Relational Transformations in Papua New Guinea Pascale Bonnemère
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Acting for Others: Relational Transformations in Papua New Guinea Pascale Bonnemère To cite this version: Pascale Bonnemère. Acting for Others: Relational Transformations in Papua New Guinea. HAU Books, 2018, 978-0-9973675-8-4. hal-01796588 HAL Id: hal-01796588 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01796588 Submitted on 26 Jan 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. ACTING FOR OTHERS Hau BOOKS Editors Giovanni da Col Sasha Newell Editorial Office Faun Rice Sheehan Moore Michael Chladek Michelle Beckett Justin Dyer Ian Tuttle www.haubooks.com ACTING FOR OTHERS RELAtiONAL TRANSFORMAtiONS in PAPUA NEW GUINEA By Pascale Bonnemère Translated by Nora Scott Hau Books Chicago © 2018 Hau Books and Pascale Bonnemère Cover, © Pascale Bonnemère Foreword, © 2018 Hau Books and Marilyn Strathern Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9973675-8-4 LCCN: 2017917361 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. In memory of Tenawi, who died in bringing life into the world in 1992. And Ikundi beri and Onorwae, my two cherished companions, who died in 2004. And to Matrena,without whom my work among the Ankave would have been very different. Table of Contents List of illustrations xi Foreword xiii Marilyn Strathern Preface to the English translation xix Introduction 1 Mothers are born, fathers are made 10 We arrive in the Suowi Valley 17 chapter 1 An out-of-the-way situation: Prohibitions and relations 25 The Anga and their anthropologists 36 The Anga in The gender of the gift 39 chapter 2 “Your wife is pregnant. Cover your head!” 45 A special meal 48 Preparing the vegetal blood 54 Food taboos 56 Lime: A male product? 58 viii ACTING FOR OTHERS chapter 3 Accompanying a birth 63 “Tok piksa,” “tok bokis”: Picture talk 71 chapter 4 Transmitting know-how 79 chapter 5 A long ritual journey 93 The unfolding of collective rituals 95 The women’s involvement 97 chapter 6 Abstaining for oneself, abstaining for others 111 Couvade and its interpretations 118 Anthropology of prohibitions 122 chapter 7 Exchanges and prohibitions: A relational view 133 The maternal kin 139 Concerning the simo’e gift 142 Exchanges at the end of a life 147 chapter 8 Male metamorphoses 155 Of birds and men 165 chapter 9 Women’s lives: A path unmarked by rituals? Part I 171 The marriage request 174 A ritual of adjustment 178 chapter 10 The brother-sister relationship through the years 187 Coming back to the Ankave 192 TABLE OF CONTENTS ix chapter 11 Women’s lives: A path unmarked by rituals? Part II 199 Hunting cassowaries 199 Catching eels 208 The impossibility of breaking the symbiotic bond with the mother 210 chapter 12 A few other relational figures? 215 Leenhardt and Kanak personhood 217 Revealing language forms 218 Personal names 223 chapter 13 “The Melanesian person”: Debates 227 An unproductive quarrel in the end 229 Conclusion 247 Glossary 255 References 265 Index 283 List of Illustrations Maps Map 1. TheA nkave territory and the location of the Anga groups in Papua New Guinea / 16 Map 2. TheA nga groups in Papua New Guinea / 37 Figures Photo 1. A young man wearing a bark cape on his head, a sign he will soon become the father of his first child / 22 Photo 2. Two shelters on the bank of one of the rivers flowing through the Suowi Valley / 27 Photo 3. Some houses in the hamlet of Ikundi, at dawn / 28 Photo 4. A young father carrying the me’we trunk / 46 Photo 5. Men pressing juice from red pandanus seeds / 56 Photo 6. Three women and three men arrive at the same time on the ceremonial ground for the public ritual closing the cycle of male initiations / 87 Photo 7. The maternal grandmother passes the baby over the me’we fire to strengthen it / 90 Photo 8. Collective shelter built on the outskirts of the village for the mothers of the novices / 97 Photo 9. The novices’ mothers must lie flat on the ground while their son’s noses are pierced so they can listen to the men without seeing them / 98 xii ACTING FOR OTHERS Photo 10. The initiates descending to the village after the collective rituals are greeted by two experienced women who rub them with clay / 102 Photo 11. Back in the village, the initiates give their mothers areca nuts and a small game animal hunted while they were staying in the forest / 103 Photo 12. A women in mourning dressed in ajiare’ ornaments / 149 Table Table 1. Ankave terms for kinship relations / 220 Foreword Marilyn Strathern Acting for others is a book to stir the anthropological imagination. It breathes new life into debates over relationality and agency, both through a vivacious and lucid style and through the considerable assistance of the Ankave-Anga of Papua New Guinea. These people furnish Pascale Bonnemère with a beauti- fully orchestrated demonstration of just what is lost in overlooking women’s participation in social processes, here specifically and pointedly in the stages through which men achieve fatherhood. She opens out their demonstration/her observation into a splendid critique of ritual action, and beyond that to the significance ofA nkave ideas about agency. In their eyes, it is the exercise of a specific capacity that divides men from women: for the former it takes a ritual sequence to gain the vantage point from which the latter already and inevitably are actors, namely the capacity to act on behalf of—on and for—others. At the end, the author suggests just why she is writing on these matters for a broad readership, and why there are debates still to be renewed here. This close focus on some of the major preoccupations of Ankave people, and the anthropological controversies concerning gender and personhood to which it leads, will bring to an English-reading audience a much broader sense of Bonnemère’s extensive and to some extent audacious—at once daring and courageous—exploration of ethnographic purpose than her articles already in English can convey. More than that, the present work transforms some of her xiv ACTING FOR OTHERS own earlier emphases, as her experiences in Ankave over time were also trans- formative. As to the courage, the conclusion here holds a little surprise. CAPAcitY The rewards are manifold. I am torn between wanting to engage with the in- triguing perspective that Ankave have afforded Bonnemère (alongside the ana- lytical vocabulary they have inspired) and not wishing to give too much away. For the argument unfolds rather like a drama, and although she states her cen- tral problematic clearly at the outset, the course of ethnographic description builds up in a revelatory manner. It would be a shame, for example, to anticipate the outcome of the considerable analytical finesse by which she shows how the presence of women is crucial to the capacities a man acquires. Ankave say their rites make men, but what are men? They are not only fa- thers but also mother’s brothers, the principal roles in which they act for others. This in turn has consequences for the identity of other participants in “the con- struction of the male person.” As the reader will find, Ankave women’s presence in these rites is not the suspended presence of absence; on the contrary, they appear as active participants in what is going on. Boys are not transformed by men’s actions alone, and ritual efficacy depends on the comportment of both sexes. Indeed, women are at once crucial to registering the transformations en- tailed and the recipients of men’s capacity to act. Participation does not imply symmetry, and this is not a book concerned with adjudications about social equality. Bonnemère had to make several actual returns to the Anga area before being in an ethnographic position to write this account; at the same time, she is also reexamining and thus conceptually re- turning to a much older stratum of theorizing about gender relations in Papua New Guinea, which took literally the exclusion of women from men’s rites, and which dominated early accounts of other Anga societies in particular. With as much diplomacy as determination she shows that exclusion from certain rites is not the same as exclusion from the whole sequence of events by which men find their destinies. While always being careful to note what is specific toA nkave— and there is much variation among Anga peoples, as Pierre Lemonnier (2004) underlines—she inevitably raises a question about the systematic “invisibility” of women from other anthropological visions. The process by which she pur- sues this question is a model of what can be gained by opening up the scope of FOREWORD xv material to be drawn into analysis; she repeatedly comes back to the need to see practices in relation to one another. If this seems an obvious anthropological strategy, the capacity of the analysis depends on just where and how that scope is defined.