these territorial groups operate as societies, as overarching local units, only for a time. Before the arrival of Europeans, which froze the habitually unstable state of relations between neighbouring tribes, numerous conflicts of interest (over women, land, game, trading partners) opposed lineages and individuals (even close relatives) from the same tribe. Ultimately, in certain circumstances, the tacit agreement between lineages and individuals to live together breaks down, the unity of the tribe is shattered, and the tribe splits into fragments that join with neighbouring tribes or come together to create a new tribe, as in the case of the Baruya. However, it must be noted that, if, before the Europeans arrived, local groups came together, split up and joined with others, the tribal form of these groups, by contrast, did not disappear and was promptly reproduced by each of the new groups.
The fact of having shown that the Baruya existed as a society from the moment they exercised a sort of sovereignty over a territory (a sovereignty that was, if not recognized, at least known by their neighbours), and of having then applied the concept of tribe to this society because the social units sharing the territory are kin groups, still tells us nothing about the internal structure of the society, a structure that engenders distinct functions and social positions hierarchically distributed among individuals as well as among the kin groups into which they are born.
SOME INSTITUTIONS ARE BROADER THAN KINSHIP RELATIONS AND KIN GROUPS
There are other divisions running through Baruya society than those between clans or lineages. Two of these are of particular importance because they cut across the whole society: one is between the sexes and the other between clans.
Baruya gender relations were, in 1967, and indeed still are, relations of complementarity and cooperation at the same time as relations of domination and subordination. The complementarity is visible in the division of labour and in the domains of activity assigned to each sex (hunting, warfare, child-raising, weaving, etc.), ensuring that each gender makes its distinct contribution to the ongoing production of the Baruya’s material and social conditions of existence. But this cooperation works on the basis of a characteristic overarching relationship of domination, which one could describe as that of the generalized subordination of women to men.22
This gender inequality is affirmed at the child’s birth, but does not reach its fully fledged and definitive form until the moment when, around the age of nine or ten, all the boys in that age group are taken away from their mothers and sisters and, after having their noses pierced, are secluded in the ‘men’s house’ that dominates every Baruya village. Women are strictly forbidden to approach this house. The separation and the marking of the boys’ bodies are the first in a long series of initiatory ordeals that, after ten or more years and four stages of initiation, ultimately rid them of everything that tied them to the maternal world. They will now be masculine enough to cope with the world of women, and to leave the men’s house and marry a girl who has been chosen for them and for whom their lineage has given a ‘sister’.
Over the course of these years, the boys will be led deep into the forest or into the dimly lit men’s house and placed in contact with the sacred objects held by the clans in charge of the various initiation rites. They will hear the sound of the bull-roarers and will discover that this noise – which terrifies the women and the uninitiated, who have been led to believe they are hearing the voices of the forest spirits come to visit the men and the new initiates in the midst of their ceremonies – is actually man-made. It will be revealed to them – but they must not speak of it to women or children on pain of death – that it was really the women who invented the flutes, bows and many other things, and that these were subsequently stolen by the first men, and now the women can neither own them nor even look on them. It will also be explained to them that the men were compelled to take the bows from the women because they used them ill-advisedly, killing too much game and compromising the cosmic and social orders by defiling everything with the menstrual blood running down their thighs. They will learn that the women’s sexual organ and sexual relations with women are a constant threat to men, who risk being deprived of their strength, their good looks and their superiority.
During this all-male period, which lasts for years,23 the boys will be secretly ‘re-engendered’ by the men, but his time without the help of women. The older boys in the last two stages of initiation – young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty or twenty-two, who have not yet had intercourse with a women – often give the young boys their semen to drink, through homosexual relations that grow up between the older initiates and the newcomers. Later, these boys will in turn give their semen, equally free of all female defilement, to those boys who follow them into the men’s house.
Little by little, these young boys and adolescents come to see it as right and proper that Baruya women are not allowed to inherit their ancestors’ land, bear arms, make salt money, have contact with the sacred objects, and so on. Little by little, too, the physical, psychological and social violence the men do to women, or at least to their wives – never to their mothers or their sisters – appears as being justified. For during the long lessons they are subjected to, the masters of the initiations also teach them that women, too, have rights, and that it is their duty to know and respect them. That is why the men’s domination is not based only on the violence they inflict on women and which the latter often resist in a variety of ways. It also rests on the fact that, up to a certain point, women consent to this domination in so far as they share with the men the same mythical-religious representations which blame women for the disorder that threatens the reproduction of the social and cosmic orders and which they do not want to inflict on their kinsmen or their children.
It is from the setting in motion of this formidable machinery for differentiating the social nature of the sexes, for growing men in the Baruya imaginary but also for (really) elevating them socially above women, that the second cross-cutting division takes its origin and its meaning. This time the line runs not between individuals according to their gender but between the kin groups into which these individuals were born and according to their genealogical position in these groups.
For only the representatives of the clans that descend from the Bravegareubaramandeuc refugees as well as from the Ndelie clan, which helped them seize their hosts’ territory, have the right to initiate the tribe’s boys, on the pretext that only their ancestors received from the Sun the sacred objects and secret formulae enabling them to sever the boys from the female world and make them into men, warriors, shamans, etc. For this reason, the native clans that joined with the Baruya are excluded from leading the political-religious activities which cement the unity of all the kin groups and all the generations, and affirm their common identity in front of neighbouring tribes. Moreover, whenever initiations are held, these neighbours are invited to come and admire the number and strength of the young Baruya warriors as they leave the tsimia, which the Baruya call the ‘body’ of their tribe. The initiates will then dance around the tsimia and sing for hours, adorned in their feathers, wearing their new bark capes, and armed with their weapons, under the admiring gaze of their mothers, sisters and fiancées massed together in the front row. The reason invoked for excluding these autochthonous tribes from leading the ceremonies is the claim that their ancestors came from forest creatures and never possessed kwaimatnie or secret knowledge (something these representatives vehemently deny when questioned).
It is thus the Baruya’s history that explains the hierarchy among those clans that have the right to initiate the boys and those that do not. On the top rung of this social ladder stands the Baruya clan, which gave the tribe its name, and in particular one of the clan’s two lineages, the Baruya Kwarrandariar, who are in charge of passing the initiates from the second to the third stage, when they will be considered warriors and will be prepared for marriage as soon as their fiancée reaches menarche and is in turn initiated by the women. This political-religious ranking of the clans also creates a hierarchy among individuals in so far as the clan representatives who exercise the various functions in the male initiations are considered ‘Great Men’, a status they acquire at the same time as their function and the sacred objects and formulae that allow them to carry it out.
The
