Preferred Citation: Weiner, James F. The Heart of the Pearl Shell: The Mythological Dimension of Foi Sociality. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1988 1988. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7w10087d/
 | The Heart of the Pearl ShellThe Mythological Dimension of Foi SocialityJames F. WeinerUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford© 1988 The Regents of the University of California |
Preferred Citation: Weiner, James F. The Heart of the Pearl Shell: The Mythological Dimension of Foi Sociality. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1988 1988. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7w10087d/
Foreword
Social scientists often write the signature of their age in the unstated assumptions they make about the nature and reality of their subject. For anthropologists of the colonial era, the reality of society corresponded to a native "administration"—official conventions for the adjudication of person and property. The more recent regime of political independence overlaid by economic colonialism has favored the realities of obligation, circulation, and reciprocity. Although it is intriguing to speculate as to what tokens of solidity and credibility a future anthropology might develop, the more pressing issue is that of the unstated assumptions themselves. Where is the "reality" of society, and what ought we make of the idea? What guarantees the credibility of social exchange and relationship?
The Foi people of the Mubi River say that "the heart of the pearl shell" is nowhere, that its reality is, as their myth paraphrases Catullus, "written on the wind, and inscribed in running water." Among the finest achievements of Dr. Weiner's supple and powerful argument is its fidelity to this penetrating indigenous insight. Dr. Weiner does not seek to "cash in" the heart of the pearl shell for a wealth-equivalent in economic exchange, to invest it in a sociology of invidious rights and interests, or to materialize it as putative groups or systems.
A telling and successful study of the meanings of a sociality implies more than the acceptance of local insights, however; it requires the analytical penetration of a world of unfamiliar significances. It may be tempting enough for those with no patience or no head for theory
to take the myths, the practices, the art objects of another people at face value. Idealism of this sort has much to offer; it salves the ethical conscience and it monumentalizes the "data." But insofar as a viable anthropology is concerned it is the kiss of death. For projection is the inevitable consequence of unstated assumptions: when it is assumed that the meanings of another culture are self-evident, the only meanings that are evident at all are one's own!
Dr. Weiner has made his grasp and understanding of Foi meanings the cornerstone of this book. A fluent speaker of the Foi language, he is in every respect a superb fieldworker, and the high standards he has brought to the collection and translation of the myths are evident on every page. Those who are familiar with his personal circumstances, and who know something of the difficulties encountered in his field situation, will also know him as one of the most courageous anthropologists to have worked in Papua New Guinea. He is no stranger to the notion of obviation, and I remain very much indebted to him for the advice and insights he offered when I was working through the concept with a corpus of Daribi myths. Before I comment on his own subtle application of the idea, a few words are in order on its epistemological scope and implications.
If meaning were a self-evident property of things, a "given" of the world around us, then we would scarcely need an anthropology. We could make do well enough with museums, art objects, documentaries, and lavishly illustrated coffeetable books. But meaning is instead something that human beings learn—after the fashion of their cultures—to perceive in the happenings around them. It is a specialized form of perception, as is binocular vision, and it may even be related to the capacity for binocular vision. The forms in which this perception is elicited and encoded, trope in all of its identifiable varieties of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, iconicity, might be said to project the "third dimension" of language and cultural convention, a dimension that is invisible to those who espouse the "flat" perspectives of systematic "rule" and process alone.
The problem is not so much that anthropology has been indifferent to meaning as that it has not known what to do with an allegedly static, subjective effect. And this is largely because trope itself, as the elicitor of meaning, has been understood as something detached and incidental—a by-blow of the businesslike logics that structuralism and semiotics use to model culture. But what if trope were, instead, a dynamic process, a constitutive principle that elicited not only the meanings but their sequence and organization as well? What obviation mod-
els is just such a processual form of trope, a sequence of contagious tropes that expand into the composite trope of a larger cultural frame—a myth or ritual.
As perception, of course, meaning remains as purely subjective and personal as the sense you or I make individually of a certain color or sound. What we can share of such an intimate experience (and what makes of such sharing a cultural phenomenon) is its conventional means of elicitation. Because it is the means by which personal perceptions can be shared and expanded into larger cultural forms, obviation is also a means of rendering the integral unity of cultural meanings accessible to us. Melanesians have always insisted on the central significance of certain myths and rituals for their way of life but, without a way of "reading" this significance in its totality, its indigenous sense could scarcely be grasped. Thus an approach to Foi sociality through myth becomes a privileged entrée to the meaning of Foi social life in its own terms, through the indigenous meanings rather than through the application of typological glosses.
Obviation is not a methodology, nor is it a recipe for myths. It comes into its own rift as a free form of interpretation, but precisely because of the constraints it places on interpretation. Diagrammatically it images the limits a myth places on the range of its possible interpretations. Add to this the conventions of a particular culture—those of exchange, the "fastening" of a woman, affinal protocols, the abia relationship, and the other usages that Dr. Weiner has learned so well—and the interpretive possibilities are further constrained by Foi culture. Using this coordinate set of constraints as a positive advantage, Dr. Weiner has managed, with suave dexterity, to elicit an indigenous commentary on social structure from Foi oral literature. What if pigs were substituted for affines, a man's bow or his fishing spear for his masculinity? What of the remarkable Foi practice whereby a man "adopts" his daughters' husbands by fostering their bridewealth payments? The implications of these "as ifs," in what Victor Turner called the cultural subjunctive, spell out an amazing Foi discourse on topics such as gender, relationship, mortality, destiny, autonomy, and personhood.
The cultural person contains implicitly the relationships that contain it; where else but in the mirroring dimension of myth can this reflexivity be articulated? And if it were not so articulated, then sociality could not enter the world of personal meaning, and would represent a merely imposed arbitrage.
What are pearl shells without people, without the person? The mag-
nificent Foi myth tells us that the heart of the pearl shell is blowing in the wind, streaming beneath running water. It is motion without substance, just as life would be if people did not imbue this motion with their lives, their wishes, their own thoughts. Pearl shells carries human life and human destiny on its wings because it has a place in human thoughts, human meanings and emotions, and in the person.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA
ROY WAGNER
Acknowledgments
This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, completed while a Research Scholar in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. My fieldwork among the Foi took place between July 1979 and May 1981, December 1982 and February 1983, and November 1984 and January 1985. It was funded primarily by an Australian National University Research Scholarship. My third field trip was partially subsidized by a small grant from the Southern Highlands Province Department of Education.
There are many people whose instruction, encouragement, and friendship made my work possible. My debt to Dr. Roy Wagner is profound and needs no special elaboration since his theoretical influence is evident throughout this book. He supervised my Master's work during my first year of graduate study at Northwestern University in 1973-1974. During that year, following Dr. Wagner's timely advice, my interest shifted away from economic anthropology and West Africa to kinship and social structure in interior New Guinea. At the end of that year, Dr. Wagner suggested that I enter the doctoral program at the University of Chicago, and I joined the anthropology department there the following year.
Over the next five years I was fortunate enough to continue my studies at Chicago under the supervision of Marshall Sahlins and the other members of my academic committee, David Schneider, Nancy Munn, and Valerio Valeri. Along with Dr. Wagner and Dr. Raymond
C. Kelly, these people are responsible for the theoretical background of this thesis. For their training and experience I would like to express my deepest gratitude.
Because of difficulties in obtaining financial support for my proposed fieldwork, I left the University of Chicago to accept a research scholarship in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University in 1979. With the advice of my supervisors, Michael Young, Marie Reay, and James Fox, I went to the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea to live among the Foi-speakers of the Lake Kutubu area.
While in the Southern Highlands I was greatly assisted by Dr. Lyn Clarke, who was then chairperson of the Provincial Research Committee and expedited my entry into the field. To those friends who occasionally saw me in Mendi, the provincial capital—Bruce French, Dinah Gibbs, John Millar, Eileen Sowerby, and Robert Crittendon—and to Gregory Tuma and Simon Kowi who were members of the government staff at Pimaga Patrol Post from where the Foi were administered, I offer my thanks for their hospitality and continuing interest in my work.
After I settled in Hegeso Village in a comfortable house on the bank of the Faya'a Creek, I began what proved to be over two years of a most intense and satisfying personal involvement with that community. Most of my data during the first year and a half of fieldwork were obtained in formal interview situations. I would spend most of the days visiting men and women in their homes and gardens and sago stands. Other time was spent with the several young men who undertook to teach me the Foi language. I accomplished this task primarily through transcribing and translating myths and other narrated speech. In the last twelve months of my fieldwork, however, I was able to follow conversations the Foi people held amongst themselves, and most of my material on observed social interactions was obtained during this phase of my time in Hegeso.
But whether it was sitting at a desk, on a tree stump in a garden, in the back of a canoe, or in people's houses and bush camps, Foi people with very little self-consciousness undertook to present their selves to me, which demanded a corresponding willingness on my part to fabricate for them an image of the Westerner and of my own self. In a very short time I realized that this process was continually at work no matter what the ostensible social context.
In one way or another, each of the 266 souls of Hegeso helped to
make my stay there a rewarding one, both emotionally and intellectually. I would like to single out, however, the following individuals: Viya Iritoro, who has grown from boyhood to married adulthood since I first arrived in Hegeso; Fo'awi Ku~ hu~ , who, sonless, adopted me during what proved to be the last years of his life, and who instructed me in the secret lore of the Usi cult and his own personal magic; Dabura Guni and his brother Horehabo, who both offered their complete personal loyalty and enthusiasm for my inquiries and who spent long hours with me in myth-telling and in the description of the healing cults; Kora Midibaru and Egadoba Yabokigi who acted as my translators, interpreters, and linguistic instructors until I learned the Foi language myself; Memene Abeabo, for his personal friendship and his precise knowledge of Hegeso genealogies which he shared with me; the women Gebo Tamani, Kunuhuaka Deya of Barutage, and Ibume Tari; Yaroge Kigiri, Iritoro Boyo, Dosabo Gu'uru of Fiwaga, Tirifa Tari, Midibaru Hamabo, Haganobo Wano of Barutage, and Fahaisabo Ya'uware and his brother Mabiba of Barutage who both excelled as myth-tellers. To these people and the entire village of Hegeso, I acknowledge an immense debt for their patience, friendship and support—a debt I can never repay adequately and which binds me yet to the dark forest and quiet rivers of the Upper Mubi Valley. I would also like to thank Murray Rule and Hector Hicks of the Asia Pacific Christian Mission for their hospitality and interest in my research.
During the writing of the original doctoral thesis I was aided greatly by the supervision of Dr. Michael Young, who was then working on his own manuscript on the social and personal uses of myth on Good-enough Island (his work appeared in 1983 as Magicians of Manumanua ). Dr. Young's careful attention and insightful criticism as well as our many conversations on mythic interpretation were crucial to the presentation of the argument in this book.
Although I had read Dr. Wagner's book Lethal Speech before I arrived in Australia in 1979, I did not think about the application of the concept of symbolic obviation to my own data on the Foi until well after I had returned to Canberra. While working through my notes on Foi bridewealth and mortuary exchanges, it occurred to me that obviation, as a central property of metaphor itself, could be applied to a wide range of semiotically based social processes apart from myth. The implication that myth and social process could thus be tied together within a unified theory of symbolization thus constituted the
framework within which I analyzed the relationship between the myths, spells, and poems and the social structural data which were the main subjects of my inquiries. Certain other properties of the six-staged obviational triad, including what Wagner calls axial encompassment, became apparent to me at the same time that Wagner was describing them in more detail in his recent book Symbols that Stand for Themselves . Without the many discussions we had concerning the mechanics of analogic transformation and the properties of obviational sequences themselves, this book could not have been written.
In addition to Dr. Young and Dr. Wagner, I would like to thank Dr. Marie Reay for her careful reading of and commentary on every chapter and her insistence upon a high level of stylistic performance. Dr. Andrew Strathern also followed the writing of the original thesis at every stage and is responsible for a great deal of my understanding of Foi society and my subsequent interpretations.
To my closest friends Wayne Warry and Leanne Greenwood, and to Mark Francillon, I offer my love and gratitude for their unquestioning devotion and for all the moments of joy and hardship, all equally precious, that we shared. To Martha Macintyre and Jadran Mimica, my deepest admiration for their professional competence and enthusiasm and my thanks for their friendship. To Charles Langlas, who worked among the Foi fourteen years before I arrived in Hegeso, my gratitude for his guidance, friendship, and hospitality.
Ann Buller and Ria Vandezandt looked after my needs while in the field, smoothed out many of the bumps of fieldwork and thesis writing, and finally typed both the original thesis and the manuscript of this book. To both of them go my great thanks for their loyalty and professional diligence. Marc Weiner, my brother, created the cover design and never flagged in his enthusiasm for my work.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to my parents, David and Barbara Weiner, for their complete faith in my work and their devotion to me during what has proven to be a long absence from home.
Orthography
The Foi language was first analyzed by the linguist-missionary Murray Rule. Along with his wife Joan Rule, he produced an unpublished grammar and dictionary of Foi during their stay at the Asia Pacific Christian Mission station at Inu, Lake Kutubu. I thus employ Rule's orthography (1977:8-10).
Consonants | ||||||
/b/ | [p] | WI<1> | /f/ | [f] | WI and WM | |
[b] | WM<2> | /v/ | [v] | WI and WM | ||
/t/ | [th ] | WI and WM | /s/ | [s[*] ] | before /a/ and /e/ | |
/d/ | [t] | WI | [s]<3> | before /i/, /o/, | ||
[d] | WM | /u/, WI, and WM | ||||
/k/ | [kx] | WI and WM | /h/ | [h] | WI and WM | |
/g/ | [k] | WI | / | [m] | WI and WM | |
m/ | ||||||
[g] | WM | |||||
/n/ | [n] | WI and WM | ||||
/r/ | [r] | WM only | ||||
/ | [w] | WI and WM | ||||
w/ | ||||||
/'/ | [?] | WM only | ||||
Vowels | ||||||
/a/ | [a] | before /a/, /e/, /o/ | /e~ / | [e~ ] | AP | |
syllable | /i/ | [i] | AP | |||
[L ^ ] | before /i/ and /u/, AP<4> | /i~ / | [i~ ] | AP | ||
/o/ | [o] | AP | ||||
/a~ / | [a~ ] | or [L ~^ ] as for /a/ above | /o~ / | /o~ / | AP | |
/e/ | [e] | AP | /u~ / | [u] | AP | |
/u~ / | [u~ ] | AP | ||||
In addition, there are two tonemes, high and low, that affect only a small number of word pairs, for example: hae~ , "egg, seed, fruit," and hae~, [high tone], "dog."
All Foi words in this book are italicized except for frequently used proper names such as Usane Habora and Usi (see chapters 3 and 4). Literal translations of Foi words and phrases appear within quotation marks (for example, gabe , "axe"). Where Foi concepts or discourse have received a more interpretive or analytical translation on my part, this is clearly indicated in the text.
Notes
1. WI = Word Initial
2. WM = Word Medial
3. Tongue slightly retroflex
4. AP = All Positions
Chapter I
Introduction
The best way I have found to define ethnographic interpretation is the classic analogy of three blind men attempting to describe an elephant by touch—one holding its trunk, one its tail, and the other its tusk. Different ethnographers see things different ways, and the contrasting subjective viewpoints of each fieldworker determine the nature of the resulting ethnographic portrait. We, as much as the people who are our subject matter, create the reality of social and cultural phenomena, for we too are acting "culturally" by doing anthropology.
While as outside observers we know this to be too self-evident to warrant extended argument, I feel at times that we lose sight of the fact that it is also true of the individuals who are our subjects. Perhaps it is because we do not appreciate them as individuals until well into our field stays that we tend to assume that their knowledge and information about their culture is more uniform than ours. And if such is not the case, as in societies with graded ritual knowledge, certainly it is assumed that their interpretive perspective, their general structural vantage point, is covalent. This is a function of our belief that cultures, particularly those of small-scale societies, can be typified by a single set of structured propositions.
But even if we grant that our subjects can have conflicting theories of their society—even, in other words, if we admit this second degree of interpretive relativity—few of us identify a third level of subjectivity, that of differentially constituted domains within a single culture. We may, it is true, scrupulously note that such-and-such an element
is given conflicting associations, names, values, meanings, or what have you, in different contexts. But having reached that point, many ethnographers feel compelled to identify one meaning, one value as the "real" one, while the others are "extensions," "figures of speech," or "inversions" or "transformations," as if the last two were necessary characteristics of culture and meaning itself.
The problem is most acute in the study of myth and its relationship to the rest of social and linguistic discourse. The examination of this relationship has been dominated for the last twenty years by structuralist approaches, in which oppositions pertaining to assumed objective phenomena—up versus down, male versus female, and so on—are inverted or transformed and then resynthesized. Myth therefore emerges as a "looking-glass" of reality, a reflection of real life, a derivative semantic form; in brief, an extension of primary cultural meanings.
It is no surprise that the analysis of myth has been most commonly and closely associated with that of ritual for, like the former, ritual too is often interpreted as a topsy-turvy world of inversion, an inside-out morality. And yet, enthographers always seek in myth and ritual the semantic equations that are the missing links in completing the structures of secular institutions. Must we then conclude, paradoxically, that it is only by subverting the semiotic and symbolic foundations of secular life that their integrity and moral force are maintained?
This dilemma can be sidestepped, however, by a symbolic anthropology that takes the distinction between the "factual" and the "representational" as itself a symbolic construction, one whose parameters must be determined by observation and analysis in each society, rather than assumed as self-evident. My aim in this book is to constitute the dimensions of Foi sociality out of the images presented in their myths and their secular institutions, to demonstrate the role of each in the elaboration of the central Foi tenets of intersexual and affinal mediation, and to express the force of these principles in terms of how the opposed functions of conventional and innovative symbolization are given shape in Foi thought.
How, first, do I define sociality ? Rather than approach separately the phenomena that many anthropologists have distinctly defined as, for example, "culture" and "social structure," I wish to begin with the notion of a single domain of socially apprehended reality which
is simultaneously conceptual and phenomenal. Roy Wagner in his book The Invention of Culture thus defines as convention
the range of . . . contexts . . . centered around a generalized image of man and human interpersonal relationships. . . . These contexts define and create a meaning for human existence . . . by providing a collective relational base. (1975:40)
Clifford Geertz (1973), in speculating on the origin of the Balinese person, similarly notes that "human thought is consummately social" in its origin, functions, forms, and applications. These interpretations ultimately owe their inspiration to the father of social anthropology, Émile Durkheim, who first defined this set of shared concepts which simultaneously embodies ethos, world view, and collective solidarity as the field of morality (1966:398). Morality for Durkheim was the set of collective representations that pertained to the cohesiveness of social units. I therefore define sociality as those symbolic domains that constitute the collective image of human interaction in any society. These domains provide the conceptual parameters for the definition of individual and social units and their interrelationship (see also Schneider 1965).
Many social anthropologists, however, begin with the notion of the irreducibility of the biogenetic facts of human reproduction. The functional relationship between such facts and the institutionalized means of ordering and expressing them—rules of marriage, recruitment, and descent for example—is, by similar reasoning, assumed to be universal in all human societies. Radcliffe-Brown, who was social anthropology's most important interpreter of Durkheim, started with this premise in distinguishing social structure from other cultural institutions (Radcliffe-Brown 1952). It is implicit in Lévi-Strauss' model of the "atom of kinship" (1967:29-53), which formed the basis of alliance theory, and in Fortes' ideas, which are the most representative of descent theory, even though these two schools of thought can be considered to represent diametrically opposed views of social structure (see Schneider 1965).
The point I wish to make, however, is that kinship and social-organizational rules are first and foremost a system of symbolically constituted meanings and that their relationship to genealogical parameters is problematic. The dimensions of social interaction and organization are therefore "contiguous with other realms of conceptualization" (Wagner 1977:627). I therefore use the word sociality to mean the culturally defined and symbolically ordered nature of social
phenomena. The meaningful attributes of sociality reside not only in the normative system of social rules but also in every other cultural domain; the manner in which the Foi and other peoples order and define their interpersonal and intergroup relationships must be related to the way they order their microcosm and macrocosm at the most inclusive level. The relationship of humans, for example, to the animals species, the spirits of the dead, and the cardinal and geographic orientations of their social space—these too partake of a similar symbolic constitution.
In much the same manner that Marcel Mauss in his classic essay The Gift described reciprocity as a "total social fact" in many archaic and non-Western societies (1954), I describe the domains of intersexual mediation (that is, pertaining to the relation between male and female) and affinal mediation as the most pervasive conceptual foundations of Foi sociality. The central role of gender differentiation "as a cultural system"—in Geertz's (1973) sense—in Melanesian societies has already been well documented (see chapter 3 below). However, in this book I have avoided the use of word gender with its implicit emphasis on sex roles in favor of a term that stresses the fact that for the Foi sexuality is a relationship, and that this relationship encompasses much more than the differentiation of men and women. Marilyn Strathern speaking from her experience among the Melpa people of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea has in a similar vein argued that "the logic inherent in the way such notions [of male-ness and female-ness] are set up must be understood in relation to general values in the society" (1978:173). Thus, the relationship between male and female and between affines, though comprising distinct normative ideologies for the Foi, encompass one another at the conceptual level with which I am analytically concerned. As domains of extreme importance to the Foi, they inform a wide range of relationships and analogies within the Foi cosmos. It is through their myths that the Foi make explicit the relationship between these analogies.
But there is an important methodological distinction to be made at the outset. On the one hand, there is the normative relationship between the institution of myth-telling and other institutions of social discourse. On the other hand, there is the relationship between myth as a context for symbolic transformation and the symbolic operations in other social processes. I have restricted the focus of this book chiefly to the second of these analytical viewpoints.
Thus, although I preface my analysis of Foi mythology with a de-
scription of Foi social organization, the images emerging from myth analysis do not formally correspond to those that emerge from statistical or normative statements about social structure, since the two represent distinct analytical views.
In chapter 5, for example, I present an image of Foi social structure that explicates the relationship between contrasting properties of asymmetrical and symmetrical exchange in the bridewealth system. This analysis stems from the comparison of different kinds of data, primarily statistical and normative, and represents one view of Foi social process. But there is no a priori reason to expect myth to reflect the intersection of these principles in the same way. It is true that several Foi myths comment on the implications of direct exchange and others on the implications of affinal asymmetry, but it is only in the interests of a functionalist methodology that one would conclude that those myths are related to one another in some exclusive way.
But it is also true that it is one of the aims of this book to establish both how myths are related to each other and how they are related to social process. And so I now turn to a description of the kind of model I feel can answer these questions, a model pertaining to the symbolic foundations of sociality.
Anthropology has at its core a commitment to making the social component of human life visible and, in this interest, the whole idea of human sociality, since the time of Durkheim, has been taken for granted. But the necessity of sociality, and all the functions attributed to it, are themselves aspects of a complex metaphor by which we assimilate the different practices of our ethnographic subjects to our own model of society.
In this book I employ a model of symbolic analysis devised by Roy Wagner, depicted most clearly in his sequence of publications Habu (1972), The Invention of Culture (1975), "Analogic Kinship: A Daribi Example" (1977), and Lethal Speech (1978). It is one of my purposes in this introduction to explicate the relationship between the stages in a unified symbolic theory that these works represent, and to introduce how I have employed them in my description and analysis of Foi society.
Social anthropology is about relationships, although up until fairly recently, most anthropologists preferred to restrict the content of relationship in this context to that between persons. But I prefer to begin with a more basic and encompassing definition of relationship,
grounded in a semiotic approach to the conceptualization of the world, and so I start with the "atom" of relationship, the metaphor.
Although any linguistic phenomenon depends ultimately on the establishment of arbitrary relationships between signifiers and signifieds, I will defer discussion of such sign relationship for the moment and merely note that signs themselves are the building blocks of metaphors, or tropes, in Paul Ricouer's phrasing. Regardless of the taxonomic differences some authors specify for metaphor—metonymy, synecdoche, iconicity, rhetoric, and others—the crucial characteristic of a trope is that it is a relationship between two elements that are simultaneously similar and dissimilar. A symbolic operation that focuses on the similarity between elements in a tropic ("trope-ic") equation can be termed collectivizing symbolization, in Wagner's scheme, while the converse operation that takes the differences as the focus of intent can be labeled as differentiating symbolization.
Because the two properties of metaphor are in direct opposition, identity as against difference, they cannot simultaneously embody the context of human intention; they cannot at the same time manifest themselves in the act of metaphorization itself, lest the intent of the symbolic construction be compromised.
I now assume that the nature of any particular metaphorical relationship depends upon the relative emphasis of either its collectivizing or differentiating function at the expense of the other, and that this relative emphasis corresponds to the conventionally defined mode of human intention itself. As an example, let us consider the Foi metaphor of clan identity. Each Foi clan has an associated group of bird, animal, and vegetable species which ``stands for it" in a manner that anthropologists characteristically define as totemic. A member of the Momahu'u clan is thus for example represented by the Raggianna bird of paradise, the sena'a species of sugarcane, the Black Palm tree, and others. In fact, each Foi clan has "standing for it" an element or species in the garden vegetable, tree, fish, bird, marsupial, and wild vegetable domains, and perhaps others that I am unaware of—in other words, in every domain that the Foi see as comprising their cosmos, in all the spheres that together make up the Foi universe. A human differentiation—that between clans—differentiates species. To the extent that the distinction between the domains themselves is backgrounded , their congruent assimilation to one clan collectivizes this distinction: the difference between items in different domains (say, the Raggianna bird of paradise and Black Palm tree, both of which stand for the Mo-
mahu'u clan) is not as significant as the difference between elements within a domain (such as the Raggianna and the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, which stands for the So'onedobo clan). The relationship between the domains themselves represents a series of homologous distinctions-that between Foi clans—and in this sense every generic domain the Foi recognize "functions" to distinguish clans from each other. To the extent thus that the domains themselves stand in homologic relationship, in contrast to the analogous distinctions within each domain, then every Foi clan has an unlimited number of totems, every generic domain the Foi recognize can serve as a field of totemic differentiation .
Analogy is the background against which the Foi articulate the distinctions that are the focus of their social life, just as difference is the background against which Westerners impose the collectivities of family and kinspeople. The corresponding emphasis on differentiating and collectivizing symbolization respectively comprises the domain of convention for the Foi and for Westerners, and such a contrast deserves more detailed scrutiny.
In an analytic framework that takes social relationships themselves as the result of tropic construction, convention can only be defined in terms of its complementary aspect, innovation or invention. Let me return to the distinction between culture and social structure with which I began earlier, with the rules that many anthropologists elicit and which form the framework for their eventual description of the content of a particular culture. What is the ontological status, as it were, of these rules? Most, if not all, are direct results of the anthropologist's questioning. But how do these anthropologists conceive of the whole notion of "a rule" itself? Is it not a product of their own cultural milieu, Western society, which posits an external and artificially constructed social contract opposed to the individual? In such a milieu, rules are the focus of conscious human articulation, since they are designed to regulate and systematize an inherently chaotic and differentiated cosmos. Our view of social artifice basically derives from such early social philosophers as Thomas Locke: society is the systematic application of constraints upon the inherent willfulness of the self-contained individual. The meaning of all social and cultural forms—including myth—is thus above all else referrable to their function in maintaining societal order.
Convention in this worldview thus emerges as a result of progressive acts of collectivizing symbolization, focusing on the artificially imposed
similarities among elements and statuses to arrive at the occupational, educational, and geographic specializations (to name a few) that comprise our social categories and the system of laws, written and unwritten, that govern their relationship to each other. In such a system, the differences that are also a part of the metaphor of social identity are seen as innate or inherent; and indeed, the morality of convention lies in the fact that it is seen to accommodate and control such difference.
Any person assuming a social role—as husband, wife, employee, citizen, and so forth—metaphorizes that role to the extent that his idiosyncratic personality is seen as hampering or promoting his performance of that role. There are punctual employees, domineering bosses, neurotic housewives, "bad" children, and not even the most punctilious diplomat is a perfect follower of protocol. The dissonance we feel when our individual motivations clash with the expectations of our social roles is what we perceive as the resistance to artificially imposed behavioral strictures, but the resistance itself is a function of the relative weighting of collectivizing and differentiating symbolization in our cultural tradition.
It is thus evident that a social convention only achieves its force and reality through individuals who recognize that convention as playing some determinate role in their action and intention. The relationship between the individual and the social, then, is also a metaphor, for each individual approximates more or less the image of a social form or action. Thus Wagner writes:
Since . . . convention can only be sustained and carried forward by acts of invention, and since invention can only result in effective and meaningful expression when subject to the orientation of convention, neither can be regarded as a determinant. Both are equally involved in, and equally products of, the successive acts of combining and distinguishing cultural contexts that constitute man's social and individual life. (1975:78)
Let us now suppose an inverse situation. Let us imagine a world-view that takes human sociality, its "rules," as "given" or "innate," in the same way that we take the individual's idiosyncratic personality as given for the purposes of social analysis. In this worldview, the energies and forces maintaining that sociality are not distinct from those that "animate" the universe in general: the cycle of birth, growth, and decay; the similarity between animal and vegetable species; the giving of food and ceremonial gifts or prestations; the proliferation of household groups; in general, all the characteristics of the
kind of non-Western society that early anthropologists labeled as "animistic." It is not, however, humanity that is projected onto an inanimate nature—the people we are speaking of do not make that distinction—but rather the self-evident continuity of cosmic forces that is seen as also encompassing the force of human action.
The Foi live in such a world of immanent continuity and transcendent human intention. The resemblances between—indeed, the essential unity of—all the different human, animal, vegetable, meteorological, and other vitalities is for them "given" or part of the innate nature of things. The moral foundation of human action, that contrastive realm that they view in opposition to this given cosmic flow, is to halt, channel, or make distinctions in it for socially important purposes.
In this type of society, what the anthropologist perceives as social process, the flow of events, can perhaps best be rendered in terms of the replacement or substitution of tropes by other tropes. Because metaphor is self-signifying—because it encompasses its symbol and referent within a single construction—this succession of tropic differentiations creates its own context, "precipitating" convention (and making it visible to the anthropologist) by means of successive differentiations against it. To put it another way, convention becomes apprehendable as a felt resistance to the improvisatory and particularistic actions of individuals that are opposed to it. Thus, in chapter 5, I discuss the various affinal and maternal payments that devolve upon wife-takers subsequent to a betrothal. To the extent that betrothal payments, bridewealth, maternal payments, and the special exchanges between cross-cousins succeed each other, they serve to shift the focus of the initial affinal differentiation across generations. What emerges from—what is "precipitated" by—these exchanges is the conservation of male as against female lineality. I thus argue that intersexual and affinal mediation emerge as the chief modes of social differentiation for the Foi. They model the successive acts of differentiation from which result the categories of Foi social structure, and to characterize the content of Foi society, perhaps nothing more need be said than that it is the constant re-creation of male and female (re)productivity out of affinity and vice versa.
However, let us now recall that a metaphor, unlike a sign, is not an arbitrary relationship between elements. Because each element in a trope can equally serve as the context for the other's articulation, it follows that the relation between the collectivizing and differentiating functions of metaphor is relative —it is not fixed, as is the relation
between a sound image and its conceptual referent in a sign relationship. To return to my example of Foi totemic usages, people are divided into groups that are represented by various "natural" species. The relationship between person and totem is a metaphor that serves to both differentiate people from each other and to collectivize species from different series, depending upon one's point of view. If it is thus true that any metaphor encompasses this contrast between similarity and difference in a relative and not fixed manner, then the possibility exists of focusing on differentiation in a collectivizing tradition, or of focusing on collectivizing in a differentiating one in certain contexts .
In Wagner's terms, any symbolic operation that exposes the simultaneously differentiating and collectivizing modes of a tropic equation can be defined as obviation . In a tradition such as ours, which focuses on bringing individual variations in personality and temperament into conformity with a collectively defined social role, any act or role that is consciously articulated in contradistinction to these conventions obviates them. Artists, writers, musicians, and any other adherents of a contrastive "counterculture" innovate upon these conventions by locating the creative impetus of their identity in opposition to them. To the extent that they render apparent the symbolic operation that maintains the moral force of these conventions—the collectivizing operation that makes itself felt as morality—such differentiating acts extend their associations and attributes. Thus, for example, idioms used by black Americans, Hollywood scriptwriters, and so on, gradually achieve a widespread conventional meaning.
But in a tradition such as that of the Foi, where differentiation is convention, where the drawing of contrasts accounts for the shape of social action, then innovation results when such contrasts are collapsed, when the distinction between elements in a tropic construction is backgrounded to their similarity. This is the force of those nonconventional acts such as magic, oratory, naming, and cult activity, all of which I will discuss in ensuing chapters.
Obviation can be alternatively defined as the manner in which the realm of the innate and that of human responsibility come to stand for each other. In the collectivizing tradition of the West that I have been broadly characterizing, it emerges as a result of deliberate focus on differentiation. The emergence of women's political consciousness in recent times is a good example of this. The dilemma of the role of women in a traditionally male-dominated society was the effect of the disparity between their collectively defined status as free citizens in an
individualistic democracy and the subordination they were forced to contend with by virtue of a perceived "n??tural" or "innate" inferiority of women as opposed to men. Feminism is the attempt to make coherent the definition of femininity by opposing or differentiating women categorically against the rest of society, in the same manner as ethnic minorities have always done. The feminist movement thus attempts to phrase the individual relations between men and women in collective terms and, by thus supplanting an innate particularization with a conventionally imposed collectivization, they obviate the innateness of men's domination.
For the Foi, however, differentiation is the conventional mode of male-female relationship. Contrast and complementarity are the substance of a husband's and wife's relationship, the normative effect of which is to commute all of their interaction to the stylized exchange of male and female foodstuffs and the "work" of sexual intercourse and procreation (see chapter 3). But in the course of a marriage, as a young man perhaps attains high status, if his wife is successful in caring for pigs and gardens, if she provides generously for her husband's visitors and trade partners and in general supports her husband's efforts, she is said to become a "head-woman," like a male "head-man." Thus, the individual and particular characteristics of that marital union, normally backgrounded to the conventional contrast between men and women in general, achieves symbolic force, working to individuate that marriage against other unions.
Since I have chosen to phrase the content of social articulation in semiotic terms, it should be clear that the tropic basis of this articulation stands in an inverse relation to the other more widely accepted process of symbolic analysis, structuralism. But it should now be clear that structuralism is the other side of the coin of obviation. Without semantic reference, there could be no metaphor, but without the assimilation of context and referent that metaphor represents, structuralism could not establish its semantic equations between different domains.
Structural analysis is an excellent vehicle for elaborating collective symbolization; it is "imperialistic" in that it always incorporates equivalences into an expanding transcendent relationship. But it fails to deal with the converse, the manner in which metaphor "seals" itself, cuts itself off from further equivalence. It cannot, in other words, explain how the different elements that comprise its basic analogies became differentiated in the first place, preferring to see difference itself as
"self-evident." But I am interested in the way that metaphor creates, rather than merely reflects, reality.
The structural interrelatedness of cultural meanings I take for granted and not as something to be didactically construed in the course of analysis. Structural analysis is primarily concerned with demonstrating homologous relationships between various conceptual oppositions. As the French anthropologist Dan Sperber notes (1975:52), in this type of analysis the symbolic signifier is analytically detached from the signified element. The signifier does not in and of itself receive a symbolic interpretation, "but only in so far as it is opposed to at least one other element" (1975:52). It is the resulting oppositions that are interpreted, and moreover, in terms of a set of extracultural or universal "codes" as Lévi-Strauss calls them (1966:90-91 et passim): for example, the distinction between nature and culture, up and down, raw and cooked, and so on. In this manner it becomes possible to speak of a single set of codes that are variably and differentially expressed by particular oppositions from one society to another (see Leach 1974: chapters 3 and 4).
In chapters 5 and 6 of this book I take issue with this interpretation. What Lévi-Strauss offers is a theory about information: how different conceptual oppositions can serve as vehicles for the expression of universal codes whose meaning is self-evident. But information is not the same as meaning. The latter is purely relative, not absolute, and cannot be measured for knowledge content (see Wagner 1972b). Meaning, as I argue, results when the elements of conventional syntagmatic orders are inserted into nonconventional contexts. The resulting figurative or metaphoric expressions define at once both the particularizing nature of metaphor and its dependence upon conventional semantic or syntagmatic references for its innovative impact.
In Mythologiques , Lévi-Strauss traces the inversions and transformations in various "elementary" oppositions of the mythology of cultures throughout North and South America. His methodology is deliberately cross-cultural, being concerned with codes and information rather than meaning. Hence the structures that result from such comparison have no implications for describing any one particular society as a conceptual or symbolic totality. My approach stands in opposition to that of Lévi-Strauss: to see not only each society's mythology as a self-contained corpus, but each myth itself as a pristine and complete figurative construction in its own right, not comparable except at a purely formal level to myths of other societies. The structural inter-
relationships of inversion between Foi myths that I trace represent not the encoding of invariant oppositions but the figurative relationship of elements in a single metaphoric structure that encompasses a meaning only for that particular culture. Structure is thus the residuum of metaphor, for the myths must stand in some determinate relationship to conventional syntagmatic orders.
The relation between myths and their associated magic spells is a good example of the relative distinction between collectivizing and differentiating modes of symbolization, and hence between semantic (structural) and tropic (obviational) analysis. In fact, this relationship depicts most dearly the dialectical creation of individual and social identity for the Foi. At first, the relationship between myth as a context for metaphoric transformation and the same process in nonmythical discourse was elusive. It was only after months of fieldwork that I learned of the relationship between myth and the corpus of magical formula that the Foi call kusa . At least in theory, so Foi men told me, every magic spell has a myth associated with it. But because the spells themselves were jealously guarded personal property, their relationship to mythology only emerged intermittently.
While both rest on the force of tropic construction for their effectiveness, myth and magic occupy opposed discursive contexts. Myths are above all else for public narration; the longhouse is the most common and perhaps only socially approved setting for their telling. A magic spell, on the other hand, is individual property, and spoken to no other person, except in the act of its transfer for payment, like any other valuable.
The magic spell focuses on the deliberate articulation of a similarity; it is a collectivizing trope, stressing the resemblances between the two elements that form the point of transfer of a specific capacity or power. One might say that magic is the Foi's own form of structural analysis, drawing similarities between putatively distinct domains, articulating metaphor in its collectivizing mode and, in addition, having the function of transferring or focusing power between those domains. The myth, by contrast, achieves its moral force by differentiating a sequence of tropes from a conventional image of ordinary social discourse, revealing the conventional nature of this image itself, indeed, recreating it by a particular innovation or individual perspective on convention.
It only remains to introduce what I perceive as the particular con-
tent of the relation between semantic and tropic symbolization for the Foi. It represents itself as a distinction between secret and public knowledge, which is also the relationship between individual and collective identities.
Why is it that the notion of secrecy and secret knowledge seems to pervade non-Western societies? Like "magic" and "ritual" themselves, secrecy is an integral part of our received image of non-Western institutions and is characteristically reported to be a definitive aspect of magic and ritual themselves. Secrecy is often invoked as the means by which one segment of a society maintains a dominance over another: men over women; elder men over younger men; ritual and cult savants over uninitiated men, to take some examples. In such cases, the restrictive effects of secrecy are taken for granted, and secrecy's implications for characterizing tropic manipulation are subordinated to its function in maintaining societal integration.
But for the Foi, the notion of secrecy itself reveals the fundamental manner in which culture is articulated. For Foi men, the metaphoric equations that underlie the power of magic, cult, sorcery, and oratory are not consciously created , they are discovered . The equations exist by virtue of an undifferentiated cosmos that admits of the free transfer of qualities between domains. These equations only assume a role in maintaining personal power when they are hoarded or guarded by individual men, when their transcendent reality is harnessed to the maintenance of individual power and identity.
Like the flow of wealth objects and procreative potential which is an aspect of it, secrecy is the result of the interdicted flow of analogy or metaphor itself—indeed, the constraint and secrecy that accompanies betrothal and marriage arrangements among the Foi is rendered more intelligible in this light. They are part and parcel of a cultural tradition that takes differentiation and restriction as the domain of human intention and action.
Myth, then, becomes public precisely because its insights and equations are elusive, not baldly and syntagmatically stated as in a magic spell. Whereas a magic spell is hidden because of what it reveals, myths are revealed precisely because of what they hide: the creation of morality and human convention out of the particular actions and dilemmas of archetypal characters. It is up to the listener, Foi and anthropologist alike, to assimilate myth's intricate plots into a transcendent insight into the most important secret of all—the mystery of human sociality.
The sequence of chapters in this book reflects what I see as the progression of Wagner's ideas concerning metaphor and symbolic anthropology. Chapters 3 and 4 thus begin with metaphors themselves, the equations between space, time, and sexuality, and between people and wealth objects, which represent the idioms through which the Foi articulate their social distinctions. I locate the theoretical impetus for these chapters in Wagner's Habu (1972). Chapter 5 details these social distinctions and how they recreate the analogies between intersexual and affinal mediation, as well as that between the living and the dead. This analysis is informed by the analogic approach to kinship described in Wagner's 1977 article. That article can be seen to represent his earliest ideas on the subject of symbolic obviation, and I explain this in more detail using the Foi data in chapter 7.
Chapter 6 also takes Habu as its starting point. Whereas chapters 3 and 4 detail the nature of Foi metaphors themselves, chapter 6 concerns itself with how metaphors are substituted for each other in the structure of various forms of Foi discourse. Chapter 7 then begins with the idea that Wagner presents in Lethal Speech , that a myth is a single metaphor in the same way as a more specific equation such as "women are marsupials" is a metaphor, and that the successive substitution of tropes by other tropes results in the obviation sequences—large-scale metaphors—that myths represent. Chapters 8 through 11 present my own analysis of Foi mythology in terms of this process.
In the first half of this book, then, I thus describe Foi sociality in terms of a set of conventional idioms pertaining to intersexual and affinal mediation. For the Foi, the most important feature of their shared apperception is what I describe as a flow of vital energies, forces, and relationships. Their sociality is but one facet of a world-view that posits a sui generis moral force to such phenomena as, for example, the motion of water and celestial bodies, the growth and death of human beings, the separation of the living and the dead, and the distinct sexual properties of men and women. Individuals, by contrast, attempt to redirect, channel, and halt these continuous cosmological and social energies for moral purposes. Thus, for example, they manipulate wealth items so that the female procreative flow of life can be harnessed to the creation of male descent units; they engage in funeral ritual so that an artificial separation can be maintained between the living and the dead.
There is a parallel between the manner in which many social anthropologists analytically separate genealogical reference from the cul-
tural context of kinship and social relationships, and the manner in which structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss separate universal binary codes from mythopoeic metaphorization. In both cases the cultural meaning of social and mythical idioms is preempted in favor of one or another functional theory of signification.[1] The intent of this book is to take both the idioms of sociality and of myth as mutually defining—they metaphorize each other even as their respective conventional components are at the same time demarcated and contrasted.
Another way of putting this is to suggest that the many images of Foi domestic, social, and ceremonial activities depicted in myth are no less accurate a rendering of Foi "everyday life" than an observer's verbal narration of daily activity. Pictures, whether verbal or graphic, must be transmuted and shaped by interpretation and analysis for them to have meaning for us. In unfolding the images that the Foi use to narrate their myths, they present their own pictures of life, and the analysis I add to them only focuses attention on the moral import of the succession of these images.
The fact that social meanings are created as a result of a structured series of tropic substitutions does not preclude the possibility of contradiction or paradox between them; in fact, such contradiction is a necessary characteristic of any cultural system, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter. An example of this, discussed in detail in chapter 3, concerns the paradox of what Foi men perceive as the extremely limited role they play in procreation and their necessity to maintain continuity in descent through males. Another example pertains to the simultaneously life-giving and lethal properties of female sexual and procreative substances. Still another centers upon the intersection of the opposed principles of consanguinity and affinity within the Foi cross-cousin relationship. In the second half of this book I attempt to describe Foi mythology as the poetic or aesthetic revelation of these and other fundamental paradoxes. If these contradictions were made visible in everyday social process, the intention of Foi actors would be irreparably compromised. It is necessary, for example, for Foi men to mask the fact that women are dangerous to them (in order that they may engage in normal sexual activity); or for cross-cousins to ignore the fact that they are consanguines (so that they may engage in certain affinal exchanges). Culture must remain "open" so that people may live in it; myth and story provide the "closures"—cosmologically and morally—that ordinary life does not permit. Myth provides a transient, fleeting, and incomplete structure
for those people whose reality it encompasses. The anthropologist is obliged by the constraints of interpretation to freeze this temporary insight into a systematic model of thought and culture.
Chapter II
The Ethnographic Setting
The People of the Above
The Foi number approximately 4500[1] and inhabit the broad valley of the Mubi River and the area to the east of Lake Kutubu, near the border of the Southern Highlands and Gulf Provinces of Papua New Guinea. The Mubi originates in the high-altitude country south of Mt. Kerewa, approximately twenty-five kilometers north of Lake Kutubu, and flows from northwest to southeast into the Kikori River (which the Foi call the Giko). Near Harabuyu village, east of Orokana mission station, it merges with the Wage River which flows into it from the north. The Mubi is also fed by the Soro River which empties from the north end of Lake Kutubu and flows southeast past the lake, parallel to the Mubi and merging with it about nineteen kilometers south of Orokana.
The altitude of the Mubi Valley ranges between 750 and 800 meters in its upper portion and drops to less than 100 meters at the point where it flows into the Kikori. The Valley is abruptly separated from the Wage River valley to the north by a range of mountains between 1400 and 1600 meters high, the Tida and Masina Ranges, and is similarly separated by a parallel ridge of lower hills to the south—the Kube Kabe and Harutami Ranges—from the interior lowlands of the Kikori basin. The entire region between the Wage and Kikori Rivers represents a series of parallel synclinal valleys and anticlinal ridges of
karstified limestone (see Brown and Robinson 1977:4) which is covered by montane rainforest in the higher altitude and by mixed sago—pandanus—Campnosperma lowland rainforest in the Mubi and Kikori Valleys (see Paijmans 1976: part 2).
The Foi are separated from their closest neighbors on all sides by large tracts of uninhabited bush. All Foi villages are located on the Mubi River or around the shores of Lake Kutubu, and the area to the north of the Mubi is used only for hunting expeditions. To the east, the Mubi is separated from the westernmost reaches of the Erave River (a tributary of the Purari) by the Go'oma River valley. Up until approximately twenty years ago, this area was inhabited by several small longhouses of Kewa-speakers from the east who had fled their homes after defeat in warfare. They were given land and political asylum by the Foi men of Kaffa and eventually left the Go'oma River entirely and settled in the southern Foi area and later with the men of Harabuyu and Yomaisi villages (Patrol Report No. 2 1955-1956; Patrol Report No. 2 1961-1962).
The Foi view themselves as comprising three main subdivisions (see Map 1). Those inhabitants of the four Lake Kutubu villages are known as the Gurubumena, "Kutubu people," or Ibumena, "lake people." Those Foi living along the Upper Mubi River are called the Awamena, "above people" or "northern people." Those Foi of the southern Mubi are the true Foi people, the Foimena. All three populations refer to their language as Foime , "Foi speech," despite minor dialectical differences. Murray and Joan Rule, the linguists who initially described and analysed the language, used the term Foi to refer to all people speaking this language, and their designation has been adopted by the Foi themselves.
The Mubi Valley occupies an intermediate position between the Highlands and Lowlands in every sense of the term—ecologically, geographically, and culturally. Along the Upper Mubi, the Awamena maintain intimate trading relations with the Kewa- and Wola-speaking groups of the Nembi River region, the Sugu Valley, and as far as Kagua and Nipa stations. The Foi collectively designate all Highlanders by the term Weyamo or Fahai . The Southern or Lower Foi by contrast maintain trading links with those groups living south of the Kikori River, now known as Kasere or Some (see Franklin and Voorhoeve 1973) and who the Foi themselves call Kewa.
The pronounced ecological and ethnic differences between the Mubi Valley and the Highlands region north of the Tida and Masina Ranges
Map 1.
The Foi and Neighboring Peoples
are translated by the Foi and Wola-Kewa respectively as a set of cultural and environmental stereotypes each group has of the other. The Foi point out the Highlanders' hirsuteness, their distinctive woven pubic sporrans, grass-roofed houses built right on the ground, their countryside consisting of much secondary grassland and casuarina groves, their skills at hunting, and their aggressive, argumentative personality as the defining features of that cultural region. The Highlanders in turn peer down into the mist-shrouded Mubi Valley and see it as a place of unremitting sickness and frightening monsters, and the Foi themselves as uncanny sorcerers and cannibals. These stereotypes seem to typify interethnic relationships between Highlanders and Lowlanders all along the interface of the southern edge of the Highlands cordillera. The Hull of the Tari region fear the sorcery and cannibalism of the Etoro further south, with whom they trade (Kelly 1977:15-16). The Chimbu-speakers of central Simbu Province for precisely the same reason fear the Mikaruan-speaking Daribi of the low-lying Karimui Plateau to the south (R. Hide, personal communication).
Southwest of Lake Kutubu in the area between the Lake and the upper portions of the Kikori River (called the Hegigio at this point) is the territory of the Namu Po people who are known as the Fasu. They are the most closely related people to the Foi culturally and linguistically. Across the Hegigio on the west bank are located the groups of the Mount Bosavi area with whom the Foi of Lake Kutubu have regular but infrequent contact and whom they collectively term the Kasua. Southeast of the Foi in the vicinity of Mount Murray live the Samberigi, speakers of the Sau language (see Franklin and Voorhoeve 1973). The Lower Foi traditionally had contact with these people and called the area Foraba. The Upper Mubi people consider the Foraba region as the source of their most important traditional healing cults, primarily Usi, as well as the direction from which the Campnosperma brevipetiolata (Foi: kara'o ) oil tree was originally introduced to the Foi by the two mythical ancestresses, Verome and Sosame.
Linguistically, the Foi language has been classified by Franklin and Voorhoeve (1973) as belonging to the East Kutubuan Family of the Kutubuan Language Stock (located within the Central and South New Guinea—Kutubuan Super-Stock of the Trans—New Guinea Phylum [Wurm 1978]). The West Kutubuan Family includes Fasu, Some (Kasere), and Namumi. Linguistically and culturally, the Fasu have as many affinities with the groups of the Mount Bosavi area as they do with the Foi, and they can be considered middlemen in the borrowing
of cultural traits from Mount Bosavi. The Foi of the Lake Kutubu villages, the Gurubumena, obtained from the Fasu the costume associated with the gisaro ceremony which Schieffelin (1976) describes as general to the Mount Bosavi area, and which the Foi and Fasu call kawari . They also performed the gisaro themselves and called the 'burning of the dancers' siri kebora ("resin burning; scar-making burning") after the tree-sap torches used. The siri kebora did not pass further east to the Awamena, although men of the Mubi villages occasionally participated in it as visitors to the Lake villagers' ceremonies. The Gurubumena also traditionally accepted Fasu immigrants into their villages and intermarried with Fasu. Two clans of Hegeso in fact trace their ultimate origin to Fasu territory, though their more immediate ancestors arrived at Hegeso from Yo'obo Village at Lake Kutubu where, in 1938, seven out of the eleven clans represented were of recent Fasu origin (Williams 1977:208).
Other cultural traits from the Mount Bosavi area were also adopted by the Gurubumena, including cannibalism and boys' initiation. The former was restricted to enemies slain in battle (cf. Kelly 1977:15). The practice of boys' initiation did not involve homosexual insemination as it did for the Mount Bosavi groups, although the Fasu traditionally practiced a modified form of it (in which the semen of older men was rubbed into the navels of immature initiates).
To the south, the Lower Foi maintain trade links with interior Gulf peoples such as the Kasere, from whom they obtain cowrie shell, and the Samberigi, from whom they traditionally obtained stone axes in addition to cowrie (Patrol Report No. 2 1939-1940). The most important trade links, however, are undoubtedly between the Foi and the much larger populations of the north. The Foi have always been producers of the oily sap of the kara'o tree, used by many Highlands peoples for decorative purposes. In return, the Foi receive shoats, pearl shells, and in pre-steel times stone axe blades and salt. As is the case with other groups with whom they have traditionally traded, the Foi have imported several cults and ceremonies from the Highlanders. Although it is no longer practiced, I suspect that the Ma'ame Gai~ cult was in fact the Timp Stone cult[2] of the Mendi and Nipa region (see Ryan 1961: chap. 9; Langlas, personal communication). In more recent times, the Foi have adopted the Mendi—Nipa Sa or Ya pork exchange, which they call Dawa . Unlike their own traditional Usane Habora pig-feast that was linked to the performance of certain healing rituals (see chapter 4), the Dawa is a purely "secular" ceremony for
the Foi. Its primary characteristic is the establishment of long-term rotating debts and credits in pork and shell valuables.
The residential unit of Foi society is the longhouse community (a hua , literally "house mother"). This consists of a central communal men's dwelling flanked by smaller individual women's houses on each side. The smallest such community was Kokiabo longhouse, inhabited by twelve adult men and their wives and children. The largest long-house was Damayu village with a total population of 306 in 1980. This seems to represent the upper limit of longhouse community population. Two communities—Wasemi and Barutage—divided in the recent past with one portion of each village building a new longhouse shortly after passing that limit. Hegeso had a population of 266 in 1980. At several times during my stay, men discussed the possibility of building a second longhouse that would have been used by men whose land was then at some distance from the existing longhouse.
The Hegeso men's house contains twenty-two fireplaces, eleven on each side of a central corridor, and each one nominally used by two men. The longhouse is 54.25 meters long and 7 meters wide. It is built 1.5 meters off the ground, and the peak of the roof is 4.5 meters from the floor. The women's houses (a kania ) are each approximately 8.5 meters long and 6.5 meters wide, and the height of the roof peak is a bit over 3 meters. Each longhouse has a cleared area in front and back called a wamo . The front of longhouse is that end which faces the Mubi River, conventionally designated the "upstream" (kore ) end. The back of the longhouse is "downstream" (ta'o ) and faces the bush (see figure 1).
In traditional times men built their longhouses on the tops of ridges or spurs for defensive purposes, preferably on a ridge at the river's edge so that only one end needed to be palisaded against attack. This remains the pattern today. The cleared area in which the houses are built is bordered by dense stands of multicolored cordyline shrubs and crotons (as are all dwellings) as well as pandanus, banana, hagenamo (Gnetum gnemon ), and other tree crops, and nowadays including orange, lemon, and tangerine. Each longhouse has its own canoe harbor (merabe ) along the Mubi or one of its tributaries.
Each men's house is associated politically and spatially with between two and four others which together form a distinct unit. F. E. Williams, the first anthropologist to work among Foi speakers in 1938-1939 called these units tribes (1977:171). Charles Langlas, who carried out anthropological fieldwork in Herebo Village in 1965 and
Figure 1.
Diagram of Longhouse and Women's House
1968 referred to them as regions. I have chosen to label them "extended communities." The Foi themselves lack a term to refer to these units generically but usually call each extended community by the name of one of its constituent longhouses. For example, Hegeso, Herebo, Barutage, and Baru longhouses are known as Herebo by outsiders. The four villages of Lake Kutubu are known simply as Gurubu by the eastern Foi. There are four other extended communities in the east and south.
Foi men say that these communities formed units in warfare in earlier times. While homicide and sorcery were not uncommon between coresidential men, formal warfare did not take place between longhouses of the same extended community. Likewise, these allied longhouses also comprise units in competitive feasting and exchange, and their constituent adult men consider themselves collectively responsible for amassing stocks of shell wealth and pigs for such ceremonial occasions (see also Weiner 1982b ). Foi men also recognize that each group of allied longhouses comprises an inmarrying community: Roughly half of all marriages take place between clan segments of the same longhouse, but less than 10 percent of all individuals, male and female, from an extended community marry outside of it.
History and Contact
The Australians first entered the Mubi Valley along its southernmost stretch. In 1910, M. Staniforth Smith led a patrol from Goaribari Island up the Kikori River.[3] The patrol reached Mount Murray by foot and crossed into Samberigi territory. It then continued along the Samberigi Creek in a northwesterly direction over several more arduous limestone ridges of the Murray Range. On the twenty-fourth of December, after a descent of 1200 feet, they arrived at a large river that "ran in a fierce rapid through converging mountains, forming a gorge 1200 feet deep. . .. The only conclusion we could come to was that this was the Strickland River." (Annual Report for 1911 :166). Smith later realized that he must have been in error and finally concluded that it was the Upper Kikori.
Smith and the expedition disappeared somewhere in the interior Gulf District along the Kikori, but Wilfred Beaver, who attempted to retrace Smith's journey the following year in the hopes of finding him, noted that it was in fact the lower Mubi River to which Smith had descended. On the twentieth of March, 1911, Beaver's party reached
Smith's No. Thirty-six camp, the last one they encountered. Beaver concluded that Smith had attempted his descent of the Kikori near that point, and he himself decided to descend the Mubi River, thinking it would flow into the Turama (Annual Report for 1911 :184). After encountering the same fierce rapids that Smith described, the patrol was forced to return to their Mubi camp on April 2 and return the way they had come. Beaver later became convinced that Smith and his party perished in an attack by "natives of the Kiko and others of the up-river tribes [presumably including the Foi]" (1911:178) somewhere along the river. However, on April 12 Beaver and his party learned from an officer who had come to meet them with fresh supplies that Smith and his group had arrived down the Kikori at Beaver's base camp (1911:185). In describing the rugged limestone country of the Lower Mubi and Upper Kikori, Beaver passionately wrote, "I can safely say, after an extensive experience of the roughest country throughout the Territory, that the portion traversed is the worst" (1911:186).
In 1923, Woodward and Saunders reached the Mubi in the course of their patrol through the Samberigi Valley (see Hope 1979: chap. 5). However, the Foi were not contacted again by the Australian administration until October 1926. In that month, a Kasere man arrived at Kikori station and reported that some Foi men under the leadership of one Poi-i-Mabu had crossed the Kikori River and raided the village of Sosogo, killing all of its inhabitants save for one adolescent boy. A punitive expedition was led by Sydney Chance, the assistant resident magistrate. He was, incidentally, the first white man to bring back a description of the waterfall that lies several miles above the confluence of the Mubi and Kikori, apparently the largest in Papua New Guinea (nearly 400 feet). Chance named it Beaver Falls after its discoverer (Annual Report for 1926-1927 :8).
The patrol followed Poi-i-Mabu and his associates who fled by canoe. For the next eight days the explorers traveled along the river and footpaths, confiscating canoes and eventually taking five prisoners at a village called Udukarua before returning to Kikori station. Chance also reported that most of the Foi men were in possession of steel axes that they obtained in trade from the Ikobi and Dikima (that is, Kasere) peoples south of the Kikori River.
This was the extent of European contact with the Foi for the next ten years. In early 1936, Ivan Champion made four reconnaissance flights over the area between latitude 5 degrees 50 minutes and 6 de-
grees 60 minutes and longitude 142 degrees and 144 degrees, the area between Mount Bosavi and Mount Giluwe, in the middle of which he viewed Lake Kutubu and the surrounding Upper Mubi River valley. Later that year, he and C. T. J. Adamson ascended the Bamu River and walked from Mount Bosavi to Lake Kutubu. They visited all five of the villages that existed at Lake Kutubu at the time but did not reach any of the Mubi River villages (Champion 1940). After crossing the lake, the party proceeded northeast across the Mubi and were shown a track leading across the Augu River and into the territory of Wola or Augu speakers.
The next year, Champion and Adamson established a police camp at Lake Kutubu. Champion made a number of patrols over the next two years, primarily for the purposes of suppressing warfare. In July of 1939, the men of Ku~ hu~ , Era'ahu'u, Harabuyu, and Pu'uhu'u (that is, Tunuhu'u) villages raided Ifigi village, burning eight dwellings and destroying twenty-two canoes and twenty pigs (Patrol Report No. 2 1939-1940:1). A head-man of Ifigi named Baiga reported the attack and enlisted the aid of men from Hegeso, Barutage, Herebo, Harabuyu, Yomaisi, and Yomagi to retaliate against Ku~ hu~ . Fighting continued and twenty men from the Herebo extended community were wounded. Champion finally led an armed party to Harabuyu where there had been more killings the night before. The Harabuyu men were armed and their village barricaded. One of the constables fired his rifle and the Harabuyu men responded with arrows. Champion finally arrested the culprits and brought the prisoners back to Kutubu station.
This was the only major fight that occurred before 1940, when the outbreak of World War II forced the Australians to abandon the station. However, in the three years of their initial administration, the Australians introduced a large number of pearl shell crescents into the Foi-speaking area, using them as payment for goods and services. It was during this period that the government anthropologist, F. E. Williams, spent four months gathering ethnographic information from the Foi villages of Lake Kutubu and the Upper Mubi. Prior to the administration's introduction of large numbers of pearl shells, the Foi had apparently been trading for them with their neighbors to the north and south. Williams reported that the Foi:
[spoke] almost with awe of the fine specimens which belong to the Grasslanders [to the north of Lake Kutubu]. . .. It would appear that there is in the upland valleys a great reservoir of shell some of which is occasionally traded down towards the south. (1977:176)
After the war, a new station was established in 1949 at Dage on the northeast corner of the lake, and regular patrols of the Fasu and Foi area began. Soon after the station was functioning, the patrol of-ricer appointed a village constable and village councilor for each long-house community. These men acted as intermediaries between their constituencies and the administration, organizing the villagers to carry out tasks ordered by the patrol officer, such as the construction of latrines and rest houses, footpath maintenance, and so forth. They were also given authority to settle quarrels within the village, though unless either of the village officials were head-men before their appointment they would have had little success.[4]
In 1951, the Unevangelized Field Mission (UFM) established missions at Lake Kutubu and at Orokana, on the Mubi River east of the present-day site of Pimaga station. By the time I arrived in Hegeso, the Lake Kutubu mission at Inu was run entirely by Foi, and the single remaining European missionary and his family at Orokana who were there when I arrived in 1979 departed permanently in 1986. The entire Foi population considers itself Christian now, and many traditional practices, of which the most important include the healing cults and mortuary exchanges, have been abandoned as a result of UFM influence. The UFM became the Asia Pacific Christian Mission (APCM) around 1970, and it is now a branch of the Evangelical Church of Papua. In the national elections of 1982, the Evangelical Alliance, an association of fundamentalist mission organizations, wielded considerable influence in the Southern Highlands Province on behalf of the candidates it supported (Ballard, personal communication).
In 1968, however, Tugiri village invited the Catholic mission to establish a station. The mission is presently staffed by a Foi man who is trained as a catechist, and the mission is visited at regular intervals by a priest from Nembi or Mendi. The influence of the Catholic mission extends to Yo'obo village and parts of Wasemi, both at Lake Kutubu, but has made no further inroads on the rest of the still solidly APCM Foi population.
Although the Foi have had the longest history of permanent contact with the colonial administration of any group in the Southern Highlands Province, they have experienced only modest economic development. In 1959, the colonial government organized work on a footpath linking all the Upper Mubi villages which was completed in 1963. During this time, many villages, including Hegeso and Barutage, rebuilt their longhouses on sites along the footpath. By the time I arrived in the Foi area, the path had been upgraded to vehicular standards.
There are at present three airstrips serving the Foi area. Two are owned by the APCM mission and are located at Moro, west of Lake Kutubu, and at Orokana. The government airstrip at Pimaga was completed in 1974. The mission also runs two primary schools at Inu (Lake Kutubu) and Orokana. In 1974, the government opened Tanuga primary school located near Pimaga station.
Government aid posts were established throughout the Foi and Fasu area in the late 1970s. A larger health center, staffed by a provincial health extension officer, was opened at Pimaga in 1977.
Australian patrol officers introduced new food crops to the Foi at the very beginning of their administration. The most important among them were the Xanthosoma or Singapore taro, the Cavendish banana, choko, pumpkin, maize, cassava, pawpaw, citrus fruits, pineapples, and peanuts. In addition, birdseye chilies and Bixa orellana were introduced for their commercial value.
Until 1979, the possibilities available to the Foi for obtaining money were limited. The most common method until recently has been contract labor at coastal plantations. Twenty of the men of Hegeso had by 1979 experienced at least one two-year term of labor, mostly on the cocoa and copra plantations of New Britain and the north coast. The sums that these men are able to save, however, are low and are primarily dissipated in gifts to relatives.
Men and women earn small amounts of money by selling fruit and vegetables to government and mission employees at Inu, Orokana, and Pimaga. Both the government and mission employ a certain number of men as laborers. During the mid-1970s, the Southern Highlands Province allocated funds under the Rural Improvement Programme (RIP) for the maintenance of roads, and a number of young men obtained regular employment in this manner (see Patrol Report No. 3 1974-1975). When I returned to Hegeso in December 1982, however, funding for local road maintenance had been discontinued.
Most men have obtained some income through the selling of chilies to government buyers. However, due to the lack of agricultural extension by government officers, the availability until recently of RIP funds for local labor, and the decline in chili prices, the production of chilies diminished considerably by the time I arrived (see Patrol Report No. 1 1975-1976).
The APCM mission has had considerable success starting cattle projects in Foi villages. Because of the relatively high costs of purchasing calves and fencing materials, most cattle are purchased cooperatively by an entire village or clan segment. The Foi view cattle
in exactly the same terms as they do pigs. In fact, they call them nami kau , which can best be translated as "the type of pig whose name is cow," just as they call the white cockatoo, for example, the ya namuyu , "the namuyu bird." The owners of cattle slaughter them to be sold piece by piece for shell wealth (and nowadays cash), the traditional manner in which they dispose of their own pigs, as I describe in chapter 4.
The most significant and potentially successful attempt at development in the Foi area, however, began in 1979 when the Department of Commerce introduced silkworms. Both the climate and the abundance of riverine garden sites in the Mubi Valley are well suited to the growth of mulberry shrubs. At the end of that first year, Foi growers had produced 1374 kilograms of raw silk, and by the end of 1981 the amount was 4022 kilograms. During the initial three-year period of the silk project's existence, Hegeso village led the Foi area in production, and in 1983 it had nineteen individual projects. The price for raw silk varied between K2.00 and K2.50 per kilogram (PNG K1.00 = U.S. $1.47 in 1979), and it was thus comparable to coffee in its potential for profit.[5]
The money that the Foi earn from these various means is primarily channeled into bridewealth and other traditional payments, although money still accounts for only a small proportion of their total value. The Foi also spend money at the trade stores: these purchases are largely confined to tinned fish and rice, which they give to guests on ceremonial occasions such as weddings. Although the introduction of cash has not as yet had a significant effect on the composition of traditional prestations, other factors to which I now turn have altered them considerably.
Bridewealth
In the ten years between 1950 and 1960, the Foi and Fasu experienced a great inflation in their level of ceremonial payments, primarily bridewealth. This was a direct result of the large numbers of pearl shells introduced to this area and to neighboring Highlands regions by the Australian administration. In 1957, the patrol officer was approached by several village constables and councilors who requested him to set an upper limit of twenty pearl shells for all bridewealth payments. Men complained of betrothal payments ranging up to thirty pearl shells and subsequent bridewealth payment of forty or more
pearl shells plus an additional commensurate amount of cowrie shells in each case. The patrol officer reported:
Previously the initial bride price has consisted of somewhere around 40 items, but over the years if the wife has words with her husband and goes home to father, it is expected of the husband that he brings more items as compensation for the father's hurt feelings. In other words, under the present system, payment goes on for years. (Patrol Report No. 2 1956-1957)
By 1959, the head-men and appointed officials had apparently discussed the problem. They agreed to an upper limit of twenty pearl shells for all first marriages and to make the betrothal payment deductible from this total (Patrol Report No. 1 1959-1960). But the attempt was mostly a failure as they had no means with which to enforce their will. The patrol officers of this period noticed a ``large number of unmarried males" in the Fasu villages due to their inability to raise the necessary amount of wealth. It was reported that in the Fasu area "there is no basic payment, and the rule seems to be to get as much as possible" (Patrol Report No. 1 1960-1961). The same year, the patrol officer wrote a disparaging report on the high incidence of "child marriage" among the Foi, complaining of the frequency of death in childbed of immature mothers. Apparently, this was also linked to inflating bridewealth levels, for it was primarily the wealthiest men who were marrying immature girls as second and third wives (Patrol Report No. 2 1961-1962), and the girls' fathers were agreeing to it rather against their will in order to raise the wealth for their own obligations. "The universal distribution of such . . . complaints lays the basis of the basic economy of these people," the patrol officer wrote. "From the youngest child to the oldest man or woman everyone is in debt to someone else . . ." (1961-1962).
When I arrived in Hegeso, each village had appointed a special komiti to represent them in matters of bridewealth. On November 5, 1980, in a meeting of these komitis and head-men from the entire Mubi area, it was agreed that the bridewealth should be fixed at 37 pearl shells (of which no more than 11 would be of the largest size, worth K40.00 each), 111 ropes of cowrie shells, and 2 bridewealth pigs (no rules were set concerning the cooked forest-game portion of the bridewealth, the ka aso [see chapter 5]). It was also agreed that a separate payment of shells and/or cash to the amount of K100.00 would be made to the father and mother of the bride which would not be subject to redistribution to relatives of the bride's parents. In order to enforce this standardization, the head-men further established
that one of the bridewealth komitis would be present at each distribution to make sure that no "secret" payments above the set level were made.
I have gone to some lengths to describe the changes in Foi ceremonial-payment levels since the time of contact with the Australian administration because, as I discuss in chapter 5, Foi social categories are primarily embodied in the Foi's own rules concerning the distribution and collection of such payments. The oldest men of Hegeso and neighboring longhouses were able to remember quite clearly what ceremonial payments were like in their youth before the advent of large numbers of pearl shells. Some men claim to remember when pearl shells were so scarce that they were not a part of payments at all. Williams described a bridewealth transfer involving a man from Gesege and a woman from Fiwaga in which the total number of items given was "apparently seven pearl shells, seven strings [of cowrie], four shell frontlets, six steel axes, two trade knives and three pigs" (1977:222). Current bridewealth levels are not only higher in real value, they are also far more divisible—they consist of at least 148 separate items, and hence can be distributed amongst more people.
I thus wish to discuss rising bridewealth levels along with what was evidently a rapid increase in the Foi population over the last forty years. Unlike the groups of the Mount Bosavi area which experienced drastic reductions in population as a result of epidemics of measles and influenza (see Kelly 1977:28-31), the Foi population, although it experienced short-term declines in population levels due to introduced disease, rose steadily after contact. The census of the Upper Mubi villages (that is, excluding the Lake and Lower Foi villages) in 1950 accounted for 1638 people. The patrol officer reported that deaths totaled only 16, or less than I percent of the population, and he estimated that in some villages over 50 percent of all women were pregnant (Patrol Report No. 1 1950-1951). Another count carried out the next year accounted for 1119 individuals in the Upper Mubi villages and 852 at the Lake, showing that one set of figures was grossly inaccurate, probably the first one. In 1954, it was reported that between 70 and 80 people died of pneumonia and influenza epidemics in the previous two years and that 84 children between the ages of birth and four years old died in that same period. Altogether there were 208 births against 248 deaths in the two years prior to the 1954 patrol (Patrol Report No. 2 1953-1954). By the last census held in 1980, the population was 4030 for all Foi-speaking villages, an increase of approximately 100 percent over thirty years.
A senior head-man of the Orodobo clan once remarked that when he was a young man there were many fewer people, and that distantly related consanguines and agnates could be included in bridewealth and death distributions. Now, however, because there are more people, relatives related more distantly than cross-cousins or father's brother's children are usually not included.
In one sense, this is a misleading characterization. Bridewealth networks have obviously expanded rather than contracted since, with rising levels of bridewealth, men have been forced to seek contributions from more distantly related and unrelated men. What the head-man therefore meant (as I learned subsequently) was that distant relatives no longer receive a share of bridewealth automatically ; they must first have contributed to the donor at a previous time. This norm of reciprocity has, however, been extended to "close" relatives also: for the Foi, a relative is no longer considered a close one solely because of genealogical propinquity and the coresidence it usually implies. Such ties must be validated by material aid in raising ceremonial payments, primarily bridewealth. The exigencies of exchange and inflation have therefore seemingly served to attenuate the importance of consubstantial kinship among the Foi. In chapter 5, I describe the nature of such ties of reciprocity as define the Foi kinship universe.
Subsistence
The Foi subsistence economy, with the exception of sago production, is primarily based on seasonal variations that regulate the availability of certain animal and vegetable species. The major Foi productive activities in their order of importance are: sago making, permanent tree-crop cultivation (chiefly Marita pandanus and breadfruit), slash-and-bum gardening, foraging (mostly for wild vegetable species), fishing, and hunting.[6]
The Foi of Hegeso recognize almost forty different varieties of sago palm,[7] but they say that only one was native to their portion of the Mubi Valley (though there are myths accounting for the autochthonous origin of this and two other species). The other varieties are said to have been imported from areas further south. All sago is subject to management. There are no "wild" palms, and the clearest proof of this can be had by flying over the Mubi Valley and observing that not a single palm is in flower (the flowering of the sago palm corresponds to a drastic reduction in its starch content rendering it unusable).
Besides providing the staple starch flour, the Foi also use the leaves,
midrib, and bark of the sago palm in the construction of houses. The base and extreme top of the palm trunk are characteristically more fibrous than the midsection and hence are difficult to process for flour. For this reason, these portions are either left for pigs to forage or for the formation of sago grubs. Unlike the people of the Mount Bosavi area, the Foi do not reserve entire palms for sago-grub production. Although the Foi prize them highly, grubs do not constitute an item of important ceremonial exchange among the Foi as they do for the Onabasulu, Etoro, and Kaluli for example (see Ernst 1978).
A single palm produces between ten and twenty suckers during its lifetime and matures in about fourteen to twenty years. Men transplant suckers to prevent palms from becoming too crowded in any one grove and in order to utilize all the appropriate swamp areas they own or acquire access to. In this manner, an adult man usually owns between five and fifteen groves in different areas in the vicinity of the longhouse and one or two at Ayamo, the hunting area to the north.
Seasonal variation in the Mubi River area is dominated by the onset of the southeasterly trade winds that begin in May and last until October (Brookfield and Hart 1966:9). In the eight-year period between 1956 and 1963, Lake Kutubu station received its highest mean rainfall between the months of August and October (1966: table 1). The driest months, by contrast, are November to January. The Foi themselves recognize five seasons based on the appearance of certain seasonal plant species. Between mid-December and mid-January, the Marita pandanus (abate ) ripens and it becomes the single most important food for this time. This is the abate base or "pandanus season." It is followed by the ripening of the Saccharum edule pitpit (gabia ) between February and mid-March, and the consumption of this vegetable eclipses all others, so that this season is called the gabia base . Following this, between mid-March and mid-April, the fruit of the waria tree begins to ripen. The Foi use this fruit in the construction of deadfall traps and the onset of waria hase coincides with an isolated period of increased rainfall in April. The hunting season however does not begin in earnest until the ba ~ ngo fruit ripens in late April, commencing ba~ ngo hase. This fruit is also eaten by forest animals that begin coming down from the higher-altitude montane forest in search of this and other tree fruit. The end of ba~ ngo base in July ushers in the main rainy season lasting until late November or early December and called the me hase , "bush season," or the kagi hua hase , "mother of rain season." Traditionally during this season the Foi would abandon the
longhouse village, and each man along with his wives and children would occupy individual nuclear-family bush houses at Ayamo, the hunting preserve located in the valley of the Yo'oro River and the foothills of the Tida and Masina Ranges directly north of it (see Map 2). At this time, men set deadfall traps and snares and collected bush-fowl eggs. While at Ayamo women processed sago planted there for the purposes of consumption.[8]
Nowadays, with the responsibilities the Foi have to send their children to local primary school, attend church, engage in Local Government Council work projects, and tend cash crops, the amount of time they can spend at Ayamo has been drastically curtailed. Younger unmarried men tend to spend the most time hunting these days, but all Foi agree that most families in traditional times spent between three and six months of every year at Ayamo.
With the cessation of the southeasterlies in December and the ripening of the Marita pandanus, the Foi used to return to the Mubi Valley to subsist on pandanus sauce for the next two months and to prepare new gardens during this relatively dry period. Again, the current gardening system differs profoundly from that which characterized pre-steel times. Older men told me that in the days when steel implements were rare, all gardens were made communally. A man who possessed effective gardening magic would assume the leadership of the other men and plant the first sweet potato (Williams 1977:198; Patrol Report No. 3 1953-1954). This man was known as the kusaga , literally the "spell-base" (ga : base; root; cause; origin). By 1955, however, Langlas reported that the men of Herebo village were making individual rather than communal gardens, due to the relative efficiency of steel axes (1974:27). The magic spells associated with garden construction have also become confined to private use as a result of mission influence. In chapter 3 I describe the differential roles of men and women in gardening and sago making.
Foi garden produce is supplemented by a wide variety of uncultivated fruits and vegetables of which the most important are several species of ferns and leafy greens. Unlike the groups of the Mount Bosavi area who cultivate sweet potato as a staple along with sago, the only Foi staple is sago and it is made all the year round.
Besides Marita pandanus, the Foi depend heavily on the seasonal production of other permanent tree crops: breadfruit; ko~ ya (a Bambusa species that bears an edible inflorescence similar to Setaria palmifolia ); and the new leaves of hagenamo , the tree from which the
Map 2.
Hegeso Village and Surrounding Area
Foi also obtain the underbark used in making string for net bags. These foods all ripen during the relatively dry months of the year between November and April. Each one assumes temporary importance as it appears, becoming the single most commonly eaten vegetable along with sago for a one- or two-month period.
The remaining important Foi subsistence activity is fishing, which is also seasonal to some extent. While the major rivers such as the Mubi, Baru, and Yo'oro are unowned, the innumerable small creeks that flow into it are. Men construct dams at the mouths of their individually owned creeks and obtain similar though temporary rights in other creeks that are corporately owned by individual clan segments. These dams are repaired annually in anticipation of the seasonal flooding of the Mubi River system at several points in the year, primarily between February and April, and September and October.[9] When the water level rises, men place their weirs in gaps made in the dams for this purpose. With the lowering of the water level, the fish that have been carried into the smaller tributaries are trapped as they attempt to reach the Mubi again. Smaller creeks may be dammed completely and Derris fish poison prepared. In addition, the Foi now use hook and line at all times of the year.
As with the Eskimo who Marcel Mauss eloquently described (1979) and the Nuer who E. E. Evans-Pritchard spoke of in similar terms (1940), the Foi provide an example of what Mauss first defined as the seasonal variation of social morphology. The rainy season for the Foi is one of dispersed nuclear-family settlements and minimal group sociality, while the drier half of the year involves the Foi in their collective longhouse community. It is not just economic activities alone that are regulated by this dual scheme but ceremonial activities as well, for the Foi mythologically view the time of their Usane pig-feasts as coincidental with the germination of garden food (regardless of when they are actually held). It also follows that such events as marriage, healing-cult initiation, and mortuary ceremonies could not (in traditional times) have been practically held during the hunting season if, as my informants said, most families resided permanently away from the village at this time. Neither could the collective tasks of, for example, housebuilding and cooperative fishing be reasonably planned during this time.
The Foi's methods of animal husbandry are also consonant with this seasonal residential alternation. Although all pigs are owned by men, women take care of them on a daily basis. Mature pigs are al-
lowed to roam the bush, and women give them just enough food scraps occasionally to keep them coming back to the bush houses regularly. In the bush, domestic female pigs mate with feral boars and bear their litters, after which they usually return to the houses. Shoats are fed solicitously and kept in houses with the women until they can forage for themselves. Since domestic male pigs are castrated to prevent them from going wild, it is clear that the feral boar population is necessary to the maintenance of the domestic pig reserves.
The feral boar population has, however, declined substantially as a result of the introduction of numbers of shotguns into the Foi area during the 1960s as well as from the contraction of disease by Foi pigs, which is still endemic. It is of course difficult to estimate the effects of this decline on the impregnation rate of domestic animals, especially as the Foi have always imported shoats from their trading partners to the north to supplement their own domestic population (so that varying rates of shoat importation would be of little value in estimating the size of domestic reserves). The haphazard methods of pig tending are also little affected by prolonged absences of women in the hunting lodges (though smaller pigs might be taken along at this time).
The Foi themselves make a strict division between their alternating residential and seasonal arrangements. They say that while in the Mubi Valley they live in their sabu a , "bush house," and that these houses are where a man looks after his pigs, makes sago, and plants gardens. A man's sabu a is never more than forty-five minutes away from the longhouse, and most of the Hegeso men built theirs along the banks of the Mubi itself, upstream from the longhouse. There the houses are easily accessible by canoes and adjacent to the major sago swamps owned by Hegeso men. A man rebuilds his bush house every three to seven years, relocating it occasionally in response to the varying maturation times of the different sago groves he owns. In contrast to the sabu a , the houses that men build at Ayamo are used only for hunting and are called aya a , "hunting houses." Men usually plant small patches of certain cooking leaves used in preparing the earth oven in which the Foi steam-cook most meat, and also occasionally plant other greens habitually eaten with meat, but the Foi do not call these gardens.
