I had made this choice in a Marxist perspective, for at the time I believed that studying the modes of production and circulation of subsistence goods and wealth (a topic generally neglected by anthropologists in favour of kinship or religion, with some illustrious exceptions like R. Firth, A. Richard, Herskovitz, Bohannan and a few others), was a better approach to explaining the origin and functioning of kinship and political systems. I went to Lévi-Strauss, who accepted me in his group and took me on as his assistant, giving me the task of studying the ‘infrastructures’ of the societies he was working on, while he analyzed their ‘superstructures’, kinship and religion. At the time Lévi-Strauss still readily used such Marxist vocabulary.2
An opportunity soon arose for me to involve myself clearly in the domain of economic anthropology when Unesco offered me the chance to study the effects of the implementation of a planned socialist economy on the development of village communities and ethnic groups in Mali. This move had been decided by President Modibo Keita and his Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) after Mali had broken with France and become independent. Having spent some weeks in the country, I concluded that there was indeed a ministry and a minister of the Plan, but no plan to speak of, and that what there was did not have a very positive impact on Mali’s development. And so I spent my time travelling around and reading the literature on economic anthropology I had brought with me. A year later when I returned to Paris, disappointed, I was ready for some real fieldwork.3
I first went for advice to my friend Alfred Métraux (1902–63). He suggested that, rather than returning to Africa, I go to Bolivia and work among some of the Indian groups he had visited thirty years earlier. I was tempted by the idea and discussed it with him on several occasions so as to shape the project. But on the evening of 12 April 1963, a few hours after we had talked at length, Métraux took his life. Never in the course of our conversation had he let slip a hint of his decision, if he had already made it. When, a few days later at his funeral, I told Lévi-Strauss about our idea of a site for fieldwork, he advised against it, explaining that a large number of French anthropologists were already working in Africa or America and that there was something better: go to New Guinea, the last country where one could find societies less devastated by colonialism and Western culture than elsewhere, and where a few major figures of the discipline had distinguished themselves – Malinowski, Thurnwald, Mead, Fortune, etc. I capitulated and spent the next two years preparing myself to go to New Guinea.
In January 1967, I arrived armed with a list of names of tribes or local groups that my colleagues – R. Rappaport, P. Vayda, R. Glasse, A. Strathern, R. Crocombe, etc., who had already worked in New Guinea – had suggested I visit before making my choice. These tribes were generally neighbours of those among whom my colleagues had worked, so they knew they had not yet been studied and thought it was worthwhile and would enrich the material in view of future comparisons. The Baruya were not on the list.
WHY THE BARUYA?
My encounter with the Baruya came about by chance, even if my decision to choose them for my fieldwork did not. In fact, the first name on my list of groups to visit was the Waffa, a tribe that lived several days’ walk south of the Markham River and which in 1967 no one had visited for some ten years. After various adventures (such as crossing the Markham without benefit of a ford or a bridge, being abandoned in the bush by my guides before crossing the Waffa River, the sudden emergence from the forest of three men who would, so they said, take me to the Waffa), I found myself several days later at the foot of a high cliff atop which one could make out a village whose inhabitants were observing our arrival. Among them were two Europeans. I then learned from my three guides that I had not reached the Waffa at all but the Watchakes, and that the Europeans were two sisters from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) who had been living there for years so as to learn the language, translate the Bible and convert the people to Christianity. I was furious to have been tricked, but they explained that in fact the Waffa lived too far away and they had thought it would be useful for me to meet the Best sisters since they knew the area and spoke English. Forty years later, I still thank them for their initiative.
I spent some time with the Watchakes listening to and questioning the Best sisters who were at that time collecting and translating stories about the origin of the Pleiades star cluster, cultivated plants, etc. One day when I was talking about my plans, one of the sisters pointed to the highest peak in the chain of mountains that barred the horizon and said: ‘Why not go see the Baruya? It was only in 1960 that the Administration set up a patrol post to control their region and only since 1965 that one can circulate freely there. We have a missionary couple, the Lloyds, who live in a village a few hours walk from the Wonenara patrol post. You’ll see, the Baruya still dress like the Watchakes used to. Only recently they were still at war with their neighbours.’
I let myself be tempted and, a few days later, found myself at Wonenara, on the edge of a small landing strip where Dick Lloyd met me and took me to Yanyi, ‘his’ village. I learned from him that the Baruya had been ‘discovered’ in 1951 by Jim Sinclair,4 a young patrol officer who had mounted an expedition to find out about the ‘Batia’, whose reputation as the makers of bars of salt used as a sort of exchange currency had reached the region he patrolled.5 I also learned that the Baruya belonged to a large group of tribes disparagingly called the ‘Kukakuka’, or ‘thieves’, by their enemies (a term carelessly adopted by the Australian administration to refer to them), and that the ‘Kukakuka’ had resisted the penetration of Australian patrols and European gold prospectors by killing or wounding a few, among whom was a young officer by the name of J. McCarthy,6 who, having fallen into an ambush, managed to escape and walk for several days with an arrow in his abdomen. Later McCarthy would become a district Commissioner for Papua New Guinea and relate his adventures among the ‘Kukakuka’ in his memoirs, published in 1963, four years before my arrival in New Guinea.
I left the Lloyds and the village of Yanyi for Baruya country. The Baruya live at an altitude of 2,000 meters in two valleys of a mountain chain culminating in the volcano, Mount Yelia. The mountainsides are a patchwork of grass fields deforested by fire and broad stretches of primary or secondary rainforest. I was struck by the beauty of the landscape, but I would quickly discover that New Guinea abounds in impressive landscapes. I left the Wonenara Valley, crossed the mountains and found myself in the Marawaka Valley, the part of the Baruya territory not yet directly under Australian control.
I went from village to village, sleeping in the men’s house where the young initiates lived. At that time all the men and adolescent boys carried their bows and arrows wherever they went. The women and young girls walking on the footpaths would stop and hide their faces in their bark capes whenever they met or were overtaken by married men or young initiates. In certain places there was a system of parallel paths, one for men and a lower one for women and children. Close to the waterways were fields of salt canes, with scattered constructions: these were ovens for producing the bars of crystallized salt. The population lived in villages of between 200 and 300 inhabitants, perched high on the mountainside to protect them from enemy attacks and dominated by one or several ‘men’s houses’.
Two weeks later I left the Baruya, taking with me my observations and impressions, and set out finally to visit the groups on my list. After some weeks, I found myself in the region of Mount Ialibu, blocked by a flooding river and forced to wait until the water fell sufficiently for us to cross to the Huli, a group living in the direction of Mendi, where Robert Glasse had worked. It was there that I decided to end this reconnaissance once it had become clear that nothing I had seen appealed to me as much as the Baruya.
Several rational criteria entered into this choice. One, of course, was the fact that no anthropologist had ever worked among the Baruya, and I was going to be the first.7 But at the time in New Guinea it was still easy and common for an anthropologist to be the first somewhere. Other reasons carried even more weight. The first was the Baruya’s reputation for producing a sort of salt ‘currency’. My head was full of Malinowski, Kula exchanges and so on; and I was delighted at the idea of studying another regional exchange network. The second was the fact that the Baruya initiated their boys (at
