67.5% of Baruya names have some connection with nature; and it is striking to see both the extreme importance of wild plants and the forest and, at the same time, the almost total absence of any reference to wild animals, with the exception of birds and insects, but nothing about snakes, marsupials, the cassowary and so forth.Snakes are not game. The Baruya fear them, even the non-poisonous kinds. They think that snakes "spoil" a woman's womb and make her sterile. But at the same time, the giant python is associated with the origin of menstrual blood. Alternatively, the many species of marsupial are game par excellence, as well as the privileged object of exchange between men and women or young male initiates. It is interesting that Baruya are not named after marsupials, whereas they feed the young boys their raw livers, thus making the animal on more or less the equivalent of the enemy bodies from which the livers used to be taken and eaten ritually during cannibalistic meals. The cassowary, on the other hand, represents woman in her wild state, and women may not eat its flesh. As the cassowary's blood must not be spilled, the birds are snared in a noose, which strangles them. The hunter who sets the trap does not eat the victim, which is reserved exclusively for the young initiates, who eat it in a ritual meal.The second major category of names refers to toponyms, especially those of rivers and tracts of forest that are good for growing taro or are planted in areca or pandanus (25.8%). All of these lands and rivers are owned by the lineages of the tribe, and it is the male or female descendants of the first owners who bear their names. Most of these sites are located in Marawaka valley, where the Baruya's ancestors took refuge after having been forced to flee the Yoyue tribe to which they originally belonged. We also find the names of rivers flowing through the valleys that were once part of the Yoyue territory. A total of 93.3% of Baruya names designate some aspect of nature or cultivated spots claimed by the Baruya. The rest, 6.7%, refer to a wide variety of phenomena: a cave in a cliff, the flat roof of a house, a bird snare, an ax-handle, lizard eggs, pig names, a bowstring, perspiration, the fact that someone is the daughter of a man who died before her birth, and so on.Thus the first major point we see in the Baruya naming system is that a very large proportion of names identify their bearer with some natural element, primarily from the plant world, except for birds and insects.The foregoing describes the nature of Baruya personal names, but it does not tell us how these names are distributed among the lineages and individuals. There is a tendency for men to have names of trees and toponyms, while women are more often named after flowers and rivers flowing through ancestral territory. Rivers often mark the boundaries of the mountains and forests owned by a clan. In the case of individuals with this type of name, as soon as one hears the name, one knows the person's lineage, since every Baruya knows which lineages own the various parts of the tribal territory.The essential point, however, is that each lineage possesses a stock of names (of plants, mountains, etc.) which belong to that lineage and which are passed on to every other generation, in other words, from grandfather to grandson, from paternal great-aunt to great-niece, and so forth. Names are not inherited through the maternal line (although women do pass on to their daughters both the names for their pigs and the magic spells for raising them).Several lineages may refer to the same plant in constructing one of their personal names. In this case, each adds an element so as to distinguish their name from those of other lineages. For instance, the word maye means "flowers" in general and more particularly the magic flowers used to adorn the bodies of the initiates and initiators. It is used as a personal name by the Kwarandariar lineage, which belongs the Baruya clan that gave its name to the tribe. Meyaoumwe is another name made from the same root, but which designates members of another clan, the Bakia.Personal names distinguish their bearer clearly then, since they indicate the lineage and clan, and also situate him or her in the Baruya's wild or domesticated natural environment. Thus the name envelops the person as a skin encloses the body, and it seals in realities that make up the person, but only for his or her lifetime. Nevertheless, it may occur that two people from the same clan have the same name at the same time, which should not happen. This stems from the fact that the tribe is split into two subgroups, one of which lives in Marawaka Valley and the other in Wonenara Valley; the latter are the descendants of the Baruya who left Marawaka at the end of the 19th century in search of a new space. It also sometimes happens that the same name is given to individuals belonging to different clans. This usually creates a problem, and one of the clans accuses the other of having robbed them. All of these practices reflect a strong desire to distinguish individuals while at the same time thinking of the individual as the reproduction or incarnation of an entity (spirit, ancestor, etc.) that is part of a pool specific to each lineage. For the spirit leaves