It is clear that the social-morphological variation I have described for the Foi is, as Mauss himself originally intended the concept, both ecological and conceptual. The progression of the seasons for the Foi
simultaneously embodies an ideational and material aspect, and it would be more appropriate to see both aspects of this variation as merely different refractions of a single cultural conceptualization of space and time. The major difference between the Foi on the one hand and the Eskimo and the Nuer on the other is that residential alternation is more a matter of individual choice for the Foi. No one is obliged to leave the village during the rainy season, and men of advanced age may elect to stay behind. In similar fashion, young unmarried men today often abandon their responsibilities in the village to go on hunting trips at any time of the year. It is the manner in which the Foi themselves interpret the variation in seasonal rhythms that is important. They know, for example, that bush fowls lay their eggs only during the kagi hua hase , and since bush-fowl eggs constitute one of the major categories of forest game obtained at this time, it would be pointless to seek them at any other time. The Foi also "know" with just as much certainty that marsupials and cassowaries descend from their homes in the sky when the cloud cover forms during the rainy season, and it is perhaps just as fruitless to go hunting during the time of the year when they have returned to the sky.
Furthermore, I have already noted that the Foi economic system has undergone great change in the last twenty years, and the benefits that the Foi have enjoyed as a result of economic development have largely come at the expense of their hunting activity. To a very small degree, the nutritional gap left in their diet has been filled by store-bought food, purchased with money obtained from cash-cropping. Even in 1938, however, Williams wryly reported the following:[10]
Meat diet, here as so often elsewhere, is extremely restricted, amounting to a rarely enjoyed luxury. . .. As in the case of fishing, interest in the chase seems out of all proportion to the results obtained. . .. A great deal of magic goes towards this difficult and not very productive phase of the food quest. (1977:199-200)
But it is precisely Mauss' point that economic rhythms are intelligible in terms of the social and moral oscillations of a particular society:
We have seen examples of this rhythm of dispersion and concentration, of individual and collective life. Instead of being the necessary and determining cause of an entire system, truly seasonal factors may merely mark the most opportune occasions in the year for these two phases to occur. (1979:79)
In the next chapter, I demonstrate that seasonal alternation—and the
subsistence system that such alternation represents for the Foi—is part of a single symbolically constituted conceptual domain that attributes a sexual and social dichotomy to the Foi universe.
Chapter III
The Responsibility of Males
In this chapter, I account for the necessity that Foi men perceive to maintain a spatial and conceptual separation between the sexes. This separation derives from the Foi male's view that women possess an innate capacity—menstruation—that is at once the source of sexual regeneration and of lethal illness. Since Foi men lack the power of menstruation, it is their responsibility to appropriate both aspects of this female capacity. They do this first by paying bridewealth, which transforms female birth into patrilineality, and second by transforming menstrual blood itself into sorcery substance, with which they implement male control of life and death.
The contrast I wish to introduce is that of the "contingency" of males versus the "self-sufficiency" of females: Simply put, Foi male identity is not "given" at birth but must be achieved through adherence to various restrictions and regimens, while female identity is not dependent on external sources or artificial implementation. Among the Daribi of the Mount Karimui area, for example, this contrast derives from certain ideas concerning the role of procreative substances in gestation. The Daribi, like the Foi, believe that two substances are necessary for conception: women's menstrual blood and men's semen. Whereas women produce menstrual blood spontaneously and regularly, the stock of semen in a man's body is depleted during sexual intercourse. In order to replenish it, men must eat the fat and juices of meat, for it is only meat that the body transforms into semen. Vegetable food, by contrast, is nonnutritive and merely fills the stom-
ach and prevents hunger (Wagner 1972a :40-41). For the Daribi, therefore, the primary moral responsibility of men is to manage supplies of meat, chiefly in the form of domesticated pigs. Pork in other words becomes the external and divisible accessory to male procreative substance and continuity. The Daribi transform this male substance into its female complement by exchanging meat for women in marriage transfers (cf. LiPuma 1979).
Among other interior peoples—such as those of the Angan-language family and the groups living in the vicinity of Mount Bosavi and the Great Papuan Plateau—men believe that in order for prepubescent boys to achieve maturity they must be directly inseminated by older men (see Herdt 1981, 1984; Kelly 1977). Conversely, other groups, rather than stressing the direct or indirect replenishment of semen, focus on the removal of harmful female substance, namely menstrual blood. Eastern Highlands peoples such as the Gururumba (Newman 1965), Siane (Salisbury 1965), Kamano (Berndt 1965), and Yagaria (Meigs 1984) hold initiation rites in which older men aid young boys in expelling residual menstrual blood left in their bodies from birth. This is accomplished by nose-bleeding or use of cane purgatives. For the men of these societies, ritual bleeding does not end with the attainment of maturity but is a lifelong obligation to oneself if one is to remain vigorous.
The antithetical nature of male and female procreative substances has been the starting point for a number of discussions regarding the opposition of male and female domains in interior societies of Papua New Guinea. Authors such as Allen (1967), Langness (1967), Meggitt (1964), and more recently Whitehead (1986) have attempted to correlate characteristics of this opposition, including the degree of residential separation of the sexes and intensity of male ritual solidarity, with various social principles such as agnation and patrilineal recruitment.
A. J. Strathern, however, has pointed out the methodological danger of such attempts, noting that
. . . if we stress that initiation rites dramatize male solidarity, male opposition to females, and so on, we are faced with the problem of assessing the strength of these values in different Highlands societies. (1970b :378)
It is not my aim to delineate a simple opposition between male and female domains among the Foi, though this will certainly emerge during the next three chapters. My goal is rather to demonstrate how this
ideological opposition derives from Foi men's notions of the nature of menstrual blood and female reproductive capacity, and the obligation of Foi men to channel, control, and transform them. The examples cited earlier indicate that in most interior societies of Papua New Guinea it is the responsibility of men to "become" male, whereas women must merely be "allowed" to be female (see Lindenbaum 1984). The contamination of men by contact with menstrual blood and the depletion of their vigor through loss of semen are both caused by sexual contact with women. Compared with the Daribi, therefore, men of these other societies such as the Foi are "contingent" in a wider sense since they alone suffer the deleterious effects of sexual intercourse and it is they who must impose restrictions upon themselves in order to mitigate such effects (cf. Rubin 1974).
I first will discuss the complementary productive capacities that the Foi distinctively accord to men and women. I then locate this productive regime within an analogously structured physical domain and describe what I call the spatiosexual dimensions of the Foi cosmos. Following this, I analyze Foi beliefs concerning procreation, birth, and life, which they see as a predominantly feminine power, and show how, by appropriating menstrual fluids as sorcery material, men create their own opposed realm of death. Finally, I describe how the opposition between the living and the dead parallels that between male and female respectively, and how men similarly appropriate the power of ghosts for their own life-sustaining rituals of curing.
Male and Female Productivity
Foi myths commonly begin: "There once lived a man and his wife. The man would habitually hunt while the woman made sago . . ." The definition of domestic units is more importantly based on the belief in two contrastive sets of productive responsibilities that the Foi separately attribute to men and women. When a married man and women complementarily activate these two sets of capacities, it results not just in the production of necessary food and other items but also in a socially defined marital unit. It is important to understand that for the Foi and other interior societies, the interaction of a man and woman as a married couple is primarily oriented toward such complementary production (of which sexual reproduction is only one kind). To define this production is to define the Foi domestic unit.
In chapter 6 examples of metaphoric constructions are described
such as oratorical figures of speech, names, and memorial songs which the Foi use to express and create individual identity. These constructs serve to focus attention not on people's conventionally defined social roles but on their particular and individual powers, abilities, and skills. By contrast, the productive responsibilities I describe in this chapter serve to constitute the images of the collective identity of Foi social personae : the categorical definition of men, women, ghosts, and so forth. As I suggested in chapter 1, the metaphors of individual and social identity stand in a dialectical semiotic relationship to each other: It is only against the background of the collective definition of male and female roles that the individual definition of social units acquires coherence, for example, in marriage negotiations. Conversely, it is the variation in individual temperament, personality, and capacities which conventional social roles serve to mediate.
In a general sense, men's tasks are: (1) those initiating ones of clearing gardens, felling sago palms, planting and caring for permanent male tree crops, constructing fish dams, and building houses and canoes; (2) hunting; (3) trading. Women's work consists of maintaining the initial efforts of men by (1) processing sago; (2) planting, tending, and harvesting gardens; (3) fishing with nets and bailer in streams; and (4) raising pigs and children.
Men usually clear a new garden every year. They distinguish between the lowlying riverine gardens, in which they plant most greens, banana, pitpit, and bamboo, from the gardens they plant on higher-ridged ground which they consider more fertile. They reserve the latter for most of their tubers and sugarcane. It is men's work to clear and burn off the bush and collect firewood. Women do all the remaining work of planting, weeding, and harvesting. Men, however, plant the male crops such as banana, sugarcane, and ginger. Depending on the location of the garden, most crops continue to bear for up to a year and a half. The overwhelming proportion of crops in a riverine garden consists of pitpit (Setaria palmifolia ) and the small-leafed green Runggia klossi : Together they account for 90 percent of all food by volume in a typical riverine garden.[1]
In addition to these crops, which the Foi call e~ kima, "garden food," there are the semipermanent tree crops, the most important of which are pandanus Gnetum gnemon (Foi: hagenamo ), and breadfruit. These are considered male cultivars, and men plant, harvest, prepare, and cook them. Finally, both men and women of all ages gather a large variety of undomesticated greens and wild fruits.
Women process sago (kui ) almost every day. They generally work alone or with young siblings or children. Sago is the staple of the Foi of the Upper Mubi and comprises roughly three-quarters of the diet.[2] After a man has determined that a palm is mature, he fells it and removes a two-foot section of bark. His wife then begins processing. She first constructs the sago washing trough from two pieces of the midrib of the fallen palm. Then, sitting perpendicularly to the trunk, she shreds the exposed pith with a hafted flat obsidian blade.[3] The woman then transfers the shredded pith to the trough where she pours water over it. Using a long wooden pole, she then beats the moistened pith to loosen the starch granules from the fiber, and then kneads the starch by hand, squeezing out the starch in suspension. This liquid runs down the slanted trough through a tightly woven bag (arera ) that filters out bits of fiber. The filtered suspension then collects in a palm spathe vessel and the starch settles to the bottom. The woman then transfers the wet starch to another arera or a cylindrical package of sago leaves and carries it back to the village or bush house.
Men and women visit their gardens daily, if only briefly, to gather the evening's vegetables. Less often, a family spends the whole day in the distant garden weeding and harvesting. People return from gardening, sago making, and other tasks late in the afternoon to fetch firewood. By the time they have begun preparing their evening meal, it has grown dark. In the village, the women cook all sago, pitpit, and most greens. Kuikima , the Foi word for food in general, is a compound of the words kui (sago) and kima , which in addition to meaning garden vegetables in general, also means pitpit in a specific sense: the main vegetable of the Foi. Kuikima is food—but it is specifically the food that women cook and provide. In the longhouse, each man cooks his own pandanus, breadfruit, bananas, tubers, and male greens such as ha~ ya, the leaf of a Ficus species tree. When the food is cooked, some children bring the men's sago and greens to the longhouse while others send breadfruit, pandanus, and portions of meat or fish to the women and children in the women's houses. In addition, women cook their own tubers and sometimes their own breadfruit. Occasionally, the women themselves bring their husband's sago and pitpit. Standing underneath the longhouse at the spots where their husbands' fireplaces are, they push the cooked bamboo tubes of food through the gaps in the flooring.
The routine I wish to depict is that of the daily exchange of complementary male and female vegetable food between husbands and
wives, for the Foi horticultural system as a whole is based on this dual division between the distinct cultivational and culinary responsibilities of men and women. This distinction also governs the somewhat different husband and wife complementarity observable in the hunting areas such as Ayamo. It is common for men to go to Ayamo alone for varying lengths of time to set traps, but the more traditional pattern, still favored today,[4] is for a man and his family to spend a number of weeks or even months there. At this time a man devotes himself exclusively to hunting marsupials, cassowaries, and birds, using traps, and fishing in the creeks and streams. It is also men's work to butcher, cook, and distribute all meat (including that of domesticated pigs in the village). Women accordingly process sago that is planted at Ayamo for the purpose of consumption during the hunting season. They also assist men in fishing and in finding the eggs of megapodes (bush hens) that are numerous in this area. The complementary provisioning in this case is that of meat and sago, which represents the exemplary dichotomy of male and female foodstuffs for the Foi.
Men and women also provide each other with characteristic and complementary implements. Women manufacture the containers the Foi use—sago baskets, bamboo tubes for cooking and storing water, and string bags or bilums (though men provide their wives with the hagenamo bark fiber for making bilum string). In addition, women manufacture the bark cloth, from which most Foi clothing is made, and pandanus-leaf rain capes. Men, by contrast, manufacture the cutting tools such as sago shredders (in pre-steel times they traded for the stone blades for axes and hafted them themselves); carve black palm handles for today's steel axes; and make weapons of war, traps of all kind, and most of their own clothing and ornaments.
Complementarity in productive expertise and responsibility parallels the geographical or spatial complementarity with which the Foi view their immediate surroundings. It is important to understand that the Foi do not inhabit a topographical space of absolute direction; rather, the contrasts in their world of space, time, and motion embody the moral contrasts of their sociality. I now examine the major properties of this topography.
Foi Spatial Orientation
The interaction between the domestic halves of Foi society proceeds within a similarly demarcated social space. Outside of the village, a
man, his wife or wives, and his children occupy a single-family house that is structurally identical to the women's house within the village. A wall called the aroro foraba (from the verb (fora , "to cut") divides this house into the men's half (anu a ) and the women's half (a kania ). These two words also denote the longhouse and women's houses respectively within the village: the structure of the bush house is thus a miniature version of the village. There is a small door in the middle of the dividing wall through which people may pass, and through which a woman hands food to her husband. The domesticated pigs are also kept in the women's half.
The division of the narrowly demarcated Foi household into male and female spaces is also replicated on a larger, macrocosmic scale. The most dominant geographical feature of the Mubi Valley is the series of limestone ridges that run from northwest to southeast. The Mubi River and all major tributaries of it have their sources in the region south of Tari and flow in a southeasterly direction through Foi territory. Unlike the Highlands rivers such as the Nembi (which also flows into the Mubi), these major rivers are broad, slow moving, and easily navigable by the canoes the Foi build and use ubiquitously. The ridges make travel along the east-west axis relatively easy by canoe or foot, while making travel across that axis impossible by water and arduous by foot.
Before the Australian administration began work on a permanent footpath in Foi territory in the early 1960s, nearly all travel was by canoe along the Mubi River and its major tributaries. Even by the time I arrived and the original footpath had been upgraded to carry vehicular traffic, most Hegeso men were still building their bush houses directly on the banks of the Mubi where they were easily accessible by canoe. Men also build their longhouse villages dose to the banks of the Mubi and at right angles to it.[5] It is clear that the Mubi itself provides the main axis of orientation for the Foi: upstream (kore ) versus downstream (ta'o ). The motion of flowing water is thus southeastward for the Foi, and they associate this flow of water with the course of human life itself. For the Foi, the place where ghosts of recently deceased people go is a beautiful sandy region known as haisureri which lies far downstream toward the east, where no Foi had ever been in traditional times.[6]
Upstream, by contrast, is the source of water and of the sunset (bane ). The latter has more specific life-giving connotations for the Foi than does the sunrise. A flamboyantly red sunset is a thing of beauty
and pleasure for the Foi, who associate it with marriage; they would remark to me on these occasions, "When we see a sunset as beautiful as this, we think of well-decorated young men and women at dances, and of the marriages of these young people." Sunsets also remind people of the red dye made from the pod of the Bixa orellana that grows abundantly in the Mubi Valley. Men use this dye to cover pearl shells, and it is also the most common facial paint used on ceremonial occasions. The flow of water also signifies the flow of pearl shells that makes marriage—and hence life and sociality—possible.
In one myth I recorded, the Foi identify the moon as a man and the sun as his sister "who follows him" (cf. Williams 1977:317-320). In another myth, the woman is the sun who travels from the east to the west to marry the beautiful sunset man; they are both eaten by the ugly night man. As one travels from east to west, therefore, one correspondingly travels from a female to a male direction. But east (downstream) and west (upstream) have a more literal sexual connotation in Foi linguistic idioms. Unlike the longhouse, men do not orient their individual bush houses with respect to the river or any other geographical point. But regardless of which direction the bush house faces, a man always speaks of the woman's half of the house as the east or downstream side. By the very nature of women's capacity to pollute, they must not only be kept metaphorically downstream of men but are also closer to death than men. In a similar fashion, a Foi always refers to his back and the area he faces away from as ki'u ta'i , "backside downstream."[7] Implicitly, the Foi associate the mouth and eyes—the organs of sight, speech, and ingestion—with the west, the "source place" as the Foi call it (me ga kore , literally "place origin west"),[8] while they associate the anus, the organ of elimination, with death. For the Foi the flow of alimentation therefore also metaphorizes the flow of life and water.
The Foi designate the other major axis of their microcosm as husa ("above") and kasia ("below"). In contrast to the kore-ta'o axis, this one is altitudinal and not cardinal. It is also relative while the other axis is absolute. Husa refers to points higher in altitude than the spot one is occupying when speaking, and kasia to points lower in altitude. An individual designates these points according to the direction one must go when visibly approaching the point. For example, when in Hegeso, Lake Kutubu is always kasia because one must walk down a steep ridge to approach it, despite the fact that one must first cross two higher ridges to get there, and despite the fact that the Lake is
situated at a higher absolute altitude than Hegeso. But the Lake is also kasia simply because all water is, by definition, "below"; by convention as well as fact, land slopes up from all rivers and the Lake.
But it is also clear from my earlier description of the Southern Highlands region that the Mubi Valley occupies an intermediate zone between the interior highlands and the coastal lowlands. North is the direction of the mountains while to the south lies the lower-altitude limestone country of the Upper Kikori River and the interior Gulf Coast. All land to the distant south is kasia , while all distant land to the north, and all places inhabited by Weyamo, the Foi term for all Highlanders, is husa .
Husa and kasia also refer to up and down on the vertical axis. The tops of trees, houses, the clouds, stars, moon, and so forth are all husa . The ground, the surface of the water, and all underground and underwater realms are kasia . The Foi refer to the sky somewhat redundantly as aya husa: aya by itself also means "above" vertically, as opposed to altitudinally, so that aya husa might be translated as "the sky above." The Foi conceive of the sky most importantly as the true home of marsupials, cassowaries, rodents, and other game animals. These animals inhabit the sky realm during the relatively dry and dear months between November and February. With the ripening of the ba~ ngo fruit in late April, the animals are thought to descend to the tops of the trees under cover of cloud and mist, and from there to the ground in search of this and other fruits that ripen during the rainy season. By November, the southeasterly winds have diminished along with the rain, the pandanus begins to ripen, and the animals, along with the clouds, ascend to the sky again.
The Foi expression "to hunt" is formed from the adverb ayaye , which is the word aya ("above") plus the adverbial suffix -ye . A man who is going hunting thus literally says "I am going up." Upwards is the direction men must ultimately go to the hunting areas,[9] and upwards and skywards are the directions in which men climb trees to scare sleeping marsupials into falling from the branches to dogs and men waiting below.
Upwards and skywards in general are the realms of male hunting. Below and underwater by contrast are the realms of female subsistence: Women process sago in the swampy valleys; plant vegetables in the ground; dive underwater to set crayfish traps and find other fish. Kasia is also the orientation of the rows of women's houses that flank each side of the men's longhouse in the village. Men's and women's
separate but complementary domestic activities are therefore associated with distinct directional zones. In sexual reproduction, which the Foi literally consider the "work" of married people, men and women also have specific and separate roles. It is to a consideration of these that I now turn.
Blood and Fat: Conception
For the Foi, procreation involves three distinct bodily fluids, two female and one male.[10] The male substance is semen, toge , or more commonly, amena ka~, u au~ , "men's fat juice," as they call pig fat nami ka~, u and breast milk o'o au~ , "breast juice." The female substances are menstrual blood, hamage dafa'a , "dirty blood," and vaginal secretions that the Foi call kanemo ka~, u au~ , "women's fat juice." When a woman feels the desire to have sexual intercourse, it indicates that she is accumulating female fat for purposes of conception. During intercourse, the female fat forms a small "bowl" in the area just above the vagina and envelopes a small fraction of the man's semen. Having done so, the resulting capsule of male and female fat moves into the uterus called ka fa'o , "woman viscera." The rest of a man's semen released during ejaculation is not utilized but merely flows out again after intercourse. A couple must therefore by Foi reasoning have intercourse between ten and thirty times before enough semen is encapsulated to block the uterus and prevent the further flow of menstrual blood. When menstruation ceases, the couple assumes that there has been a sufficient number of copulations.
At this point, the woman's menstrual blood, prevented from release and filling the uterus, now covers the individual capsules and punctures them. The female fat then forms a large envelope surrounding what is now a core of semen within a container of blood. There are thus two layers of female substance surrounding a small core of male substance.
Only after this occurs does the fetus begin to form, according to the Foi. The male semen accounts for the white hard parts of the body—the teeth, bone, and nails—while the woman's blood accounts for the fleshy, soft remainder of the body's tissues. The Foi word for bone is kigi which is also the adjective meaning "strong"; men believe that their strength resides in their bones, whereas their flesh is au ~ wa, "soft." Men also consider it a fundamental paradox of nature that
they should "work so hard" to promote conception and yet contribute so little to the substantive formation of the human embryo.
Sexual intercourse takes place during the day in the bush, preferably on a gentle slope where the woman can lie with her head lower than her feet "so that the semen will not run out too fast." Men say that it is inadvisable to have intercourse in a garden or at a woman's sago stand since the food being prepared there may become contaminated with a woman's sexual fluids.
When a woman feels her labor is imminent, she moves to the confinement hut (yabo a ) where women also stay during their menstrual periods. Confinement huts are cruder and smaller versions of the women's houses, and one is located behind each row of women's houses in the village. In the bush, such shelters are often extremely primitive, consisting of nothing more than a platform and firepit with a lean-to roof overhead. While in the confinement hut, a woman cannot prepare her husband's food nor touch any of his clothes, tools, or other belongings, lest he become sick from contamination with female fluids.
When ready to give birth, a woman's dose female relatives, her mother and/or sisters, stay in the birth hut to aid her. Unrelated women often assist also, though if such women materially aid the mother during the birth and confinement, for example, by bringing firewood and doing household chores, they are entitled to receive a payment of between one and four ropes of cowrie from the woman's husband. When the woman goes into labor, the other women hold her upright in a squatting position. The infant is placed in a palm spathe vessel identical to the ones used to collect sago, and one of the women cuts the umbilical cord with a fresh bamboo razor. The placenta is called the uni go ~ , "heavy bilum," or u'ubi uni go~ , "heavy child bilum"; it is disposed of quickly by burial as it is considered dangerous to the mother.
The infant and mother stay in the confinement hut eleven days if the child is male and nine if it is female.[11] After the mother formally shows the child to its father at the end of this period, she returns to her woman's house with the child and resumes her normal duties.
Women have the capacity to turn their own procreative fluids into new life. Conversely, men possess the knowledge of how to turn women's procreative fluids into an instrument of death: the sorcery substance irika'o . Like witchcraft and sexual relations among the
Etoro which Raymond Kelly describes, men's irika'o sorcery and women's gestation and childbirth "occupy analogous structural positions within a larger conceptual system" (1976:51). I now explore the semantic dimensions of this structure.
Blood and Skin: Sorcery
The Foi traditionally imported their sorcery techniques, primarily from southern neighbors. However, they consider two sorcery methods as originally theirs: fana , performed on a victim's personal leavings such as hair, body dirt, or clothing; and irika'o which the Foi consider the far more common and important technique.[12]
To manufacture irika'o , a man first secures a small bamboo tube and into it he puts the characteristically stiff and irritating down of the bamboo, the wild pitpit, and the "kava" plant (Piper methysticum ). One practitioner mentioned that stinging insects such as biting ants, wasps, and so on could also be added at this point. After the man collects these items, in traditional times he would secretly approach the open platform coffin of a deceased woman, preferably one who was light-skinned and/or who had died in childbirth. He then inserted the tube into the dead woman's vagina and allowed the fluids of decomposition to collect in the tube.
At the beginning of effective missionary influence and Australian administration of the area during the early 1960s, the Foi drastically altered their burial customs. Traditionally, they placed a dead body on the raised coffin for thirty-seven days until decomposition was nearly total, after which they permanently removed the bones. The mission and colonial government however insisted on immediate deep burial for health purposes, and the use of the exposure coffin ended sometime in the later 1960s. Given this situation, practitioners of irika'o sorcery have turned to the use of vaginal fluids from living, menstruating women (and in such cases I was told that only one's true sister would be a suitably trustworthy contributor).
When the sorcerer has collected these fluids, he seals the bamboo and conceals it on the top of his fireplace. Over the next two months its contents gradually dry into what the Foi describe as a "gritty powder" at which time it is ready to use. Depending on the source of the female fluids (that is, whether the woman was alive or dead; whether she died in childbirth or not; whether she was light-skinned or not) the powder is of variable strength and takes anything from several
minutes to four days to kill the victim. Men call the instantly lethal variety so'o sae~ irika'o, "tobacco-rolling-leaf irika'o ," and the more gradual one sosomagoro , "stale."
When the powder is ready, the sorcerer contrives to sprinkle a small quantity on his victim's sleeping mat or directly on the victim's chest while he is sleeping. The Foi do not associate any particular symptoms with the effects of the poison; it is the sudden, unexplained death itself that is the indication of irika'o . Such a death, Foi men say, is often preceded by dizziness, abdominal and muscle pains, internal bleeding, and loss of consciousness.
The Foi consider irika'o primarily as a weapon that a cuckolded man uses against his wife's lover. They say that it is thieves who are most commonly sorcerized, but the Foi verb agiko- or agima- ("to steal") has as its strict meaning "to steal another man's wife (in adultery)." The act of adultery itself is referred to as fageni- (literally "to break open and eat"). During the course of my fieldwork, older Foi men constantly used to express their suspicions that younger unmarried men sought to seduce their wives. Because of the protracted bride-wealth payments a man is obliged to accumulate for his sons' and younger brothers' wives, it was not unusual, even in earlier times, for men to be well into their twenties before securing their first wife. Older men were convinced that unmarried men habitually indulged themselves in adulterous liasons with married women in order to revenge themselves on the recalcitrance of their older male relatives. Against this, an older man, especially one no longer physically vigorous, had but one weapon, and that was irika'o .
The implications are as follows: in socially approved sexual intercourse (that is, between a married man and woman), women turn their menstrual blood into life. Against socially disapproved adultery, men turn menstrual blood into an instrument of death. Women use their reproductivity to bear children for their husbands; men transform such a reproductive capacity into a lethal substance to protect their rights in the former. From the point of view of the male adulterer, his lover is doubly contaminating: both she and her husband can "pollute" him. But the sorcerer, in effect, replaces the relatively nonlethal contamination of his living wife with the more potent one of a dead woman. Morally approved sex turns a contaminating substance, menstrual blood, into new life, while sorcery conserves and enhances its debilitating properties.
When sorcery experts turn menstrual blood into irika'o poison, it
becomes a valuable, like women themselves, and other men can purchase it with shell wealth (or nowadays money).[13] Depending on the known strength of the poison, a man might pay a single pearl shell valued between K8 and K20 for a small amount, and up to K50 to K100 for a single bamboo. Men therefore control the bifarious properties of women's menstrual blood through the manipulation of wealth: by paying bridewealth they turn menstrual blood into patrilineal continuity and by purchasing irika'o , they appropriate its lethal properties in defense of these patrifilial responsibilities.
But of course, if men can appropriate female substance for lethal purposes, women can use it themselves. Men build separate houses for their wives and forbid women to handle their food during their menstrual period and childbirth so that men will not be contaminated with female blood. But nothing can prevent a willful woman from deliberately introducing such substances into her husband's food, or merely exposing her genitals over them. Such contamination causes dorobage sickness whose symptoms are primarily those of aging: arthritic joints, shortness of breath, loss of strength, coarsening and slackening of skin, and so forth. Men afflicted in this way are called dorobagemena , and of them it is said that their wives, either deliberately or through carelessness, are responsible for their condition.
It is therefore men's responsibility to avoid antagonizing their wives to the point where they might consider subjecting their husbands to such contamination. A man must be generous to his wife's brothers and father and prompt in his bridewealth obligations. He must regularly supply his wife and children with portions of meat and fish. In a sense then, Foi women are "born" sorcerers, possessed of an inexhaustible supply of lethal substance. It is consonant with the structure of pollution and sorcery beliefs that women characteristically implement this contaminating capacity with respect to their husbands' affinal responsibilities, while men use sorcery ideally in defense of their patrifilial rights. The spectre of menstrual contamination, whether in its female form or its male form of sorcery substance, thus occupies the interface of affinal and marital categories and comprises the moral impetus to maintain such categories in their proper form.
Ghosts and Sickines
I have suggested that for the Foi, the opposition between the living and the dead parallels that between men and women. Like women
themselves, ghosts are potentially lethal to the living, depending on the manner of their death. The Foi define the body's spiritual aspect as that which animates the body and leaves it after death. In this form it is known as the amena ho~ . A person's physiognomy is his i~ ho~ , "eye ghost." The i~ ho~ leaves the body during sleep and experiences the actions apprehended in dreams. The ghost of a man who died from sickness is an amena denane or bubuna and takes the form of one of three birds. However, a man who was murdered or killed in battle becomes a far more dangerous bauwabe or taruabo and takes the form of the Palm Cockatoo or other black cockatoo. The Foi of Hegeso usually refer to any malevolent ghost as ho~ gai~ ("bad ghost"), just as the Christian Mission refers to the Holy Spirit of the Trinity as the ho~ wasira ("good ghost").
In addition to the ghosts of dead people, there are other dangerous spirits. Donoma are spirits that take revenge on men who fail to meet their bridewealth obligations by attacking and killing the children of these men. These spirits are thus the most common agents of maternal illness, which I discuss in chapter 5. There is also a specific illness, attributed to ganaro or da~ bu spirits, whose symptoms are jaundice and other liver disorders. These spirits inhabit tabia trees, and pieces of the bark of this tree are used in effecting the cure for ganaro sickness.
People feel that ghosts are unwilling to leave the society of the living and join the other ghosts in haisureri , the afterworld. In order to encourage a ghost's departure to this realm, the Foi traditionally held a series of funeral ceremonies and exchanges, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 5. They abandoned these ceremonies in the early 1960s as a result of injunctions by the Christian Mission. However, the Foi still speak of the malevolence of ghosts and describe them as sensitive to the anger and frustration of their dose living relatives. A ghost perceives the anger of a living relative toward another person and intervenes directly without being either supplicated or deterred. If, for example, a man is angry over not receiving a portion of wealth or meat he feels is due him, a ghost will sense his frustration and attack the person who is the source of his anger. This is not considered the fault of the angry man, but rather of the victim who unleashed the ghost attack by causing the other man's anger in the first place (cf. A. J. Strathern 1968).
Against the constant threat of ghost-induced illness, the men of Hegeso participated in several different healing cults in traditional times.
By the late 1960s, the Foi had abandoned all of these cults. The Mission forbade men to participate in them and when possible destroyed secret cult objects necessary to their operation. However, although the Foi were forced to give up the cults and funeral practices by which they controlled ghosts, they have not abandoned their belief in the illnesses and malevolence of these ghosts. They are now merely convinced that Christian deities offer a more efficient protection against them.
The cults of Ma'ame Gai ~ and Dabi Gerabora specifically concerned the ghosts associated with maternal illness, and there is evidence that the Foi imported both of these cults from the north (Sillitoe, personal communication). The Bi'a'a Guabora cult, linked with funeral rites themselves (see chapter 5), involved the appropriation of ghosts' aid in ensuring luck in hunting (cf. Williams 1977:283-289). The Hisare cult was dedicated to achieving control over the class of Hisare spirits which men believed aided them in killing personal enemies.
The major cult, however, was Usi or Usi Nobora . This cult was practiced in every Foi-speaking village in the Lake Kutubu and Mubi River region and involved by my estimates between 60 and 80 percent of all adult men. Men initiated boys into the Usi cult for the purpose of aiding them in achieving a permanent rapport with certain ghosts. These ghosts gave Usi initiates the power to heal illness and to be successful in sorcery.
I collected several versions of the origin story of Usi which differ from one Williams heard at Lake Kutubu. According to Sesa'ahae~ of Barutage:
In the area near the Moro'o River in the country of the Foraba people to the east[14] there lived a young man, his sister, and sister's husband. The woman's name was Dugunu or Moro'oka Dugunu, and the brother's name was Hobo or Moro'o Hobo. The woman's husband once killed a pig, and she and her brother returned to their home village Yomaisi [in Foi territory] in order to share pork with their agnates. While journeying there, they had sexual intercourse, and upon arriving back in Moro'o country the woman's husband discovered this and wanted to kill them. The young man Hobo found a small stone, the bitter-tasting ko'ome vine and the bark from the banima tree. With another stone, he ground these things up and mixing them with water, drank it. He did this for no reason and was the first to do so. Now, as he walked westward along the Erave River, men became sick. Before this time, there had been no sickness. Hobo's sister Dugunu followed him after eating the same mixture. They continued walking until they arrived at Yomaisi once more. They separated, and Dugunu went alone to Ku- hu- Village while Hobo went to Damayu. At Ku- hu- she said to the men, "I must stay in an enclosed room [a kau~ , referring to the Usi
enclosure in the men's house]. Because I have drunk this thing, there is sickness and I am ashamed. Therefore, make an enclosed room for me in the men's house." The men did so and there she made the mixture again and drank it, and the village was struck with a variety of illnesses. She told them, "It is ghosts that are making you sick but I possess the cure for it." But the men insisted on learning how to make it for themselves and she taught them. The men learned how to make the Usi mixture and the Usi enclosure. The woman went to Hegeso and the Lake villages, and that is why they only practice Ka Usi, the female Usi. But at Damayu and the other villages in the east, they have Amena Usi, the male Usi.
Another version of the myth locates the action atop Mount Sumi, an isolated ridge in eastern Foi territory, near the confluence of the Mubi and Nembi (Tawadobo) Rivers. Two women from the Moro'o River region named Yawame and Faririme began female Usi there, while two men, Somaya and Hobo, began male Usi. They invented the Usi mixture and ritual near the base of a large homono duga tree, and at that time they met the mythical creators of all the other healing cults I mentioned above: the Foi therefore consider Mount Sumi as the source of all ghost appeasement cults they practiced in the past.
The Foi also mythically assume, despite the historically northern origin of several of their cults, that all practices relating to ghosts originated in the east, from the direction of haisureri , the afterworld, itself. Hobo and Dugunu, the brother and sister, move from east to west, that is, from a female to a male direction. Their incestuous act transforms this sexual movement into a vital one between life and death, as they bring sickness from the east (the land of the dead) to the west (the realm of the living). In other words, the two elide the proper mediation between the sexes and replace it with an unmediated relationship between humans and ghosts: sickness. This dilemma is rectified when the brother and sister separate (as they should do figuratively in real life under Foi marriage rules). The sister asks to be isolated (as women who are menstruating and giving birth are), thus restoring control of her curing capacity to men. The myth, in other words, establishes the prototypical parameters of ghost-human interaction (sickness and curing) and of male-female interaction (incest and separation) as metaphors of each other. The rituals of the Usi cult thus represent a sustained analogy on the appropriation of female reproduction. Let us explore this analogy in more detail.
Usi
Older men related the following procedures of initiation into the Usi cult. The leaders of the cult in an extended longhouse community
would decide that there were enough young boys (between ten and fifty) to warrant the ceremonies. These boys ranged in age from nine years to young married men. (Men told me that prior to the abandonment of all cult activity sometime in the 1960s, about two-thirds of all men were admitted to the cult as boys or young men. Membership was entirely voluntary.) One or two of the older Usi men would undertake the task of initiating the boys, taking them all into the bush, while the other Usi men in the village prepared the enclosure (the Usi a kau~ ) within the longhouse. In the bush, the boys removed their clothing and replaced it with a thin cane belt (reminiscent of the widow's dress I describe in chapter 5). The older men forbade the boys to eat or drink and put them to work gathering the materials from which they would make the Usi mixture. These materials were various bitter-tasting vines, leaves, and barks. The boys gave these materials to the Usi leaders whom they called the fa'ari hua , the "coconut mothers." The fa'ari hua instructed the boys to act as if they were losing their senses. To this end, the initiates would spend three days finding small lizards and rats, and eating nothing except small amounts of dry sago on the third day. They would lash the small animals to large poles and carry them back to the village, grunting and puffing as if they were carrying large wild pigs or cassowaries. In the village, they presented the rats and lizards to the fa'ari hua saying, "Here are your pigs and cassowaries." The other villagers would assume that the initiates had already become bereft of their senses.
The boys then gathered in the Usi enclosure, where for eleven days they ate and drank nothing more than small amounts of dry sago and the Usi mixture. The mixture was prepared by the fa'ari hua , who served it to the boys in a half-shell of a coconut (fa'ari ; hence the term for the Usi leaders). The strong and bitter-tasting liquids of the mixture were thought to make the initiates go mad, and during this period the boys would occasionally leave the enclosure and run outside the long-house acting like "wild men," terrorizing the villagers by exposing their genitals and anus, defecating in public, and tearing up cultivars. While the initiates were thus occupied, the villagers gathered vegetable food for the culminating feast and the fa'ari hua gathered the following items: the white exudation of insects found on tree branches and called denane kosega , "ghosts' saliva"; the shoots of the red yu'uri cordyline; red Bixa oreliana pods; male human molars painted with Bixa dye; the juice of the red foreyabe cordyline; and red ka~ i leaves. The fa'ari hua obtained enough of these items to give each initiate repeated doses.
The older Usi men then began singing the hoa chant, a signal for the initiates to gather and begin eating these items. This began the period known as gi foraye hubora , "painting the clay." The initiates were supposed to eat each of the items and then examine their feces to see if they had excreted them. If they found the teeth or any of the other items, the fa'ari hua gave them another dose until the initiates could find no trace of them in their excreta. At this point, fa'ari hua would announce to the public that "the paint has stuck well to the boys' bodies," which was a veiled reference to the fact that if the initiates succeeded in assimilating the items, they had obtained the sorcery power of the Usi spirits and would be a threat to their enemies. But only the other Usi men would understand the reference; other men and the women would think that the fa'ari hua were referring to the yellow paint the initiates wore when this period was over. At this time, the initiates returned to the bush, each carrying a tiny arera basket under his armpit. In the bush, the fa'ari hua gave each of them another male human molar, a man's small finger bone, red birds' feathers, the roots of the waro tree, and other secret items. These things were the "heart" or "fruit" or "seed" of Usi, and the power of the cult focused on them. The initiates kept them in their tiny baskets. it was these items for which each man sponsoring an Usi initiate paid the fa'ari hua in shell wealth.
After receiving the Usi fruit, the initiates returned to the Usi enclosure, eating small amounts of sago. While the preparations for the closing feast were going on, the fa'ari hua taught them how to remove the Usi fruit from a sick person's body by concealing the items in their hands and pretending to suck them from the skin of the patient. At this time, the older Usi men also told them that the Usi curing was a pretense, except for the sorcery power, but forced the boys to comply with the pretense under penalty of death at the hands of the angered spirits. During the seclusion of the boys, the fa'ari hua also instructed them in identifying different types of illnesses, and related to them the origin myth of the cult as well as other stories relating to the practice of Usi.
Each man who sponsored an Usi initiate, usually the boy's father or father's brother, paid thirty-seven ropes of cowrie shell to the fa'ari hua and provided the pig and vegetable food for the feast. When the food was ready, the initiates decorated themselves with new clothing and the fa'ari hua painted their skins with kara'o tree oil mixed with dye made from a variety of yellow leaves. The fa'ari hua also gave
them special rear coverings of aboduri cordyline. As the boys left the longhouse in single file, the villagers would think that they were shining and beautiful "like young maidens." They were, in fact, supposed to be impersonating the female originator(s) of the Ka Usi at Hegeso.
The villagers and visitors shared in the cooked food, but the initiates were forbidden to eat. They had to remain "thin" and "bony" and had to avoid all food with water or grease in it, for fear of jeopardizing the tenuous rapport they had newly established with the ghosts. The fa'ari hua allowed them small amounts of dry pork and sago. "The initiates were not thinking about food, but only of their sorcery power," the older men explained to me when describing this. These dietary restrictions lasted for several days until the initiates managed to trap a gorabe bird. They cooked the bird, and each boy ate a morsel of flesh. This marked the end of the initiation, and the initiates could resume accepting food from women in normal amounts and variety. The men dismantled the Usi enclosure, and the Usi leaders once again hid the secret stones that they used to make the Usi mixture.
I have maintained that the relationship between men and ghosts parallels that between men and women, and I have suggested that the rituals of Usi represent the appropriation of female reproductivity as a means of controlling ghostly intervention. Like women who are menstruating and in labor, the Usi initiates were confined in a separate room "while the ghost was inside them." Their food restrictions were parallel to those normally incumbent upon pregnant women, who do not eat excessive quantities of meat or grease for fear that the fetus will grow too large and lead to a difficult birth. The "heart" or "seed" of the Usi itself resembled the red and white components of procreative substance, and the curing ritual of Usi was designed to remove rather than implant these substances. Just as in the myth ghost-related sickness began as a result of an incestuous act of procreation, the Usi curing ritual removed the symbolic tokens of that act and ended the sickness. Such affliction can in this sense be interpreted as an unwanted "impregnation" by ghosts; Usi men deliberately fostered this impregnation and figuratively became "sick" and secluded themselves (as the Foi quite literally describe women who are menstruating and in labor as "ill") so as to achieve a homeopathic control over and identification with the ghosts.
Furthermore, the Usi ritual and irika'o sorcery stand in an inverse semantic relationship to each other. Sorcerers take the life-giving fluids of women and transmute them into death-dealing poison. The Usi men
appropriated the power of the dead and used it for life-sustaining rituals of curing. Men place irika'o on the skin to cause death; they removed bonelike Usi fragments from within the body of an afflicted person to cause health. This inverse semantic relationship also involves the opposition and structural equation between ingestion (of Usi substance) and impregnation. A man who "eats" a woman in adultery becomes sick from irika'o ; an Usi man "ate" the fruit or seeds of the ghost and restored the health of the sick person.
The sexual dichotomization of ingestion is further reflected in the set of food taboos observed by men between the ages of puberty and advanced middle age. The list of prohibited foods is termed yabo ho'obibira (related to yabo a , the women's confinement hut), and abrogation of them results in an illness similar to dorobage , menstrual contamination. Men explained the list of prohibited foods by saying "They make us think of women," or "Our skins will turn bad," or "We would get old quickly." In other words, these foods are analogous to women and menstrual blood itself in their effects. For example, men do not eat yellow pandanus for fear their skin will become yellow with age; they do not eat red pandanus and the greasy hagenamo leaf together because the mixture simulates the mixing of blood and semen (for further examples, see Williams 1977:247).
These food taboos are also structurally related to Usi practices. Men avoid the contamination of women by adhering to food restrictions and secluding the women in "little houses," a euphemism the Foi use to designate the confinement hut. Men conversely promoted the internal assimilation of ghosts by secluding themselves (in the Usi enclosure) and observing an opposed set of restrictions on consumption (avoiding foods reminiscent of male grease rather than of female blood). By avoiding male foods in Usi initiations, they fostered the ingestion of the Usi fruit and their identification with ghosts. By avoiding female foods, they foster their own male vigor.
The vitality and efficacy of men is therefore contingent upon a wide range of practices that have no counterpart in women's life. Indeed, sorcery and the curing rituals of Usi are a metaphorical appropriation of the incubatory powers of women by men. They seem to assert that although only women bear new life, men can achieve control of life, death and health in wider terms. But such cults and poisons would be fruitless undertakings if men did not also attempt to directly control women's life-bearing capacity. They do this by giving and receiving valuables in bridewealth transactions, demonstrating that men's own
control of procreation is contingent upon the manipulation of extrinsic wealth items. The importance of this activity far outweighs those that I have just described in order to introduce it, as the next chapter indicates.
Chapter IV
Oil, Shells, and Meat: The Media of Foi Sociality
The word for goldlip pearl shell is a cognate in the languages of several neighboring peoples of this area of the Southern Highlands; for example, seket in Wola, and sekere in Kewa and Pole (see Franklin and Franklin 1978:230). The Foi of Lake Kutubu occasionally refer to pearl shells by this term, which they pronounce segeri , but the Mubi dwellers call it ma'ame , which also means variously "thing; something; anything." A pearl shell, in the sense that it can be exchanged for all other things of value, could very well be said to be "anything" or "all things" (cf. Williams 1977:176). This ambiguous semantic reference, the use of ma'ame to signify both the pearl shell and anything else, the particular thing of value and all things of value, embodies the precise meaning of the pearl shell for the Foi. It far outweighs in importance the other main valuable, cowrie (bari ), the use of which antedates that of pearl shells among the Foi.
In this chapter I describe the origin, acquisition, and classification of pearl shells and other shell valuables, and the contexts in which they are exchanged for their homologous counterpart, animal flesh, particularly that of domesticated pigs. To do so, I begin with a description of the one and only valuable the Foi consider autochthonous to the Mubi Valley and original to their society, the oil of the Campnosperma brevipetiolata tree, which they call kara'o .
Kara'o
Early in my fieldwork when I was making my first enquiries about the origin and use of shell wealth among the Foi, men were fond of
saying, "In the beginning, there was only kara'o ." This meant that before they acquired pigs and shells, they knew how to tap the viscous oil of the kara'o tree. It was only when men first collected this oil in bamboo tubes, carried it up to the Highlands, and sold it to Wola-and Kewa-speaking groups (called Weyamo or Fahai by the Foi) that the Foi then obtained the pearl shells and pigs that they now own and exchange among themselves.
In contrast to most of the ceremonial trade of times prior to European contact in interior Papua New Guinea (see Hughes 1971), the trade in kara'o remains vigorous and has increased since pacification. Unlike the commerce in traditional salt and stone axe blades, for example, that died out after being supplanted by Western substitutes,[1]kara'o remains greatly valued by Highlanders and much sought after. The Foi and Highlands peoples use it for decorative purposes and often tint it various colors by the addition of dyes. The Foi mix charcoal with kara'o to make the traditional black battle covering (also used in other ceremonies) and mix red Bixa dye with it to achieve a reddish-colored oil used during dances.
But more importantly, the Foi profoundly associate the collection and trading of kara'o with the achievement of male status, and men consider it the indisputable staring point for the acquisition of all other objects of value. With few exceptions all adult men make at least one trading trip each year, and some make two or three. A large proportion of the trade in oil takes place between established partners whom the Foi call somomena . These partners visit each other's villages with equal frequency over a long period of time. I observed, however, that while nearly all of the men of Hegeso who were active in the kara'o trade had learned to speak fluent Wola, few of the Wola men who visited Hegeso for trading purposes knew more than several phrases of Foi.
The other main items involved in the kara'o trade are pearl shells, pigs, money, and steel implements.[2] To a lesser extent the Foi also provide their Highlands trading partners with black palm bows, live cassowaries, and feathers. Foi men admit that the trade in kara'o is primarily controlled by men of renown, who possess most of the permanent trading partnerships. Many ordinary men in fact do not have these regular longstanding partners but merely sell their oil to any takers.
The shells that the Highlanders give for tubes of kara'o are with few exceptions the very large and highly prized specimens, many of
them large enough to have names, while the shells the Foi give their trading partners, though greater in quantity, are smaller and of far less value. The Foi give both these types of shells and money primarily as gifts to maintain permanent partners and not strictly speaking as payments for large shells or pigs.
In addition to the trade in valuables, Foi men provide their longstanding Highlands partners with supplies of sago flour for ceremonial occasions. The Highlanders consider it a delicacy. They in turn invite Foi men to their pig-feasts and give special recognition to them at this time through gifts of pork.
However, some men do not make regular trips to the Highlands even once a year, and others do not collect their own oil but rather sell the rights to their kara'o trees to other men. Those men who disdain to collect oil and carry it to the Highlands are accorded low status and are called dibumena or poor men. Just as the Foi call a stunted or malnourished child a dibu u'ubi , a dibumena is a man whose social development as an adult male has been retarded or insufficiently formed.
Paul Sillitoe, who worked with the Wola people, recorded a version of the kara'o origin myth while on a visit to Lake Kutubu (1979a ). This myth refers to Hegeso as the first Mubi River village to receive kara'o . The version I collected also implies that it was brought to Hegeso and the surrounding area directly from the southeast:
There once lived two women named Sosame and Verome. They came from a swamp named Pasa'afu [Pasa'a Swamp] which is located near the border of Lower Foi and Kewa territory to the southeast. They traveled to Kaffa [south of Pimaga] until they arrived at the Upper Mubi. Traveling upstream on foot, they arrived at Ganudobabo [a small stream in Herebo territory]. They kept traveling upstream into Hegeso territory until they reached Segemi. There they crossed the river to the north bank and followed it downstream back the way they had come. They crossed the Baru River and arrived at a place name Sererabe. From there they followed the base of Mt. Vivi in Herebo territory and went to Masera'afu and Tugifu in that area. One of the women died at Sebebufu in Herebo territory and the other died at Faibufu which is owned by Hegeso.
While the women traveled, they wore no string skirts but rather fastened the leaves of kafane ferns around their waists as pubic coverings. They were both menstruating and in the places they traveled, their menstrual blood dropped to the ground. From it, the first kara'o trees sprung up, and the swamps they passed through have kara'o trees in them now next to the sago palms. In the two swamps at which the two women died, Sebebu and Faibu, there are today many kara'o trees.
In Sillitoe's version, Verome herself made the first hole in the trunk of a kara'o tree and some of her menstrual blood fell into the hole: "When this happened the tree started to 'menstruate' too and oil gushed from the hole" (1979a :293). The oil of the kara'o tree is also menstrual in nature in that it collects in the interior cavity of the tree carved by a man for this purpose. This interior cavity thus suggests a woman's uterus where according to the Foi menstrual blood similarly collects during gestation. I return shortly to this imagery.
The kara'o -tapping procedure begins when the tree becomes mature, in other words, when its diameter reaches approximately three feet. At this time, the owner of the tree makes a shallow elongated semicircular cut in the bark. It must be deep enough so that the heart-wood begins to decay, and yet shallow enough so that the tree is not killed outright. An improper cut ruins the tree's oil production, and therefore it must be done with great precision.
The owner of the tree then leaves it for several years while the heartwood decays and the interior hole begins to form. When the hole has been covered again with new bark, the owner returns to the tree and reexposes the cavity by removing the new bark. He then very carefully scrapes a thin layer of wood from the inside of the hole which stimulates the flow of oil. This seeps down the sides of the cavity and collects at the bottom, where the owner erects a framework of twigs resembling in miniature the cross-hatched floor beams of a house and called similarly the wage and dufu . The man then covers this framework with kara'o leaves so that the oil collecting in the bottom is protected from rainwater and debris.
The owner then waits between two and three weeks beecting the oil that has gathered at the bottom of the cavity. Approximately one-half to one pint of oil is collected at this time. This procedure is repeated four or five times with decreasing amounts of oil each time until the capillaries of the tree are permanently blocked by a thin lining of whitish solidified sap that the Foi call ka~, u, "fat; grease; semen." According to Sillitoe, this sap is occasionally fed to pigs to encourage the accumulation of their own fat: "Being the residue from oil wealth, [ka~, u] is considered particularly suitable for increasing the size of animal wealth" (1979a :294).
The analogy between kara'o production and human conception and gestation is quite explicit, for as kara'o collects in the tree cavity to be encased by whitish congealed sap, so does blood, encapsulated by
men's and women's fat, collect in the uterus during conception. More explicitly, men make reference to menstruation and copulation in the magic spells used during the kara'o -tapping procedure. One spell mentions a maiden named Wagiyomo:
I am not about to cut this kara'o tree
But Wagiyomo's chest I am cutting
When the man finishes the cutting procedure and is about to make the small cross-hatched platform, he recites:
I am not putting the wage and dufu twigs
I am putting Wagiyomo's thigh bone
I am putting Wagiyomo's shin bone
I am putting Wagiyomo's humerus . . .,
continuing on through a list of all the long and straight bones of the body. When the man places the leaves on top of the platform, he says:
I am not putting kara'o leaves here
I am putting Wagiyomo's vagina here
Finally, when the man is about to insert his small bamboo tube in the bottom of the tree cavity to collect the oil he states:
I insert this bamboo tube into Wagiyomo's vagina
I withdraw it again
Her menstrual blood drips down
Her menstrual blood continues to flow
Another spell for tapping kara'o states that the owner is not cutting his kara'o tree but is cutting the vaginas of Sosame and Verome in order to stimulate their menstrual flow. Sillitoe (1979a ) relates a spell that associates the oil with other similarly textured liquids such as mineral oil and the greasy sap of hinanu magenane (a Zinjerberaceae species called golgol in pidgin). This spell also likens the flow of oil to that of blood from a wound where a leech has bitten and injected its anticoagulant—something the Foi associate with the origin of menstruation, as I shall show in chapter 8.
Furthermore, since I have suggested that the manufacture of irika'o poison is also analogous to gestation, then the collection of kara'o must by the same token resemble the production of irika'o . Like the latter, men store kara'o in bamboo tubes in the corners of the men's house until they are full and ready to be carried in trade.,[3] In the myth, Sosame and Verome tie kafane ferns around their waists, which widows do in real life during their mourning period. The myth therefore
suggests that kara'o has its mythical origin in the death of men as husbands, and thus links the two women's status significantly with the production and use of irika'o .
It is also important to understand why Foi men consider both irika'o and kara'o as valuables, since this chapter is concerned with the meanings the Foi impute to wealth objects in general. Kara'o and irika'o are both substances either metaphorically associated with or manufactured directly from women's menstrual blood.,[4] They are both applied to the skin to cause exactly opposite effects: death on the one hand and the vitality of shining decorated skin on the other. They also connote diametrically opposed kinds of sexual relationships: the illicit sexual union of adultery and the approved attraction between unmarried men and women at dances, when men decorate their skin with oil.
The control of both substances is a major goal in the achievement of male status. But the fact that the Foi consider kara'o their only original wealth implies that this metaphorical menstrual blood is the source of all subsequent wealth, and that the value of wealth objects lies in their association with female reproductivity. That is the reason why a woman is the most valuable thing a man can exchange for wealth objects: for the Foi, women, like pearl shells themselves, are "all things."
I have described the relationship between men and women in one of its aspects as the complementary provisioning of male and female foodstuffs and implements. Foi men view the relationship between themselves and the Weyamo in terms of an analogous complementarity of geography, customs, language, and products. The fact that the interaction between the Foi and the Weyamo is reduced to this exchange of complementary wealth items exaggerates the contrast between each other's additional characteristics, as a similar stylization of interaction emphasizes the contrastive traits of men and women themselves.
This can be stated in another way: Foi men supply the Weyamo with "female" substance or wealth, kara'o , and receive "male" pearl shells and pigs in return, just as Foi men provide each other with wives exchanged for the same wealth items. This is the reason why Foi men observe strict protocols of hospitality and correct behavior toward their trading partners: they are obliged to act similarly to their wives' male relatives. The myths that I analyze in chapter 11 develop these themes in more detail.
Pearl Shells
The Foi recognize three main sizes of pearl shells, small (fufu ), medium (hura'a ), and large (fore ). These have in more recent times been assigned, rather arbitrarily, values of (Papua New Guinea) K10 to K20, K20 to K30, and K40 respectively. Shells of very large size that the Foi are likely to obtain from the Weyamo are termed denane ma'ame , "ghost pearl shells," but Foi men rarely use them in ordinary bridewealth payments. Small pearl shells worn as ornaments around the neck by men, women, and children are called diga ma'ame , "throat pearl shells." They are never formally decorated, are not dyed, and are not used in payments.
The large shells that the Foi receive from the Highlanders are already cut into their crescent shape and dyed with ochre. In addition, the Highlanders weave a string band by which they can suspend the shell from the neck. The Foi do not weave these bands themselves though they apply fresh Bixa dye to shells as the occasion warrants. The Foi decorate large and important shells destined to be used in the main component of bridewealth payments with a variety of objects including small cowries, strings of Job's Tears seeds, crayfish claws, marsupial fur, and a variety of hollow seeds. Smaller shells of lesser value are more scantily decorated, and ma'ame fufu have only a woven band and red dye.
When Foi men are not displaying pearl shells, they wrap them in kunamiki'u , the leathery nest of the larva of the Opodipthera joiceyi moth (see Sillitoe 1979b :147). Men also use fragments of bark cloth as padding. The bundle is then further wrapped in strips of pandanus leaf and bound with vine.
Foi men make use of a number of procedures to aid them in acquiring pearl shells. In the past, before the Christian Mission forbade the practice, it was the responsibility of men to go into the bush at regular intervals to dream. A man would choose a site near a tu'u tree, which has a bright red interior and is believed to be the residing place of ghosts. Similarly linked with ghosts are those sharp bends in a river causing a whirlpool or area of still water. At such sites a man constructed a small lean-to hut and slept there for several days. He prepared for dreaming by eating only sparing amounts of sago. At night the ghosts revealed pearl shell dreams to him.,[5] If at this time the man dreamt of any red-leathered bird, particularly the ya ga'are
(Pesquet's Parrot) or ya koa (Raggianna bird-of-paradise), it meant that he would obtain many pearl shells. If he dreamt of the ya namuyu or ya gedirimabo (Sulphur-crested Cockatoo), it signified that he would acquire many pigs. A dream of striking a woman or clutching a woman's string skirt indicated that the man would find much game.
These were the dreams a man sought to have. But he could also dream of inauspicious things such as sickness or death. A dream of the Palm Cockatoo or any other black cockatoo (called generically ya fana'ayu ) indicated the impending death of another man. A tree or house falling down in a dream indicated also that a man would die. A dream of sexual intercourse with a woman indicated that the dreamer himself would die (I was told that this dream occurred repeatedly to many men). If in a dream a crayfish bit, then the dreamer would have no luck in finding pearl shells. "It means that pearl shells don't like you," men explained to me.
A man required the aid of ghosts in order to dream effectively, that is, portentously. Men believed that those of them who never went to the bush but slept only in the longhouse would never dream and that, therefore, their gardens and pigs would not prosper and they would never obtain pearl shells or trading contacts with Weyamo.
In addition to seeking the assistance of ghosts and the revelation of fortune in this way, men still have varying access to pearl shell magic. This is among the most valuable magic that men possess. Williams notes that the myth of Kubirabiwi—which he relates under the title of "The Place of the Pearl Shells" and which I analyze in chapter 11—is "of value in pearl shell magic. I have heard several versions and they were all told to me in great secrecy" (1977:325, 329).
Spells for pearl shell acquisition further emphasize the associations the Foi make between certain birds with brightly colored feathers and shells and between similarly colored leaves and shells. Williams reports that in the spell mentioning Kubirabiwi and his multicolored croton shrubs:
Birds with bright plumage are also named as having a magical bearing on pearl shells.,[6] I imagine that in both cases the connection lies in the highly prized coloured sheen of the gold-lip. (1977:329)
In addition to the birds I mentioned above, the Foi also associate the following with pearl shells in the spell that Williams relates (1977:325): the furubu tree because of its red leaves; the yu'uri cordyline because of its shiny red leaves; and the tu'u tree because of its red interior.
Another spell also concerning the acquisition of pearl shells, the abere kusa, is recited during the marriage ceremony of a maiden and bachelor. During the ceremony, the bride and groom hold between them a single section of red sugarcane. The man recites the spell and breaks the section in half with a cassowary bone spike. The bride and groom then exchange the two halves and eat them. The groom takes the scraps of sugarcane and wraps them in a red ka~, i leaf and ties it with vine. This leaf in turn is wrapped in kunamiki'u, placed in a string bag, and hung in the corner of the men's house. The basic format of the spell is: "I am not breaking this sugarcane section with this cassowary spike, but I am breaking it with the heart of the ya kegere bird [Rainbow Lorikeet[7] ]; I am breaking it with the heart of the Pesquet's Parrot; . . ." and continuing through a list of other birds. In addition, the speaker recites the following:
With the heart of a wealthy man, I cut [this sugarcane]
with the heart of a wealthy woman, [8] [I cut this sugarcane]
with the neck-band of a pearl shell . . .
with a rope of cowrie . . .
with the rope of a white pig . . .
with the rope of a black pig . . .
If after the sugarcane is exchanged, the groom hears the cry of any of the red parrots or birds-of-paradise, it means he is destined to receive much shell wealth, while if he hears the cry of any of the white cockatoos, he is destined to own many pigs. The sugarcane scraps remain wrapped up and stored in the string bag where they will "pull" pearl shells toward the house.
The second major items of wealth, cowrie shell, is primarily imported from the Kasere people (whom the Foi call Kewa) to the south of the Foi. Men of Hegeso also receive it in small amounts from their Weyamo trading partners. The unit of cowrie wealth is the rope made by sewing shells side by side onto lengths of plaited cane. The cowries used are one-inch long and are individually referred to as bari hai~ , cowrie "fruit" or "egg." The term bari by itself means a cowrie rope. There are two sizes: the long ones, bari ta~, i, approximately two to three yards, and the short ones, bari mano, approximately one yard. Occasionally two ropes of cowrie are tied together to make one, and this is called bari serebodi ("cowrie joined"). A single short rope of cowrie is usually valued at PNG 50 toea while a long rope is worth K1.00.
Other shell items used occasionally in payments by the Foi are
Nassa-shell headbands and earrings. Pendants of Bailer shell and Melo shell are worn during dances but are not used as wealth items.
Like the Melpa (Strathern and Strathern 1971:132-136; 162-164), the Foi figuratively refer to the skin in making a number of judgments about people. Of an attractive boy or girl people say that "nothing is eating their skin" or "there is no sickness on their skin." Every illness the Foi recognize has its appropriate symptoms of the skin. A person afflicted with ringworm or other sores is an object of derision, and old men and women are said to have skin covered with ashes and soot from sleeping near the fireplace all day. Like the shells, bird feathers, and tree oil that are merely extensions of it, one's skin should be shiny and glossy. Men say that their ornaments are bright, and that when young men's skins are decorated with kara'o and bird feathers during dances, they "shine like fire" from brightness.
The verb sano- means "to decorate; to put on ornaments and paint; to dress." But it also means "to turn into, to transform," as when people turn into birds and other animals in myth. In this sense, it is synonomous with the verb i~ ga- ("to make or create"). The putting on of clothing and decorations transforms individuals into their various social personae ; it creates the person in his or her social capacity. When a new bride is about to leave for her husband's home, her close agnates give her small gifts of money, cowrie ropes, trade store cloth, and one or two shoats. This is called ka mosanoira, "woman" or "wife decoration," and the Foi say they give it "to make the bride happy." These items are her "decorations," in other words, her wealth.
A man also speaks euphemistically of his own "decoration" that is his penis. It is the transfer of wealth—metaphorical male decorations—that allocates a person to his or her patrilineal group. And of course it is the penis that is literally the organ of male continuity and lineality (as, for example, the Mae Enga say that a clan is begotten by the "one penis" of its male founder [Meggitt 1965:8]). Wealth items are male things because they transform individuals into social persons; "they represent the creativity of the father" (A. M. Strathern 1981: 680). The groups formed by their exchange are male groups: clans and lineages and men's-house communities.
Shell wealth is the main component of all payments the Foi make. In contrast, the animal wealth represented by domestic pigs and wild animals is of value both as a source of meat and as a means of acquiring shells. Though closely identified with shells conceptually, meat has other connotations that distinguish it from shell, and I now turn to a description of them.
Aname Kobora: Pigs, Shells, and Sickness
The Foi value the meat of forest animals because it represents the exemplary product of male subsistence activity and because, for the Foi, hunting is "hard work." They value pigs because men ideally purchase them with kara'o, oil wealth. Pigs also represent the productivity of a man and woman united as a married pair (which the Foi term hakasame ), since a man requires the services of women to care for pigs.
The generic word for all game found in the wild is aso. This includes bush-fowl eggs, tree grubs (but not sago grubs), flying foxes, birds, cassowaries, and snakes. It does not include fish since the aquatic domain is by and large one of female subsistence activity. Aso in a more restricted sense also means the marsupial family, as in aso tuba, tree kangaroo, or aso bohabo, Spotted Phalanger. Sese is another word for marsupials in general. Rodents are generically termed fagira but are also included in the wider aso category.
The major ceremonial use of game nowadays is in affinal payments, which I describe in the next chapter. In addition, older Foi men told me that in much earlier times, game was exchanged for pork at the Usane pig-feast. Since pearl shells have been available to the Foi in large numbers, however, they have been exchanged for pork instead. In addition, men from Lake Kutubu sell portions of smoked fish and game to the Mubi River Foi at a market held at Gesege village each Saturday morning.
Men raise pigs primarily to slaughter, cook, and sell piece by piece for cowrie, small pearl shells, and money. This custom, traditional to the Foi, is called aname kobora. Men do this when they are obliged to raise shell wealth to meet marriage and other payments. Men are also aware of endemic illnesses of pigs, chiefly anthrax, that can render the animals worthless: a pig that dies of illness cannot be exchanged for shells. This fact encourages men to liquidate pigs regularly at the earliest reasonable time, provided a formal pig-kill is not being planned. [9]Aname kobora is the most important use to which men put pigs in Hegeso, and this section is primarily devoted to a discussion of it.
The Foi say that their bush houses (sabu a ) are where they care for pigs as well as make gardens and process sago. They allow their pigs to roam the bush and forage for themselves. If the pigs return to the house, they are given chunks of saw sago pith, cooked taro leaves, red pandanus pits, pieces of stale sago, and other food scraps. This keeps
them reasonably close by.[10] Women keep piglets in the house, however, and feed them solicitously until they become big enough to forage themselves. Pigs that sleep in the women's part of the house are called a nami, house pigs.
When determining when to slaughter a pig or use it for exchange, the Foi ideally speak of a nami giwei~ ("pig teeth-come"), or in other words, one whose tusks have appeared, though all of the pigs I saw slaughtered for exchange were far smaller. At formal exchanges such as the Usane or Dawa, the Foi speak of a properly sized pig as one for which one large pearl shell (fore ) is given for each leg or arm (gege ) or half ribcage (ka'a ). But at informal aname kobora exchange where pigs are not full-sized, the meat is cut into much smaller strips, approximately six to eight ounces each and worth one short cowrie rope apiece.
Men planning to convert pigs in this manner attempt as much as possible to coordinate their efforts and kill their pigs in the village on the same afternoon. This makes for a festive occasion and a day of intervillage visiting and socializing. A man usually announces several days in advance that he is going to kill one or more pigs and begins accepting the pledges of others interested in obtaining pork. A literate young boy is given the task of writing everyone's name and amount pledged. The pig owner collects the money, cowrie, and other shells the day the pig is butchered.
The Foi say that anyone may purchase pork in this way on these occasions. They define aname as unrestricted public exchange, and oppose it to the hypothetical killing and private consumption of one's own pigs. Aname kobora is also the general term for the exchange of pork and shells or pork and game at the much larger and more formal Usane and Dawa pork exchanges.
The pigs are cooked in earth ovens in the area surrounding the longhouse. Close male relatives of the pig owner aid him in preparing the oven and butchering the meat. Likewise the pig owner's wife is aided in her tasks by her husband's brothers' wives and other women in the village. The men cut the pig into three main sections, the two back legs, the two front legs, and the remaining backbone, ribcage, and head. Men cook these sections in the oven using heated stones. The meat is cooked along with tree ferns and covered with banana leaves and similarly shaped leaves called komo'o.
Men and women gather in the hosts' village in the late morning, the women crowding into the pig-owners' wives' houses and the men
distributing themselves among the fireplaces of the longhouse. When the men are preparing the main portions for cooking they trim from them strips of fat that are approximately five inches long and an inch thick. The pig owner gives these as gifts to all those who have pledged to purchase cooked pork. The pig owner's wife also provides sago and cooked vegetables, while the young boys aiding the pig owner distribute sago, pitpit, pandanus when in season, and raw tidbits.
The internal organs (collectively called nami fa'o ) are not cooked in the earth oven. Men give them to the women to wash in the nearby river. When the women return, they give the small intestine, the amen-anemo nami fa'o, the "male pig viscera," to the pig owner. The heart, lungs, liver, stomach, and kidneys are also given to the men. The women keep and distribute amongst themselves the large intestine and colon, the kanemo nami fa'o, the "female pig viscera." The men explain this division between male and female intestine as the difference between that part of the alimentary tract "where the food enters" and that part "where the excrement forms." Like the pieces of raw pork fat and vegetables, pieces of viscera of both categories are distributed freely to those people who have given shells or money. It is these people who are thought to be performing a service for the pig owner, and therefore the pig owner treats them solicitously.
When the other meat has been in the earth oven for approximately an hour and a half, the men remove the leaves and stones, place the cooked meat on the verandahs of the wives' houses, and begin cutting it into strips roughly ten to twelve inches long and one inch wide. They then distribute these strips to the purchasers. The meat is not consumed immediately but is taken home by the recipients and eaten privately. This distribution marks the end of the event.
A man or woman does not venture beyond the extended community of four longhouses to purchase pork in this way. One can therefore speak of the members of the extended community acting as a pool of shell resources from which any man can draw by making gifts of pork. This insularity had been reinforced by the men of Herebo in the years preceding the Dawa pig-feast held in January 1985, which I attended. Along with other men from the extended community who also participated in the Dawa, the Herebo head-men urged others not to allow shell wealth to leave the community. During my field work prior to the Dawa, they regularly requested that men find wives within the four-longhouse area and deplored the trade in smoked fish and game at Gesege which represented a small but steady outflow of shells that,
they claimed, would be needed to repay loans they secured in the course of planning the Dawa.
But the Dawa (from the Foi verb dawaye gi -, "to cut up and give meat") is a recent importation into the Foi area. It is the Foi equivalent of the Sa or Ya pig-kill complex held by Mendi-, Wola-, and Kewa-speaking groups to the north.[11] The traditional meaning of aname kobora for the Foi is linked to the exchanges of meat and shell at the Usane, the indigenous pig-feast of the Foi.[12] And in order for the Usane to be held, men must perform one or more of the three Usane curing ceremonies. It seems, therefore, that to explain the meaning of the exchange of pork, game, and shell, we must reconsider the sexual and "vital" distinctions I introduced in chapter 3, since sickness is the primary rationale of their definition.
The contrast between game and pork represents simultaneously the opposition between male and female, up and down, bush and village, and living and dead. I have demonstrated in the last chapter that these are analogous distinctions for the Foi. They reflect in their different aspects a single contrast, the abrogation of which is defined by the possibility of specific illnesses. As a single principle, it defines no more nor less than the total range of male responsibilities and female capabilities. The numerous spirit-healing cults such as Usi specifically concern the relationship between the living and dead. The Usane curing ceremonies, on the other hand, concern the other aspects of this distinction.
Sago sickness (kuiremo hubora ) occurs "when a person has eaten bad sago" or when a man has eaten too many sago grubs, which the Foi say resemble a woman's vagina: in other words, when there has been an imbalance between male and female foodstuffs. Women's sickness (ka ma'agari hubora ) occurs when there has been a breakdown in female hygiene or in male and female spatial separation. Included in this category of illness is that affliction resulting from the violation of male food taboos. The third Usane illness, i~ remo hubora, is caused by the i~ insect found in trees and resembling the praying mantis. It is a sickness associated with the tops of trees, but the i~ is also a metaphorical reference to another illness caused by women, since during the curing ceremony for i~ emo hubora two young men dress in women's clothing. These two men represent the i~ and are called the i~ka, the i~ women.[13]
These curing ceremonies cannot be held unless a major distribution of pork follows them (see Williams 1977:266). At the Usane staged
at Barutage in 1966, all three curing ceremonies were held at once (Langlas, personal communication). The implicit reasoning is that a rectification of female-based illness must be accompanied by a general exchange of male for female wealth. In this respect, it is immaterial whether, as the Foi believe, they actually did exchange game for pork in the distant past before shell wealth in contrast to pigs, in the context of aname kobora. In bridewealth transactions, which are conceptually different from aname kobora for the Foi, all wealth and meat by definition is male since it is exchanged for women. In aname kobora exchanges generally and at the Usane in particular, the community represents itself in its male and female productive aspects (as suppliers of male and female wealth respectively) in order to rectify the intrusion of debilitating female influences into the male realm (as depicted in the three stylized Usane sicknesses). In sum, while bridewealth exchange is conceptually oriented toward the (procreative) conjunction of male and female capacities, aname kobora is concerned with depicting their (productive) contrast and separation.
In a more figurative fashion, nonceremonial aname kobora is designed chiefly to raise bridewealth for unmarried men, thus rectifying an imbalance between male and female domains that leaves eligible people unmarried. Single men always represent a dangerous imbalance in Foi thinking, since men without wives resort to adultery with the aforementioned dire consequences. Therefore, the marriage community as a whole is responsible for maintaining the proper flow of meat and shell in order to prevent this imbalance.
In these last two chapters, I have argued that it is the responsibility of Foi men to maintain a proper spatial and conceptual separation of men and women, and of male and female domains in general. When this separation is abrogated, the result is human affliction, the remedy for which includes the distribution and exchange of wealth items.[14] The means by which the community provisions its male members with wives is analogous both to the manner in which male and female goods and services are exchanged and to the way in which human sickness is forestalled. I therefore now consider the protocols of Foi marriage and affinity.
Chapter V
The Solicitude of Affines
A married man and woman who daily provide each other with typical male and female subsistence products interact as men and women generically, rather than as members of particular social units. Similarly, men and women who exchange shell wealth for pork in aname kobora are doing so as male and female members of an otherwise undifferentiated community representing itself on these occasions as an ongoing internal flow of male and female wealth items.
In contrast to this, the exchanges that accompany marriage involve the definition and articulation of specific social units. Unlike aname kobora in which men and women freely participate, the Foi conceive of bridewealth exchange as subject to a set of rules that stipulate the specific social relationships men and women must assume for a marriage to be properly legitimized. Since bridewealth involves the exchange of wealth items for human beings, rather than for wealth items themselves, it represents a different contextualization of male and female complementarity, and the exchange items themselves take on rather different metaphorical associations. In this chapter I discuss the social categories involved in marriage, the procedures relating to the collection and distribution of bridewealth and funeral payments, and the resulting relationships of affinity and matrilateral kinship.
Clan and Longhouse Structure
The most important social groups to which an individual belongs are the patrilineal totemic clan (amenadoba, literally "man line") and
the longhouse village (amena a, literally "men's house"). Because most clans have representatives in more than one village, it is more accurate to call the members of one clan who reside in the same longhouse community a clan segment or local clan. It is inappropriate to term them subclans since, for the most part, the Foi do not conceive of clan segments as occupying hierarchial positions within a segmentary system. For example, members of the So'onedobo clan of Hegeso call themselves the Ibuga or Mubiga So'onedobo because they believe that their original ancestors came to Hegeso from a place near the source of the Mubi River (ibu, "water, river"; ga, "head, source"). They refer to the So'onedobo people of Barutage as Baibu So'onedobo since the ancestors of that clan segment originally arrived at the mouth of Baibu Creek in Barutage territory. Not all clans differentiate themselves solely by reference to longhouse membership, however. The people of the Momahu'u clan segments in Hegeso, Herebo, and Barutage are the Erarohimu Momahu'u as opposed to the Damayu village representatives of that clan who are the Bubia Momahu'u. In this case, the local division of Erarohimu Momahu'u is thought to be more recent than that between the two named subdivisions.
In most cases, members of the same clan in different villages consider themselves related in name only. They do not share land or bride-wealth responsibilities and theoretically may even intermarry. They refer to each other by agnatic kinship terminology because they share the same clan name but consider this relationship entirely putative. Members of the same clan segment, however, believe they are descended from a common male relative in the more recent past (except in those instances where a coresident clan segment is composed of more than one set of immigrants) and say that marriage within the segment is prohibited.
In some villages a clan segment may be divided into two named subdivisions. According to Langlas this occurs if the clan segment "has been large in the past, or if part of the segment is descended from an immigrant" (1974:46-47). I recorded several marriages that took place between members of the two subdivisions of the Aidobo clan segment of Herebo (though the men of Herebo disapproved of them).
Although no clan segment of Hegeso was divided into named subdivisions, two clans were composed of descendants of different immigrants. The original ancestor of the Fo'omahu'u clan segment, for example, arrived from Irikai village in the distant past, while two other Fo'omahu'u men are the sons of a Barutage man who died within
recent memory. Although these Fo'omahu'u men know no more of their genealogical connection than individuals of the same clan name in different villages, they act as a single clan in Hegeso since they "live together" (cf. de Lepervanche 1967-1968). Similarly, there were two distinct groups of Banimahu'u clan members in Hegeso who were unsure of both their origin and their genealogical connection.
Each longhouse community comprises between three and eleven different clan segments (cf. Williams 1977:208). The men of Hegeso speak of So'onedobo clan as being the founding clan of the village. They believe that they originated in the Nipa-Tari area of the Highlands and wandered down to the Mubi Valley following a dispersal caused by warfare. At this time, the original refugee group split with some going to Lake Kutubu, some following the Mubi River to Hegeso (the Ibuga So'onedobo), and some following the Baru River to Baibu Creek (the Baibu So'onedobo). Men say that all subsequent clan segments originated in similar refugee groups from within the Foi- and Fasu-speaking area. These groups fled their home villages after such events as defeat in warfare, overcrowding of their natal longhouse, or internal strife following adultery, murder, or sorcery accusations. The next clan group to arrive in Hegeso was Orodobo, then living at Ibutaba village in the east but having originated in the Erave River area. The So'onedobo men of Hegeso invited a group of Ibutaba Orodobo men to come and settle in Hegeso "so we wouldn't be alone," as the So'onedobo men said, and gave the Orodobo men land and other resources. These two clans are the oldest and largest ones in Hegeso. The other eight clans are said to have arrived much more recently.
When immigrants or refugees are permanently incorporated into another longhouse, they receive land, sago swamp areas, and rights in hunting territories. Both the specific host clan and the village as a whole extend patronage to them that includes political alliance and aid in amassing ceremonial payments. The Foi verb that describes this incorporation is garani-, which literally means "to eat together" but is more accurately translated in the transitive form in which it is used as "to adopt." It also describes the adoption of orphaned children, who are called gara u'ubi. But in fact, the precise meaning of garani- is "to nurture; to sustain or feed; to raise," as when the Foi describe a father's or mother's obligation towards his or her children (cf. A. J. Strathern 1977, who reports similar ideologies among the Melpa).
Adoption, however, is not the same thing as patrilineal affiliation, though the Foi see the two as analogous. Adopted immigrants retain their clan names and may even claim rights in their natal villages under
certain circumstances. They intermarry with their host clans although in time they may become so closely identified in terms of bridewealth obligations that they cease to do so. For example, Haibu, a man of Hegeso Orodobo, married Sugaka of Barutage Fo'omahu'u. Sugaka had two younger brothers, Dafaba and Sare. When their father died, there was only one other adult Fo'omahu'u man living at Barutage, and Sare and Dafaba came to Hegeso to stay with their older married sister. When Sugaka died, the two brothers remained in Haibu's household, and when they came of age, Haibu undertook to raise the bride-wealth for their wives, both Hegeso women. Although Sare and Dafaba still call themselves Fo'omahu'u men, they add that they are really "Fo'omahu'u Orodobo" and their status is not distinguishable from other "true" members of that cian segment. By virtue of their history of contributing to bridewealth payments of Orodobo men and receiving shares in the bridewealth payments of Orodobo women, they cannot marry women of their host's clan. However, they still share bride-wealth responsibilities with their two father's brother's sons still resident at Barutage.
In some instances, individuals can change their clan affiliation. For example, Wa'o and Fagiabo are So'onedobo men. Their grandfather was an infant when his father, a Banimahu'u man, died and his mother remarried a So'onedobo man. Because he was just an infant, he was incorporated into the So'onedobo clan and his descendants are So'onedobo. However, the "true" clan origin of Wa'o and Fagiabo is not forgotten, and other Banimahu'u men use agnatic kinship toward them. The two men do not retain rights in Banimahu'u land and do not cooperate with Banimahu'u men in giving and receiving bride-wealth (cf. Langlas 1974:85 ff.).[1] It is explained to me that the two men's grandfather was "too small to have been raised by his true father before he died" and so was incorporated into his mother's second husband's clan.
