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 the time I did not know that girls too were initiated) and that, until their marriage, these boys lived apart from the women’s world in the famous men’s houses built high on a mountainside or in the village. The third was the fact that the Baruya had the reputation of being warlike and that other tribes in the same ‘ethnic’ group (known as Kukakuka) had mounted an armed resistance to European penetration. Fourth was the fact that the Baruya lived in fairly big villages, and I would not have to spend my days hiking to little groups of ten or fifteen people dispersed in the forest, which would have been the case had I chosen to live with the highly nomadic groups to the south of Mount Hagen or Mount Bosavi, which were on my list. As my family was scheduled to join me, the fact of being able to live in a fairly well-populated village and only a few hours walking time from an airstrip also counted significantly in my choice.
In all, between 1967 and 1988, I spent, as I said, over seven years with the Baruya, usually in the same village, Wiaveu, which I left periodically to visit other Baruya villages or those of neighbouring – friendly or hostile – tribes. During my various stays, I conducted, simultaneously or successively, several major studies, among which was one on kinship (which I completed at least three times over the course of the twenty years). I should add that, in 1975, Australia granted Papua New Guinea its independence, and the Baruya, one of the last tribes to come under the control of a colonial power, found themselves willy-nilly citizens of an emerging state, which would almost immediately become a member of the United Nations. The society in which I lived and worked was thus not frozen in the past or even clinging to it. It was a society about to undergo rapid and profound changes, which were the work not only of the colonial power but of the Baruya themselves coming to grips with these new situations.
A FALSE START
During the first months of my stay, I applied myself to collecting the genealogies of the people around me. At that time, my main informants were not-yet-initiated boys and young unmarried girls, in short, youngsters for whom my presence was an unusual and continual source of entertainment and who accompanied me in packs from morning to night.
After several months, I submitted my first genealogies to some adult informants – married men and women with children. All conveyed to me that almost everything I had noted was inexact. In the sense that the young people did not know or confused the birth order of their uncles and aunts (on both sides), their grandparents’ names and places of birth, and so on.
But I had also begun to collect the Baruya terms for kin ties – father of, son of, etc. – which I had compared with a much fuller list that had been drawn up before my arrival by Richard and Joy Lloyd, the missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics.8 In spite of that, and for different reasons, my survey had gotten off to a bad start, and I decided to take time out and turn to something else I had in mind: a study of how the Baruya produced their salt money and made their gardens. This entailed measuring the areas of their sweet potato, taro and yam patches; identifying the composition of the groups of men and/or women who worked together on a given step of the production process; calculating the number and areas of the patches in each garden; getting the