bartered for a pig (or bought with money) into an object not only loaded with a new meaning but also one that has become more beautiful in their eyes – and by their hand. What is this new meaning? For the Wiru, yellow is a female colour, associated with a yellowish substance that they say is found in the womb and becomes a key component of the foetus when it is conceived. Ochre is associated with virility and wealth, and for this reason the sacred stones associated with the fertility of the land, human health, etc., are smeared with ochre powder. The white of the sap is associated with semen, and the black, like the ochre, is associated with virility. The cuts on the female lip of the object represent the incision of the glans of a penis. In short, these androgynous objects harbour the attributes of the men’s masculinity and the women’s femininity – in this case essentially their reproductive capacities. It is in this sense that the apparently inanimate objects given in exchanges are not only substitutes for persons but are themselves objects endowed with meaning and power.44
The same holds for the Nuer who, according to Evans-Pritchard, define all social relations in terms of cattle. When they are initiated, young men are given the animals that they will tend to throughout life, a life they will spend in a society where the production or maintenance of practically all social relations demand the transfer of cattle in various ways.45 It is understandable that in these conditions an identification is created between men and their cattle such that, when they give away their animals, they are giving part of themselves. By alienating part of their herd to get a wife, men detach part of themselves from their own lineage and expect that their wives will detach from their own bodies and lineage the children they will bear. But the husband’s lineage will not appropriate these children unless he has paid his affines a brideprice. Otherwise they will belong to the man who pays the price in the husband’s stead. This man will then become the children’s social father, while the husband is no longer the father but simply the genitor.46
WHAT IS THE BRIDEPRICE?
Making a marriage payment, paying a brideprice is therefore not ‘buying’ a woman. Except in very rare cases, such as ancient China, the woman is not completely detached from her birth group and absorbed into the group, clan, lineage or family that has alienated a portion of its wealth to obtain her. Women continue to possess rights in their birth group and have obligations to the members of this group. In addition, a wife acquires rights in her husband’s group, together with duties. This is precisely the case in China, where the daughter-in-law’s status changes once she has given birth to a boy who will carry on her husband’s line and continue to venerate their ancestors after his father’s death. When a woman dies, it is not unusual for her name to be included among her husband’s ancestor tablets. In short, we are far from the image suggested by Lévi-Strauss’ famous formula ‘kinship is based on the exchange of women by and for men’. Moreover, the groups that exchange partners are not composed exclusively of men but of men and women who descend from common ancestors and in which women also have a voice.47
In matrilineal Minangkabau society, where the husband is called by an expression that means ‘borrowed man’, the matrimonial prestations give the husband and wife rights in each other and, through them, extend these rights to their groups.
In sum, all these various prestations (bridewealth, groomwealth, dowry, conjugal prestations) establish two kinds of ties at once: conjugality between the spouses and affinity between the groups that become allied through them. In the next generations, the affines are transformed, depending on the type of kinship system, either into consanguines (as in the Western kinship system) or into consanguines and affines (as in the Dravidian system, where the mother’s brother and the father’s sister are affines for Ego and not consanguines).
To conclude this point, let us say that the exchanges that seal an alliance are always fundamentally exchanges that transfer from one group to the other rights in the persons who are detached from one group and attached to the other. But these detachments and attachments are almost never complete.
Jack Goody, following Leach, drew up a relatively exhaustive list of the various categories or rights that can be transferred by these exchanges and which constitute reciprocal or non-reciprocal obligations between the spouses (conjugal rights) and between the allied groups.
• Rights to henceforth officialized sexual relations.
• Rights to domestic services.
• Rights to the men’s and/or the women’s procreative capacities and rights for the allied groups on the children born of the marriages.
• Rights to cooperation in the production and exchange processes if the family, lineage, etc., are production and exchange units; and rights to a share of the things produced by these units or exchanged between them.
• Rights to mutual assistance and to solidarity in the event of political and social strife.
• Rights to mutual assistance in the performance of rituals and other ceremonies concerning ancestors, spirits and gods.
Of course one party’s rights are at the same time the other parties’ duties. This is why it is indispensable to distinguish among these rights those that are reciprocal and non-reciprocal, are identical or different, equivalent or non-equivalent, complementary or opposing. For example, the husband’s right to demand that his wife join him in living next to or with his father is an obligation, a duty for the wife. In other societies it is the husband who will go to live with his wife or with her parents, either during the first years of marriage or definitively.
Such transfers of rights in persons are often the starting point for transfers of material and immaterial goods48 to the individuals that are born to these alliances or who will be integrated through adoption. Lands, names and titles will be inherited by all descendants, male and female, of a union, or by only certain men or women. Standards, values and knowledge will be transmitted, social functions will be transferred. Filiation and descent return in force to unite or divide people according to sex and age, and combine with alliance to ensure the transfer from one generation to the next of a share of the conditions of their physical, material and social conditions of existence. For instance, in a society with a matrilineal descent rule, descent groups give other groups the right to their daughters’ sexual services but keep the children born of their marriages for themselves. In ancient Roman law, girls were exherited en bloc, and the father would choose a single son to inherit his potestas, or authority, and carry on the ancestral cult after his death. For as long as he lived, the father would exercise his patria potestas, the absolute right, recognized by the city of Rome, over the members of his family, including his married sons and even his married daughters, if they were still ‘under his hand’. And yet the authority that prevailed in the everyday domestic life of this ‘family’ was not founded, as Yan Thomas showed, on this unlimited potestas.49
Let us take another look at the notion of patria potestas, the absolute right of the pater familias over his descendants. To be a pater familias in ancient Rome, a man could not be under the control of another, he had to be sui juris, under the control of no other, to have been chosen by his father to inherit his potestas and have received it instantaneously on his father’s death. The pater familias was thus an autonomous subject, whereas all other members of the family were alieni juris, under the control of another. The pater familias thus had control over his wife, his children, his slaves and his goods. It was the fact of inheriting the patria potestas, the father’s power, that made a man a pater familias. Such an heir could be unmarried or be married without children. He was still a ‘pater’ familias. This power lasted all his life, for his sons, even when they married and had children, remained under the control of the pater familias until his death. Daughters too, but in ancient Roman law girls were given in marriage and then passed under ‘the hand’, the manus, of their husband, becoming as a daughter. A wife thus became the sister, as it were, of her sons and daughters. And if her husband was under the control of her father-in-law or an older ascendant, then she