Men can also adopt grown unmarried men of their own village. If a grown son has irreconcilably quarreled with his father, he accepts the patronage of another man, often his wife's father. If a man's father dies and there are no adult male agnates in his line, he must necessarily seek a patron or foster-father in another clan. In both this case and that of true immigrants, men say that the host clan "fetches" (vegema- ) the adopted man, and the latter "turns into" (sano- ) a member of that clan.
Not all adoption is permanent. Men, especially those of ordinary
status with several sons who have had to adopt male children of, for example, widows they have remarried, sometimes "send back" these adopted sons to their true fathers' clans when they come of age "because there is not enough land to divide amongst them." This is also an idiomatic way of expressing doubts concerning one's ability to raise bridewealth for many sons. Head-men, who control more wealth, are far less likely to reject an adopted son in this manner.
Men speak of clan segments as being composed of a number of lines of men which they call ira ("trees"). For example, a leading man of the So'onedobo clan explained that there were five male So'onedobo ancestors whose descendants comprise the present-day members of the Hegeso So'onedobo clan. These men are the five grandfathers of the oldest living male members of the So'onedobo clan. I translate the term ira as "lineage" or "line" and define it, as the Foi usually do, as comprising three generations of paternally related men. But unlike amenadoba, clan, the term ira is used only in a relative or contrastive sense; men refer to lines only in opposition to other lines within a clan from which they wish to distinguish them. This is because the clan segment is normatively a corporate group whose members define themselves in terms of responsibilities for each other's bridewealth obligations. Lineages, on the other hand, are artifacts of the way in which men describe patrilineal proliferation. It is true that a lineage, as a small group of closely related men, may appear to be a residential and landholding unit. But it is not a corporate group in terms of bridewealth responsibilities, which is how the Foi define the clan segment. The different lines of the Fo'omahu'u and Banimahu'u clans referred to above, though unable to demonstrate their genealogical connection, relate primarily as members of a single clan. Only in specific instances pertaining to land rights, which are individually held, and control of an individual's marital destinies, which are restricted to an individual's father, true brothers, and true father's brothers' sons, do divisions within the clan segment assume temporary importance (cf. Langlas 1974:47-48). In fact, it is difficult to distinguish conceptually between a lineage and an individual. A man is so closely identified with his father and grandfather in terms of which land he holds rights to, which women's bridewealth he controls, and the name he receives, that in many respects the lineage is merely the extension of a single man's procreative destiny. When the Foi adopted the use of a surname to aid in government censuses, they added their grandfather's name and called it their "tree name."[2]
Men speak of the clan segment as the landholding unit, however, with some of its area—chiefly hunting preserves—held in common by all resident male members. But individual members of the clan segment make claims to certain pieces of territory by exploiting them for productive purposes, and these claims are usually inalienable as long as the owner maintains active use of them. These individual rights in land are passed down from father to son.
However, another of the defining features of the concept of garanobora is the sharing of land and other resources. Clans and men's-house communities are discrete groups largely because their members "live on the same land" or "live in the same house" and "eat together." A man often extends the same privileges to his sisters' sons and male affines (see Langlas 1974:294 ff.), though these men are not usually adopted in the same sense in which an orphaned child is adopted. The longhouse is a group of men with different clan affiliations who have chosen to be solidary in this way.
Residence and Head-Men
The Hegeso longhouse[3] is longitudinally bisected by a central corridor of split black palmwood planks called the kunuhua, which literally translates as "shield mother" or "the mother of shields." Kunu refers to the war shields men used to fashion from lighter bark, some of which are still stored in the rafters of the men's house and are now sooty with disuse. The designation therefore metaphorically suggests that the longhouse is a unit in warfare. Flanking the corridor are two rows of eleven fireplaces each (see fig. 2). Each fireplace is shared by two men who collectively pool their firewood and eat together during the morning and evening meals. These men call each other eresaro which derives from the verb eresa-, "to look after." Men who choose to be eresaro are most frequently brothers, or fathers and sons (including persons similarly related by adoption). When a man dies, his son usually takes over his fireplace. A man calls the person sitting opposite him across the corridor erefa'asobo, "face to face," and calls the man next to him at the next fireplace ki'ufunage, "back to back."
Williams notes (1977:207) that the arrangement of sleeping places in the longhouse does not follow clan lines. The men of Hegeso told me that men should not sleep segregated into clans in the longhouse "because there would be fights all the time." Yet all but three of the So'onedobo men slept in the lower end of the longhouse and all but
Figure 2.
Floor Plan of End of Longhouse
one of the Orodobo men slept in the upper end. These two clans accounted for two-thirds of the adult population in the longhouse. The remainder of this section is devoted to an explanation of this discrepancy.
The four corner fireplaces are called a hiforamai~ , which literally translates as "house cut," meaning that these fireplaces are the ends of the house; they define the limits of male coresidence. The next but last fireplace in each corner is called the a boroso. The a boroso ira are the four main vertical support posts of the longhouse. These fireplaces are reserved for the head-men of the village who in a more figurative sense are described as being the foundation or support of every community of coresident males. These are the only fireplaces in the longhouse that are preferentially allocated. Langlas (1974:240) thus describes the men's house as being divided into either four or two zones, each zone controlled by a head-man. Each member of the longhouse tries to locate his fireplace in the quadrant occupied by the head-man to whom he owes loyalty. This is usually the head-man who undertook to organize and contribute to his bridewealth fund. The longhouse is therefore divided into sections not only representing agnatic clusters and attached allies but also the separate factions of leading men.
The men of Hegeso also speak of the longhouse being divided into an upper and lower end. The imaginary line between the two ends is called aname hiforaye nobo. Hifora- is the verb meaning "to cut" in the sense of a single thing like sugarcane or bamboo being cut into two or more sections. Nobo is the participial form of the verb "to eat." Aname as in aname kobora, translates as "free; unrestricted." Men describe this line as dividing the men's house into two halves, within which men freely share and eat food but between which they do not. This division is therefore an ideal representation of the political opposition between two pairs of head-men and also, in Hegeso, between the two leading clans, Orodobo and So'onedobo. In past times, when arguments between members of these factions escalated, men would have formalized stick fights called ya'o enabora where the object was to draw blood and injure but not kill or incapacitate seriously. Men always speak of these fights as having taken place between members of the two halves of the longhouse and never within them. The one stick fight I witnessed during my fieldwork involved only So'onedobo men fighting against Orodobo men and their assimilated allies.
Members of each of these halves not only literally share food but by implication also share land and other resources as well. In fact
literal coresidence on the same land and the sharing of food are completely identified in Foi thinking; they are both referred to by the term garanobora ("eating together"). It is head-men, however, who most frequently make gifts of land to other men.
The Foi word for head-man is kabe anuhae~ literally "man head." Anuhae~ is a compound of two words: anu ("male" or "man" as in anu a, "men's house") and hae~ (meaning "egg; fruits; seed"). The head is semantically the "male egg or fruit," therefore figuratively an organ of male reproduction. The main portion of bridewealth pearl shells, composed solely of large-sized shells, is called the ma'ame anuhae~ the "head pearl shell" or the "male egg pearl shell."[4] These pearl shells are indeed "male eggs" insofar as what they purchase is precisely male procreative continuity and lineality: a man's right to affiliate his wife's children to his clan.
Head-men are "male eggs" for precisely the same reason. The five recognized leading head-men of Hegeso collectively purchased wives, including second and third wives, for thirty-nine of the fourty-seven living adult men of Hegeso. Two other less important head-men accounted for the wives of an additional five men. These head-men therefore are as much the source of male patrilineal continuity as the pearl shells they control.
According to Williams, the villages of Lake Kutubu each possessed what he translated as "village chief." This man was "the leading male descendant in the direct patrilineal line of that clan which claims to be the first established in the village" (1977:206). The Kutubu word for this man was kabe ga, literally "man base-source," as in ibu ga, "river source." The description Williams gives of the characteristics of a kabe ga are exactly those that the Foi of Hegeso enumerated when describing "head-men":
The kabe-ga is said to give the word for the building of a new [long-house] or for an [Usane]; he will be personally approached by a war party requiring allies, or by a man who wishes to marry off his son (when he will probably contribute generously to the bride-price which the whole village gets together). When a member of his [longhouse] dies he will kill a pig, if he has one (expecting, of course, to be able to dispose of a good deal of it for bari ), and will contribute to the gift which the deceased's kinsmen must make to his maternal uncle. He also entertains visitors and sponsors immigrants, receiving from them a gift of ornaments called [asa'abu hafinibu ], because they are laid out on his [asa'abu ], or sleeping place. He will probably give such an immigrant some land, since as gi-
gamma [principal land owner] of the original clan, he nominally has far more of it than anyone else. (1977:206-207)
The term kabe ga was not used to describe this type of leader in Hegeso and, in fact, the men of Hegeso never spoke of a single village leader. For the Foi of Hegeso, one's kabe ga was the man who controlled the distribution of one's bridewealth for a female, or the collection of it for a male. But it therefore follows that head-men are most often kabe ga in this sense and that the Mubi and Kutubu definitions of this term are analogous. The crucial point is that head-men act as kabe ga predominantly for men of their own clan. Figure 3 shows the men who sponsored the youngest adult males of So'onedobo clan in Hegeso in bridewealth organization. None of these sponsors were men of other clans and, further, all but one were genealogically close patrilineal relatives. Example 6 represents an important headman of the Tirifadobo clan, attached to the So'onedobo clan through the remarriage of his mother, who accordingly sponsored his matrilateral brother's son "because this head-man had no grown sons of his own and so chose his closest adult male relative." Men without sons who aspire to head-man status must attempt to sponsor other young adult men of their clan, as in example 2 in the figure. By the same token those head-men who raised proportionally more bride-wealth for men of different clans were themselves men of small clan segments with few adult men or were attached immigrants of recent origin. Example 6 noted above also was responsible for the marriages of four of his wife's male agnates.
The paradox in the Foi conceptualization of patriliny is that although they say that the clan segment is the unit in giving and receiving bridewealth, the activities of head-men serve to coalesce lineages or "trees" (as the Foi term them) of more closely related males within that clan segment. A. J. Strathern makes a related point in describing the segmentation of Melpa groups:
. . . it is the exchange system, geared to the activities of big-men, rather than any principle of descent, which actually generates segmentation in groups. (1972:51)
Meggitt notes that among the Mae Enga:
[P]eople recognize that the number of patrilineages [in a subclan] is unlikely to exceed the number of important and wealthy polygynists who lived three generations ago. (1965:59)
Figure 3.
Bridewealth Sponsors Within Hegeso So'onedobo Clan (dotted lines indicate adoptive relations)
It is also crucial to this argument to observe that the Foi make a distinction between true relatives (tamaru, "true; straight") and classificatory relatives (for example, doba wame, "clan brother"; abia kasi, literally, "mother's brother below"). They explain true relatives in terms of common parentage by referring to siblings of "one mother and one father," or "breast-milk cousins," that is, cross-cousins whose parents are cross-sex siblings "of the same breast." Such a distinction in genealogical distinction has a great bearing on the definition of bridewealth networks as I shall show in more detail.
It seems that for the Foi, the successful proliferation of patrilineal groups depends on the concomitant success of head-men who can control sufficient quantifies of shell wealth; to discuss one implies the other. But at the same time, successful head-men introduce invidious distinctions of patrilineal distance within a clan segment.
I have noted briefly that it is not only to agnates and adopted agnates that one extends privileges of landsharing and bridewealth aid, but also to affines and maternal relatives. Indeed, it appears that for the Foi, all coresident individuals partake of what Schneider calls a "diffuse, enduring solidarity" and which the Foi call garanobora. As a relational principle, garanobara is insufficient to explain the distinctions within the Foi social universe. The idea of garanobora and the vague coresident sharing it implies is refracted in various forms to produce a set of distinct though analogous relationships. But the Foi system of kin differentiation derives not from it but from an opposed set of affinal protocols. It is to these that I now turn.
The Affinal Interdict
When I asked the Foi why they pay bridewealth to obtain wives they replied, "so that when the woman bears children, they will belong to the husband's line." Just as a man considers his brothers' children his own, so he considers his sisters' children likewise, "since [true] siblings are the children of one father and one mother." A man refers to all of his true siblings' children as his sons and daughters, though he uses different kin terms of address. Bridewealth does not sever this relationship but merely gives the father the right to affiliate a woman's children to his line. A man and his wife's brothers thus share equally in the bridewealth responsibilities of his male children and in the wealth obtained from his female children's marriages.
Foi men say that women "work hard" to bear children and further
say that a woman's relatives work hard to raise her from infancy to marriageable adulthood. This is what they compensate a woman's relatives for in marriage payments. But I interpret this as an expression of a Foi theory of the innateness of female lineality—women can bear children for any men while men cannot bear children at all. When men pay bridewealth, they convert the innate lineality of females into the conventionally or normatively defined lineality of males (cf. Wagner 1977:628-629). This is why the patrifiliative relationship between men and their children is contingent—it depends upon the substitution of wealth items for women—whereas the relationship between a man and his sister's children is not.
But the complementary lineality of males and females can only be defined in relation to each other; each metaphorizes and encompasses the other, and this in fact amounts to nothing less than the continuous and contrapuntal social definition of male and female. A man must be compensated for the loss of his sisters' procreative powers, for he considers their children as much his as their fathers'. But a man does not have the right to give pay to his sisters' husbands to affiliate his sisters' children; lineality is the prerogative of husbands even as it is the "natural" power of wives. A woman's line therefore represents itself as the provisioner of female items for which it receives shell wealth—the "eggs" of male continuity—in return. A woman's relatives are constrained by the norm of patriliny to represent her loss to them not as an aspect of their own male lineality but of their female productivity. Foi men say that with the bridewealth they receive for their sisters, daughters, and sisters' daughters the men of their clan can obtain their own wives. The responsibility of men therefore is continually to transform the sexual productivity of their own females into the artifice of male patrilineality.
The Foi explain their marriage prohibitions by saying that if a man can expect to receive a portion of a girl's bridewealth she is unmarriageable. They say first of all that marriage with a clanswoman or a woman of one's mother's clan is prohibited "since these two groups are responsible for raising one's bridewealth." They state the same thing in somewhat different form by saying that female consanguineal relatives cannot be married "if they live with us and we have given them food while they were growing up." A relative of this sort is a "true" relative regardless of actual genealogical designation, and a man is entitled to a share of her bridewealth when she marries. When pressed, the Foi admit that true genealogical sisters' brothers' daugh-
ters, and cross-cousins cannot be married even if they "live far away and we never see them." By contrast, any true or classificatory relative beyond this range is marriageable so long as "we haven't helped them or their brothers." The limits of Foi exogamy are thus defined by paternal and maternal clanship, but this in turn is defined not by genealogical kinship as such but by the degree of mutual aid and sharing—garanobora, "eating together"—that characterizes a coresident group of agnatic and consanguineal kinspeople.[5]
The Daribi of Mount Karimui also define the members of a clan as "those who 'share wealth' or 'share meat' together" (Wagner 1969:58), in other words, a group of normatively patrilineally related men who form a "pool of wealth" in making bridewealth payments. A man affiliates his children to his clan by making payments to his wife's brother—the child's mother's brother—which sever the claims that the child's mother's brother is entitled to make.
For the Daribi, as for the Foi, conception comes about as the result of the union of two procreative substances, a man's semen and a woman's menstrual blood. A person is thus related through ties of substance to both his father's and mother's clan, and it is this consanguineal link that forges the alliance bond between wife-givers and wife-takers in Daribi society. In contrast, the patrilineal definition of Daribi clans is effected by the bridewealth and other payments that a man makes to his wife-givers to recruit his children.
Wagner (1969:74-76), citing Williams' material, has noted the similarities between Daribi and Foi ideology concerning the definition and relationship of marriage units. Since a woman's bridewealth is divided equally between the clans of her father and her mother's brother and since it is the responsibility of a man's father and mother's brother to pay bridewealth for his wife, a man cannot marry into his mother's clan:
That a clan should at once be liable for and entitled to payment in respect of the same girl is absurd and undesirable, because it would lead to dissatisfaction and disputes about the bride price. It is as if the bride price had become the matter of major importance. (Williams 1977:216)
To a lesser extent, a man is not supposed to marry into his father's mother's or mother's mother's clan, since members of these clans are sometimes entitled to shares of bridewealth for the man's sisters. However, the force of this prohibition is proportionally weaker, as are the corresponding bridewealth claims. The Foi thus recognize a three-generation line of uterine descendants. To put it another way, the transfer
of bridewealth and the resulting patrilineality of males reflexively creates or precipitates a complementary lineality in women that the Foi recognize and which, like a male "tree," is three generations in depth.
Wife-givers and wife-takers define themselves through the exchange of wealth and women. This initial differentiation is maintained by the payments a man makes to his wife's brother to forestall the supernatural sickness a man can send to his sisters' children, which I will describe in more detail below. When these children reach adulthood, however, the force of this distinction becomes eroded and a man and his wife's brother relate as sharers of the bridewealth responsibilities of these children. From the point of view of the wife-takers, a woman's mother's, father's, mother's mother's, and father's mother's clans represent themselves as a single lineality refracted into its male and female components.
It is the possibility of marriage between nonallied and unrelated clans that distinguishes the sharing of bridewealth responsibilities among clan members from the more diffuse sharing that is supposed to characterize all interpersonal relationships within the longhouse community. I have described the wider longhouse and extended communities as defined by an ongoing flow of complementary male and female wealth items and foodstuffs. Here I am concerned with the manner in which this continuous flow is cut and redirected so that intermarrying groups may be defined in opposition to each other.
Marriage begins with betrothal. A man seeking a wife for his son approaches the father of an eligible young girl[6] and asks permission to give a betrothal payment. This is called giahabora ("giving") or more commonly segemi forabora. Segemi describes a mark that a man makes on a path to warn passers-by that they are approaching privately owned property: a garden or grove of bamboo, for example. Forabora is the nominalized form of the verb "to cut," as in aname hiforaye nobo (the line that cuts off the sharing of food in the long-house). A man who makes a betrothal payment marks the intended girl "so that other men will not be able to claim her": the path to the girl is "cut." In a more figurative fashion, the two men also "cut" whatever residual relationships of cooperation existed before the betrothal. The parents of the prospective groom and those of the bride address each other as habomena (male) and haboka (female). These terms derive from the verb ha- meaning "to live (together)," and refer to the period following betrothal during which they will bring each other gifts of meat. This practice is supposed to last as long as the marriage endures.
The size of the betrothal payments varies greatly. In Williams' time (1977:220) it was small, and Foi considered it to be separate from the actual bridewealth payment that followed it. However, in the 1950s the Foi economy began to feel the effects of the large quantities of pearl shells that the colonial administration introduced into the Highlands: bridewealth levels became inflated. In 1957, the patrol officer for the Mubi River area reported that the Foi had decided to set a limit on the total amount of bridewealth and to consider the betrothal payment as a first installment of the actual bridewealth. The Foi nowadays do not therefore consider the size of the betrothal payment as important, as long as it is judged sufficient, and it may range from seven wealth items to fully half of the total amount of bridewealth pearl shells and cowrie ropes. The groom's father gives this to the girl's father who in turn gives half of it to his wife's brother—the bride's mother's brother—to distribute to his agnates.
A betrothal creates a set of categories of consanguineal relatives within the group of wife-takers and wife-givers that I have already alluded to. People relate to the bride and groom as members of the aba busi ("father's side [clan]"), hua busi ("mother's side"), and aya busi ("father's mother's" and "mother's mother's side"). These relatives are defined both by their relationship to the bride and groom and to the primary participants on either side. The men most closely related to the bride, her father, brothers, and father's brothers, and her mother's brother and mother's brother's sons—in other words her patrilineal tree and her mother's patrilineal tree—are called the gi ga (literally "give source") or, in other words, the main recipients, and they receive the largest pearl shells of the betrothal payment and subsequent bridewealth. Other more distant agnatic relatives of the bride and her mother receive smaller shells or portions of cowrie. If one of the gi ga is also indebted to another man for the purchase of his wife, then this man is entitled to a "head" pearl shell and is considered a gi ga, regardless of his actual relationship to the bride. For example, Nabu's father, Mogebo, purchased the wife of his dead brother So-bore's son, Dafaba. Dafaba's first child was a daughter who reached maturity after the death of Mogebo. Nabu therefore became the kabe ga of Dafaba's daughter and distributed her bridewealth.
On the groom's side, the same range of relatives is involved in collecting the brideprice, so that the actual collection and distribution of bridewealth is an affair of four lineages. Although all of the four respective clans as units are responsible for the marriage, members of other "trees" receive and contribute only nominal amounts. Similarly,
the affinal terms and regulations are restricted to these four lineages: a person does not usually extend affinal terminology to his classificatory brothers' or sisters' affines, though he may do so out of politeness, as the Foi explain.
Upon the payment of the segemi forabora, the prospective groom avoids contact with his future bride and is constrained against talking to, uttering the name of, or seeing the face of his future wife's mother. A man must similarly avoid his wife's elder sister and his wife's brother's wife. These relatives cannot eat food together nor can they eat food served in the same bowl or cooked in the same bamboo tube. The name of this relationship is yumu and the Foi say that yumu is "built" or "woven" (both described by the verb tege- ) as a house is built or a bilum woven. In other words, people in this relationship do not practice avoidance as such but rather positively enact a characteristic protocol that entails such behavior.[7]
A man calls his wife kae and she in turn calls him ima, though they address each other as "man" and "woman" (kabe and ka respectively). After the woman bears her first child, they usually address each other teknonymously by the child's name.
An individual addresses all other affines by specific terms that, like all Foi kinship terms, are reciprocal. A man calls his wife's father (WF) and father's brothers (FB) and his wife's mother's brothers (WMB) kauwa. He is forbidden from mentioning these men's names but is not prohibited from seeing their faces or speaking to them, though he acts in an overly formal and restrained manner toward them. Male kauwa are similarly constrained against sharing food from the same plate and touching each other. A man also calls his wife's mother's brother's wife (WMBW) and wife's father's sister (WFZ) aya, which is the same term used between an individual of either sex and his father's mother (FM) or mother's mother (MM). The constraints on food sharing and name avoidance are similar to those between kauwa. A woman calls her husband's father (HF) and husband's mother's brother (HMB) kauwa and her HM, HMBW, and HFZ (husband's father's sister) aya, and the corresponding protocols of behavior are identical to those described for a male.
The relationships between siblings-in-law are, by contrast, free from constraint. A man calls his WB and WZ kabusi, which literally translates as "wife's side" or "woman's side." A man in turn calls his ZH base (this is the only instance of nonreciprocal terminological usage apart from husband and wife terms). A woman calls her HB karege
and her HZ kena'ae. These affines may share food freely and converse without restraint. I will introduce other aspects of affinal terminology when I discuss the total range of Foi kinship terminology usages.
Betrothal thus draws a sharp boundary, as does aname hiforaye nobo, between groups who share food amongst themselves and those who do not share food and do exchange women and wealth between them. It is from this initial interdiction that the entirety of the Foi social universe devolves, as I will demonstrate shortly. It is also important to my argument to show that the distinction between wife-givers and wife-takers cannot be privileged analytically over the analogous distinctions between male and female domains I have already described. Observing the proper restraint toward affines—"building yumu, " and so forth—is no more nor less important than men's avoidance of female menstrual blood, or the exchange of "female" kara'o for "male" pearl shells between Foi and Weyamo. Similarly, a man does not eat from the same bowl as his wife for fear of contamination and illness, and this ideology cannot be said to be more basic than similar constraints on food sharing between kauwa, aya, and yumu. Having represented themselves as complementary exchangers of male and female productivity, these relatives must maintain this differentiation by commuting all interpersonal interaction to that which generally applies to males and females. The relationship between Foi affines is thus not determined by a biological, universal fact of kinship and parentage but is rather predicated in terms of the manner in which the Foi conceptualize intersexual mediation in its most pervasive form. A single idiom inflects all of these domains: that of the perceived necessity to transform female productivity into male continuity.
Bridewealth Transactions and Networks
I now consider the composition and formal distribution of bride-wealth and participation in marriage payments. The Foi say that the bridewealth (buruga ) consists first of thirty-seven ("one hand"[8] ) pearl shells, of which no more than twelve must be large pearl shells: six of K40.00 value and six of K20.00 value. These are the ma'ame anuhae~ the "head pearl shells." They represent the main component of the payment and the groom's father[9] gives them privately to the gi ga, the "main recipients" of the bride's side before the public distribution of the remainder of the bridewealth. The remaining twenty-five pearl
shells are of the smaller variety valued between K10.00 and K20.00. The bride's relatives receive and distribute these to classificatory relatives of the bride on the day of the marriage. This portion also consists of three times thirty-seven ("three hands") cowrie ropes (bari ). One "hand" is set aside by the groom's father for those women who bring gifts of sago-washing baskets (arera ) for the bride, and so the cowrie ropes are called the arera bari (though women also bring other female domestic items such as string bags and pandanus-leaf rain capes). Another thirty-seven ropes (one hand) must be of the long variety (bari ta'i ), and these are the ka bari, "woman/wife cowrie." The remaining "hand" consists of the buruga bari, "bridewealth cowrie," but is also referred to as the kunubua bari ("central corridor cowrie") as the small pearl shells are sometimes called the kunuhua ma'ame, because they are publicly displayed and distributed in the longhouse of the groom on the day of the marriage (even though the ka bari, the long cowrie ropes, are also displayed and distributed in this manner).
The groom's family must present all of these shells before the bride can be taken to the groom's house. But after the couple begins cohabiting, the groom's father must bring portions of cooked meat to the bride's relatives. This is the ka aso, "woman/wife marsupial." There is no set amount of meat that must be given, and the groom's father usually brings it piecemeal so that a woman's relatives often complain for years following the marriage that they have not received enough meat. Finally, upon the birth of the bride's first child, the groom's father gives two live pigs, one to the bride's father's side and one to the bride's mother's side. These are the buruga nami, the "bridewealth pigs," and their transfer marks the end of payment obligations on the part of the groom's relatives. Table 1 summarizes the sequence of marriage payments.
If the groom's father has not given the head pearl shells at the time of betrothal, he must do so before the public distribution of smaller shell items. When he has obtained the necessary amount of properly sized shells, he sends word to the bride's main recipients who come to inspect them. The groom's father formally displays the shells by propping them up against the pillow bar of his sleeping area—putting the "head" pearl shells where his own head belongs, as it were. The bride's relatives on both the father's and mother's side who represent the wife-givers, silently inspect the shells without touching them. Then, one by one, the men take them and closely scrutinize them from all
TABLE 1 | |
1. | segemi forabora ("betrothal payment"): given to main recipients on the bride's side. |
2. | ma'ame giga ("give-base pearl shells"): primary component of bridewealth given to main recipients on bride's side. |
3. | arera ("sago-washing baskets"): articles of female domestic labor given by adult females of bride's village to the bride. |
4. | arera bari ("sago basket cowrie"): given by groom's father in repayment for item 3. |
5. | kunuhua ma'ame ("longhouse corridor pearl shells"): small pearl shells given to distant consanguineal relatives on the day of the marriage. |
6. | (a) kunuhua bari ("longhouse corridor cowrie"): cowrie ropes given to distant consanguineal relatives on the day of the marriage. (b) ka bari ("woman/wife cowrie"): long ropes of cowrie distributed along with the kunuhua bari. |
7. | ka mosanoira ("woman decoration"): small gifts of wealth given to the bride by her close agnates. |
8. | unnamed payment given to bride's agnates by the groom's father in return for ka mosanoira |
9. | ka aso ("woman marsupial"): gifts of meat made to bride's relatives. |
10. | buruga nami ("bridewealth pig"): two live pigs presented to the bride's mother's and father's clan upon the birth of the first child. |
angles. The bride's relatives and the groom's father are aware of how stylized this interaction is: the bride's father is apologetic for the poor quality of the shells and refers to his poverty. The bride's relatives receive this self-exculpation with an arrogant lack of sympathy and berate the man for "wasting his shell wealth on food to fill his stomach." Each of the main recipients chooses the particular shell he wants, wraps it up again, and takes it back with him.
The interval between the giving of the head pearl shells and the public distribution of the remainder of the bridewealth varies between several months and a year, during which time the groom's relatives accumulate the cowrie ropes and small pearl shells. When the groom's father has secured the entire amount, he sends word for the bride's relatives to gather at his longhouse to distribute it.
Like aname kobora, the day of a bridewealth distribution is an occasion of festivity. On two occasions men timed their distributions so that two women's bridewealth payments occurred simultaneously, reflecting the Foi attitude that the entire longhouse community should participate in a marriage transaction. The wives of the groom's consanguineal relatives and his female agnates spend the morning cooking sago, pitpit, and other vegetables. Men purchase tins of fish and rice from the trade store and gather pineapples, ginger root, and red pandanus when in season. At midday, the bride's relatives arrive (if they belong to a different village). The women of the bride's village come first, walking in single file. Hanging from the head of each one is a new sago-washing basket (or string bag, and so forth), the "trousseau" they bring for the bride. The women gather in the house of the groom's mother (if it is a different village) or the bride's mother (if it is the same village). The bride's mother collects each gift and notes the identity of each donor. The bride sits silently next to her mother with a new bark cloak covering her head[10] and acts in a constrained manner. The groom's father then divides the thirty-seven arera bari between the bride's father and mother's brother, who, in consultation with the bride's mother, distribute one to each woman who brought one arera bridal gift; these women are either paternal or maternal relatives of the bride or wives of similarly related men.
At the completion of this distribution, if the bride and groom are of the same village, the bride's mother and mother's sister lead her formally to the groom's mother's house. The bride walks with downcast eyes and with great reluctance, so that the older women appear to be pulling her along against her will. Inside her husband's mother's house, the bride sits with head bowed and her cloak covering her face, avoiding her husband's parents. The groom, meanwhile, is likely to be absent entirely from the village because he feels "great shame."
The men of the bride's village arrive following the women, also walking in single file, and seat themselves amongst the fireplaces of the men's house. After the women's arera bari has been given out, the groom's father prepares the pearl shells and cowrie for distribution in the longhouse. He lays the cowrie out on the central corridor and places the pearl shells in two rows on top of them. They are displayed in this manner for several minutes before the bride's father and mother's brother approach them and divide the shells equally between them. These two men, assisted by one or two others, make the distributions simultaneously to the classificatory paternal and maternal male rela-
tives of the bride respectively, calling out each name and handing out first the pearl shells and then the cowries.
After the shells have been given out, the men of the longhouse distribute the cooked food, which everyone present shares: first, appetizers of sliced pineapple served with crushed ginger and salt, then pandanus if available and tinned fish and rice, and lastly, sago, pitpit, tubers, and greens. After people have finished eating, head-men often take the opportunity to orate, and on these occasions the most compelling topic is bridewealth itself. At the five bridewealth distributions I attended head-men argued vehemently over rising levels of bride-wealth and the attempts of men to hold out for higher payments. These are also fitting occasions for men to remind their sisters' and daughters' husbands of payments that are still outstanding or insufficient. This leads to further quarreling.
Sometimes the father or patron of the groom receives a substantial portion of the bridewealth from the bride's relatives themselves. At the end of the public distribution, these shells must be repaid, though the Foi say that they are really repaying the gifts of shells, shoats, and money, the ka mosanoira, which the bride receives from her relatives and takes to her husband upon marriage.[11] Foi explain that both kinds of aid from a woman's relatives amount to the same thing and, if they are sizeable, the groom's father and other close relatives reciprocate with further gifts of shell wealth and money. This, they say, is to show that the new affines will support each other in future payment obligations.
The bride's mother, father, and sometimes her elder brother stay in the groom's household for a period of several months. They cooperate with their in-laws in subsistence activities while observing the restrictions against food sharing I have described above. The mother stays with her daughter to help her adjust to her new home, while the men stay to demonstrate the ties of sharing—"living together"—that are supposed to characterize the relationship between habomena (wife's parents/groom's parents) and other affines.
The first basic rule concerning participation in bridewealth transactions is this: if a man receives aid in collecting his own or his son's or younger brother's bridewealth, he must repay such aid in identical amount when his sister, daughter, or brother's daughter marries. The Foi therefore do not describe the composition of bridewealth networks, as they do not describe the range of unmarriageable women, in terms of specific categories of kin but rather in terms of reciprocity.
To paraphrase Kelly, "it is not classificatory kinship per se " that enters into the definition of consanguinity and affinity "but the elements of reciprocity which kinship encodes" (1977:178). For the Foi, one's "true" brothers, mother's brother, cross-cousins, and so forth are those relatives who are most reliable as bridewealth contributors and sharers, regardless of their true genealogical designation. Similarly, Glasse reports of the South Fore that they
do distinguish between "true" and "tenuous" relationships, but their distinction refers to the importance and solidarity of the bond and not necessarily to genealogical closeness. In the nature of things, "true" relationships often turn out to be those with close genealogical kin but they are not restricted to that category, and not all close kin are counted as "true" relatives. . . . [T]hat the South Fore express their norms of solidarity and potential affinity in the idiom of kin terms, is confusing only if kinship is equated with genealogical closeness. (1969:33)
It is therefore not particularly relevant to examine the actual genealogical relationship between a women and those men who receive shares of her bridewealth. What I am interested in is the categorical distinction of female relatives from whom a man can expect to receive bridewealth.[12]
The most important male relatives of the bride are her male lineage mates. These men cannot be denied a major share of the bridewealth—they are a woman's gi ga because they "live together" and share food, as I have noted above (cf. Langlas 1974:192). Beyond this, Foi men feel that all adult male members of the clan segment should share in bridewealth received for any female agnate, though men of other lineages receive only a token payment—the usual amount is one small pearl shell and two ropes of cowries. These are "small things" in relation to the head pearl shells, according to Foi men. Out of a sample of thirty-five adult men (four head-men and thirty-one ordinary men), 52 percent of all the bridewealth shares they received in their lifetimes were from female agnates.[13]
The next most significant category of female relative is that of one's sister's husband's (ZH's) clan—that is, one's sister's daughters (ZDs). Seventeen percent of all bridewealth receipts in the sample were of women in this category. But in this case, the relationship is between a man and his own ZDs only. A man is not entitled to payments for the true daughters of other men of his ZH's clan, as the sister's husbands themselves do not control these women's bridewealth. In other
words, classificatory agnates of one's affines are not one's affines also and are not obligated to one in the same way.
The sample also demonstrates the asymmetry that characterizes the relationship between wife-givers and wife-takers in the matter of bride-wealth distribution. A man is not usually entitled to shares of his wife's brother's daughters (WBDs), to whom he stands in the relationship of yage ; only six percent of bridewealth receipts in the sample were for women in this category. But a man is entitled to a share of his sister's husbands' daughters' (ZHD's) marriage payments (17%) because they are "his daughters."
The same asymmetry characterizes the relationship between the children of brothers-in-law, that is, cross-cousins. In fact, from the point of view of the Foi, it is more correct to view the relationship between cross-cousins as a derivative of the affinal relationship between WB and ZH, rather than as an aspect of the cross-sex sibling bond only. The Foi address both paternal and maternal cross-cousins as kumi , but they refer to the father's sister's child (FZC) as an o'o kumi or o'o au~ kumi ("breast-milk cross-cousin") because "it is through a female," that is, a female agnate. They also say that one's o'o kumi is one's "true" cross-cousin, the point being that one's FZC is a person one's father refers to as "his child" (his sister's child). But the same reasoning does not apply in reverse precisely because for the Foi it is the prerogative of males, but not females, to claim kinship through a cross-sex sibling . The sample illustrates the asymmetry between bridewealth claims made for paternal (7%) as opposed to maternal (2%) cross-cousins and their children (emo'o ). This is another way of illustrating that the asymmetry between WB and ZH carries over to their children. The Foi explain this in a significantly different way by saying that "we think of our o'o kumi and perhaps we remember that our fathers didn't get enough pay for our father's sisters [whom a Foi man calls ape ], so we go to these men and ask for pay for their sisters."
But, of course, all this is just an inside-out way of describing the asymmetry between a man and his sister's son. An individual is called o'o kumi by the child of his MB (abia ) and like his abia , an individual's MBS can induce supernatural illness that if man is unsatisfied with the bridewealth he has received for his father's sister (FZ) or father's sister's daughter (FZD). I will return shortly to a more detailed discussion of the content of maternal relationships.
I have described a reflexive lineality of women that is three gen-
Figure 4.
Descendants of Cross-Sex Siblings
erations in depth and that represents the limits to which a man can make claims on the descendants of female agnates. Foi kinship terminology reflects the varying intensity of such claims (cf. Langlas n.d.). In figure 4 I have diagrammed the range of women for whom ego (solid line) and ego's father (dotted line) can normally claim bride-wealth. In reality, a man rarely receives pay for daughters of cross-cousins or more distant relatives: only 4 of the total of 478 bride-wealth shares represented in the sample were for daughters of cross-cousins. Similarly, both head-men and ordinary men alike only very rarely received pay for sisters' children's daughters (ZCDs). A man calls his children's children, his siblings' children's children, and his cross-cousins' children emo'o (sometimes using the alternate term tauwa for his children's children only [cf. Langlas n.d.:9]), and this seems to represent the effective limit of bridewealth claims. The children of cross-cousins call each other ma~ ya and each other's children tauwa . The children of ma ~ ya (for example, ego's son and person number 1 in Figure 4) do not recognize any bond of kinship. "Tauwa are the end of the line" the Foi say quite literally. Although theoretically, emo'o, ma~ ya, and tauwa are kin, men do not ordinarily receive bride-wealth for them and indeed they can marry them.
But there are other implications to this last statement. Referring to Figure 4 again, if person 2 is a male and ego marries person 3, then person 2 is simultaneously related consanguineously to the bride and the groom. The second basic rule concerning participation in bride-wealth transactions is that no individual should be at the same time contributor and recipient to the same marriage payment. The tendency of the Foi to marry within the extended community implies that husband and wife may sometimes be consanguines. To explain the manner in which the Foi rectify the resulting equivocation of wife-takers and wife-givers, I now turn to a description of patterns of intermarriage between the clan segments of Hegeso and neighboring longhouses.
Marriage Patterns and Bridewealth Networks
Williams, describing the distribution of marriage among the Foi villages, noted that
Mubi informants [Hegeso, Barutage, and Herebo villages] said they like to marry between their own three villages; and if it is not too obvious to note, each tribe tends to constitute a regional endogamous unit.
It is suggested that we see here a compromise between two conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, there is the urge to establish contact and alliance with other groups by means of giving them your daughters in marriage. . .
The other tendency, which to some extent counteracts the above, is to keep your girls at home, or at any rate maintain touch with them. It appears to be primarily a case of sentimental attachment, which is reciprocated by the girls themselves. Neither they nor their parents desire that they should sever their connection with home. So a solution is found by marrying, not at home, but reasonably near home. (1977:217-218).
While the distribution of bridewealth is in most respects the corporate responsibility of each clan segment, the control of men's and women's marital destinies per se is not, though the latter is a function of the former, as I have suggested. The Foi do not espouse any positive rules of marriage, nor do they deliberately attempt to maintain intensive ties of intermarriage with particular clan segments at the expense of others. Yet the genealogies I collected indicate that 66 percent of all remembered marriages of the four largest clan segments of Hegeso were between these clan segments and others of Hegeso. Further, only 9 percent of the 270 marriages in the sample involved villages outside of the four-longhouse extended community. Clearly, the Foi do not only
prefer to marry "nearby" as Williams observed, but they also prefer to marry within the village for the same reasons. Men told me that they do not want their daughters going to live far away because "if they became sick or their husbands refused to look after them properly, who would give them food and take care of them?"
The clan segments of Hegeso in fact intermarry to the limit set by the degrees of consanguinity the Foi recognize, and marriages are distributed among these clan segments in direct proportion to their size. The disproportionate size of the So'onedobo clan segment in relation to the other Hegeso clans suggests that all other Hegeso clan segments marry intensively with So'onedobo, and that So'onedobo itself marries intensively with the next two largest clan segments. In order to understand the relational effects of this pattern, I must further consider aspects of Foi kinship terminology.
Similar to the usages of the Kewa (Franklin 1965) and Polopa (Brown 1980) to the east, the Foi call the children of FB and MZ "brother" (wame ) and "sister" (ana ). Though they do not distinguish MZC from FC and FBC in terms of address, they refer to MZC as hua susu wame (ana )—"mother only brother (sister)"—as they similarly refer to their mother's children by a different father. These relatives are siblings through the mother only, as opposed to paternally related or "real" siblings.
A man calls his WZH sawi , which means ``to share," since these two men "share" affines. The Foi say that sawi are "like brothers." A woman calls her HBW garu ("co-wife") but also uses the term boba (female sibling, female speaking). They also appropriately call their MZH by the same term as FB (mai ) and their FBW by the same term as MZ (babo ).
David Brown discusses the structural implications of this usage among the Polopa with whom he worked. He observes that the terminological equation MZS = FBS means that agnatic terminology includes nonagnates and that
if clans are to unify in groups rather than remain as sets, there must be circumstances in which male agnates are coextensive with brothers and filiates. This condition is met only if sets of brothers marry sets of sisters, so that the fathers of parallel cousins on both sides are agnates (since MZH = FB) and so too are the cousins themselves (since MZS = FBS). (1980:305)
This reasoning only holds true if there is corporate control of women's marriages. It also assumes that the agnatic meaning of kinship terms
is primary and that kinship terminological usages are determined by the structural qualities of particular marriage systems. But for the Foi, the forging of affinal relationships is a prerogative of individuals only—men are not constrained to choose wives from the same clan as do their classificatory clansmen, and it is difficult to understand why kinship terminology must necessarily reflect intergroup structure. Among the Foi, while it is true that a man should not marry his true MZD (though one such marriage occurred during my fieldwork), he can marry his mother's classificatory sister's daughter. But this has no implications for affinity, since he does not consider his mother's classificatory brother as a "true" mother's brother, nor does he consider his mother's classificatory sister's husband as more than a mai in name only. Similarly, two brothers who marry women of the same clan have separate affinal relationships, as they would if the women were of different clans.
On the other hand, the marriage of men of the same clan to women of the same clan would tend to promote congruence in and increase the overlapping of bridewealth distribution networks. Since the Foi define kinship and agnatic clanship not in terms of genealogical criteria per se but in terms of the range of consanguineal female relatives for whom they share payment, it would appear that it is the relationship between bridewealth networks—that is, patterns of reciprocity—rather than agnatic cores that is encoded in terminological usages, as I have suggested above.[14]
The marriage of two brothers to women who are of the same clan—agnatic parallel marriage, as Kelly (1977:72) terms it—is congruent with the asymmetrical nature of the WB-ZH relationship. Genealogical evidence indicates, however, that there is no evidence that clan segments act as wife-giver to one clan segment and wife-taker to another; in other words, they both give and receive wives with equal frequency to those clan segments with which they intermarry. If kinship and the control of women were indeed corporate, then one could describe this pattern as indicative of classificatory sister-exchange. But the Foi neither approve nor disapprove of sister-exchange as a marriage mode and, at any rate, it is only the exchange of the true sisters that could interfere with the asymmetrical relationship between brothers-in-law. This occurred only once in all the genealogies I examined. For the Foi, classificatory sister-exchange is not sister-exchange at all, since different men control the women in each case. Furthermore, given the Foi distinction between true and tenuous kinship relations,
the exchange of women implied by intensive intermarriage has little consequence for the affinal relations involved. A man can give his sister to one man and can marry the sister of a classificatory brother of that man, but the two relations remain entirely distinct.
The implicit structure of Foi affinity therefore suggests a model that combines both symmetrical and asymmetrical properties. This model does not necessitate that the Foi espouse an ideology concerning reciprocity in women; what they do espouse is reciprocity in bridewealth, which nevertheless amounts to the same thing. Intensive intermarriage promotes congruence and balance in bridewealth debts over time. The Foi give their lineage sisters to certain men and receive wives from these men's clan brothers. They can therefore maintain the asymmetrical nature of affinal relations while restoring a symmetry in bride-wealth debts over time.[15]
However, while agnatic parallel marriage promotes the discreteness of bridewealth networks, intensive intermarriage has the opposite effect. Being a close relative of the bridegroom for example and simultaneously a classificatory relative of the bride may entitle a man to receive a share from a bridewealth to which he is also obliged to contribute. But Foi say that a man cannot receive a bridewealth shell from a man to whom he is obliged to give one. They obviate this contradiction by maintaining that what he should receive in private before the payment of the bridewealth is a special gift not directly connected with it. Figure 5 shows the competing relationships of a man (B in the figure) who received such a special gift in lieu of a share of the bridewealth. The payment of a pearl shell and money totaling K40.00 was what he would have been entitled to receive from the bridewealth if he had not been obliged to contribute to it. This special gift is called mofoha ubora. Mofoha- is the transitive form of the verb foha- ("to disembark from a canoe"), and ubora is the nominalized form of the verb u- ("to go"). When traveling by canoe, if one of the passengers wishes to go ashore, he says "Mofohae ," "let me off." When B demanded payment for D 's daughter, he approached A and said "Mofoha we !" ("Come and let me off!"). This payment is not bridewealth, however, and the express purpose of it, as the Foi say, is "so a man will not have to receive bridewealth from his own relatives."
The implications of this payment are crucial to an understanding of Foi kinship for they prove that the Foi do not reckon kinship transitively: if B is the true FZS of C , and is also the FB of E , it does not
Figure 5.
Mofoha Ubora
follow for the Foi that E is the FZSD of C . Indeed, this is all that allows the Foi to intermarry as intensively as they do with coresident clan segments. However, the example outlined above occurs rarely, since men do not usually receive head pearl shells for women who are not of their lineage. Other men told me that mofoha ubora really has to do with the recipients of the bridewealth meat, the ka aso ("woman marsupial") and the buruga nami ("bridewealth pigs").
Although the Foi say that individuals should not simultaneously be contributors to and recipients of the same bridewealth, it is not uncommon for a woman's father or brothers to make a sizeable contribution to their future son-in-law's bridewealth fund (though as I noted, this aid is often repaid separately). However, the Foi do say that those relatives of the bride who are also relatives of the groom cannot eat the bridewealth meat. Characteristically, only those relatives to whom the main recipients are indebted receive bridewealth shares, but every relative, male and female, of the bride on both the mother's and father's side shares in the bridewealth meat. While the distribution of the shell portion of the bridewealth is constrained by reciprocity, the consumption of meat is not, and it represents a more figurative expression of local clan solidarity. A bridewealth network can therefore be
further defined as those people who share the bridewealth meat of its female members and who, conversely, do not formally give bride-wealth meat to each other. A person who may not eat bridewealth meat because he is related to both the bride and groom is entitled to a mofoha ubora payment regardless of whether or not he would have received a share of the shell portion of the bridewealth (though if he is only a classificatory relative this payment usually does not exceed the value of a small pearl shell [K10.00]).
Affines are defined as those who do not share the same bridewealth meat, just as the two halves of the Hegeso longhouse do not share food between themselves. The opposition between the two major clans of Hegeso which in effect encompasses the division of the longhouse thus replicates the terms of affinity in general. The Foi social universe is maintained by controlling the flow of wealth, meat, and food that produces these differentiations. The failure to do so properly results in an undesirable moral state that takes the form of sickness, as does the failure to differentiate properly between male and female domains in general. The remaining portion of this chapter concerns the social implications of illness and the restructuring of affinal relations following the death of a spouse.
Death Payments and Widow Remarriage
In chapter 31 suggested that it is the responsibility of Foi men to maintain the proper spatial and conceptual distinctions between the living and the dead, which are analogous to those pertaining to men and women respectively. Under normal circumstances, the metaphorical equation between women and ghosts remains tacit and is expressed only in certain figures of speech and in the ritual symbolism of Usi initiation. When a woman's husband dies, however, this implicit analogy is revealed: not only is a Foi widow dangerous because of her innate menstrual capacity, but she is also the focus of the lethal jealousy of her dead husband's ghost who will attempt to kill any man who wishes to remarry her. The Foi say that the ghost suspects such a man of having had adulterous intercourse with his wife and of having plotted his death. For this reason, the widow must undergo drastic restrictions and purifications before she can safely remarry.
I have also suggested that when a man's wife bears children, it transforms the relationship between him and his wife's brother from
one of exchangers to sharers in the marital destinies and responsibilities of those children. The death of a woman's husband, however, returns the relationship between the men's respective agnates to its original affinal mode since the dead man's clansmen traditionally made payments to his maternal relatives. In this section, I describe the exchange obligations traditionally incumbent upon the relatives of a deceased man and the responsibilities of widows.[16]
When a man dies,[17] his body is placed on the floor of the longhouse. The deceased's wife and his female relatives sit closely around the body wailing. Some shake small rattles that the Foi use only during mourning "because they are things of sorrow." From time to time, a close male relative of the deceased may also join the women and cry over the body, but mourning is specifically an affair of females. Williams, who observed funeral ceremonies at Lake Kutubu, reported that this "formless wailing" gradually resolved itself into a formal chant listing the foods that the ghost will now have to subsist on in haisureri , the land of the dead in the east. If the dead man was of ordinary status, the body rests in the longhouse for one day, but in the case of a headman it remains two or three days. This gives people from distant villages time to arrive and pay their respects. Men told me that when death payments were still made, the agnates of the deceased placed the shells comprising the maternal death payment (abigibora ) on the deceased's chest during the mourning period in the longhouse.
Nowadays, the men of the deceased's village bury the body immediately after the mourning period, but in traditional times the maternal relatives of the deceased placed the corpse in a raised open coffin called the doge or debe . The maternal relatives of the dead men erected the doge close to the village a short distance into the bush. The Foi told me that the distant or classificatory female maternal relatives of the deceased did all of the work of preparing the coffin and placing the body, and the true or closest maternal relatives did none at all. The reason for this, they explained, was that if these relatives did not come and help with the work, they would not be entitled to a share of the death payment, just as a classificatory relative of a bride does not get part of her bridewealth unless he helped her when she was growing up. They also added that the deceased's true relatives would be too consumed with grief to undertake these tasks.
After the body was placed on the doge , traditionally the Foi held a series of mortuary feasts and exchanges. The first exchange took place between the deceased's clansmen and the widow's clansmen. The
widow's agnates gave a payment of pearl shells called ka yaro bana'anu ("widow's bana'anu ") to the deceased's agnates. The purpose of this was to cancel the future claims of the deceased's clan on the bridewealth of the widow's remarriage and on the bridewealth of any female children she might bear for her second husband. The payment was also intended to allay suspicions of the woman's complicity in the man's death. The payment varied in size between six and nineteen pearl shells, but Langlas (1974:187) noted that it often consisted of live pigs. The deceased's agnates would use these pigs to raise the shell wealth needed for the main death payment. In return, the deceased's agnates made a smaller payment of shells to the widow's agnates.
Five days after death, the first formal mortuary ceremony took place, the kabaye habora ("Fifth Day"). The agnates of the dead man slaughtered a number of pigs and held an aname kobora exchange to raise cowrie ropes, pearl shells, axes, and knives. These comprised the payment called abigibora that the deceased's agnates made to the dead man's maternal relatives. Men told me that the size of the payment was "two hands" (seventy-four) of cowrie ropes, two hands of pearl shells, one hand (thirty-seven) of axes, and one hand of knives. The maternal relatives in turn gave a payment half this size of the same items to the deceased's agnates, and this was called bana'anu i~ gabora ("bana'anu making"). Finally, the deceased's agnates gave the items received as bana'anu i~ gabora to the relatives of the deceased's mother's mother's and father's mother's clan (the aya busi ), and this payment was bana'anu gibora ("bana'anu giving").
Men told me, however, that "bridewealth and abigibora were the same thing." They explained that despite the discrepancies in the size of the two payments, both should ideally be the same amount: "The widow's relatives got the death payment back as bridewealth when she remarried." When a married woman died, her husband gave abigibora payments to the same relatives who originally received her bridewealth (Langlas 1974:189). These maternal and paternal relatives of the dead woman in return gave a smaller payment of bana'anu igabora that, as in the case of a man's death, the husband gave to his dead wife's aya busi . It is significant, however, that the death payments included axes and knives, whereas bridewealth usually does not. The introduction of large quantities of steel implements by the colonial administration accounted for their inclusion in Foi death payments during the 1950s (for Williams did not mention them in his description of Kutubuan funeral payments in 1938), but it remains to be explained why the Foi considered steel tools appropriate for death payments and
not marriage payments. As tokens of the productive value of men and women, these tools are particularly apposite markers of the contribution a dead person made to his clan or her husband's clan during his or her lifetime. The deceased's relatives represented this contribution in the form of productive wealth. The dead person's agnates also repaid the maternal relatives of the deceased for the work they performed in preparing the funeral platform and handling the corpse (cf. Williams 1977:292). Similarly, Reay notes that among the Kuma of the Western Highlands:
A man acts throughout his life as a member of his father's clan, which he cites as his own, but at death the people of the mother's clan address him as their son, and in a certain sense it is this clan of origin to which he really belongs. Its contribution to the strength of his father's clan has never been fully paid for in his lifetime, but with his death it is finally recognized and settled. His mother's brother (the brother-in-law to whom the marriage payments are always owing) has to receive compensation for the death. (1959:101)
On the nineteenth day after death, the second mortuary feast was held, called the gisiye habora ("Nineteenth Day"). Williams noted that around the fourteenth day after death, the unmarried men went to the bush to find marsupials and other game and returned with their catch the night before the nineteenth day. The next morning they cooked and distributed the meat to all those present. When people finished eating, they threw the bones into the fires, apparently as an offering to the ghost of the recently deceased, saying: "Go now to your father. Do not stay here to make your widow or children or relatives sick. This is your food" (1977:293).
The last feast was held on the thirty-seventh day after death. Called the kigiye habora (literally "bone making"), it was associated with the Bi'a'a Guabora cult, the "black palm-splitting" or, as Williams translated it, "arrowhead" cult. The latter was concerned with ensuring general fertility and in particular success in the hunt. Men prepared secretly for the thirty-seventh day hunt and left the village at night, so the women and children would not see them. They would stay in the bush between five and six days, collecting and smoking the game they caught in a small bush house, the Bi'a'a a , which they had built beforehand. The deceased's brother or other close agnatic relative would secretly take the jaw bone of the corpse[18] (accessible at this point due to the advanced stage of decomposition). This, according to my informants, was to force the ghost to accompany the hunters and
ensure their success. The men would periodically call out the deceased's name, and the ghost supposedly answered by making whistling sounds. During this time, the men would also listen carefully for the cries of certain birds, for such cries were portentous in the same way they were during the dreaming expeditions and the maiden's marriage ceremony described earlier: if, for example, the hunters heard the cry of the Raggianna bird-of-paradise, it meant they would be successful in obtaining pearl shells. If they heard the cry of any of the white cockatoos, it presaged success in hunting.
The men returned to the village the night before the thirty-seventh day after the death. Before they left the Bi'a'a a , they would gather the leaves of the Piper methysticum (Foi: ta'anobo ) and, spitting on them, rub them on the dead man's jaw bone and on their bilums of meat. They then returned to the village and placed the jaw bone above the door of the longhouse. On the thirty-seventh day they decorated themselves and brought the meat into the longhouse. There they distributed it to all the men present. My informants told me that at this time, the women and children were not allowed to see the hunters return nor participate in the feast. They were constrained to stay in the women's houses with the doors securely fastened. The men explained that this was because the women and children were not supposed to learn that the hunters had removed the jaw bone from the platform coffin and had consequently placed it above the longhouse door.
The next day, the deceased's brother or other close agnate returned the jaw bone to the coffin and gathered it with all the remaining bones of the corpse and placed them in a string bag. He and the other men returned to the village where they hung the string bag from the verandah of the longhouse. At this point the widow was permitted to leave the woman's house and view the bones of her dead husband. She and the other women would cry over them, and the men would then take them to the distant rock ledge where all bones were permanently kept.
The traditional Foi sequence of mortuary ceremonies represented the gradual replacement of an affinal opposition with the more inclusive one between men and women. In this respect the structure of Foi funeral rituals closely parallels that of the Daribi habu funeral ritual (Wagner 1972a : chap. 7). The sequence began when the widow's agnates present her dead husband's agnates with the shell wealth or pigs of the ka yaro bana'anu , reversing the direction of and "closing" the
initial bridewealth transaction. The ensuing abigibora and bana'anu gira payments to the deceased's maternal and grandmaternal clans in turn severed these kinsmen's claims and forestalled the sickness they could be liable to induce if they did not receive it.
The items exchanged in these transactions were shell wealth and pigs, "the things of marriage" as the Foi say. The Nineteenth Day feast, however, called for male hunting, and the game that the men brought back was shared by all male and female members of the deceased's community. These men and women represented themselves as sharers of meat who in turn offered the bones to the ghosts, thus replacing the exchange between affines and maternal relatives with that between the living and the dead (or between the village and the bush, the spatial dimension of that opposition). Finally, the men themselves held their own Thirty-seventh Day feast from which the women were excluded, returning the community to its more mundane dichotomy of male and female.
As in the Daribi habu , the male members of the Foi community were obliged to identify themselves with the deceased's ghost, and so they took the jaw bone of the corpse with them on their thirty-seventh day hunting expedition. This expedition expressed the opposition between men, bone, and bush on the one hand, and women, flesh, and village on the other, encompassing these analogous distinctions within a single unitary ritual dimension. The mortuary hunting expeditions also separately distinguished between the male and female contributions to conception and growth: a patrilaterally composed group of men appropriate the bone, while a matrilaterally related group of women "care for" the decomposing flesh.
The symbolic equations created during mortuary ceremonies also illuminated the significance of bridewealth transactions. After a man's agnates "fasten" his bride by making a payment of shell wealth and before she bears her first child, the husband is obliged to present gifts of smoked game, the ka aso , to his wife's relatives, representing the husband's side in its exemplary male productive role. When the woman bears her first child, however, live pigs are presented to her relatives, the maternal relatives of the child, shifting the emphasis from an exclusively male meat item to one more representative of the joint productive and reproductive capacity of a married couple. It is this capacity that woman's relatives represented when they gave pigs to her deceased husband's agnates, and it is this that made axes and knives appropriate items of death payments to maternal relatives.
The sequence of funeral rites also gradually shifted the locus of the ghost from the interior of the longhouse, to the platform coffin located a short distance away, to the deep bush where the men carry the ghost with them and, finally, back to the longhouse where the widow was allowed to view the remains. The success of the hunters demonstrated that the ghost had been reconciled to the community of the living, but it was at the expense of the ghost's identification with it, since women and children could not view the men nor touch the funeral meat lest the ghost cause them to become sick and die. In other words, it was men's responsibility to transform the identification of the widow (and by implication, the female community) and the deceased to an identification of the male community and the deceased. Let us therefore consider the transformation in the status of the deceased's widow.[19]
When a man died, his female agnates traditionally gathered at the woman's house of his widow. They took her a short distance into the bush, and there she removed all her clothing and ornaments, which at that point were called her amena denane sanoi , "man's ghost decorations." The women gathered black mud and, in a palm spathe vessel, mixed it with their own urine. The women then applied this mixture, called kaemari , to the widow's skin. They also gave her arm and leg bands and belts of megorodame vine and replaced her skirt with an apron of kafane fern leaves. On the widow's head the women placed a covering of wild taro leaves. These leaves were also used by the men to cover the head of the corpse after they had taken the jaw bone into the bush.
The women applied the kaemari to the widow's body again on the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and nineteenth days after death. On the day the men brought the bones back in the string bag, the women removed the last traces of the kaemari from the widow's skin and applied a new covering of charcoal and sugarcane juice. Up until this time, while she wore the kaemari , the widow remained secluded in her woman's house, but when the men brought the bones back and the new covering was applied to the widow's skin, she was permitted to leave the house and view her dead husband's remains.
The widow continued to wear the charcoal and sugarcane juice covering until her remarriage. If the widow was childless and young, this period was not long. However, if she was nursing an infant when her husband died, her agnates and her husband's agnates would insist she remain unmarried until the child was weaned and had "grown up a little." The children were then retained by the dead husband's agnates when the widow remarried.
The Christian Mission forbade the use of the kaemari and charcoal widow's coverings, and nowadays Foi widows don black or dark-colored clothing that her agnates obtain from trade stores. The following rites pertaining to widow purification and remarriage are still performed, however.
A man who wishes to marry a widow must secure the services of a man who knows the ka yaro kusa , the "widow's spell," if he himself does not know it. After the widow's agnates agree on the marriage, the widow removes her dark clothing (charcoal covering in former times) and her agnates give her new clothes and ordinary women's ornaments. As the Foi say, "She must wear nothing she owned from her previous marriage and must become like a young woman getting married for the first time." The widow takes her old clothing and belongings to a pool of still water or swamp water in the bush where she permanently disposes of them.
The man who recites the widow's spell instructs the woman and her new husband to each take two leaves of stinging nettles and with them they rub each other's entire skin. They repeat this procedure for ten days, and on the morning of the eleventh day the "widow specialist" gathers the wood of the Caryota species palm (which bears a red fruit); leaves from various red- and yellow-colored cordylines; hornbill feathers; the bark of the red tu'u tree; the skin of the kegebo vine (which bears red flowers); and the feathers of those red-plumed birds mentioned in chapter 4 in connection with the maiden's marriage ceremony. Near the base of a tu'u tree, the specialist starts a fire with the Caryota wood and heats two stones. With these, he steam-cooks the feathers, leaves, and bark and then departs. The widow's new husband then instructs her to remove her string skirt and squat over the steam so that it may penetrate her vagina, while he continues to add water to the hot stones to produce steam.
Other men described an alternative method for cleansing the widow. The husband places the red leaves and feathers on a large red ka~, i leaf and instructs the widow to remove her skirt and lie down on the leaf with the other items under her vagina. The husband then carefully binds his hand with the skin of the kegebo vine and cleans the woman's vagina manually. While doing so, he recites the following:
I am not using this kegebo vine,
I am using the rope of so cowrie
I am using the band of an anema pearl shell
I am using the band of a ka'amea pearl shell
I am using a rope of yare cowrie[20]
I heard two versions of the widow's spell, which the specialist recites on each of the ten days of the stinging-nettles procedure. One version states that the widow's dead husband's ghost is sitting in the branches of a ma'abe tree, but the new husband has thrown a bamboo arrow that has pierced the ghost in the heart. The ghost then falls into the Tegibu River where a furubu fish devours him. The other version describes the widow's skin as "loose and dirty" because her dead husband's ghost is making her sick. The ghost takes the form of two dogs, Hinima and Tegare, that come from a small mountain named Sangua, which the Foi say lies far in the west in the Mount Bosavi region. These dogs are about to come and devour the widow and her new husband. By rubbing the stinging nettles on their skin (metaphorically referred to in the spell as the abeabo-sangura variety aquatic leaves), the widow and her new husband "make their skins shine again" and the two dogs retreat.
After the spell and the cleansing ceremony, the couple go fishing until they have secured two large buri fish. They bring these back to the village, and each one cooks one fish separately with a dark-colored edible leaf called buru ("black"). When the fish is cooked, the man shares his with the men of the longhouse and the widow shares hers with the women. From this point on they may live a normal married life, but the man may be compelled from time to time to recite the widow's spell if it is thought that the ghost is still causing the woman to become sick.
The Foi emphatically state that a widow must return to her agnates who negotiate her subsequent remarriage with a man of another clan. There is no leviratic retention of the widow by the dead man's brothers or other agnates. This is consonant with the individual as opposed to corporate control of women that characterizes Foi marriage negotiations. It is also intelligible in light of the fact that a man's relationship with his sisters is hardly affected by her marriage. A. J. Strathern (1917b :460-461) reaches similar conclusions concerning the absence of leviratic retention among the Wiru.
Affinal relations by the same token do not survive the death of a spouse. I have suggested that the funeral payments themselves represented the closing of affinal and maternal responsibilities. If a man's wife dies, he calls his former affines by the same self-reciprocal terms but qualifies them with the prefix denane ("ghost"), so that, for example, a man's dead wife's father is called denane kauwa . A widow and her dead husband's relatives use the same reciprocal terms.
However, a window's remarriage does not affect the patrifiliation of her children. They are retained by the dead husband's close agnates. Sometimes, a widow takes her very young children with her to her second husband's home, and this man raises them as his own children. If one of them is a girl, he and the dead husband's brothers divide the paternal portion of her eventual bridewealth.
But the widow purification ceremonies seem to express very specifically Foi men's concern with differentiating physical paternity. Foi men told me that one of the dangers of adultery is that a woman could contaminate her husband with another man's semen. Likewise, a man must remove the physical traces of the first husband's sexual contact from a widow's vagina, and it is characteristically accomplished with the red leaves and feathers that explicitly represent shell wealth: the second husband redirects the widow's reproductive and sexual capacity not only by paying bridewealth to her relatives but also by figuratively canceling the residual claims of the dead husband. The widow's agnates achieve this more explicitly by making the ka yaro bana'anu payments.
The ceremonies of widow remarriage underline the preeminence the Foi assign to the control of a woman's child-bearing capacity, which is how they define the function of bridewealth itself. A widow past child-bearing age is often leviratically retained by her dead husband's brother, who gives half of the bridewealth normally given for a young woman. By contrast, Foi men pay full bridewealth for young widows and cannot retain them leviratically.
The ability of a man's ghost to make his widow and her new husband sick is comprehensible in terms of the rights that man held in the woman by virtue of paying bridewealth. The ability of an individual's mother's brother to cause the sickness of his sisters' children is also similarly based on that man's rights in a woman's reproductive capacity. I therefore conclude this chapter with a consideration of ma-trilateral sickness and the payments the Foi make to forestall it.
"Fastening the Skin"
Although ghosts eventually leave the living community to reside in the afterworld, haisureri , they maintain an interest in their living relatives. As I mentioned in chapter 3, ghosts are extremely sensitive to
the anger and frustration of relatives and habitually intervene by causing the sickness and death of those individuals who are the object of this anger. Although the "hot heart" of any relative can result in ghostly intervention, the most common are one's mother's male agnates. Characteristically, a man often feels that the bridewealth he received for his sister was insufficient. The frustration he feels on these occasions is sensed by his bilaterally related ghosts who take it upon themselves to cause sickness in that man's sister's child. The father of a sick child perceives the maternal cause of the illness in a dream, during which he sees his wife's clan's totemic bird or other animal biting or attacking his child. He thereby identifies the child's affliction as hua busiremo hubora, "mother's side striking." At this point, he gives between one and five medium-sized pearl shells and several ropes of cowrie to the sick child. The child then takes them and presents them to his mother's brother: although the Foi say that any maternal male relative can cause hua busiremo hubora , it is usually the mother's true brother who is responsible. The maternal relative's heart then ceases to be "hot" with anger and the ghost desists.
The symptoms of maternal illness are primarily undesirable skin conditions such as sores, ringworm, and emaciation. It is the skin and flesh that are formed by a woman's menstrual blood during gestation, and therefore an adverse skin condition is an appropriate metaphor for dissonant maternal relations. Other symptoms of maternal illness are painful or arthritic joints, as they are also the symptoms of menstrual contamination itself.
It should be obvious from a consideration of the Foi perception of disease that they construe an essential similarity between the contaminating effects of contact with women and the illness associated with the maternal uncle. The relationship between wife-givers and wife-takers is one of intersexual mediation, not simply affinity. That is, the contrastive and complementary roles of men and women are mediated through the giving of bridewealth and the marriages that bridewealth makes possible.
This association of maternal relationship with femaleness is even more explicit in the sickness known as kumabo whose symptoms are also ringworm. This illness results when a man has stepped over his cross-cousin while the latter is sleeping. The afflicted man must give pay to his cross-cousin to remove kumabo illness. The Foi say that cross-cousins are "just like brothers" since their parents are siblings. But they also say that, conversely, cross-cousins are "like brothers-in-
law" because their fathers were brothers-in-law. In so far as the relationship between cross-cousins replicates the affinal one of their fathers, they should temper their derivative or analogical siblingship with circumspect behavior, that is, one should not step over a sleeping cross-cousin, just as a woman should not expose her genitals to her brother's or husband's food or belongings by stepping over them.
It is important to understand the implications that maternal payments have for the analogical relationship between male and female lineality. Each Foi individual is a child of both his father and his mother's brother. These two men, who are originally brothers-in-law to each other, become related analogically by virtue of their common bond of kinship with that child. In other words, the force of the original affinal interdict becomes correspondingly attenuated because of their coeval filial relationship to a single individual. But since it is men's responsibility as well as prerogative to normatively affiliate their wives' and not their sisters' children to their clans, they must periodically reimpose the original interdict in opposition to the claims of the mother's brother. Just as a woman has innate powers of menstrual pollution, so one's mother's brother has the innate power to send illness to his sisters' children. This analogically female capacity must be offset by payments of male wealth, so that the moral force of maternal payments becomes identical with that of bridewealth itself: it distinguishes male from female lineality. That is why the Foi say that maternal sickness is solely the result of frustration over insufficient bridewealth.
The obligation to maintain the original affinal interdict is thus a continuing one for the Foi. A man who was a very young boy when his sister married often approaches his sister's husband later in life and demands a share of the bridewealth he never received. He takes a large pearl shell and a length of plaited gare leaves and says to his sister's husband, "I didn't get pay when you married my sister because I was just a boy. Therefore I am giving you this pearl shell and fastening the belt ["skin"] of gare leaves on you," and he ties the leaf belt around his sister's husband's waist. This initiates the exchange known as ka'o manahabora. Ka'o is the Foi word for skin or bark and also describes the bark corset that men wear. Manaha- is the verb "to put on (clothing)." From that point on for a period of two to three years, the man gives his sister's husband regular gifts of raw vegetables, fruit, and meat. These gifts are called konemo ka'o gibora ("mouth-belt-giving"). The sister's husband keeps a tally of exactly how much his
wife's brother gives, and when he feels the amount is sufficient, he tells his wife's brother to come and collect the main ka'o payment. This consists first of two large-pearl shells that, when used in ka'o payments, are called the ma'ame anuhae~ ("head pearl shell") and the ma'ame sisigi ("jaw-bone pearl shell"). The remainder of the payment includes between six and twelve smaller pearl shells and one "hand" of cowrie ropes. The sister's husband gives each item saying, "This one is for the basket of sago you gave me; this one is for the sugarcane; this one is for the pandanus," and so forth.
The reason that such payments are made, according to the Foi, is to forestall the anger (and resulting maternal illness) of an affinal relative who feels he has received insufficient bridewealth or death payment.[21] Most often, ka'o exchanges take place between cross-cousins, the maternal cross-cousin "putting ka'o " on his paternal cross-cousin. A man usually approaches his maternal cross-cousin shortly after the death of his mother's brother and asks him to put ka'o on him. This effectively transfers the locus of maternal authority from the mother's brother to the mother's brother's son, who henceforth considers himself the maternal "source" (ga ) of his father's sister's children.
It is consonant with this analysis that the recipient of the ka'o shell wealth gives gifts of raw vegetable food and meat to the man on whom he puts ka'o . If the conceptual complementarity of male and female underlies ka'o payments, then it is appropriate that each party represent himself in terms of exemplary male and female productive items. The inclusion of uncooked meat in the food gifts does not detract from the essentially female nature of these gifts: it is the maternal aspect of nurture that is represented. Through the exchange of "bone" pearl shells for "skin," or of male wealth for predominantly female vegetable food, ka'o payments produce a conservation of the male lineality imposed at marriage. The paternal and maternal substances of a man and his wife's brother respectively become united in that man's children, and ka'o payments serve to reimpose the affinal interdict and remove the ambiguity of the child's dual allegiance.
But the Foi also analogically deem ka'o payments appropriate between two men who have shared substance in a more literal sense. If a man has been badly wounded and is bleeding heavily and another man helps him bind the wound and stop the bleeding, the wounded man may put ka'o on the man who came to his aid, because the latter got the wounded man's blood on his hands, as they would explain. Similarly, if a man has a large and festering sore and another man
helps him drain and dress it, he often asks that man to put ka'o on him. Just as a man promotes the health of his children's skin by fulfilling his payment obligations to their maternal relatives, so the Foi similarly view the obligation of a man whose health has been restored by the ministrations of another to make restitution for that aid.
These last three chapters. have as a recurrent theme the image of what the Foi perceive as an innate flow of human and natural relations: the motion of water, which parallels that of the human life course; the growth, aging, and death of living species; the flow of blood and kara'o tree oil; the mingling of procreative fluids and the resulting system of interpersonal kinship; the passage of wealth items and food from hand to hand. But profoundly integrated with this are the idioms by which the Foi describe how this eternal movement is "cut," halted, and redirected: the imaginary line of aname hiforaye nobo which cuts off food sharing in the longhouse; the dams that stop the course of rivers and result in edible fish; the protocols that sever the prior relationships between affines; death and illness that redirect the flow of wealth items. The essence of Foi sociality, the heart of Foi life, consists of the maintenance of this motion in a prescribed moral fashion. The Foi say that the heart is the organ of intention, comprehension, and moral apperception; human awareness is thus intimately linked with the repetitive and ceaseless flow of the heart's function.
It is the manipulations of these streams of life that comprise the moral realm of human intention. This conceptually construed realm admits of a semiotic structure, the foundations of which are subject to the type of symbolic interpretations I have made up to this point. It remains for me to demonstrate how this semiotic foundation is created and how it encompasses the moral basis of Foi society. In the second part of this book, I offer as a partial solution an analysis of Foi mythology.
Chapter VI
Metaphor and Substitution
The preceding chapters suggest that the focus of Foi sociality rests on the progressive substitution of wealth items for human beings (chapter 5), or for other wealth items such as meat that embody the value of masculine or feminine work, as the case may be (chapter 4). Whenever such a substitution is made, of course, an equivalence is drawn between the items involved. Indeed, it is this aspect of exchange that has prompted many analysts to view it as a form of communication, for substitutive equivalence is the starting point for any semantic and hence linguistic analysis.
Let us, however, side-step the functionalist implications of communication theory, recalling what I suggested in chapter 1, that cultural meaning—the subject of my analysis—is not the same thing as information. If Foi exchanges and the affinal and consanguineal statuses that are precipitated by them devolve from a system of substitutions, then let us first examine how the meaningful basis of these equivalences is established. I wish, therefore, to begin this half of the book with a discussion of substitution as the basis of semantic and figurative symbolic constructions.
Lexical and Metaphorical Substitution
In linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's classic formulation, a sign consists of the arbitrary relationship between a sound-image (signifier) and
a concept (signified). But the relationship between signifier and signified does not exhaust the value of a sign, as distinct from its signification. This depends upon its comparison with other signs within the domain of articulation. The value of a sign
is therefore not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be 'exchanged' for a given concept, i.e. that it has this or that signification: one must also compare it with similar values, with other words that stand in opposition to it. Its content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it. . . . When they are said to correspond to concepts, it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system (1966:115, 117)
It is "the social fact," as Saussure further states, that creates the system of differentiated values (1966:113). It delineates the conventional or lexical definitions of words in a language and embodies merely the classificatory or semantic meanings of language and culture. The system of classificatory meanings also encompasses what the semiotician Roland Barthes (1970) and Edmund Leach (1974:46-48) call syntagmatic associations. These are groups of lexical items whose relationship is based on their concurrence within a conventionally defined context. Leach (1974) gives as examples of syntagm the items of furniture that belong in any given room (bed, table, wardrobe, and so forth) or the set of clothes that comprise an outfit (skirt, blouse, jacket). For the Foi such syntagmatic associations define the categories of, for example, game animals (wild pigs, marsupials, cassowaries, and so on) or men's weapons (spears, bows, arrows, clubs) as well as the conventional features of each item within the syntagm (marsupials are pouched, arboreal, and nocturnal; spears are made from black palm; and so forth).
Following Louis Dumont (1965), Victor Turner (1969), Geertz (1973), and Wagner (1975), I now assume that opposed to this system of conventional syntagmatic orders are metaphors: constructions and usages comprising nonconventional or figurative significances. They have as their property the ability to draw conventional signs into innovative relations that embody cultural meaning. In Ricoeur's terms, they are "tropic" constructions (trope : "a change or deviation affecting the meaning of a word" [1977:44]). In lexical signification, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, while in metaphoric signification, such relationship is determined by the system of meanings in a culture. Lexical signification and its associated syntag-
matic systems register the conventional definitions of isolated units, while metaphor brings such units together into the nonarbitrary and determinate relationships that comprise a moral and cosmological structure.
A metaphor I have already implicitly introduced may illustrate what I have said: Foi men say that "women are marsupials." This metaphor establishes a relationship of identity between two conventionally contrasted elements (one human, the other animal) by focusing on the figurative similarities between them (they are both difficult to obtain; they can both be exchanged for shell wealth; and so forth). As opposed to conventional signification, metaphor encompasses a moral content, one that relates lexical elements to the values and precepts of society (in the aforementioned case, Foi men are judging both the difficulty and desirability of obtaining marsupials and women).
While a lexical symbol necessarily draws a sharp distinction between the signifier and the entity signified, a metaphor does not. In a lexical sign, for example, the Foi phonetic sequence sese (marsupial) and the range of animals it refers to are two completely different kinds of things. But both terms of a metaphor are signs themselves and so affect and extend each other's meaning. In metaphor, "marsupial" is redefining the conventional significance of "woman" at the same time that "woman" is redefining the notion of marsupial. Metaphor, in other words, is essentially reflexive; the terms "signifier" and "signified," interchangeable and relative in such constructions, become meaningless. Since the focus in a metaphor is on the relationship between the terms rather than the terms themselves, one can say that metaphor encompasses symbol and referent in a single expression. It is, in this view, a "symbol that stands for itself " (Wagner 1978:25).
The fact that metaphors are self-contained expressions implies that both a trope and its component signs are substitutable. In a general sense, metaphors arise in a context that allows their seemingly unlike lexical components to come together. I define a context broadly as a conventionally defined syntagmatic association of elements. For example, for the Foi, a woman's string belt is an item of female clothing and takes on those conventional significances associated with other elements within the syntagm of women's apparel: a bark cloak, a string skirt, net bag or bilum, and so forth. The string belt that a man wears, identical in all respects, takes on different associations based on its syntagmatic relationship with such male items of clothing as a bark corset, leg bands, and cordyline leaves. Similarly, a belt made
from gare leaves and worn in the same way as the string belt has different associations stemming from its use in certain ritual exchanges between cross-cousins (chapter 5). The bounding of contexts and the definition of their constituent elements falls under the lexical or semantic category of conventional symbolization. The tropic or nonconventional quality of metaphor, by contrast, requires the insertion of signs into new contexts in innovative ways. In metaphor, a tropic and innovative association of elements supplants or is substituted for a conventional one. Certain forms of specialized discourse such as rhetorical speech, magic spells, and mourning songs serve as contexts in which Foi metaphorically "invest" a variety of lexical items with a consequent "gain" or "interest" on their figurative associations (cf. Turner 1967: chap. 2).
Substitution is thus both an abstract symbolic operation and a normative strategy for the Foi, as the operations of affinal and maternal payments and the exchanges of aname kobora demonstrate. It can be considered the point at which purely linguistic operations inflect the social operations that are based on the former. Before examining the structure of metaphoric substitution in myth, therefore, let us examine such substitutive operations in more basic forms.
Leaf Talk
The Foi employ a number of rhetorical devices that they base chiefly on the presentation of paired elements with one substituting for the other so as to emphasize the contrast between them. It was common during my field work for an informant to come to my house and with a grave expression say to me, "I have not come to tell you a story, but for another reason [that is, to ask you a favor]." Men approach each other during bridewealth negotiations and begin by saying, "I am not speaking about that pearl shell you showed me last week, but I am speaking of another one which you own [and which, in other words, I want in its place]." A young man confiding to an elder patron could say bashfully, "I have not come to speak to you about X 's eldest daughter, but about his youngest unmarried one".1 These rhetorical devices commonly use the paired verb from dibiye-dibige to link the two contrasted predicates for example:
FOI: |  |
LITERAL: | magic-spell that to speak negative stated |
TRANSLATES: | I am not going to relate that magic spell |
FOI: |  |
LITERAL: | but story other to speak positive stated |
TRANSLATES: | but I am going to tell (you) another story |
The Foi use this construction frequently in myth-telling to emphasize a crucial or unbelievable action or point in the plot, for example, "He didn't kill the animals with his axe, but with his penis."
