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

Abstract

The 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.