The day the house is to be built, all of the young men in the groom’s age group arrive to frame the house and lay the floor. The mood is festive. Meanwhile the village girls, especially those of the same age as the bride, file to the site with bundles of grasses for the roof. The future couple watch the others work but do not participate. In general the house is raised in a day. The next day, the men of the husband’s lineage arrive to construct the hearth, using flat stones and clay they have carried to the site. The groom is not present. His father and his uncles light the first fire and chew betel around the brand new hearth while telling stories about their ancestors and talking about current events. The day after, a member of the Bakia clan comes to affix the four sharpened sticks, called ‘the Sun’s flowers’, on the peak of the roof. They will henceforth connect the house and those who live in it with the Sun, the father of all Baruya.
The wedding takes place the following day, in the presence of the members of the allied lineages and their kinfolk and guests. The two young people are seated side by side and listen in silence to the speeches addressed to them, usually by men reputed for their rhetorical skills. They address the bride and the groom successively, exhorting them to remember that they must not commit adultery, must work hard in the gardens, and must raise and protect their children. They are also publicly reminded of their shortcomings, or of certain childhood incidents – thefts, quarrels, etc.
At the end of the day, the young groom spends the night in his new house surrounded by the not-yet-initiated village boys, who come to sleep beside him. Next evening, it’s the bride’s turn to spend the night with the village girls. From then on, the couple sleeps in the house, but they are theoretically forbidden to make love before soot from the fire in their new fireplace has blackened the walls of their house. This can take several weeks. During this time, though the couple abstains from actual intercourse, the young man has the young woman drink his sperm so that her breasts will fill out and she will later have plenty of milk to nourish the children she will bear. From this time on, the young man can no longer have homosexual relations with the young initiates living in the men’s house.
We can thus see how a number of factors come into marriage: kinship relations (for example the husband’s lineage, which constructs the fireplace); the age groups linked to initiation, which build the house; ritual relations; the intervention of a clan, the Bakia, which owns the sacred objects and ritual formulas that will allow this new house and family to be connected to the Sun, father of all Baruya.
Inside the family home, the man sleeps with his sons at the back of the house, on the other side of the central fireplace, while his wife or wives sleep next to the door with their daughters and babies. A woman will never enter the male space without permission and will never step over the hearth set in the middle of the floor. For her vulva might open over the fire where she cooks the food that goes into her husband’s mouth, and that would pollute it. It would be sorcery on her part, and, if her husband were to catch her in the act, he would beat her or even kill her on the spot. A woman may resist her husband physically, but she must never strike him in the face – and even less on the nose, which is pierced and adorned with his initiation insignia. Husband and wife do not address each other by name but by using the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’. And they never touch each other or make intimate gestures in public.
The fact that the man and the woman have usually not chosen each other, the existence of all these bodily constraints, and the affirmation of male domination and the fear of sexual relations, do not prevent numerous couples from feeling deep affection for each other, and it is not uncommon for a man or a woman to hang him- or herself when the spouse dies. It is also not unusual for a widower or a widow to wear on a necklace for the rest of their life their spouse’s hair or certain bones removed at the time of the second funeral for the deceased, when the bones are collected and placed in a tree in the ancestral forest.
WHAT IS A CHILD FOR THE BARUYA?
The Baruya’s view of child conception testifies to the dominant status of men in the kinship system and more broadly in the society as a whole. For the Baruya, it is the man’s sperm that makes the better part of the child in its mother’s womb – its bones, blood and skin. The woman’s uterus is simply a ‘bag’ in which the foetus develops, nourished for the first months by the sperm of the husband, who increases his sexual relations with his wife once she discovers she is pregnant. The woman’s vaginal fluids (and not her blood) play their role in the child’s identity. If they are ‘stronger’ than the sperm, it will be a girl, if the sperm prevails, it will be a boy.
Nevertheless, the sperm, which makes the foetal body and nourishes it, does not suffice to bring it to its final form. It still does not have fingers and toes, and especially a nose, which will be pierced when the future boy or girl is initiated. The Baruya believe that the Sun ‘completes’ the embryo in the woman’s womb. Each Baruya man and woman thus has two fathers: the first engenders three quarters of the child with his sperm and gives it a social identity as a male or female member of a lineage; the second is a heavenly power which completes the foetus with a nose, the seat of intelligence and understanding, as well as hands and feet to move about and act with. Later, when the child has survived for at least a year, the father’s lineage presents the mother’s with a series of goods during a ceremony at the close of which the child will receive its first name, the name it will carry until it is initiated and which is the first name of a male or female lineage ancestor.
But it seems that the child receives more than just the ancestor’s name. Something like part of this ancestor’s spirit (in the sense of soul, anima, which is associated with the Sun) is transmitted along with the name. Sperm is therefore the life force. It is what justifies male domination in society. Even the milk that swells the new mother’s breasts is, according to Baruya men, their sperm changed into milk. And it is to work this transformation that, during the first weeks of marriage, the young man has his young wife drink his sperm every day so that she will later have plenty of milk to nourish their children. On several occasions, however, I observed that not all of the women entirely shared this representation of the male origin of their milk, and in particular almost none of the younger generation, who have gone to school and been Christianized, any longer believe this.
The sperm concealed in the woman’s womb becomes life, but at the expense of a mortal threat to the men’s strength and even to the reproduction of the cosmos. To make love is to take risks, and to put society and the universe at risk as well. When a married couple makes love, they cannot work in the gardens that day, and the man cannot make salt or go hunting. In short, sexuality (heterosexuality) must be tightly controlled because it is a threat to the social and cosmic orders. This is, in the final analysis, because heterosexuality entails a man uniting with a woman whose menstrual blood periodically runs down her thighs and threatens to deplete not only the force and strength of the men, but also that of the plants or the game that feed them. Alternatively, the sperm that the initiates give the younger boys in the men’s house, in so far as it is free of any contact with a woman’s vagina, contributes to their rebirth as stronger and more handsome men.
It is therefore understandable that the Baruya forbid a married man to give his sperm to a boy. Once a penis has entered a woman’s vagina, it can no longer enter a boy’s mouth. It is similarly understandable that a woman is forbidden to straddle the man during coitus, for her vaginal fluids would run out onto his abdomen and pollute it, and so on.
In sum, in this society as in many others (and not only in Oceania), ‘sexuality-as-desire’ is subordinated to ‘sexuality-for-reproduction’, and the heterosexual nature of the latter is seen as a threat to the reproduction of society and the cosmos. Women in particular are the bearers of this threat, and because they are responsible they are therefore guilty. Their menstrual blood is seen as the opposite of sperm, an anti-sperm, as it were. The ambivalence of all these representations is glaring. For the first flow of menstrual blood, the arrival of a girl’s first period, is also the sign that one day she will bear children, will enable a lineage to reproduce itself by providing descendants, sons who will inherit their ancestors’ lands