These rhetorical forms are an aspect both of the syntactic properties of the Foi language itself and the way in which the ordinary Foi speaker manipulates such properties in everyday discourse. But there is also a speech form know as iri sae~ medobora, literally, "tree-leaf talk" or "leaf talk," that consists of cryptic and stylized substitutes for common objects and actions. Iri sae~ medobora is a form of veiled speech as Strathern has described the phenomenon in Mount Hagen (1975).[2] Some of the metaphors the Foi use are common ones and known to everyone, for example gesa ko ~ se or "skinny dog" (adulterer); kinu or "mushroom" (meat); so'o vera- or "to roll a smoke" (to murder). People sometimes refer to others by the totemic birds of their clan. In inquiring about the marriageability of a young woman of the So'onedobo clan, a young man might ask an elder male member of that clan, "Do you have a white cockatoo feather you could give me?" Forms such as these were commonly known and standardized.
However, one of the defining features of men of status (kabe fore , "big-men," or kabe anuhae~ , "head-men") was that they possessed a wider range of "leaf talk" that they employed in oratorical encounters. I did not acquire much knowledge of these forms during my field period, but Foi men of ordinary status would remark to me that they lacked the experience in iri sae~ medobora that would allow them to understand the speech of head-men on these occasions. Like certain magic spells and sorcery techniques, these speech forms were valuable, and men could obtain them as a gift or by purchase with shell wealth.
These figures or tropes of speech depend upon the metaphoric relationship between certain objects to achieve their rhetorical effect, one that emphasizes the defining and accentuating power of deliberately contrasted paired elements. Such contrasted elements are then substituted for each other in highly formalized speech contexts. But substitution is also a property of Foi grammar itself, and it is to a consideration of its syntactic properties at this level that I now turn.
Foi Narrative Style
Tipton (1982: chapter 6) and Wagner (1978: 38-39) have noted the phenomenon of discursive substitution in Nembi and Daribi nar-
rative respectively, and their descriptions also apply to aspects of Foi narrative. The verb forms Foi use in recounting a myth or any long story are peculiar to it and distinct from the forms used in everyday speech. Murray Rule, the first linguist to analyze the language, observed that the Foi speaker "indicates by the particular verb suffix which he uses the means whereby he has become aware of the event about which he is talking" (1977:71). There are six such categories that Rule calls "verbal aspects." In addition, the Foi recognize four tenses.
However, as Rule also noted, the language uses strings of participial and other subordinate clauses in long narratives, particularly myths (1977:38). These linguistic conventions have the effect of eliding the fine distinctions in categories of evidence the Foi make in everyday speech and in their place focusing on the successive replacement of continuous, repetitive, or habitual actions. The Foi use the verb affix -bikera to indicate a continuous action presently in progress, for example dibikiribubege , "I am speaking." The affix -ha or -biha , on the other hand, indicates an action that is repetitive or customary over a longer time, as in a tegehabubege , "I am currently at work building a house." The verb stems ha or biha by themselves mean "to live" or "to exist," and the precise meaning of verbs that compound themselves with these stems can be rendered "to live, doing such and such"—as in ayaye nibiha- , "living, (they) hunted and ate" or "to live by hunting." In a parallel fashion, kera- by itself means "to be" in a more immediate and transitory sense; to be present or visible at the point of speaking—for example, nibikeraboramo uge , "while I was (in the act of) eating, he left."
In the narrative conventions that govern myth-telling, the participial suffixes -bure (present tense) and -re (past) are most important in linking a set of successive actions (Rule 1977:105). For example:
he sister's son's wife woman they-two went . . .
having-arrived his house arrived . . . .
(house) having-arrived . . . etc.
Often a set of participially linked actions is "fastened" by a final verb using the ending -bo'orege or the construction [verb stem] plus dibige . I translate this as an emphatic quotative used (as in the rhetorical examples above) to contrast elements or (in myth-telling) to indicate the fact that the tense and aspect are irrelevant and that the
speaker has heard the story from someone else. This construction thus merely indicates an unspecified past tense. For example:
having-arrived his food having-cooked-eaten
he slept (it-is, or I-have)-stated
This construction has the effect of locating the substitution of predicative actions in a hierarchy; the use of dibige or -bo'orege turns a small set of serial actions into a single compound action that in its turn can be substituted by other compound verbal predicates.
Other verb endings link clauses in somewhat different time sequences. For example, simultaneity is indicated by the present participial ending -bure :
upstream while going men speech heard stated
While traveling upstream, he heard men's voices.
In addition, there are suffixes that indicate conditional ("if. . .then"), past conditional, or hypothetical relations, as well as various other forms of consequentially linked clauses such as -somone or -bo'o , "as a result of" or "because":
I here come [plus] as a result of we to go go (command)
Since I have come here, let us go together!
These endings too can be used within participially linked clauses in the narrative mode, particularly when the narrator is relating the speech of characters within the story.
However, as will become evident when I analyze the mythology, it is not just verbs that are replacing each other syntactically within each myth but also a series of images upon which the metaphoric content of the myths rests. The syntactic properties of the Foi language I have been discussing merely serve as the vehicle for the metaphoric contrasting of conventional and nonconventional images. The successive substitution of these images within the myth has the effect of continually altering the tropic quality of the initial predicate of the myth and, at the end, finally inverting it. It is this property of metaphoric construction that I call obviation . It depends upon the fact that the elements in a metaphoric relationship must be simultaneously dissimilar as well as similar. Obviation occurs when the figurative basis of
metaphoric construction is revealed: when, for example, a myth finally reveals that women are not exactly the same as marsupials and the original premise of the myth that predicated a literal (that is, conventional) identification between them, is supplanted by a morally appropriate social solution (for example, the betrothing of, rather than the hunting of, women by men).
Magic
The substitutive process is even more apparent in the corpus of magic spells that the Foi call kusa or kusa dobora , "spell talk." During my field stay I collected fifty-five spells, most of which serve as aids to major domestic activities such as gardening, fishing, and hunting. Foi men also know a great many spells that concern other activities such as house building, the acquisition of shell wealth and, perhaps most importantly, the killing and enfeebling of enemies. Men consider these latter spells to be much more valuable than those in the first category, but I recorded only several during my time in Hegeso.[3]
The knowledge and ownership of spells in this second category are intimately linked with the achievement of male status. As with oratorical metaphors, men acquire valuable spells by payments of pearl shells and cowrie shells. Often, an elderly man might reward the clientship and support of a younger man by passing on his kusa to him. Men of high status who have a reputation as sorcerers or secret assassins, or who have great shell wealth, or who are consistently successful hunters, are thought to possess many spells of high quality giving them the power to succeed in these endeavors.
Subsistence-activity magic of the other category, however, is transmitted more casually and women too possess their own corpus of sago-processing, pig-raising, gardening, and fishing spells. Regardless of status, most adult men know several spells including at least one to aid in hunting.
Ethnographers reporting on groups culturally related to the Foi, such as the Daribi (Wagner 1972a ) and the Kaluli (Schieffelin 1980) as well as other Highlands societies such as the Mbowamb (Strathern and Strathern 1968), have described the metaphoric links that make magic spells effective for members of these societies. These links are not essentially different in form from those in Foi spells. Although the efficacy of the spell lies in its memorization and correct recital, the imagery of the content of the spell is readily apparent to the Foi. The
key format for the majority of Foi spells, as the examples already discussed in chapter 4 suggest, is "I am not doing x ; I am doing y ." For example, in a spell used when planting sugarcane, the speaker says, "I am not planting sugarcane; I am planting wild Saccharum pitpit." The characteristically exuberant and rapid growth of wild Saccharum is invoked in order to promote a similar effect in sugarcane. A spell recited during the preparation of Derris-root fish poison centers around the following substitution: "I am not squeezing this Derris root; I am squeezing the blood of Bamuya and Karaya." The reference is to the two mythical originators of Derris (the myth that accounts for the origin of this spell is analyzed in chapter 8). The metaphoric link resides in the red color of Derris leaves and blood, and in the lethal effects of both.
A spell for the construction of deadfall traps used in hunting rodents and small marsupials states that instead of building the trap with the usual wooden parts, the bones of the hawk are used: the backbone representing the log, the ribs representing the pointed struts into which it falls, and so on. The analogic relationship between man and hawk, each of which preys on common animals, is here being utilized, and the speaker attempts to appropriate the superior hunting abilities of the hawk.
In spells that do not employ the above format, the substitution appears in a more explicit manner. A spell to ensure success in hunting marsupials involves the gathering of red leaves from the banamo gibi tree (a Ficus species). Before leaving the house, the hunter chews these leaves and recites the spell, part of which runs, "I am chewing the leg, the tail of the dark marsupial; I am chewing the leg, the tail of the igini cassowary; I am chewing the leg, the tail of tree kangaroo, . . ." continuing through a long list of desired species. In this case the red leaves of the banamo gibi tree are associated in several ways: as the tree that bears a fruit commonly eaten by many species of forest game, and by its reddish color that is suggestive not only of blood and flesh but also of the reddish fur of a variety of marsupial and fowl species.
So far it has become apparent that the innovative use of metaphoric or figurative construction in magic and rhetoric represents a source of power for the Foi; they accord status to those individuals who are most skilled in those activities that in my terms are based upon the creation of tropic constructions.
Individual identity itself can be seen as an innovation on (and hence a metaphor of) conventional social roles. A person's repertoire of par-
ticular talents, skills, and capacities distinguishes him or her as a unique personality rather than, for example, a categorical male, female clan member, or kinsperson. In striving to differentiate themselves by employing rhetoric, magic, and other skills of metaphor, individuals draw upon conventional social and moral meanings, and it is these meanings, in turn, that mediate such innovations by individuals. In other words, it is in pursuit of socially defined goals that people utilize individual power, and this tempers and constrains the tropic and differentiating impact of such power.
It is also clear that such figurative constructions are not given within the system of lexically differentiated values. For example, a magic spell does not merely express the similarity in color between banamo gibi leaves and certain marsupials: strictly speaking, the spell itself creates the equivalence, like any metaphor, encompassing context and symbolic equation within a single construct. The spell focuses on the quality of redness, out of a wide range of other equivalences and symmetries between culturally defined items, to achieve a morally or culturally desirable end. A functional or utilitarian orientation might tempt an observer to interpret such similarity solely in terms of the empirical association between such elements. But Marcel Mauss, in his essay on magic originally published in 1903, pointed out that when the association of one object with another is ostensibly on the basis of color, this is
a formal convention, almost a law, whereby out of a whole series of possible characteristics colour is chosen to establish a relationship between two things. Moreover, only one, or very few, of the objects having that colour are chosen to share this relationship. This kind of reasoning, applied here to colour, can also be used with regard to form, contrariety, and all other possible properties. (1972:77)
This point can be made more forcefully by examining the customs surrounding Foi memorial poetry, in which the socially significant properties of individual human beings are aesthetically created.
Mourning Songs
My first and most enduring aural memory of the Mubi Valley is the rhythmic thud of women shredding sago pith and the sound of their atonal chanting in time to it. When I asked what those chants or songs were, people replied that they were obedobora , "obe talk," named after the characteristic refrain to most of the songs: abu biri-
o, obe-u ! ("sago mallet-oh!"). The sago song is considered by the Foi to be their original poetic medium. The men used to tell me: "These songs belong to the women. When we men perform our sorohabora chants, we are merely imitating the women."
The Foi define both the women's obedobora , that is, the sago chants, and the more formal men's sorohabora chants as mourning songs. They design them to associate the memory of deceased relatives with the territories he or she used to frequent. These songs are composed by any individual, but memorable ones can be passed on to children. One sago chant that was sung to me by an elderly widow named Gebo concerned her deceased husband, Kigiri:
Boy, your sabe tree wood grubs, owe
Boy, your dabi tree deadfall, eya
The bush has covered them up, owe
Boy, your Sumani Creek, eya
The bush has covered it up, owe
Boy your Agegenebo Creek, eya
The bush has covered it up, owe[4]
This continues, listing several other places the dead man had owned and frequented, and then finishes:
(My) deceased Orodobo clan daughter Fumaruwame, eya
(My) deceased son Aruweye, owe
The line of the So'onedobo man Bugimena, eya
Kigiri, owe
Remembering the places where her husband made deadfall traps, cut wood grubs, and dammed small creeks for fish, Gebo lists these places, referring to the fact that because he can longer go there, the bush and forest have obliterated the signs of human intervention. The final lines include reference to the deceased children of the two (though there were three others alive at the time), noting that although Kigiri was by genealogy of a lineage of the So'onedobo clan, he was adopted by the Orodobo clan and his children were Orodobo also.
Obedobora can also commemorate people without referring to death. The next song was described by the singer Kunuhuaka as being taught to her by her widowed mother Duma: "When my brother Ta'anobo ran away when he was a small boy, she followed him, calling out to him. She searched and searched through the bush, calling out, but only the birds answered her, 'i ! i !, wo ! wo !":
In this uninhabited place[5] I hear the sisiyo bird,
eya
But there are no men, eya
The side of the mountain, the u bird, eya
But men I do not hear, owa
At Ayamo where the yamu sago is, the sisiyo bird,
eya
(But) you only, I hear not
At Ayamo, the muri bird, eya
But you I hear not
At the bend in the Ama'afu Creek, The sisiyo bird,
eya
But to me you speak not
This continues through a list of other creeks and places at Ayamo.
Another of Duma's songs was composed upon the death of her husband, Kunuhuaka's father Deya, during the funeral services. "When my mother went to take my father's bones to the place Abu, she cried and sang this song":
Mount Vivi, while climbing
Eh, I am coming
Aquatic grass, while going
Eh, I am coming
Rock and sandy bottom
Eh, I too am coming
Gama'ibu Creek following
Eh, I am coming
Tawagari Creek going
Eh, I am coming
At the head of the Barua Creek going
Eh, I am coming
In the valley of the Warotabo Creek going
Eh, I am coming
Mount Wanuma climbing
Eh, I am coming
. . .[other place names inserted]
I am the mother of the widow's place
Ai! I am coming
I am the mother of the widow's paint
Eh, I am coming
I am the mother of the fufumasibo
necklace
Eh, I am coming
I am the mother of the black charcoal
paint
Ai! I am coming
Ta'anobo's mother
I am coming
Yegina'o's mother
I am coming, following
House-watcher mother[6]
I am coming
Kuidobo clan Fasu'u'ubi's daughter
I am coming
Ifigi Village woman Ayabo's daughter
I am coming
The first stanza traces what amounts to a socially cognized landscape; a region of place names culturally quickened by the morally apprehendable actions of human beings. The second refers to the decorations a widow must wear for the period of her mourning. In these lines, the singer identifies herself metaphorically as the source or "mother" of the widow's rituals themselves. The third stanza is a common theme and is the basic framework for the men's sorohabora . It identifies the singer or the subject of the song by reference to his or her parents and children, those relatives with whom a person is most closely identified in the Foi social universe.
The most frequently sung (and obviously, most easily composed) and simplified version of the obedobora is merely this repetitive listing of the singer's teknonyms. The woman Yefua, for example, the mother of seven children, would sing the following song, the first refrain of which is known by all women and all young girls old enough to make sago:
this sago mallet, obe-u
quickly take it [i.e., make sago quickly]
This refrain can be repeated over and over again. The second part begins with Yefua's naming of herself teknonymously:
Mother of Waibo [her eldest child, a boy]
Mother of Garibi [her second eldest, a boy]
and so on, through the remaining five children in the order of their birth.
The substitutive process in the case of these songs is slightly more complex but is identical to the previous examples in its creation of metaphoric relationships. All memorial songs have a basic duplex structure. In the first case, that of the mourning journey, the lifespan of a deceased person is transposed onto a geographical route, and like the gisaro songs of the culturally related Kaluli of Mount Bosavi:
it is possible with any song to construct a map of the region concerned, including hills, streams, gardens, sago stands, and other resources, and . . . trace a history of the area. . . (Schieffelin 1976:184)
In the second case, the lifespan of the person is described in terms of a genealogical route, detailing the identity of one's parents, then wife, and finally children. These two commemorative modes are equated within the context of the song itself so that the spatial representation of a personal geography is substituted by a procreative route in genealogical time. People become known through their lives in terms of the places they are associated with and have frequented: the area grows in size as the person grows older. In the same way, a person's genealogical area also grows in size during the same period. In their memorial songs the Foi are merely asserting that the two things are not unrelated; that they are metaphorically equivalent.
Name Transmission
When a man dies, his sons, including those he has adopted, take over his territory. The cumulative effect of this is to identify the proliferation of lineages and local clan segments with individual movements and activities within particular pieces of property. Men make claims to land based on their father's and father's father's use of particular territories.[7] A man is replaced in this sense by this sons, but he is replaced, or substituted, by his namesake (ya'o ) in quite another. It is the custom for men and women of advancing years to have an infant named after them. It is important that this should not happen at too young an age lest the person fed that he or she is being replaced too soon and his death hastened. In addition, there is the risk that the hisare spirit of the living person will become angry and attempt to kill the child who has received his name. Namesakes usually are dose relatives of the father and mother; most commonly, a child is named for his or her parent's or parent's close siblings, including dose adoptive relationships. Thus although the memorial songs, for example, portray an ostensibly "pure" patrifiliative portrait of Foi society, name transmission reflects the equal importance of matrilateral ties. Similarly, although land is patrilineally transmitted, men borrow other men's land frequently, and by far most commonly, from their mother's brothers.
Most Foi names have a lexical derivation, for example, Buri : a fish species; Gesa : "dog"; Aso : "game animal" (generic); Fo'owi~ : "came to stay from a distant place"; Sohai : an edible leaf. Sometimes people
give names to mark an unusual death; these resemble the "penthonyms" that A. J. Strathern describes for the Wiru (1970a )—for example, Kuiremohui~ : "sago killed (her)" (the child's namesake was killed by a falling sago palm); Huya'one : "killed-cooked-eaten" (the man's namesake was killed and eaten by Fasu men who traditionally were cannibals). Commonly, personal names are also place names, for example, Hesa : a section of bank along the Mubi River; Gora : a small stream flowing into the Mubi; Yo'orowi~ : "came from Yo'oro." But the Foi view the lexical meaning of names as irrelevant for most purposes, and many have no meaning at all but are, as the Foi say, "just names." When asked what one's name means, most Foi identify their namesake.
It is common for Foi men and women both to address and refer to each other teknonymously by the name of their eldest child, male, or female. For example, one of my informants, Horehabo, was usually referred to as Yiyimakaba (a shortening of the phrase, Yiyimaka aba : "Yiyimaka's father"). Midibaru was known as Awa~ yoba ("Awa~ yo's father" even though Awa~ yo had been dead for years. Small children are called by their namesake's teknonyms also (for example, twelve-year-old Gisu'umi was called Goberohua, "Gobero's mother," because the late Gisu'umi for whom the child was named was this man's mother). They retain these teknonyms until they themselves have their first child. A child with a living namesake is usually referred to by a short nickname until the namesake dies, because, ideally, there should be only one person for each name. For example, the child Ibume was called Gi, "ground"; the child Irasaburi was called Koai, "old"; the younger girl Ko'ofeka was called Fu, "swamp." By the same token, a person should only have one namesake, but occasionally this is controverted so that people contemptuously refer to more than one namesake of the same person as ena gari yafodobora , "named after the leg," or u~ gari yafodobora, "named after the head" (rather than the whole person, since the name has been "split").
In beginning the previous section with memorial songs and ending this one with the rules of name transmission, I have tried to indicate the Foi view of the general substitutability of people, places, and names. An individual can be referred to metaphorically in memorial songs by the geographical sites with which he was associated during his life. A person can also be metaphorically referred to as the "mother" or "father" of their namesake's children, since one substitutes for that person in the social system. This affects kinship termi-
nological usages also, such that, for example, if a child receives the name of a person's dead mother's brother, that person addresses the child by that kinship term (abia ).
These last examples indicate that social identity—the analogue to linguistic "value"—is formed by the same substitutive process as kinship statuses themselves; indeed, the inheritance of such statuses by namesakes indicates that the Foi do not distinguish between them in any significant way. Replacing human beings with meat and shells (through bridewealth and maternal payments) has the effect of reordering social boundaries and creating affinal relationships. Replacing peoples' names—the creation of the namesake relationship—has the contrastive effect of freezing a current social system, of replicating a system of interpersonal relationships in both genealogical and geographical space. Such a distinction again reflects what I have identified in the last chapter as the opposition between what the Foi perceive as a natural "flow" of analogic relationship and the deliberate efforts of humans to redirect or halt it.
The most important result of the metaphors of naming, magic, leaf-talk, and other examples I have discussed in this chapter is the way they order a conventional set of significances. Because the analogies they elicit have become standardized , their status as tropic constructions has been compromised or hidden to a large extent. But sociality, as a flow of such conventionally elicited images, ultimately reveals the tropic or figurative nature of these constructions; it reveals, in other words, the process by which figurative constructions can be identified as themselves "standing for" other tropes. Such an assumption is necessary in order to elucidate the metaphorical nature of both myth and social process, and it is to an analysis of this relationship that the remaining chapters are addressed.
Chapter VII
Obviation and Myth
The Dialectic of Foi Social Process
Throughout the last four chapters, I have assumed (with considerable anthropological precedent) that a basic orientation exists among the symbolic usages of any people and that this orientation is a function of the workings of the symbols themselves. The function can be simply stated: the conventional usages define, in and of themselves, what we would call (in semiotic rather than sociological terms) the moral or collective realm. As opposed to conventional usages, there are others whose construction impinges upon these semantic (or syntagmatic) domains. Although the meaningful properties of conventional usages require that they be treated as metaphors in some sense, I shall go on to assume that nonconventional usages may be treated as a cultural order in contradistinction to the conventional. This self-structuring orientation that I am assuming thus replicates Geertz' notion of a dialectic between "ethical" and cosmological ("worldview") realms such that each "emerges" from the other (1973). Dumont's (1965) discussion of the individual versus the collective suggests, furthermore, that the nonconventional can be opposed to the conventional as a differentiating function. Marshall Sahlins (1979) has similarly argued that individual experience and cultural meaning are mutually constitutive, describing them as respectively encompassing referential (semantic) and metaphoric signification.
Given this opposition, the question arises of the relation between the two realms, which becomes the relation between conventional (that is, literal, nonmetaphoric) and nonconventional (metaphoric) usages. I have defined the Foi realm of conventional usages as consisting of a set of images that depicts a flow of vital and personal energies and forces. Symbolically opposed to this domain are the idioms of human action and intention. For the Foi, this domain comprises the efforts of men and women to halt and redirect such vital forces into morally appropriate channels so as to create the artifice of human sociality. In chapters 3 and 4, for example, having outlined the content of the conventional distinction between male and female realms, I described how this distinction is maintained by the ongoing attempts of men to control sorcery material and to ward off illness. In chapter 61 observed that the Foi geographical environment of place names is recreated in a socially relevant form through the innovative medium of mourning songs.
As I noted, the metaphoric quality of these processes rests on the fact that they involve the substitution of one kind of symbolization by another. But I have also emphasized that what we might label as Foi kinship is defined not by genealogical criteria but by the bridewealth networks a person participates in. And since the exchange of wealth items that forms such networks is also a matter of substitution—of wealth objects for human vitality and continuity—then the processes of Foi social structure should also be susceptible to this kind of tropic analysis. I therefore now wish to analyze the sequences of the Foi marriage and mortuary cycles, described in chapter 5 as the progressive alternation between what for the Foi are innate conventional distinctions and the opposed social processes that serve to maintain such conventional orders.
All major social process for the Foi begins with the conventional separation between men and women, or between male and female domains. In figure 6, I label this as the starting point A of a dialectical alternation I now describe. The daily life of the Foi represented in one of its most important aspects the intersection of male and female productivity, as I suggested in chapter 3. When bridewealth items are given, however, the focus is shifted from this general distinction between the sexes to a more specific one between wife-givers and wife-takers. The initial negotiations of betrothal and bridewealth are the affair of the immediate kinsmen of the bride and groom so that at this stage, the distinction between wife-givers and wife-takers is one
Figure 6.
Tropic Alternation in Foi Secular Marriage Sequence
between individuals rather than larger social units such as the local clan or lineage. Since affinity and its attendant behavioral restrictions begin with the acceptance of the betrothal payment, it is the transfer of wealth that creates the affinal alliance. I will label the giving of the betrothal and bridewealth payment as B in figure 6, and the resulting affinal distinction between wife-givers and wife-takers as C .
In terms of my argument, it is necessary to view these two distinctions as analogous. In the bridewealth transfer, the wife-takers give male items of wealth and wife-givers provide the bride and her attendant gifts of female domestic implements and clothing (the arera gifts). The two parties to a marriage thus represent themselves as provisioners of male and female products, in a manner similar to which men and women provide each other with specific sex-linked foodstuffs on a more regular basis. Though the two kinds of transfer are differentially contextualized, they are analogues of each other at the level of cultural analysis with which I am concerned. I have thus drawn a line between A and C in figure 6 to show that, in the act of transferring bridewealth, the conventional distinction between the sexes has been temporarily supplanted or substituted by that between affines, and that the two therefore become metaphors of each other.
I identify the next stage in the sequence, which I have labeled D , as the final transfer of the buruga nami , the bridewealth pigs that the wife-takers give upon the birth of the bride's first child. Since the Foi say that a person is equally the child of both his father and his mother's brother—in other words, since he is related consanguineously to both his father's and his mother's group—the conventional distinction between affines has become correspondingly ambiguous. Thus, although the buruga nami is part of the bridewealth, the Foi say that it is given only when the first child is born. In other words, the buruga nami is given by a "child-taker" to a "child-giver," thus once more shifting the meaning of the conventional distinction between affines. The men formerly related as wife-takers and wife-givers are now additionally related transitively through the child they both consider their own. The payments that pass from wife-taker to wife-giver at this point become matrilateral payments, given to ensure the health of the child by mitigating the spiritual illness that can be sent by the child's mother's brother. These payments are made by the sister's husband to the wife's brother but are called "payments to the mother's brother." I label this stage in the sequence E . The line I draw between E and C depicts the symbolic transformation of affinity into its analogue, matrilaterality.
As I described in chapter 5, a man who feels he did not receive enough bridewealth for his sister can become the unwitting agent of the matrilateral sickness that attacks his sister's child in such cases. Under the same reasoning, a man can also demand pay from his father's sister's son (FZS), especially upon the marriage of the latter's sister. A man and his cross-cousin thus may initiate ka'o manahabora exchanges of (female) foodstuffs and (male) wealth items in order to reimpose the original affinal interdict that existed between their fathers, who were brothers-in-law to each other. As I have already noted, the Foi say that cross-cousins are "like brothers," but unlike brothers they belong to different clans, and unlike brothers one's mother's brother's son (MBS) has the ability to send illness to his FZS if he is dissatisfied with the bridewealth he received for the latter's sisters. Yet because they are like brothers—in other words, because their parents were siblings—cross-cousins call each other's spouses by the same terms they call their siblings' spouses. The relationship between cross-cousins thus combines both consanguinity and affinity: their parents are cross-sex siblings, but they are also brothers-in-law. In the cross-cousin relationship, the original interdict that separated male and female and wife-giver and wife-taker has been dissolved, or combined into one analogue.
The initiation of ka'o manahabora payments that I identify as point F in figure 6 serves to return the sequence to its original distinction between male and female, since the two cross-cousins give male and female items respectively, and since one's cross-cousin can cause kumabo illness, which the Foi classify both etiologically and symptomatically along with women's menstrual illness.
In other words, what began with point A as a clear-cut division between male and female domains becomes, through the successive differentiations that the Foi make in marriage and childbirth, a sum-mating analogue of the normatively opposed principles of bisexuality, affinity, and consanguinity. Indeed, being merely different refractions of a single analogical social differentiation, they are all metaphors of each other. The progressive explication of this analogy can be defined as symbolic obviation. The sequence I have described begins with the literal or conventional separation of men and women and ends by transforming this literal or semantic opposition with a metaphorical one between male cross-cousins, who are figuratively like male and female to each other. In other words, the "symbolic" rather than the "factual" nature of the distinction between male and female has been
Entrance to longhouse, 1939 (photo by F. E. Williams)
Foi men, 1939 (photo by F. E. Williams)
Foi women, 1939 (photo by F. E. Williams)
1979: Foi women in ceremonial dress: pearl shells and painted chest cloths (fefa'o kosa'a)
Wa'abu, a head-man of Barutage, displays the
bridewealth received for his daughter, Yebinu
Sumabo of Hegeso leads her co-wife's daughter, Fu, to the house of her
husband-to-be
The transvestite i~ ka of the Usane Habora curing ceremony
Horehabo of Hegeso demonstrates the procedure in constructing a cassowary snare
Canoes along the Faya'a River next to Hegeso longhouse
Heating stones for the earth oven prior to Hegeso's Dawa, December 1984
Baru longhouse, facing the Baru River
Women mourn over the corpse of Iraharabo in the Hegeso longhouse
Men remove the body of Iraharabo, from the Hegeso longhouse surrounded by mourners
rendered apparent or "obvious," for it now encompasses both the relationship between affines and between (certain types of) consanguines.
If obviation concerns the relationship between literal (semantic) and metaphorical usages, then, given the assumptions I have outlined in the beginning of this chapter, it can also be defined as the mutual creation of the conventional (or collectivizing) and nonconventional (or differentiating) cultural realms as I have defined them for the Foi. Referring to figure 6, it can be seen that points A, C , and E represent the transformation of the opposition of male and female into wife-givers and wife-takers, then child-givers and child-takers, and finally back to the analogically intersexual opposition between cross-cousins. Points B, D , and F , by contrast, represent the transfers of wealth that impel the former transformations: betrothal and bridewealth, the buruga nami , and finally ka'o manahabora. B, D , and F therefore represent the imposition of categorical oppositions in Foi social life, while A, C , and E represent the conventional distinctions that result from them. Following Wagner (1978:47-48), I will refer to points A, C , and E as the facilitating (conventional) mode of the sequence, and to points B, D , and F , the tropic constructions that obviate the former, as the motivating (figurative) mode. A more accurate depiction of this tropic alternation would fold the sequence back upon itself so that the obviation of F leads back to the starting point A , as I have illustrated in figure 7. The resulting ternary figure allows one to view schematically the preceding analytic sequence as a series of interlocked triads, ABC , CDE, and EFA . Points A, C , and E are respectively the theses of the triads they initiate and the syntheses of the preceding ones.
However, I now wish to reconsider the significance of point D within this sequence. Recall that unlike the bridewealth pearl shells and cowrie, the buruga nami or bridewealth pigs are shared by all members of the bride's paternal and maternal groups respectively. It must also be noted that unlike shells, pigs have a male and female component, the external flesh and internal organs respectively. This distinction, however, is not given normative expression in the division of the bridewealth pork, since men and women share both kinds of meat without restriction. Therefore, D negates or obviates the original male-female distinction of A , while at the same time the birth of the child it represents serves to render ambiguous the distinction between wife-givers and wife-takers. It is significant in this respect that, unlike the Daribi and many Eastern Highlands groups, the Foi do not artic-
Figure 7.
Obviational Sequence of Foi Marriage Cycle
ulate the contrast between maternal and paternal procreative substances as an idiom of filiative asymmetry.
The obviation of A by D , on the one hand, thus depicts the moral implications of the analogy between the differential provisioning of male and female vegetable staples and the undifferentiated sharing of male and female meat: that maternal and paternal substance relate individuals equally and that the distinction between male and female procreative substances must not be made a model for asymmetrical filiative relations. The relationship between points E and B , on the other hand, extends the implications of this point further, showing that asymmetry in social relations should be confined to the parties to the marriage, and not to the offspring. The obviation of B by E thus depicts the fundamental identity between bridewealth and matrilateral payments that I have already elucidated. Finally, if F is contrasted with C , it can be seen that the end result of the affinal interdict is the paradoxical or analogic brotherhood of cross-cousins: consanguines or "sharers" who are nevertheless impelled by a residual affinity to make ka'o manahabora payments involving the exchange of male and female items. The Foi marriage sequence therefore begins with unrelated wife-givers and wife-takers exchanging male and female objects and ends with consanguines doing the same. Consanguinity and affinity thus become analogues of each other, and it is in this analytic sense that I define obviation.
The second example I describe is the Foi mortuary sequence that I analyzed in chapter 5 and which is in all respects an inversion of the normal Foi marriage cycle. When a man dies, the distinction between the living and the dead is substituted for that between wife-takers and wife-givers (point A in figure 8). The affinal relations existing prior to this death are quickly severed by the death payments made between affines linked by the deceased (B ). This motivates the community to reorient itself in opposition to the ghost (temporarily abrogating the conventional male-female distinction normally characteristic of the community), and all men and women partake of the cooked meat during the Nineteenth Day feast from which the ghost is excluded (C ). Implicitly, as I have shown in the line between C and A , the distinction between the ghost and the living has been substituted for that between men and women. The next step marks the beginning of the return of the community to its normal secular state, as the men and women separate, the men to assume identification with the ghost in the bush and the women staying in the village to care for the corpse (D ). In
Figure 8.
Tropic Alternation in Foi Mortuary Cycle
relation to A, D marks the turning point in the obviation sequence: the reimposition of a male-female dichotomy for the original affinal opposition dissolved by death. It is consistent that the Foi represent this in terms of the essentially sexually bivalent composition of the corpse itself: the male spirit and jawbone and the female corpse or external flesh (which itself constitutes a metaphor of the separate male and female contributions to conception).
Upon their return to the village, the men hold their own feast (E ) from which they exclude the women, emphasizing their identification with the ghost brought about during the Bi'a'a hunting expedition. The men reestablish a total separation of male and female as the means of dispatching the ghost to its proper afterworld; thus E obviates B . Similarly, the death payments severed the previous affinal relationships among the deceased's kin for the same purpose: to separate or isolate the widow. When the feast is over and the men have been successful in ordering the ghost to take up residence in the afterworld, the widow is released from confinement and allowed to view the bones of her dead husband, after which the bones are permanently removed to the burial ossuary. As the community of men and women offered the bones to the ghost in the Nineteenth Day feast urging it to leave the living community, so the men and women now offer the dead man's bones to the widow (F ), forcing her to reassume her place in the society of the living. The sequence began with the disposal of a dead man and ends with the figurative rebirth of a live unmarried woman, and hence the resumption of the normal secular cycle of marriage and bridewealth (see figure 9).
However, it must be noted that if the widow resumes her place among the living, she does so in significantly altered form, for she wears the widow's kaemari mixture and is considered unmarriageable for a period of time due to the jealous interest her dead husband's ghost maintains in her. The kaemari mixture in fact is designed to simulate the offensive odor of a decomposing body: she has become the corpse, so to speak, an image which reveals that the distinctions between the living and the dead and male and female have become collapsed within a unitary ritual expression. Likewise, those affines linked through the dead man now prefix their affinal terms of address with denane , "ghost," so that they are to other normal affines as the dead are to the living. The distinctions between the sexes, between affines, and between the living and the dead have been established as analogues of each other.
Figure 9.
Obviational Sequence of Foi Mortuary Cycle
The Foi sequences of marriage, the creation and obviation of affinity and consanguinity, the recreation of the conventional flow of male and female productivity following death, are all instances of processes that span months or years. However, this should not mask the fact that as a series of successively preemptive metaphors, they are a form of discourse, as I am employing the term. My depiction of them is thus a purposeful condensation of the relevant tropic substitutions and turning points so as to demonstrate the semiotic and discursive foundation of these most important Foi social phenomena. But the tropic creation of the Foi moral universe is by no means limited to these social processes alone. In their stylized and compacted genre, myths provide miniature examples of the effect of metaphoric substitutions. The obviation of social predicaments in myth are prized by the Foi for their humor, irony, or chilling revelation of crucial moral ambiguities.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the formal diagrams and the abstract terminology I have been employing are not meant merely to represent reality, as a map depicts a portion of terrain, but to illustrate the relationship between different symbolic functions themselves. I do not consider it necessary to demonstrate a relationship between these diagrams as models and some behavior that they are supposed to explain, simply because I do not think that it is profitable to separate so radically thought and action. I focus the "heart" of this book on myth, and use myth as a model for the rest of social reality, not because I enjoy the arcane exercise of formal analysis but because I feel that myths reveal not only the categorical oppositions of the structuralist enterprise but also what is fundamental to Foi conceptualizations of morality, intention, consequence, agency, and person-hood themselves.
The Ethnography of Foi Myth
It is a common convention in ethnographic reporting that the analysis of myth and/or ritual should follow the analysis of, for example, the social structure, or the kinship, or the economic system of a particular society. This, as Marshall Sahlins notes, reflects the received anthropological definition of culture as a
division into component purposive systems, economy, society, and ideology . . . each composed of distinct kinds of relations and objectives, and
the whole hierarchically arranged according to analytic presuppositions of functional dominance and functional necessity. (1976:211)
As I reach this point in my analysis, however, it is necessary for me to reveal that I analyzed mythology of the Foi before I interpreted the symbolic dimensions of their society. What I have prefaced these remaining chapters with, in other words, is a normative portrait of Foi society based on my structuring in a particular way the images that emerged from my interpretation of their myths. But if I am correct in assuming that the cultural phenomena that constitute our anthropological subject matter are semiotic ones, then the ethnographic facts of Foi society I derive from an analysis of its myths are no less real than, for example, a catalogue of its population size or statistical rates of intermarriage. If I have demonstrated satisfactorily that the most important Foi social events of marriage, exchange, and death can be semiotically analyzed as a series of successive figurative constructions, then, as Sahlins implies, the analysis of myth should provide no less central an arena for the understanding of cultural meanings of such archetypal moral and social images.
In the last chapter I introduced the discursive styles appropriate to myth-telling and observed how the syntax of verb forms the Foi use in mythic narrative facilitates the substitutive structure of the tropic constructions involved. I now wish to describe the Foi practice of myth-telling itself before I analyze the myths as examples of symbolic obviation.
The Foi recognize several classes of folktales and stories. The most common and important ones, and the only ones I am concerned with here, are called tuni . The Foi define most of them as deliberately fanciful and untrue, and they regard as purely imaginary the various giants, ogres, and semihuman men and women—all of whom might be described as "Foi-manqué "—who appear in many of the tuni .
Williams, however, reported that "the Kutubu recognize two general types of story—the tuni and the hetagho " (1977:302). While he describes the function of the tuni as "obviously recreational" (p. 302), the hetagho were understood by the Foi "to deal with ancient events of fundamental importance and consequently possess a religious as well as magical meaning" (p. 303). This contrast corresponds to the one the Daribi draw between "moral tales" and "origin myths" (Wagner 1978:56). It is possible that Williams' rendition of the word hetagho could be what I heard as irika'o —that is what the Foi of Hegeso suggested when I inquired as to the meaning of the hetagho
stories. However, a simpler explanation of Williams' distinction is available.
Occasionally, a Foi man would recite a tuni to me and then approach me some days later and inform me that the particular tuni he narrated had "a base" (ga : the word meaning "base; origin; root; reason; significance" and so forth). What he meant was that he was subsequently informed by other more knowledgeable men that the tuni , in addition to its overt plot, also contained the implicit charter for a kusa or magic spell. The Foi of Hegeso therefore distinguish between two types of tuni : those whose content is limited to their overt moral, and those that also account for the origin of specific magical procedures. These latter myths, I believe, are what the Kutubuans define as hetagho . I found that this category of tuni often included the names of the main protagonists—names that figured significantly in the associated spells—whereas the other category of tuni dealt with unnamed characters.
Of the twenty-four tuni I analyze in chapters 8 through 11, only one is included which accounts for the creation of magical procedures by legendary characters of Foi mythical ancestry. In chapter 4 I noted that Williams observed that the pearl shell origin story he heard at Lake Kutubu (which included knowledge useful in making pearl shell magic) was told to him in great secrecy. It is conceivable that the Foi of Hegeso and neighboring villages avoided telling me those tuni that were associated with their most important magical procedures. On the other hand, I have no evidence that each magic spell known to the Foi has its corresponding myth accounting for its origin. I wish at this point only to explore the implications of the division the Foi make between those tuni that are origin stories for magic spells and those that are not. The implications of such a conceptual division bear upon an understanding of the relation of mythology to a more specific domain of magical efficacy in Foi thought.[1]
From one point of view we can isolate three independent normative institutions: (1) a set of certain subsistence activities; (2) a corpus of magical formulæ; and (3) a corpus of myths, each of which in addition to accounting for the origin of some magic spell also encompasses a commentary on various moral aspects of Foi sociality. By implication, those tuni that describe the origin of magic spells also account for the origin of the activity with which the spell is associated. But let us for argument's sake view these three apparently separate domains as different objectifications of a single symbolic nexus, much as Lévi-Strauss characterized the different properties of a Tlingit cedarwood fish club:
Everything about this implement—which is also a superb work of art—seems m be a matter of structure: its mythical symbolism as well as its practical function. More accurately, the object, its function and its symbolism seem to be inextricably bound up with each other and m form a dosed system. (1966:26)
The corpus of tuni that have associated magic spells or which account for the actions of legendary culture heroes responsible for such spells lends to the Foi economic sphere a moral significance: the resolution of paradoxes within the particular tuni is part of the meaning of the associated subsistence activity, much as the geography of Foi territory created through the media of mourning songs is rendered morally cognizable through the historical actions of human beings. I explore the implications of this relationship between particular myths and magic spells in the course of my analysis of the myths in chapters 8 through 11.
The Foi recite their tuni only during the nighttime after they have finished their evening meal. As they explained to me, they believed that if a person told a tuni during the daytime his anus would close up and he would be unable to defecate. The reciting of tuni , therefore, has an intimate association with the communal sharing of food that the Foi engage during their main evening meal: eating complements speech and vice versa, and speech is in a sense the residue or by-product of a more profound commonality centering on shared eating.
In the man's longhouse, when a man begins to recite a myth, he is immediately surrounded by a group of wide-eyed and attentive children, since it is for the ostensible amusement of the children that the tuni are told. But other adults also gather, most of whom have heard the tales many times before, and it is common for men to interrupt the narrator from time to time to demand a point of clarification or correct an ambiguous phrase.
Although only men recite tuni in the longhouse of course, women and girls gather in the women's houses at the same time in the evening for the same purpose. Four of the myths I present were told to me by women. Most others, although told to me by male informants, were known by both men and women. I attempt to make various contrasts between those myths told by men and those told by women during the course of my analysis.
My own investigation and collection of the tuni interfered somewhat with the Foi conventions of storytelling. Sometimes I tape-recorded the myths as they were told in the longhouse. More com-
monly, men and women visited my house and told one or more myths that I recorded there and then (I must note that they did not seem hesitant to do so during daylight hours, contrary to their belief concerning the harmful effects of diurnal myth-telling). After recording the myth, I transcribed the entire Foi text with the aid of a field assistant and made a word-by-word translation from Foi to English. From this literal translation I recomposed an English version, attempting at all times to preserve the syntactic and stylistic properties of the Foi version within the bounds of comprehensible English.
In addition to the tuni , the Foi also describe another class of stories as dase gahae , literally "first tales." The Foi consider these stories true: they account for real events that supposedly happened in the distant past, though the names of the specific individuals involved have been forgotten. Unlike the tuni , they deal with one basic theme: a malevolent ghost takes the form of a human being and the tale describes the successful attempts of a real human to overcome the ghost. The Foi, especially children, consider these stories particularly frightening, since they portray one of the more abiding fears of the Foi: attack by spirits of the dead.
A significant feature of Foi tuni is paradoxically that which is left unsaid; that which is assumed by the narrator to be understood by the listener. This is partly the result of the fact that much of the action in these tales is normal daily activity that requires little elaboration. For example, a common opening to many plots involves the meeting of a man and woman who consequently "live together." It is not necessary for the narrator to specify that they lived "as a married couple" or whether bridewealth was paid, and so on. This is understood by narrator and listener alike. But this feature is also a deliberate device on the part of the speaker to introduce ambiguity at certain points in the story so that the final resolution is made correspondingly more forceful: a previously veiled part of the plot is more sharply illuminated in this manner. In the above example, it might later be revealed that the man and woman were cohabiting adulterously. The initial ambiguity of the conventional description thus facilitates the particular moral transformation encompassed in the myth.
In a more profound sense, however, the Foi myth teller's failure to elaborate conventional settings only appears as an omission to the anthropologist who himself comes from a tradition that focuses on such settings as the form of moral statements. The Foi, instead, located morality in the particular actions of the characters, judging them not
in relation to a set of transcendent social rules but in terms of the consequences such actions have on relationships between the characters in and of themselves. And as I suggested in the opening chapter, it is the moral quality of such "precipitated" relationships that constitutes the social setting of the myth, but only after the fact, as it were. One might say that, like Indiana Jones, Foi myth makes up its morality as it goes along, and it is this lack of emphasis on moral backgrounding that is singularly evident to the Westerner.
Yet the Foi also go to the opposite extreme and explain in minute detail a minor aspect of the plot that has little to do with the meaning of the final resolution of the story. Much of this is done in a deliberately exaggerated sense to create, for example, a sarcastic, facetious, or ironic setting; to establish the comic or heroic proportions of the characters' personalities; or to deliberately sharpen the conventional roles of those characters.
In recent times, evening sessions of myth-telling must often give way to conversation on the mundane matters relating to all the myriad influences and pressures the Foi have been experiencing as a result of change and development. The Christian Mission too has encouraged the introduction of stories from the Bible, which in the eyes of strong Mission advocates are preferable to irreverent traditional Foi tales. Yet notwithstanding, before the Foi were contacted by the Mission and government, they had pressing concerns with bridewealth and other payments, sorcery accusations and litigations, all of which must have competed with the tuni for attention during the evening period of vigorous discourse. In short, the stories continue to be told and few have been forgotten. The tuni I present here represent only a fraction of the 130 myths I collected during my fieldwork. Most men and women beyond the age of twenty-five are well-versed in many different myths and "first tales." I have selected the ones here as most representative of the corpus. Many are those that were most frequently recounted to me and that the Foi consider important or otherwise favored; others are those I have chosen as exemplifying a single group of nearly identical plots. Yet I also chose them with the aim of presenting the entire range of moral problems to which all the myths are devoted.
Obviation and Structural Analysis
In the first chapter, I asserted that structural and obviational analysis were two sides of the same coin of meaning—one cannot invoke
metaphorical relationships without reference to the signs that are their ultimate building blocks, and one cannot discuss signs without considering the tropic equations that restrict and limit their associations. I also suggested that Lévi-Strauss's approach to myth could be characterized by a focus on sign relationships to the exclusion of tropic ones.
But can one really compare the enterprise of Lévi-Strauss with my current goal that easily? After all, Lévi-Strauss dealt with hundreds of cultures and thousands of myths, spanning two continents, while I have confined myself to the several stories that I collected in the sparsely populated jungle of one small and remote Papuan valley. Yet when all is said and done, the last paragraph of Lévi-Strauss' final volume of Mythologiques seems to reduce his entire magnificent enterprise to the ultimate and simple existential dilemma that humankind faces: how can we become self-conscious? Whether it is three or four lonely Foi myth tellers, or the records of long-dead missionaries attempting to immortalize a dying consciousness, that dilemma is insolubly and irreducibly the meaning of all culture. Semantic and tropic analysis may be formally opposed, as I will show, but they are both essential to the discovery process by which the apparent opacity of myth is revealed as the self-invented inscrutability of the meaning of man's life. Whether one confines oneself to a dozen stories of a single people or the representative corpus of an entire hemisphere, the nature of this insight cannot be made more or less intense. Structural and obviational analysis are not sterile attempts to reduce the artistry of myth to dreary formalisms, but rather joyous and reckless tools with which to demonstrate the overwhelming force that human language—and hence culture itself—possesses.
Let us therefore contrast the semantic and tropic qualities of mythic discourse with the aim not of negating Lévi-Strauss' work, but rather of augmenting it. This is perhaps best illustrated by contrasting the manner in which each analytical mode deals with the problems of variations of a single myth, and fragmented versus whole myths. I therefore begin with a Foi myth that both F. E. Williams and I collected but in significantly different forms. Williams entitled his version "The Origin of the Kutubu People" (1977:313-314 ff.) and rendered it as follows:
A girl was gathering firewood in the bush when she fell in with an ugly old woman. Going on together they came to a haginamo tree and derided to gather berries. The girl climbed into the tree when the old woman, who
stood underneath, suddenly struck the trunk. The tree sprang up to an enormous height, so that the girl could not possibly get down. She sat there crying in the branches and the old woman went away.
For several days the girl remained without food. But one morning she woke to find a great stock of provisions beside her. She ate and ate and fell asleep. Next morning there was fresh supply, and so on each day—sugar-cane, sago, meat, firewood, etc. (a long enumeration). She now stripped bark from the tree and made herself a new skirt and settled down to a solitary life.
Presently she found herself pregnant. She was very puzzled and angry about it. She could not imagine who had brought her to that condition. But in due time the child was born and nursed in the top of the tree; and after that a second child. Now she had a boy and a girl. Food continued to be supplied each day, and ornaments, bari shells, armlets, etc. were sometimes found with it. These she put on her children.
By now they had grown up. The boy had long hair and the girl's breasts were showing. Then one day the mother told her two children to close their eyes together. When they opened them there was no mother, no tree. They were standing on the ground beside a house.
At first they wept for their mother. But there was a supply of sago in the house, so they ate and made themselves comfortable. Then they fashioned a toio [stone axe] and a sago scraper and set about getting their own food. While the girl made sago the boy would hunt. One day they found a number of young plants set down near their house, and they proceeded to make a garden. Another day they found two piglets done up in a parcel of leaves; another day two puppies. The brother said, "You look after the pigs, and I will look after the dogs." He gave them medicines and took them out hunting and caught many animals. Brother and sister were very happy.
But the brother noticed that his sister was each day absent a long time at the sago place. He wondered what she was up to, and followed her secretly. He saw that she used to embrace a palm tree, rubbing up and down against it with her legs astride. Next day, while she was elsewhere, he wedged a sharp piece of flint in the tree trunk, and lay in hiding to see what would happen. When the girl came to embrace the tree again she cut herself, and was thus furnished with a vagina. She fell at the foot of the tree bleeding profusely. The boy did his best to stanch the blood, using various leaves (which have ever since been red or autumn-coloured).a Finally he though of applying bari shells and pearlshells, and the bleeding stopped.
Thenceforward they lived as man and wife and their children inter-married and populated the whole Kutubu district.b
The following were Williams' footnotes to this text:
a In another version it was said that the girl's blood was responsible for red colours in nature, the boy's semen for white colours (white leaves, stones, etc.).
A theory of conception or the make-up of the body, is that the mother's menstrual blood makes all the soft fleshy parts (thus, if you cut yourself the blood flows); the father's semen makes the hard "white" parts—bones, teeth, finger- and toe-nails.
b This story was one of those given me without names for the characters, my informant only supplying them after the tale was told. The mother (i.e. the girl who climbed the tree) was Saube (she became a marua bird on leaving the children). The person who supplied the food, i.e. the father who revealed himself, was Ya Baia, a hawk (the imagery is obvious). The boy was Kanawebe and the girl Karako. These were said to belong to "Paremahugu" amindoba .
The first part of the story is one of the amindoba myths, representing "Paremahugu" as the original clan. The second part, the story of how the girl cut herself, etc., is a general myth. Other versions of it give the characters different names.
Lévi-Strauss, in his analysis of the story of Asdiwal, began by isolating the "various levels on which the myth evolves . . . each one of these levels, together with the symbolism proper to it, being seen as a transformation of an underlying logical structure common to all of them" (1976b :1, author's emphasis); I begin in the same fashion. First, one can observe a succession of separations along a vertical axis represented in the form of a tree: the elder and younger woman are separated by the elder's magical elongation of the hagenamo tree; the mother and her children (a brother and sister) are separated when the two siblings are magically returned to the ground; finally, the sister separates herself from her brother by sliding up and down the palm tree (this point is made clearer in my own version of the myth).
Second, one can note a shift in subsistence activities: from the gathering of firewood and hagenamo berries (a characteristically female activity among the Foi), to the phantom provisioning of male food and other products to the stranded woman in the hagenamo treetop, and to the complementary raising of male and female domestic animals by the brother and sister respectively. This succession of domestic-subsistence regimens is mediated or perhaps paralleled by a series of anthropomorphic birds: first the male hawk husband; second the female marua mother; and last, the banima birds, represented totemically by the first married Foi couple, the transformed cross-sex sibling pair. The first Foi, according to Williams' version of this myth, were thus members of Banimahu'u clan (rendered as "Paremahugu" by Williams). The totemic bird representatives of this clan, the ya banima , was described by my informants as "always dwelling on the ground
and never flying among the treetops."[2] This characteristic of the banima bird becomes significant when I consider my own version of the myth.
Finally, to return to the significance of the vertical axis in more detail, one can note that movement up the tree in each case is associated with the creation of a marriage: first between the hawk man and stranded younger woman in the hagenamo tree, and second between the sister who, by returning to "tree climbing," provides her brother with the opportunity to transform her from a sister into a wife. In figure 10 I have diagrammed what I have so far abstracted analytically.
Williams' version deals with the transformation of certain Foi social relationships: the elder woman strands the younger woman in the treetop and this leads to the latter's marriage. The mother strands her children on the ground and this leads to the transformation of these children from siblings to a married couple. Beyond this, it is difficult to draw any further conclusions concerning the relationship between the several parallel series of transformations. Why should the shift from (female) gathering to (male and female) animal husbandry be mediated by movements along an arboreal axis? Why should the transformations between marriage and siblingship be similarly expressed? And why should the successive series of social relationships be paralleled by a succession of bird species?
These questions I ask in a deliberately rhetorical fashion as a foil for introducing my own version of the myth, which serves to clarify some of the above points. The myth that Williams recorded as a single story I heard as the following two separate and unrelated myths.
The Hornbill Husband
Once there lived a young woman. She was working in her garden one day when a ka buru approached her and said, "Sister, my hagenamo leaves are ready to pick and I want to gather them. But since I am too old to climb up the tree and pick them, I have come to ask you to help me." The young woman agreed and they left. When they approached the hagenamo tree, the ka buru said to the young woman, "Remove all your clothing and leave it at the base of the tree here; take my clothing instead before you climb up." The young woman did so and climbed up the tree. While she was in the top branches picking leaves, she heard the ka buru whispering to herself below. "What is she saying?" the young woman wondered and called out to the ka buru . "No, it is only that some biting ants have stung me," the older woman replied. Then the young woman heard the sound of the tree truck being struck repeatedly. "Now what is she doing?" she wondered. The ka buru called out to her, "I am going to marry your
Figure 10.
Structure of Williams' Version of the Myth "The Origin of the Kutubu People"
husband. You will stay here and die." And with that, the trunk of the hagenamo tree elongated greatly and the branches spread out in all directions and the young woman was marooned in the top of the tree. She looked down at the ground now far below her and thought, "How shall I leave this place now?" and she cried. That night she slept. In the morning she awoke and found that someone had built a fireplace and a small house. In this house she lived. At night while she slept, someone had fetched firewood and with this she made a fire.
She lived in this manner in the little house in the hagenamo treetop and presently she became pregnant. She continued to live in this manner, and then she bore a son. She gave birth to this child in a small confinement hut that someone had built for her. The unseen provider also began to bring food for the small infant boy as well as the mother. When the child grew up to be a toddler, one night the woman merely pretended to be asleep. Waiting there in the dark, a man arrived and held the child. The woman quickly arose and grabbed the man's wrist. He said to the woman, "Release me," but she refused. Finally, the man said to her, "The ka buru who trapped you here is married to your husband. But here near this tree where you live, they will soon come to cut down a sago palm. You must make a length of hagenamo rope and tie one end onto the middle of the sago frond. In this manner, you may pull yourself and your child onto the top of the palm. When they come to cut down the palm, you can then jump off and return to the ground." The woman did as the man instructed her, and with the aid of the rope she and her child pulled themselves onto the sago palm.
The ka buru and her husband arrived to set up the sago-processing equipment. While the ka buru erected the washing trough, the man began to chop down the palm. When it fell, he went toward the top to remove the fronds and gave a cry of surprise when he saw his other wife sitting there with a child. The ka buru heard his exclamation and called out to him, "What is it? "No," he replied, "Some wasps have stung me." The ka buru asked suspiciously, "You haven't found another woman perhaps?" The man meanwhile looked at his long-abandoned wife and was filled with shame. He brought her over to where the ka buru was making sago and the two women continued working together. They all returned when the task was done and lived together.
The two women began making a garden together, but the ka buru would constantly shift the boundary marker between her ground and the younger co-wife's ground, making her own bigger. The younger woman repeatedly moved the marker back to its proper place and the two eventually fought. The husband discovered their quarrel and blaming the younger wife, hit her on the head with a stick, drawing blood. The young woman became very disconsolate and remembered the words of her treetop husband: "While you live with your husband on the earth, I will be around. If he mistreats you, call out to me, I will be flying in the sky above." For he was really a hornbill and his name was Ayayawego or Yiakamuna. Now the young woman called out to him "Ayayawego, Yiakamuna, come fetch
me!" There she waited and she heard the cry of the hornbill. It approached and grabbed the woman by her hair and pulled her up along with her child. They then returned to their treetop home. The overwrought husband cried, "Come back, wife!" But in vain. At the same time, the ka buru turned into a cassowary and crying "hoahoa," she departed. That is all.
The Origin of the Foi People (or, The First Married Couple)
There once lived a man and his sister. Each day, the woman went out to make sago, but she would be gone an inordinately long time. She would not return in the late afternoon with food and firewood or sago but seemingly came back late every night. "What is my sister doing? the man wondered. One time when the woman left, her brother followed her. Downstream they traveled, and he saw her arrive at a tamo tree [arecoid palm]. He watched her climb up the tree and slide down, climb up and slide down, doing this repeatedly. He saw that the trunk of the tree was worn smooth from this activity. When she departed, the man took a sharp flake of obsidian and stuck it in the middle of the tree. The next time the woman went to slide up and down the tree, the stone knife cut a gash where her vagina belonged; before this time, she had had no female sexual organ. Meanwhile, the brother waited at the house but his sister did not arrive. He waited and waited and finally he returned to the tamo tree. He found her, seemingly dead, her skin yellow from loss of blood. The man gathered all manner of leaves and tried to stop the flow of blood from the wound but was unable to. The leaves he used in his attempt to stop the bleeding became colored red, and all the present-day trees with red leaves are the ones the brother first used to stop his sister's bleeding. He then tried the point of a pearl shell and when he rubbed this on the wound, the bleeding stopped a little. He then used the tail of a marsupial and the blood flowed less strongly still. Finally, he took a pig's rope and tried to stop the remaining blood and it finally ceased. He tied the pearl shell to the wound with a piece of bark cloth. When the sister recovered, the two became husband and wife and had sexual intercourse. From their offspring the Foi people originated. That is all.
The first myth now presents a more coherent theme: that of the hostility of co-wives. Foi co-wives can address each other both by the reciprocal term garu (co-wife) and by the reciprocal term boba , which is also the term used between female siblings. The myth therefore draws a contrast between women who are separated by their respective marriages to different men, and an opposed image of their difficulties in living together as co-wives of the same man. In other words, it presents a sustained moral comparison between monogamy and (sororal) polygyny. It is important to understand that sororal polygyny is the unmarked form of plural marriage for the Foi at the conceptual level, for reasons that will become apparent.
Nor is this the only way in which this contrast is depicted in the
Figure 11.
Structural Oppositions in the Myth "The Hornbill Husband"
first myth. The Foi say that the hornbill and the cassowary are "cross-cousins" to each other. In a different tuni , they describe how originally the hornbill inhabited the ground and the cassowary flew in the skies. Dissatisfied with their respective zones, they decided to switch. From that point on, the cassowary became a terrestrial bird and the hornbill assumed the aerial realm. Foi men then add that one should not make a snare trap for cassowaries if a hornbill is flying overhead at the time—the bird will see the trap and warn his cassowary cross-cousins to avoid it.
The contrast between the two trees and this version of the myth is also more easily understood: the hagenamo tree, the gathering of whose leaves and fruits is female work, contrasts with the sago palm, the exploitation of which requires intersexual cooperation. The descent by the young woman and her child by way of the sago palm thus signals her entry into a conventional marital domestic arrangement. I have diagrammed the relevant oppositions in figure 11.
The focus of hostility between the two women shifts from a vertical separation and arboreal entrapment in the beginning to the elder co-wife's furtive movement of the garden boundary marker along the horizontal axis in the latter half of the myth. Analogously, the two
women compete for exclusive access to a single husband in the first half and compete for exclusive rights to a piece of garden land in the second half. The story thus encompasses a commentary on the relative difficulties of polygyny and its resolution through the separate marriages of women. By portraying the two women as complementary avian species, the myth emphasizes the necessity of their separate and contrastive marital destinies: in other words, monogamy is the means by which the hostility of co-wives can be mitigated.
What then is the relationship between this myth and the second myth, which Williams recorded as a single tale? A transition between the two myths is missing in the version I collected, so that the vertical separation of the hawk's wife and her children is no longer a structurally relevant episode. Nevertheless, the second myth seems to invert the first in several key respects. "The Hornbill Husband" begins with a pair of females who become co-wives and therefore nominal siblings (since "co-wife" equals "sister" [female speaking] in Foi terminological usages), while the second myth begins with a pair of cross-sex siblings. The sister in the second myth abandons her female role in order to slide up and down a tamo palm (an arecoid species found in sago swamps but which bears no fruit or other edible part), while the younger woman in the first tale is trapped in a hagenamo tree by the elder ka buru .
The brother wounds his sister and creates her vagina and her menstrual ("reproductive") capacity in the second myth, while the husband in the first myth wounds his younger wife on the head, drawing "non-reproductive" blood from that part of the body which is for the Foi both diametrically and conceptually opposed to the sexual organ.[3] In several other Foi myths, the drawing of blood from a woman's head by a man is a figurative expression of having marked her by paying betrothal or bridewealth installments. Both wounds, however, lead to key moral separations: the separation of co-wives into their respective monogamous marriages, and the figurative separation of the sibling-ship of the brother and sister. The brother's actions in staunching the bleeding represent the proper sequence of bridewealth prestations: shells, game, and finally pigs, as I described it in chapter 5. By so doing, he converts his sister's newly created reproductive capacity into that of a wife's. This can be interpreted as a figurative statement on the dependence of Foi men on their sister's bridewealth for securing their own wives (see figure 12).
But a more complete analysis of the relationship of the two myths
Figure 12.
Inversion in Myths "The Hornbill Husband" and "The Origin of the Foi People"
would have to account for the themes of male and female subsistence activities woven into the plot of the first myth, and the exclusive preoccupation with the creation of bridewealth media in the second. I now present an obviational analysis of these myths in order to demonstrate that certain analogical equivalences are created in the plots which cannot be accounted for by structural analysis alone.
I begin with my version of "The Hornbill Husband" and present it, as I have suggested, as a series of substitutions. An elderly ka buru (literally "black woman" or in other words, an ogress), approaches a young woman and persuades her to leave her gardening work and help her gather edible hagenamo leaves (substitution A : [gathering] edible leaves for gardening; cooperative for solitary female activity). At the tree, the elder woman tells the younger woman to change clothes with her and ascend the tree (B : young woman's clothing [= identity] for elder woman's). Then, by a magical process, the ogress causes the hagenamo tree to elongate, trapping the younger woman. She then departs, announcing her intention of marrying the young woman's husband (C : elder wife for younger wife; treetop for ground). Substitution C now obviates A by revealing the hidden treachery of
the elder woman's offer of cooperation in gathering edible leaves, and completes the replacement of the elder woman in the younger's implicitly revealed marital household.
The turning point of the myth occurs when the young woman discovers that she is being supplied with food and shelter by an unseen provider (D : arboreal [male] nurturance for terrestrial [female] treachery, hence obviating A). This substitution also obviates A by introducing the new marital destiny of the young woman: her arboreal phantom husband has replaced her unidentified ("phantom") terrestrial husband.
Revealing himself, the hornbill husband tells his new wife how she may rejoin her terrestrial husband by shifting to the top of a nearby sago palm that the latter is due to cut down (E : sago palm for hagenamo tree), obviating B by creating the opposed vertical orientations of the sago palm and the hagenamo tree: one must climb up the hagenamo tree to gather its leaves, while one must cut down the sago palm to appropriate its starchy interior. The final substitution occurs when the husband rediscovers his first wife (F : terrestrial husband for hornbill husband), reversing (and hence obviating) the treachery of the elder woman represented in substitution C . The final substitution also returns the myth at this point to its original substitution, but in significantly altered form: the myth began with the competition between two women for a husband and ends with their ironic marriage to the same man, in which they would be expected to cooperate (as co-wives or "sisters").
The facilitating modality represented by substitutions ACE details the transformations in the relationship between the two women, while the motivating modality represented by substitutions BDF details their competitive relationship to husbands, impelling their assumption of a co-wife relationship (see figure 13). But the plot of the myth continues past the point of obviation. How does its additional resolution relate to the initial figurative construction I have already exposed?
If the facilitating and motivating modalities can be taken as whole metaphors themselves, then their relative positions can be reversed or inverted. In other words, if the relationship between women and their husbands can transform the relationship between women themselves then, logically, the inverse is also possible: the relationship between women can motivate the transformation of their marital statuses. The remainder of the plot of the "The Hornbill Husband" inverts the terms of each of the previous successive substitutions, turning triangle ACE
Figure 13.
First Obviation Sequence of "The Hornbill Husband"
into the motivating modality of triangle BDF , which facilitates it. And if this is so, then the order of the substitutions themselves must be inverted. Recall that D represents the "highest point" of separation between the two women, while the initial point A began with their nominal cooperation. The inversion of the first obviation sequence must therefore necessarily begin at its midpoint, D , and return in inverted form to that point, completing the substitutive sequence
The next substitution thus occurs when the younger woman rejoins her husband and new co-wife in a conventional domestic household (inverse D : terrestrial for arboreal marriage). The two women return to garden making (inverse C : gardening for gathering of edible leaves; horizontal for vertical separation). The elder wife attempts to encroach on the younger woman's ground (inverse B : appropriation of land [marital identity] for appropriation of clothing [individual identity]). This leads to their physical fighting and the husband's wounding of his young wife's head (inverse A : fighting [between co-wives] for cooperation). In anguish over her unfair treatment at the hands of her terrestrial husband, she calls out to Ayayawego, her benevolent aerial husband (inverse F : hornbill husband for terrestrial human husband). The hornbill returns her to her arboreal home (inverse E : return to arboreal home for return to terrestrial home). It is understood in the myth that this effects the young woman's transformation into a female hornbill herself. Having finally been separated by husbands who inhabit complementary and distinct spatial zones, the women themselves complete the terms of this complementarity: the hornbill wife versus the cassowary wife, once again obviating the quasi-sororal identification of the two women made in the opening of the myth.
My task now is to reintegrate the second myth into this sequence. I am obliged to do so solely on Williams' ethnographic evidence that the Foi of Lake Kutubu did once relate the two tales as a single myth. But it is my assertion, which I will prove with other examples in the next four chapters, that in such cases these double myths are separated and/or reintegrated precisely at the point of obviation . For I now show that the second myth simultaneously inverts both obviation sequences of "The Hornbill Husband" as I have just interpreted them.
"The First Married Couple" begins with a brother and sister who live as an intersexual domestic unit (substitution A , inverting D of the previous myth: cross-sex sibling complementarity for marital complementarity). Curious as to his sister's failure to provide her share of
food, the brother discovers that to the neglect of her domestic responsibilities, his sister instead regularly engages in metaphorical copulation with a tamo palm (substitution B , inverting C of the first myth: nonedible treetop for hagenamo treetop. It also inverts C in the following way: in the first myth, the young woman is helplessly trapped as the tree itself elongates; in the present tale, the tree remains passive while the girl herself moves up and down. The young woman in the first myth becomes trapped in the course of carrying out a normal female subsistence task; the sister in the present myth remains unconstrained in the course of neglecting her domestic responsibilities [thereby revealing what the Foi articulate as the conceptual contrast between sexual intercourse and subsistence activity]). The brother then inserts a sharpened stone into the trunk of the tree (substitution C , inverting B of the first myth: placing an obstacle in the sister's vertical progress, for the elder woman's placement of an obstacle [the garden boundary marker] in the young woman's horizontal gardening progress). Sliding down the palm, the sister slashes herself, releasing the first menstrual blood (substitution D , inverting A of the previous myth: substituting a wounded sexual organ for the younger wife's wounded head). The brother finally stops the bleeding with a conventionally correct series of wealth objects (substitution E , inverting F of the first myth in a rather complex fashion: the hornbill husband reclaims his young bride not merely because of her supplication but by virtue of the fact that he provided her with food and shelter and bore a child by her. The brother in the second myth claims his sister's reproductivity by accumulating the proper sequence of wealth objects. In all respects, this is a metaphorical inversion of the conventional Foi definitions of cross-sex siblings versus husband and wife relationships. A brother expects to exercise control over his sister's bridewealth because he nurtured her with food and other domestic necessities during her lifetime. A husband by contrast repays his wife's brother for such nurturance by making payments of wealth objects). Finally, the brother and sister become the first married couple, the ancestors of all the Foi people (substitution F , inverting E of the previous myth: ground-dwelling human marital pair for arboreal hornbill marital pair; terrestrial human progeny that are nevertheless totemically banima birds [who always inhabit the ground] for arboreal human marital pair who are hornbill birds). In figure 14 I have superimposed in italics the obviation sequence of the second myth onto the inverted myth of the "The Hornbill Husband."
Figure 14.
Inversion of First Obviation Sequence in "The Hornbill Husband"
and Parallel Obviation Sequence of "The First Married Couple"
The three substitutions of triangle BDF of the second myth in figure 14 represent the motivating modality. They detail the transformation of the sister into a wife. The facilitating modality of triangle ACE by contrast focuses on the transformation of the brother's role, from the provider of male subsistence products to the provider of the bride-wealth items with which he transforms his sister's reproductive capacity. In other words, although the myth itself represents an inversion of the inverted sequence of the first myth, "The Hornbill Husband," the relative positions of the facilitating and motivating modalities parallel that of the first obviation of the first myth. Hence the two sequences in their entirety metaphorize each other, and one can readily understand why Williams recorded them as "one myth." By juxtaposing the two tales, an analogy is revealed between the moral necessity for women to separate in marriage and the corresponding necessity that men have to separate themselves from their sisters by "turning them into" sources of bridewealth for their own wives. That these two mythical statements correspond to one of the quotidian preoccupations of Foi women and men respectively is demonstrated by the fact that I was always told "The Hornbill Husband" by a woman and "The First Married Couple" by a man. The two myths establish as metaphors of each other the complementarity of wives separated by marriage (represented by the respective final arboreal and terrestrial domains of the two women in "The Hornbill Husband") and the simultaneous complementarity of brothers and sisters and of husbands and wives.
If one were to follow Lévi-Strauss, it might be said of these myths that: (1) the progress between arboreal and terrestrial zones; (2) the progressive transformation of humans into birds; and (3) the successive replacement of intersexual domestic-subsistence activities serve as codes for the expression of parallel transformations between sibling and affinal relationships. Speaking in a similar manner of the logic of totemic differentiation, Lévi-Strauss maintains that they
constitute codes making it possible to ensure, in the form of conceptual systems, the convertibility of messages appertaining to each level [of a single culture]. (1966:90)
The significance of this convertibility obliges the analyst to correlate the objective differences between various natural species with correspondingly differentiated social categories. But I maintain that such objective differences are themselves created in the course of tropic con-
structions within a single culture. In the myths I have just analyzed, it can well be said that rather than the difference between hornbill, cassowary, marua , and banima species serving as a code for the differentiation of Foi kinship statuses, the reverse is equally true. In the same vein as Mauss offered his analysis of magical symbols (see discussion under "Magic," chapter 6), I dispute that this relationship between avian species reflects some objective connection between them. The hornbill and marua come to express figuratively a male and female marital unit, and do so in its nurturative aspects: the hornbill provides male sustenance while the female marua in Williams' version of the myth bears and succors children. Likewise, the Foi idea that the hornbill and cassowary are cross-cousins to each other, and hence figuratively depict the complementarity of cross-cousins in ecological terms, is another construction, itself serving as a foil in the plot of the myth for the comparison of the moral content of two different kinds of interpersonal differentiation (that between co-wives and that between husband and wife). To say that one differentiation serves as the fixed source of the other is misleading, since what myth does precisely is create the context of their mutual definition and delineation (cf. Kirk 1970:43; Lévi-Strauss 1963:215).
Furthermore, I have suggested that since each myth is itself a self-closing image, a series of successive substitutions that culminates in the creation of a single tropic construction, then the transformations between myths that Lévi-Strauss identifies throughout the four volumes of Mythologiques remain, in my terms, culturally unmotivated. Hence, Lévi-Strauss can only reduce such transformations, as I have said, to a set of objective or naturally derived oppositions. Their tropic basis as signifiers within a metaphorically created system of cultural meanings are sacrificed to their purely lexical or referential status. But nature is itself only created reflexively as a cultural construct; its reality bears a determinate relationship to the semiotic parameters of a symbolically constituted cultural domain.
Boon and Schneider (1974) have criticized Lévi-Strauss for failing to provide a holistic relation of a single culture's mythology to the total social facts of its particular and individual sociality. Despite Levi-Strauss' suggestion that "myth itself provides its own context" (1963:215), his enterprise is based on the deliberate decontextualization of mythic fragments. That is why Lévi-Strauss does not feel obliged to draw more than intermittently throughout Mythologiques on the nonmythical cultural elements of the societies whose myths he compares, though certain key facts he gleans from the associated eth-
nographies aid him in delineating the oppositions and transformations in mythical themes from culture to culture.
What obviational analysis obliges us to do is precisely the opposite: to consider the entire corpus of a single culture's mythology as a related set of moral statements on a unique set of cultural valuations. Let us begin not with a set of transcendental oppositions such as nature and culture, naked and clothed, raw and cooked, and so forth, but rather with the paradigmatic analogies I have analytically extracted in the two obviation sequences I discussed in the beginning of this chapter (figures 7 and 9).
As I have noted, if Foi sociality had to be expressed in a summating analogy, it would be the creation of affinity out of intersexuality and vice versa. The transformation of one to the other (and both out of life and death) depends upon the type of complementarity involved between these categories, which in turn is characterized by particular kinds of exchanges. Thus, men and women exchange complementary foodstuffs, affines exchange contrastive wealth items, and so on.
Thus, although the myths that now follow tell us much more about Foi society than is expressed in this simple equation, I have grouped them into four chapters according to their relationship to themes of male and female sexuality, affinal mediation, and the nature of complementarity and exchange themselves. In the course of focusing attention on certain metaphorical substitutions, each myth unfolds its own perspective on this analogy (and hence on one of the substitutions in the secular obviation sequences of Figures 7 and 9), until the analogy itself becomes refracted into many different statements. Indeed, perhaps the most appropriate way to introduce these myths is with the observation of Franz Boas, which also precedes Lévi-Strauss' original outline of his analysis of myth (1963:206): "It would seem that mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments."
Chapter VIII
Intersexual Mediation
In chapters 3 and 4 I introduced the idea that it is the responsibility of Foi men to maintain a proper spatial and conceptual distinction between the sexes. For the Foi, the mediation of male and female capacities is largely a subordinate aspect of "being male," and the myths of this chapter explore the implications of this concept. Although each of the following tales depicts in various ways the definition and interrelationship of contrastive male and female domains, they all take a decidedly male point of view in so doing, and thus present the bisexual basis of Foi sociality as a precipitate or product of male assertiveness and potency.
The Origin of Tree Grubs
I have suggested that it is through the flow of conventionally defined male objects such as meat, wealth items, and other decorations that Foi men and women define themselves in their most important domestic and social roles. These objects embody an image of male virility that is depicted in the first four myths of this chapter. The first one links the origin of sexual characteristics to hunting.
There lived a head-man and his two wives. The man would regularly go to the bush to find game, leaving his wives at home. He would habitually give them marsupial and other meat, but it never tasted sweet to the wives. They would say to him, "Husband, this meat is bad." But he would reply, "No, I'm eating the same meat, it is all right." He refused to tell them
what was making the meat bad. One time while one of the wives was working in the garden, the other wife followed the man to the bush. She hid and watched him. He hung up his bilum and then left. While he was gone, she went to the bilum and took the meat from the bottom and placed it on the top, and took the meat from the top and placed it on the bottom. Then she quickly returned home. She told her co-wife, "Sister, I've seen the way he kills game. He kills it with his penis. I switched the meat that he habitually shares between us. The meat he himself eats he kills normally, but the meat he gives to us he kills with his penis." They waited and the man returned home. He put down his bilum and told his wives to cook the meat. They did so and ate the switched portion and found it good tasting. But the man said, "My two wives, you've done something to this meat. It is bad." They replied, "No, it is the same meat we normally eat."
They lived there and presently, the man became pregnant. They all kept this a secret. When his time approached, the two women built him a birth house and gathered provisions for him. The man went inside and gave birth to a male child. Soon the child could accompany his father back to the men's house, and presently was walking outside on two legs. At this time they heard a marua bird cry out. "My two wives, what is that bird saying?" he asked. "No, garden food shall sprout, it is saying," they replied. But he answered, "No, my cross-cousins are going to have their Usane, it is saying." He left to go hunting, telling his two wives to take care of the child. He returned from the bush with great quantifies of meat. The next day he prepared to go to the Usane, again telling his wives to care for the child while he was gone. He decorated, hiding the breasts that he had developed in his pregnancy with ya'aro chest cross-bands. The child cried when he saw his father was about to leave. The man fastened the door so that the child couldn't leave. "Mother!" the child cried after him. The man arrived at the Usane and danced and distributed his meat. While he was exchanging his meat for shell and pork, the men heard a child crying, "Mother! mother!" The men said, "A woman's child is approaching." The child did not go to the women's houses but came inside the longhouse and searched there. The head-man's cross-cousin was sitting on his head-pillow next to the head-man. He watched as the child approached the head-man, lifted the man's cross-bands, and began to suck breast milk. The man sweated in his shame and fear. They finished dancing the Usane.
The next day, when it became dark, the man's cross-cousin, a large light-skinned man, secretly left and went to the two wives' house. He was ashamed for his cross-cousin and suspected his wives had something to do with it. He went to kill the two wives. But the women knew he was coming to kill them. "Our husband's cross-cousin is coming—you hold him and I will kill him first," one said to the other. This they did, using their husband's farabo stone axe. Having killed him, they hid the body in a pond the next morning. Meanwhile, the other men had finished their Usane and the husband returned home. They shared the meat he had brought back. While sleeping that night, a firefly came and flew around the man's head. He was frightened, but went down to the pond. He returned, not saying
anything to his wives, and slept. The next morning he awoke and said to them, "My two wives, I wish to tell you something. Let us go outside." He waited for them. They approached and he said "My cross-cousin came here." They denied it. "Then remove the water from this pond," he ordered them. They bailed the water out, and the body rose to the surface. It was badly decomposed. "You've killed him. Now remove the body," he ordered. They did so. "Now cook sago," he told them. They did so. "Now cut the body up and eat it." They did so, eating it with sago. "Don't leave the smallest piece of flesh or greens," he ordered. They ate the entire body between them. The man then forced them to drink a large quantity of water and after so doing, their bellies swelled up and their limbs became fore-shortened. "Follow me in line," he then ordered, and he led them to a large breadfruit tree. He told them to sit near the base of the tree while he himself climbed up and picked a large breadfruit. "Where are you two sitting?" he called down, and they waved at him. He then threw down the breadfruit and it struck them on the head. The two women then exploded and their flesh scattered in bits all over the bush. The man departed, and when he returned some time later, he saw a great many dead trees had fallen down. There were many bandicoots, wild hinanu ginger, and amano trees. He cut the fallen logs and found tree grubs in great quantities. He cooked them and ate them himself. The women, in dying, had turned into tree grubs. This is how tree grubs were created. That is all.
This myth introduces what I call the "Usane Transformation," which also appears in two other myths of this chapter. The appearance of the marua bird, and the stylized sequence of rhetorical question and answer which follows it, is virtually the same wherever it appears in Foi myth, like the azuna conclusion of Daribi myth (Wagner 1978:152). What it does is figuratively replace horticulture with hunting, and in general terms shifts the action of the myth from the domestic female realm to that of male hunting; from secular life to (male) ceremonial life; from production to exchange. It is nothing less, I suspect, than a narrative device to contrast the distinctive female and male emphases in Foi life. It does so in temporal terms, by linking the onset of a (female) "season of fertility," when garden good and other seasonal cultivars ripen, with the cry of the marua bird, thereby signaling the replacement of horticulture with male hunting, which is also seasonal. It is thus an apt device to express the mutual obviation of male and female domains in these myths that concern themselves with intersexual mediation.
