How do societies and “corporate” groups delimit themselves? A puzzle common to social and medical anthropology

Abstract

Classic anthropological theories define the first but neglect the second condition of social life. When they assume that the universal effect of the incest taboo is the opening of the consanguinial groups to the others, to exchange, they do not explain the closure of their sphere of reciprocity, i.e., the delimitation of the society. Hence the question: How, by which means, are stateless societies delimited or do they delimit themselves? Among the Senoufo of Ivory Coast (Nafara), one of the main acts of male initiation ceremonies--to the Poro, which is the very basis of the Senoufo's ethnic identity--is a ritual intercourse between the neophytes and their symbolic mother who has just given birth to them. This rite materializes the initiatic axiom: Senoufo men reproduce themselves by incest. In this case, the prescription of ritual incest is a means by which the society "closes" the field of reciprocity "opened" by the prohibition of actual incest. The return of the forbidden--at the heart of the institution which reproduces its identity--is the basic principle of the ritual delimitation of this society. Despite appearances, the delimitation of the so-called "corporate groups"--for example, an African lineage--is neither more "natural" nor more jural than that of the society which contains them. The limits of these groups are traced and retraced notably in the course of traditional "therapies" and by means of etiological entities which share several common, distinctive properties. (1) They cannot operate outside of the group delimited by them. (2) They are polyvalent and their effects are permutable from one group-member to another. (3) They act periodically: they have to dismantle the group periodically from the inside in order to be able to delimit it constantly from the outside. This phenomenon of spatio-temporal inversion (inside-outside; periodic-continuous), observable in any process of ritual delimitation, deserves our attention insofar as its closer analysis could lead us to rethink our present theories of ritual.