Marriage Patterns

There is an explicit as well as statistical preference for marriage within the clan cluster (cf. Rappaport 1969: 121; LiPuma 1988). Over time there has been some change in marriage patterns (app. 1). Since around the time of contact with the government in 1956 there has been a trend toward greater intermarriage within the Kundagai-Aikupa population. Marriage with the Simbai Kalam and Maring, and with Maring settlements upstream in the Jimi, has always been prevalent. Since the mid-1950s, however, intermarriages with lower-Simbai (Maring) populations have decreased at the expense of relations with upper-Simbai (Kalam) groups. Marriage ties to Up-Jimi settlements, notably neighboring Kompiai, have increased considerably since that date.

Ideally, the Maring do not marry major enemies, cenang yu (liter-

ally "axe men"). Besides their major enemies, the Tsembaga and Am-brakwi, the Kundagai also fought other clan clusters as allies of kinsmen of yet other populations. Men of one local group might therefore find themselves on opposing sides, but only in the role of allies of the respective major enemies, never as major belligerents themselves.

Over the last fifty or so years of hostilities several intermarriages between the Tsuwenkai Kundagai and the Ambrakwi, and the Bokapai Kundagai and the Tsembaga, have occurred. These marriages do not transgress the rule of avoiding intermarriage between major enemies since the Tsuwenkai Kundagai fought the Ambrakwi only as allies of Bokapai kin, who in turn fought the Tsembaga as allies of Tsuwenkai men.

Major enemies observe taboos on eating the produce of each other's territories and on sharing the same fires. Failure to observe these taboos invites sickness or even death sent by angry ancestral spirits, and women married to cenang yu are considered vulnerable to such attacks, as are men who merely visit enemy communities. Maring ideas of the supernatural and taboos thus serve to isolate enemy populations, inhibiting intermarriage and a variety of other contacts resulting from the marriage bond. Nonetheless, the exchange of women is a recognized principle in the formal establishment of friendly relations between formerly hostile groups. To establish peace, each enemy group sends to the other as many women as men were killed by them in warfare.

Rappaport (1969: 128) notes that in 1963 the Tsembaga were already considering the exchange of women with the Kundagai to establish peace. Despite a marriage between a Kundagai girl and a Tsembaga in 1974—a union opposed by the bride's kin—the exchange of women to formally establish peaceful relations between the two populations remained unresolved in 1985.

Maring marriage patterns differ markedly from those of some other highland groups, such as the Mae Enga, who told Meggitt (1964: 218), "We marry the people we fight." The avoidance of such marriages may correlate with a less marked antagonism between the sexes and a milder concern with the polluting capacities of women, as Meggitt (1964) has suggested.

By contrast, men state that the ideal marriage is either contracted within the clan cluster or with allies. The latter are called nokomai , literally "road" or "track," but this was also explained to mean "the way or road of the ancestors, along which flow women, pigs, and other valuables." The principal nokomai groups of the Tsuwenkai and Kinim-

bong Kundagai are the Kundagai of Bokapai, the Kauwatyi and, to a lesser extent, the Cenda, Manamban, Tuguma, and Kanump-Kauwil. These, and to a lesser extent some other Maring and Kalam groups, were those from whom military aid was sought. Such assistance was reciprocal. Aid in war was negotiated individually between kinsmen. The :number of allies who might be recruited depended mainly upon the extent of intermarriage and the distance between groups. Thus the Tsuwenkai and Kinimbong Kundagai received most aid in war from the Bokapai Kundagai and the Kauwatyi, among whom they had the greatest number of affines and cognates, and whose settlements are among the closest to Tsuwenkai and Kinimbong. Some 94.2 percent of existing marriages contracted outside the Kundagai subcluster settled in Tsuwenkai and Kinimbong are with allies, 2.3 percent are with enemies (including the Ambrakwi in this category), and 3.4 percent—all contracted since the suppression of warfare—are with populations beyond the limits of Kundagai alliance in warfare.

Rappaport (1969) and LiPuma (1988) have discussed Maring marriage arrangements in detail. Here it need only be noted that the ideal form of marriage is one arranged by the agnates of a girl or young man. In this way they are able to establish affinal links in the most economically and politically advantageous location. In practice, many young people form romantic attachments leading to marriages that may not meet with their agnates' approval. Marriages are often unstable until the birth of children.

I determined the reasons for marriage in a nonrandom sample of thirty-six cases (table 3) (see also Lowman-Vayda 1971 for a list of reasons men give for offering women to specific clans).

There are other means of acquiring a wife not revealed in the table. Kundagai claim that the sororate, wherein a man is permitted to marry a clan sister of his deceased wife, is occasionally practiced.^[10] Marriage by capture has occurred at odd times in the past, when women of enemy populations found trespassing were given in marriage to allies. Rappaport (1969) has identified the sole prescriptive marriage rule among the Maring, whereby the daughter of a woman's son is given in marriage to her paternal grandmother's natal subclan. Several marriages recorded in Kundagai genealogies conform to this pattern but were not included in the sample on which the table is based. Kundagai genealogical material indicates, however, that the rule is not often adhered to, as Rappaport (1969) also notes for the Tsembaga, and it seems inappropriate to refer to the pattern as a "prescriptive rule."

To conclude this section I would note that discussion of formal patterns and rules of marriage reveals little about the choices underlying particular marriages, or the structured embeddedness of marriage within a system of social reproduction (see also LiPuma 1988). Within the constraints on marriage imposed by cultural understandings of incest, clan exogamy, and nonmarriageable kin, there remains a wide field of choice of particular marriage partners. Whether a particular marriage can be classified as sister exchange, widow inheritance, blood debt, and so on is, in at least some cases, a post hoc rationalization for

a marriage that may have begun as an instance of "stealing the bride." More generally, reasons given by Maring or anthropologists for marriage, as a set of typologies, may be somewhat epiphenomenal to the exercise of strategic choices by those involved in contracting marriages. Factors influencing men's decisions on their own or their clansmen's choice of spouse include the control potential affines exercise over valued economic and political resources.