In Foi mythical convention, the Usane pig-kill is always depicted as involving the exchange of meat and wealth objects between cross-cousins and maternally related men. As I noted earlier (see chapter 4), in
its traditional and perhaps apocryphal form, this exchange took the form of forest game (male) for domestic pork (female). It is understood, therefore, that the protagonist is the father's sister's son of the light-skinned man who attempts to exact revenge on his mother's brother's son's wives. The myth draws an analogy between (1) a man's inability to distinguish between meat and the women whose domestic capacities it is supposed to mediate, and (2) his consequent failure to relate properly to his matrilateral cross-cousin for the same reason.
The opening substitution of this tale depicts a head-man who kills forest animals with his penis, a provocative confusion of distinct productive realms, in contrast to the conventional syntagmatic relationship of husbands and wives in a polygynous household. The man in effect has sexual intercourse with the items for which women are exchanged rather than with the women themselves. Because he copulates with the meat, he renders it unfit as an item of mediation between the sexes (and between patri- and matrikin in the context of the Usane exchange); hence, "it is not sweet" (substitution A : penis for weapon; meat for wives; indirect oral copulation for genital copulation or insemination). This initial substitution could be rendered more simply as "copulation for eating"—and it is in this form that the resolution of the myth acquires its moral impact. One of the man's wives suspects that the husband is doing something irregular and follows him on his hunting expedition. There she discovers his secret and switches the meat (substitution B ). The man, by eating the inseminated meat, now figuratively inseminates himself orally. This leads to substitution C , the pregnancy and feminization of the husband. In other words, that which is copulated with is female, and it is important to note that the Foi verb "to copulate" (fe -) is transitive, like the verb "to kill" (hu -). For the Foi sexual intercourse is what a man does to a woman. [1]
As a "woman," the head-man's male role as meat-exchanger at the Usane pig-kill has been completely compromised. "He" cannot bring meat, as an ordinary male, but can only bring "his" child. One cannot exchange with a woman, but only for a woman. Therefore, the ma-trilateral cross-cousin of the head-man, in his anger at being denied exchange with his FZS, seeks the latter's wives whom he identifies as the source of the problem. The two women, however, preternaturally learn of the man's murderous intent and kill their husband's cross-cousin (substitution D ). Having turned their husband into a childbearing woman, the two wives have by implication turned themselves
into (male-like) killers. Not only is the husband unable to control his own sexuality, he cannot control the dissonant sexual roles of his wives. The two women have conspired to sever even the false com-plementarity between themselves and their husband; now they destroy the analogously complementary relationship between the two cross-cousins, the "female" matrilateral cross-cousin who gives domestic pork and the "male" patrilateral one who gives forest game. It is the women who turn out to be the true "hunters" and in this sense, substitution D obviates A .
The husband returns and sees a firefly at night (a common portent of death throughout interior Papua New Guinea). Thus learning of the fate of his cross-cousin, he forces his wives to disinter the body and eat it (E : human flesh for forest game). What the two women have killed as "hunters" they are now forced to consume: false human meat replaces the false "sexual" meat of substitution B , replicating the terms of the husband's initial predicament. Having borne the consequences of his own misplaced sexuality (his self-insemination), the husband forces his wives to bear the consequences of their own misplaced hunting. The man in effect also gives false meat for his false child—he gives bridewealth or childwealth to his wives, further emphasizing the breakdown in their intersexual mediation (and thus dosing triangle CDE ). After the women eat the flesh and drink the water, they swell up in alimentary pregnancy, obviating C by once again reversing the normal flow of meat: the man became feminized by inseminating his own meat; the women become defeminized by consuming the corpse of their husband's cross-cousin, becoming unnaturally pregnant by the consumption of an irregular meat item. In the final act of their de-feminization, they "give birth" to penis symbols (tree grubs). Henceforth, men and women will figuratively "copulate" with themselves orally by eating tree grubs. Having given birth to the grubs, the women must have been "inseminated" by their consumption of the dead body. The penis is once more a "weapon," in the final resolution, this time of the women's demise.
The facilitating modality represented by triangle ACE focuses on the consequences the husband is forced to bear as a result of his inability to distinguish sex from hunting. The motivating modality of triangle BDF by contrast outlines the acts of his two wives that define his predicament. As the substitutions succeed each other, they dialectically impel the feminization of the man and the masculinization of
his wives. The summating image of this alternation, and the obviation of sexual dichotomy it represents, is the tree grub—a penis symbol that is eaten—representing this ambiguity in everyday life for the Foi.
The Origin of Leeches
The preceding myth focuses on the penis as organ of insemination and depicts the breakdown in sexual dichotomy that results from its improper use in hunting. The next myth reveals the penis as the source of women's menstrual capacity and the consequent moral necessity for sexual segregation.
In the Lake Kutubu area, there once lived a solitary light-skinned man who inhabited the hollow interior of the black palm (kawari ). The top of this palm was broken off, and the palm itself moved from place to place. No man saw him. But when a man stole something, this palm would appear, and the light-skinned man's head and shoulders would appear from the top of the palm and he would shout in a loud voice so that all men could hear, "This man is taking another's property!" The men were all frightened whenever this happened. "Who could be doing this?" they wondered. "Where is he?" they asked themselves. The men searched for him but could not find him. They worked hard without success to do so and finally gave up.
Another time a man said to his brother, "Go to my garden where my wife is working. Throw a twig in her direction as if you mean to seduce her." Then he hid near the garden. The other man approached his wife there and threw a twig toward her. She searched and searched, as if she too wished to commit adultery. But it was all a pretence and the man watched from hiding. The lone palm arrived and the light-skinned man's head appeared from the top, and he spoke the other man's name, saying, "Sir, this man is throwing a twig at your wife!" in a loud voice. Then he went back inside the palm. The man saw this and called out, "Brother, he is in that kawari palm over there!" and they both ran towards it. They grabbed the palm. "Here is where he speaks from," he said. Now the palm could not move. Having been touched by men's hands, it could not move. Then the two men called out for all the other men, telling them to bring their axes to chop down the palm. The men gathered with their stone axes and started cutting. But the palm was very hard and they only succeeded in mining their blades and wearing themselves out. They were all exhausted and the sun was about to set. "What shall we do?" they asked one another. But then they heard something speak from inside the palm. "Degi biane, degi biane, degi biane, dege biane! " it cried. "Degi " is a Wola word meaning "chop." "Listen!" the men cried, "'Biane ' it is saying!" they cried. Then some men left and returned with crowbars made from the hard biane tree. They tried to split the palm with these and did so effortlessly. It split into two halves, and there they finally saw the light-skinned man. He was
covered with thick body hair. His head hair hung down his back. He had a noseplug and earrings and a very wide bark belt made of cane in the Wola fashion. He was truly decorated. The men killed him. Having killed him, they cut up his body. They left only the penis and testicles. These they carefully enclosed in a small fence in the bush where they had killed him. Then they brought back the meat and distributed it.
Having done so, the head-men asked everyone. "Is there someone who hasn't received a portion?" And the people answered, "We have all eaten, but one maiden has received nothing so far. She went to make sago while the meat was being given out and received none." The men searched, but everything had been eaten. But they told her, "near the base of the black palm, we left one portion—go and take that." The maiden quickly went to the palm but found nothing there. She sat down and, with her hands, searched near the base of the palm but found nothing. It became dark and she could not see and kept feeling with her hands. Finally, she was about to leave and stood up. But she looked down and saw something hanging from her vagina. A large leech, engorged with blood, had eaten her menstrual blood and when finished had dropped off. The maiden removed the leech and carefully put it back into the little fence. Then, bleeding heavily, she returned to the village. "I searched and searched but found no meat. But something has bitten me and I've come back." In the morning, the men went to look again. They lifted the leaves covering the little fence and saw tiny leech offspring as thick as hair there. The penis had turned into a leech and had lain eggs. From then on, leeches covered the bush. That is all.
In its metaphoric creativity, this myth calls upon every image that the leech evokes for the Foi. Ubiquitous itself, the leech becomes an apt image for expressing the ubiquity of certain forms of communication. As the most common thing brought back from the bush (though unwittingly), the leech is a fitting vehicle to symbolize statements concerning the relationship between village and bush.
The opening of the myth posits a bizarre moral state in which men are subject to an externally imposed, publicly proclaimed moral judgment, a roving bush "vigilante" if you will. A hairy, light-skinned man dwells in the hollow of a Caryota species palm, the black palm from which bows are made. The Foi describe the palm as hollow since the external hardwood surrounds a very soft pithy interior. The physical characteristics of the man are in every sense a caricatured opposite of the Foi self-portrait—they describe themselves as dark-skinned and scanty-haired. In fact, the hairy man resembles the Foi's conventional image of their Highlands neighbors to the north (and he ultimately speaks in their tongue, the Wola language). Like the leech, the mobile
palm is drawn to men (as the Foi say that leeches are attracted to the paths that men use). The light-skinned man emerges from the top of the palm (as a leech raises itself up and also as a penis becomes erect) and betrays thieves by calling attention to them in a loud voice. Once again, the prototypical crime of theft is portrayed as the theft of a woman in adulterous sexual intercourse (see chapter 3). It is therefore not the public moral offences such as fighting, warfare, or slander that the hairy man acts against but the secret or private wrong-doings of individual men. I have thus labeled substitution A as "external mobile morality of a 'wild' man for collective immorality of village men."
Two men concoct a plan to locate the hairy man and arrange a false adulterous liaison. This draws the attention of the mobile palm, which the two men then immobilize (B : "False" theft for real theft; trapped for mobile palm; "tamed" for untamed morality). The other men of the village cooperate in attempting to chop down the palm, which they only accomplish after exhausting effort. Having finally felled it, however, they are unable to split it open. But at this point the hairy man, having betrayed other men with his loud voice, now curiously betrays himself, cryptically instructing the men about the biane stake that will allow them access to the palm's interior. The biane tree, like the black palm itself, is one of the hardwood trees most commonly used by the Foi for house building.
The men then chop the man up (as men chop leeches after plucking them off their legs, believing this is the only way to kill them) and bring the meat back to the village for general distribution and consumption (substitution C ). They distribute every bit of flesh except for the penis and testicles, which they carefully enclose in a tiny "house" and cover with leaves. The penis has metonymically come to stand for the originally mobile bush man: he has now been domesticated by a community of men. Substitution D then is "penis for man; penis for meat." In its inversion (and obviation) of the opening substitution it could perhaps be rendered "penis for mouth," since the significance of the hairy man's relationship with the village has been shifted between these two organs.
One young maiden, however, does not receive a portion of meat. Not having been "stolen" (in adultery or sexual intercourse), she cannot be said to have incorporated a collective (im)morality; she is "pre-moral." But the men instruct her as to where she can find the last remaining portion of meat, and so she goes to the bush to find the "little house" (which is how the Foi refer euphemistically to the men-
strual hut). Substitution E , then, is "premoral individual (maiden) for immoral community," thus replacing the experienced married woman who lured the hairy man to his destruction. In addition, it also implies "maiden for meat," the image of Foi marital exchange (hence the obviation of C by E ). The young woman searches for the penis but finds it has turned into a leech, which figuratively copulates with her (F : leech for penis; menstrual blood for meat). She brings the blood back to the village, conflating the spatial separation of menstruating and nonmenstruating women. The men return to find that henceforth the bush shall be infested with leeches. Their legs will be bitten and their blood "stolen," as they themselves attacked the lower extremity of the hairy man's mobile palm. The external theft of blood replaces an internal collective theft, and a mobile thief (the leech) replaces a mobile moral arbiter. The leech will become swollen and engorged with blood, even as a man's penis does.
The young woman not only allows herself to be bitten, but she carefully incubates the leech after it has bitten her. The implication is that if the leech had not copulated with the maiden, it would have remained immobilized within the "little house." Henceforth, women will have to confine their own menstrual periods, since it was the maiden's menstrual capacity that let the leech loose on the world—it is women who will have to stay in the "little house," while leeches follow men through the bush.
Fonomo and Kunuware
The penis, as I noted earlier, is often euphemistically referred to by Foi men as their "decoration" (sanoira , from the Foi verb sano -, "to decorate; to transform; to turn into" [see chapter 4]). The meaning of male wealth items, particularly shell ornaments, also includes their status as decorations. Wearing such ornaments literally transforms an individual in any number of social or mythically figurative ways. It is a trope in the very specific meaning of that word, a "turning" that encompasses a socially meaningful transformation.
The next myth initially centers around the saboro , a short length of shell inserted through the pierced nasal septum. The saboro (from the two words sabe , "nose," and oro , "bamboo" [though the ornament is made from shell]) was worn by both men and women whose noses were pierced under casual circumstances at approximately twelve years of age. Today, women no longer wear them, though men
continue to do so. Young children's noses are no longer pierced, however, and many men have abandoned the ornament altogether except on ceremonial occasions. Unlike all other items of shell adornment, including earrings and arm-shells, the saboro is the only one not used as an item of wealth.
The following story, "Fonomo and Kunuware," capitalizes on the metonymic quality of personal decorations: if humans can assume different social personae by putting them on, then the decorations themselves have representative powers of such personae . The Foi practice of marking a young girl's future marriage with a small payment of shell wealth transforms part of this figurative interpretation into social fact. "Fonomo and Kunuware" explores the imaginative implications of this. The story also introduces a double theme of intersexual hostility and intrasexual competition and their mediation by such marking objects. As was the case in the story "The Hornbill Husband," the female protagonist of this myth is the ka buru , the "ogress" of Foi mythology.
A man and his wife and their grown son once lived. One day the son took his bow and pronged arrows and went looking for birds-of-paradise. He went toward the east and came upon a small creek belonging to his father. He noticed that the water had been churned up as a result of recent activity. Then he noticed along the bank a string of fish that had been caught there. "Who has been fishing in this water?" he thought. He followed the stream and came upon a large ka buru who was fishing in the stream. Then he put down his bow and took a stick and said to her, "You are stealing my father's fish," and he began to beat her. She took no notice of him and continued to thread fish onto the string. He kept beating her with no effect. Finally she said to him, "So, a small boy such as you wishes to fight, eh? All right, I'll put my fish down and we can go up there and fight." They continued to fight until the boy was nearly dead from exhaustion and he fell down. He fainted and when he revived, he saw that the woman had left half of the string of fish before departing. She had also left her nose-plug [saboro ] between the man's toes. The man saw it and thought to himself, "Why did I beat her, she is my wife." He felt sad and returned to his house. He cooked and ate the fish with sago, then decorated himself, and holding his bow and arrow, set out toward the east to follow her. He wrapped up the saboro and took it with him.
He kept traveling toward the east and arrived at a large longhouse. He went inside and on one side there were women's things—sago mallets and bilums, but on the other side there were men's sleeping places. There was a bark cloak hanging from the woman's fireplace, the first one as one enters the door, and he took it down and slept underneath it there. Then the woman who lived there arrived. She went to take the cloak to wipe sweat
off her face and noticed it wasn't hanging where she left it. "I thought I hung it up here, but someone has taken it down," she thought. She lifted the cloak and saw a man underneath it. She had never seen a man before, and she covered him up again. She had arrived during midday and now proceeded to cook sago and sat there in her place. As it was getting dark, the other women started to arrive. They began to break off lumps of fresh sago for cooking. The woman cooked good food including soft sago grubs and small chicks and gave them to the man, although she kept him hidden. When all the women were finally asleep the man arose and began trying to fit the saboro into the sleeping women's noses. He tried them all but it didn't fit any of them. In the morning the woman again gave him sago to eat, and he took his bow and arrow and quickly jumped up and ran out of the house. "What's that? A man!" they all cried. They had never seen one before and now they began to fight over him. The woman whose place he had slept in and who had given him the food cried after him, "You must give me something because you slept in my place," but the man ran away. The man continued on toward the east.
He came upon another longhouse and there too it was a house of women only. The same thing happened when he was found sleeping at the end fireplace, and when he ran away all the women chased after him. "Did you see him?" "No, he went that way!" they cried as they ran around frantically trying to catch him. This same thing happened at other long-houses along the way until finally he left the area of longhouse settlement and came upon a house of a large ka buru . "This is the woman I am searching for," he thought. The woman asked him, "where have you come from?" and he replied, "I have been wandering in this direction and so have arrived here." She then said, "Toward the east no other men live. This is the last place." She gave the man good food including meat and they slept. That night he tried to fit the saboro into her nose but it didn't quite fit. He wrapped it up again, and in the morning prepared to leave once more. The woman said to him, "Where are you going? This is the last place of human settlement. You can go no further eastward." But he said, "No, I'm going," and he continued in that direction.
After much difficult traveling, he came upon a small valley surrounded by low hills and through it ran a river. It was a beautiful flat place and there was a house there. He saw that whoever lived there had removed the smoldering pieces of firewood and thrown them down the side of the house. [2] The pieces were as big as a man's abdomen. He sat down in the house and presently heard someone arriving. He looked through a hole in the wall and saw a woman coming, the one whose saboro he was carrying. He was sitting in the men's half of the house and the woman arrived in the woman's half. She put two pieces of firewood together in the fireplace. She looked and saw him sitting there and said to him, "So, a small boy such as you has followed me here." He sat there silently. She had brought two leaf-wrapped parcels and stuck both of them on the fire. She gave him two burning pieces of firewood and he placed the burning ends together in his own fireplace. She took two bamboos of sago from the fire and
removed the cooked parcels. She asked him, "Do you want to eat rat or bush fowl?" He replied, "I want to eat bush fowl," and she threw him one of the parcels along with a sago bamboo. He unwrapped it and saw to his amazement that there was an entire cassowary in it, uncut but with the bones broken. He peered stealthily into her room and saw that her parcel contained an entire pig cooked similarly. He saw her eat an entire pig leg in one gulp. She proceeded to do that with the other leg portions. She held the cooked viscera in her hands just like a rat and ate it one bite at a time. "She's going to eat me," he thought, and he was frightened. "Are you finished eating?" he heard her ask. "No, I'm not finished yet," he replied. "Son, you are eating slowly, not like a true man," she taunted. He continued to eat slowly. "Will you perhaps want to eat tomorrow also?" she asked. "Yes, tomorrow I will eat." "If you don't want to finish, give it to me and I'll finish it." And he was frightened upon hearing this. When he was finished eating, she said, "Who did you follow here? If you followed me, then we will go outside and have a contest." "What kind of contest," he wondered. He was still frightened. Standing on the verandah, she said to him, "Take your bow and arrow and come." They went down and she said to him, "Try breaking that stone with an arrow." He shot at it but the arrow splintered into pieces. He finished shooting his arrows unsuccessfully and stood there silently. "Watch me," she said, and taking the stone in her hands, crushed it into pieces with a loud report. "Did you know I could do that?" she asked. That night they slept, and during the night he tried to fit the saboro in her nose and it fitted perfectly. In the morning they awoke and she said, "You have brought back my saboro . This is the one." He was silent. Then he married the woman. He went hunting but his wife didn't accompany him. She would stay at home while he hunted, and they both ate the meat he brought home. They lived in this manner.
Another time it was a bright sunny day and they heard the cry of the marua bird singing "go'orogoai ." The woman said, "My darling, what is that bird saying?" and he replied, "Bamboo shoots will appear, children will grow up, it is saying." And she said, "No, 'it is an Usane,' it is saying. The men to the west are saying we should go hunting. 'Today is the first day,' it is saying. On the nineteenth day they will have the Usane." The man then went hunting. "I will not go with you, you go alone," she said to him. She stayed at the house and wove arm-bands, a string sporran, and a belt for her husband. He returned with two bilums of meat, one of which they put aside for themselves to eat, the other which they would use to exchange for pork at the Usane. Then he decorated himself and his wife told him to try dancing. He danced outside the house, and she said, "Very good, you go now. There is an old broken canoe below and paddles also. Take the canoe and go." She remained at the house. Before he left she said to him, "During the usanega dance, when it is almost dawn, this drum will speak to you. It will say something and you'll know what it is saying. At this time you must come back here. But if you wait until it has become light, well, then you'll see what will happen." He agreed. He took the
bilums of meat and paddled the canoe westward. He arrived at the long-house and distributed his meat and received pork in exchange. They ate, and then the men asked, "Who shall lead the samoga ?" and they searched until they found this man and he led the dance line. As dawn was approaching, he heard the drum say, "Fonomo, go!" The men heard the drum and in amazement cried, "That drum is speaking! Don't go!" they urged him. Finally it was dawn and the birds began singing. The samoga was finished and the usanega was about to begin outside. He took his bilum and paddled toward the east. He arrive where his house was and saw that it was no longer there. "Something has happened," he thought. Near where the house was he saw the white face of freshly cut limestone; the side of the hill had collapsed and had formed a deep hole burying the house. It was a very deep hole and he could not see the bottom. He cried for his wife and ran aimlessly in circles.
Then he went and gathered the bark of the kabosa tree from which the bark walls of houses are made. He gathered bark and then he took sago bamboos, pieces of pork and he made an enclosed barrel out of the bark. He put the food inside, and then he himself went in and sealed both ends. He rolled the barrel to the edge of the hole and then flung himself over the edge. It bounced and caromed as it fell down, making the hollow sound of an object being dropped down a deep well. It bumped and crashed as it descended but remained intact. Finally it stopped, and Fonomo crawled out. He looked and saw a dark place but a beautiful one. He took the sago and pork and thought to himself, "Which way shall I go? . . . I'll go eastward." Taking his bow and arrows he set off. He kept walking and eating small amounts of food, but finally he finished eating and became very hungry. There was no other food in that place. He kept going and finally heard the sound of sago being pounded. "Oh, this way," he thought and headed in that direction. He was very close to the sound now and he looked. Aiyo! It was his wife, the ka buru , pounding sago. He went there. She was off washing sago pith, and he went over to the sago palm and took her mallet by the back of the head and holding it, hid in the nearby bush. The woman had washed the last batch of sago and returned to pound more. She searched and searched for her mallet and finally saw it in the bush. She went and took hold of it and then she saw her husband holding the other end. She cried out in amazement. "Did I not tell you something would happen? Now we are finished. I have come to my first husband's house in this place here. How did you get here? I told you to come before dawn," she cried. The man was ashamed and finally said, "If you have died and come here, then I too will find my death here. You and I will rot here." Then she protested, "No we won't. My darling husband, why have you come?" she cried. "Don't cry, we will die here," he repeated. Then she finished making enough sago to fill one basket. She took a bamboo tube that she had put there and took out pieces of cassowary meat, and they ate together. They took the sago baskets and, with the man following the woman, they left. They arrived at a longhouse. There was a small boy sitting on the verandah and he saw them coming. He saw them come up
the hill to the house, and he got up and went inside and said to the woman's first husband, whose name was Kunuware, "Kunuware, your wife is bringing Fonomo with her!" The man abruptly got up and said, "You bad boy!" and running out of the house he looked and cried out, "My wife!" and he was shaking with fright and rage. "This is it!" he cried and ran and took his bow and war arrows, and Fonomo also took his bow and arrow. They leveled their bows together and aimed at each other's armpits and fired simultaneously. They both fell down and died at once. The woman dropped the sago baskets and ran and took each man's hand. Each man turned into hinanu [Zinjerberaceae plants]. One turned into the magenane variety and the other turned into the kuisabo variety. The woman wailed a death lament for both of them. Thus, hinanu grows crooked and bent when it bears fruit. That is all.
The ka buru , literally "black woman," is a common female character in Foi folk tales. She is usually depicted as cannibalistic and has exaggerated female secondary sexual characteristics such as pendulous breasts. Often a giant, she typically lives alone in the bush. Her male counterpart is the uga'ana , commonly represented as an undesirable and often comical caricature of the Foi man: he speaks in a whiny, nasally voice, and is usually treacherous and also cannibalistic. As is the case in the mythology of most Highlands and interior groups, the uga'ana often appears as the "foolish younger brother" in those myths that contrast the moral and immoral behavior of a pair of siblings.
In some Foi myths, the uga'ana and the ka buru appear as a married couple and thus depict an "antidomestic" unit. In the present myth, however, the ka buru emerges as a more complex character.
The story opens with a young unmarried man who happens upon a ka buru fishing in his father's stream (substitution A : wifeless man; woman for birds; fish for birds). Angry at her apparent theft, the young man puts aside his bow and, taking a stick, beats her (B : stick for bow; hostility for sex; theft of fish). But the ka buru is unaffected and finally condescends to beat the young man senseless. When he revives, he finds her saboro and half the fish she caught. This closes triangle ABC by revealing the ka buru as his marked bride and her theft of fish as the normal exercise of her virilocal right (C : saboro for woman; figurative wealth for woman). The nonspecific intersexual tension between unrelated men and women is replaced by the specific functioning complementarity of a married or betrothed couple, mediated by a transfer of shell wealth and food.
The young man then decorates himself and takes his bow (D : bow [weapon] for saboro ) reversing C and also obviating A (decorated hun-
ter of woman for nondecorated hunter of birds). He sets out in search of his marked bride but encounters only longhouses of unmarried women (also inverting A : husbandless women for wifeless man). D also substitutes for B in that the competition between women replaces that between man and woman. In effect, the man is now in the position the ka buru was in the beginning: he is forced to bear the harrowing consequences of accepting food and shelter from a woman (D : pursuit of man for pursuit of female ka buru ; unmarked women for marked ka buru ; unmarked women for "marked" man).
Nevertheless, he manages to escape from these women and finally, leaving the area of human habitation, he comes upon the house of his wife. The terms of their second meeting are an exaggeration of their first and seem to involve a complete reversal of male and female roles (E : ka buru for menless women; exaggerated gift of meat for normal female food item; competition for normal sexual complementarity). The ka buru lives by herself and is well able to provide herself with meat. Being "masculine" in this sense, she obviates the need for a functioning marriage. But the fact that the man had brought her saboro is both a necessary and sufficient condition for her assuming a normal female role: having been marked (and having marked the man herself) she must accept the implications. In substitution E , the two have gone at least part of the way toward a normal sexual and marital relationship, since they focus their competitive hostility on a neutral rock rather than each other. The next day, the man finds that the saboro finally fits the woman (substitution F ), and they become married (obviating C ). Their intersexual hostility has been transformed into normal domestic accommodation (thus
The inversion of the plot begins with the man's assumption of his hunting role and the subsequent announcement of the Usane (inverse D : hunting of game for hunting of woman). The ka buru stays at home and weaves male decorations, which is conventional female work. Before he leaves, she also provides him with a drum, in effect substituting a tubular male "marking" object for a bisexual one, the saboro (inverse C : male decoration for female). She warns him to obey when the drum speaks (the drum now "marks" the man, as the saboro did previously). But instead, he chooses to "strike" the drum in the company of men and fails to return when the drum calls his name (inverse B : striking of drum for striking of woman; Usane competition
of the samoga dance—[when young unmarried men compete for the attention of unmarried women]—for intersexual competition of B ). The implicit competition of young men at the Usane also inverts and is metaphorized by the previous competition among menless women for the young man. He finally returned the next morning to find that a large sinkhole has opened up carrying his wife deep into the earth. Having set out in the beginning of the tale to find aerial birds, he must now descend to find his subterranean wife (inverse A ). But more importantly, having appropriated the tubular drum for his own male ceremonial decoration and competition, he himself must replace the original saboro , and so he uses a tubular item to descend to the underground realm to where his wife was carried. In contrast to the lavish gifts of choice meat that he received on his first journey, he searches in hunger this second time. He finds the ka buru not with gluttonous amounts of cassowary meat but with staid portions of processed sago flour. [3] But the point is that in refusing to obey the directives of the marking drum-saboro , the man has revealed the ka buru 's status as an already-married woman (inverse F : married for unmarried woman). Having chosen the competitive search for unmarried women, he must now compete in a more lethal contest for the hand of a married women (inverse E : contest between males for contest between man and woman; inverse D : males fighting for a woman for females fighting for a man). The men both kill each other and turn into the crooked hinanu , which bears a red fruit (like the red Raggianna bird-of-paradise that the young man initially set out to find).
There is a further interpretation to the imagery of this myth. One can view the ka buru , the "black woman," in literal terms, as a widow who wears the black kaemari mourning paint (see chapter 5) and thus figuratively view Kunuware not as a living man but as the ghost of her first husband. The vertical descent of Fonomo to his wife's subterranean world therefore parallels the direction of the subterranean disposal of a widow's clothing and the implements and belongings associated with her dead husband that I described in chapter 5. In Foi mythology, women always serve to mediate men's transition between the land of the living and the land of the dead. The next myth makes more explicit the analogy between the opposition of the sexes and that of the living and the ghosts.
Return From the Dead
Part of the responsibility of males, as I have already noted, consists of controlling the flow of valuables and meat so as to preclude the
creation of ambiguities in women's status. Fonomo's failure to answer the drum's initial summons revealed the widowed status of the ka buru . His separation from his wife and his lethal contest with Kunuware is therefore a result of his refusal to properly mark the woman. In the following myth, a man is separated from his wife by an analogous failure to control the flow of relational solicitude toward his affines and his wife. Williams collected a version of this tale, and Wagner cites it as closely parallel to his Daribi story "The Hunter's Wife" (1978:207 fn.). The obviation sequences of the Foi and Daribi versions are virtually identical, and this allows one to pinpoint thematic contrasts between them.
Once there was a longhouse. There was a young man whose relatives helped him fasten [marry] a wife. When they were newly married, his relatives said to him, "You and your wife go to the swamp to sleep. Stay three days and then return to the longhouse. But do not stay a long time." The boy agreed, and he and his wife went to the bush house. But the two disobeyed their relatives' advice and they stayed in the bush. They worked three sago palms and still they did not return. Then the wife became sick. But the young man did not inform either his parents or the girl's parents. The woman worsened and finally died. He left the body in the empty house and went and told his parents. "Father, mother, my wife is dead. I've left her in the bush house, and have come to tell you." But the parents replied, "We told you not to do this. But you disobeyed us and stayed long enough to process four sago palms. We said you should not do this." They wanted to beat the man for his negligence. Crying, the young man returned to the bush house. The people of the longhouse mourned for her and approached the boy saying, "We have come to put the body on the burial scaffold." But he said, "No, I myself shall look after it. I will place her bones, and I myself will make the burial scaffold here near the house." Saying this, he built an exposure platform near his house. The other people were getting ready to disperse back to their houses and they called him to come along. But he refused. The relatives of the man and dead woman came to view the body, but the boy himself remained at the house crying and mourning his wife. The body decomposed, and soon only the bones were left. His relatives kept urging him to abandon the bush house and return to the village. "She is dead; come back," they kept saying, but he refused all their entreaties.
He took the bones and hung them up over the verandah of his bush house. In his overwhelming sorrow, he could only wander aimlessly about. In his wanderings, he came upon a set of fresh footprints, leading eastward or downstream. [4] "Who is this?" he thought to himself. He inspected them closely and saw that they were identical to his dead wife's footprints. "Is her new ghost walking around?" He wondered. He followed the footprints eastward. Leaving the bones hanging at the house, he followed the trail. He walked a great distance until, coming to the top of a mountain, he saw a house hidden below. There were cordyline, bananas, sugarcane, and flow-
ers of many varieties. In great quantities, these things were planted around the house. He approached the house and looked inside. Aiyo! There was very large old man there, of great girth. The old man laughed as he saw the young man approach. "Brother, what do you wish?" he asked, and the young man replied, "No, for no reason I have been wandering and have thus arrived here." The old man said, "No, there is something on your mind that has brought you here." "No, my wife had died, but her footprints seem to lead this way and so apprehensively I have followed them here." The old man said, "I have heard no talk regarding whether your wife has come or not. But 'with my ear only, a little talk of wind,' I heard that she went. Thus, let us go see if she has gone. Stay here for now." Then the old man left and came back with meat and vegetables which they steam-cooked and ate. Then the old man went outside and broke off a large segment of ka'ase cordyline. He also brought male decorations such as a bark belt, forehead band, and cassowary plume for the young man and said, "We shall go now." They walked eastward until they came upon a stone cliff face. It was of great height, touching the clouds at the top. "Eso!" the man thought, "How shall we pass here?" But the old man spoke a magic spell and pointed his war arrow at the cliff, and it parted and a path opened up in the middle. The two went through the gap eastward. As they passed, the two sides dosed up again. They kept going east and came upon a river in a broad valley. There were Ficus species trees of the su'uri variety, gofe palms, bark-cloth trees, and kotabera ferns in groves. The two men went and stood near the base of a huge kafane fern. Then the old man said to him, "You will now go fetch your wife. Down below there will be men sitting near the end of a longhouse, on the verandah, but when you arrive they will go back inside. At one end of the house there will be bohabo bananas; at the other end will be ginigi bananas. They will both be very ripe. If you try and enter the house, the bananas will attempt to block your path. If they do so, do not admire them or try to pick them. Look with your eyes only and go straight inside. Inside the house, the men there will give you grubs, chicks, pork, cassowary, water, tobacco, these things. Do not eat them. I alone will give you your food. The things that the other men give you put on the fireplace rack. While you are there, a woman will approach you and will invite you to have intercourse. Do not do it. But yell out when she does and I will come strike her." The young man agreed, and they peered down. There was a gigantic longhouse down there, with a large verandah. There were ko'oya tree saplings around the house. At the upper end of the longhouse there were many men. When the two men approached the house, they all went inside. "I told you what would happen," the old man said to him.
Then he went on, "There is one more thing. In the morning as it is getting light, your wife will come. She will come dancing. She will come and stand close to you. If with her eyes or gestures she says 'come' then take her by the wrist." The boy heard him. Then they went inside the house. The bohabo and ginigi bananas moved and blocked their way inside. But he only looked with his eyes and went inside. There was a man's
sleeping place there with bark blankets and a man was sleeping under them. "Ai, mother! Is there a real man underneath there?" he thought. He lifted the blanket and saw that there was indeed a man there. The other men of the house brought him banana, fish, grubs, meat, pork, cassowary, but the young man did not eat though they gave him great amounts. He kept hiding it on the upper fireplace rack. The old man gave him food, and this he ate. In the afternoon, from the east steps they heard the sound of footsteps. He looked and saw a woman approach seductively. But the young man yelled out, and the old man came running and struck the woman and threw her out of the house. Four times the woman tried to approach the young man, and each time the young man yelled and brought the old man who struck her and threw her out. The young man slept there restlessly that night. He kept nodding off sleepily all night, trying to stay awake waiting for his wife to come. Then the house shook—something was coming. He heard the sound of singing. "In the west you have looked, in the east you have looked, right here you have looked. . . ." Then as he watched he saw his wife come close up to his face. She was being supported by dead people, and her head reeled from one man's shoulder to another's as they escorted her into her new home, limp and helpless. He listened as his wife said something in a low voice to him while the other dead people sung the song, "In the east, in the west, right here. . . ." Since the woman's bones were back in the land of the living, she had to be helped up. The woman recognized her husband and said to him "Come!" and the man quickly went and tightly held her wrist. The other men chattered in consternation at this—"nenenenenene !" they cried, in the speech of ghosts Then they disappeared. Only the young man, the old man and the dead wife were there. Then the woman saw that her husband was holding her wrist. She attempted to frighten him into releasing her by changing into a snake, water, and other things. But he held the snake tight; he cupped his hands so the water would not run out. She turned into saliva and this too he held. Finally, resuming her form she said to him, "Because you desired me, you have come. Let go of my hand; I will go with you now." Then the man thought to take with him the food that he had been hiding on the fireplace rack all this time. Ai! It wasn't the things he thought he saw but only the bell of the banana instead of real fruit; pigs' penises instead of real meat; saliva instead of water. There were the food of the ghosts perhaps, that he had really put there.
Then, the old man left the house first, followed by the woman in the middle and the man last. They came up to where they had descended through the kafane hole and climbed up, alighting on the ground. Then toward the west they went. Once more, the old man said a spell and pointed his arrow at the stone cliff, which parted and let them through. They arrived at the house of the old man and he told them to wait there. He went and fetched food and meat and then heated stones. They cooked and ate the meat. He prepared a large bilum of food for the two to take with them. Then the old man returned to his garden. Coming back the young man saw that he had brought a cutting from the abuyu sugarcane
and a sucker of the bohabo banana. Then he instructed the young man, "To your wife 'make sago' don't say; 'find fish' don't say; 'care for pigs' don't say; 'cut a garden' don't say; 'cook me sago' don't say; 'fetch firewood' don't say. You alone must do all the work. Go and plant this abuyu and bohabo near the refuse pit. When the sugarcane has flowered, the bohabo fruit is truly ripe so that flying foxes come for it, then you can tell your wife to do all these things. This is what I wish to say to you." The old man whispered these things urgently and carefully in the man's ear. "Do you hear and understand?" he asked, and the young man replied, "Yes." Then he took the sugarcane cutting and the banana sucker and the bilum of food. The old man then said, "Look to the west and close your eyes. When I strike you both on the back, then open them." They did so. The old man struck them both on the back and said, "Open your eyes," and when they did, they saw they were back at the young man's bush house. "Ai! What has happened?" he thought. But he quickly went and planted the banana and the sugarcane near the refuse pit and quickly built a fence around it. He was happy now. He did not tell his relatives he had returned. They thought he had lost his senses and had run away for good.
Then they lived there. The man himself did all the work. He was solicitous toward her, preparing all the food, caring himself for the pigs. He saw the sugarcane and the banana growing, and one day he saw that the sugarcane was about to flower and the banana fruit was almost ripe. The man continued to do all the work, chopping down sago palms and processing them himself. One night he heard the bilum with the wife's bones in them rustling and rattling. Stealthily, he went and looked in the woman's half and saw that she was gone. "She has gone to insert the bones back into her body," he thought. Then he slept again. Near dawn, he went to the latrine, and when he returned it was light and he went to look at the bilum where he had put his wife's bones. Eke! They were all gone. There was not one left. "She has inserted them back into her body," he thought, and he continued to look after her. Another time he went to chop another sago palm down. He removed the bark and made the washing trough. They both went to the sago stand and he said to his wife, "Wife, stay here, I will make sago." He washed sago until they were filling up the last basket. There was only one more batch of washing to do before the last basket would be filled. At this time, he said to her, "Wife, I've been doing all the work for a long time now, and I am very exhausted. You go and cut sago leaves to wrap the sago in." "what is this?" she asked in fear. "Do it," he repeated. She obeyed. The man was finishing making sago when he heard a scream. "Wife, what is it?" he called out, but she didn't answer. He went to look, and was very frightened now. Eke! His wife had cut her hand on the thorns at the edge of the sago leaf, and blood was pouring out in great quantities, enough to fill a water bamboo. "Ai! my wife! my wife!" he cried out. He fetched tree moss and leaves and tried to bandage the wound, but because the blood was so profuse the leaves would not stick. He left the sago there and carried his wife back on his shoulders. Crying, he carried her back while she continued to bleed heavily. Her skin
finally turned yellow from loss of blood. It continued to flow through the floor planks under the house. She began to shrink and shrivel up as she became exsanguinated. He stayed up all night watching her, grimly trying not to fall asleep, but finally, as the birds started to twitter, he slept. He awoke again when it was light and looked in the woman's room and there were only bones left. "My wife! my wife!" he cried in grief. When it was light enough, he gathered her bones and hung them up and continued to look for her body. He found footprints going eastward, and he followed them. Along the way gagi thorns, tinigini thorns, mafu thorns, pandanus spikes, wasps, and ants scratched and bit him viciously [literally, in Foi, they "ate his skin completely"]. He arrived at the old man's house again. "Get up!" he cried to the old man. "Brother, what has happened?" the other asked. "No, my wife, my wife . . ., "and he told him what had happened. "Did I not instruct you," and the old man became very angry. Taking a fireplace tongs, he took hold of the young man's tongue and twisted and pulled it. Having twisted his tongue, he pushed it back into the man's mouth so that he choked on it.[5] "You no longer wish to stay at your house either. You heard my talk but you chose to disregard it. Now you can go back east to the land of the dead, to where the ghosts reside." The man died and went east. So it is said. That is all.
In the opening of this tale, a young man fails to heed the delicate protocol of newly married life during which a bride, her mother, and the groom's mother live together for several months in the groom's mother's house. Instead, he keeps her unduly long in the sago swamp, substituting the complementarity of husband and wife for the solicitous sharing and coresidence of habomena (daughter's husband's parent/son's wife's parent). This reveals the precariousness of new marital ties: she becomes sick and dies (substitution A : bush for village; place of ghosts for place of humans). The man himself prepares the corpse and tends the exposure coffin until the ghost departs and the bones remain (B : bones for skin; dead wife for live wife). The disconsolate husband, however, discovers the footprints that his wife left in departing for the afterworld, haisureri . It is to this place that he follows her, where he meets the Foi equivalent of "Charon," who, in Williams' version, is named Gaburiniki. According to my informants, people who die from illness are transformed into the bird of this name. The mediation of this man in procuring the dead wife replaces that of the man's parents in obtaining her when she was alive (C : land of dead for land of living). It is of interest to note that whereas the Daribi version of this tale encompassed a statement on an elder brother's leviratic responsibilities toward a younger, the Foi tale significantly does not include this (cf. Wagner 1978:204-208). The guardian of
the dead gives the young man strict warning against identifying with the truly dead people through the sharing of food or sexual contact (replacing the warnings of the parents with those of the "Charon" character, C obviating A ). With the help of the mediating elder male, the young man is able to reclaim his wife (D : "living" dead wife for elder male guardian, obviating A by repeating the terms of his initial marriage in altered form).
The man returns to the land of the living with his "refastened" bride and "Charon" gives him a set of strict rules to follow which, as in the Daribi story, substitutes the complementarity of living and dead for that of male and female (E ). But this now reveals the mourning episode in a new light: the young man refused to share the complementary exchange work of mourning and tending the corpse, and so the new placement of the dead must now be his entire responsibility. The dilemma is that man and woman cannot live together except in a relation of sexual complementarity, and the woman dies again because of it (F : death for life; dead husband for dead wife, obviating A ). Like the Daribi tale, the Foi myth unfolds the facilitating modality of ACE as a series of regulations maintaining the proper separation of complementary realms (A : bush and village; C : living and dead; E : male and female), while the motivating modality of BDF plots the mortal consequences of their abrogation (B : death of wife; D : journey to land of dead; F : death of husband).
Opposed to intersexual mediation by implication is what I can identify as the dilemma of consexual cooperation. The solidarity of men and women is typically phrased in terms of male and female sibling-ship, and it is men's and women's divergent responsibilities toward the opposite sex that to a large degree creates the content of such siblingship. The last two myths of this chapter thus detail the nature of consexual differentiation.
The Fish Spear
In "Return from the Dead," the elder male "Charon" character mediates the young man's reacquisition of his dead wife. In the next myth, a younger man acquires a wife indirectly through the appropriation of his elder brother's sexuality. The fish spear that symbolically represents this occupies an analogous functional position to that of the saboro in "Fonomo and Kunuware."[6] "The Fish Spear" is also
an example of those myths "with a base": it accounts for the origin of one of several magic spells used in the preparation of Derris-root fish poison.
There once lived a young man, his elder brother, and his elder brother's two wives. One time there was to be a pig-feast. The elder brother wanted his brother and elder wife to stay behind, but the younger brother said, "No, you three stay here. I will go alone." The elder brother refused, however, and he and his younger wife left. The elder brother had left his fish spear [sa'are or age ] encased in a bamboo tube under the side of the house. The younger brother removed it and took it to a large ko'oya tree in fruit. There he saw a large flock of ga'are birds [Pesquet's Parrot]. He took the arrow and shot one of them. But one of the prongs broke off and the bird flew away and fell down at a distance. He then whittled a new prong, removed the broken one, and darkened the new one with charcoal and replaced it.
The elder brother returned from the pig-feast with a bilum of pork. He looked at his sa'are and saw that one of the prongs had been replaced. "Who touched my arrow?" he asked, and the younger brother told him about the ga'are bird. The elder brother struck him on the head three times and also struck the elder wife. Then the boy left in shame. He went to where the bird had fallen down when he shot it and came upon a small pond. The brother's first wife also went with him. There was a tall kubaro tree near the side of the pond, and this he cut down and stuck in the middle of the pond until it touched bottom and only the tip still showed above the water. "Karege [brother's wife] you stay here," and using the kubaro tree as a pole, he rafted out to the middle of the pond. He dived into the water and went below. His lungs were almost bursting and finally he came to the surface again. Again he dived under the water. He used the kubaro stake to pull himself under. Then he noticed that the stake had become caught in the branches of a kanega tree and, where it was stuck, a length of anekewabo vine came across the tree and led under the surface of the water. Now he could follow it all the way down and did so. He came upon a large grove of buru edible leaf that was located on a fiat beautiful piece of ground. Downstream or eastward he went following a narrow path. He came upon a large garden. There was abuyu sugarcane and many bananas. He stood near the base of the abuyu sugarcane [a red variety]. He heard the sound of women approaching. One of them, a young unmarried girl, came to cut sugarcane and holding a stalk in her hands she saw a man standing there. "Yu-eh! What are you doing here?" she cried. The other women heard her cry out and called out, "What is happening?" and she replied, "No, a wasp bit me," and then she turned back to the boy and asked him again, "What are you doing here?" he said, "No, I've been traveling in this direction and so have arrived." She then said in fear, "There is a tu'u tree, there is turuka'asia leaf; cut them and throw them in a hole!" But he replied, "No, I haven't come for these things; I am a true man."[7] Then she said, "Then let us go. First we women must gather
food; stay here." Having done so, they all approached the man and the other women were afraid. "Ai! It is a man!" they cried. the young woman said to the man, "When we reach the house, you'll see a man leaning on the east verandah. He'll say, 'Sweetie is bringing a man with her.' That is my brother speaking. Go to that end of the house. If other men give you food, it is for me. I will bring you your food myself." They walked on until they came up to a huge longhouse perched on a very high ridge. There was a large man standing on the downstream side verandah and he called out as they approached, "Sweetie has brought a man with her." The woman said to the younger brother, "That is my brother of whom I spoke." They went inside and the woman's brother's fireplace was one of the a boroso , where only head-men sleep. The younger brother sat there and saw that they were pouring worms out of bamboo tubes, preparing to eat them. He accepted some but did not eat them. His wife brought him regular food. Then his wife's brother said to him, "Base [sister's husband], why have you come here?" and the man told him the story of how he had left his brother's house. "I've come finding the sa'are ," he concluded. As he said that, he saw a man at the other end of the longhouse removing a mafu vine thorn from his leg. He then placed it over the doorway where the Usane emblems are usually placed. The large man said to him, "You and I will go inspect it more closely," and when they did, the man saw that it was the sa'are prong that he had lost. Then he said to his wife's brother, "Kabusi [wife's brother], tonight I will take it and go," and the large man said, "Yes, do so." He and his wife took the arrow prong and left. They arrived at the base of the kanega tree, and he told his wife to stay there. "Are you going to return for good?" she asked. "No, I will only give back the arrow and return." He climbed the tree and reached the kubaro stick and then reached water again; the water appeared when he touched the kubaro stick. He swam toward the surface. He saw his karege still there crying. Then he gave her the arrow and said, "Give this to my brother and tell him to kill a young girl with it [that is, use it as bridewealth]; tell him I said this. Tell him l said to build a large longhouse, and a large canoe. Tell him I said to beat his fare drum." Then he gave her the arrow, "Karege , I'm not coming. I am finished now. You go." She cried for the man as if he were dead. She gave the arrow back to her husband and told him all his brother had said. The brother broke the arrow and threw it away. Then the younger brother dove into the water again and, when he once more surfaced, his wife was there and they returned.
He built a bush house and there they lived. The woman would make sago for the man, but he spent his time only finding worms, which was her food. He found meat and other things which he himself ate. His wife bore him two children. One time he was digging for worms and he got a thorn stuck in his hand. He went home and silently waited. His wife came back, soaked to the skin as from a heavy downpour. He gave her worms to eat. Finally, in exasperation he said, "I always find good meat and things but you only eat worms." She replied, "What was that you said, my darling?" "No, I said nothing." "No, darling, you said something. Tell me."
Finally he repeated, "No, wife, you should be eating good meat but you only eat worms and I have gotten a thorn in my hand from looking for them for you.' "Thank you darling, that's what I thought you said." Then she said to the two children, "Go sleep with your father tonight. I'm tired of you two.' They slept in their father's house that night and, close to dawn, the little boy awoke and said to his father, "I want to urinate but I don't want to get up." The father said, "Urinate underneath the house." The boy did so and the father heard the sound of water splashing. He said, "What is that?" and looked to see that water was under the house. He ran to his wife's house and saw she was gone. He allowed the children to go first and they climbed up a nearby mountain. On top of one peak was a long weye palm and they climbed up. The two boys sat on the frond bases and the man sat on the male growth further down. The water kept rising. It came up to his ankles. It came up to his chest. It was about to cover him up. Then he said to his children, "Son, you are Somobamuya and your brother is Somokaraya . . .
" 'We are brothers-in-law,' if they say, they are lying
'We are cross-cousins,' if they say, they are lying
'We are brothers,' if they say, they are lying
'We are mother and child,' if they say, they are lying
'We are father and child,' if they say, they are lying
"under the turubea tree
under the ground
under the hisunu grass
under a hole in the water
along with the bubasi . . .
"This you must say. Your mother's people are all fish. You two are fish poison, bamuya and karaya . If you wish to kill your mother's line, they will call out, 'We are cross-cousins, we are brothers-in-law, . . .' and so forth. But do not listen to them, they are lying. But under the submerged turubea trees, under the hisunu riverine grass, in the water, there you will find them." Then the water covered the father up. The water then receded taking the man with it. The two boys climbed down the tree, and there on the ground they ran around in circles until one turned into somobamuya Derris and the other somokaraya Derris. So now when we use fish poison, we say that we are using these two boys, whose names were Somobamuya and Somokaraya. That is all.
This story begins with the problematic situation of an elder brother with two wives and a younger brother with none.[8] The elder brother commands his younger brother and elder wife to stay behind while he attends a pig-feast,[9] meanwhile admonishing him not to touch his fish and bird spear in his absence. This, however, is exactly what the younger brother does, and what it involves is a metaphoric appropriation of the elder brother's sexuality (substitution A : elder brother's spear for younger brother's). Using it to shoot a ga'are bird, the arrow
is broken; one of the prongs is embedded in the escaping bird (B : bird for arrow). The younger brother substitutes his own spear ("sexuality") for his brother's and therefore becomes implicitly associated sexually with his brother's wife, his karege (C : younger brother's arrow for bird, or younger brother's arrow for elder brother's, completing the reversal of sexual roles in triangle ABC ).
The elder man returns home and discovers the replacement, and in his anger expels both his brother and his elder wife (D : elder brother for younger brother; younger wife for elder wife, obviating A : the appropriation of the elder brother's spear results in the younger brother's appropriation of his brother's wife). But the younger brother is betoken to the principle of the "hunter's propriety": that which a man shoots, he must claim (Wagner 1978:177), and he dives beneath the water in search of the wounded ga'are bird. There he finds an underwater world (E : submarine world for terrestrial world). Through the mediation of another woman, this time his wife, he meets his brother-in-law, who is in fact the wounded bird. Recovering the spear prong, he returns with it and sends it back to his brother via his karege (F : arrow for wound; brother-in-law for brother; wife for brother's wife) commanding the woman to instruct his elder brother to "kill a wife" with it, as the younger brother figuratively had already done. Since the younger brother has already been expelled and since giving up the arrow means giving up his brother's wife (and his brother), this substitution is the obviating one: he leaves the terrestrial world and returns underneath the water to dwell with his affines.
Substitution F , however, internally obviates C , for the younger brother uses his elder brother's "sexuality," his "hunting" capacity that is, to gain a wife for himself. The internal obviations of
The inversion of the myth thus begins when the younger brother assumes his underwater life, where his hunting is to no avail, and instead, like a gardener, he must dig in the ground for worms (inverse A : horticulture for hunting; digging stick for arrow). He becomes frustrated with his life and finally manages in his anger to wound himself with a thorn (inverse F : wound for "arrow," since the metaphorical equivalence between the mafu thorn and arrow has already been established earlier in this myth). He refuses to dig, which motivates his
estrangement from his wife (since she sends his children back to him) and his return to the terrestrial world. For that night, when his son urinates, he discovers that the water is "rising." But since he is already living underwater , it means that he is in effect being forced back into the terrestrial world (inverse E : terrestrial world for submarine world). It is this realization that leads him to conclude that he has been dwelling with fish. Only his children, who are placed above him, survive (inverse D : separation of father and male child for separation of male siblings; younger males for elder male). Henceforth, the solidarity of male siblings will be defined in reference to their common maternal relatives—something that failed to unite the elder and younger brother initially (inverse D : estrangement of maternals for estrangement of male siblings).
We can also view the mediating role of the fish spear not solely as a symbol of male sexuality but in more literal terms. The sa'are or age , the five-pronged spear, is both a bird and fish arrow, and it precisely mediates male (bird) hunting and female fishing in this myth. Moreover, the social roles it mediates are metaphorically related to this differentiation. The arrow first separates male siblings, while its analogue in the latter part of the myth, the digging stick, leads to the separation of husband and wife and maternal relatives. The younger brother loses his children through his inability to relate in complementary economic terms with his wife: being a hunter, he cannot for long sustain his role as gardener (of worms).
The Milk Bamboo
The last myth of this chapter can be viewed as the female counterpart to "The Fish Spear." Whereas the separation of brothers was mediated by a male weapon (and penis symbol), the separation of female siblings is expressed in terms of breast milk in the following myth. Such differentiation between sisters, however, also has implications for male consanguinity, as the myth demonstrates.
Once there was a longhouse where only women lived. One time, the woman who slept in one corner disappeared. The next day, the woman with whom she shared a fireplace also disappeared. The next day the woman who slept across the house from her also disappeared. This kept happening down the line of fireplaces until there was but one woman left in the opposite corner on the east end. "What shall I do?" she thought. She killed her pig, and not eating any of it herself, she put it in her bilum and went to look for her sisters. She searched for them but could not find
them. But there on the other side of the latrine fence, she saw that the ground was muddy and churned up from many footprints—as if the women had climbed over, jumped to the other side, and left that way. She too went in that direction. Along the way she came upon a cave where they had slept. She kept traveling until she came to a wide river. "How shall I get across?" she thought. Sitting there she heard the sound of a paddle being struck against a canoe and looking, saw a worthless uga'ana approaching. She called out, "Uga'ana ! Come and get me." But he replied, "No, your sisters also asked me the same thing and mixed pig excrement with the sago bundles they gave me. So I won't take you." And he continued on downstream. She sat there helplessly. But then she heard the sound of splashing and saw the uga'ana returning. He backed the canoe toward the harbor and told her to get in. Taking her to the other side, he told her to get out, but she said, "All my sisters wanted good men, but l myself am a rubbish woman so you and I will be all right together; I won't leave the canoe." Then the uga'ana said to her, "All your sisters used to give me pig excrement with the sago bundles: look at the base of that damu cordyline there!" She looked and saw that the ground was dark and muddy with the discarded sago and excrement. The two paddled downstream. They shared a pig kidney and roll of sago. As they paddled they passed a large bamboo grove, hagenamo trees, arase edible leaf, amaranthus, bamboo shoots, sugarcane, wingbean, and yam. The uga'ana said, "These are my sister's son's." They disembarked, and the uga'ana took one of each food item, and they continued downstream. They passed a beautiful canoe with two finely cut paddles. "This is my sister's son's canoe and harbor," he said. Then he added, "We'll sleep at my sister's son's house but only for tonight." They disembarked and the uga'ana tied up his shabby, broken-down canoe. The house was atop a small ridge, and it was well made and surrounded by beautiful flowers and shrubs. Then the uga'ana said to the woman, "Cook sago. I will fetch water," and he left. While she was cooking sago she heard someone coming up the steps, and she looked up to see a handsome young man. He said to her, "Wife, give me sago," but she said, "No, the uga'ana will beat me, I won't give you sago." But he replied, "But it is I who brought you here from upstream," he said. "This is your house now; those pigs underneath the house and the garden and vegetables you saw are yours." Then she exclaimed, "All my sisters abandoned these good things when they left you!" and the two of them lived there as man and wife.
The woman bore a female child. At the time the child started walking, they heard the cry of the marua bird. The husband said, "Wife, what is that bird singing about?" and she replied, "No, garden food will prosper, it is saying," she said. But he replied, "No, it is not saying that. Your sisters' line will have an Usane—go hunting, it is saying. You stay here and make our decorations. I am going to find game," and he left. The day before the Usane was due to be held, the man returned with two bilums of game. Then they decorated and saw that each one was beautiful. The man took his fare drum and his Usane ceremonial skirt and it swayed gently
back and forth very beautifully. They both smiled with pleasure. They then embarked and paddled downstream. They arrived at the longhouse of the Usane and saw that one of the two dance lines still did not have a leader. But the man himself took the place and, together with the other dance-line leader, they were sufficient. The man looked perfect and the two together led the dance very well. Their two wives went first, and everyone thought that no others could have led the dancing so well. They danced and then exchanged their meat for pork. There was another woman who kept following the man around, and when the handsome man noticed her, she averted her eyes flirtatiously. The exchange was finished, and the men all decorated again for the nighttime dancing. While they were getting ready, the woman explained to her sisters, "The worthless man to whom you gave pig excrement is this handsome man here." They all cried, "Aooh! You're lying!" "No," she replied, "It is he." "Oh, we did that to that handsome man!" they lamented. "Sister, look at us now!" and the woman noticed that her sisters' children were emaciated and had swollen malnourished bellies, and that her sisters too were poor looking, and their husbands were bad men. "Ai!" the woman thought, "It is these bad men who are having this Usane."
Then the men returned ready to begin the nighttime dancing. The two dance leaders arrived, and the man went over to his wife and gave her two thin bamboo tubes. "Put these in your bilum and hide them under your cloak. Do not let anyone else see them. If one of your sisters' children cries out for water, do not give them this. When it is almost light, you will hear me tell you to give them to me." Then the men danced. The other woman who had been staring at the handsome man, she had a child who started crying. The woman tried to give the child things to settle it, but nothing worked. The child said, "I want my mother's sister's little bamboos." But the woman said, "But I'm not carrying anything in my bilum." "No," the child insisted, "They are there." So the woman took one of the bamboos and gave it to the child saying, "Drink just a little, your mai [mother's sister's husband] will get angry." But the boy swallowed the water and drank it all. The woman took the empty bamboo back and squeezed her own breast milk into it, thus refilling it. Then, as it started to get light, she heard her husband say the thing he told her would be the signal for her to give him the bamboos: "River stone moss water, I want to drink; urabi moss water, I want to drink; water found at the base of trees, I want to drink; hekana aquatic grass water, I want to drink," he sang as he approached. The woman removed the bamboos and gave them to him. He drank the one with the good water in it, but when he drank the second bamboo, he knew it was bad and broke it over his wife's head. Then the dancers left the longhouse and prepared to leave. Below at the harbor, the man and his wife loaded their pork into the canoe. As they did so, he said to her, "I want to sleep; put the child here with me in the back of the canoe and finish loading our bilums." The woman went back to get their pork. As she was almost finished and had come back from putting the last ribcage in the canoe, she saw that her husband and child were gone.
"Where have you two gone?" she called out. Aiyo! There under the water was her husband and child sleeping, with his fare drum used as a head pillow. She dived in to try to retrieve them, but she only managed to grab handfuls of leaves and grass. Five times she tried unsuccessfully. Then she took a piece of sago bark and went up to the longhouse and struck her sister's child. Then she struck all of her sisters, and they scattered along with their husbands. She looked, and there behind a section of kewabo vine she saw that all the men and women and children had turned into marsupials and were lined up there. She turned around and went back down to the water. Again she tried to retrieve her husband and child but failed. Walking back and forth along the bank she turned into an abeyeru aquatic rodent, dived in the water, and lived there. That is all.
The story begins with a longhouse comprised only of female siblings who one by one disappear until only a single woman remains. Discovering the path they have apparently taken, the woman follows, only to be stranded on the near shore of an unfordable river. While she sits there, a seedy uga'ana passed by. He first refuses to take her, pointing out the cavalier treatment he received at the hands of her sisters, but he finally relents and takes her into the canoe, at which point she announces her intention not to abandon him (substitution A : uga'ana for sisters; "worthless" woman for other sisters). Passing by impressive stands of edible semidomesticates and a fine canoe that the uga'ana identifies as belonging to his sister's son, they arrive at the sister's son's house. But in substitution B it is revealed that this uga'ana is in fact the handsome young sister's son (B : uga'ana 's sister's son for uga'ana ; handsome young man for ugly old man). The two live as husband and wife, and the woman bears a child.
It is then decided that it is time for an Usane, which motivates substitution C , the ceremonial reunification of the woman and her sisters. But it occurs in a now inverted form: It is revealed that the other women married poor men and have sickly children while the originally "worthless" woman has a fine husband and child, thus obviating A (D : worthless sisters for worthless uga'ana ; worthless husbands for the "good" husbands the women thought they wanted to marry). Because he is now revealed as the most handsome man at the Usane, the "uga'ana " is coveted by the other women and one in particular. It is to this woman's child, her babo (sister's child, female speaking) that the woman gives her husband's special water, replacing it with her own breast milk (E : sister's child, female speaking for sister's child, male speaking [abia ]; consanguine for husband [obviating B ]). The uga'ana drinks his wife's breast milk, identifying himself ma-
trilaterally with his own child and thus mirroring the prior conflation between himself and his own sister's child. But it is women as sisters who relate men consanguineously, not women as wives . Moreover, women as sisters must be separated by marriage. One of the paradoxes of Foi kinship, therefore, is that it extends a terminological consanguinity or siblingship to the children of female siblings (since MZC = sibling) even though these children have different patrilineal credentials. For affinity to be uncompromised, the relational effects of female siblingship must be ignored. The Foi therefore refer to their MZC as hua susu wame (or ana ), literally "mother only brother (or sister)," in contrast to patrilaterally related siblings. This is not the case with the children of cross-sex siblings, however: it is therefore a man's prerogative, but not a woman's , to claim kinship (consanguinity) with his sister. You might say that the "unmarked" form of brotherhood (or sisterhood) is always paternal brotherhood or sisterhood for the Foi. They therefore "mark" linguistically those brothers and sisters they trace only through their mother's. Hua susu wame (ana ) also refers to a half-sibling—that is, a sibling with whom you share the same mother but have a different father.
Having identified her husband and child through the drinking of breast milk, the woman must now accept their separation from her. The final paradox is that even as she and her husband are irrevocably separated, her sisters and their husbands are finally completely identified (as the same animal species). The effect of this is to return the plot to the initial separation of the woman and her female siblings, obviating A (F : underwater husband and child for surface husband and child; separation of the woman and her sisters into different animal species). As an abeyeru rodent, the woman's child and husband assume an aquatic habitat, while her marsupial sisters and their husbands inhabit an arboreal zone. In other words, sisters must be "totemically" identified with their husbands (by bearing children that belong to their husband's clans) at the expense of their own female consanguinity.
"The Milk Bamboo" indicates that it is not just the flow of male wealth and meat and of sexually related weapons and decorations that men must control, but the relational powers of female productivity and nurturance also. The dilemma for Foi males is that wealth items represent merely an exterior accessory to male assertiveness, while women's reproductive potential is intrinsic to their bodies. Maleness, in this sense, is always being dissipated (in ceremonial payments) while
uterine creativity conserves itself and resists men's efforts to redefine it in terms of male continuity. The next chapter examines the mythological portrayal of feminine reproductive power.
Chapter IX
Female Reproductivity
The reproductive capacity of women is often phrased in terms of women's ability to nurture children. The Foi say that a mother, much more than a father, works hard to carry children in her string bag and breast feed them when they are infants. The idiom of breast feeding is a convenient starting point for introducing a set of myths that illustrate Foi images of female nurturance and reproductive capacity.
The Breast-Milk Women
The following myth depicts the sufficiency of female milk in its reproductive aspect and contrasts it with the relative insufficiency of male hunting. Like "The Origin of Tree Grubs," the story involves the reversal of sex roles and the oral fertilization of a man. However, in this myth, it is sexual intercourse and nurturance that are metaphorically equated rather than sex and hunting.
There once was a longhouse where only men lived. In it, there lived one man who was habitually unsuccessful at finding game. The other men who regularly brought home meat and made their own sago would not share their food with the poor man. They only gave him the fingers and claws and inedible scraps to eat for they had nothing but contempt for him. One time, the poor man went downstream and came upon a large garden. In it he saw great quantifies of ripe yams, bananas, and sugarcane. Standing there, he watched and saw a very large woman with huge breasts arrive to gather food from the garden. Her breasts were as large as a man's thighs and they hung down very low. The man was afraid. He hid near the base
of a banana tree with ripe fruit. The woman came to cut the bananas down and, looking, saw the man hiding there. She shivered with fright and asked him, "What are you doing here?" The man replied, "I am a poor man and have come in this direction seeking game." The woman allowed him to take some of her garden food, and the man returned with it to his long-house. There he ate the food secretly so his brothers would not discover what he had found.
He returned habitually to the woman's garden and received vegetables that he ate in secret in the longhouse. Another time he went again downstream to get vegetables and the woman arrived to gather food from the garden. This time she said to him, "If you wish to take vegetables now, you must first drink my breast milk." The man suckled both of the woman's breasts until they were dry and shriveled up. His stomach then swelled up, and there in the middle of the garden he vomited forth the milk, along with blood and bile fluid. When he was finished his skin was slack and empty, but the woman revived him by feeding him ginger, cucumbers, and other vegetables. The woman then said to him, "Come back in two days' time."
The man did so, and the day he arrived he heard the sound of laughing voices. There he saw many young maidens. They approached him calling out, "Aiye! Father! Father!" and they followed him. He went further and saw the woman; her breasts now hung slackly. He returned to the long-house and told his brothers, "Construct women's houses." They all built women's houses for themselves. When they were finished, he went and brought all the women back to the longhouse and each man married one of the maidens. The poor man, he married the woman from the garden, the one whose breasts he had suckled. They all lived there. But one man of the longhouse kept beating his wife. The other women were angry at her mistreatment, and they discussed it amongst themselves at night. The poor man kept returning to his woman's house that night to see if the women were planning anything. But in the middle of the night, they all left. When it became light the next day, the poor man returned to the woman's house downstream. He saw that his wife's breasts were large and full once again. He wanted to speak to her but was afraid, and so he left, and he and his brothers lived alone as before. That is all.
The first half of this myth elaborates a pervasive theme in Foi myth, the equation of women and game animals, for in substitution A through D , a man who fails to obtain game succeeds in providing wives for his brothers. The story begins with a man who is unsuccessful in hunting and hence rejected by his brothers in the longhouse. One day he comes upon a garden owned by a woman with abnormally large breasts. The woman regularly supplies him with vegetables that he eats secretly, refusing in turn to share them with his brother (A : garden food for meat; quasi-maternal or marital nurturance for same-sex food sharing). But before he is permitted to obtain more vegetable
food, the woman forces the man to drink her breast milk (B : breast milk for garden food), substituting a subordinate dependent relationship with a woman for a similar relationship with his male siblings. He regurgitates the milk, along with his own blood and bile fluid, which covers the garden (C : rejected milk and blood for garden food). Afterward, his skin becomes "shriveled up," as do the woman's breasts, and he is given more garden food, which revives him. The obviation of the initial substitution completes the identification of the poor hunter as one dependent on women as well as men, for the Foi conventionally describe poor men as having "bad skin".
He returns to the woman's garden two days later, however, to find that the vomited fluids have been transformed into young maidens who call him father (D : women for breast milk; daughters for brothers), obviating A by transforming the failed hunter into a successful father. But the man, by failing to find game, has feminized himself. He has therefore been metaphorically impregnated by the woman and subsequently mingles his own blood with the breast milk, "planting" these procreative substances in the garden (since he has no womb) where they gestate into daughters. The myth therefore reverses the normal masculine and feminine roles in conception and encompasses a figurative equation between breast milk and semen. Thus, the man is able to provide his brothers with wives as he was unable to provide them with meat (again obviating A ).
But one man in the longhouse mistreats his wife (E : rejected wife), first obviating A by revealing the men's simultaneous inability to care for their brother and their wives, and internally obviating B by replacing intersexual nurturance with its opposite, intersexual hostility. This causes the return of the women to their original breast-milk form (the man discovers that his wife's breasts have "swelled up" again), reversing the initial exteriorization of breast milk in substitution C and returning the men to their original wifeless state (F : breast milk for women). The motivating modality of BDF plots the transforming sequence "garden-food—breast milk-women-breast milk-(garden food)," transposing this theme of female reproductive sufficiency against the facilitating modality that details the limitations of male contingency (A : inability to share—C : inability to gestate—E : inability to treat wives properly).
The internal obviation of
"mother" finds daughters. This sequence is structurally comparable to the same internal obviation in "The Origin of Tree Grubs" where, consequent to an initial conflation of sex and hunting, the female "hunters" find "game" in the form of their husband's cross-cousin. In each myth, the feminization of the male protagonist is the residue of his inability to "be" male by hunting successfully. The corollary of this is that women's roles are also precipitated by the conventional performance of such male activities, for the female protagonists in each myth are correspondingly masculinized by the men's predicament. For the Foi, male and female can only be defined in relation to each other and not in isolation. The two myths can thus be said to represent an imaginative statement on the nature of intersexual "schismogenesis" (see Bateson 1958).
The Origin of Fish Poison
The next myth also partakes of the metaphorical equation between subsistence activities and procreation. Through the symbolic manipulation of female blood and its lethal properties, it also achieves a statement on the manner in which men can utilize social ties through blood for socially appropriate purposes and comments on the innate continuity of female progeniture I discussed in chapter 5.
A man once lived with his old aya [grandmother] near the bank of a deep river in a place in the west where it was forbidden for men to go. They dammed the river once and gathered fish. Another time, a man, disregarding the injunction, came to stay with them and saw their peculiar method of fishing: the man took hold of his grandmother and began beating her with a stick. The old woman did not cry out as he did this. As her grandson beat her, he splashed water over her with his other hand, so that the blood from the woman's wounds flowed into the river in great quantity. When she was apparently exsanguinated, her grandson threw the corpse aside in the nearby bush. The visitor watched in anguish and cried out, "Brother! Don't do that to your poor aya !" But the other man did not heed him. After disposing of the body, the man went to inspect the dam in the river. There he found fish of all varieties and in great quantities, which the two men began to remove. The man gave the visitor a large bilum of fish to take with him when he departed.
Another time, the man returned to the place in the west. He and the other man went to gather more fish and, to his amazement, he saw the man's old grandmother sitting in the sun apparently unharmed. Returning once more to his own house, the visitor told his relatives what he had seen. They all traveled with him to the west this time, and they watched as the man struck his grandmother in the same manner and used her blood to
kill fish. When they all returned yet again, they were astonished to see the old woman alive and unharmed. "Now I know how to do it!" the visitor thought to himself excitedly.
One time at his own house, the visitor invited his mother to his house and she sat on the bank of a nearby creek while he constructed a fish dam. When he was finished, he held her tightly and began to beat her with a stick. "Sonny, what are you doing?" she cried, and his relatives also expressed their consternation. When the old woman's body was covered with blood and viscera, he held the body by the legs and dipped it into the water, finally discarding the corpse when he was finished. He inspected the creek but found not one dead fish there. In great agitation, he went to find his mother's body but saw that she was truly dead. Crying, he took a stone war dub and returned to the other man's house in the west. He told the man what had happened to his mother and the man replied, "I did not tell you to do anything like that." As he spoke, he walked around in circles, and the visitor watched as he turned into somokaraya Derris root, while his grandmother turned into somobamuya Derris. Nowadays, when we prepare fish poison from these two plants, we say that it is the blood of this man's old aya that is spreading through the water. That is all.
Aya is the term a man uses reciprocally with his FM, MM, MBW, ZSW, and his wife's relatives of the same category. A man nowadays also uses the term reciprocally with his WM, the yumu avoidance rules having been slightly relaxed in recent years due to Mission influence (see chapter 5).
Informants from the Lake Kutubu villages, in contrast to the Upper Mubi villages where I did my work, spoke of a marriage preference that they called hua mogarira verogibu , "mother in back turn-give," or more colloquially, "marrying behind your mother's back." This specified marriage with a woman from one's mother's mother's clan (that is, MMBSD or MMBD if of appropriate age). The kinship terms used between men and women standing in this relationship would be ma~ ya and emo'o respectively in the Upper Mubi kinship usage, with which marriage is tolerated but not encouraged and at any rate is not preferred or prescribed. But taken as a starting point, this kinship terminological usage provides an entree to the differential relational protocol between a man and his mother's and mother's mother's clans. This myth seems to concern these differences.
An adult man and his aya , which I will take to mean mother's mother (though keeping in mind the range of other relatives in the aya category) live together in an area of the bush forbidden to humans. This and the man's wifeless state underline the liminal character of this domestic arrangement (A : man plus aya for man plus wife). A
visiting man discovers their peculiar methods of killing fish: the man strikes his aya , separating her blood and flesh, allowing the blood to flow into the dammed water (B : blood for aya ; blood for skin). The "poison" causes many fish to be killed (C : fish for blood; fish for aya; aya for fish poison)—in effect, the old woman has mediated the man's attainment of female fishing productivity through her own maternal substance, the blood which she shares with her daughter and with her brother. In other words, the "blood" of a woman in the aya category is her daughter, which is a man's wife, whether one applies the term after marriage as the Upper Mubi Foi do, or whether one seeks a "daughter" (or brother's daughter) of a woman whom one calls aya before one's marriage.
The visiting man returns to find that the old woman had not been killed after all (D : live aya for dead aya ) obviating A by positing the continuing claims through the aya category a man may make in terms of marriage, for fish poisoning represents the exemplary subsistence activity requiring intersexual cooperation for the Foi. The visitor becomes convinced of the efficacy of this procedure and attempts to substitute his own mother in the same manner, whom he ultimately kills (E : mother for aya ), revealing that blood cannot be claimed through the mother but only through the mother's mother for purposes of marriage (obviating B ). This impels the transformation of the man and his aya into the two Derris species, both of which are necessary in the poisoning of fish according to the Foi (F : fish poison for aya relationship, reversing C ). Henceforth, men will invoke the blood of the old woman when reciting a magic spell (different from the one given in "The Fish Spear") for preparing fish poison.
In another myth which also accounts for the origin of Derris poison, a man's mother's brother claims the former's wife to help him in his cannibalistic fishing, after which the two of them are also transformed into wane and ma'asome , the other names for the two Derris plants. Just as in the current myth, a man may make claims through the aya to obtain the reproductive capacity of a wife, so may a man make claims upon his ZSW, whom he helped raise the bridewealth for. The two mythical portrayals of the aya relationship are reciprocals of each other, as is the aya term itself.
The Two Matrilateral Brothers
The origin of Derris poison is the theme of at least four separate tuni , all of them thematically related. For the Foi, fish poison is in-
timately associated with the lethal properties of menstrual blood, and thus all four myths deal with various aspects of female reproductivity and uterine kinship.
In chapter 5 I noted that the marriage of men of the same clan to women of the same clan promotes congruence in bridewealth distribution networks. As with the Etoro (Kelly 1977:94 ff.), the solidarity of patrilaterally related men among the Foi is enhanced if they also share coordinate matrilateral relationships. In "The Fish Spear," an elder and younger brother become differentiated as a result of their marital destinies. In the following myth[1] the focus is inverted: two inherently differentiated brothers become additionally related through their ties to two pairs of female siblings.
There once lived two sisters. Toward the east was a forbidden area. "Men, don't go there!" people always said. But one day the elder sister went to this forbidden area. She came upon the house of a little old woman living by herself. She had a small fire with only two pieces of firewood in the house. The young woman chopped more wood for her and placed it on the fireplace rack. She had also brought her infant son with her. The old woman then said to her, "I will look after the child. I heard a tirifa [Cyrtostachys species] palm fall down outside—go out and bring back the spathe." The woman did so, and while she was cutting the spathe, she heard her child crying back at the house, but she said nothing. When she returned, the child and the old woman were gone. The woman had also gathered frogs, and there at the house she put them in bamboo tubes and prepared to cook them. Then, from behind the dividing wall of the house she heard, "Mother, give me some of that frog and sago." She looked and saw a young adolescent come from behind the wall. It was her child who had suddenly grown into a young man. She gave him some frog and sago which they ate and they returned to their house.
The younger sister also had an infant son. She said to her sister, "Tell me how to make my son grow quickly too," and kept pestering her to reveal the secret. Finally, the elder sister said, "All right, you must do thus and thus . . . ," and she carefully told her what to do. The younger sister went to the forbidden area with her son and gathered frogs. When the old woman told her to go fetch the tirifa palm spathe, she knew what would happen then. As she was removing the spathe, she heard her child screaming from the house. She cried out, "Old woman, what are you doing to my child?" She returned to the house and saw from behind the dividing there appeared a young nasal-voiced uga'ana . In his whiny voice he told his mother to give him frog and sago. This woman's child too had suddenly become a young adolescent, but in this case he had turned out wrong. She returned to the house and the four of them lived there.
The two young men would make traps in the bush and catch much game. The elder sister's son, the good man, would always bring home
whatever he caught and share it with all the others, but the young sister's son, the uga'ana , he never brought any of his catch home. The others all asked each other, "What is he doing in the bush?" One day, the good man pretended to be sick so that he could follow his brother. He said to him, "Brother, I can't go to the bush today. Would you look at my traps for me?" The other man agreed and left. The elder sister's son followed him, wondering what the other man was doing. He arrived at a place where the uga'ana had made a small fire. He saw that there was marsupial, cassowary, bush fowl, and all other kinds of meat in great quantities which the uga'ana had caught in his traps. He had also cooked sago and had carefully cut all the meat up into equal portions. He put each portion aside with some sago, one for each member of the household, saying out loud as he did so, "This is for my mother, this is for my aunt, this is for my brother, this is for me." Then he called out, "Mother, come and eat!" and he ate her share. He called out for the other two to come and eat and then ate their share also. When he finished eating, he noisily drank water and prepared to return to the house. The good man quickly ran back before him. "He is going to eat us!" he thought. When he arrived at the house he cried, "Mother, auntie, he is going to eat us!" But the uga'ana 's mother said, "Do not lie. He would not do any such thing. He is going to bring meat home which we will eat." The young man replied, "Then you may wait here for him," and he left with his mother. They came up to a large swiftly flowing river. Standing near the bank of it was a huge tabia tree. The two of them took their belongings and climbed up the tree. In the middle of the trunk, the young man carved out a room. They made sleeping places for themselves inside and gathered food. With tree sap, the young man fastened a door to this little tree house. Then, from the house where they had run away from, they saw yellow smoke drifting up. The woman thought, "This boy spoke truthfully—that uga'ana is cooking and eating his mother." The young man said, "I did not lie. I told her to run away but she did not believe me." And he and his mother remained hidden in the tree house.
Meanwhile, the uga'ana found the trail of his aunt and brother and followed it to the tabia tree. He began to chop the tree down but, as he did so, he was stung viciously by snakes, stinging nettles, and biting insects which the other man had placed at the base of the tree. Unable to continue, the uga'ana ran away. Each time he returned to resume chopping, these things attacked him. But slowly he did cut the tree down little by little.
The other young man saw that the uga'ana would soon succeed so, with an obsidian blade, he made large cuts above and below their room around the circumference of the tree. Finally, the tabia tree fell as a result of the uga'ana 's exhausting efforts. As it fell, the section with the tree house separated, fell into the middle of the river, and was swiftly carried downstream. The little house zigged and zagged as it rushed along with the current. The stupid uga'ana , however, thought they were still inside the tree and he searched for a long time. "Are they here, or what?" he thought.
The elder sister and her son continued to race downstream. When they felt themselves stuck on some projection, they would rock back and forth until they freed themselves and continued downstream. Finally, they became stuck again, but this time they felt that they were truly aground. They opened the door and looked out upon a beautiful, sandy place. There were ha~ ya edible-leaf trees, hagenamo trees, and large stands of bamboo. They left the tree house moored there and built a longhouse, and there they lived.
The woman had a very small parcel wrapped up in kunamiki'u , the fine cocoon fibers found in the bush. Unwrapping it, she found a tiny red pig inside. Soon it grew big. The young man brought home much meat and they lived a life of plenty.
Another time, the young man finished making a canoe. He then said to his mother, "Make a very long coil of hagenamo fiber rope." He tied one end of the rope to the hole in the side of the canoe. He placed new paddles in the bow and in the stern. Then he allowed the canoe to float downstream, paying out the rope as it did. Finally, the rope stopped moving and began to slacken, so he began to pull it back. He wound the rope up as he pulled it in and, when the coil was nearly the same size as when he started, he saw the canoe approach, paddled by two young women. When they arrived, he married both of them. He gave them each two bilums of meat to take to their relatives, after which they returned and lived at the young man's house.
