SOME DEBTS ARE NOT CANCELLED BY A COUNTER-GIFT
Why is the debt created by the gift of a woman not immediately cancelled by the counter-gift of another woman? At the close of this exchange, each woman has taken the other’s place without ceasing to belong to her original lineage. If the counter-gift does not erase the debt, it is precisely because the person ‘given’ has not been detached from the lineage that gave her. She has been ‘given’ without being truly alienated by those who gave her and who continue to have rights in her (and her descendants). Through this exchange, one woman has taken the place of another while keeping her original identity. This reciprocal permutation of persons and places is the act that produces the alliance between the members of the two lineages. These movements of persons, this production of new relations between them and between their birth (or adoptive) groups are induced by the fundamental social pressure that is the prohibition of a man marrying his sister or a woman marrying her brother. The source of sister exchange – but this is just as true in the case of brother exchange – lies in the compelling force of the incest taboo.
A few more remarks are needed to enter more deeply into the logic of these exchanges. The persons who have been ‘given’ are not alienated. They keep their original identity and are not completely detached from their original lineage. They are separated from it. They are not goods that one can alienate and which pass from seller to buyer, who does what he will with them. What is given, ceded, are the rights in the persons, rights to their domestic, sexual and economic services and to their reproductive capacities. But we should not forget that, when it comes to matrilineal societies, a woman’s children belong to her own lineage and not to her husband’s.
Furthermore, when two persons (two men or two women) are exchanged, this is an exchange of two beings whose ‘value’ is a priori deemed equivalent by their lineages and their society. Children’s socialization and education ensure that boys know how to hunt, clear forest, fight, etc., and that girls know how to cultivate gardens, raise their children, care for pigs, make clothing. And everyone is asked to conduct themselves as responsible adults who do not go about creating conflicts that are a threat to families and society. But even the best upbringing cannot guarantee that a woman will not be barren (or a man sterile), that their children will survive, and so forth.20
It needs to be stressed that, by this gift and counter-gift of women, the two lineages find themselves mutually indebted to each other and thus feel obligated for the rest of their lives to exchange services, to share the salt-bars they produce, the meat of the pigs they slaughter, to invite each other to clear a new garden in the forest and to work it together. These reciprocal gifts of goods and services, this mutual aid in the event of strife in the village, materialize the debt they contracted by each receiving a wife from the other who would enable them to perpetuate themselves (independently of what, in the child, is supposed to come from its father or mother). These gifts are therefore in no way bridewealth.
It is also important to reiterate that many societies, like the Baruya, who practise direct sister exchange for the most part, abstain from repeating the same alliances before several generations. A son may not reproduce his father’s marriage and take a wife from his mother’s lineage. Two brothers may not take wives from the same lineage, and even less marry two sisters. These bans prevent the constitution of groups made up of two lineages or two clans that reproduce together and thereby isolate themselves from the rest of the society, at least from the standpoint of the exercise of kinship. These prohibitions thus compel each lineage to multiply its alliances and ensure that each is simultaneously the starting and ending point of several alliance paths, which, despite their possible expansion, can never manage to include all the lineages of all the villages of the society. In order for an exchange system to bring all members of a society into a single network, these individuals must have been sorted from birth into distinct categories which intermarry according to rules that compel each individual, according to his or her category (moiety, section, subsection), to choose their spouse exclusively from another category, the same one every time, thus reproducing the same alliances from one generation to the next. This is the logic underlying the Australian and certain Amazonian systems, which will be examined later.
A final point: the principle of the direct exchange of women – real or classificatory sisters – is always limited by the number of ‘sisters’ available for exchange, so that, in order for all men to find a wife, there must be a prohibition or a strict limitation on certain men – the eldest, for example – exchanging all of their sisters for their own benefit and thus sentencing their younger brothers to a long bachelorhood and to delaying marriage or marrying widows. But this obstacle to direct exchange disappears when it is no longer persons but goods or wealth that are exchanged for a person. In this case, the character of the exchange and its limits are entirely different. On one side, there is a woman or a man, in other words concrete persons, and, on the other, wealth, valuables (shells, jewellery, etc.), or goods (livestock, pigs, etc.), which can be produced or procured through trade or by some other means. On the one side, there are persons; on the other, different kinds of ‘things’ that function as substitutes for persons. The equivalence between the two exchange terms takes on a new, much more abstract character than in the exchange of a person for a person. The moment persons (men or women) are exchanged for wealth, there appears a true political economy of kinship. Wealth procures women, and women procure wealth through the bridewealth they bring to their lineage and through their productive activities in their husband’s lineage.
WEALTH FOR PERSONS
To illustrate this change of logic in marriage practices and in the way societies function, we will take the example of the Melpa, a widely dispersed set of tribes whose territories lie around Mount Hagan in the heart of the New Guinea Highlands. The Melpa are famous for their system of competitive ceremonial exchanges known as moka, in which clans and tribes from an entire region used to face off on the occasion of large-scale redistributions of pigs and goldlip pearl-shells, which would be exchanged for pigs, marsupial furs and so forth with tribes further to the south, who had procured them through exchange with tribes living along the Gulf of Papua. Moka, like the Kwakiutl potlatch, consisted in giving more than the other clan could give in return, or returning more than had been given, the aim being to make the others your debtors and force them to recognize their inferiority when it came to accumulating and redistributing wealth. As one might guess, this escalation of generosity was driven by political interests. It glorified the name of the richest and most generous clans, it spread far beyond their tribal boundaries the renown of their Big Men who had managed to amass such wealth by their ability to produce it and/or to convince their kinsmen and their affines to engage their own pigs and shells in the same venture.
In these Big Men societies of New Guinea, direct sister exchange, while theoretically known, was not practised and was even explicitly forbidden by the Mendi. The general rule for concluding a marriage alliance was to exchange wealth for a woman. For example, in the Melpa society, when two lineages agreed to unite two of their children, negotiations to set the amount of the marriage payments were conducted in several stages. We will summarize this process, referring to Andrew and Marilyn Strathern’s remarkable analyses.21
In the first phase, the bridegroom’s lineage presents the bride’s lineage with a number of goods they plan to give