the human body not only after its death but also while it is alive. It can therefore go and take up residence in another person living at the same time, or skip a generation and reincarnate at some later time.Lastly, we must keep in mind that every person who lives long enough to be initiated receives two names, a "little name" used before initiation, and a "big name," which a boy receives when his nose is pierced and a girl, when she menstruates for the first time. It is forbidden to go on calling an initiated man or woman by their "little name." It would shame them. But this leads us to an entirely different chapter, which is the taboos surrounding names. For instance, an initiate may not call a co-initiate by his name, a wife may not pronounce her husband's name and vice versa, and so on. Last of all, a great many individuals have a nickname, which is used much more often than their real name. For example, Koumaineu, a Nounguye clansman, is called "Tsinname," "dirty nose" because he has a big broad nose.The spirit leaves the body when the person is asleep, whether in the daytime or at night. Spirits fly like birds and visit all parts of the Baruya territory. Many stray over the border into enemy lands, where sorcerers try to capture them. The Baruya shamans - male and female - are therefore constantly on the alert, and their own spirits form a sort of magic barrier around the territory to stop Baruya spirits as they are about to cross the boundary. The shamans drive them back into Baruya territory and into their bodies, where they once more take up residence, before dawn or before the end of the nap. But sometimes a spirit does not return to its body. The person goes on living, but now behaves strangely, until one day a shaman discovers that he or she has no spirit, and undertakes the journey that will lead to the spot where an enemy sorcerer is holding its victim captive. Following a successful battle, the Baruya shaman returns with the delivered prisoner and restores it to its body.These are the main elements of the Baruya's theory of how children are made. Before going on to analyze the relationship between these ideas and Baruya social structure or models of social organization, however, I would like to complete these ethnographic details by some social representations and practices that have to do with skin, flesh, bones and semen, but which are not directly connected with conception and procreation.Flesh and bones: death, cannibalism and initiationsBefore the Europeans arrived, when an important or widely respected man or woman died, it was customary to stop up the body's orifices and to leave the corpse for several days in a sitting position beside a burning fire. The deceased received many visitors, who would crowd around the body, stroking it, crying over it and insulting it for leaving them, and so on. When several days had elapsed and the body began to decompose, they would flay it and place the pieces of skin in a bark cape, which they would then take into the deceased's piece of forest or into the bushes surrounding his or her house. Then the flesh would be rubbed with blue clay, a color that closes the way to evil spirits, and the first funeral would be held. Depending on the clan and the status of the deceased, the body would be buried or placed on a raised platform.The dead were buried or exposed in a sort of no-man's land on the side of a mountain, with the head towards their hunting grounds and streams. In most cases, the bodies of great warriors were exposed on a platform with their bow and arrows, and the platform surrounded by a fence, forming a sort of small garden. Taros would be planted beneath the platform so that the deceased's fluids would drip onto the plants as the body decomposed. At the time of the second funeral, the taros would be dug up, and the members of the deceased's family and his or her descendants would transfer them to their own gardens. The earth nourishes humans, but humans enrich the earth they leave to their descendants with their own flesh.This is a good time to recall that the Baruya and other Anga tribes such as the Watchakes explain the origin of cultivated plants by the murder of a woman, who was killed by her husband and buried in the forest. From her corpse sprang all the plants that humans now cultivate and use (Godelier 1982: 119; 1986: 71).While the Baruya see agriculture as a sort of transition from the savage state to a state of civilization, they make the murder of a woman the condition of this passage. Even though they acknowledge by this account that women possess a power and a fecundity that men do not, they maintain that it is by doing violence to women that this fecundity, this creative force is set free and placed, by men, at the service of all, of society as a whole.And a last remark on the subject of the body and its flesh: it is important to keep in mind that the Baruya used to be cannibals, and that they ate their enemies, and not only the most valiant enemy warriors killed in battle. They would cut off the arms and legs of a certain number of bodies fallen on the battlefield. That, they said, was easier than carrying back whole bodies. They would eat the limbs either on the way back, if the expedition had taken them far from home - and in this