They were living thus when one day the uga'ana appeared. From the other side of the river they heard him call out, "My brother, come and fetch me with a canoe." The good brother was frightened. "Has he still come to kill and eat us?" he thought. "I don't want you to come and get me, brother, but the wife who was sitting in the stern, I want her to come and get me. Not the one who was sitting in the bow, but the one in the stern," and he pointed to the woman. "Aiyo! So, you've come to say this?" the good brother thought. Then the wife who the uga'ana pointed out went and brought him to the other side. "So, this is where you came, eh? You certainly have a lot of food here!" the uga'ana said, and he ate the meat that the brother had put in the house. They slept that night, and the next day the uga'ana said, "Brother, I've come to say one little thing to you." Thinking of what the uga'ana was going to say, the brother just sat there silently. "Your first wife, the one who came in the bow of the canoe, I'm not speaking of, but the second wife, the one who came in the stern, I'm speaking of. I want to ask her to come with me." Then the other brother replied, "What is it you wish to do with her?" and the uga'ana replied, "No, I have a little work to do and I cannot do it alone so I've come to ask her to help me." The good brother said, "No, I refuse." But the uga'ana became very crestfallen and kept begging the brother to lend him his wife. Finally, in disgust, the good brother said, "You're a rubbish man," and to his second wife, "Come! Go with this wretch here." He left his brother and his first wife on the other side of the river and, before he went, the uga'ana said to them, "If at any time you hear thunder striking, and if it
comes over in this direction, then come and see me at my place. If you don't hear it, it means that we two will return here." Then the uga'ana and his brother's wife left.
They came up to a swamp where there was a pool of water. Perhaps at another time, the uga'ana had hid something there, because now he reached underneath and drew out a stone warclub decorated with snail shells. He took it out and gave it to the woman. He told her to stand there and said, "I'm going underneath the river. If something surfaces right here, then with this club kill it. If you fail to do so, I will kill you and eat you." The woman stood there and the uga'ana dove in. She waited there and presently she saw debris and scum floating down and saw a large woman with pendulous breasts hanging down her chest surface near her. She got out of the water at a small bend in the river and ran away. The woman allowed her to do so and presently the uga'ana came back. "Where did she go?" he asked. "I didn't see," she replied. "Don't tell me you didn't see her; she came here," the uga'ana insisted. "I didn't see her," she repeated. "If you do so again, I'll eat you instead," he replied and then left again. Again she waited. Again she saw churned-up water, debris, and surface scum, and she saw a middle-age man surface. He sped off after leaving the river. Again the uga'ana returned and inquired what happened. He promised again to kill and eat the woman if she allowed another to escape. Another woman with large breasts came, and this time when she surfaced the woman took the stone club and hit her in the middle of the head, and she dropped to the bottom dead. The uga'ana returned. "Where is she?" "No, I've killed her," she replied. "Thank you," he said and he shook her hand and was very pleased. "Very good," he said. Then he took the dead body and they carried it to his house toward the west. There he readied firewood and then disappeared. When he returned he carried with him a very large cassowary. This was for the woman to eat. But this uga'ana only ate people.
The next day, back at the good brother's house, they saw clouds gathering toward the direction of the uga'ana 's house, and thunder struck. "He said to come and see him if this happened," and so they went to the uga'ana 's house. There they saw that the woman had turned into a shoot of the wane Derris and that the uga'ana had turned into the shoot of the ma'asome Derris. The uga'ana had fetched the woman so that they could work together. That is why today if you only use one of the roots, it will not work. You must use both together for the poison to work. One is the uga'ana and the other is the woman. That is all.
Two sisters live alone as a female domestic unit. This myth introduces the recurrent character of the "little old lady" or man who dwells alone in a forbidden area of the bush and is a source of magical powers.[2] As is the case in other Foi tales, this character introduces the significant action of the story. In repayment for the (male) work of cutting firewood and fetching palm-spathe vessels (used in sago pro-
cessing), the old woman performs the exaggerated female task of rearing the young woman's child. The younger sister in this tale plays the role of the "foolish younger sibling" that serves as a contrast in so many Foi tales. She forces the elder sister to reveal the manner in which her son's maturity was accelerated but fails to observe the proper restraint during the process, which causes her son to mature as an "incorrectly formed" uga'ana . I therefore locate the significant substitution that opens this myth at this point (A : MZS for sisters; grown men for young boys; uterine-related men for linking female sibling pair).
The two young men add hunting to the domestic repertoire of the household. But while the elder brother shares his catch with the other members of the domestic unit, he discovers that his younger matrilateral brother does not. The latter instead eats the portions that should have been given to the others, clearly representing them as metonyms for the relatives themselves (B : animal synecdochical cannibalism for meat sharing). The elder brother attempts to warn his female relatives, but the younger brother's mother refuses to believe this, and only the elder brother and his mother escape alive. Although there is a substitution here—mother and son for MZ and MZS, or mother-son pair for sibling pair, that is, a generational transposition—I locate it as part of the following substitution: the mother and son find refuge in a tabia tree that they convert into a dwelling place. They manage to escape from the pursuing younger brother by detaching the section they inhabit and allowing it to fall free into the river when the younger brother chops the tree down. Foi men say that the tabia tree is the home of ganaro spirits and that "You should never cut it down for firewood after eating meat or else the spirits will make you ill with ganaro sickness." This is substitution C : water-borne for arboreal house. As a metaphor of fish poisoning itself—a treelike plant being chopped down and thrown into the water—it foreshadows figuratively the literal transformations that are to come. If we assimilate the Foi belief concerning the ganaro danger of the tabia tree, then the supernatural deadliness of the tree also metaphorizes the lethal properties of Derris root itself.
The mother and son float downstream until they are blocked by the land. They disembark at a place of great fertility and live a life of plenty. Using an empty canoe and a length of (female) bilum string, the man "catches" two women whom he marries. The resulting transfer between the two brothers which follows makes this substitution
clear, but here I will call substitution D "women for canoe," and in its obviation of A , "two sisters as wives for two sisters as linking matrilateral relatives," a conservation of uterine kinship. As the two women gave firewood and palm-spathe vessels for their sons in substitution A , so does the elder brother give meat and a canoe for his wives. Spathes allow women to make sago, and canoes allow them to fish, the two most important female subsistence tasks. D also inverts A by positing a transfer between males in place of one between females, and introduces the domestic complementarity of a husband and wife in place of the rather liminal mother-son complementarity that precedes it.
The younger uga'ana brother returns, however. He asks "not for the woman in the front (ga ) of the canoe, but for the one in the back (gamage )"; that is, not for the elder sister but for the younger. This mirrors the initial uterine split (see Fig. 15). The facilitating modality thus plots the transformation in matrilateral siblingship between the elder and younger brother. The two men not only are brothers through the female siblingship of their mothers, they become figuratively brothers—sawi or "sharers," the term used between wife's sister's husbands,—when, after considerable hesitation, the elder brother accedes to the younger brother's request. After obtaining his wife, the latter leaves him with the instructions concerning the thunder. The younger brother uses his wife in a cannibalistic parody of fish-driving (obviating B : cannibalistic fishing [intersexual] for cannibalistic hunting [male]). This is substitution E : wife for mother; humans for fish. And, as the brother and mother's sister were thrown into the water in substitution C , so is the brother's wife now. In another sense, substitution E also replaces the consanguineal cannibalism of B with a nonconsanguineal cannibalism. But the thunder sounds, and the elder brother discovers that his younger brother and younger brother's wife have been transformed into two pieces of Derris, wane and ma'asome (substitution F ), neither of which alone will kill fish, according to the Foi.
Triangle BDF , in contrast to the facilitating modality of ACE , deals with the transformation of male hunting into intersexual fishing, mediated by the brothers' sharing of wives (as opposed to their sharing of matrilateral aunts). While solitary male hunting requires no cooperation, the killing of fish by poison apparently does. And it requires a very specific type of intersexual cooperation, since the Derris root, though its sap is milky white in color, has red-veined leaves and is thus a female substance associated with menstrual blood. Henceforth,
Figure 15.
Transformation of Uterine Relations in the Myth "The Two Ma-trilateral Brothers"
the elder brother will "pound" ("kill") his younger brother and his wife and "throw them into the water" (thus inverting C where the opposite occurred: a mother and son were thrown into the water), turning the cannibalistic idiom inside-out by using a "human" substance to kill fish.
Sister-Exchange
"The Two Matrilateral Brothers" is an example of a Foi "woman's folktale"; it was related to me in several versions and always by a woman. The following story can be said to represent a male counterpart to the preceding myth: it contrasts a fanciful image of male nurturance and an exaggerated view of the irresponsibility of elder sisters.
There once lived two women. Each one had a younger brother who was a dibu u'ubi , a stunted, malnourished child. The two women treated their young brothers badly, making them sleep underneath the house. There the two women would throw them unwanted food scraps, charred pieces of fat and skin, burnt sago, and the leavings of pitpit. One of the women had lived there before with her brother; the other woman had joined her with her brother afterwards. This second woman would care for her brother slightly—she occasionally gave him proper food, which the two boys would share. But the woman who originally lived there, she did not even give a small amount of proper food to her brother. They all lived in this way.
One time an Usane was announced. The two women went hunting and brought back meat. Then, leaving the two boys underneath the house, they departed. Arriving at the longhouse of the Usane, they distributed their meat. The two boys meanwhile cried as they stayed by themselves. Before the two women had left, they had told their brothers, "Toward the west is a forbidden area. Do not go there," but they did not explain why. While the women were at the Usane, the two boys went to this forbidden area. In the middle of this place, they saw smoke rising from behind a tangle of tura'a vines. Looking, they saw a little old man in an old broken down house. He was burning his own excrement in place of firewood and, because he was unable to move, he had defecated all around his fireplace. The two boys cleaned up the house. "So this is what is here in the forbidden area," they exclaimed to each other. They fetched firewood and straightened the house. They built up a good fire and placed the old man near it so that he could warm himself. They rubbed the pus out of his eyes and carefully washed and rubbed his skin clean. They gathered food and fed him. Because the man had not eaten, the two boys had to force his jaw open in order to feed him. "Ai! Who is doing this?" the old man finally said. He looked and saw these two poor-looking boys. "What are you two doing?" he asked them and they replied, "No, we found you in this wretched state and have helped you." Then they helped him sit up and
straightened his limbs properly. The old man took a cassowary bone spike and split the trunk of a wild banana with it. He told the two boys to step through the resulting hole, and when they reached the other side, they had turned into handsome young men. The old man gave them each a fare sonono drum. "These are my favorite drums," he said as he took them down. Then he gave them pearl shells for decoration and tera'ayefi bark belts and gave them other items until their decoration was complete. They were indeed very handsome. He then gave them pearl shells with which to purchase pork at the Usane. "Eat pork with these," he said. "Don't come back here to repay me. Return to your house before your sisters do. They have left you two to go to the Usane."
The two young men took their drums and left. They distributed their shells at the Usane. It became time for the farega , the beating of the drums. One of the young men stood at the front of the line and the other young man stood in back of him. Thus they danced and beat the drums. The young girls were all watching the young men. The two women were there, and they were entranced by these two handsome young men in the front of the line. With the leaves of pitpit and used bamboo, they struck the ankles of the boys as a mark of romantic interest. The two young men remained silent however. When the dancing was over, they took their pork and ran home. On the verandah of the house, one of the young men used his drum as a headrest and slept, and the other young man did the same thing on the other verandah. Reclining there as the old man instructed, they heard the laughter of their sisters approaching. The two young men remained silent. The two women called out to taunt the two poor boys who they thought were there under the house. "No, two ugly, scabies- and ringworm-ridden boys like yourselves, we met at the Usane." They laughed scornfully at the two boys. They then searched for them but could not find them underneath the house. But there were the two handsome men that they had admired at the Usane, sleeping on the verandahs. The two women bowed their heads and ceased their laughter and went to the other side of the house. The two boys beat the two women with sharpened thorns. Then one boy married the other's sister and the other boy did the same. They did not pay each other bridewealth. They shared the women between them. That is all.
The Foi view the' distinction between immature and mature adults to be as profound as that between the living and the dead and between male and female. This myth uses this distinction to contrast the roles of younger and elder male siblings with respect to their sisters.
Two unrelated women live with their younger brothers whom they treat like pigs, keeping them underneath the house and feeding them on the leavings of human food (substitution A : malnourished, improperly cared for younger male siblings). The dependent status of the two boys diametrically reinforces the exaggeratedly unfeminine characteristics of the two women, who depart on a hunting expedition
when the Usane is announced (B : women as hunters; hunting for metaphorical "pig-raising"). The two boys, left to themselves, travel upstream to the forbidden area where they encounter a solitary little old man. They rebuild his house and take care of him, thus reversing the initial situation (C : care of older man for care of younger boys; younger boys for older females). In gratitude for their solicitous aid, the old man helps them to appropriate the characteristically rapid growth of the wild banana,[3] and the two boys become handsome, healthy young men (substitution D ). This obviates A by substituting the nurturing power of males for that of females. More precisely with respect to the resolution of the myth, the two boys have gained their maturity through a symmetrical exchange of "male nurturance," for Foi men view their house-building, firewood-breaking, and sickness-curing capacities as analogous and complementary to the more specific food-giving and child-raising functions of women. The two boys have replaced a helpless, dependent, and asymmetrical relationship with their sisters for a symmetrical relationship between men.
The two young men go to the Usane, after having been given new decorations "for their skin" as the Foi describe them. There they attract the amorous intentions of their two sisters (E : potential wives for sisters). This obviates B by revealing the fact that what the two women were really "hunting" was husbands, and what they were intending to exchange the meat for were male spouses. As the women threw pitpit leaves down to the two boys underneath the house, so they use these same leaves to signal their sexual desire, striking them below on their ankles even as the leaves must have fallen on the two boys' heads previously. The boys upon the completion of farega dancing, quickly return home. When the two women return later, it is revealed that the two young men they sought were each other's brothers, who punish them and then exchange them in marriage (F ). This inverts C :
In opposition to C , it might also be rendered "wives for drums or decorations," the metaphorical wealth of the skin that attracts women in the first place, and for which they are exchanged in bridewealth transactions. It also inverts the terms of the opening premise A (dependent women for dependent males).
As I have earlier discussed (chapter 5), Foi men determine the marriageability of a woman by the role they have taken in that particular
girl's nurturance and upbringing. A girl who has spent a considerable portion of her young life under the patronage of a man is considered unmarriageable by that man "since his clansmen and consanguines will share in her bridewealth" as the Foi explain. But by the same token, strong-willed men often claim unrelated female dependents as wives "because we work hard raising them." While partaking of the intimate identification and substitutability of women and wealth, this expression also maintains that nurturance must be repaid. Although the young men assume control at the end of the myth, it is nevertheless the sisters who are implicitly claiming them as husbands for the nurturance (however poor) they provided them: this is the meaning of the sisters' marking of the young men at the Usane. In back of this lies the theme of the myth, that the true reward for the boys' aid to the old man was the gift of attracting young women as wives—the supreme gift an older man can bestow upon a younger.
The Sister's Husband's Penis
The reproductive powers of women obviously include the children they bear for their husbands, which are also considered in literal terms as the children of her brothers. A man has the same rights in the bridewealth of his sister's daughters as he does in his own—and the same obligations toward his sister's sons. In common with other horticultural societies (see for example Fox 1972; Rappaport 1969), the Foi express ties of maternal kinship using idioms of planting, growth, and harvesting. In the following myth, the Lesser Yam (Dioscorea nummularia ) is used to metaphorize the relationship between a man and his sister's children.
Once there lived a brother and sister. The sister would go make sago but, when she came back to the house in the afternoon, she would put down her things and leave the house again. Telling her brother m cook his own sago, she would leave, and when she returned at night she would not bring anything with her. The brother thought, "What is my sister doing?" So another time when the sister went to make sago, the brother took her string skirt, bark cloak, her bilum, and her other clothes and dressed in them and followed. He arrived at a large clearing in the bush, just like a house site. He waited there, and presently he saw a penis approaching by itself. It headed straight for the man's groin. He took his stone axe and chopped it in half, and with a big whoosh ! it retreated. He went back to the house and put his own clothes on and waited for his sister. She returned, gave him fresh sago and said to him, "Brother, if you
don't want to cook this yourself, wait for me and I'll cook it when I return." Saying that she left hurriedly. He waited and waited but she did not return.
He slept and the next morning she was still gone. He went back to the place where he had severed the penis and saw that his sister had broken branches along the path she had taken. The man stayed several days and then decided to follow after her. He followed the small path until it came to a small hill and he saw the path leading up it. He went up and arrived at a longhouse. Arriving near the house he heard, "Eke! abia, abia ! [mother's brother]." And then, dancing as they came, were two small boys. Dancing, they took their mother's brother's hand. While they were dancing, a woman came out from the house and then went back inside. It was an ugly woman. The man merely looked at her. Then he went to the house with the two boys. Dancing, they led him to the house. Singing "Abia, abia, abia ," they brought him inside. They sat down in the house and the two boys said to him, "Abia , if the other men come and give you meat, do not eat it. We will bring you what you want." Then they brought him tobacco, smoking leaves, a pipe, sugarcane, sago, and other food. Having eaten, the man ignored what the other men gave him. Then the two boys said to him, "Abia , these men will give you yam runners for planting. They will wrap them up, but do not attempt to look at them. Just say 'thank you' when they give them. We too will say thank you. When they come to give you these, you must dance as you go to get them. When you take it, you will find it is not heavy, it will be light in weight. Having taken it, bring it to your house and put it outside along the side of the house and sleep that night. In the morning, break firewood and burn the bundle." The man agreed. They slept there that night.
The next day, the men told him they were going to give him the yam runners and they all left the house. The woman with the ugly face also came outside, and the two boys said, "That is our mother, your sister. Do you see her?" And the man said, "Yes, I have seen her." "That is your sister, our mother." And the man thought, "My sister has changed into an ugly woman? The two boys said, "Our father also is here, your sister's husband. It is he whom they have really wrapped up in that parcel of yam runners. It is intended that he will surprise you and kill and eat you later." The man heard this. Then he watched as the men came carrying something heavy on a carrying pole. It was so heavy that the pole was nearly breaking under the weight. They put it down and the man said, "Thank you! For giving these yam runners to take with me, thank you!" And the two boys said "Thank you" also. Then saying it again, he danced up and took the parcel. It was not as heavy as it appeared but was light in weight. Then carrying it and dancing, the two boys told him, "Abia , you must go now. If you notice something happening here, it is us fighting. At this time stay at your house." The man agreed. "Abia , when you get ready to burn this parcel, do not worry, the man inside cannot hear you." The man left, and taking the parcel he left it near the side of the house. He slept that night and the next morning took firewood. Piling it up along the side of the
house, he carefully fastened both doors. Then he took a bamboo flare and set fire to the entire house. As the flames engulfed the parcel, he heard the dying screams of the sister's husband trapped inside as he burned to death.
At this time, the man noticed the clouds become black with smoke over another area. Toward the house of his sister's sons, he saw flames lick the sky and smoke blot out the clouds. He sat down on a log and waited. The two boys, their faces covered with blood, came running. "Abia , we have fought, we are finished," they said. "No, let us all go now," the man said. But the two boys replied, "No, abia , you cannot come. They will kill us. You must stay here. If you see more smoke coming from below, you will know they are burning us." The two boys went back. He waited and once again saw black clouds of smoke. "They have burnt my sister's sons," he thought. Then thunder sounded. "They are dead," he thought. Thus it happened, so it is said. That is all.
The tale begins with a man who becomes curious as to his maiden sister's afternoon absences. Determined to discover the reason for this, he puts on her clothing and follows her track (substitution A : brother for sister). In a clearing in the bush, he encounters a perambulating penis that, apparently deceived by the brother's string skirt, attempts to copulate with him (B : penis for sister). The brother severs the organ, however, and it withdraws. The next day, observing that his sister has seemingly left permanently, the brother follows her to a longhouse where he meets his sister's children (C : sister's children for penis; sister's children for sister). The image depicted by obviation sequence ABC in every sense inverts the "real life" situation for the Foi: a man as a husband stays "planted" on his own ground while his penis is capable of long-distance copulation with a wife, who maintains her fratrilocal residence. Viewed from the other direction, it portrays a woman who does not leave her natal land and yet bears children who live with their father. The triangle ABC thus represents the obviation of the separation of cross-sex siblings pursuant to a woman's marriage.
As the brother approaches the longhouse, he is solicitously greeted by his sister's children who "dance" toward him in ceremonial fashion. These children effectively commute all interaction between the man and his affines to that between themselves and their mother's brother. The affines themselves present the man with a parcel of yam runners for planting (D : yam runners for sister; yam runners for penis).[4] The imagery here is vivid: in real life, a man can be said to plant a yam runner (his sisters) who will bear fruit hidden in another place (her own children), yet whose leaves "wander back" (like the sister's husband's penis, that is, his "wealth") and which can be "severed" and
replanted. In the myth, the affines in effect have substituted the reproductive power of the sister's husband (as yam runners) in exchange for that of the man's sister (obviating A ). But acting upon the sister's children's instructions, the man burns the parcel at which point it is revealed that it was the sister's husband whose penis had been severed (E : sister's husband for yam runner, obviating B ). It is a woman's brother who properly mediates the exercise of his sister's husband's procreative sexuality. Having destroyed it, the implication is that the man must accept the demise of his sister's children (F : separation of mother's brother and sister's children for separation of brother and sister, obviating A . In addition, this substitution includes "warfare for ceremonial presentation of sister's children," obviating C by encompassing the conceptual equation of affinity, ceremonialism, and warfare). The resolution of the tale is that a man must accept the loss of his sister's children to his sister's husband; in return he receives bride-wealth, the "planting material" that allows him to propagate his own line. It is consonant with the analysis I presented in chapter 5 that the wealth given by the wife-takers should be simultaneously viewed as male (a penis) and female (vegetatively propagated runners). In other words, wife-givers see the return payment as representing the male component of the sister's husband's line, while the wife-takers view the woman as an aspect of the wife-givers' female capacity. Hence in the myth they pay for her and her children with female (that is vegetable) procreative objects.
The Origin of Usane
The last myth of this chapter does not so much account for the origin of the Usane pork-exchange as much as it describes the origin of the maternal relationship between a man and his sister's sons that makes the Usane necessary. Like the preceding myth, it draws upon the idioms of planting and regeneration, though in a significantly different form.
There once lived a man and his sister. One time he left for the bush leaving her alone in the house. Sitting there, she heard a loud wind begin to blow, coming from the west. The ground shook and thunder sounded. She was frightened. "Is something coming to eat me perhaps?" she thought. She sealed all the holes in the house and threw the steps down and sealed the doors. Presently, a huge python approached, as big as a tree trunk. The python circled the house and put his head through the door of the woman's half. Without speaking, the python told her to stand up, with gestures only.
"If I refuse, he will eat me," she thought. She gathered all her belongings and fastened the door behind her. She climbed onto the python's back as it instructed her to do with gestures. Then the python left. As they traveled, she broke off twigs and branches to mark her trail. They traveled a while until they came up to a cave. There the python told her to alight. Motioning for her to stay, he went and fetched firewood. "How will we light it?" she wondered. She waited and the python returned with a cassowary, leaves for steam-cooking, and a bundle of firewood. He gestured for her to cook it. "But I don't know how I will light the fire," she said to him. The python then struck his tail against the stone and sparks flew, and with a whoosh of flames, the fire ignited. They cooked the cassowary and the woman ate, though she was still frightened. They slept, and the next morning she again climbed onto his back and they left. They traveled until they arrived at a longhouse. There was a fine garden with sugarcane, banana, cordyline, ginger, and crotons, all on a piece of fine red ground. Inside the house there was no sign of fires having been recently lit. Once again, he lit a fire by striking his tail against a stone. He left, and when he returned he had brought another cassowary that he gave to the woman and which she ate. The python slept in the men's house and the woman slept in the woman's half. There they lived. The woman alone ate garden food and made sago. Presently, she became pregnant. The python instructed her to make a bark box, like the one in which puppies are kept. She gave birth to four tiny snakes no bigger than one's little finger. She put them in the bark box. They grew up until they were the diameter of a wrist.
One time the woman went to the garden and the python went hunting. At this time, the brother returned to his house after being gone a long time. He came back and found the house covered with bush growth. "Ai! Someone has eaten my sister!" he thought. He slept, and in the morning he noticed the trail his sister had made. The python had flattened the bush when it left, leaving a broad path. The brother followed it. He came upon the cave where they had slept, spent the night there, and in the morning continued on. He came upon the house. "Do men live here?" he wondered. He looked in both the men's and woman's half. "My sister slept here," he thought, seeing the woman's fireplace. He saw the bark box. It was fastened shut. He lifted the lid, and four snakes reached up with their mouths open as if to drink breast milk. He dropped hot coals into the box, burning the snakes. There they shrunk with the heat and died. He closed it again and went to the men's half and lit a fire there.
Later on, his sister returned and saw smoke coming from the house. "Who is there," she wondered. She saw her brother, and they hugged each other in relief. Then she went to the box to give breast milk to her snake children. But when she opened it, the snakes did not appear. "Did you look in this perhaps?" she asked her brother. "Yes," he replied. "What did you do?" she asked. "No, there were snakes in it and I burnt them," he said. "Brother, you've done something very bad! We are finished now. He will come and eat us. He is not a man, he is something else. You will see when he arrives," she wailed. Then she said, "We must not sleep at the
same time tonight. We must watch each other when we sleep. If he brings meat, do not eat a lot." There they waited.
Presently, a cloudburst pattered the roof and lightning flashed. The ground shook and it thundered. "He has arrived," the sister said. The python appeared carrying a very large cassowary and much firewood on his back. But as he approached the house, he sensed the brother's presence and turned with an angry expression on his face to the woman. "What is in the house," he asked in gestures. "No, there is nothing," she replied. "No, I feel something is there," he repeated. "No, my brother has come," she finally said. And the python's expression became happy. He flicked his tongue in and out with pleasure. "Yes, my brother. We are of the same mother and father," she explained. "Your true kabusi [WB]," she added. He went inside the house and prepared the cassowary. He indicated that they should both eat it. But the brother ate only a small portion. The python curled himself around the other fireplace and watched his wife's brother with pleasure. Then, noticing that his wife had not given milk to the infants, he sat up and said in python's language, "Feferegeme !" which means, "give them breast milk!" But the woman replied that they had been burnt in the fire. The python's expression changed once again. His skin exuded much slime. The brother knew now that the python intended to eat him. The python stared at the man with an angry red eye. The brother built up his fire and tried to stay awake as the python watched him. When the fire died down and the brother began to doze off, the snake would move forward, and then retreat when the brother started. He stayed awake all night but, close to dawn as the birds started singing, the two of them finally fell asleep. The python saw this and he straightened his body and swallowed the man whole. The sister was sleeping soundly, and the python left. As he traveled, he squirmed his body between the spaces in between tree roots in an effort to squeeze the brother to death. He tried to do this without success and kept traveling. He came upon a large lake and went underneath, settling on the bottom. Meanwhile, the sister awoke and found her brother was gone. She set out to follow him, following the python's path, seeing the flattened ground that he had left. She took food with her, crying as she traveled. She came up to the lake where the python had submerged. There she built a small house and waited.
Meanwhile, the brother was inside the python's stomach. He thought he was still sleeping in the house. He opened his eyes and thought, "What kind of place am I sleeping in?" It was very dark, and he realized that the python had swallowed him. He straightened himself and found that he was unharmed. The python's stomach was transparent, and he saw the water surrounding him outside. "What shall I do?" he thought. He had a cane armband on and underneath it, he felt an obsidian flake knife. It was very sharp and with it he started cutting the python's stomach. Having released himself, he swam to the surface of the lake. He was nearly overcome by the time he reached the top. His body and skin was covered with the internal secretions of the python's stomach. He came upon the house where
his sister was waiting, and said to her, "Sister, he is dead. I killed him. He will rise to the surface shortly." Presently the water started churning up with debris and twigs. It bubbled and churned, and the python's body appeared. The brother took lengths of vine and tied them to the python's body, telling his sister to fetch leaves for cooking. Then he gathered other men of that place and with ha~ ya, sa~ ae, kotabera, and bare leaves, they dragged the python's body to the surface and cooked it with those leaves. Having cooked the python in a very long earth oven, they cut up the meat. His sister said to him, "Give me a portion of heart and portion of kidney." The brother gave her these portions of the python.
She took them to an old kara'o tree that had long been tapped, so that the hole inside was dry. She cleaned the interior hole of dirt and twigs, and built a small platform of crossed twigs, as men do when collecting kara'o oil. She laid the two portions of viscera onto this platform and covered them with leaves. She waited four days, and when she looked again, she saw the two portions of meat had disappeared and there were only two tiny maggots there. She waited another four days perhaps, and when she returned again to look she saw two tiny infant boys. They wriggled and turned, and their skin was red and wrinkled. Again she waited and when she returned, she saw that the two boys were sitting up and crawling on their knees. They frolicked together. Another time they were big enough to want to climb outside. At this time, the woman gathered good food, ripe bananas, and different kinds of good meat and started to give them food regularly. They grew to be identical twins.
Another time, after the boys had grown up more, it was heard that a longhouse far away was to have its Usane. The woman went to her brother and said, "Brother, make me two sets of armbands, two sets of legbands, two sets of earrings and arm-shells, two bark belts, two pearl shells, two bows and arrows." The man did not ask her why she wanted these things but made them without inquiring. The sister said to him also, "Make two short drums, two beautiful drums exactly alike." The man did so. Soon it was time for the Usane. "Brother, go hunting," the sister said to him. "Bring back two bilums of marsupials and bring pearl shells also," she said. Then she went to give the decorations to the two boys. They decorated and practiced their dancing outside the house. It was very good. The woman smiled in pleasure and admired their handsome bodies. Tomorrow was to be the Usane. She said to her brother, "If two boys come, give them the two bilums of meat." The next day, the man left for the Usane. Along the path he met the two boys and they said to him, "Abia [MB], give us the bilums of meat." The man gave them to the boys along with the two duibo drums. They arrived at the longhouse and discovered that they were still searching for the two men to lead the dance line. The two boys arrived, and they took the two leading positions. They danced the farega and then received their aname , their pork and shell for meat. The two boys received two bilums of pork. Then the men decorated again and prepared to dance the usanega . They took their duibo drums and danced. The two boys sung:
"abiamo sa'ae sangura bibimekeribiyo
abiamo ha ~ ya wa~ yo bibimekeribiyo
abiamo bibi game bibimekeribiyo
abiamo kui adora bibimekeribiyo
Our mother's brother has cooked our
father in sa'ae sangura leaves
Our mother's brother has cooked our
father in ha~ ya wa~ yo leaves
Our mother's brother has cooked our
father in bibi game leaves
Our mother's brother has cooked our
father with sago."
The men heard this and thought, "It is dawn now, the Usane is over." They took their pork bilums and departed for their own longhouses as it became light. This was the first Usane. That is all.
A brother and sister live together as a domestic unit. While the brother is away, a giant python comes to the house and takes the sister with him (substitution A : python for brother; husband for brother). They arrive at a human house where they assume marital coresidence, and the sister gives birth to python infants (B : python children for human children). The liminal status of both the nonhuman children and the woman's maternal capacity is underlined by the confinement of the infant pythons in a bark box, which we can interpret as an external womb. The brother follows the track made by the python and, upon arriving at his sister's home, the first thing he does is discover the small pythons and kill them with hot coals (C : sister's children as metaphorical meat; brother for sister's children [since the sister leaves the infant pythons in the house and returns to find the brother in their place]). In another sense, the python is a penis symbol, and the killing of the python children represents the brother's obviation of both his sister's and his sister's husband's sexuality and re-productivity. The next two relevant episodes are an analogical corollary of this. The python returns and, learning of his wife's brother's deed, swallows him and settles on the bottom of a lake. There, the brother is "reborn" by slicing his way through the python's stomach (D : brother kills python) obviating A , but, more importantly, completing the identification of a man with his sister's children, for as the python fathered the infant snakes, so does he now figuratively "give birth" to his wife's brother. By "gestating" a human rather than pythons, the brother's supplanting of the python's paternal relationship represents the beginning of his own appropriation of the python to gestate truly human sister's children. From the sister's husband's point of view, he needs a man's sister to generate his patriline; from his
wife's brother's point of view, he needs his sister's husband to generate his sister's children.
After killing the python and becoming reunited with his sister, the brother prepares to steam-cook the python (treating him as "bride-wealth meat" in exchange for the python's initial abduction of his sister). On the request of the sister, he gives her two portions of the python's internal organs (E : python's internal organs for python children, obviating B ). This metaphorizes very nicely the contrast between male and female lineality: the brother gives his sister the python's maternally derived bodily organs, thus preserving the continuity of the python's maternal line in the act of obviating the python's patrilineality, even as the brother mediates his own sister's progeniture.
The sister places the two pieces of meat into the interior of a kara'o tree, where they first transform into two maggots and then into human infants (F : human children for python's internal organs; sister's "human" children for meat, obviating C : "meat" for sister's python children). The nurturance of the two boys and their subsequent growth and development mark the closing of the obviation sequence
I have already described the analogy the Foi perceive between the interior cavity of the kara'o tree and a woman's uterus (see chapter 4). The initial appearance of the two sister's sons as maggots on the python viscera preserves their identity as their father's offspring—"lit-tie snakes"—thus encompassing the obviation of C by
In chapter 7 I described the obviation of the initial interdict between wife-givers and wife-takers that occurs when children are born. The two preceding myths focused on this aspect of the sequence, contrast-
ing the different metaphors of matrifilial and patrifilial continuity. "The Origin of Usane" from one point of view represents the structural inverse of "The Sister's Husband's Penis." in that myth, the woman's brother obviates the external procreative sexuality (that is, the penis, or "wealth") of his sister's husband at the expense of losing his sister's children. In "The Origin of Usane," on the other hand, the woman's brother appropriates the sister's husband's internal organs, thus obviating the sister's husband's patrilineal identification with his own children.
While these two myths thus comment on substitutions D and E of the obviation sequence I diagrammed in figure 7 (chapter 7), the myths of the next chapter concern substitution B and C of that sequence, which focus on the initial differentiation of wife-takers and wife-givers themselves. These myths depict a number of important political and cosmological dimensions of affinity, as well as the analogy between various affinal dyadic relationships.
Chapter X
The Anxiety of Affines
In chapters 8 and 9, the problematic mediation between the sexes revolved around procreative organs themselves, or those partible extensions of them—male weapons, female milk, and so forth. In this chapter, the mediation between affines is directly effected by humans who in the following set of myths come to literally stand for the wealth items that usually substitute for them in Foi social process.
The first myth thus depicts the political dimensions of affinity in terms of ceremonial exchange. The second two myths center around the pervasive metaphorical equation between humans and game animals (since they are exchanged against each other in ceremonial prestations). The last three myths juxtapose affinal relationships with agnatic and maternal ones and create certain analogies between them, thus elucidating the summating obviation of Foi secular life I outlined in figure 7.
The Origin of the Karuato Feast
The first myth initially contrasts Foi images of domestic and ceremonial life and thus draws a parallel between intersexual and affinal mediation. However, this theme becomes backgrounded as the myth unfolds the relationship between male affines. The resolution of the tale is extremely important from an analytical point of view for it may well be said to represent a charter for the affinal exchange of pork.
Once there was a large longhouse where only men lived. Half of the men would hunt while the others made sago. In this longhouse there were four brothers. The youngest was a teenage boy. One day he went hunting and came upon a fallen tegare tree. There growing on it was the shoot of a plant he could not identify. He carefully made a fence around it and then went to set his traps. Another time he went back to the fallen log and saw that the unknown plant was the shoot of the ko'oso pandanus. He continued to inspect the pandanus periodically until it bore a red fruit. He continued to hunt and share the catch with his brothers.
Finally he inspected the pandanus one day and saw that the fruit was ripe. He removed it and left it there while he went to inspect his traps as usual. He found a cassowary in one snare, which he removed and placed near the fruit. He then went to look at his other traps. Returning, he found that the pandanus fruit and the cassowary were gone. Puzzled, he searched around and saw footprints leading off to his bush house. Arriving at the house he saw the cassowary hanging from the roof beam, and there on the verandah was a person. It looked somewhat like a man but had large breasts and different clothing. The young man realized that the pandanus had turned into a young maiden. He cooked the cassowary and shared the meat with her. He then ordered her to remain at the house while he went back to the longhouse and shared meat with his brothers. In the late afternoon he returned to his bush house. He found that the woman was making arera baskets, something which the men had no knowledge of, not having seen women or women's crafts before. He once again returned to the long-house and asked his brothers to build him a little house for himself alone. They replied sarcastically, "We have our own longhouse; why do you desire a small house? Are you suffering from menstrual contamination that you wish us to build you a separate house?" But they agreed. They noticed the arera he was carrying and became very curious as to what it was. He promised to return to the longhouse in two days and show them how he had found it. The young man returned to his bush house and found that his wife had made an arera for each man of the longhouse. The young man carried them all on a long pole back to the longhouse where the men were sitting on the verandah waiting for him. They looked with amazement at the woman and told her that the new house they had built was for her. The young man then gave each man an arera and also a string bag that the woman had also made. They thanked him gratefully. The woman then began to cook sago, and her husband and his brothers helped her. She left enough for all the men to eat along with all the game they had caught, and then she left with her husband. They lived at the man's bush house and presently she became pregnant. They went upstream to where the man had built a confinement hut for her, and there she gave birth to a male child. She then returned to her woman's house in the village when her confinement was over.
The two lived in the longhouse with the other men until the child was old enough to walk under his own power. Then, leaving much sago and meat for his brothers to eat, he and his wife left again for the bush house. One day it began to rain and the ground shook. The woman became
frightened. She looked at her husband and meeting his eyes, averted her face in shame. The man watched as a large uga'ana arrived. He was dressed in garments of gerewa cane only, and was very fat. He said to the young man, "Kauwa [DH], so you two live here now, eh? Aiyo? He then explained that his agnates' children wanted to have an Usane and he had come to fetch his daughter so that she could come and eat pork. The woman cried upon hearing this, but her husband told her to go with her father. She readied her belongings and took her child and her large piebald pig along with her. The man was very despondent after she left. Finally, he decorated himself for battle and readied his weapons. He followed the path his wife and wife's father had taken, sleeping along the way where they had slept. He found meat and sago that his wife had left for him. On the sixth day he came upon a very large muddy path with many footprints. It led up to a very large longhouse. Inside, the men were dancing the irigasoro , the nighttime dancing of the Usane. Outside, there were two very straight lines of women's houses, and tied to the central post of the verandah of each house was a pig. At the last easternmost house he saw his own piebald pig tied up. He walked underneath the house and climbed into it through one of the empty fireplaces.
Later that night, his wife and child returned. As his wife stood on the steps holding the child on her shoulders, the man took the shaft of an arrow and touched his child lightly on the head. The child cried out, "Mother! Mother! My father is there by the empty fireplace!" But the woman replied, "No, we have abandoned your father coming here," and she cried. She then opened the door and her husband pulled them both inside. She cried out, "My darling husband, why have you come? Look at us well, for tomorrow we shall be killed." Then the young man put ashes in his mouth and said, "I will sleep here. Do not give me good food. We two are of one spirit; if you are to die then I too will die."
There they slept, and in the morning he looked out and saw the uga'ana's son, who was a very fat man like his father. He held a boge warclub as he came down the steps of the longhouse. The young man's wife called out to him, "Brother, will you now do as you have done before? Will you kill us all now?" And the man replied, "Yes, just that." Then he called out, "All you women who have carried your children here, carry them now! All your pigs, take their ropes and hold them!" Each woman stood in front of her woman's house holding her child and her pig. Then the uga'ana's son went down the line, killing each woman, child, and pig as be went along. He killed all of them on one side of the longhouse and went over to the other side. "What we have always done, we are doing now," he announced. He finally killed all the women and pigs and children until only the young man's wife and child were left. As he lifted his club ready to strike them down, the young man leaped from inside the house. Outside of the house, the two men fought with dubs. They fought for a long time and, finally, the young man killed his wife's brother.
Having done so, all the men who were watching from the longhouse, all the men who had been dancing the night before, came down and examined the body. They said to the young man, "It is our wives who he
has killed. We were frightened of him, but you alone came and killed him." The young man took as a second wife the only other remaining maiden. The ug'ana came and gathered leaves and firewood for an earth oven. The young man took these things and cooked his dead piebald pig, which his wife's brother had killed before they fought. The uga'ana then cooked the body of his dead son. The other men also cooked their dead pigs and also their wives and children. Then they all ate. The ug'ana ate his son and the other men ate their wives and children and pigs. When they were finished they all returned home. The uga'ana said, "This ceremony in which we killed our wives and children and pigs, it is over now. Its name was Karuato ."
The story begins with a community of men without women, who are thus forced to substitute a unisexual complementarity for the conventional male-female one (substitution A ). The protagonist, identified as the youngest of the four siblings, comes upon an unidentified plant shoot while hunting and "domesticates" it by "making a fence around it" (B : horticulture for hunting). Returning some time later, the young man discovers that the shoot has grown into the edible red pandanus and has borne fruit. Removing it, he returns to find that it has transformed into a young maiden who goes to his hunting lodge and shares meat with him there (C : woman for pandanus, obviating A by replacing the sharing of meat among males with that between a man and a woman). The identification of red pandanus with women is thorough and pervasive for Foi men, who in traditional times forbade women from speaking or leaving their houses while men were eating it.[1] Because the control of women is the preeminent concern of Foi men, it is not surprising that the planting, care, harvesting, and preparation of red pandanus fruit is entirely a male concern.
The implications of the obviational sequence ABC are also perceptively noted by the male narrator of this myth: if men previously shared amongst themselves the fruits of their labor, so must the novel domestic (but not sexual) capacities of this sole woman be similarly shared amongst them. The young man and his wife live as a married couple, and the woman bears him a child.
It is the birth of the child that impels the subsequent episodes, for it is shortly after the child has grown up to the point where it can move under its own power that the woman's father appears and takes his daughter away with him to participate in the Usane (D : wife's father for wife), returning the young man and the entire longhouse to their previous wifeless state. The implication is that men are wifeless because women's male relatives do not wish to release them in mar-
riage (hence obviating A ). We must also recall that the birth of a woman's first child is the occasion for her husband to pay the final installment of bridewealth, the buruga nami or live-pig portion. The woman's father, however, takes his daughter and her child instead: in other words, if the bridewealth is not forthcoming, the woman must return to her agnatic group.
Distraught, the young man decorates himself and readies his weapons, setting out in pursuit of his wife. As in the myth "Fonomo and Kunuware," this episode alludes to a conceptual association of ceremonial exchange, warfare, and affinity.[2] The first half of "The Origin of the Karuato Feast" also creates an analogy between the hunting expedition during which the young man first acquires his wife and the ceremonial terms under which he must "refasten" her. Finally, the myth makes an important statement about how women are "found" (as game or as wild cultivars) versus how they are "given" (by affines).[3] Because women, in reality, must be given by other men, marriage always represents the obviation of male hunting. And since the normal method of acquiring a wife is inverted in the myth, so is the normative direction of sibling cooperation similarly inverted: it is the younger brother who marries first and provides his elder brothers with the services of a sister-in-law.[4]
The young man arrives at a huge longhouse and discovers many women with their pigs and children formally lined up in front of their women's houses. Finally meeting his wife, he further learns that they are all about to be slain by their brother (E : "human" pig-kill; sisters and sisters' children as pigs). This substitution reveals (and hence obviates) the implications of B : if women can be obtained by domesticating pandanus, with which they are associated in secular life, they can also be treated directly as meat objects with which they are also associated metonymically in ceremonial life. But apart from this, the episode now aligns husbands with those attributes of women associated with cultivation (as women are figuratively planted in marriage in nonagnatic groups) and aligns their male agnates with those female attributes associated with the complementary activity of pig-raising: it is women who "die," as they are abandoned in marriage, so that pigs may be killed; it is husbands who "raise" wives and their children so that ceremonial pig-kills may come to fruition.
The final substitution F occurs when the young man kills his wife's brother, thus ending the Karuato pig-kill and implicitly substituting the (normal) killing of pigs in future ceremonial affinal exchanges. This
obviates C : it is the exchange of pork (that is, bridewealth) that releases women in marriage; they cannot be claimed as unowned wild plants or game. As men enjoy the fruits of women's domestic labor, so are they obliged to bring shells and enjoy the fruits of their affines' ceremonial work. In C , had the man "eaten" the pandanus, men would still be wifeless; in F , had affinal hostility and the Karuato pig-kill not been ended, men would be unable to "eat" their wives in marriage. Henceforth, men will compete by consuming pigs and shells, rather than the women they really represent. Through the lethal hostility between a man and his wife's brother, the initial sharing and cooperation of men is restored.
"The Origin of Karuato " also represents the thematic inverse of the myth "The Origin of Usane" discussed in chapter 9. The latter tale accounts for a system of maternal prestations designed to forestall the hostility of maternal relatives (and the illness consequent to this hostility). Because a man must relinquish control of his sister and sister's children (in real life), he must be given ceremonial payments of shell wealth and meat in compensation. In "The Origin of Karuato ," on the other hand, a man must conversely supplant his wife's brother in order to implement this substitution of meat and shells for his wife and children. "The Origin of Usane" maintains the preeminent claim of a woman's brother on her reproductivity; "The Origin of Karuato ," by focusing instead on the preeminence of a woman's husband, accounts for a truly moral society: the innate ties of siblingship between a man and his sister are replaced by the artiface of patrilineality.
The Wild Pig Brother-in-Law
In chapter 5 I noted that Foi men depend on the bridewealth they receive for their sisters in order to secure their own brides. The control of a woman's destiny is thus a pressing concern of her elder brothers.
In traditional times, as Foi men relate, a woman had to obey absolutely the wishes of her brothers and father in the choice of her spouse. If she refused, she was likely to be bound by her wrists and ankles, suspended from a pole "like a pig," and carried forcefully to her husband's home. "The Origin of Karuato " has already illustrated the pervasive identification of women and pigs in Foi male thought. Women care for pigs as they do their own children and keep them in their houses. Women's productivity is paid for with pigs for it is upon
the birth of her first child that her husband gives the live-pig portion of the bridewealth.
One of the most common points of contact between those domains apportioned between village and bush is the impregnation of domestic sows by feral boars. Domestic pigs are given cooked sago and greens at night to keep them close to the house, but they often stay missing for long periods. Pigs are unlike humans in that they present only the female half of the reproductive cycle: the male half takes place in the deep bush. Pigs, therefore, have no visible "affinity." The following myth makes an imaginative statement on the implications of this for human affinity by placing humans in the roles otherwise taken by pigs.
There once lived a young man and his maiden sister. The man would go hunting with his three dogs while his sister made sago. The brother cut down one palm, then another, then another for his sister to process but, though she worked very quickly, she would always return late at night. One day when he knew she was going to her sago stand he decided to follow her. From hiding he watched her. She was sitting astride the sago palm but was only pretending to scrape the pith. A rustling sounded in the bush and she looked up. Pretending to scrape, she looked around her. From the east there came a crashing and a loud rustling of branches through the bush, and as the brother watched a large wild pig appeared. The pig's body and skin were that of a pig, but his penis and testicles were those of a man. These organs were very large, and the testicles completely blocked the pig's legs. The pig's mouth was lathered from exertion and he was out of breath, having run very hard. The young man watched then as the pig copulated with his sister. Seeing this, the brother ran back to the house. There he cooked some marsupial and cassowary meat that he had caught. His sister did not return until late at night. She cooked sago and put it next to the cooked meat, but she herself ate very little. She was thinking of her pig lover. The next day the brother followed the sister again and from hiding watched once more as the wild pig came and copulated with his sister. This happened two more times. The third time, his sister did not return to the house at all. He slept that night, and in the morning he went to her sago stand to look for her. She had left her sago-making tools and baskets but she herself was not there. "Lost" the brother thought. He searched around the stand, finally finding a place leading off where tree branches had been broken, as if to mark a trail. They led off to the east. "That pig has taken [i.e., married] my sister and left," he concluded.
He returned to the house and decorated. His bark belt, white shell armbands, yataba armbands, chest cross-bands, shell headband, cassowary feather headdress, bird-of-paradise feathers, hornbill feathers, black fana paint, these things he put on and followed the trail his sister had made. He slept one night on the track and continued on the next morning. Finally, he arrived at a house, not a Foi house that is built off the ground on posts, but a Highlanders' style house, built on the ground. It was located on a
piece of fine red ground. Around the house was a garden and many kinds of flowers, crotons, and cordyline shrubs. He noted this and stealthily approached the house. He saw his sister and a small male child that was hers. The child saw the man and cried out to his mother, "Mother! my mother's brother has come!" But she replied, "No, my son. I have left your mother's brother, coming here," and she cried as she said that. The brother remained hidden but showed himself again to the child. The child saw him again and once more cried out to his mother. But she repeated the same thing and cried once more. The third time, the brother revealed himself and the child said, "Mother, my mother's brother is over there," and so she went to where the child pointed and saw her decorated brother. They both cried with joy upon seeing each other again and embraced. The brother saw that his sister's child was very light-skinned and his hair was very fair. The sister said to her child, "My son, go tell your father that my brother is here." The man arrived running, and the brother saw that he was covered with hair all over his body, face, and head. He was also light-skinned and was very big. It was really the wild pig. The boy was frightened of him. The large man approached the brother and said, "Shake hands, base [WB]." The light-skinned man then took the brother to his house and spread a mat and told him to sit down. He brought choice vegetable food and told the brother to eat. He then told his wife to cook marsupial meat, sago, and greens. When they were finished eating, the light-skinned man brought two string bags of pearl shells and three string bags of cowrie ropes. Having stolen the woman, he now wanted to give pay to his brother. He also gave two large live pigs and three string bags of marsupial meat. They all slept, and the next day the brother wished to return to his house. While he was readying his belongings, the light-skinned man said to him, "My sister is here—you marry her." The young man agreed. Then, when they were both ready, the light-skinned man told them. "Close your eyes." They did so, and then the light-skinned man clapped his hands and uttered a spell. They heard him say, "Open your eyes," and when they did so, they found themselves in the bush nearby the house of the young man, where his traps were. They were overjoyed and cried out, "Thank you!" There he lived with his new wife.
After a while, she bore him a male child. At this time the young man thought about giving pay to his sister's husband, so he gathered bridewealth items. Having readied these things, he and his wife dosed their eyes again. The light-skinned man knew they wanted to come so again he said the spell and clapped his hands and, when he said "Open your eyes," the young man and his wife found themselves near the house of the light-skinned man. "Thank you," they said once more. "Without you, we would have had a hard difficult journey carrying all these things here. I have brought pay for your sister." The light-skinned man took them. They all slept, and the next day the light-skinned man told them, "You wish to return home so dose your eyes once more." Again they did so, but this time the young man only pretended to dose his eyes and ears because he wanted to learn the spell. The spell was spoken and the light-skinned man clapped his hands
and, when the two opened their eyes, they were at the young man's place again. But they never returned to the light-skinned man's house and he himself never came to visit them. The young man's wife bore another male child and a female child. The young man's sister back in the east bore four children altogether. None of them went back to visit each other. Having had children, each man built a large house and lived there with their wives separately. That is all.
A brother and sister live together as a domestic unit, but although the sister processes great quantities of sago, she returns late at night (substitution A : nocturnal for daylight regimen; "missing" sister). Seeking to discover the cause of this, the brother secretly follows her and, from a hiding place, watches as a wild male pig with exaggerated human genitals arrives and copulates with her. This happens repeatedly until one day the sister fails to return, whereupon the brother concludes that the wild pig has "married" her and taken her away into the bush (B : wild pig revealed as sister's husband). The brother then decorates himself (creating a pun, for the Foi, as already noted, refer euphemistically to the penis as a man's "decoration," and the narrator of this story so describes the wild pig's penis). The brother follows his sister's trail and, arriving at a fine house and garden, he finds not only his sister and her son but also his sister's husband in his human form (C : sister's husband for sister; human for wild pigs; reunification of cross-sex sibling pair). The myth presents an image of a "village" in the bush, for although the sister has run away into the deep forest, the brother finds her in a "human" habitation, that is, the place where wild pigs are themselves "domestic," since they are not domestic in human villages. The sister's husband greets the young man cordially and gives him the overdue bridewealth and his own sister as a wife (D : wife for sister; bridewealth for sister), obviating A first by reversing the terms of the opening premise—now a human man marries a wild-pig woman—and second, by creating a sister-ex-change. In effect, the two men exchange a "real" woman for a "false" pig. Both women, therefore, are like pigs: one is exchanged for a man's sister and the other is impregnated and carried off to the bush by a feral boar. Since, however, in real life it is domesticated pigs that are given in bridewealth, the young man's wife is "more human" (that is, more domesticated) than his own sister.
It is within the wild-pig man's power to transport instantaneously his sister and brother-in-law to the latter's house and back again, so that although they live far apart, the young man can come and give
pay for the wild-pig man's sister. But as he earlier discovered his sister's secret, so now by subterfuge does he discover his sister's husband's secret spell (E : revealed spell, obviating B ). The consequence of this is that he is forever separated from his sister and her children and his brother-in-law (F : "missing" sister, dosing A and reversing C ). The implication is that "wild" and "domesticated" pigs must inhabit separate domains. Recall that the sister says to her child, "I left your mother's brother, coming here." It is she who makes the initial and, to her mind, the irrevocable separation in substitution C . Had the brother not followed her, he would not have learned of the wild pig's human nature (despite what he may have inferred from his genitals) and would not have been offered the wild pig's sister as a wife. Domestic pigs are not followed into the bush when they mate, and perhaps neither should one's sister be followed. In the last analysis, it is the "wild" impulses of the brother, as opposed to the cultured generosity of his brother-in-law, which unstabilizes the situation.
In "The Wild Pig Brother-in-Law" the coresidential solidarity of male affines is obviated by the direct exchange of sisters in marriage. The fact that this myth, and the related myth of the last chapter, end with sister-exchange as their resolution presents a provocative problem for interpreting the Foi normative system. In chapter 5 I noted that such exchange is not a normal strategy of Foi marriage, though it is neither approved nor disapproved of by Foi men. What, then, is the relationship between the mythical images of sister-exchange and the Foi's disdain for it in real life? This is perhaps not a proper way to phrase the question, for there is no reason for the analyst to expect myth to reflect "real life" in such an overt manner. Indeed, much of myth's innovative moral force would be lost if it did not present these very "unreal" caricatures of real-life protocol, statuses, and relationships.
Sister-exchange for the Foi represents the overt equation of wife and sister, an equation that is only implicitly present in normal life but is nevertheless important for understanding the manner in which the Foi view the analogies between their relational statuses. Second, it collapses the roles of wife-giver and wife-taker into the same person and thus in effect represents the canceling or negation of affinity, for what is Foi affinity without its asymmetrical dimension? If men directly exchanged sisters, it is conceivable that they could agree not to pay bridewealth to each other; in such a case not only would affinity be compromised but the system of bridewealth contributions and debts
that defines networks of male kin would likewise be obviated. That is why sister-exchange is a destabilizing act in "The Wild Pig Brother-in-Law." It seems that we are confronted with one of those puzzles akin to the "Nuer Paradox" (Evans-Pritchard 1951:28): it is only because the relationship between Foi brothers-in-law is so asymmetrical that they can become closely cooperating allies in real life. What is depicted in this myth is the hypothetical inversion (and obviation) of this paradox.
The Marsupial's Son's Bridewealth
The preceding myth demonstrated that if women can be conceptually equated with the wealth and meat items against which they are exchanged, so can the men who give these items: rather than being given for the woman, the pig himself marries her. In other words, instead of a human giving a pig for a wife, a pig gives a human (sister) for a wife. It is therefore this initial transposition that impels the exchange of sisters. The next story is based on a similar identification between men and the marsupials they must give in bridewealth payments.
There lived a man and his wife and their young unmarried daughter. One time the young woman left her parents at home and went diving for fish. She removed her string skirt and left it on the bank of the river and dove in the water. Having eventually caught many fish, she was ready to return to the house, but when she went to put her skirt back on, she saw that it was gone. She searched and searched for it but could not find it. She stood there silently when suddenly she heard from up above a rustling noise in the trees. She looked up and saw a cuscus or spotted phalanger (figibu or bohabo ) up in the tree holding her skirt. "Ai! Figibu-o , give me my skirt!" she cried. But the cuscus said nothing. The woman climbed the tree to get her skirt back, but the cuscus jumped to another tree. The woman climbed down and ran after it. She cried as she chased it, leaving behind the fish she had caught. The cuscus ran up a mountain and the woman followed. Downstream they kept going, the woman chasing after her skirt. "Where is he going?" she wondered. Finally she arrived at a house. She silently approached and saw an old man sitting there. He said to her, "No, here is your skirt, come and take it," and he repeated himself and pointed to the skirt. Silently, she put it on. The old man spoke again saying, "I brought you here to marry my son. Wait for him in the house." Presently, the son arrived, a young handsome man, and he came into the men's half of the house. She smiled in pleasure. The old man said, "I took your skirt here to lure you to this place because I wanted to find a wife for my son." She
stayed there and cooked sago for them. The old man gave her pearl shells, cowrie shells, marsupial, and cassowary meat. "Take these and give them to your parents," the old man instructed her, and she left with them.
But when she returned she said to her father-in-law, "My father and mother said that the meat is not enough. Also, the shells are not enough. They said you should give more." The old man gave her more wealth and meat. Again the woman returned with the same message. "My parents say it is not enough," she reported. The old man thought to himself, "What else can I give them?" They lived there, and the woman presently became pregnant. The old man worried again. "What more shall I give them now?" Finally, he said to his son after they had discussed it a long time, "Son, I am tired of talking about it. But where the path leads down to the latrine I want you to set a snare trap." The son refused at first, but the father insisted and he finally complied. In the morning he awoke and saw that his father was gone. He searched and saw that a figibu was caught in the snare he had set yesterday. He cried, knowing it was his father. But he did not cry out loud, because he did not want his wife to know what he was thinking. He removed the figibu and said to his wife, "Your father and mother are unsatisfied. But take this figibu and give it to them." Smiling, she took the figibu and left.
While she was gone, the man made a small hole in the dividing wall of their house. There he sat and waited. He heard his wife returning, laughing as she did. She said, "Husband, my father and mother said it was sufficient. 'Do not give more,' they said." He replied, "Very good," and the woman went inside. In the afternoon, the woman was sitting in her room preparing bamboos of sago for cooking. The man held up a torch to the hole and made it larger. He leveled his bow and drew it and fired an arrow at the woman in her pregnant abdomen. Having shot her, he proceeded to place firebrands around the house, and soon it had burned to the ground. Having done this he thought, "Her line will come and kill me." So he turned into a figibu and left. That is all.
The tale begins with an unmarried young woman diving for fish, an activity that the Foi specifically associate with young girls. A figibu or phalanger, however, steals her string skirt and lures her into chasing after him (A : marsupial for fish; arboreal chase for underwater chase). The woman finally arrives at a house where she discovers that the marsupial is really an old man and that he lured her there as a wife for his son (B : human for marsupial; son for father). The father then accumulates bridewealth items that he sends back with the woman (C : wealth for woman, obviating A : male wealth for string skirt, or male decorations for female). But the bridewealth is insufficient, as it invariably is in real life for the Foi. This situation is only exacerbated by the woman's pregnancy. Again, in real life, the pregnancy and subsequent childbirth of a woman raise fresh demands for pay on the part of her consanguines. Since the woman is about to give birth, it is a
meat item which must be given. The father, unable to give more wealth, plots his own death by instructing his son to set a snare trap (D : "human" marsupial trap for "marsupial" human trap [obviating A ]). The son does so, and the father is found dead in the trap the next day in his marsupial form (E : marsupial for old man, obviating B ). As a marsupial, he is given by the son as the final installment of the bridewealth: men must sacrifice themselves in order to arrange their son's marriages, a sentiment that the Foi express in any number of literal and figurative ways in real life. But the marsupial's son plots the death of his pregnant wife, in effect, claiming the unborn child in return for his sacrificed father (F : wife for "game") obviating C : if game can be exchanged for a woman in bridewealth transactions, then a human can take the place of game. In other words, substitution F renders as a literal identification the metaphorical equation of women and game animals. This substitution also obviates A : it was the woman who was initially trapped like a marsupial, since the Foi explicitly recognize the similarity between the tail of a marsupial and the long "tail" of the back of a woman's string skirt. Finally, having trapped the woman, the son completes his own identification with his father and must assume the marsupial form himself, reversing the initial predicate of the story: the woman's relatives will hunt a marsupial man-as-husband, rather than men hunting women-marsupials.
The Sky Village
The next myth begins with the identification of women and rodents, thus representing the third possibility in the equation of affines and game animals: husband, male affine, and now wife.
In chapters 3 and 5 I described the pervasive analogy the Foi make both linguistically and ritually between the oppositions of male and female of the living and dead. As did the myth "Return from the Dead" (chapter 8), the following story capitalizes upon this analogy to express tenuousness of the marital bond between husband and wife. This tenuousness in one respect is a function of a man's divided loyalties between his agnates and his affines, and it is this theme that is the focus of the key obviation in "The Sky Village."
There once lived three brothers. The third brother never found any game. He would set his deadfall traps using the fruit of the gofe tree for bait. But every time he went to inspect the trap he found the fruit gone and the trap sprung and nothing caught inside. "What is happening here?"
he wondered. Another time he took his bark cloak and went and hid near the base of the gofe tree and watched his trap. Nothing happened for a long time until it was almost dawn and the birds started to twitter. From downstream he heard the sound of laughter coming. Moving, he looked up and saw two young women arrive. They picked the gofe fruit from the trap and ate some and put some in their string bags. They kept picking gofe fruit from around the trap and the man kept watching them. Two ripe fruits were hanging near where the man was hiding and, when the two girls came over to get them, he grabbed each one by the wrist. The girls screamed out and then tried to turn into different things—centipede, caterpillar, python. Then the two girls turned into water. The girl that he was holding with his left hand, his weak hand, she dripped out of his hand, but the girl he was holding with his strong hand, he was able to prevent the water from running out. Finally, she turned back into a girl with light skin, and she said to him, "You must truly desire me. Let me go now, we shall go to your house." The man released her, but he said, "No, we will not go to my house. We shall go to yours." But she said, "No, we cannot go to my house, you are unable to go." But he insisted and finally she agreed.
There was a banamo tree with red leaves the color of the bush fowl [so that the Foi call this species banamo gibi , after the bush fowl]. The woman climbed it. "This is where my house is where you said you wanted to go," she said to him, and he replied, "I will climb." But he found himself unable to and released the tree. The woman too descended when she saw his difficulty. "Hold on to me," she said, and she walked straight up the side of the tree as if it were the ground. They climbed up in that fashion until they reached the top of the tree. There just beyond them was a place. The woman took a piece of gare leaf and with it tied the top of the banamo tree down to the ground so they could alight. It was a fine piece of red ground. The woman said to him, "Husband, where we are going now, you will see the woman who turned into water and escaped sitting on the steps of the house." The two arrived at a large longhouse. It had many red flowers and flowering shrubs around it and was built on a flat piece of ground. There was much namidama grass growing around it. The other woman who had turned into water, who was very dark of skin, was standing near the doorway of the house, and she smiled as the two approached. "That is she of whom I spoke," the woman said. They went inside the house to the east end. The woman said to the man, "If you hear someone say 'Eke! Sweetie has brought a man with her,' it is my brother speaking. His house is at the east end, go to it." They continued through and he sat down at her brother's place, the second to last from the end [a place reserved for head-men]. The woman said to him, "I will give you what you need—don't eat what the other men here will give you." The woman brought him tobacco and cooked all his food for him.
They lived there as man and wife, and the woman gave birth to a male child. When the child was old enough to be playing outside the house, the woman's father approached the man and said, "Kauwa [DH], let us go
outside and sit." They sat down on the grass, and the woman's father kept feeling around the ground with his hands. He dug up some of the grass, making a hole, and he said, "Kauwa , come over here and look. Look at your house," and the man looked in the hole and was staring down at the ground below the sky land. Men appeared as tiny things as from a great distance, but they seemed engaged in great activity. The man was afraid. The woman's father then told him, "Kauwa , your elder brother has died. Do you see him down below?" The man saw his dead brother and cried. The elder man then said, "Kauwa do not cry here. This is not a place of sorrow." But the younger man was preoccupied with his grief. Finally, the woman's father asked him, "Is it your wish to return down there?" and the other man said, "Yes, I wish to see my brother." Then the other man said, "Then go, and take my daughter with you." "Yes, we will go." "Kauwa , will you cry when you arrive down there?" "No, I will not cry." The elder man then said, "For your brother's Fifth Day feast, take my large red pig. Where your gofe fruit deadfall was, and where your other tree fruit deadfalls are, I will place sago, bamboo, and leaves for you to cook the pig. Your brother's Fifth Day feast is tomorrow; when they announce it, go find these things." Saying this, the man prepared to leave. "Close your eyes," the woman's father said, and the man did so. "Look now," and when he opened them, he was at his brother's place along with his wife and child. The elder man had also said this to the man before he went below: "If you cry, then my daughter will return here and my grandson, who is also my namesake, will come to harm. Therefore, you must not mourn at your brother's funeral." The man had agreed. The elder man had also said, "They will be frightened of my daughter because she is a stranger." When the two arrived at his dead brother's house they saw the men and women crying over the body. The woman stood near the steps of the house and the other woman cried in fear upon seeing her. The man went and held his brother and, although he remembered what his wife's father had said, he cried over the body and kissed him. His wife then became frightened. The man cried and slept. The woman too mourned.
Then the man went to put the body on the scaffold, and the woman went and sat in the women's house. As the time for the Fifth Day feast was announced, they went to look for the pig. They found it tied up in the west as the wife's father had said. They had the feast and the man made his death payments, and when he was finished, he and his wife stayed there. When the time came, the man gathered his brother's bones. He and his wife then lived there for a while.
The woman, however, kept striking the boy. The man heard this and told his wife to stop. Then the woman said, "Son, you go sleep with your father." The boy did so and that night, close to dawn, she disappeared. The man searched for her. he went back to the banamo tree but did not find any trace of her. He returned to his house and when his brothers were all gathered there, he spread his mat and sat down and told all the men the story. He told them everything and then finished, "Because I mourned and disobeyed my kauwa , my wife has returned to the sky land." He then
turned around and died. His ghost returned to the sky land and his body remained on earth. His wife's father asked him, "Kauwa , where is my namesake?" "I left him on the place below." "What I said would happen has come to pass. My namesake will come to harm." The three of them continued to live in the sky village.
Another time, the elder man once more invited his daughter's husband to sit outside on the grass. He uprooted some of the grass once again and told his daughter's husband, "Look below." The man looked and saw his son wandering around uncared for. The man cried. But the elder man said, "No, don't cry. You abandoned him, coming here." They continued to live. Another time they went back and looked below again. They saw smoke drifting up from below and the man became afraid. The elder man said, "Your son is cooking 'battle sago' or 'war sago' [bai kui , i.e., sago one takes into battle]; your son is in the middle of a fight. He is a war leader and a big man." Then the two men left him there. So it is told. That is all.
As we have discovered is the case in numerous Foi myths, this story begins with what can now be identified as a conventional Foi metaphor, that of the analogy between women and game animals which also encompasses the image of Foi marital exchange. A man, puzzled by the ineffectiveness of his traps, decides to hide nearby and discover the reason.[5] He sees the two women who have been stealing the fruit from the trap and, grabbing each by one hand, manages only to retain the woman he holds with his "strong" hand (the hand of habitual use, either right or left). This opening substitution is a duplex one (A : woman for rodent [game]; strong hand for weak hand) and raises a methodological point. When doing an obviational analysis, one must focus on certain substitutions at the expense of others in order to outline correctly the resolution of the main theme of the myth. But other themes may unfold concurrently with it. For example, substitution D will obviate the first part of A while substitution F will obviate the second part. This is exactly what we desire from an analysis of mythology: to determine how one set of metaphors, as a structure, expresses another, or, in other words, how themes are interwoven within a single plot.
The woman finally accedes to the young man's tenacity and leads him to her village in the sky (B : sky village for ground). There he meets his new wife's agnates, including his wife's father. His wife then bears him a male child who becomes her father's namesake. In most versions of this myth, the woman's father is not only a physically large man, he is also metaphorically a "big man" or head-man (which, sig-
nificantly, implies that he is a successful hunter). Substitution C therefore introduces a punning play on relative size: as a "large" female was substituted for a "small" rodent, so is a "small" namesake substituted for a "large" one (C : son for wife's father). But C could also be expressed as "affinal namesake for agnatic namesake," a substitution that will assume significance later on in the plot. Although Foi names are inherited bilaterally, it is usual for a man's firstborn son to be given his father's father's or father's (elder) brother's name. The fact that in the myth, the child is named after his mother's father thus underlines the husband's identification with his affinal relatives at the expense of his agnatic ones, whom he has abandoned.
However, one day the wife's father opens up a hole in the ground through which his son-in-law is permitted to view the preparation being made for his elder brother's funeral. Overcome with grief, he is allowed to return to the terrestrial world to participate in the funeral feast, but is admonished from showing any grief for fear of the consequences to his wife and child. The man, however, is unable to refrain from doing so, thus substituting his original agnatic relationship for his affinal one (D : brother for wife or wife's father; pork for brother [inverting A : women for meat]). This substitution thus obviates A by replacing the initial metaphorical "bride payment" with a matrilateral death payment. By entering into funeral exchanges with his terrestrial maternal relatives he implicitly cuts the maternal relationship between his son and the latter's maternal agnates (so that the woman abandons her son). By forging a link with his own agnates and maternal relatives, he severs the maternal relationship between his son and his mother (substituting patrilineality for matrilateral filiation). The Son, therefore, must stay on the surface world, while the father ascends as a true ghost (E : ghost for living man; son for father), obviating B by revealing the sky world as the land of the dead "where there is no sorrow"—and hence no death payments—as the wife's father had cryptically alluded to earlier. By having made an exchange, the man has purchased his own son's recruitment to the surface world (thus drawing an analogy between child payments and death payments).
Resuming his life in the sky world, the man once again looks down to the ground and sees his son cooking "battle sago" (F : "head-man" for son, obviating C ; "battle" hand for "marriage" hand, obviating A ). This reveals the extent of the literal identification between namesakes: as the wife's father was a "big" man, so is his daughter's son.
The Younger Brother's Resurrection
In contrast to what may appear to be the self-evident connection between agnatically related males in a patrilineal society, I have maintained that Foi men see the agnatic connection as contingent, as opposed to the sufficient connections they trace through females. Raymond Kelly has made this the focal point of his analysis of the social structure of the Etoro, who are culturally related to the Foi, by demonstrating that the solidarity of patrilineally composed lineages among the Etoro is dependent upon additional links of matrilateral siblingship (1977). In the last chapter, I demonstrated that the myth "The Two Matrilateral Brothers" uses the idea of matrilateral siblingship as a solution to the paradox of agnatic contingency. The following myths present alternative resolutions of the insufficiency of agnatic relationships, focusing on the related dilemmas of younger males without fathers and elder males without sons. The solution to these predicaments in each case is not merely the stipulation of an agnatic bond, putative or otherwise, nor a contrastive matrilateral tie, but the formation of an affinal relationship.
There once lived an adolescent boy, his elder sister, and the sister's husband. One time, the sister's husband said, "I am going to an Usane," and to his wife's brother he said, "I have left my tightened bow there; do not touch it in my absence." While he was gone, the young boy saw that a pig had come and eaten the bamboo shoots that had been planted. He took his sister's husband's bow and shot it but, in doing so, the bow snapped. "What shall I do sister?" he asked. "No, it is between you and your base [sister's husband]," she replied. "It will be all right," she added. The two of them cut up the pig and cooked it. They left a leg, rib cage, and backbone and also some lung for the sister's husband and ate the rest. The next day, the sister's husband returned. He looked at his bow and saw that it had been broken and mended. He said nothing but merely put the pork he had brought with him near the wall of the house. The boy and his sister spoke to themselves, "Brother, my husband is up to something—I will watch you while you sleep and you watch me as I sleep." The sister's husband hung the rest of his pork up after putting a share in the sister's half. He sat there silently, not moving. The other two sat there ashamed. The young boy spoke, "Base , a pig came to eat the bamboo shoots you planted and I shot it with your bow, but it broke." The sister's husband said nothing. They slept that night, the two watching each other. But late into the night, they both fell asleep at the same time. Then, the sister's husband cut the boy like a pig. He divided the body into portions and removed the bones, throwing them into a pond. The flesh he allowed to
rot. Then he took the woman and left, leaving his wife's brother's dog behind also.
The dog took his father's bark cloak and, carefully straightening the flesh, wrapped it up. Then, carrying the bundle with his teeth, he climbed up a ridge and at the top he barked loudly. But he heard and saw no one, so he went to the other side and did the same thing. Again he heard no reply. He slept that night, putting the bundle in a small cave to keep it dry. The next day he climbed another mountain and called out. He heard nothing. He slept and the next day climbed a third mountain. When he barked, he heard a man answer "Hae - !" [dog!]. He kept barking and soon he saw a very hairy man approach. The dog wagged his tail excitedly. He showed the man the cloak-wrapped flesh and the man said, "You've killed a marsupial and brought it here! Very good!" The man had killed some marsupials himself. Some of this meat he brought back with him and some he left in the bush. He put the parcel in his bilum, and they went back to the house. His wife and children had not yet returned. He put the cloak-wrapped boy's flesh on the drying rack and waited. Then his wife and three maiden daughters returned. He said to them, "Yesterday I killed marsupials. Go get bibu leaves for cooking." He cleaned the marsupial meat and they ate and slept.
The next morning, he said to them, "Go bail water from the pond there. When I return with the other marsupials, fetch more bibu greens." Then he took the dog and left. He killed many marsupials. Meanwhile, the three daughters went to bail water for fish. They removed the water and presently the fish began to bunch up. They saw one particularly large fish. "If it goes into my net then I am going to give it to my father," the youngest sister said. But the elder sister said, "If it goes into my net, I will give it to our mother." But the fish went inside the youngest daughter's net. The other two daughters were ashamed. They returned to the house and she gave the fish to her father. He gave them marsupial meat to eat in return. "Go get leaves and we will cook these," he said to them. He then removed the parcel from the drying rack and, unwrapping it, saw that it contained the flesh of a man. He straightened the flesh on the floor of the house. Then, when cutting up the fish, he saw that there were men's bones inside its stomach, They were all there, not one was missing. He started to put the bones back into the flesh. None of this was decomposed. He put all the bones back in their place and carefully covered the flesh back up. Then he brought men's decorations and placed them next to the body. He took ginger, cucumber, and salt and put it in the boy's mouth. With the handle of his axe he struck the floor and shouted, "Men! men! men!" The boy did not move. Twice he struck the floor with his axe and then stamped on it, shouting, "Men! men!" again. The boy stirred slightly. He did it again, and the boy finally sat up. He put the decorations on. The man gave him tobacco to smoke. He ate some more ginger and other things, and he was recovered. The man built up a fire and they sat there. The three daughters returned with the greens. They sat together in the other half of the house and looked at the boy, competing for his attention. "I am your fish friend,"
the youngest daughter said. "No, you two are not friends," the man said. "This boy is your husband." Then to the other two daughters he said, "You two, no, you two are finished," and they were ashamed. They all lived there, and the boy married the other two daughters later.
One time, the young man said to his wives' father, "We shall have our Usane." They built a longhouse and four women's houses next to it on each side. They fetched firewood and readied flares. When they finished, they put all their pigs inside a fence until it was full and one could not count them. The hairy man also lined many pigs of his own. Three days before the Usane, they said, "We will dance in three days. Today, the men with one leg, the men with one arm, the men with one cassowary leg, and the young men, let them dance." These men did their dancing for three days. The young man's former sister's husband also came. They met, and the young man addressed him, "Come and sit with me in my wife's house—my sister can stay here." The young man readied tobacco and water for his sister's husband. He did not say base any more but called him "brother," wame . The singing went on at the longhouse. The young man said to his former sister's husband, "Brother, tomorrow you must help me. I am all alone here and it has been hard work. You must help me cut and distribute the meal Let my sister stay here." The next day he killed and distributed his pigs. When he was finished, he said to the sister's husband, "Brother, there is one pig left. I wish to give it to you. Tomorrow you will go, but first eat this pig." The man agreed. The next day the young man told the sister's husband to ready firewood and cook the pig. While the sister's husband was eating, the young man went to the latrine, and there he sharpened stakes and planted them on the bottom. He cut the support log so that it was ready to break. He returned and said, "Brother, you and my sister take all the meat with you." The man cooked all the meat, ate his fill, and then asked for the latrine. The young man said, "That way is the old toilet. It is bad, I have built a new one just for you," and he pointed the way. The man went to relieve himself, but when he tried to sit he fell through and impaled himself on the stakes. The young man went back to the longhouse and fetched his stone axe. He went to the latrine and saw the wounded sister's husband had climbed back up and run away. He followed the trail of blood. He followed him and saw that the man had turned into a tree grub and burrowed into a log. He cut the log and chopped the tree grub into pieces. He returned and said to his sister, "I have repaid my base for what he did to me." The sister answered, "Thank you, I wanted you to do that." They hugged each other in relief, and the sister stayed with him and married his wives' father. They all lived there.
One time, the light-skinned man said to his daughters' husband, "Kauwa , you stay here, I am leaving." The man took the young man's sister, his wife, and left, leaving his daughters and their husband alone. They stayed there a long time, until the house was falling apart from disrepair and age. One time he and his third wife went to the garden to cut sugarcane. He saw his wife approach the sugarcane and there circled it and turned into a ground python. The young man too circled around and turned into the base of the megorodame vine. That is all.
This story begins, as does "The Fish Spear" (chapter 7), with the figurative appropriation of an elder male's sexuality by a younger male. Having disobeyed his elder sister's husband's warning not to touch his bow in his absence, the protagonist of the myth breaks it while shooting a wild pig. Mending it, he attempts to substitute pork for the broken bow (substitution A : pork for bow; younger male for elder male; wife's brother for sister's husband). The elder man returns home and, unappeased by his younger affine's offering, treats him as pork, "cutting him up just like a pig," as the male narrator of this myth explains (B : younger male for pork; younger male for bow). Leaving the dismembered body separated into its component male (bone) and female (flesh) halves, the elder man departs with the young man's sister.
The protagonist's dog carries his father's flesh to a semi-wild bush man who praises the dog for "bringing meat" (C : bush man for sister's husband). He commands his daughters to go fishing, and they compete over the ownership of a large fish: it having landed in the youngest sister's net, she has the right to present it to her father (D : younger sister for elder sister; fish for net). This is the structural inverse of A :
Obviating A , the propriety of female fishing replaces that of male hunting. Moreover, as the young male, associated with the sister, appropriated his elder affine's male identity, so does the younger sister provide her father with the male component of the younger man's body.
The bush man finds the bones within the fish's body and then resurrects the younger man (E : bones for fish, reversing the initial butchering process of B [flesh for pork; male bone is to female flesh as pig is to fish]). Substitution F , the offering of the youngest daughter as wife, closes the obviation sequence in the following ways: the bush man first replaces the original sister's husband as elder affine (wife's father for sister's husband, obviating C ). Second, the younger male appropriates the daughters of the bush man, as he initially appropriated his elder sister's husband's bow (obviating A ). Finally, it completes the terms of the younger daughter's proprietary right over the fish (obviating D ). The first half of the myth thus depicts male and female sexuality in terms of the identification between hunter and prey: hunting and fishing are sexual matters as is the claiming of a spouse,
and so affinity is a function of the implementation of male and female productivity.
The inversion of the myth, and the revenge of the younger male, begins with the announcement of his and his wives' father's Usane (inverse D : [ceremonial] pig-kill for [secular] hunting and fishing). Having been treated as pork himself, the younger male traps his ex-brother-in-law in a stylized wild-pig trap (inverse C : sister's husband for wife's brother as pig). This motivates the reidentification of the elder male with another penis symbol, a tree grub, in which forms the younger man finally completely assumes control over his sisters (tree grub [= bow] for elder male, inverting B [younger male for bow]). But the affinity between the younger male and his wives' father remains to be balanced, which occurs when the sister remarries the bush man (inverse F : sister's husband for bush man) completing the obviation sequence that began when the bush man first received the younger male's flesh ([female] wife for [male] daughter's husband). The direct exchange of women however is always a destabilizing act, as was evident in the myth "The Wild Pig Brother-in-Law"—it ends affinity, and the bush man leaves permanently, repeating the terms of the first elder affine's departure. The protagonist's house falls into disrepair and his wives turn into pythons (which shed their skins)—pythons that represent the male procreative power of the bush man, once again appropriated by a younger male who is at once son and son-in-law (inverse E : "bones" of elder male for bones of younger male).
