THE NEXUS BETWEEN KINSHIP AND RITUAL Roy Wagner Department of Anthropology University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia USA [email protected] Not only ritual, but also kinship, can be understood as self-generative and in fact mutually self-generative social phenomena. They are in this sense foils for each other’s production of social values, transformations, causes, and effects. Because this model of cultural agency is nonlinear rather than linear, it works on the transformation of social wholes rather than categorical divisions, and thus can be applied to medieval as well as contemporary socio-ritual contingencies. What do we mean by a nexus between kinship and ritual? Is it an artificial construct im- posed by the anthropologist, or is a general or universal feature of human social aggrega- tion itself? If so, would it not be the single point of articulation through which kin rela- tionship and ritual performance might grow and develop out of one another? These are but speculation; let me give you a concrete example from medieval European history. The actuality of an effective point of articulation between ritual and social struc- ture had an early precedent in the infamous Investiture Controversy of the twelfth centu- ry. Both the Holy Roman Empire, represented by the Emperor Henry IV, and the papacy, represented by Pope Gregory VII, claimed the right to invest bishops with their holy of- fice, and the countervailing claims of the religious and secular orders threatened the whole hierarchical structure of medieval society. The impasse between social and ritual authority was resolved finally by an impromptu "ritual" invented on the spot: the Emper- or was obliged to kneel in the snow like a penitent all night long at a place called Canossa before he could receive absolution from Pope Gregory. It took me a long time to realize that the circumstances of Henry's capitulation were by no means unusual, for they correspond with standard practice in societies charac- terized by dual divisions, or moieties. I finally put two and two together in August 2011 on' the banks of the Rio Negro in Brazil, where I had been invited by the indigenous au- thorities to attend the consecration ritual for a new ceremonial longhouse. The secular head of the society, adorned in brilliant red and yellow feathers, gave a long explanatory !240 lecture in which he pointed out that his people, the Tukana, rule the secular affairs of the alliance, whereas their affines, the Tuyuka, who speak another language, are the shamans in charge of ritual. By analogy then, Emperor Henry and his followers, who spoke Mid- dle High German, were the Tukana, and Pope Gregory and his followers, who spoke Church Latin, were the Tuyuka. The main point, however, is that dual divisions of one sort or another are practically ubiquitous in human societies, and that they arbitrate their differences through ritual means. What that, in turn, really means has long been a mystery to social anthropologists. What does ritual really "do" and why is it so important? There are no easy answers. But the best answer comes from Victor Turner's Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual (1975): "Ritual enacts what cannot be thought, owing to thought's subservience to essences." Ritual, in other words, is the communication of the unsayable. (Sure enough: at, the conclusion of the Tuyuka ritual they gave me a draught of Ayahuasca, and I was speechless!) Both kinship and ritual are artificial constructs that anthropologists have devised to articulate the otherwise unmarked intricacies of everyday and ceremonial life, but they are not exclusive in this respect. Certain life-crisis rituals, such as weddings, funerals, and initiations, straddle both categories, and belong to both at once. They are points of articu- lation, like the investiture of bishops in the Roman Catholic Church, or the consecration of a longhouse on the Rio Negro. Thus they permit the transformation of everyday secular life and specially charged ritual life into one another, such that without that transformation neither kinship nor ritual would be recognizable as such. So we have a right to expect some marked and deliberate manifestation of it, something like the social integration of the functionalists or the schematic non-linear logics of the structuralists. There are also, of course, dialectical models, such as those proposed by G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx, and actually discovered in the field by Gregory Bateson. But there is also the caveat, identified as "Schneider's Law" by Robert Murphy, to the effect that all structural-functional models come down to the same thing, which is that “if things did not work this way, they would work some oth- er way." How often are qualified anthropological observers or theorists blindsided by their naive assumptions that a society or a culture must work in order to be valid as a sub- ject of study, despite the fact that many of the most important ones, such as the Third Re- ich and the Soviet: Union, did not work at all. (As a mark of courtesy, or just plain bore- dom, I have omitted consideration of my overworked society from this discussion.) "Kinship" has no real existence as such anymore than any other abstraction. But this fact only serves to give added emphasis to the concrete particulars, like specific kin terms and kin relationships. These not only serve as prime organizers in human life, but, given the recent identification of Fox P2 in the Neanderthal genome, may be older than the human race. So, if it was the idea of kinship, as a quasi-institution that was invented by Lewis Henry Morgan, then it was the reality behind that idea that Morgan invented himself. But it is easy enough to belittle Morgan's contribution; for all his faults he did objectify kinship, and was the first to objectify the role it plays on a comparative basis. !241 But this approach had its drawbacks too. It tended to reify "types" of social orga- nization just as much as the terminological categorization did, created hard and fast stereotypes like "matrilineal," "patrilineal," and "double descent"—dogmatic constructs that ruled the discipline for over a century after Morgan's death. It was only in the last four decades of the twentieth century that we learned, under the ofttimes impatient tute- lage of David Schneider, that none of these so-called "archetypes" could possibly exist in its own right, and that they themselves only make sense as transformations of one anoth- er. Hence the Daribi of Papua New Guinea would be a totally matrilineal people but for the injunction to “buy” their offspring from their mother's line with huge payments of wealth. They live by the idiom of normative patriliny—meaning patriliny is something to be achieved rather than assumed. But for the ostensibly "matrilineal" peoples of Papua New Guinea, such as Malinowski’s Trobrianders as well as the Barok I studied in New Ireland, the situation is almost the same but for different reasons: an ambitious father is obliged to "repossess" his begotten offspring by claiming and purchasing the men's house (a taun) of their mother's line. As the Barok like to put it: “your mother's people only give you what they have to, but what your father gives you is given out of pure love." (There is no word for "love" in the Daribi lexicon.) Hence it is not the descent categorizations themselves that define these peoples and enable their social life, but the transformations from one class of relationships to an- other: transformative exchanges, occasions, and rituals that serve not only as designation- al markers, but also as operatives, points of action (protocol), that often enough introduce additional problems of their own. For they are points of life-crisis in which the learning curve of the individual intersects that of the society as a whole. The Daribi kinship system, if not unique, at least has a very limited distribution pattern in Papua New Guinea. It has been described for not only some other peoples of the Purari River drainage, such as the Wiru (Strathern 1968), but for the Foi speakers of Kutubu (Williams 1940, Weiner 1918) as well as the Ningerum of Western Province (Welsch 1991). It is best described in the way my indigenous congeners explained it to me when I first began asking them about it. Daribi draw an invisible security-circle around the local group, defined by the dis- tinction between those who share, wealth and those who exchange it. "We marry those with whom we exchange meat and wealth; we do not marry those with whom we share meat and wealth." The key terms here are "meat" and "wealth," for these turn out to be the all-important substance of exchange, the vital wealth that extends the flow of life and relationship among kin units. In terms that are both cognitive and material at once, it makes life possible. Because this distinction extends to all individuals, and all facets of life, it domi- nates the whole social structure of the people. Thus for the Daribi, a man’s sister's chil- dren are the only ones he can call his own, since the offspring begotten of his wives are only his by right of making payments for them. The term for this purchase is pagehaie ("buying the base," since one's maternal kin are considered the base or basis of one's exis- tence), and every single person, regardless of gender, must have his or her identity and paternal affiliation redeemed in this way. In cases of default (non-payment), the maternal !242 uncle (pagebidi, "man at the base") has the perfect right to take over custody of the child, or else deliver his infamous curse upon it, which can result in illness or death.