case they would roast them; or they would take them to the village and cook them in pits, like pigs. The fingers were a favorite "delicacy." It would be untrue to think that the Baruya ate only great enemy warriors whose might they wanted to assimilate. After several years of fieldwork, when my informants thought they could trust me, they confided that their ancestors also used to kill and eat women and children of enemy tribes when they came upon a group in the forest or in the gardens. Their flesh was highly prized. So for the Baruya, the human body is not only strong and handsome, it is also good to eat.But flesh matters less than bone, for the Baruya, something that is corroborated by the custom of the second funeral. Some months after the body of a great warrior has been buried or exposed on a platform, his bones are carefully recovered. The bones of his left hand are placed in a areca tree along with the skull. The long arm and leg bones are placed in holes in trees or rocks standing on the deceased's hunting grounds or in the forest around his house. The finger bones of the right hand are divided among his paternal and maternal relatives, or given to young boys who seem destined to become great warriors, aoulatta. Several years ago, Inaaoukwe, a great warrior, died. Before the European arrival, in 1951, he had single-handedly killed "dozens" of Baruya enemies. Although it had been over 25 years since the Australians had pacified the area, as soon as Inaaoukwe was dead, his close relatives cut off his right hand - the killing hand - and had it dried so as to preserve it. They claimed that they wanted his descendants to be able to show it to future generations whenever his exploits were recounted and celebrated. Another example. Until 1960-61, which is to say two years after the Australians had established the first patrol post at Wonenara and begun to pacify the tribes in the area, the Baruya had carefully kept the hand of one of their legendary heroes, Bakitachatche. Unfortunately, Bakitchatche's fingers went up in smoke when an Australian officer burned down the village where they were kept to punish its inhabitants for having taken up arms against another Baruya village. Such incidents attest the importance of certain ancestral bones in the initiation ceremonies, where they are used to pierce the nose of the young boys just taken from their mother and the women's world.These bones are also an essential component of the kwaimatnie, the Baruya's sacred objects, owned by a few clans, which have the exclusive power to initiate boys and men. Two of the kwaimatnie are also used in the initiation of shamans, and, in this case, serve to initiate women as well as men.A kwaimatnie is an oblong parcel some 40 centimeters in length and 12 centimeters across, wrapped in barkcloth and tied up in a ypmoulie, the headband worn by men, which is made of strips of bark died red, the color of the sun. Inside the packet, some long, sharp bones and flat "nuts" surround a smooth black stone. All the bones, with the exception of one, come from the eagle. The eagle is the sun's bird. The Baruya charge it with carrying their prayers, breath and spirits up to the sun. But alongside the eagle bones, which can always be replaced, lies a bone that is irreplaceable, regarded as sacred, a bone (from the forearm) of a famous ancestor who passed the kwaimatnieon to his descendants, who keep the memory of his name alive.The word kwaimatnie comes from kwala, "men" and yimatnia "to raise the skin," "to make grow," "to make bigger." So the kwaimatnie contain the supernatural power to make children grow. The Baruya also associate the word with another, nymatnie, which means "fetus," "apprentice shaman" or "novice." Only certain clans and lineages have inherited such powers, and their ancestors received them directly from Sun at a time when humans were not like they are now but were wandjinia, spirits.In addition to the human and eagle bones, a kwaimatnie usually contains the seeds of an inedible fruit found in the forest. These seeds are small, flat discs, purple or brown in color, with a design on one side that looks like the iris of an eye: the Baruya call them "babies' eyes." When the eye is "open" it is a sign of life. Men suck these seeds to purify their mouth when they have been talking about women, and especially when they have discussed subjects having to do with sexual relations, children and so forth. When sucked, these "nuts" transmit to the men the sun's strength, which spreads "from the roots of their teeth down to their penis."At the center of the kwaimatnie lies a long, smooth black stone. All kwaimatnie come in pairs and work as a couple: one is male and the other, female. The more powerful of the two, the "hotter," is the female kwaimatnie. Only the representative of the lineage that owns the kwaimatnie can use this one. The other, the male kwaimatnie, is left to his brothers or to other men from the lineage who assist him in his ritual functions. The existence of these kwaimatnie "couples" and the fact that the female is the more powerful are kept strictly secret from women and young boys, even when the latter are initiated.At the beginning of the initiations the kwaimatnie-bearers and their assistants circle the line of boys several