It is not uncommon for a man to raise the greater portion of his future daughter's husband's bridewealth, especially if he himself is without sons or the younger man is without a father or elder brother. As I noted earlier, Foi men, especially wealthy men, regard their own eldest sons with suspicion, for it is thought that they will attempt to hasten their father's death in order to inherit their patrimony. A son-in-law, on the other hand, is regarded as a more faithful and trustworthy ally. For example, when Iraharabo, a head-man of considerable wealth, died, his four daughters' husbands inherited most of his shell wealth, keeping a portion of it in trust for the man's only son who was an immature boy when his father died.
"The Younger Brother's Resurrection" thus in a sense deals with the paradox of men who wish to see their daughter's husband tied to them by the closest bond of flesh and blood and yet still not feel proprietary towards the elder male's possessions and land, as true sons do. The dilemma is that sons-in-law appropriate a man's sexuality, in
the form of his daughters and daughters' children, in a more profound sense than sons, whose wives maintain the productive resources of their husbands' father. This is the theme of the last myth of this chapter.
The Origin of Garden Food
The two myths that follow are, like "The Hornbill Husband" and "The First Married Couple" (chapter 7), an example of a single story that is detachable into two separate myths at the point of obviation. Early in my fieldwork, a young male informant related to me the first story, which ended at the point where the uga'ana obtains the younger brother's wife by tricking the men at the Usane pig-feast. Some time later, the same informant's father told me the second myth, "The Origin of Garden Food." Subsequently the first informant retold the first story, incorporating the second myth as an inversion of the first within the plot. I now analyze both this second version and the original myth, "The Origin of Garden Food," that follows it.
There once lived two brothers. Their parents were dead and they lived alone. One time the elder brother paddled his canoe upstream. Along the bank of the river he came upon a large garden belonging to someone else. He disembarked, and in the garden he took one stalk of sugarcane, one bundle of pitpit, and one of every other food item, and returned home. The elder brother returned habitually to the garden and took one of each item. He and his brother continued to live this way. One time the elder brother became sick and told his younger brother to go in his place to get the garden food, warning him to take one of each item only. The younger brother agreed and pulled the canoe upstream. When the younger brother arrived, he started to take as much food as he could, filling the canoe so that it nearly sunk from the weight. He paddled back to the house, and when his brother saw that he had taken great amounts of food he said, "Brother, the owner of that garden will come here." They waited and in the morning a light-skinned man covered with body hair arrived. He beat the two boys severely and then left. The next morning, the elder brother said, "We cannot live here together any longer; I want to go. Therefore, you stay here alone," and he left.
The elder brother journeyed, crossing three ridges. On top of the fourth ridge he stood and heard the sound of a woman pounding sago. He went down and looked and saw a beautiful maiden making sago. The girl saw him and said, "Why have you come here?" and he told her what had happened, finishing, "Having wandered in this direction I arrived here." Then she said, "My father is a cannibal and will eat you." But the boy replied, "That is sufficient; I have come seeking my own death." The two
hurriedly finished making sago and then returned to the girl's house. There he hid inside her sago basket. In the afternoon, the girl's uga'ana father and his wife arrived. He sniffed the air and said, "Daughter, you've brought something back with you." "Yes, I've brought a bit of rat," she replied. The uga'ana and his wife were pleased. "Where? I want to see," he said. The daughter showed him the boy. He said, "We won't eat him," and they all lived there. The boy married the girl, and she bore a male child.
One time the man and his wife were cutting a new garden. They went habitually to cut the undergrowth and trees. One day the man climbed up a ko'oya tree to trim the branches. Facing eastward he saw his younger brother off in the distance, living alone. He was wandering around shooting grasshoppers with a small bow. He climbed down and said to his wife, ``Make a length of Gnetum fiber rope." She made a long length and gave it to her husband. At the end of the rope he tied a piece of cassowary meat and a bamboo of sago. Climbing up the tree in the garden again, he saw his younger brother still wandering around with his toy bow. He threw the meat and sago and it landed a short ways from the boy. He grasped it and started to eat it, but as he did this, the elder brother pulled the rope in. He pulled the boy all the way to the tree and placed him there. The small boy was afraid, but the elder brother said to him, "Don't be afraid. We lived alone together. It is I who left you, coming here." The younger brother was happy, and they returned to the house. In the afternoon, the wife's parents returned and the elder brother showed them his younger brother. "Why did you abandon him?" the uga'ana reproved him. They all lived there, and the uga'ana grew to love the younger brother, who gradually grew to be a young man.
One time they were all conversing when a mama bird came and alit on a nearby tree. It sang, "Go'oro goai, go'oro goai, dorefe, dorefe. " The uga'ana said, "People, what is that bird saying?" They answered, "It is the time of fertility—ko~ ya, hagenamo will grow and flourish." But the uga'ana replied, "No, they will have an Usane in the east—the marua is telling us to find game." The uga'ana and the two young men went hunting while the wife and daughter stayed behind. Three days the men stayed in the bush and on the fourth day they returned. They filled three bilums with meat. The next day they decorated and left for the longhouse of the Usane. There, the men were getting ready to dance the samoga . While the men were singing, the uga'ana distributed his meat. Then the drums were taken for the usanega and they danced. As it was close to dawn, the uga'ana said to the younger brother, "Let us go to the latrine." There, the uga'ana laid down on his back and opened up his scrotum, and he said to the boy, "Climb inside." The boy did so, and uga'ana reclosed his scrotum. Then he returned to the longhouse. As the dancing was ending he said, "My son is missing. Therefore, you men of this house must give me this maiden as a wife in his place." They were frightened of the uga'ana and so allowed him to take the woman. Then the uga'ana and the others returned to their house. On the path toward home, the uga'ana said, "Wait here all of you. I am going to relieve myself." He went off a ways and released the younger
brother from his scrotum. The two of them returned. The others looked sharply at the uga'ana and he said, "Because I had no shell wealth, I obtained this woman in this manner. I have raised the younger brother as my own son—she belongs to him." They were all pleased. They returned to the house.
They next day, the younger brother said to the uga'ana , "You must eat me." The uga'ana replied, "I cannot eat you. But if I am to eat you, then climb up this tamo palm. The younger brother climbed up. In the middle, he rested and then continued up. He wanted to grab hold of the fibrous out-cropping of the palm, but he slipped and fell and died. The uga'ana and his wife cooked the boy. The younger brother's wife said to them, "Give me only the heart of the boy." He gave it to her, and she took it and left. She made a clearing in the bush and then cut the heart into small pieces and planted it. She then returned to the house. About three weeks later she went to look and saw that pitpit, sugarcane, all manner of garden food had sprouted. She cleared the grass and weeds around it. Then she returned to the house. When she went back to the garden to look some time later, she found the food was ripe. She gathered it and they all ate this garden food. This is how garden food originated. That is all.
There lived a young man and his two sisters. One was a young woman of marriageable age; the other was a small girl "whose breasts had not yet come." He habitually asked his sisters for sago. The elder sister, in frustration with his demands, said to him one time, "Don't keep saying 'sisters give me sago'; say 'wives, give me sago.'" The young man was ashamed and left. The little sister followed him. They arrived at a longhouse of an uga'ana . There was a young woman sitting there who saw them and was afraid because she thought they were ghosts. But the young man told her that he was indeed a true man. Then the young woman said, "My father eats people. He will eat you too." Then they went inside and sat down. But for the little girl they drilled a hole in one of the fireplace posts and she hid inside there. Then the ground shook and a light rain came. "My father and mother are coming," the young woman said. The uga'ana father arrived and called out, "I cannot come into my house, something is in there." The young woman replied, "No, I have killed a rat in a trap and I have brought it here." The uga'ana said that it was all right and went inside. He then saw the young man and the little girl who came out of hiding. He did not eat them. One time he said to the young man, "Climb up this tamo palm," and the boy did so. But he slipped and fell and died. The little girl said to the uga'ana, "If you intend to eat the body, then give me only the lung and heart." He did so. The little girl took it and found a cleared area. She cut the lung and heart into pieces and planted it. She waited a while and returned to look at the clearing. Food items had sprouted: sugarcane, aibika, pitpit, greens, yam, banana, all kinds of food. There, food came from the lung and heart, in abundance. This is how garden food originated. The two girls and the uga'ana and his wife ate these for the first time. That is all.
The overt theme of this pair of myths seems to be that the origin of garden food lies in the relationship between a man and his adopted sons or sons-in-law, whom he secures to his own ground by sponsoring their marriages. It also perhaps more importantly lies in the relationship between that man and his (adopted) sons' wives who maintain the productive continuity of a man's land. Under the terms of the Foi patrivirilocal postmarital residence norm, a man's daughters make sago and gardens on their husbands' fathers' land: in other words (in-married) women are necessary to the maintenance of the patrilineal continuity between a man and his sons. The two myths, however, invert the sexual roles of this normative practice: patrilineality is phrased not in a genealogical idiom but in terms of its opposite, the adoption of daughters' husbands. The implication is that the biogenetic connection between a man and his male offspring is of less significance than the elder man's sponsorship of their marriages. This, for the Foi, is the real content of the father-son relationship.
The first myth begins with an orphaned pair of brothers who are forced to subsist on the theft of food for their sustenance (substitution A : theft of food for growing of food). It is dear that it is not the mere existence of garden vegetables that is being accounted for, but rather their domestication within a conventionally defined human sociality. Shamed by the younger brother's excesses and their consequent punishment, the elder brother departs and comes upon a young marriageable woman (B : maiden for younger brother). Hidden in her sago basket, he encounters her cannibal father who forbears from eating him and allows him to marry his daughter (C : wife's father for younger brother, obviating A : elder affinal male for younger sibling male).
The elder brother then uses a sago-and-meat lure to retrieve his younger brother, pulling him up the tree from which he had originally spotted him (D : younger brother for meat and sago). This obviates A by replacing the stolen vegetable regimen of their initial liminal existence with the normal complements of a conventional domestic one. Thus, it is a relation to affinity that keeps brothers together, not their bare siblingship. In the absence of parents, elder brother's wife assumes the nurturative role of elder female toward the unmarried younger male. The plot now focuses on the relationship between the cannibal and his daughter's husband's younger brother. Substitution E occurs when the cannibal hides the younger brother in his scrotum, transforming him from a quasi-affine into a son (obviating C : son for son-
in-law). The relationship between the (male) scrotum in which the younger brother is hidden and the (female) sago basket in which the elder brother was hidden encompasses the obviation of B by E : it is the woman who initially mediates the relationship between the elder male and the elder brother, his "quasi-son," but it is the elder man who supplants the elder brother as the younger's patron. The sum-mating image of these successive tropes is precisely to establish the analogical equivalence between the WF/DH and the father-son relationships. By hiding the younger male in his scrotum, the cannibal is able to extort a wife from the Usane villagers (F : daughter-in-law for son; inverting and obviating C : son-in-law for daughter, and obviating A by replacing the theft of garden food with the theft of a wife).
The inversion of the myth begins when the younger brother offers himself as food to his cannibal father. This inverts A , where the elder brother ran away "seeking his death" by cannibalism. The young man falls from the tamo palm to his death, and the cannibal prepares his body for cooking, giving the heart to the younger brother's widow (inverse E : food from [revealed] heart for man [hidden] in scrotum). From this internal organ garden food originates (inverse D : garden food for younger brother): it is women's gardening capacity that was "stolen" by the cannibal, even as the two brothers originally subsisted on stolen garden food.
Furthermore, the domestication of garden vegetables is brought into an inverse relationship with the eating of human flesh: the cannibal uga'ana is only "domesticated" through his acquisition of younger male clients (sons or sons-in-law). The latters' wives mediate the replacement of cannibalism with vegetable gardening: it is women who implement the "cultural" content of garden productivity in opposition to the destructive cannibalism of men.
The second myth begins with a young man and his two sisters living together as a domestic unit. Frustrated by his demands for sago, the elder sister suggests that he should call them wives (A : wives for sisters; younger immature sister who stays with him for elder sister who incestuously differentiates herself from him). He comes upon a young woman and later her uga'ana father who, however, refuses to eat him (B : eater of human flesh for eater of sago; marriageable woman for nonmarriageable sister). Although not stated explicitly by the narrator in my literal translation of this text, it is clear from the narrative convention that the young man marries the woman (C : wife's father for cannibal; wife for sister, obviating A : "true" wife for "false" wife).
The young man dies from a fall from a tamo palm, an arecoid species significantly associated with sago since areca and sago palms inhabit the same swamp areas. In this form he is taken as meat by his wife's father (D : meat for son-in-law) who gives the internal organs to the immature sister, thus obviating A (brother as meat item [given by affine] for brother as husband). The imagery here is complex. The brother is first divided, like a pig, into his internal organs (female) and external flesh (male). A man realizes his patrilineal destiny through his own marital links, but it is his sisters, and specifically his younger sisters (whose marital careers he controls), who procreate his complementary uterine line. The myth therefore contrasts patrilineality and the complementary filiation of sister's children in terms of the contrast between meat and vegetable food. In the myth, however, the two contrasting linealities are collapsed into one.
The contigency of males is depicted in terms of relationship of men to their affines. The younger sister takes her brother's internal organs and plants them (E : viscera for younger brother), obviating B : she refuses to eat the brother, planting him instead, even as the cannibal at first refused to eat the young man, figuratively planting him in marriage. Men are "consumed" (by having to make onerous affinal payments) in marriage. Women, on the other hand, maintain the reproductive power of males and are necessary to it for, in the absence of sons, a man must use his daughters to secure a son-in-law to his land and loyalty (as in the first tale). This encompasses the final transformation (F : garden food for internal organs). Males are contingent vis-à-vis their affines, who must be "fed"; female siblings are self-sufficient and are necessary for the reproductive career of their brothers (obviating C ).
The relationship between the cannibal and the young man's sister is in every respect an inversion of normal marital protocol. The sister receives a gift of meat from her brother's affine, as if the elder man was paying "groomwealth" to the young man's sister. She uses the meat (that is, wealth) not to obtain a spouse for herself (as a man would normally) but to maintain the domestic continuity (in terms of gardening) of her brother's affinal household. Men are therefore dependent on their sisters: their affines pay wealth (meat) for their gardening capacity, and it is this capacity that a woman's brother depends on for securing his own affines. The two myths therefore symbolically focus on a woman's medial position between her brother (and his male affines) and her husband (and his agnates), but they invert this by depicting the medial position of the younger male.
The last two myths and "The Origin of Karuato " have illustrated a pervasive parallel between the mediation of male and female productive expertise and the attainment of affinal accommodation. They therefore continue the themes depicted in "The Fish Spear" (chapter 7) and "The Two Matrilateral Brothers" (chapter 8). From the analyst's point of view, these myths address themselves to the moral problem of how to effect a relationship between members of social categories with opposed yet complementary productive capacities. In the case of male affines, this complementarity is a relative rather than an absolute one—a man gives his sister to another man who gives male wealth in return; they therefore define themselves as providers of female and male things respectively. The aforementioned myths of the last three chapters, however, have depicted this relative complementarity of affines in terms of the unalterable one between male and female. Since male affines are not inherently differentiated, they must create such contrastive roles through the exchange of appropriate items.
One of the recurrent themes throughout Lévi-Strauss' analysis of South American mythology is the manner in which contrastive productive roles are used to depict reciprocal social relations on a number of different semantic levels (see for example Iévi-Strauss 1969: chapter 4; Lévi-Strauss 1978:36). The myths of the preceding three chapters have illustrated that such a semantic concern with productive complementarity is also a pervasive theme of Foi mythology. The last chapter, however, deals more specifically with the mediation of such reciprocal roles through exchange.
Chapter XI
Complementarity, Exchange, and Reciprocity
Exchange and reciprocity have been invoked as underlying principles of Melanesian social and cultural organization in general since Malinowski's time.[1] But I have tried to avoid referring to such principles ex nihilo in describing the content of Foi social relationships. Instead, I have attempted to show first how the Foi use the ceremonial exchange of wealth items and meat to draw boundaries between contrastively defined social categories (for example, wife-givers and wife-takers), and second how the exchange of complementary food and wealth items defines a congruent social complementarity, as, for example, when men and women exchange male and female foodstuffs on a daily basis (see chapter 3). The Foi therefore tend to explain the phenomenon of exchange in terms of the contras five roles of those engaged in it which makes it possible as well as necessary.
The first two myths of this chapter center around the cross-cousin relationship and illustrate the problems cross-cousins face in differentiating themselves, given that they are "like siblings." The second two myths focus on the converse problem of male trading partners: given that they are from distinct ecological and cultural worlds, how can they relate as brothers? Finally, the last two myths explore the cosmological properties of wealth items themselves and how these properties imply reciprocity and exchange.
The Ugly Wife and the Beautiful Wife
As I have already suggested, the Foi cross-cousin relationship represents the intersection of the two principles of consanguinity (or siblingship) and affinity. Foi cross-cousins are thus both "sharers" and "exchangers," and this conflicting aspect of their relationship is brought out most vividly in the following story.[2]
A man and his uga'ana cross-cousin once lived. When the black palm fruit was ripe, the man climbed up one preparing to shoot birds. A raggianna bird-of-paradise alit and he shot it. The arrow hit and the bird fell below. He searched, but he could find neither the bird nor the arrow. Searching, he suddenly saw a young woman. "What are you doing?" she asked. "No, I'm searching here for no reason," he replied. He took the woman back to his house. The uga'ana saw the woman and said, "My kumi [cross-cousin], you've brought a beautiful woman with you! Tell me, how did you find her?" and he kept pestering the man to tell him. Finally, the man did so, instructing the uga'ana to shoot only a bird-of-paradise and not to shoot another kind of bird. The uga'ana went and climbed up the black palm but did not shoot a bird-of-paradise. Instead he shot a karia , a black bird. The bird Fell down and the uga'ana descended to find it. Searching, an ugly black woman appeared. The uga'ana cried out in fright and was angry that he found this ugly woman. He took her back to the house.
One time the uga'ana said to his cross-cousin, "Let us go cut tree grubs." They came upon a fallen log and began to cut. In the middle of the log, the uga'ana struck with his axe and then used a stick to wedge the log open. They found ya'aro grubs turning inside, and he told his cross-cousin to take them. When the man did so, the uga'ana removed his axe and stick and the log closed up, trapping the man's hand tight. "You will stay here and die," the uga'ana said. "I am going back to my wife [i.e., your wife]," and he left. He went back and took his cross-cousin's wife. The black woman decided to search for the other man and Found him near death with his hand trapped in the log. She took the stick and wedged the log open, took him back to the house, and rubbed stinging nettles and healing lotion over his skin, and he recovered. The man then proceeded to carve a large cave from the stone. He worked until he had carved a space big enough to live in. There he made a fireplace and everything else that goes inside a house. He collected firewood. When everything was ready, he said to the black woman, "Wife, after having killed the other two, I will return. You stay here." Then he went in pursuit of his cross-cousin. But whenever he approached, the uga'ana was able to smell the skin of the first man and ran away. This kept happening. Meanwhile, the beautiful wife had borne a child. The man was Frustrated and despaired of ever catching his cross-cousin.
One time he climbed a ridge and came upon the run-down house of a little old man. The old man was burning excrement in place of wood. The man fetched firewood for the old man. The old man was grateful and said to him, "What shall I do to repay you for what you have done?" He then turned around and took two wrapped parcels and gave them to the man. "Rub the contents of the first parcel on your skin," he advised. The man took the parcels and went off after his cross-cousin again. He approached the two of them as they were making sago. The old man had said, "Rub the first parcel on your skin," but the man rubbed the second one instead. He turned into a mabera , a silent gecko. He climbed among the sago leaves while they were making sago, and the uga'ana smelled him and said, "My cross-cousin is here, I can smell his skin," and they finished making sago and disappeared. The other man searched but could not find them. Another time, he happened upon them again. This time he rubbed the first parcel on his skin. He turned into an o'otoni , the singing gecko, and the sound he made was like the wind tinkling through the limestone stalagmites of caves. The uga'ana heard it and he thought it sounded as sweet as his cross-cousin's little drum. "What is making that sound? Let us find it," he said to the woman. They cut the sago leaves looking for it. They looked all around the fallen sago palm, and finally he found it and put it in the woman's palm. Like the sweet singing of crickets it was. Holding it, the o'otoni turned back into the man. He grabbed the uga'ana's wrist and, taking an axe, killed him. He also killed the woman—the beautiful wife—and her child. Then he returned to the old man's house and told him that he had been successful and had killed them. He then returned to his wife's place. There were many pigs there. There was sugarcane and banana in abundance. There was a large house divided for men and women. The man built a pig enclosure and gathered much firewood. There he held his own pig-feast and killed his pigs. That is all.
The story opens with the now familiar metaphorical equation between hunting and wife-acquisition. A man climbs a black palm to shoot birds and hits a raggianna bird-of-paradise, which turns into a beautiful maiden (substitution A : woman for bird [-of-paradise]). The man's uga'ana cross-cousin extracts this information and goes to find a woman himself, but his arrow misses and instead he obtains an ugly wife, transformed from the black karia bird (B : karia for bird-of-par-adise; cross-cousin for first man).[3] Plotting revenge, the uga'ana invites his cross-cousin to cut grubs and traps the man's hand in the log (C : grubs for birds; first man's wife for cross-cousin's wife; horizontal log for vertical tree). This closes triangle ABC : the cross-cousins having replaced each other, their wives in effect now also do so.
The cross-cousin's ugly wife rescues the first man, however, and after leaving her in a cave, the first man sets out in pursuit of the uga'ana . The man cooperates with his cross-cousin's wife, whom, like
his male siblings' wives, he calls karege . The Foi also say that the Raggianna bird-of-paradise and the karia are "brothers" to each other. The two cross-cousins therefore, by virtue of having married women who are "sisters" to each other, become sawi (WHZ, reciprocal usage). The Foi say that since sawi "divide and share" a pair of female siblings, they are "like brothers" who are also defined as sharers. The first three substitutions efficiently encapsulate the essence of the cross-cousin relationship: siblings who exchange (in this case, wives).
As the first man pursues the uga'ana , however, the latter keeps smelling the skin of the former and eludes capture. The first man climbs a ridge one day and comes upon a solitary "little old man" (D : old man for cross-cousin). Having climbed up the tree to obtain the bird-wife in the opening substitution, he now climbs up a ridge to meet the old man and obtain the two parcels. Substitution D may also have been rendered "rescuing of man by wife from horizontal log for capture of wife by man from vertical tree," thus inverting A . But more importantly from a thematic consideration, the old man now gives instructions as to how to choose between the two alternative parcels, as the man himself gave similar instructions to his cross-cousin. And like the uga'ana , the first man makes a mistake and chooses the second parcel, which turns him into the silent house gecko (mabera ). Recognizing his error, he then substitutes the first parcel for the second and becomes the singing gecko (o'otoni —substitution E : o'otoni for mabera ). This doses triangle CDE ("first parcel for first wife") and sets up the following structural opposition:
sight |  |
sound |  |
Finally, it obviates B by replacing the substitution of (ground-dwelling) lizards for that of (arboreal) birds. In the form of the o'otoni , the first man is sought by the uga'ana and the first wife. They locate the sweetly singing lizard, who turns back into a man and promptly kills them both. He then returns to the cave where he left the ugly wife to find that his pigs and gardens have multiplied in his absence, allowing him to make his own pig-feast (thus
The complementarity of cross-cousins is mirrored throughout the plot in the substitution of complementary positional, sensual, and conceptual binary pairs: the uga'ana is first deceived visually (shooting the black bird rather than the red bird) and then aurally (by the o'otoni in place of the mabera ). Having trapped his cross-cousin during (male) tree-grub collection, the uga'ana and his wife is contrasted with the pig raising and gardening of the first man and his wife. As they are differentiated according to these domestic activities, so the cross-cousins are also differentiated by their wives. The "brotherhood" of the two birds is not enough to keep the cross-cousins together, for in the end it is the difference between the birds that sets the two men in conflict with each other. By differentiating themselves in terms of their wives, the two men only confirm their metaphorical rather than literal brotherhood, which quickly resolves itself into a lethal complementarity of form and sense.
The Orgin of Feral Dogs and Pigs
The foregoing myth contrasts the relationship between cross-cousins with that between siblings (their wives) and allows the asymmetry of their relationship to develop against their figurative relationship as "sharers." The following myth proceeds in the opposite manner: against the background of cooperating cross-cousins, complementary animal species develop a figurative brotherhood. The opposition between humans and domestic animals also serves as an idiom for the hostilities and tensions in the cross-sex sibling and brother-in-law relationship.
There once lived a young man and his maiden sister. One day, the man said to his sister, "Stay here with your pig. I am taking my dog [named Dani] with me hunting," and he left for the bush. While he was gone one day, an uga'ana arrived. He learned from the young woman that her brother was away hunting and, after giving her a large gift of pork fat, the two of them conspired to murder the woman's brother and then elope. They slept that night, and the next day the woman's brother and the dog Dani returned. As they did so, the pig grunted heavily in warning and the dog barked shrilly. Noticing this, the brother called out, "Sister, is something wrong in there?" She called out in reply, "No my brother. It is just that I am sick and close to death." The brother went inside and saw his sister lying in the garura , the place in the woman's half of a house reserved for pigs. The sister protested that she had done nothing untoward but was
only very sick. However, her brother was suspicious and refused to approach her. Finally, he went to gather stinging nettles for her and, as he bent over to give it to her, his head brushed the baisesa , the roof beam connecting the two fireplaces in the woman's half. He found that his head was stuck to the beam. With an effort he wrenched free, breaking the beam, and then noticed that the uga'ana had been hiding behind it and had been holding on to his head. The two men fought. The sister aided the uga'ana while the dog and pig sided with the man. Their struggle carried them outside, and finally the brother was overcome. The uga'ana wanted to cook and eat the man, but the sister said, "No, let his body rot here." And the two of them left, leaving the dog Dani and pig behind with the body.
The two animals cut stinging nettles with their teeth and rubbed them on the unconscious man's body. He stirred slightly. They cut firewood and carried the man into the house, making a fire and gathering cucumbers, salt, and ginger for the man to eat when he revived. Then the dog said to the pig, "Brother, you stay here and watch over him" and he left in pursuit of the uga'ana and the sister. Westward he went, arriving at the Kusubia River in northern Fasu territory, west of Lake Kutubu. The river ran swiftly into a waterfall at this point, and the dog was unable to cross. He returned to the house and brought the pig back to help him. At the bank of the Kusubia River, there was a large overhanging tree. The dog chewed at the roots of it while the pig dug them up with his snout. Finally they uprooted the tree and it fell over, forming a bridge across the water. The dog tested it and found that it was safe and they both continued on.
They finally arrived at a garden that the uga'ana and the sister had made. They also saw a wild-pig trap that the uga'ana had made in a fallen sago palm. The pig said to the dog, "Dani, go kill a bandicoot." The dog returned with a large one. "Cover my skin with its blood," the pig then said, and the dog did so. Then the pig went underneath the deadfall log of the pig trap and told the dog to spring the log. Dani let the log fall, and the pig appeared trapped although he was unharmed. Leaving the pig there, the dog went to the garden and there he transformed himself into a tiny, emaciated dog with mange and sores covering its body and hid there.
Presently, the sister arrived at the garden. She saw the miserable little dog there, and it jumped up and wagged its tail happily at her. The sister was pleased at the thought of bringing a dog home to her husband. Before she returned home, she went to inspect the pig trap. She saw a large pig apparently trapped there and cried out in joy. Returning to the house, she showed her husband the dog and told him about the pig in the trap. The uga'ana was very pleased. He cooked and ate a man and a child he had killed that day, and also cooked a cassowary for the woman, telling her to give the choicest bits to the dog. The next day the two of them went to the trap. While they were attempting to lift the heavy pig, the pig sprang up and, running between the woman's legs, split her in half. The dog Dani had meanwhile resumed his normal appearance and cut the woman's neck, severing her head. They then attacked and killed the uga'ana . They then
returned, crossing the Kusubia River by nightfall. They slept in a cave that night. The pig said to the dog, "Brother, there is only room for one of us inside, so you sleep there. I will sleep outside since I am used to getting wet."
In the morning, they awoke and the dog said to the pig, "Brother, last night I had a 'ghost-making-dream.'[4] I saw our father talking to his cross-cousin and he was saying that he intended to cook and eat you. He was gathering leaves and firewood and heating stones. He is wondering where we are." The two of them continued on until they approached the house. The dog Dani told the pig to wait and he went alone up to the house. There he saw that the man had recovered from his injuries in their absence and was gathering leaves for the earth oven as he had seen in the dream. He returned to where the pig was waiting and revealed what he had seen. "Brother, let us run away," he said to the pig. The pig bent his head in sorrow and said, "My father worked very hard to raise me. If he wishes to cut me up and eat me, then let him. But you must eat two of my legs, brother." The dog returned alone again to the house, and he heard the man remark to his cross-cousin, "The dog is up to something. He has not brought the pig back." They both became impatient as it grew dark. The dog returned once more to the pig and urged that they should both run away, and finally the pig agreed.
The pig said to the dog, "Brother, you climb the mountains; I will follow the base of them." The pig roamed through the valleys of the bush and ate bai~ -tree fruit shoots, dug for worms, these things. The dog hunted marsupials and slept in caves or near the bases of trees. At times they would meet and they would ask each other how each was faring, and they were both happy in their places. They became the first wild pig and wild dog. That is all.
The myth opens with a man and his sister coresiding along with the domestic animals appropriate to each of them: the man takes the dog Dani hunting and leaves his sister at home with the pig (substitution A : dog for sister; pig for brother). While the brother is gone, a cannibal uga'ana arrives and he and the sister plot the brother's murder and their own marriage (B : husband for brother; sister's husband for sister). They set a trap for the returning brother which underlines the terms of the identification outlined in A : the sister takes the place of the pig in the pig sty (garura ), and the brother becomes the victim of a "hunting trap" (C : sister for pig; brother for prey). The emnity between brother and sister realigns the positional referents of their associated domestic animals—the pig must side with the brother to balance the loss of the sister to the uga'ana . In other words, the pig must replace the sister, dosing triangle ABC . Second, the brother and sister having forfeited the moral content of their sibling loyalty, and hence their humanity, the dog and pig thus assume human moral
roles: it is the pig who nurses the man back to health and the dog who himself goes hunting. And, as the sister and the uga'ana trapped the brother, so do the two animals now trap them (D : animal trap for human trap; sister as cut-in-half "pig" and uga'ana as "prey") obviating A by replacing the opposition between brother and sister with that between animal and human.
Returning to the home of their "father" (hence the figurative siblingship of the dog and pig), the dog dreams of the impending treachery of the man. In effect, having replaced his sister by his cross-cousin, the man must once again oppose himself to the pig (E : cross-cousin for sister; cross-cousin for pig). This obviates B (cross-cousin for sister's husband) and creates the following analogy: as the sister and sister's husband (that is, a husband and wife pair) plotted against the woman's brother, so do the two cross-cousins plot against the domestic animals. The treachery of cross-cousins against animals replaced that of the sister and the uga'ana , closing triangle CDE .
The cumulative effect of these episodes is to replace the oppositional complementarity of certain human relationships with an analogous opposition between animals themselves. Having separated themselves once and for all from humans, the pig and dog oppose each other, one taking to the valleys and the other to the mountains (F : wild for domesticated animals), obviating A : "complementarity of pig and dog for that of brother and sister," and, obviating C , "emnity between wild animals and humans for that between brothers-in-law." Pig and dog, though nominally brothers, become figuratively cross-cousins to each other by inhabiting complementary ecological zones. Henceforth, man will conspire to trap wild pigs; wild dogs will steal men's game. By failing to "domesticate" his sister, the man loses the domestic companionship of his animals. The pig, in turn, becomes the mediator of the hostility between brothers-in-law (as an item of affinal payment). Finally, the ecological complementarity of pig and dog in the bush returns the plot to its original intersexual demarcation, that encompassed by the distinct relationship of men and women to opposed domestic animals.
The Foi in general tend to view any pair of animals that inhabit opposed ecological zones as "cross-cousins" to each other. There is a set of myths, all of them identical in plot, that account for these ecological placements. In chapter 7, I noted that one Foi myth relates that the cassowary and hornbill, who are cross-cousins, originally inhabited the sky and ground respectively and that they agreed to change places.
Nowadays, the hornbill always warns his cassowary cross-cousin of snare traps that men have set in its path. Identically, the fish and kotabera aquatic fern are cross-cousins, and they originally switched places, the kotabera emerging from the water to grow on the banks while the fish took its place underwater. Foi men note that one should not use kotabera ferns in the construction of a fish dam; the fern will move aside and allow its cross-cousin to escape.
Such complementarity of ecological or geographical zones also characterizes the relationship between Foi men and their Highlands trading partners, their somomena . As with one's affines, there are a set of delicate behavioral protocols that exist between somomena . I have already described the nature of such partnerships in chapter 4. The next two myths deal thematically with the kind of reciprocity that defines these relationships.
The Foi Man and the Weyamo Man
The following myth can be said to account for the geographical separation of the Foi and the Weyamo, the Highlanders who live north of the Mubi Valley. As I noted in chapter 2, the Foi describe their differences with the Weyamo in terms of a set of exaggeratedly opposed characteristics. They note that the Highlanders build their houses right on the ground and make their roofs with grass, rather than the raised houses with sago-leaf thatch roofs of the Foi. They describe the woven pubic sporrans the Highlands men wear in contrast to a Foi man's bark-cloth covering, and the Highlanders hirsuteness as opposed to the scanty-haired Foi. The Highlanders in turn view the Foi as uncanny sorcerers and the low-lying Mubi Valley as a place of unremitting illness (Sillitoe 1979:26).
In a longhouse village, a man and his wife once lived. The man would go hunting all the time and bring back meat, which he and his wife ate together. One time, the man's wife said to him, "I always eat all kinds of meat that you bring home, but one thing which you never bring home is tree grubs. Why do we not eat grubs?" The man replied, "Where shall I cut grubs? If I see a fallen tree that has grubs in it, I will bring them back." But his wife kept pestering him, and so one time he took his weapons and his string bag and went westward. He kept walking, a long hard journey. He came to one mountain that he climbed, and he looked on the other side. There he saw great amounts of sawdust from where tree grubs had bored through an old fallen tree. In it he found many grubs. Pleased, the man continued cutting, but in doing so the axe slipped and he cut himself
badly on the leg. He became dizzy and lost consciousness. After a while, he revived. He arose and saw that his "hard blood," his dotted blood [hamage dafa'a : also the word for women's menstrual blood"] had dried, and his "thin blood" [hamage ibu : literally "water blood"] had formed a little pool on the ground. He cut a section of new bamboo, and into one tube he put the hard blood and in another he put the watery blood, and he sealed both of them with leaves and left them near the base of a tree. Then, sitting there, the wound became cool and the cut stopped bleeding. He cut a stick to help him walk, and took his belongings and the grubs he had cut and returned to his village in the east. When he arrived home and his wife inquired as to what had befallen him, he said, "The way you kept pestering me for grubs it would seem that you wanted me to kill myself to get them; well, I just now almost succeeded!" and he told her how he had cut himself. "Aiyo!" the woman cried in sympathy, and they cooked the grubs and ate them.
About a month later, the man's leg was healed. So he went back to where he had found the fallen tree in order to see what happened to the two bamboo tubes of blood. He climbed the same mountain and looked again on the other side. Aiyo! Where before he had just seen bush, there was now a big clearing. There was a large garden full of cucumbers and other vegetables. He did not walk through the garden but circled around the edge of it. Aiyo! On the other side of the garden there were two big houses. One was a Highlander's grass-roofed house, with a grove of casuarina trees growing near it; the other was a Foi house with a sago leaf roof. On the verandah of the house he saw sitting there a Foi man. The visitor looked inside the house and on the fireplace rack was a great deal of marsupial meat, black from smoke and very dry. He did not touch the meat but only looked with his eyes. He then heard another man go inside the other house. Looking, he saw a Weyamo man, carrying a string bag full of marsupial meat. His body was very hairy and he wore a pubic apron of knitted string, and there were cordyline leaves hanging from the back of his belt. The visitor stayed hidden and watched from inside the Foi man's house. Presently, the Foi man went inside and saw the visitor there and said, "Ai! What are you doing here?" And the visitor replied, "No, having wandered in this direction for no reason, I have arrived." The Foi man replied, "Then you must sleep here," and he introduced him to the Weyamo man. The two men steam-cooked one of the marsupials they had killed. The visitor asked the Foi man, "How did you come to arrive here?" The Foi man answered, "No, we came here for no reason." Then the visitor told the two men the story of his accident and how he had left the two bamboo tubes of blood. "I think you two have come from this blood," he concluded. "Yes! That is it!" they agreed. Then the two men said to the visitor, "You must keep visiting us, but you only. Do not tell another man. You will visit us and get pearl shells and meat, but if you reveal our existence to another man, these things will be lost to you." The men ate meat together and slept. The next morning, the Foi and the Weyamo man each brought the visitor two string bags full of marsupial meat, and each one
also gave him one string bag of pearl shells and cowrie. Taking them, the Foi man said, "Close your eyes," and the man did so. The Foi man then spoke a magic spell and struck the man gently on the shoulder and he heard the Foi man say "Open your eyes." He did so and found to his amazement that he was back at his house. He did not tell his wife what had happened, but continued to go hunting as before. He shared the meat with everyone in the village. He also took two gutted marsupials and gave them to the man with whom he shared a fireplace in the longhouse, his eresaro . They ate meat together habitually. The man continued visiting the Foi and Weyamo in the west and brought home shells and meat.
One time his eresaro . who was an uga'ana , said to him, "Ai, eresaro-o , before you never brought home all this meat. Where have you found it all?" But he replied, "No, just my traps only. That is the only way I find meat." But the uga'ana was suspicious and kept begging him to reveal where he had found the meat, following him everywhere and pestering him. Finally the man in exasperation told him. "All right. Take your string bag and bow and arrows and go toward the west. You will come upon a big log there near the base of a mountain. Climb that mountain and then...," but the uga'ana interrupted him, saying, "Don't go on, I know!" In the morning, the uga'ana took his poor, worn-out weapons and his tom string bag and left. He came upon the mountain where the fallen log was. "Ai! This is it!" he thought. Climbing up to the top, he arrived at the garden and went straight to the middle of it, eating a great deal of cucumber and pitpit that was growing there. He came up to the houses and, looking inside, saw a large quantity of meat inside. Still eating the vegetables, he made a fire and cooked some of the meat. When he finished eating, he sat there. Presently, the Weyamo man arrived. He saw that the uga'ana had helped himself to meat and vegetables in his absence and averted his face in annoyance and anger. The Foi man arrived later, and he too was angry at the uga'ana 's behavior. They asked him bluntly and without invitation, "What do you want." The uga'ana replied, "No, having wandered in this direction, I have come only to visit." They all slept and the next morning, they gave the uga'ana not good fresh meat but only dried-out inedible meat. The Foi man told him to close his eyes and he spoke the spell again. But when the uga'ana heard him say, "Open your eyes," he found himself in the middle of the deep bush, completely lost. He wandered around, swearing and cursing the two men, and finally died of hunger.
The first man noticed that his eresaro had not returned. He returned to the place of the two men and told them how he had revealed their location to the uga'ana . "Did he arrive here or not?" he asked finally. "Yes, he arrived, but we sent him back," they replied. "He never returned," the first man said. He took gifts of shell and meat again and returned to his house. The next day he went back to the two men's house. But when he arrived, he saw that a landslide had obliterated the houses and gardens. On top of the mountain there remained only casuarina trees and at the bottom of the mountain, in the valley, there were only sago palms. That is all.
Because kara'o tree oil is the most important item of trade between
the Foi and their Highlands trading partners, it is not surprising that this myth uses the metaphorical equation between kara'o and menstrual blood to phrase the differentiation of the Weyamo and Foi in procreative terms. The story begins with a man and his wife who live together. Though he provides her with meat, she insists on eating tree grubs (substitution A : "cultivated" wild-meat source for hunted-meat source; "penis" for meat [perhaps a veiled hint that the man should bring home wealth objects]). While cutting a log for grubs deep in the bush, the man accidentally cuts himself on the leg, whereupon he "dies"—that is, loses consciousness.[5] When he revives, he finds his blood in its two forms on the ground: the "dirty" or menstrual blood and the nonlethal "watery" blood (B : blood for grubs; female substance for male grubs). He leaves each blood in a separate bamboo tube—figurative gestation, especially since in a sense the "penis" (tree grub) was the source of the "menstrual" blood.
Returning some weeks later to the same spot, the man finds a large human settlement and discovers that the two bamboos have turned into a Highlander and a Foi man (C : men for blood;
The second half of the story is concerned with the resulting geographic separation of the Foi and the Weyamo man, which begins by replacing the distinction between the Foi and the Highlander with that between the visitor and his eresaro . As I noted in chapter 5, one's eresaro is the man in the longhouse with whom one shares a fireplace and food, creating an analogy between the exchange relationship already depicted and a coresident sharing one. Unlike the first man, the uga'ana fails to observe the respectful solicitude that one should toward a trading friend, and as a result he dies (literally rather than
figuratively) in the deep bush (E : uga'ana for first man; distinction between eresaro [sharers] for distinction between Foi and Weyamo [exchangers]:
Tononawi and Aiyabe
The plot of the following tale is closely parallel to that of the preceding myth and explores the reciprocity involved in revenge killing.
There was once a very large man's house. Other men lived there with their women and children. They all ate tree grubs regularly. But two men of this village, along with their wives and children, never ate tree grubs. Their wives kept nagging them because they were hungry for grubs. So one day one of the men left. He went all by himself to a place in the west which was forbidden to men. "Don't go there," other men would always say. He kept walking west, and he heard the continuous sound of an axe chopping wood, as if cutting grubs. He stealthily approached. Aiyo! There was a large cassowary that had been killed. There he saw a large stone axe, its handle resting on the ground and itself chopping wood and gathering grubs. The axe itself had dug two shallow holes in the ground. They were already full of grubs; the axe was in the process of filling a third one. The man stood silently. Then the axe stood up quietly, not moving. The man said, "I have come here; if you are really a man then continue cutting grubs; I will not interfere." And the axe continued m cut grubs by itself. The axe spoke to the man, "Take these two plates of grubs and take the cassowary also." And the man took them and went back m his house in the east. In the middle of his garden there was a small firewood house and there he singed off the fur of the cassowary and mumued it [cooked it in earth oven]. He filled bamboo robes with grubs and cooked and ate them.
In the village there was another man with whom he shared a woman's house and who slept near him in the men's house. The first man went back again to where he found the axe and got grubs and cassowary. He went back a third time and a fourth time. Then the other man who lived with him said to him, "Brother, tell me: how did you kill those cassowaries, how did you get those grubs? Tell me." The man kept asking him. Finally, the first man said, "Oa! Go that way, to the west. If you hear the sound of wood chopping, then go there. But do not interfere; the axe itself will cut the grubs." The second man said, "Yes," and taking a large bilum he went to the west. He heard the sound of the axe chopping wood and followed the sound. The axe looked up and saw that it was not the same man as before; it was another man. The second man saw a large stone axe was standing there by itself silently. He saw one hole in the ground had a cassowary in it; another was full of grubs; and the axe was filling up a third hole. The man approached the axe and silently stood there. Then the second man took the axe by the handle and tried to cut grubs himself, but as he tried, the axe broke in the middle of the handle. A great quantity of blood flowed and fell down to the ground. The man was frightened and, leaving the grubs and the cassowary, he ran away back to his house. His eresaro , the first man, was waiting there for him thinking that they two would eat grubs and cassowary that night, but the second man arrived withdrawn and worried and empty-handed. The first man asked him, "What happened?" and the second man replied, "No, the axe did not come." He was ashamed and did not reveal what had happened.
The first man went by himself back to that place, to look for the axe. Eke! There were many tree grubs there. But the cassowary was missing. He looked around and saw that much blood had been spilled. The axe and the cassowary were gone; only the grubs were there. The man continued on toward the west and heard the sound of other axes crying. He looked and saw a large longhouse. He went inside. Eke! There in one comer on the central floorway was the large axe he had seen, with its handle, there lying on the floor at one of the corners [a man's body is placed on the central floor opposite his fireplace. Therefore, if the axe was placed in the corner, then it must have been a "head-man" axe, for this is where headmen sleep in Foi longhouses]. There were no men, just the axes. When the man went inside, the axes ceased crying. They were lined up on both sides of the floorway, resting between the lower roof rafter and the sago-leaf roof itself; the lower roof rafter was their "pillow-bar." They were thus lined up and their heads were bent in shame and sorrow, from one end of the house to the other. There were also two big lines of women's houses outside on either side of the longhouse, but there were no children or men. The axes were silent now. The man himself sat down and he too cried. He said, "Eheh. This thing that helped me so well, I will not be able to use it now. This other man kept pestering me for no reason and I told him where to go," he said in sorrow to the other axes. He kept crying for a while and then stopped. He was about to go back to his house in the east when the axe who was hung up eresaro to him, that is, on the other side
of the fireplace from where he was sitting, began to move back and forth. Moving back and forth, the axe said to the man in a low unclear voice, "It is now the second day [after death]; on the fifth day, bring that other man back here." The man heard the axe and agreed. The axe did not speak dearly or loudly; out of nothing [i.e., having no mouth] yet it spoke. "Yes," the man said again and he left.
He went back and did not say anything to his eresaro . Then the fifth day arrived. He quietly scratched his eresaro 's arm and motioned him to follow. They each took a large bilum and quickly left. He said nothing to the other man. They came up to the place where the grubs had been left and they continued on, until they arrived at the axes' longhouse. There were many pigs there, having their hair singed off preparatory to cooking, and the smoke from all the fires was very thick [they were preparing to have the kabaye habora, the Fifth Day mourning feast]. The axes stood around the fires on their handles and kept lifting pigs and singeing their fur. There were no men, only axes. Then the first man motioned the second man to follow him into the longhouse. He pointed to the empty sleeping place of the dead axe and told the second man, "Sit here." Aiyo! Hanging up on the rafter, eresaro to the second man, was a very large axe; this was the replacement for the dead axe; this new axe had taken over its sleeping place. It was the same axe that had directed the first man to bring the second man to the longhouse. Its former sleeping place was empty and it was hanging on the dead axe's place. The axes had not yet cut their pigs; not being men, they had not yet cut their pigs as men do. Then the large axe hanging eresaro to the second man came down and struck the man on the back of the head. All the other axes gathered around and they struck him on the back of the head, severing the head, and then cutting him all over the body. Having done so, they all turned into men, desiring to show the first man that they were really true men. They gave pork to the first man, and the first man also took the second man's severed head. He took the head back to the east and planted it. There, the first sago of the variety called honamo came up. This man, the second man, his name was Tononawi. The first man's name was Aiyabe. That is all.
The myth nicely conveys the overliteralness that sometimes characterizes Foi metonymic usages. As I described in chapter 5, the Foi call a man of status a kabe anubae~ , a "head man" but literally a "man male-egg." The head, the "male egg" is contrapuntal to the penis: while the head is the organ of socially (that is oratorically) articulated maleness, the penis connotes a more individual and private male continuity and power.
Metonymically associated with these organs are the tools that men use, especially axes. Men explained to me that stone axes were very scarce before the introduction of steel implements and that stone blades traded from Highland areas to the north fetched commanding prices in shell wealth and pigs.[6] For this reason, they were the property
of wealthy men only, who would rent them to other men for a smaller fee in shells. Male domestic labor is therefore encompassed within the paradigm of achieved male status, for it is only the latter that makes the former possible.
The myth begins with a man who, while searching for tree grubs, comes upon an axe apparently cutting grubs by itself (substitution A : axe for grubs; male tool for male meat). Sensing the true human identity of the metonymically represented head-man, the visitor acts properly circumspect and is rewarded with a gift of grubs and other meat (B : meat for axe; external trading friendship for nominal intralong-house brotherhood). But another man in the longhouse with whom the man shares a woman's house keeps pestering him to reveal the source of the meat. The first man finally tells him the location, and the second man departs. However, in his eagerness to appropriate the axe for himself, he kills it, thereby killing the man it really represents (C : death of axe; severing of axe-man syntagm; blood plus grubs for axe), as the Foi would consider an axeless man socially "dead" in real life. The first man then returns and arrives at the longhouse of the axes, where the extent of this syntagmatic identity is finally revealed to him: it was not just a man, but a head-man that the axe stood for (D : head-man for axe; head-man for grubs [obviating A : "head" for "penis"]). Therefore, it is only another head-man that can replace him. As head-men, the axes demand compensation in the form of revenge homicide, which the first man arranges (E : man for axe), obviating B by repaying the debt in meat. The axes return the gift with the head of Tononawi (F : head for man) replacing the axe-man syntagm of A : their axe-man relationship having been severed, they must resume human form and offer "meat" in its place. The man plants the skull of Tononawi and from it sprouts the first sago palm of the honamo variety (
The Place of the Pearl Shells
The last two stories concern the origin of pearl shells and the properties of exchange that make them necessary. The following story was
recorded by Williams (1977:314) and, as Wagner notes, is closely parallel to the Daribi tale "The Origin of Pearl Shells at Iuro" (1978:70-71).
This was when the men and women of Herebo lived in the longhouse at Iburio. One time the men of Barutage longhouse announced their Usane. At Iburio, there were only rich men living there, but one man was a poor man. This man was married. When the time approached for the Usane, all the women set to work beating new bark cloth, making string belts and skirts. The poor man's wife also made decorations for herself, but for her husband she did not weave armbands and he was forced to ask his clans-women to do so. This man had no pearl shells or cowrie shells. They were about to go but, before they left, the woman's brothers' wives said to her, ``Your husband is not going to the Usane for he has no shells. You stay here and look after our pigs while we are gone." Then everyone left for Barutage longhouse upstream. The woman was very angry at her husband. She took off all the new clothing she had made and rubbed ashes on her skin. This caused her husband to feel great shame.
So he took his bow and pronged arrow and pulled his canoe downstream along the Mubi. At the mouth of Yefikiribu Creek, he tied his canoe and followed the creek upstream on foot. He followed it along the side of Koroba Sabe until he arrived at the head of Dorobo creek. There he looked and saw in the branches of a tree a female bush fowl. The man shot at it. One of the prongs of his arrow broke off in the bush fowl's body and it flew off, leaving a trail of blood. He followed the trail of blood up a long, steep hill [Koroba Sabe] and on top, he arrived at a clear place. There were cordyline, flowers, crotons, and the colors reminded him of a decorated stone club. There was a small house built on a piece of find red ground. Around the outside of the house, fragments of pearl shells and cowrie shells littered the ground like stones. The man also saw a man there of strikingly handsome appearance with the countenance of a head-man and with fine smooth skin. This man was removing a thorn from his foot. He saw the poor man approach and said, "Brother, why have you come here?" and the poor man replied, "No brother, I was just wandering in this direction and have thus arrived here." Then the handsome man said, ``I seem to have stepped on a mafu thorn while walking around the house outside here." But the man looked above the door of the house and saw the prong of his arrow that had broken off in the bush fowl hanging up there. "It is this man I shot," the poor man thought. "He is really a bush fowl." The bush-fowl man went inside the house and told the man to come. Inside the house was covered with pearl shells and cowrie; they were stuck in between the sago leaf of the roof and were lined up against the walls. They were also outside. The bush-fowl man's head was covered with sweat that fell off in drops as he turned his head. He prepared tobacco for smoking and gave it to the man. Having done so, he took a bark box that he had made that was there behind him and reached inside. For the man's wife, he took out five beautiful pearl shells for her to decorate with. For the man, he gave
two pearl shells, earring-shells, wrist-shells, nose-shell, nassa -shell headband, cassowary feather plume and other feathers for decoration. "Now you must go and eat pork," the bush-fowl man said. "You and your wife decorate yourselves and go. At the Usane you will see a man who looks exactly like me. My name is Kubirabiwi, or Kubiradare. A man with my name who looks exactly like me will be there. You will think it is me but do not call out to him." Then taking the things, the man returned.
He saw his wife sitting in her house eating ashes in protest. But he simply told her, "Wife, go wash the ashes off your skin, we too are going to the Usane." They both put their decorations on again. Kubirabiwi had also told the man before he left, "You yourself eat the pork. When you obtain pork for these shells, you yourself eat it. Do not give it to me." Now the two finished decorating for the Usane, and this poor man had now become a head-man. He pulled the canoe upstream to the mouth of Magihimu Creek, and then, because the creek becomes too narrow for a canoe, walked part of the way, past a large mountain where there are many large bush-fowl nests. Taking another canoe, he arrived at Barutage long-house. The men there were preparing for the dance, and they said to him as he approached, "Brother, you've come," and he replied, "Yes, my wife was very unhappy about staying behind so we've come." Then turning around, he took out his pearl shells and distributed them amongst all the men. Afterward, the recipients gave back pork to those who had given them shells. The man made a very large parcel of viscera and put one huge pig-leg with it. He had also received shells too in the exchange, and these he put with the pork and viscera. Then taking these, he walked up and down the floor looking for Kubirabiwi. He had been told not to call out his name or try to give him pork, but the man was doing so. Finally, at the back wall, he saw Kubirabiwi sitting. "Kubirabiwi, Kubiradare, come and get your pork! Kubirabiwi, Kubiradare, come and get your pearl shells!" he cried out. Then, sweating heavily, Kubirabiwi said, "It is not I, brother. Perhaps you want another man. I am not the man you seek." At this, the man was ashamed.
That night, they danced the Usane. At this time Kubirabiwi left. He took none of the things the man had tried to give him. That night a big rainstorm came and thunder and lighting struck. The men stopped dancing and went outside the house to look. Where the Baru flowed into the Mubi, the water had risen and was swollen and silt-filled and red. "What is this?" the man thought. The men and women took their canoes and paddled downstream. "We had to leave our canoes on the other side of Magihimu but now we can paddle right through because the creek is so swollen," They remarked. They saw the ground crumbling along the banks around them, and from the direction of Koroba Sabe they saw trees and vines running swiftly downstream. Koroba Sabe had fallen into the water and was being broken apart by the swift river. The water was red with silt and bubbly. It carried Kubirabiwi's house and all his shells with it. It reached Du'ubari longhouse downstream along the Mubi, then Harabuyu long-house. It joined with the Nembi River and reached Foi territory, going past
Humane, Gobe, and Kadobo longhouses. It flowed into the Giko [Kikori] River past the territory of the Kewa people who live in the northern Gulf Province and finally flowed into the ocean. That is where the pearl shells have been found from that day on.
The unstated opening of this story (and presumably Williams' version) occurs when a man without pearl shells, shamed by his poverty, goes hunting in search of bird feathers for decorations (substitution A : bird feathers for pearl shells). Sighting a bush fowl, he shoots it and follows as it escapes with the arrow (B : bush fowl for bird feathers). On top of a long spur he comes upon a human house inhabited by a head-man with the same wound as the bush fowl (C : man for bush fowl), revealing the bird's identity as Kubirabiwi. Because his identity has been revealed, he attempts to bind the man to secrecy by making him a gift of shell wealth and decorations (D : shells for man; shell decorations for bird-feather decorations [obviating A ]). As long as the secret of the source of the pearl shells is uncompromised, the man is permitted to use them to exchange for pork at the Usane (E : pork for shells). But against his warning, the man attempts to give pork and shells to (the double of) Kubirabiwi, thus making public what the man had been told to keep secret (F : revealed man for pork and shells, obviating C ). This leads to the disappearance of the local source of the pearl shells (and perhaps completing the circle "pork for bird feathers").
This story posits a local origin of pearl shells that makes explicit their analogy to eggs that I noted in chapter 5. The bush fowl in particular has decidedly human characteristics for the Foi since, in clearing a large area of the forest floor for twigs and debris with which to build its mounded nest, it is said to "make a garden." Its nest is called its "base" (ga ) by the Foi. As Wagner suggests, the reproduction of birds and other egg-laying creatures is constituted by the spontaneous and intermittent creation and destruction of their eggs. Humans, on the other hand, are obliged to "pass their 'eggs' around and never hatch them" (1978:65).
The sequence of substitutions in "The Place of the Pearl Shells" is feathers-bird-hidden man-shells-pork-revealed man-(feathers). One could say that this sequence is destroyed by the implied exchange of pork for bird feathers. More to the point, the (hidden) metaphor of man-as-bird that facilitated the whole sequence was obviated by the public acknowledgment of a debt by a man who had brought shells but had only gone into the bush to get feathers—that is, what occurred in the bush could have been deduced by a clever spectator. Kubirabiwi
purchased his secret back from the hunter who discovered it by giving him shells. In the end, then, a private act of obtaining shells was made public by the man who felt an irresistible urge to reciprocate, thus destroying the secret source of the shells and making them public: that is, everyone could then obtain them through exchange. The myth thus first posits exchange as a secret and, when the secret is revealed, exchange, like the pearl shells themselves, becomes universal. Or, to put it another way, the exigencies of public (human) exchange obviate the (birdlike) production of pearl shells (cf. A. J. Strathern 1980).
It is therefore not pearl shells themselves that create human sociality but their movement or flow:
[T]he exigencies of display and circulation, elemental to the cultural significance of shells as ornament and wealth, obviate both the secrecy of rare goods available only to some and the sources of these goods. Shells in fact have no source, for they pass ideally from person to person in a never-ending rhythm of human marriage and procreation. (Wagner 1978:67-68)
This point is given cosmological significance in the last myth.
The Heart of the Pearl Shell
In a longhouse village, there was an unmarried young man. He wanted to marry a woman, and he gave pearl shells to her line. They said, "These pearl shells we will not take." The young man killed a pig and gave it to them, and they also refused it. "I want the heart of the pearl shells," the woman's brother said. "Your shells and pigs I do not want. I want only the pearl shell heart," he said. The young man heard this and departed. Downstream he paddled his canoe until he came up to another longhouse. "I have come looking for the heart of the pearl shell," but the men replied, "This thing we have never seen. We pay bridewealth with regular pearl shells, cowrie, and pigs only." They showed him their wealth objects, but he only left them saying, "These things I offered my wife's line but they refused." But the men could only answer, "We never pay bridewealth with these pearl-shell hearts." The young man continued paddling downstream. He visited twelve more longhouses downstream and got the same reply from all the men there. Finally he arrived at the last longhouse of human habitation. It was a longhouse with only head-men living there. They prevented all men from going further downstream. "This is the last house of men, you can go no further. Downstream is only the bubbling sound of the underground river," they used to say. They said to the young man, "Your journey is over. Return to your longhouse upstream." They too showed him pearl shells, cowrie, and pigs as the other men had done. The young man agreed, but when he left, he turned his canoe around and continued downstream.
He arrived at the spot where the river ran underground. There beneath the water he saw the reflection of something colored brilliantly red. He also saw what appeared to be red objects on the bottom of the river that had apparently fallen in from a height and were now completely submerged. He looked up abruptly and saw high above a piece of beautiful red ground. He kept paddling his canoe downstream and arrived at a place of habitation. There were flowers, crotons, in great quantity and variety. He moored his canoe and went up. There was a house and latrine. The ground was slippery. He went inside. There was a young man of healthy and handsome countenance there. He looked up and said, "Brother, so you have come!" "Yes, I was traveling in this direction and so have arrived here." The other man ate, and when finished said, "Stay here, I am going a short distance upstream." He left. A young woman came and cooked and gave the visitor food, but he did not eat. He also had not eaten what the other man had given him. The visitor still abstained from eating. They slept that night, and all the while the visitor watched the handsome boy carefully.
In the morning, the handsome young man said, "Let us go downstream." He went to the side of the house and took a long thin piece of bamboo. The visitor watched only and said nothing. They went on foot toward the east and came up to a very steep valley. There the visitor heard a sound as if many birds were flying high above, a whispering whooshing flapping sound, the sound of twittering and singing and flight through air. It felt as if a wind was blowing. They stepped into the valley, and their skin and hair was cut by slivers of flying pearl shells. There were pearl shells flying all around them like birds, making a breeze and accounting for the sound the visitor heard. The young man took the long thin bamboo and stuck it above and speared one of the pearl shells. Pulling it in the visitor looked and saw a truly beautiful, unflawed, beautifully red, perfectly round, uncut pearl shell. It looked just like the red awayo hae~ stones that are kept in the longhouse as decorations. The handsome man took two pearl shells in this manner and wrapped them up. Then he turned to the visitor and said, "You have come to search for the heart of the pearl shell. Take them then and with these obtain your wife." The visitor kept spearing the hearts until he had enough to fill up two baskets. They divided these between them. Then they returned to the house and shared food. He put his basket in the canoe and the young man said to him, "Close your eyes," and he did so. He stood up in the front of the canoe with his eyes closed, and when he heard "Open them" he did so, and saw that he was at the canoe harbor of his longhouse. He went up to the house and put the two pearl shell hearts in the woman's house and took the fragments of shell to his wife's brother and gave them to him. There were two of the red round pearl shell hearts. The other items were the broken shards and fragments of the pearl shell "skin" which the two men collected in quantities and divided between themselves. The pearl shell skins were flying around the hearts and thus the hearts had to be carefully speared. The skins were broken and pitted looking, but the hearts were smooth and unflawed.
"Your pearl shell heart is here. Come and get it," and he gave him one of the pitted bad shells. The wife's brother said "l won't take this," and he wanted to strike his sister's husband over the head with it. Then the first man went and took the two hearts that he had put in the woman's house and gave them to his wife's brother. "Ogo! This is what I want," he said. Then he said, "Now you can fetch my sister," but the first man replied, "No, tomorrow I will fetch her; let them distribute the pay then." He then married his wife.
Another time another man approached him. "Brother, I want to marry a woman but I have no pearl shell hearts and they are asking me for them" The man told him he had no knowledge of these. But the other man kept pestering him and following him around everywhere, so the first man told him how to get to the underground river, of the red objects there and the canoe harbor. The last thing he said was "Be polite and obey his wishes." The man agreed, and the next morning he took four baskets—the first man had told him to take only two but he took four instead—and left. He went from longhouse to longhouse as the first man did, making disparaging comments on the shells and pigs offered to him. He went past the last longhouse and came up to the underground river and went up to where the red ground and the crotons and flowers were. "Yes! This is really something else!" he thought in triumph. He cut sugarcane and picked food and quickly ate everything there was to eat in the man's garden. He met the handsome man and sat in his house. The man said to him, "Stay here; I'm going upstream a bit," but the impolite man said, "Wait! We'll both go!" but the man refused. "What? Do you wish me to stay here alone?" and he complained again. Finally he relented and waited while the man was gone. The woman came and gave him food, which he quickly and gluttonously finished. The man returned and saw that the visitor had eaten all the food. He said nothing however. They slept, and in the morning the young man said, "Let us go upstream now," but the visitor said, "Why? What shall we do there?" "For no reason," the young man said impatiently. Then he took the long thin bamboo. "Ai brother! Are we to remove breadfruit?" the visitor cried. But the young man did not explain. They left and arrived at the deep gorge. The handsome man was thinking all along, "This man here is not good, the first man was better." The pearl shell fragments flew about and one struck the visitor on the top of the head causing a great deal of blood. The young man speared pearl shell hearts, but these ones were not the beautiful red ones that he had given the first man but worthless insect-eaten shells. He wrapped them up and gave him the shells. "Here are your pearl shell hearts for you to obtain your wife with." The visitor thought to himself, "The first man did not tell me about these bad shells." The visitor filled his baskets with these rotten shells. He and the other man shared them between them and also ate food together. As the visitor was ready to go, he asked the second, "Emo'o , are you not going to say your magic?" and the handsome man told him to close his eyes and stand in the canoe. When the visitor heard him say "Open your eyes" he found himself back near his canoe harbor. He got out and carried the baskets up
to the woman's house. He took the two bad hearts the man had given him, but the woman's brother said, "These bad pearl shell hearts I will not take. They are bad." And this man was not given that woman. Thus it is told. That is all.
This story objectifies the two qualities of pearl shells: their essence or "heart" is that they must continually move from person to person. Their objective state, however, is that they are always owned at any point in time by a particular man, and hence are stationary. The plot begins when a young man's prospective affines reject the "objective" quality of his pearl shells and insist on the "heart" of the pearl shell, which the narrator of this story literally called ma'ame gamu'u , "pearl shell heart" (substitution A : negative for positive affines; stationary for moving pearl shells and woman). In a sense, the "flow" of women is blocked because the pearl shells given lack their essence, which is their movement. The young man departs on a search for the pearl shell hearts. And though he himself "flows" from community to community, the shells that are offered to him along the way remain stationary (that is, he refuses them—B : movement of man for movement of woman and shells), thus caricaturing in inverse form the essence of Foi society: that men remain stationary while women and shells move.
The young man then leaves the area of human habitation (C : non-human for human place). There he discovers an underground river at the bottom of which is reflected the objectified flow of the pearl shells he seeks. A handsome young man also appears and welcomes him (D : positive nonhuman "brother" for negative human affines, obviating A ). The two men then travel upstream (reversing the young man's original downstream direction), implicitly locating the source of pearl shell hearts with the source of water in the west, thereby equating the two (see chapter 3). There they find the heart (or source) of the pearl shell, metaphorized as stationary airborne red objects while around them fly the broken and pitted pearl shell "skins," that is, the metaphorized aspect of pearl shells that does not move (E : objectified flow [hearts] for eternal flow, obviating B : the shells that the human men offered him were stationary [owned] shells and hence unsuitable). The nonhuman young man spears these hearts and gives them to his guest, whereupon he is magically returned to his village. There he gives the pearl shell hearts to his affines and "fastens" his bride (F : pearl shell hearts for human woman).
The inversion of the plot incorporates the theme of the contrasting foolish brother. His rude behavior at the young man's house matches
the lack of solicitude that the first young man's affines demonstrated (inverse D : negative for positive guest). When he accompanies the non-human man upstream to the place of the pearl shell hearts, he is cut by the flying shell fragments (inverse C : flow of blood for flow of water; red blood for red pearl shell hearts). As a result of his impolite behavior, he is given worthless pearl shell hearts that block the flow of women, since these shells are refused by his affines (inverse B : non-movement of shells and women for movement of man). In other words, the flow passes him by. The moral force of the inverted myth is to create the solicitude of affines and trading partners, for this politesse objectifies the flow of sociality as much as the media (the pearl shells) that make it possible.
Chapter XII
The Hidden Myth
Boy, your Upper Arm myth
You can no longer tell
Boy, your Little Eye myth
You can no longer tell
Boy, your Long Nose myth
You can no longer tell
Boy, your Middle-of-the-Chest myth
You can no longer tell
—memorial song for Hibare, a So'onedobo man of Hegeso
The names of the myths fisted in the above sorohabora memorial chant are not the titles of real tales. The terms are stylized and poetic forms by which body parts are referred to in such literary contexts as memorial songs and myths. More importantly, they are evidence of the kind of metaphorical detotalization (Lévi-Strauss 1966: chap. 5) that characterizes the memorial songs and sago chants as I described them in chapter 6. A man's life is represented by the sequence of places where his actions and work made visible impressions; the songs express the total man as a series of interconnected places.
In the figurative manner of the above chant, the deceased is also represented by the sum total of those myths he told during his lifetime. Like the geographical places the man occupied, each myth represents a fragment of Foi life, as a man's arms, legs, chest, and other body parts are the components of his corporeal existence, and of which his territory is but an extension in geographical space.
In chapter 7, and throughout the analysis of the individual myths themselves, I have suggested that, broadly speaking, the theme of each myth can be seen as representative of some point along the obviation sequences I diagrammed in figures 7 and 9. As opposed to the Foi's own conception of the individual life cycle that they depict in their memorial song, this sequence represents my analytical construction of the collective cycle of Foi sociality.
In order, therefore, for me to draw any conclusions concerning the relationship between the symbolism of Foi mythology and social pro-
cess, I must first explore the relationship between individual and collective representations that the Foi themselves recognize. In chapters 1 and 7 I suggested that as a corpus, the myths represent charters for magic spells, the full range of which aid the Foi in their productive activities. The spells themselves are kept secret, but the myths that account for their origin are general knowledge, recounted over and over again. These myths account not for the spells' efficacy, which is a function of the magical words themselves, but of the place of such productive activities within a socially and morally construed conceptual world.
The places that a man frequents during his lifetime, his territory away from the longhouse, represent the private and individual part of his productive life. His public life consists of the exchanges and ceremonies he participated in, the speeches he made and myths he recounted, and so forth. It is after death, during the composition and performance of the memorial songs, that these two hitherto separate realms are juxtaposed, compared, and exposed as metaphors of each other.
It may be argued at this point that my undifferentiated use of the concept of metaphor is insufficient as a starting (and ending) point for analysis. Some may intuitively feel that it is unwarranted to use the same term to describe both the narrow equation "bamboo equals penis" and the broader one of "life span equals territory." But in this dilemma lies the key to understanding the difficulty that faces functionalist approaches to the study of symbolism and meaning: How do we decompose a symbol or gradate a meaning? Must we admit that the second of the above equations has "more meaning" than the first? Can we say that because a metaphorical equation is more central or more pervasive or more expandable than another that it has more meaning? A meaning certainly may have more connotations, but it is precisely because connotation is not the same as meaning that I pose this question.
A myth is a series of successively embedded metaphors, as I have tried to show through analysis, and the way such metaphors succeed each other is also complex and admits of many interpretations, many meanings. Yet a single myth is itself a small thing when measured against the totality of the cultural tradition it is embedded in. A myth can be seen as a miniature culture that has a beginning and an end, unlike "real" life. But a myth appears as a small thing when seen in relation to that life, just as the equation "bamboo equals penis" seems
small in comparison with broader, more encompassing equations. Meaning, as I have tried to stress, is above all relative. One can expand the "small" equation "pearl shell equals flower" until it encompasses every meaning in Foi culture (indeed, the word for pearl shell, let us recall, is also the word for "something, anything, everything"), and one can at the same time restrict the "large" equation "affine equals consanguine" to the very particular exchange between two men who are cross-cousins to each other. My use of the concept of metaphor, itself deliberately broad, is intended to capture this sense of the relativity of cultural meaning and the idea that it is gratuitous to attempt to divide it into discrete units.
It is in these terms that I see myths as metaphors of real life, both in the narrow sense in which I have dissected them individually, and in broader terms—the relation between the myths as a collection of Foi life images and the individual men and women whose experiences the myths draw upon in the depiction of these images.
As I have noted, the description of places in memorial chants centers around the productive activities a man carried out in them during his lifetime, in particular, the hunting traps he set. A woman's memorial song characteristically focuses on the creeks in which she fished. These two activities, hunting and fishing, are among the most pervasively associated with magical procedures for the Foi. In performing the sorohabora , the existence of men's and women's private repertoire of magical and productive techniques is made public, albeit in the veiled form of "leaf talk," of which the mourning poems are a variety.
If the memorial songs represent this form of productive and geographic detotalization, then the myths illustrate an opposed symbolic function: they integrate productive activities and associated magical spells within a transcendent moral statement, focusing not on particular individuals but rather on resynthesizing the actions of individual men and women within collectively defined social and moral predicaments.
These predicaments emerge as such largely as a result of my own analytical decomposition of each myth, but the process of symbolic obviation they represent also informs the ambiguities of Foi daily experience. As an example, let us consider the two myths of the last chapter which concern the source and disappearance of meat and wealth items, "The Foi Man and the Weyamo Man" and "The Place of the Pearl Shells." The dilemma for Foi men is that these items must be shared and displayed, yet the source of them is each man's jealously
guarded prerogative, both in the sense of the magic that men use to lend them success in obtaining them, and in the secrecy with which men woo and maintain generous trading partners. The imagined state in which the scarcity of these items is the result of men's inability to maintain this secrecy or to relate appropriately to their trading partners comments on the difficulty of controlling these wealth items in real life.
To take another example, in Foi social process wealth items serve to mediate the competition among men for marriageable women; they regulate men's access to spouses and affines. In the myth "Fonomo and Kunuware" (chapter 8), the obviation concerns the breakdown of this process, in that two men must lethally compete for a single woman whom they have both successfully marked for marriage. In real life, such competition is indeed often viewed as deadly by Foi men, since a woman whose male relatives rejected her lover as an appropriate husband might conspire with that suitor to sorcerize the man her relatives had chosen instead.
In this sense it may be, as Lévi-Strauss maintains, that "myths provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction" (1967:226), but it may be just as accurate to say that the plot of the myth itself creates the very social paradox around which centers its obviating conclusion. Indeed, what the myths offer is the creation of paradox without any necessary resolution at all (cf. Gell 1975:342). All that Foi myth does is to present such contradictions in terms of images not given by the conventions of normative social process and language, thus revealing the analogies between cultural categories and distinctions. Burridge, in his study of narrative forms of the Tangu of northern New Guinea, suggests that:
Not exhausted by the referents of ordinary usage, these words communicate that which ordinary language does not: they evoke the cultural awareness on an objective and collective level, they indicate the possibilities to which an individual in the culture might aspire but not himself be able to realize. (1969:415)
The Foi are not concerned with the relationship between their myths and the everyday life they surrealistically depict—which may be one interpretation of Burridge's passage. Unlike the Kalauna leaders of Goodenough Island (see Young 1983), the Foi do not incorporate important myths as vehicles of their own personal biographies. Foi myths, even when serving as the charters for important magic spells, are not owned, as the most important myths in Kaluana are, though
of course the spells themselves are private property. Indeed, the Foi seem to find their myths as refractory as any anthropologist would, valuing them only for the manifest plot and skill with which certain people can narrate them. Time and again when I asked the Foi in various ways about the value or function of the myths as literary form, they merely said that they told them to make the children go to sleep at night.
Yet if myth itself appears opaque to the Foi, they are well aware of the uses and effects of metaphor. In chapter 6 I described the metaphorical speech form known as iri sae~ medobora or "leaf talk" and noted that the most important of these lexical substitutions were the private property of head-men who used them on oratorical encounters amongst themselves. Like the metaphorically based magic spells, these speech forms are valuables and must be purchased. The Foi consider metaphor to be elusive, and access to it is competitive and restrictive. The ability to perceive and employ metaphor is a mark of status and is ultimately acquired along with material wealth and knowledge of magic. So it is not surprising that the metaphors of myth are inscrutable to the Foi, for these metaphors represent the kind of discourse that, rather than revealing and explicating, has as its function to conceal and divert, as tree leaves themselves hide the activities of the forest.
The underlying theme of Foi culture which both their social process and mythology reveal is that of a continuous stream of innate vital forces, substances, and energies; a repetitive series of differentiations and distinctions, such as the motion of water and the sun, the seasonal alternation of plant and animal life, the growth and death of humans, the proliferation of lineages and clans, and so forth. The moral intention of human action—the raison d'être of social protocol—is to control, channel, and redirect such forces for socially appropriate purposes. The Foi often articulate this theme precisely in terms of what should be hidden and what should be revealed, and the time and circumstance appropriate to each. For example, the verb tege - means "to build a house,". "to make a string bag," and "to enact the yumu avoidance rules between wife's mother and daughter's husband" (see chapter 5). But the Foi point out that the verb tege - is similar to the verb tega -, "to hide something," and they explain that houses hide men and women from the exterior public view, that string bags hide belongings and food, and that a woman hides her face from her daughter's husband. The concealment of meaning in "leaf talk" and in the tropes of myth is as necessary to its form as its explicit revelation of analogy,
for metaphor short-circuits lexical signification by limiting as well as extending its connotation.
This notion is fundamental to the process of obviational analysis itself. The analyst has to choose from a number of symbolic substitutions presented in a myth those that make sense in terms of a particular resolution. But precisely because obviation is not a structure or, more accurately, not a structure of lexical signification merely, the fact that one must choose among alternative substitutions implies that for any myth there are a large number of potential symbolic combinations that could be used to approximate each of its thematic substitutions, and a large number of potential interpretations that could be made of the myth as a whole.
A good example of this is the myth "Fonomo and Kunuware." The inverted myth I outlined in chapter 8 precipitates the resolution of the first sequence as a commentary on intersexual attraction and competition:
A : wifeless man
B : physical hostility between sexes
C : saboro for woman
D : menless women
E : culinary competition between sexes
F : woman for saboro
But as I noted in passing during the course of this analysis, the first sequence can also be interpreted as a statement of how hunting and wife-seeking are metaphors of each other:
A : woman for hunting [of birds]
B : striking of woman for "striking" of animals
C : fish for birds
D : man for "bird" [a decorated man, like a bird, is fought over by women]
E : meat for saboro [meat for fish]
F : marriage for hunting
Thus, although I have grouped the myths under four broad themes (corresponding to the most important principles of Foi secular life), each myth's inclusion under any given category is somewhat arbitrary. But the analysis of culture always risks as one of its residual effects
the reification of symbolic processes that cannot be reduced to a set of lexical equivalences.
These considerations must be kept in mind when attempting to relate the myths to each other. It is tempting to see in the repetitive concern that Foi myth has with certain kinship statuses such as brothers and brothers-in-law an overarching pattern that is susceptible to structural analysis. The only attempt I have made in this direction is to correlate each myth with some point along either of the two obviation sequences of bridewealth and birth (Figure 7) and funeral payments and death (Figure 9). Beyond that I hesitate to make systematic comparisons between the images of kin statuses portrayed from myth to myth for these reasons. First, it accords an unwarranted centrality to kinship in defining the central images of myths, when, as we have seen, the kin statuses themselves serve to metaphorize other analogies. Second, I have emphasized that each myth, as an obviation sequence, is self-contained, self-sealing. I do not portray them as open-ended and indefinitely referential, as structural analysis does. Hence, the relation of the summating analogy of each myth is only related figuratively to other such analogies. What we identify as structural equations are differentially contextualized in each myth, differentially valuated. If brothers are thus portrayed in different myths as both friends and enemies, if affines are both substitute fathers and treacherous cannibals, no principle can explain these facts apart from, for example, a resort to the idea of contradiction as a necessary property of culture, or some equally assumed psychogenetic ambivalences concerning family members. I have chosen instead to approach culture as much as an art form as a system, and to stress that the relationship of myth to social forms, and of myths to other myths, is as much a matter of interpretive critique as of the inductive discovery of semantic structures. Given this, contradiction becomes an end in itself, a strategy of mythic and cultural revelation, rather than an analytic by-product that must be mediated by further analysis.
This point can be taken further still. The analysis of each myth in the preceding chapters can be depicted in terms of a single analogy or metaphor, even though the obviation sequences themselves, as we have seen, are comprised of a series of successively preemptive metaphors. The myths, then, as whole metaphors in their own right, can themselves be arranged in obviation sequences. Again, I must emphasize that obviation is not a structure but a property of metaphor itself and an aspect of the way meaning is contained or given shape in meta-
phoric equations. Because metaphors can have different meanings, the myths themselves have different meanings, as I have demonstrated above, and can be arranged in any number of interpretive sequences, like a kaleidoscope revealing a different pattern with every turn along its axis. Yet each pattern is part of what we can label as Foi culture, for should not their structures be as capable of generating an unlimited number of interpretations as our own?
As an example, let me illustrate another way in which the myths may have been grouped for purposes of analytic revelation. Let us assign a summating substitution to each of six myths I have already analyzed above:
Myth | Substitution |
A : The Fish Spear | wife's brother for elder brother (male speaking) |
B : The Origin of Garden Food | elder brother for (affinal) father (female speaking) |
C : The Younger Brother's Resurrection | wife's father for sister's husband (male speaking) |
D : The Milk Bamboo | elder sister for husband (female speaking) |
E : Sister-Exchange | wives for sisters (male speaking) |
F : The Two Matrilateral Brothers | female siblingship for male siblingship |
These six myths all comment on the nature of male relationships, each one using the contrastive medium of an opposed affinal or female relationship to lend to them a different value. I have arranged them so that each myth substitutes for the one preceding it, so as to form an obviation sequence leading to a larger metaphor concerning the manner in which male kinship is constituted out of all those opposed relationships. "The Fish Spear" begins with the replacement of a young man's elder brother by a male affine, phrasing it in terms of the moral necessity for men to avoid appropriating their brother's procreative rights. "The Origin of Garden Food" looks at the same replacement from the point of view of a younger brother's sister, and shows how the affinal relationship is akin to the filial one between a man and his sons. "The Younger Brother's Resurrection" makes this point even more explicitly but, in this case, the contrast has shifted away from
the agnatic relationship to the contrast between lineal and collateral affinal relationships themselves. The opposed moral images of the collateral wife-taker (the sister's husband) and lineal wife-giver (the wife's father) in C , "The Younger Brother's Resurrection," thus obviate A by revealing that the moral failure of the elder brother in ``The Fish Spear" is his inability or unwillingness to provide a wife for his younger brother.
