The fourth type of marriage is very rare. A young orphan with no sister to exchange, no father to help him, and no father’s brother who will come to his aid by allowing him to exchange one of his daughters, marries the daughter of a couple who has no son to help them in their old age. Last of all, sometimes the Baruya marry women from tribes with whom they trade but never fight. In this case, they make a compensation payment of a large quantity of goods – salt-bars, cowries, weapons, etc. This type of marriage, which implies a bridewealth, is never practised between Baruya themselves.
Of the more than 1,000 marriages I recorded, covering four generations, only eleven took place between a Baruya man and a woman from a neighbouring tribe. All of the other marriages were between Baruya and, with the exception of fewer than ten cases, all had involved an immediate exchange of women (ginamare) or an exchange deferred to the following generation (kouremandjinaveu). A prime example of an endogamous society.
The Baruya thus follow two rules when it comes to marriage: exchange of a woman for a woman, and exchange of wealth for a woman; in other words, one rule which, according to Lévi-Strauss, is typical of elementary kinship structures, and another which is typical of complex structures. The principle of exchanging wealth for women is forbidden in Baruya society but is occasionally practised with outsiders (their trading partners). In other parts of New Guinea, where we find a form of society characterized by Big Men instead of Great Men, who amass women and wealth and win their renown and their authority through the ceremonial competitive giving of gifts and counter-gifts, the practice of ‘direct’ sister exchange is, on the contrary, known but forbidden. The reason alleged is that direct exchange of women would encourage lineages to be content with equivalent exchanges, without rivalry, without competition, and therefore to forsake the network of ceremonial exchanges that reaches beyond the village and the local group to encompass an entire region, bringing face to face in a giving-war the representatives of clans from a great number of tribes that, in other circumstances, might fight over land or for other reasons.
Thus we see that, in Big Man societies, the principle of direct sister exchange has become purely abstract, known but forbidden, and that the practice of giving wealth for a woman – bridewealth – is the very rule that the Baruya apply only exceptionally in their relations with more or less remote tribes with whom they entertain friendly trade relations. Alternatively, the Baruya occasionally exchange women with neighbouring tribes, and we have seen why. In making brothers-in-law among their former enemies, they hope that, the next time war breaks out, these affines will forsake their own tribe and join with the Baruya in exchange for protection of their lands, their goods and, of course, their lives. The Baruya rule is that a Baruya will not kill enemies who are at the same time affines. But he can kill his sister if she has run away to an enemy group and married there without the consent of her lineage and without compensation for the marriage – in the form of a woman or wealth. Cleverly managed alliances thus serve not only to divide groups but also to unite and bring them closer together.
GIFTS AND COUNTER-GIFTS: DEBTS THAT CANNOT BE CANCELLED
We need to come back here to a very important point, one that is not always easy for a Westerner to understand. When a Baruya (lineage) gives a woman and receives another in return, the two parties are not even, their debts are not cancelled.29 The debts balance out and are the raison d’être for many exchanges of goods and services between the two men and their lineages. And these exchanges will continue throughout their lives. By giving, one makes the other one’s debtor and by receiving, one becomes the debtor of the one who has given. At the close of these reciprocal exchanges, each lineage is at the same time ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ to the other: superior because it has given a woman and inferior because it has received one. Their debts are now equal, but on the basis of a double inequality that will fuel a flow of reciprocal prestations over a lifetime.
Several features must be clarified here concerning marriage and alliance between two lineages. First of all, a girl who wants to break a marriage that has been forcibly arranged for her (and that will enable her brother to marry) can use other means than getting herself abducted by the man she wants to marry. She can also wait for the onset of her first menstrual period and then refuse the gifts and the game her fiancé, with the help of his brothers and other men from his and her lineages, has gathered for her and has had delivered to the menstrual hut where she is fasting while waiting to undergo the puberty rites. This supposes a great deal of courage on the girl’s part, but it does happen (and increasingly often today). A great deal of courage because, in refusing to marry the man to whom she was promised, she prevents her brother from marrying this man’s sister, who was promised to him. She breaks the ties that were contracted between the two lineages when she was promised as a child, ties that translated over the years into exchanges of services, pork and so on.
A girl is not absorbed into her husband’s lineage when she marries. She keeps her identity and remains a life-long member of her own lineage. But this lineage has ceded its authority over her. It is not unusual to see a man beating his wife in the presence of her brother, who remains silent. For her brother is the husband of the man’s sister. In the course of a secret ritual that takes place at the base of a giant tree in the forest, the future husband, at the time of his fiancée’s menarche when she undergoes the initiation performed for girls, calls upon the Sun and declares that this woman is no longer under her father’s authority but under his own. At the same moment, in another part of the forest, hundreds of women surround the girl, shouting and pounding her head with their digging sticks, telling her that the time for playing is over, that from now on she will have to obey her husband, not try to seduce his co-initiates – otherwise he will beat her and kill her.
This is proof that the exchange of women concerns not only the two men involved but their lineages as well, which have a collective right over the women they give, in that when a man dies his wife is inherited by one of his brothers or uncles, who may be scarcely older than the deceased. Furthermore, the Baruya forbid divorce. A man can repudiate a wife and give her to one of his brothers, but he cannot send her back to her family or agree to let her leave and make a new start elsewhere.
THE FAMILY
Up to now I have not said much about families. Yet families are what I see everyday in the field. It is rare that the men and women of a lineage get together; the sisters live in their husband’s house, since residence is virilocal. It is rarer still that the village meets to discuss matters concerning everyone – initiations, building an airstrip for the mission planes, etc. The family is a living unit, and also a production and consumption unit. In Baruya, the word for family is kuminidaka, which designates the group formed by the man, his wife and his children. Kumi means ‘everyone/all’. The family is thus all of these people together. Married men sleep in the men’s house when their wives are menstruating or have just given birth. Their wives must purify themselves before resuming life with their husband and cooking for him once more. Theoretically, a married man should not cook his own food and, in the event of conflict with his wife, if she takes the risk of refusing to cook for him or if she takes his children and goes to stay with her mother for several weeks, the man – somewhat embarrassed – gets his sisters to invite him by turns. Polygamous families are not unusual, but a young man who wants to marry two women will marry them on the same day so that neither can claim to be the first wife and mistreat the other. This is not the case with widows inherited together with their children by a man. They are usually subjected to harassments and humiliations by the first wife or wives.
Let us now come back to the moment of the marriage and look at the role played by several types of social relations and groups – the future spouse’s lineages, their age groups, the inhabitants of the village where the couple is going to live, and who will build their house. A week or two before the ceremony, the groom’s father comes to the men’s house where the young man has been living since he had his nose pierced and tells him to