two brothers.
It may be the prime importance of bride abduction, of marriage founded on capture, on predation, that explains why, in a highly unusual manner, Sioux kinship terminology derives the terms for cross cousins from those designating affines, the wife’s brother and sister. The outside prevails over the inside, but it is an outside characterized by predation and death. At least this is what Emmanuel Desvaux has tried to show in an article rich in surprising perspectives, devoted to the difficulties of Sioux kinship nomenclature.39
WHEN TAKERS AND GIVERS ARE EQUAL
Finally, the last possibility: wife-givers are neither superior nor inferior to wife-takers. Takers and givers are equal. This is the case in many societies, including the Vezo of Madagascar, studied by Rita Astuti.40 In this possibility, the exchange takes the following form. The woman’s parents say to the man’s parents: ‘We give you our daughter, take her.’ And the man’s parents respond: ‘We give you our son, take him.’ The two gifts are equivalent. The Vezo have a cognatic kinship system in which a person is linked to the ancestors through men and/or through women, indifferently. There is therefore in this case no exchange of women by the men or exchange of brothers by their sisters. Nor is there any such thing as exchanging a woman or a man for wealth (bridewealth or groomwealth). There are two reciprocal gifts of individuals of different sex by two families, who cooperate to produce a third family whose members will descend from each of the two spouses inseparably. From a certain standpoint, it cannot be said that these two gifts of persons of different sex are an exchange. The gifts are two parts of a single act performed at the same time by two families in order to form a third. In addition, according to Rita Astuti, this society does not discourage sex before marriage and does little to encourage it afterwards. The woman has more rights over the children than the man.
A summary of the various cases of marriage and the status of the partners is shown in the following table:
| Wife-givers are superior to wife-takers (anisogamy) |
| Wife-takers are superior to wife-givers (anisogamy) |
| Wife-givers and wife-takers are equal to each other (isogamy) |
It is clear that the obligation to pay a bride- or a groomprice to seal an alliance places young people of marriageable age in a situation of personal dependence on their parents, their elders, their family or their lineage. Generally speaking, these young people have not yet managed to build up their own means of payment (livestock, shells, gongs, pottery vessels, etc.). They rely on other people to provide these so that they may give them in turn. Yet the fact that elders control the wealth and the means of social reproduction does not mean that they behave like a ‘class’ which dominates the younger people and exploits their labour in exchange for the payment that will enable them to find a spouse. This thesis was defended in the 1970s by a number of Marxist anthropologists, citing Claude Meillassoux’s work.41 They saw control by the elders as ‘the beginning of the transformation of the society with the genesis of hierarchical social classes’, the transformation of older–younger relations into patron–client relations.42
No one can deny the general fact that younger generations depend on their elders for, according to the context, transmission of land or status, succession to functions, and marriage payments. This dependence also entails a relationship of authority between older and younger generations, and unequal responsibilities. But it does not necessarily mean domination or exploitation. In New Guinea, for example, the young people have duties to the other members of the lineage, but that is not all; they also share rights with the older members – the right later to use lineage lands, the right to the bridewealth they need to get married, the right to be avenged by their lineage in the event of homicide or to count on their armed solidarity in the event of aggression or vengeance.
In societies where the merits someone has acquired or the wealth they have produced, individually or by their capacity to enlist kinsmen, affines or friends, give them authority in their group, authority and prestige do not automatically go to the older men, and even less to the oldest or the ‘elders’, but to the Big Men (and to certain women, who achieve the status of Big Women through other means). The Big Man is an older man, but not all older men are Big Men, and even less the oldest. This is apparently not the case in the African societies described by numerous specialists, from Meyer Fortes to Meillassoux. But the example of New Guinea shows at least that the fact that the older men control the lineage lands does not automatically result in domination and clientelism. Other conditions – which largely remain to be described – must be present for this to occur.
Another point is worth mentioning: we saw, among the Daribi for instance, that gifts to the wife’s lineage continued throughout life because the woman’s father is believed to have spiritual and ritual control over his daughter’s fertility. The children she bears are therefore further gifts, as it were, from the woman’s lineage to that of her husband. This is a cultural dimension based on an imaginary representation of the source of women’s fecundity. This representation has serious social consequences, because it makes for a particular configuration of the exchanges between the two groups of affines and between individuals in virtue of the positions they occupy within their group and in these exchanges (husband/wife, father/daughter, father-in-law/son-in-law, etc.). It is important to take note of the social character and the imaginary dimension of the wealth exchanged or given as a one-way gift to seal these alliances and produce new social relationships. In New Guinea, the pig is not valued because it is the Highlanders’ principal source of protein, and to give dead or live pigs is not merely a way of redistributing a certain quantity of pork for consumption or of making a gift of sows that will have piglets. The same is true of cattle in Nuer society. But it also applies to ‘inanimate’ objects which, in addition to pigs, feature in exchanges – polished and decorated shells worked by the men and women in Melpa society, or decorated mats which circulate by the dozens in Polynesian exchanges, the most valuable, the most sacred of which were used to envelop statues of their gods or the bodies of their dead.
OBJECTS AS SUBSTITUTES FOR PERSONS
All of these valuables act as substitutes for persons living or dead. They are given, for example, by a murderer’s lineage to that of the victim to compensate this death and to save the murder’s life. They must therefore be produced (or acquired) and then transferred into other hands so as to establish not only marriage alliances but also political alliances, and alliances with gods and ancestors. By means of these objects and their transfer, individuals and groups contract relations with others, and these relationships form part of their identity. The exchanged objects are loaded with both the meaning and the strength of these relationships, vested with cultural meanings and social importance. They are thus mental and social representations materialized in animate or inanimate beings. I purposely say ‘beings’ rather than things or objects, for these ‘things’, which are substitutes for persons, are perceived as containing powers for acting on persons and therefore as being in a certain manner persons themselves. That is why, like human or supernatural people, some of these objects (shells, mats, etc. – which are of no use in daily life when it is merely a question of subsistence, but which are necessary for producing a social existence) acquire a name, an identity, a history and powers of their own.
As an example of the complexity of the imaginary and symbolic meanings taken on by some shells, which explain their use in the reproduction of kinship and political relations but also their status as both wealth and symbols of power, we will summarize some findings that Jeffrey Clark presented in his exemplary study of the symbolism of pearl-shells among the Wiru of New Guinea,43 who exchange them for ‘the body’ of a wife, for ‘the skin’ of the children she bears, and so forth.
Here briefly is how the Wiru load a pearl-shell with meaning. The naturally yellow pearl-shell is rubbed with ochre powder and its lower lip is outlined in white sap, which quickly turns black. Several notches are cut into the upper lip, and the whole shell is laid and exposed on a bark support. All of these operations are the outcome