The contrast between myths C and A is further sharpened by the fact that they begin in identical fashion, with the younger man's appropriation of his elder male relative's hunting weapon (equals sexuality). The resulting separation of these men is mediated by the younger man's attainment of his own affinal connections. Myth D , however, reopens this dosed image by positing a female as the agent of obviated male kinship. In the myth "The Milk Bamboo," the woman reverses the flow of nurturing breast milk, the "integument" of Foi filiation, revealing it as a substance relating women only (sisters) rather than as the analogic implementation of male nurturance (a man and his son are linked through the redirected female nurturance of a woman as wife and mother). This dilemma obviates A by revealing that not only is the control of men's sexuality subject to the interference of sibling competition, but that it is mediated in a more obvious way by the objects of that competition, women themselves. Thus, the relationship between female siblings is exposed as "self-sufficient" as opposed to that between male siblings which is always "contingent."
Myth E , "Sister-Exchange," uses this sufficiency of female sibling-ship as a model for what Foi men fancifully view as possibly the most felicitous of male relationships, men who are simultaneously wife-givers and wife-takers to each other. Moreover, since such a relationship results in the canceling out of affinal asymmetry, what is left is their residual siblingship, the fact that they were raised together in the same house. This situation thus obviates the events of myth B where it is the younger brother's treatment of his sister as a wife that impels his predicament—what the obviating link between E and B thus shows is that sister-exchange is the way that this immoral conflation can be circumvented.
Finally, myth F , "The Two Matrilateral Brothers," transposes the relationship between two sets of cross-sex siblings into two sets of same-sex siblings, indicating that the differentiation between brothers is determined by the differentiation of their mothers, or that male siblingship is derivative of female siblingship. This is mirrored by the
fact that, toward the end of the myth, the two brothers must constitute their siblingship in a second transitive manner, through their marriage to women related as sisters (recalling that Foi men usually address their WZH as "brother," since they "divide and share" [sawi -] a pair of sisters). But such uterine brotherhood is insufficient for the maintenance of proper male siblingship for two reasons. First, because the myth does not initially posit a cross-sex sibling relationship, the content of affinity is obviated; there is no scope for women to mediate men's relationship as wife-giver or wife-taker to each other. Second, matrilateral brothers are brothers without being agnates. The implication is that both affinity and lineality are required to constitute siblingship between men , as I noted in the analysis of myth B in chapter 10, though in "normative" contexts, such principles are often opposed as conflicting or competing criteria for group composition. Thus, the mythological analysis of social "rules" depicts analogies that while constituting the meaning of social process are not always entailed in practice.
The transformation of the bad uterine brother and his wife into fish poison brings the obviational sequence back to its beginning, myth A , which also ends with the origin of fish poison. This image provides the conceptual link between the two major feminine components of male kinship: maternal asymmetry ("The Fish Spear") and matrilateral transitivity. Maternal kinship serves to obviate the patrilineal relationship between a man and his children, while matrilateral kinship serves to differentiate the agnatic credentials of brothers. Feminine kinship is "lethal" to the artifice of male solidarity, and the obviational relationship between myths F and A perhaps explains why even though "The Fish Spear" is about the genesis of maternal differentiation, it begins with the separation of two brothers, as does myth F .
To represent this sequence another way, the facilitating modality represented by triangle ACE depicts the replacement of male sibling-ship by affinity or, more accurately, the necessity of affinal relationships for the constitution of conventional male sibling relationships (that is, brothers define the content of their relationship in terms of obligations toward each other's affinal duties). The motivating modality of triangle BDF contrasts this conventional metaphor with a nonconventional one, the obviation of male siblingship by female siblingship or kinship: men are related through women ultimately, and such a realization always subverts the nominally unisexual nature of agnation (see figure 16).
Figure 16.
The Obviation of Male Siblingship
From the analyst's point of view, in other words, the myths can be grouped in unlimited ways, and the myths themselves are individually refractable by several methods: for example in structuralist terms and in the dialectical alternation that provides their obviating summation. I have focused on this latter phenomenon because it reveals the working out of social and cosmological premises that form the basis of Foi experience. As the obviation sequence I have just discussed indicates, myth can juxtapose certain premises and reveal analogies that ordinary life does not permit. For example, the myth ``Return from the Dead" (chapter 8) revolves quite clearly around the symbolic equation "living is to dead as male is to female," but this equation is not ordinarily given conscious articulation by the Foi in everyday discourse. As I have been suggesting, myth creates precisely the symbolic closures that nor-mative social process does not entail.
This quality of myth is also illustrated forcefully in the repeated use of the Usane Habora exchange as background for significant action. in real life, the Usane is held perhaps once every generation: it cannot therefore serve as a context for the depiction of everyday life among the Foi. Yet eight out of the twenty-seven myths I have presented feature the Usane and what I have labeled the Usane Transformation as a key element in the development of the plot. What does this tell us about both Foi myth and the Usane itself?
The Foi were fond of describing the Usane as "a very big aname kobora ." In chapter 4 I described aname kobora as the exchange of pork for shells which individual men undertake on a regular basis in order to raise wealth for their ceremonial payment obligations. I suggested that, symbolically, aname kobora consisted of the exchange of female pork for male shell wealth and that the Foi community represented itself on these occasions in its exemplary male and female productive roles.
The Usane, then, from this point of view, is merely this aspect of aname kobora carried out by the entire community rather than by a single individual. But additionally, the myths portray the Usane not just as the exchange of male and female wealth items but also as the exchange of pork and shells between maternal relatives and cross-cousins (see chapter 8). Insofar as I have analyzed such exchanges as comprising the final stages of Foi affinity (chapter 7), the Usane then really represents nothing less that the ceremonial expression of the two analogous principles of intersexual and affinal mediation.
Against this conventional background of intersexual and affinal accommodation are set the individuating dilemmas of Foi mythical char-
acters: for example, the feminized man in "The Origin of Tree Grubs" (chapter 8); the confusion of female siblings in "The Milk Bamboo" (chapter 8); the lethal conflict between brothers-in-law in "The Origin of Karuato Feast" and "The Younger Brother's Resurrection" (chapter 10). It is in such terms that the differentiating function of tropic construction that I discuss in chapter 7 is most visible. By contrasting the general image of intersexual and affinal mediation with the fanciful and particular actions of individuals, the myths extend and comment upon the parameters of such mediation. In this sense, since all eight myths focus on affinal and intersexual definition in their resolution, the Usane is perhaps the most apt context within which their plots can unfold.
In chapter 8, I also noted that the Usane Transformation figuratively replaces horticulture with hunting, and in chapter 2, I suggested that such a shift can be interpreted in terms of the manner in which the Foi view their seasonal alternation: from the isolated nuclear-family units of the hunting season to the collective longhouse-based life that centers around gardening and pig raising. When the men and women of Hegeso Village are dispersed in the hunting area of Ayamo, their discourse is by definition limited to the highly stylized interaction between husband and wife. But in the village, with the daily gathering of people in the longhouse community every evening, conversation focuses on the collective activities and concerns of Foi life: bride-wealth, betrothal arrangements, plans for forthcoming feasts, sorcery suspicions, compensation hearings and, of course, the telling of myths. In a sense, it is the opportunity for individuals to "invest" their private experiences in the bush in the collective consciousness, sharing triumphs and disappointments in hunting adventures and commenting on the contrasts between life at Ayamo and life in Hegeso.
If the seasonal alternation of Foi life represents a dialectic between individual and collective experience, so do their myths, which particularize those general social and cosmological principles, even as each individual Foi domestic unit replicates in miniature Foi society in its categorical definitions. All metaphorical literary forms, including the sorohabora and sago chants as well as myth, represent this ceaseless contrast between individual experience and the idioms of collective sociality, and in so doing, these forms lead to the creation of Foi culture, in common with all metaphors, as the relationship between the conventional distinctions of social boundaries and the created analogies of aesthetic innovation.
Notes
Chapter I Introduction
1. For a general critique of functionalist theory and methodology see Sahlins 1976.
Chapter II The Ethnographic Setting
1. According to the 1980 National Census, 439 Foi live in other areas of Papua New Guinea.
2. Ryan (1961:270) states that the Timp Cult originated in the Purari River delta area of the Gulf Coast.
3. Penelope Hope (1979) describes this and other patrols into the interior Gulf Province and Southern Highlands Province during this period.
4. One of the first village constables of Hegeso was Irasaburi of the So'onedobo clan. He was not a head-man at any time in his life, and as an elderly man when I arrived in Hegeso was without influence. He was replaced in 1961 by Iritoro, of the Banimahu'u clan, who by the time I arrived was one of the wealthiest and strongest leaders of the Herebo extended community ( Patrol Report No. 3 1960-1961; Patrol Report No. 2 1953-1954).
5. Elsewhere I describe the role of silk production within the Foi domestic economy (Weiner 1982 b ).
6. Raymond C. Kelly (1972: chap. 2) gives a derailed account of the subsistence system of the Etoro, of the nearby Mount Bosavi area to the west of Lake Kutubu, which shares some features with that of the Foi.
7. I would like to thank Bruce French who was Southern Highlands Province food crops field horticulturalist during my fieldwork period and who made a brief survey of Foi horticultural and sago management techniques in Hegeso in October 1980.
8. The Foi recognize at least five varieties of sago that grow only at Ayamo.
9. The flooding of the Mubi Valley watercourses is a result of seasonal rainfall increases near the source of the Mubi, south of the Tari Basin. The flood months coincide with the period of maximum rainfall recorded at Tari station over a ten-year period between 1953 and 1963 (see Brookfield and Hart 1966: table 1).
10. Williams' ninety-three days of fieldwork took place between November 18 and May 7. Between February 1 and April 17 of that period he was with the Wola-speakers of Augu village to the north in the higher-montane valleys. In other words, his time spent with the Foi coincided almost exactly with abate hase , "pandanus season," when interest in hunting among the Foi is at its lowest.
Chapter III The Responsibility of Males
1. I would like to thank Bruce French, who was the Southern Highlands provincial agronomist during my fieldwork period, for much of this information.
2. This approximation applies only to the people of Hegeso, Barutage, and Herebo with whom I lived. I received the impression during brief visits to Tugiri and Yomaisi villages, however, that there were other areas in the Mubi Valley where people were more dependent upon sweet potato and could be said to have a double staple of sweet potato and sago.
3. The obsidian for such blades is not found in Foi territory but is imported from groups living to the southwest in volcanic areas.
4. During my first fieldwork period, the men and women of each village spent one day a week on road maintenance, upkeep of aid post and primary school grounds, and similar activities. The Local Government Council fined all people who did not attend communal work duties, and hence men and women drastically curtailed their time spent at Ayamo. Hunting activity was also greatly reduced by the responsibility of children's attendance at local primary schools and the desire of people to attend weekly church services. A favored time then for "family hunting outings" was the end of December and early January when the children received a prolonged Christmas holiday.
During my last trip to Hegeso in 1984-1985, however, government funding allocated to such rural improvement work had been suspended, and many men had been living at Ayamo for some time when I arrived, returning only to participate in the Dawa pig-kill that was held in January 1985.
5. Hegeso rebuilt their present longhouse in the early 1960s, locating it along the footpath but still near the River. When Barutage longhouse split into the new Barutage and Baru longhouses, the latter moved further up the Baru River in the bush and Barutage relocated to ridged ground south of the Mubi River. Men told me that an ideal site for longhouses was a ridge or spur near the river which made defense easier during times when warfare was still practiced.
6. The Foi were fond of telling me how in early days when a non-Foi-speaking stranger arrived and indicated the east as his origin, men assumed he was speaking "ghosts'" language.
7. Ta'i is the form used when speaking of position or location; ta'o by
contrast is used when indicating motion to or from a point. Similarly kore (when speaking of motion to the west) versus kuri (when speaking of position), and so forth.
8. Several spells I recorded refer to rivers that are said to exist in distant places to the west outside Foi territory, such as the Tunamo, which is said to be "near Koroba" (near the Upper Strickland River) and is considered "sacred" by the Foi; or the Dunu River that the Foi locate in the Mount Bosavi region. These waters are sacred because they are nearer the imagined source of all waters, which to the Foi is synonymous with the source of life itself.
9. This is true even though Ayamo is always kasia , because it is in the Yo'oro River valley and is approached by walking down intervening Mount Aguba.
10. I am indebted to Tirifa and his elder sister Ibume of the Hegeso So'onedobo clan for elucidating Foi conception theory and to their brother's son Heno for aiding me in a difficult translation.
11. "Eleven" in the Foi counting system is indicated by pointing to the side of the shoulder "where a man carries a child." "Nine" is the elbow "where a female holds a nursing child.''
12. This was also true in traditional times according to Williams (1977: 250).
13. The acquisition and use of irika'o as a valuable parallels the use of busare poison among the Daribi (Wagner 1967:73). I had no knowledge of irika'o ever being used as an item of Foi bridewealth, though such an occurrence would be rare and highly clandestine. The use of husare by Daribi sorcerers seems to belong to the same class as fana sorcery among the Foi: that performed on the personal leavings of a victim.
Men also told me that Highlanders from Nembi and further north would purchase irika'o from Foi men for shell wealth, pigs, and other valuables.
14. The Foraba or Polopa people live along the eastern portion of the Erave River near the border of the Southern Highlands and Simbu Provinces. They are neighbors of the Daribi to the east and the Kewa to the west (see Brown 1980).
Chapter IV Oil, Shells, and Meat: The Media of Foi Sociality
1. Traditional salt is still traded among Angan-speaking groups (Godelier 977:127-151).
2. The Foi say that two large bamboos of oil are traded for one large pearl shell or one midsized pig. One bamboo of oil may also be traded for one shoat.
3. These tubes are sixteen to twenty feet long and contain roughly ten to twelve liters of oil. Nowadays a small proportion of oil is also shipped by airplane, and in this case empty twenty-liter kerosene drums are used.
4. The Melpa people of the Mount Hagen area, who receive kara'o via Wola middlemen, liken it to male "grease" or semen rather than menstrual blood (see Strathern and Strathern 1971:163, 193).
5. Sillitoe (1979 b :165) reports that Wola men were aided by the spirits of
dead ancestors who gave them dreams revealing the future acquisition of pearl shells and other wealth objects.
6. A. J. Strathern (1971 a :233-234) notes that among the Melpa, the image of glossy bird plumage and the brightly colored leaves of certain plants is a common one in pearl shell magic.
7. According to Schodde and Hitchcock (1968) the Foi refer to the Black Capped Lory and the Red Cheeked Parrot by the same name.
8. The Foi refer metaphorically to a "wealthy woman" as one who cares successfully for many pigs and who is lavish in providing food for her husband's male visitors.
9. In preparing for the slaughter of pigs at the Dawa held in January 1985, the men of Hegeso cooperated in fencing off a large tract of unused swamp ground for their pigs. This, they felt, would mitigate against the contraction of illness from feral pigs.
10. It is common, however, for pigs to become lost in the bush, necessitating extended searches for them when they are needed.
11. Sillitoe (1979 b :271) reports that the Wola themselves only recently borrowed the Sa or Sa aend wiya from Mendi-speakers to the northeast.
12. Williams (1977:173), however, suggested that the Foi of Lake Kutubu learned of the practices relating to the Usane from the Lower Foi to the southeast.
13. I was told, however, by other men that the i ~ was also a ghost or spirit, and perhaps semantically related to the i ~ ho ~ mentioned in chapter 3.
14. Note that Williams' account of the Usi cult stressed the origin of payment for Usi curing services (1977:275-277).
Chapter V The Solicitude of Affines
1. Fagiabo married a widowed So'onedobo woman of Barutage. Men said that this was permissible since they were not related.
2. I am indebted to Murray Rule for discussion concerning this point.
3. For a description of Foi housebuilding and architectural techniques, see Weiner 1982 a .
4. LeRoy (1975:xiv) reports a cognate idiom among the Kewa. The Ikwaye-Angans also refer to the head as the "egg bone" (Mimica 1981:96 fn.).
5. A. J. Strathern similarly concludes that "food creates substance, just as procreation does, and forms an excellent symbol both for the creation of identity out of residence and for the values of nurturance, growth, comfort, and solidarity which are associated primarily with parenthood. In cultural terms what we often find in the Highlands, I would suggest, is a combination of filiative rules and ideas based on upbringing, nurturance and consumption of food" (1973:29).
6. Before the Christian Mission discouraged the practice, girls were betrothed in infancy. Men nowadays wait until a girl's breasts develop before making betrothal enquiries.
7. The men of Hegeso told me that as a result of Christian Mission influence, the yumu protocols have been relaxed somewhat and that they may refer
to these relatives by the less restrictive cross-sex affinal term aya . However, I noticed no relaxation in interpersonal conduct between yumu affines, nor any lessening of the force of other affinal protocols.
8. A "hand" refers to the counting system of the Foi. Starting with the left little finger: 1; ring finger: 2; middle finger: 3; index finger: 4; thumb: 5; palm: 6; wrist: 7; forearm: 8; elbow: 9; upper arm: 10; side of shoulder: 11; top of shoulder: 12; side of neck: 13; mastoid: 14; ear: 15; cheek: 16; eye: 17; side of nose: 18; nose: 19, and continuing in mirror fashion down the right side to the right little finger: 37, or "one hand."
9. I refer to the kabe gibumena , the man who gives the bridewealth, as the most common relative who assumes this role: the groom's father. However, I have noted in the previous sections where exceptions occur.
10. Nowadays, it is more common for a new piece of trade-store cloth to be used instead.
11. The Stratherns describe a part of Melpa bridewealth that is given about one week after the penal kng , "pig for public distribution": "The groom's family and close lineage mates cook two to six pigs and take these by night to the bride's family. In return, the bride now receives a personal dowry of netbags, oil flasks, and breeding pigs, and ideally a return is also made for the cooked pigs" (Strathern and Strathern 1969:147).
12. Apart from the arera bari , only men receive bridewealth. A man sometimes receives a share of bridewealth for his wife's female relatives, and he may often share it with her, but the wealth is given to him and not to his wife.
Only 3.7 percent of bridewealth shares in the sample were for matrilaterally related women: MZDs, for example, but-more commonly, mother's second husband's daughters. Usually, a man receives pay for his MHD only if he accompanied his mother to her second husband's household and "lived with" his step-sister.
For the four head-men of the sample, 18 percent of their bridewealth claims were for women with whom they had no recognized claim other than a tie of patronage with one of the woman's main recipients. These shares thus primarily represent reciprocation for aid they gave in accumulating the bride-wealth for the main recipient's marriage. Men explained to me, for example, that "I received this amount for this woman not because she is a relative of mine but because I helped her brother when he got married." By contrast, only 2 percent of the bridewealth shares the thirty-one ordinary men received were for women of this category.
13. Similar idioms are reported among the Mating of the Western Highlands and the Mendi. Rappaport (1969:122) notes that among the Maring, "all members of a subterritorial group share in the pork which accompanies the bridewealth. . .. But despite such ritual food sharing throughout the entire subterritorial group, and despite references to 'our women' which accompany it, it is within the minimal agnatic unit, the subclan, or clan, that rights in women are chiefly held." Ryan (1969:165) says of the Mendi that "a share in a woman's bride price is thus seen as a material return for certain personal
obligations, gifts and services, rather than as a compensation to her clan as a whole.''
14. I am indebted to Raymond C. Kelly and Andrew Strathern for their correspondence on these subjects while I was in Hegeso, which helped me to formulate the problem.
15. Wagner (1967:154 if.) describes a similar structure of Daribi intermarriage, though the Daribi ideology relates it specifically to debts in women themselves, as the Foi ideology does not.
16. The Christian Mission forbade the Foi from making death payments in the early 1960s (see Langlas 1974:187).
17. I shall describe traditional funeral customs as they pertain to male decedents and note at which points the customs diverge for a female decedent.
18. Williams (1977:293) observed that the Kutubuans took two bones from the deceased's little finger instead.
19. I am unable to say whether the same funeral rituals applied to a deceased female.
20. When I asked the speaker what kinds of shells these names referred to, he said that they were "magical" shells and that the names were "only names.''
21. Nowadays, the Foi say that one makes ka'o exchanges to make up for bridewealth insufficiencies only.
Chapter VI Metaphor and Substitution
2. LeRoy (1978) also discusses the rhetorical and competitive use of metaphor in Kewa ceremonial songs.
3. I am indebted to Nelson (Yaroge) Kigiri of Hegeso Village for his elucidation of the two categories of Foi magic.
4. Owe and eya are the conventional two-syllable cries ending each sentence in a sago chant.
5. The Foi use the expression me huraro to mean a place where humans do not live. By extension, they call a house in which there are no people an a huraro , an empty house.
6. The reference here is to those elderly, house-ridden people in a village who watch over the house while others are out at their tasks.
7. This is also true when men use land belonging to other individuals, which is common in Foi. The long-term occupation of land can sometimes outbalance true ownership, as in cases where the true owner has neglected a piece of territory and the borrower has occupied and used it extensively and advantageously. Be this as it may, the memorial songs always speak of an ideal system in which certain lands and territories belong to and have belonged to specific lineages and clans for all time.
Chapter VII Obviation and Myth
1. I am indebted to Charles Langlas for discussion on this topic which aided me in formulating my analysis.
2. The Foi possess a tuni that accounts for this distinctive feature of the ya banima . The men of Hegeso also told me that the Banimahu'u clan is considered to be the only "true" Foi clan, the only clan with an autochthonous origin in the Mubi Valley region.
3. See later the analysis of the myth "Tononawi and Aiyabe" (chapter 11).
Chapter VIII Intersexual Mediation
1. I have already mentioned the common metaphorical equation between sexual intercourse and death in Foi dreams (see chapter 4). Foi also told me that if one dreams of having sexual intercourse with a woman, it foretells the fact that the dreamer will kill a cassowary or wild pig. (For a more detailed account of Foi dream interpretation see Weiner 1986).
2. This is commonly done when one is leaving the house for the day.
3. Apparently, the circumstances under which the man revealed himself to the ka buru are thought to be romantic by the Foi. F. E. Williams gives an account of a seduction in which the man "finding [the woman] at work sago-making and ready to pack up and go home . . . had stolen up and taken her stick while her back was turned. After searching for it high and low she had finally seen it poking up near the heap of sago fibres and behind the heap found [the man] himself—an excellent joke which quite melted her heart" (Williams 1977:218-219).
4. In Williams' version of this myth, the husband discovers a hole leading from the spot where the si'a'a sui is planted. This springy stick was attached to the hair of the corpse and was designed to snap the scalp off after the body had become soft enough through decomposition. Wagner notes that among the Daribi, the coronal suture is the spot at which the soul leaves the body after death (1978:207 fn.). Glasse (1965:30) reports an identical belief among the Huli of the Southern Highlands Province.
5. In Williams' version, Gaburiniki, the guardian of the afterworld, is supposed to have plucked out the tongues of all new arrivals and replaced them back to front in their mouths so that they could not speak properly.
6. "The Fish Spear" is closely cognate to the Daribi tale "The Yaga " in its depictment of the mediating role of the fish spear (Wagner 1978:117).
7. This passage is a conventional reference in myth-telling. It indicates that the woman at first fears that the young man is a ghost and implores him to carry out the rites associated with the Dabi Gerabora ghost-appeasement ceremony.
8. Williams (1977:218), however, comments on the mediating confidant-like function of a young unmarried man's elder brother's wife, his karege , in acting as a go-between during the young man's courtship.
9. Most other versions of this myth begin with the "Usane Transformation."
Chapter IX Female Reproductivity
1. The theme of the "good brother" versus the "bad brother" seems to be a pervasive one throughout the interior and Highlands area of Papua New Guinea and is found in almost identical form among the Western Enga (Meg-
gitt 1976:73) and Melpa (Vicedom 1977:106). The theme of the detachable tree that serves as a riverine escape vehicle is also found in a Daribi tale (Wagner 1978:117).
2. This character also "figures . . . often in Daribi folklore" (Wagner 1978:208).
3. The bush banana grows and bears fruit very rapidly and is used as a deus ex machina for accelerating the growth of humans in several Foi myths.
4. Tuzin (1972) has explored the symbolism of the yam among the Arapesh of the Sepik River area of New Guinea and has described the equation between the yam and the penis. As among the Foi, what Meggitt has described as the "perambulating penis" (1964) is a theme in the mythology of the Arapesh.
Chapter X The Anxiety of Affines
1. Williams (1977:328) recorded this statement from his Kutubu informants: "the abari [red pandanus] are women; therefore when men are eating abari women must not talk."
2. The association of warfare and affinity characterizes a number of interior and Highlands cultures (see for example P. Brown 1964; D. J. J. Brown 1979; A. M. Strathern 1972; Wagner 1977).
3. I would like to acknowledge Dr. Raymond C. Kelly's suggestion of the importance of this distinction in Foi mythology.
4. The themes discussed in this paragraph are similarly treated in the Auyana myth "Two Brothers Obtain Wives" (McKaughan 1973:333-337).
5. It may be of incidental interest to note that the fruit of the gofe tree ( Ficus pungens : see Conn 1979) normally falls to the ground when ripe where it is eaten by ground-dwelling animals including the bush fowl, cassowary, and the various rodents, as well as the arboreal marsupials. The latter are said by the Foi to "spend the night on the forest floor looking for food and then take it back up into the trees with them during the day." In addition, as I have described in chapter 1, the marsupials and other forest animals are said to descend from the sky under cover of cloud during the beginning of the monsoon brought on by the southeast trade winds. The onset of this rainy season corresponds to the ripening of the fruit of several Ficus varieties which are used in setting traps during these months.
Chapter XI Complementarity, Exchange, and Reciprocity
1. For an appraisal of the literature concerning the role of exchange in Melanesian societies, see Sillitoe 1978.
2. This tale is found in nearly identical form among the Kewa (Beier 1977:48-51).
3. The Foi call any large magpie-like black bird by this term (see Schodde and Hitchcock 1968: passim.)
4. The Foi refer to a medenane giru as a dream of the impending death of a man ( denane: "ghost''; me -: transitive or causative prefix; giru : "dream"). It is often dreamt by the intended victim's brother. It portends not just death,
but specifically death by murder or sorcery, as distinct from a dream of fatal illness.
5. The Foi use the same verb ( ku -) to denote "to lose consciousness" and "to die." The generality of this semantic usage in other New Guinea languages is perhaps reflected by the pidgin usage of the verb indai , "to faint'' and indai pinis "to die" (see Mihalic 1971:79).
6. The axe heads found in the Foi area were identified by Ian Hughes (Human Sciences Program, Australian National University) as originating in the Ambiamp quarries in the Western Highlands.
7. A spell recited during the planting of honamo sago identifies the sago sucker as the skull of Tononawi.
References
Government Reports
Papua, Territory of, Commonwealth of Australia.
1911. | Annual Report for the Year 1911 . |
1928. | Annual Report for the Year 1926-27 . |
Papua and New Guinea, Territory of.
1939-40. | Patrol Report No. 2 . |
Southern Highlands District, Territory of Papua.
1950-51. | Patrol Report No. 1 . |
1953-54. | Patrol Report Nos. 2 and 3 . |
1955-56. | Patrol Report No. 2 . |
1956-57. | Patrol Report No. 2 . |
1959-60. | Patrol Report No. 1 . |
1960-61. | Patrol Report Nos. 1 and 3 . |
1961-62. | Patrol Report No. 2 . |
Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.
1974-75. | Patrol Report No. 3 , Pimaga Sub-District. |
1975-76. | Patrol Report No. 1 , Pimaga Sub-District. |
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Index
A
Adoption, 80 -83;
and immigrants, 80 ;
and coresidence, 80 , 83 ;
and food-sharing, 85 ;
of sons-in-law, 256
Adultery, 117 , 178 , 180 ;
and sorcery, 53 ;
and ghosts, 61 , 108
Affinity: affinal mediation, 4 , 9 , 231 -259, 295 -296;
and betrothal, 92 -94;
avoidance protocol between, 94 , 228 , 300 n. 7;
and intersexual mediation, 95 ;
and bridewealth, 99 ;
asymmetry between, 101 , 105 -106, 240 -241;
and kinship terminology, 105 ;
and mortuary ceremonies, 108 -109, 112 ;
and death, 116 -117;
and cross-cousin exchanges, 118 -121;
tropic analysis of, 139 -149;
and matrilaterality, 203 ;
and maternal kinship, 221 -224, 226 -230;
and pork exchange, 231 -236;
and pigs, 237 -241;
and sister-exchange, 240 -241;
and game animals, 243 ;
and patrilineality, 256 -257;
and male contingency, 258 ;
and pearl shell hearts, 282 -283;
and obviation of male siblingship, 291 -294. See also Brothers-in-Law; Father-in-Law
Afterworld, 47 , 55 , 109 , 117 , 193 ;
origin of Foi healing cults, 57
Agnates, 104 -105, 112 -113, 291 -294;
and widows, 116 ;
vs. affines, 247 ;
and male contingency, 248
Agnatic Parallel Marriage, 211 , 213 , 216 ;
relationship to bridewealth networks, 105 -106
Analogy, 7 , 288 ;
cross-cousins and male/female, 119 ;
flow of, 137 ;
and social process, 139 -149;
between myths, 170 ;
male/female and living/ dead, 243 ;
eggs and pearl shells, 278
Aname Kobora (exchange of meat and shell wealth), 73 -77, 110 , 227 , 295
Arrowhead Cult (Bi'a'a Guabora ), 56 , 111 -113
Avoidance. See Affinity
Axe, 272 -275, 305 n. 6
Aya (Wife's Mother, Mother's Mother, etc.), 208 -210
Ayamo, 34 , 296 , 297 n. 8, 298 n. 4, 299 n. 9. See also Hunting
B
Bateson, G., 208
Betrothal, payments, 30 , 31 , 92 -95
Big-Man. See Head-Man
Birds, 115 , 170 , 195 , 197 -199, 300 n. 7, 304 n. 3;
and ghosts, 55 ;
and pearl shells, 278 -279, 280 ;
banima , 157 , 168 ;
hawk, 130 , 157 ;
hornbill, 115 , 158 , 162 , 165 -171;
in death, 112 ;
karia , 261 -263;
marua , 157 , 171 , 174 , 175 , 184 , 200 , 254 ;
Palm Cockatoo, 55 , 70 ;
Pesquet's Parrot, 69 -71, 195 ;
Rainbow Lorikeet, 71 ;
Raggianna bird-of-paradise, 6 -7, 70 , 112 , 182 , 188 , 261 -263;
Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo, 7 , 70 ;
symbolism of, in dreams, 69 -71
Bi'a'a Guabora Cult. See Arrowhead Cult
Black Palm, 6 , 178 -179
Blood, 120 , 161 , 163 , 181 , 207 , 269 , 271 -272;
and fish poison, 208 -210
Bone, 189 , 191 , 193 , 248 -249, 251 -252;
jaw bone, 111 -113;
and mortuary ceremonies, 113 , 114 ;
pearl shells, 120
Bow, 248 , 251 , 252
Breast, 205 -207;
breast milk, 50 , 174 , 199 , 201 -202, 205 -208;
and semen, 207
Bridewealth, 78 , 117 , 119 -120, 163 , 168 , 224 , 240 , 242 -243, 301 nn. 9, 12 ;
inflation of bridewealth payments, 1950-1960, 30 -33;
role of head-men in raising, 85 -89;
head pearl shells in, 86 , 95 -97;
defined by Foi, 89 -90;
categories of marriage payments, 92 -108;
description of distribution, 98 -99;
women's portion, 96 -99;
rules of distribution, 99 -100;
marriage and bridewealth networks, 105 -108;
mofoha ubora , 106 -108;
relation to mortuary payments, 110 -113;
and maternal illness, 118 -120;
and sister-exchange, 240 -241;
and daughter's husband, 252
Brother and Sister, 156 , 157 , 161 , 163 , 167 -170, 221 -224, 224 -230, 237 -241, 248 , 255 , 257 -258, 264 -267;
and origin of Usi cult, 56 -57;
and obviation of male siblingship, 292 -294
Brothers, 245 , 247 , 253 -259;
and cross-cousins, 118 -119, 261 , 263 ;
and maternal relatives, 199 ;
and male sexuality, 194 -199;
matrilateral brothers, 211 -218;
wife's sister's husband, 216 ;
and affinity, 256 ;
pig and dog, 264 -267;
obviation of male siblingship, 291 -294;
theme of good and bad brothers, 303 n. 9
Brothers-in-Law, 94 -95, 105 , 196 , 198 , 226 -230, 236 -241, 248 -253;
and cross-cousins, 101 , 118 -120, 142 , 264 -267;
and sister's sons, 221 -224;
and pig-kill, 233
Brown, D. J. J., 104 , 299 n. 14, 304 n. 2
Burial, 52 , 109 . See also Mortuary Ceremonies
Burridge, K., 287
Bush Fowl, 39 , 276 -279
Bush House, 38 , 47 , 73 ;
and spatial orientation, 48
Bush vs. Village, 76 , 114 , 179 -181, 235 , 237 , 239
C
Campnosperma brevipetiolata (Foi: kara'o ), 19 , 63 -68, 270 -272, 299 nn. 2, 3 ;
originated from Foraba region, 21 , 22 ;
origin myth of, 65 ;
and maternal kinship, 227 , 229
Cannibalism, 22 , 212 , 214 -218, 233 -236;
vs. gardening, 253 -258, 265
Cash-Cropping, 29 -30
Cassowary, 39 , 161 , 162 , 184 , 188 , 268
Champion, I., 26 -27
Childbirth, 51
Clan: described, 78 -83;
local clan segment, 79 , 82 -83;
intermarriage between, 104 , 105
Collectivization, 44 , 143 ;
symbolic process defined, 6 ;
vs. differentiation, 8 ;
function of metaphor, 9 , 10 ;
structuralism as, 11 ;
in Foi magic, 13
Complementarity, 65 , 95 , 118 , 120 , 220 , 260 ;
husband and wife, 45 -46, 177 , 186 -187, 193 -194, 199 , 216 ;
male and female lineality, 90 ;
and cross-sex siblings, 170 ;
of affines, 259 ;
between pig and dog, 264 -268;
between trading partners, 271 -272
Conception, 41 -43, 207 ;
Foi theory of, 50 -51, 157 ;
analogy with sorcery and Usi cult, 60 -61;
analogy with kara'o tree oil production, 66 -68, 91 ;
symbolized in mortuary ceremonies, 113 , 147 ;
in myth, 157
Context, defined, 124 -125, 171
Convention, 8 -10, 13 , 137 , 138 -149 passim ;
defined, 3 ;
vs. innovation, 7 ;
and sign relationships, 123 , 128 ;
and individual identity, 44 , 130 -131
Co-Wives, 161 , 173 -178;
conflict between, 163
Cowrie Shell, 31 , 32 , 71 ;
in bridewealth payments, 96 -98;
in mortuary payments, 110 ;
in widow remarriage spell, 115
Cross-Cousins, 101 , 118 -120, 142 -145, 162 , 174 -177, 260 -268;
and matrilaterality, 120
D
Daribi, 41 -42, 91 , 126 , 129 , 143 , 150 , 175 , 189 , 193 -194, 276 , 299 n. 13, 302 n. 15, 302 n. 1, 303 n. 6, 303 n. 1, 304 n. 2;
Habu ritual, 112 , 113
Dawa Pork Exchange, 22 -23, 74 , 75 -76
Dead, 189 -194, 243 -247;
living/dead opposition, 76 , 188
Death Payments, 108 -111, 146 -149, 245 -247
Decorations, 64 , 71 -72, 114 , 181 -182, 186 -187, 219 -220, 227 , 229 , 239 , 276 -279. See also Pearl Shells
Development, 28 -30
Detotalization, 284 , 286
Differentiation, 143 , 296 ;
symbolic process defined, 6 ;
totemic, 7 ;
role in precipitating convention, 9 , 10 ;
role in creation of secrecy, 14 ;
and individual identity, 130 -131
Dog, 248 ;
feral dogs, 264 -267
Downstream, 23 , 47 , 195 , 279 , 282 , 298 n. 7
Dreams: acquisition of pearl shell magic via, 69 -70;
of maternal illness, 118 ;
of death, 266 , 304 n. 4;
of hunting, 303 n. 1
Drum, 184 -185, 187 -188
Dumont, L., 123 , 138
Durkheim, E., 3 , 5
E
Ecology, complementarity of different zones, 267 -272
Etoro, 52 , 211 , 248 , 297 n. 6
Exchange, 64 , 122 , 172 , 176 , 247 , 260 ;
and complementarity, 95 ;
Aname Kobora (pork/shell exchange), 73 -77, 110 ;
as mediation of male and female capacities, 77 , 120 ;
mortuary exchanges, 109 -111, 245 , 247 ;
ka'o manahabora (exchange between cross-cousins), 118 -120;
tropic analysis of bridewealth and death exchanges, 139 -149;
and Usane Transformation, 175 ;
affinal exchange of pork, 231 -236;
and cross-cousins, 261 , 263 ;
and Highlanders, 68 , 270 -272;
origin of pearl shells, 276 -279
F
Facilitating Modality, 143 , 165
Fasu, 21 , 22
Father: and son, 252 , 256 -257;
and father-in-law, 254 -257
Father-in-Law, 244 -247, 250 , 252 , 254 -258;
as cannibal, 233 -236;
as marsupial, 242 . See also Affines
Female Serf-Sufficiency, 204 , 205 -230 passim , 258 , 292 ;
defined, 41 -43;
vis-à-vis bridewealth, 90 , 96 ;
and patrilineality, 91 -92;
and maternal relationship, 118 -119;
female siblingship, 292 -293
Fighting: within village, 85 ;
war-leader, 246 , 247
Figurative Association, 150 . See also Metaphor; Trope
Fishing, 37 , 182 , 186 , 241 -242, 249 , 251 , 286 ;
fish spear, 194 -199;
and fish poison, 208 ;
and intersexual cooperation, 210
Fish Poison, 195 , 197 ;
magic spell, 130 ;
and matrilateral relationships, 208 -218
Fish Spear, 194 -199, 303 n. 6
Flowers, 276
Foi Language, narrative style, 126 -129
Food, 300 n. 5;
food gifts in cross-cousin exchanges, 119 -120
Food Sharing (Foi: Garanobora ): idiom of Foi kinship, 80 -81, 83 , 85 -86, 89 ;
and exogamy, 91 ;
prohibition of between affines, 94 -95, 99 ;
and bridewealth, 100
Food Taboos, 61
Foraba (Polopa), 21 , 299 n. 14;
origin place of Usi cult, 56
Functionalism, 5 , 122 , 131 , 149 -150, 285
G
Game Animals, 49 , 73 , 76 , 111 , 243 , 246 , 304 n. 5. See also Meat
Gardening, 35 ;
men's and women's roles in, 44 , 45 ;
vs. hunting, 198 -199;
garden food, 205 -207;
origin of garden food, 253 -258
Gecko, 262 -264
Geertz, C., 3 , 4 , 123 , 138
Gender, 4 ;
male and female capacities and activities, 41 -46. See also Intersexual Mediation; Male and Female
Ghosts, 145 -147, 189 , 191 , 247 , 298 n. 6, 300 n. 13, 303 n. 7;
description of, 54 -57;
role in Usi cult, 59 -61;
as source of dream revelations, 69 -70;
and mortuary ceremonies, 108 -116 passim ;
and maternal illness, 117 -118;
and Foi story-telling, 153
Ginger (Zinjerberaceae ), 186 , 188
Gisaro , 22
Glasse, R. M., 100 , 303 n. 4
Gnetum gnemon (Foi: hagenamo ), 155 -160, 162 -168 passim
H
Head-Men, 31 , 246 -247;
and kara'o tree oil trade, 64 ;
status dependent on dreams, 69 -71;
description of, 83 -89;
vs. Williams' definition of kabe ga ("base-man"), 86 -87;
associated with pearl shells and bridewealth collection, 86 -87, 99 , 276 -277;
use of metaphor, 126 ;
and magic, 129 ;
and axes, 273 -275
Healing Cults, 22 , 55 -56
Heart, 121 , 255 , 257 ;
of Usi medicine, 59 , 60 ;
and maternal illness, 118
Hegeso Village, 23 , 27 , 28 , 30 , 60 , 108 , 296 ;
and origin of kara'o tree oil, 65 ;
clan organization, 79 -85;
marriage patterns, 103 -104;
myth-telling, 151
Hidden vs. Revealed, as theme of Foi social discourse, 288
Highlanders, 19 , 49 , 268 -272;
perceived by Foi, 19 -21; 178 -179;
role in kara'o tree oil trade, 22 , 64 -65;
trade in pearl shells, 69 . See also Weyamo; Wola
Highlands, 64 -65, 179 , 186 , 303 n. 1;
contrast with Mubi River area, 19 -21;
source of axes, 275
History, white contact, 25 -29
Hunting, 174 , 175 , 177 , 251 , 286 , 289 ;
seasonal variation of, 34 -35;
complementary to gardening, 46 ;
spatial and temporal coordinates of, 49 ;
in mortuary ceremonies, 111 , 113 ;
and magic, 130 ;
and sexuality, 187 , 194 -198;
and gardening, 205 -208, 296 ;
and cannibalism, 215 ;
and fishing, 216 ;
and marriage, 235
Husband, 144 , 158 -179 passim , 186 -188, 233 ;
and widow, 114 -116;
and dead wife, 189 -194;
and sister's husband (female speaking), 202 -203;
vs. wife's father, 233 -236;
as python, 224 -230
I
Immigrants, incorporation into host longhouse, 79 -82
Incest, 257 ;
and origin of Usi cult, 56 , 60
Innovation, 7
Intersexual Mediation 4 , 173 -204 passim , 289 , 295 ;
and affinal mediation, 9 , 95 , 118 , 231 , 296 ;
and male and female properties, 41 -43;
in gardening, 45 -46;
and origin of sickness, 57 ;
reflected in food taboos, 61 ;
through exchange of meat and shells, 73 -77;
and cross-cousin exchanges, 118 , 177 ;
intersexual hostility, 182 , 187 , 207 ;
intersexual competition, 187 -188;
analogous to mediation of living and dead, 145 -149, 189 -194;
and fishing, 210 , 216 ;
and trade, 275 -276
Inversion, in obviational analysis, 165 -170
K
Ka Buru (Black Woman), 158 , 163 , 164 , 182 -188, 189
Kalauna, 287
Kaluli, 22 , 129 , 134 -135
Kara'o . See Campnosperma brevipetiolata
Kelly, Raymond C., 22 , 32 , 42 , 52 , 105 , 211 , 248 , 297 n. 6
Kewa, 19 , 21 , 63 , 71 , 104 , 299 n. 14, 300 n. 4, 302 n. 2, 304 n. 2
Kikori River, 18 , 25 -26, 278
Kinship: as symbolically constituted, 3 ;
and bridewealth inflation, 33 , 89 ;
categories created by marriage, 100 -103;
and bridewealth, 104 -106;
matrilateral, 202 -203;
and myth, 290
Kinship Terminology, 89 , 104 ;
categories of affines, 93 -95;
encoding bridewealth debts and claims, 100 -103;
classificatory usages, 104 -105;
following death, 116 -117;
sister's children and siblings, 202 -203;
aya (wife's mother, mother's mother), 209 -210
Kuma, 111
Kusa , defined, 13 . See also Magic
L
Lake Kutubu, 155 , 178 ;
location, 18 ;
discovery by Ivan Champion, 26 -27;
Catholic Mission, 28 ;
and Foi spatial orientation, 48 ;
mortuary ceremonies, 109 ;
myth categories, 150 -151, 167 ;
kinship terminology, 209
Land, 302 n. 7;
gifts of, 86
Langlas, Charles M., 22 , 23 -24, 35 , 77 , 79 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 85 , 100 , 102 , 110 , 302 nn. 16, 1
Language, Foi, Speech conventions, 125 -129
Leach, 123
Leaf Talk (metaphorical Speech), 125 -126, 286 , 288
Leech, 67 , 178 -181
LeRoy, J., 300 n. 4, 302 n. 2
Levirate, 116 , 117 , 193
Lévi-Strauss, C., 3 , 16 , 151 -152, 157 , 259 ;
and structural analysis, 12 , 155 , 170 -172;
and detotalization, 284
Lexical Signification, 122 -125;
in
naming, 135 -136. See also Syntagmatic Associations
Lindenbaum, S., 43
Lineage, 87 ;
defined, 82 ;
uterine, 92 ;
involved in betrothal, 93
Longhouse, 23 ;
and clans, 79 -86;
internal organization, 83 -86;
myth-telling, 152 . See also Village
Longhouse Community, 24 -25, 37 , 73 , 296 ;
and bridewealth, 98 ;
and marriage patterns, 103 -104
M
Magic, Magic Spell (Foi: Kusa ): contrasted with myth, 13 , 14 ;
spell for tapping Kara'o tree oil, 67 ;
pearl shell magic, 70 -71;
widow remarriage spell, 115 -116;
as metaphoric discourse, 129 -131;
and Foi myth, 151 -152, 194 -195, 285
Maiden, 179 -181, 195 , 234 , 253 ;
Usi initiates resembling, 60 ;
marriage spell for, 71
Male and Female: intersexual mediation, 4 ;
and affinity, 9 , 95 , 258 -259, 295 ;
and differentiation, 11 ;
procreative capacities, 41 -43;
productive roles, 43 -46, 49 , 113 ;
spatial coordinates, 47 , 48 , 49 ;
and ghosts, 54 -55;
and Usi cult, 56 -57, 60 -61;
related to food taboos, 61 ;
and wealth items, 68 , 86 ;
associations with pig anatomy, 75 ;
with game vs. pork, 76 ;
in Usane illnesses, 76 ;
mediation through exchange, 77 , 90 , 295 ;
and lineality, 90 -92, 119 , 229 ;
and cross-sex siblingship, 101 ;
and mortuary ceremonies, 112 -113;
and affinal/cross-cousin exchange, 120 , 295 ;
tropic analysis of, 139 -149;
and brother and sister, 157 , 221 -224;
in myth, 167 -170;
and Usane Transformation, 175 ;
role reversal, 176 -177;
and cross-cousins, 177 ;
competition between, 182 , 187 -188;
and living vs. dead, 189 -194, 243 -247;
and kinship terminology, 202 -203;
and productive roles, 158 , 208 , 210 ;
nurturance, 220 -221;
and hunting vs. fishing, 251 -252;
and opposed domestic animals, 267 . See also Female Self-Sufficiency; Intersexual Mediation; Male Contingency
Male Contingency, 61 -62, 173 -204 passim , 207 , 208 , 248 , 258 ;
defined 41 -43;
vis-à-vis bridewealth, 90 ;
summating image of, 291 -294
Male Initiation, 42
Maring, 301 n. 13
Marriage, 89 -95, 238 , 241 , 243 -247, 258 ;
marriage spell, 71 ;
marriage payments, 95 -108, 113 ;
marriage prohibitions, 90 , 102 , 158 ;
and hunting, 187 , 235 , 243 -246;
marriage preference, 209 ;
sister-exchange, 219 -221;
and cross-sex siblings, 223 ;
and ceremonial exchange, 232 -236;
and heart of pearl shell, 279 -283. See also Affinity; Bridewealth
Marsupial, 39 , 49 , 73 , 124 , 161 , 202 , 203 , 241 -243;
in bridewealth payment, 96 ;
in mortuary ceremonies, 111 ;
and magic, 130
Maternal relatives, 141 -149 passim , 199 ;
and mortuary ceremonies, 109 ;
maternal death payments, 109 -111, 113 , 247 ;
maternal illness, 55 , 56 , 117 -121;
and fish poison, 197 , 208 -210;
and yams, 221 -224;
and origin of Usane Habora exchange, 224 -230
Matrilateral Siblings, 203 , 211 -218, 248 ;
and obviation of paternal kinship, 292 -294
Mauss, M., 4 , 37 -39, 131 , 171
Meaning, and metaphor, 12 , 285 -286
Meat, 180 -181, 229 , 252 , 258 , 268 -271, 275 ;
as wealth item, 73 -77;
of game animals (aso ), 73 ;
in bridewealth payments, 96 ;
and affinal categories, 107 -108;
and mortuary ceremony, 111 -112;
as mediating item of sexual roles, 113 , 173 -178
Meggitt, M., 42 , 72 , 87 , 303 n. 1, 304 n. 4
Melpa, 72 , 87 , 299 n. 4, 300 n. 6, 303 n. 1
Mendi, 22 , 301 n. 13
Menstrual Blood, 41 -43, 118 , 168 , 179 , 181 , 211 , 269 , 271 -272;
role in conception, 50 ;
related to sorcery, 53 ;
men's contamination by, 42 , 54 , 118 ;
similarity to kara'o tree oil, 65 -66, 67 -68;
equation with fish poison, 208 , 210
Menstruation, 41 , 51 , 52 , 178 -181 passim
Metaphor, 122 -137, 246 ;
defined, 6 ;
and social identity, 8 , 44 , 130 -131;
as self-signifying, 9 ;
and obviation, 15 ;
and signs, 123 -125;
metaphoric speech, 125 -126;
and convention,
138 -139;
myths as, 170 , 285 -286, 290 ;
as valuable, 288
Mission, Christian: beginning of in Foi area, 28 ;
Catholic and A.P.C.M., 28 , 29 ;
role in abandonment of healing cults, 56 ;
opposition to mortuary and widow ritual, 55 , 115 , 302 n. 16;
and relaxing of avoidance protocol, 209 , 300 n. 7;
and Foi myth, 154 ;
opposition to infant betrothal, 300 n. 6
Morality, 3 , 8 , 179 -181;
moral content of metaphor, 124 ;
in myth, 153 -154; 284 -296 passim
Mortuary Ceremonies, 108 -117, 245 , 247 , 273 -274;
burial customs, 55 ;
tropic analysis of, 145 -149. See also Death Payments; Widow
Mother's Brother (and Sister's Son), 101 , 119 , 222 -224, 224 -230, 238 ;
mother's brother's illness, 118 -119, 141
Motivating Modality, 143 , 165
Mount Bosavi, 21 -22, 27 , 32 , 35 , 42 , 116 , 134 , 299 n. 8
Mourning Songs. See Poetry
Mubi River: location, 18 ;
in spatial orientation, 47 ;
geographic significance, 49 , 268 ;
terminological usages of Mubi tribes, 209
Myth, 138 -296 passim ;
structural analysis of, 12 ;
and Foi magic, 13 -14, 151 -152;
and cosmology, 16 ;
and memorial poetry, 286
Mythologiques , 12 , 155 , 171 -172, 259 . See also Lévi-Strauss, C.
Myth-Telling, 126 , 127 , 151 -154
N
Names, Naming, 82 , 135 -137;
in mourning songs, 134 ;
teknonymy, 136
Namesakes, 135 -137, 245 -247
Nose Plug, 181 -188
Nurturance (Foi: garanobora ): female, 205 -207;
female vs. male, 218 -221;
maternal, 229 . See also Food Sharing
O
Obviation, 138 -172, 246 , 284 -296;
defined, 10 , 128 -129, 142 -143, 145 , 290 ;
and structural analysis, 154 -172, 295 ;
and inverted myth, 167 ;
of individual and collective, 296
P
Pandanus, 34 , 61 ;
as women, 232 -236
Patriliny, 47 , 54 , 72 , 78 , 86 -87, 89 , 90 , 229 -230, 236 ;
and adoption, 80 ;
and lineages, 82 ;
defined in opposition to female lineality, 90 -92;
name and property transmission, 135 ;
and wives, 256 -258
Pearl Shells, 63 , 64 -65;
introduction into Foi area, 27 , 30 ;
and inflation of bridewealth levels, 30 -32;
associated with sunset and upstream direction, 48 ;
varieties described, 69 -72;
symbolized by birds, 70 , 71 ;
and head-men, 86 ;
in bridewealth, 93 , 95 -97;
in widow remarriage spell, 115 , 117 ;
in cross-cousin exchanges, 119 -120;
"head" and "jawbone" pearl shells, 120 ;
origin myths of, 276 -289;
heart of, 279 -283
Penis, 174 -181, 252 , 274 , 275 ;
associated with shell wealth, 72 , 230 ;
as tree grubs, 173 -178, 271 ;
and fish spear, 194 -199;
and yams, 221 -224, 304 n. 4;
python as penis symbol, 228 ;
of wild pig, 237 , 239
Pesquet's Parrot. See Birds
Pigs, 66 , 236 -241, 250 -252, 264 -267, 277 -279, 296 , 300 nn. 9, 10;
husbandry methods, 37 -38, 73 ;
used in exchange, 73 -77;
in bridewealth, 96 -97, 107 -108;
in mortuary payments, 110 , 113 ;
in mythical Karuato exchange, 233 , 235 -236;
as brother-in-law, 236 -240
Piper methysticum , 52 , 112
Poetry, mourning songs, 131 -135, 284 -286
Political Organization, longhouse communities, 24 -25
Polopa (Foraba), 104
Polygyny, 161 , 163 , 250
Population, rise in Foi population since 1945, 32 -33
Procreation, 41 , 271 -272, 279 ;
and Usi symbolism, 60 -61;
and fishing, 208
Python, 224 -229, 252
R
Raggianna Bird-of-Paradise. See Birds
Reay, M., 111
Reciprocity, 260 ;
in bridewealth, 99 -100, 105 -108;
in revenge killing, 272 -276;
and pearl shells, 279
Reproductivity: female, 57 , 60 -61, 68 , 205 , 207 , 210 , 211 , 216 ;
male, 86 ;
female and male, 90 -92, 95 , 113 , 258
Residence: and seasonal variation, 38 ;
structure of bush house, 47 ;
within
longhouse, 83 -85;
related to food sharing, 85
Rule, M., 127
S
Sago, 33 -34, 162 , 165 , 297 n. 8;
description of processing, 45 ;
sago sickness, 76 ;
sago songs, 131 -135 (see also Poetry);
origin of honamo variety, 274 -276
Sahlins, M., 138 , 149 -150
Sa Pork Exchange (Sa aend wiya ), northern origin of, 22 . See also Dawa
Saussure, F. de, 122 -123
Schieffelin, E. L., 22 , 134 -135
Schismogenesis, 208
Scrotum, 254 -255, 257
Seasonal Variation, 34 -40, 296 , 304 n. 5;
Mauss and Evans-Pritchard on, 37 ;
conceptualization of by Foi, 38 -40
Secrecy: as an effect of tropic symbolization, 14 ;
and origin of pearl shells, 278 -279
Semen, 41 , 66 , 117 , 156 , 299 n. 4;
role in conception, 50
Semiotic, and definition of culture, 6 -11, 138 , 150
Sexual Intercourse, 50 -51, 53 , 161 , 168 , 180 -181, 237 , 239 , 303 n. 1;
and dreams, 70 ;
vs. subsistence activities, 168 ;
and nurturance, 205 -208;
and oral insemination, 173 -178
Sexuality, 251 , 252 ;
obviation of male sexuality, 292
Sickness: menstrual contamination, 54 ;
originating in act of incest, 57 ;
Usi healing cult, 56 -62;
and food taboos, 61 ;
analogy with intersexual mediation, 60 ;
and skin, 72 ;
Usane sicknesses, 76 -77;
maternal and cross-cousin sickness, 113 , 117 -119, 161 ;
and widows, 114 , 116
Sign, 10 , 122 -124
Sillitoe, P., 56 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 69 , 268 , 299 n. 5, 300 n. 11, 304 n. 1
Sister-Exchange, 105 -106, 218 -221, 238 -241, 250 , 252 , 292
Sister-in-Law, 195 -198, 256 , 303 n. 8
Sisters, 199 -204, 211 -218, 218 -221, 258
Sister's Child, 201 -203, 227 -230, 233 , 258 ;
as yams runners, 221 -224. See also Mother's Brother
Skin, 68 , 220 ;
and shell wealth, 72 , 114 -116;
"Fastening the Skin" (cross-cousin exchanges), 117 -121, 302 n. 21;
and maternal illness, 118 ;
of pearl shell, 281 -282
Sky: as home of marsupials, 39 , 49 , 304 n. 5;
as land of the dead, 243 -247
Sociality, 2 -4, 8 , 121 , 139 , 284 ;
and myth, 16 ;
summating image of Foi sociality, 172 , 288 , 296
Social Structure: and myth, 5 ;
contrast between culture and social structure, 3 , 7
Sorcery, 51 -54, 59 , 60 ;
analogy with Usi cult, 56 , 60 -61;
structural relationship with kara'o tree oil, 67 -68
Spatial Orientation, 46 -50;
and origin of illness, 57
Strathern, A., 42 , 55 , 72 , 80 , 87 , 116 , 126 , 129 , 136 , 279 , 299 n. 4, 300 n. 6, 300 n. 5, 301 n. 11
Strathern, M., 4 , 72 , 129 , 299 n. 4, 301 n. 11, 304 n. 2
Structuralism: in symbolic analysis, 11 -13;
structural analysis of Usi cult, 60 -61;
and obviation, 154 -172, 290 , 295
Subsistence: description of Foi system, 33 -40;
male and female roles in, 43 -46;
and magic, 152 ;
in myth, 157 -160 passim , 259
Substitution: as property of metaphor, 9 ;
as feature of tropic construction, 122 -137 passim
Sunset, 47 -48
Symbolic Analysis, 5 , 15 , 285
Syntagmatic Associations, 123 -125;
vs. figurative associations, 138 . See also Lexical Signification
T
Teknonymy, 94 , 136
Territory: as poeticized in Foi song, 132 -135;
as metaphor of life span, 125 , 284 -285
Theft, 178 -181, 253 , 256 -257;
adultery as, 53
Timp Cult, 22 , 297 n. 2
Tools, 46 ;
used as items of mortuary payment, 110 -111;
and head-men, 274 -275
Totemism, 203 ;
as tropic contruction, 6 , 10
Trade, Trading Partners, 22 , 64 , 268 -272, 283 ;
pearl shells, 69 ;
kara'o tree oil, 64 -65;
internal trade in meat in Foi area, 73
Tree Crops, 35 -36, 44 , 234
Tree Grubs, 173 -178, 250 , 252 , 268 -269, 271 , 272 -273, 275
Trope, 6 , 9 , 181 ;
tropic analysis, 13 , 139 -149;
semantic vs. tropic symbolization, 14 ;
defined, 123 . See also Metaphor
Tuni (Myth), ethnography of, 150 -154
Turner, V. W., 123 , 125
U
Uga'ana (Foi Mythical Character), 186 , 200 -202, 211 -216, 233 -234, 253 -255, 257 , 261 -264, 264 -267, 270 -272
Upstream, 23 , 47 , 276 , 298 n. 7
Up vs. Down, 157 -158, 188 ;
as spatial axis in cosmology, 48 -49;
associated with game vs. pork opposition, 76
Usane Habora (Pork Exchange and Healing Ceremony), 22 , 76 -77, 174 -175, 184 , 187 -188, 200 -201, 218 -219, 250 , 252 -254, 276 -277;
origin myth of, 224 -230, 295 -296;
and mythical Karuato exchange, 233 -236
Usane Transformation, 184 , 200 , 254 , 295 -296, 303 n. 9;
defined, 175
Usi Healing Cult, 56 -62;
origin myth of, 56 -57;
analogy with sorcery, 60 -61;
and food taboos, 61
V
Vagina, 67 , 76 ;
and sorcery, 52 ;
and widow remarriage, 115 , 117 ;
origin of, 156 , 161
Village. See Longhouse; Longhouse Community
W
Wagner, R., 3 , 5 , 15 , 42 , 90 , 91 , 112 , 123 , 124 , 126 , 129 , 143 , 150 , 175 , 189 , 193 , 198 , 276 , 278 , 279 , 299 n. 13, 302 n. 15, 302 n. 1, 303 n. 6, 303 n. 1, 304 n. 2;
on collectivization and differentiation, 6 ;
on convention, 8 ;
on obviation, 10
Wealth, 68 , 71 , 75 , 224 , 230 , 235 -236, 276 -283;
purchase of sorcery, 54 ;
productive wealth (tools), 111 ;
and decorations, 181 ;
exchange, 260 ;
and Highlanders, 269 -272;
and women, 221 , 241 . See also Campnosperma brevipetiolata ; Cowrie; Pearl Shells
Western Society, contrasted with Foi society, 7 -10, 153 -154
Weyamo. See Highlanders
Widows, 108 -117, 147 ;
and origin myth of kara'o tree oil, 65 , 67 -68;
remarriage of, 114 -117;
widow retention, 116 ;
as "black woman" (ka buru ) in myth, 188 , 189
Wife, 158 -170 passim , 216 , 240 , 261 -264, 289 ;
dead wife, 189 -194;
elder brother's wife, 194 -199;
and sister-exchange, 221 ;
as pandanus fruit, 232 , 234 -236;
and sisters, 257 -258;
as birds, 261 -264. See also Widow
Williams, F. E., 22 , 23 , 27 , 32 , 35 , 39 , 48 , 61 , 70 , 76 , 80 , 83 , 86 -87, 91 , 93 , 103 , 104 , 109 , 110 , 111 , 298 n. 10, 299 n. 12, 300 n. 12, 302 n. 18;
on Foi myth, 150 -151, 155 -158, 163 , 167 , 170 , 171 , 189 , 193 , 276 , 278 , 300 n. 14, 303 nn. 3, 5 , 6 , 304 n. 1
Wola, 19 , 27 , 63 , 178 -179, 299 n. 5, 300 n. 11;
role in kara'o tree oil trade, 64 -65. See also Highlanders
Women, 205 -230;
and ghosts, 60 -61;
and mourning, 109 ;
and mother's brother, 118 , 119 ;
without men, 187 , 199 -202;
equated with game animals, 206 , 243 -246;
as pandanus, 232 -236;
medial between husband and brother, 236 , 258 ;
and pigs, 239 ;
and gardening, 257 ;
as birds, 261 -263. See also Female Self-Sufficiency, Intersexual Mediation; Male and Female
Y
Yam, and penis, 221 -224, 304 n. 4
Young, M., 287
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1. For a general critique of functionalist theory and methodology see Sahlins 1976.
1. According to the 1980 National Census, 439 Foi live in other areas of Papua New Guinea.
2. Ryan (1961:270) states that the Timp Cult originated in the Purari River delta area of the Gulf Coast.
3. Penelope Hope (1979) describes this and other patrols into the interior Gulf Province and Southern Highlands Province during this period.
4. One of the first village constables of Hegeso was Irasaburi of the So'onedobo clan. He was not a head-man at any time in his life, and as an elderly man when I arrived in Hegeso was without influence. He was replaced in 1961 by Iritoro, of the Banimahu'u clan, who by the time I arrived was one of the wealthiest and strongest leaders of the Herebo extended community (Patrol Report No. 3 1960-1961; Patrol Report No. 2 1953-1954).
5. Elsewhere I describe the role of silk production within the Foi domestic economy (Weiner 1982b ).
6. Raymond C. Kelly (1972: chap. 2) gives a derailed account of the subsistence system of the Etoro, of the nearby Mount Bosavi area to the west of Lake Kutubu, which shares some features with that of the Foi.
7. I would like to thank Bruce French who was Southern Highlands Province food crops field horticulturalist during my fieldwork period and who made a brief survey of Foi horticultural and sago management techniques in Hegeso in October 1980.
8. The Foi recognize at least five varieties of sago that grow only at Ayamo.
9. The flooding of the Mubi Valley watercourses is a result of seasonal rainfall increases near the source of the Mubi, south of the Tari Basin. The flood months coincide with the period of maximum rainfall recorded at Tari station over a ten-year period between 1953 and 1963 (see Brookfield and Hart 1966: table 1).
10. Williams' ninety-three days of fieldwork took place between November 18 and May 7. Between February 1 and April 17 of that period he was with the Wola-speakers of Augu village to the north in the higher-montane valleys. In other words, his time spent with the Foi coincided almost exactly with abate hase , "pandanus season," when interest in hunting among the Foi is at its lowest.
1. I would like to thank Bruce French, who was the Southern Highlands provincial agronomist during my fieldwork period, for much of this information.
2. This approximation applies only to the people of Hegeso, Barutage, and Herebo with whom I lived. I received the impression during brief visits to Tugiri and Yomaisi villages, however, that there were other areas in the Mubi Valley where people were more dependent upon sweet potato and could be said to have a double staple of sweet potato and sago.
3. The obsidian for such blades is not found in Foi territory but is imported from groups living to the southwest in volcanic areas.
4. During my first fieldwork period, the men and women of each village spent one day a week on road maintenance, upkeep of aid post and primary school grounds, and similar activities. The Local Government Council fined all people who did not attend communal work duties, and hence men and women drastically curtailed their time spent at Ayamo. Hunting activity was also greatly reduced by the responsibility of children's attendance at local primary schools and the desire of people to attend weekly church services. A favored time then for "family hunting outings" was the end of December and early January when the children received a prolonged Christmas holiday.
During my last trip to Hegeso in 1984-1985, however, government funding allocated to such rural improvement work had been suspended, and many men had been living at Ayamo for some time when I arrived, returning only to participate in the Dawa pig-kill that was held in January 1985.
5. Hegeso rebuilt their present longhouse in the early 1960s, locating it along the footpath but still near the River. When Barutage longhouse split into the new Barutage and Baru longhouses, the latter moved further up the Baru River in the bush and Barutage relocated to ridged ground south of the Mubi River. Men told me that an ideal site for longhouses was a ridge or spur near the river which made defense easier during times when warfare was still practiced.
6. The Foi were fond of telling me how in early days when a non-Foi-speaking stranger arrived and indicated the east as his origin, men assumed he was speaking "ghosts'" language.
7. Ta'i is the form used when speaking of position or location; ta'o by
contrast is used when indicating motion to or from a point. Similarly kore (when speaking of motion to the west) versus kuri (when speaking of position), and so forth.
8. Several spells I recorded refer to rivers that are said to exist in distant places to the west outside Foi territory, such as the Tunamo, which is said to be "near Koroba" (near the Upper Strickland River) and is considered "sacred" by the Foi; or the Dunu River that the Foi locate in the Mount Bosavi region. These waters are sacred because they are nearer the imagined source of all waters, which to the Foi is synonymous with the source of life itself.
9. This is true even though Ayamo is always kasia , because it is in the Yo'oro River valley and is approached by walking down intervening Mount Aguba.
10. I am indebted to Tirifa and his elder sister Ibume of the Hegeso So'onedobo clan for elucidating Foi conception theory and to their brother's son Heno for aiding me in a difficult translation.
11. "Eleven" in the Foi counting system is indicated by pointing to the side of the shoulder "where a man carries a child." "Nine" is the elbow "where a female holds a nursing child."
12. This was also true in traditional times according to Williams (1977: 250).
13. The acquisition and use of irika'o as a valuable parallels the use of busare poison among the Daribi (Wagner 1967:73). I had no knowledge of irika'o ever being used as an item of Foi bridewealth, though such an occurrence would be rare and highly clandestine. The use of husare by Daribi sorcerers seems to belong to the same class as fana sorcery among the Foi: that performed on the personal leavings of a victim.
Men also told me that Highlanders from Nembi and further north would purchase irika'o from Foi men for shell wealth, pigs, and other valuables.
14. The Foraba or Polopa people live along the eastern portion of the Erave River near the border of the Southern Highlands and Simbu Provinces. They are neighbors of the Daribi to the east and the Kewa to the west (see Brown 1980).
1. Traditional salt is still traded among Angan-speaking groups (Godelier 977:127-151).
2. The Foi say that two large bamboos of oil are traded for one large pearl shell or one midsized pig. One bamboo of oil may also be traded for one shoat.
3. These tubes are sixteen to twenty feet long and contain roughly ten to twelve liters of oil. Nowadays a small proportion of oil is also shipped by airplane, and in this case empty twenty-liter kerosene drums are used.
4. The Melpa people of the Mount Hagen area, who receive kara'o via Wola middlemen, liken it to male "grease" or semen rather than menstrual blood (see Strathern and Strathern 1971:163, 193).
5. Sillitoe (1979b :165) reports that Wola men were aided by the spirits of
dead ancestors who gave them dreams revealing the future acquisition of pearl shells and other wealth objects.
6. A. J. Strathern (1971a :233-234) notes that among the Melpa, the image of glossy bird plumage and the brightly colored leaves of certain plants is a common one in pearl shell magic.
7. According to Schodde and Hitchcock (1968) the Foi refer to the Black Capped Lory and the Red Cheeked Parrot by the same name.
8. The Foi refer metaphorically to a "wealthy woman" as one who cares successfully for many pigs and who is lavish in providing food for her husband's male visitors.
9. In preparing for the slaughter of pigs at the Dawa held in January 1985, the men of Hegeso cooperated in fencing off a large tract of unused swamp ground for their pigs. This, they felt, would mitigate against the contraction of illness from feral pigs.
10. It is common, however, for pigs to become lost in the bush, necessitating extended searches for them when they are needed.
11. Sillitoe (1979b :271) reports that the Wola themselves only recently borrowed the Sa or Sa aend wiya from Mendi-speakers to the northeast.
12. Williams (1977:173), however, suggested that the Foi of Lake Kutubu learned of the practices relating to the Usane from the Lower Foi to the southeast.
13. I was told, however, by other men that the i~ was also a ghost or spirit, and perhaps semantically related to the i~ ho~ mentioned in chapter 3.
14. Note that Williams' account of the Usi cult stressed the origin of payment for Usi curing services (1977:275-277).
1. Fagiabo married a widowed So'onedobo woman of Barutage. Men said that this was permissible since they were not related.
2. I am indebted to Murray Rule for discussion concerning this point.
3. For a description of Foi housebuilding and architectural techniques, see Weiner 1982a .
4. LeRoy (1975:xiv) reports a cognate idiom among the Kewa. The Ikwaye-Angans also refer to the head as the "egg bone" (Mimica 1981:96 fn.).
5. A. J. Strathern similarly concludes that "food creates substance, just as procreation does, and forms an excellent symbol both for the creation of identity out of residence and for the values of nurturance, growth, comfort, and solidarity which are associated primarily with parenthood. In cultural terms what we often find in the Highlands, I would suggest, is a combination of filiative rules and ideas based on upbringing, nurturance and consumption of food" (1973:29).
6. Before the Christian Mission discouraged the practice, girls were betrothed in infancy. Men nowadays wait until a girl's breasts develop before making betrothal enquiries.
7. The men of Hegeso told me that as a result of Christian Mission influence, the yumu protocols have been relaxed somewhat and that they may refer
to these relatives by the less restrictive cross-sex affinal term aya . However, I noticed no relaxation in interpersonal conduct between yumu affines, nor any lessening of the force of other affinal protocols.
8. A "hand" refers to the counting system of the Foi. Starting with the left little finger: 1; ring finger: 2; middle finger: 3; index finger: 4; thumb: 5; palm: 6; wrist: 7; forearm: 8; elbow: 9; upper arm: 10; side of shoulder: 11; top of shoulder: 12; side of neck: 13; mastoid: 14; ear: 15; cheek: 16; eye: 17; side of nose: 18; nose: 19, and continuing in mirror fashion down the right side to the right little finger: 37, or "one hand."
9. I refer to the kabe gibumena , the man who gives the bridewealth, as the most common relative who assumes this role: the groom's father. However, I have noted in the previous sections where exceptions occur.
10. Nowadays, it is more common for a new piece of trade-store cloth to be used instead.
11. The Stratherns describe a part of Melpa bridewealth that is given about one week after the penal kng , "pig for public distribution": "The groom's family and close lineage mates cook two to six pigs and take these by night to the bride's family. In return, the bride now receives a personal dowry of netbags, oil flasks, and breeding pigs, and ideally a return is also made for the cooked pigs" (Strathern and Strathern 1969:147).
12. Apart from the arera bari , only men receive bridewealth. A man sometimes receives a share of bridewealth for his wife's female relatives, and he may often share it with her, but the wealth is given to him and not to his wife.
Only 3.7 percent of bridewealth shares in the sample were for matrilaterally related women: MZDs, for example, but-more commonly, mother's second husband's daughters. Usually, a man receives pay for his MHD only if he accompanied his mother to her second husband's household and "lived with" his step-sister.
For the four head-men of the sample, 18 percent of their bridewealth claims were for women with whom they had no recognized claim other than a tie of patronage with one of the woman's main recipients. These shares thus primarily represent reciprocation for aid they gave in accumulating the bride-wealth for the main recipient's marriage. Men explained to me, for example, that "I received this amount for this woman not because she is a relative of mine but because I helped her brother when he got married." By contrast, only 2 percent of the bridewealth shares the thirty-one ordinary men received were for women of this category.
13. Similar idioms are reported among the Mating of the Western Highlands and the Mendi. Rappaport (1969:122) notes that among the Maring, "all members of a subterritorial group share in the pork which accompanies the bridewealth. . .. But despite such ritual food sharing throughout the entire subterritorial group, and despite references to 'our women' which accompany it, it is within the minimal agnatic unit, the subclan, or clan, that rights in women are chiefly held." Ryan (1969:165) says of the Mendi that "a share in a woman's bride price is thus seen as a material return for certain personal
obligations, gifts and services, rather than as a compensation to her clan as a whole."
14. I am indebted to Raymond C. Kelly and Andrew Strathern for their correspondence on these subjects while I was in Hegeso, which helped me to formulate the problem.
15. Wagner (1967:154 if.) describes a similar structure of Daribi intermarriage, though the Daribi ideology relates it specifically to debts in women themselves, as the Foi ideology does not.
16. The Christian Mission forbade the Foi from making death payments in the early 1960s (see Langlas 1974:187).
17. I shall describe traditional funeral customs as they pertain to male decedents and note at which points the customs diverge for a female decedent.
18. Williams (1977:293) observed that the Kutubuans took two bones from the deceased's little finger instead.
19. I am unable to say whether the same funeral rituals applied to a deceased female.
20. When I asked the speaker what kinds of shells these names referred to, he said that they were "magical" shells and that the names were "only names."
21. Nowadays, the Foi say that one makes ka'o exchanges to make up for bridewealth insufficiencies only.
2. LeRoy (1978) also discusses the rhetorical and competitive use of metaphor in Kewa ceremonial songs.
3. I am indebted to Nelson (Yaroge) Kigiri of Hegeso Village for his elucidation of the two categories of Foi magic.
4. Owe and eya are the conventional two-syllable cries ending each sentence in a sago chant.
5. The Foi use the expression me huraro to mean a place where humans do not live. By extension, they call a house in which there are no people an a huraro , an empty house.
6. The reference here is to those elderly, house-ridden people in a village who watch over the house while others are out at their tasks.
7. This is also true when men use land belonging to other individuals, which is common in Foi. The long-term occupation of land can sometimes outbalance true ownership, as in cases where the true owner has neglected a piece of territory and the borrower has occupied and used it extensively and advantageously. Be this as it may, the memorial songs always speak of an ideal system in which certain lands and territories belong to and have belonged to specific lineages and clans for all time.
1. I am indebted to Charles Langlas for discussion on this topic which aided me in formulating my analysis.
2. The Foi possess a tuni that accounts for this distinctive feature of the ya banima . The men of Hegeso also told me that the Banimahu'u clan is considered to be the only "true" Foi clan, the only clan with an autochthonous origin in the Mubi Valley region.
3. See later the analysis of the myth "Tononawi and Aiyabe" (chapter 11).
1. I have already mentioned the common metaphorical equation between sexual intercourse and death in Foi dreams (see chapter 4). Foi also told me that if one dreams of having sexual intercourse with a woman, it foretells the fact that the dreamer will kill a cassowary or wild pig. (For a more detailed account of Foi dream interpretation see Weiner 1986).
2. This is commonly done when one is leaving the house for the day.
3. Apparently, the circumstances under which the man revealed himself to the ka buru are thought to be romantic by the Foi. F. E. Williams gives an account of a seduction in which the man "finding [the woman] at work sago-making and ready to pack up and go home . . . had stolen up and taken her stick while her back was turned. After searching for it high and low she had finally seen it poking up near the heap of sago fibres and behind the heap found [the man] himself—an excellent joke which quite melted her heart" (Williams 1977:218-219).
4. In Williams' version of this myth, the husband discovers a hole leading from the spot where the si'a'a sui is planted. This springy stick was attached to the hair of the corpse and was designed to snap the scalp off after the body had become soft enough through decomposition. Wagner notes that among the Daribi, the coronal suture is the spot at which the soul leaves the body after death (1978:207 fn.). Glasse (1965:30) reports an identical belief among the Huli of the Southern Highlands Province.
5. In Williams' version, Gaburiniki, the guardian of the afterworld, is supposed to have plucked out the tongues of all new arrivals and replaced them back to front in their mouths so that they could not speak properly.
6. "The Fish Spear" is closely cognate to the Daribi tale "The Yaga " in its depictment of the mediating role of the fish spear (Wagner 1978:117).
7. This passage is a conventional reference in myth-telling. It indicates that the woman at first fears that the young man is a ghost and implores him to carry out the rites associated with the Dabi Gerabora ghost-appeasement ceremony.
8. Williams (1977:218), however, comments on the mediating confidant-like function of a young unmarried man's elder brother's wife, his karege , in acting as a go-between during the young man's courtship.
9. Most other versions of this myth begin with the "Usane Transformation."
1. The theme of the "good brother" versus the "bad brother" seems to be a pervasive one throughout the interior and Highlands area of Papua New Guinea and is found in almost identical form among the Western Enga (Meg-
gitt 1976:73) and Melpa (Vicedom 1977:106). The theme of the detachable tree that serves as a riverine escape vehicle is also found in a Daribi tale (Wagner 1978:117).
2. This character also "figures . . . often in Daribi folklore" (Wagner 1978:208).
3. The bush banana grows and bears fruit very rapidly and is used as a deus ex machina for accelerating the growth of humans in several Foi myths.
4. Tuzin (1972) has explored the symbolism of the yam among the Arapesh of the Sepik River area of New Guinea and has described the equation between the yam and the penis. As among the Foi, what Meggitt has described as the "perambulating penis" (1964) is a theme in the mythology of the Arapesh.
1. Williams (1977:328) recorded this statement from his Kutubu informants: "the abari [red pandanus] are women; therefore when men are eating abari women must not talk."
2. The association of warfare and affinity characterizes a number of interior and Highlands cultures (see for example P. Brown 1964; D. J. J. Brown 1979; A. M. Strathern 1972; Wagner 1977).
3. I would like to acknowledge Dr. Raymond C. Kelly's suggestion of the importance of this distinction in Foi mythology.
4. The themes discussed in this paragraph are similarly treated in the Auyana myth "Two Brothers Obtain Wives" (McKaughan 1973:333-337).
5. It may be of incidental interest to note that the fruit of the gofe tree (Ficus pungens : see Conn 1979) normally falls to the ground when ripe where it is eaten by ground-dwelling animals including the bush fowl, cassowary, and the various rodents, as well as the arboreal marsupials. The latter are said by the Foi to "spend the night on the forest floor looking for food and then take it back up into the trees with them during the day." In addition, as I have described in chapter 1, the marsupials and other forest animals are said to descend from the sky under cover of cloud during the beginning of the monsoon brought on by the southeast trade winds. The onset of this rainy season corresponds to the ripening of the fruit of several Ficus varieties which are used in setting traps during these months.
1. For an appraisal of the literature concerning the role of exchange in Melanesian societies, see Sillitoe 1978.
2. This tale is found in nearly identical form among the Kewa (Beier 1977:48-51).
3. The Foi call any large magpie-like black bird by this term (see Schodde and Hitchcock 1968: passim.)
4. The Foi refer to a medenane giru as a dream of the impending death of a man (denane: "ghost"; me -: transitive or causative prefix; giru : "dream"). It is often dreamt by the intended victim's brother. It portends not just death,
but specifically death by murder or sorcery, as distinct from a dream of fatal illness.
5. The Foi use the same verb (ku -) to denote "to lose consciousness" and "to die." The generality of this semantic usage in other New Guinea languages is perhaps reflected by the pidgin usage of the verb indai , "to faint" and indai pinis "to die" (see Mihalic 1971:79).
6. The axe heads found in the Foi area were identified by Ian Hughes (Human Sciences Program, Australian National University) as originating in the Ambiamp quarries in the Western Highlands.
7. A spell recited during the planting of honamo sago identifies the sago sucker as the skull of Tononawi.
Preferred Citation: Weiner, James F. The Heart of the Pearl Shell: The Mythological Dimension of Foi Sociality. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1988 1988. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7w10087d/