Chapter IV
The House and the Economy

"The most that one can say about the economic aspect of the relationship is that it appears to be one of mutual convenience."
—Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants, on the Mbuti-Bila partnerships

Part One: The House

In a creative study of the local Colombian economy, Stephen Gudeman (1990) suggests the house as an alternative to the model of the corporation. He argues that Colombian peasants use a model of the house to organize their social and economic lives, and he defines the house primarily in opposition to the model of the corporation, which he believes coexists in dialectical tension with the house. Gudeman holds that the house economy is an institution of such long standing that it preceded historically the development of the market and its corporate organization (1990:9). He also contends that the notion of a house economy has widespread applicability and relevance and thus asks whether, in rethinking the corporation as a model for local forms of organization, we might modify the use of that model in African studies as well.

The corporate model upon which lineage theory is based is a specifically Western model that has been imposed on others at the expense of their folk models. The house, in contrast, seems to represent the way that many people conceive of and model their own economies. In fact, one of the ancestors of descent theory, Evans-Pritchard (1940), reveals that the Nuer do not conceive of their social world in terms of a lineage model. For example, in 1933, Evans-Pritchard posed the question: "What exactly is meant by lineage and clan? One thing is fairly certain, namely, that the Nuer do not think in group abstractions called clans. In fact, as far as I am aware, he has no word meaning clan and you

cannot ask a man an equivalent of 'What is your clan' " (1933, part 1:28). In The Nuer , Evans-Pritchard offered a definition of lineage that has little to do with corporate or descent groups: "A lineage is thok mac , the hearth, or thok dwiel , the entrance to the hut" (1940:195). For Evans-Pritchard, then, lineage was the model for the hearth and home. But might the hearth and home, rather than the descent group and lineage, be the Nuer models for political opposition? Might the lineage be an imposition of a European corporate model? Or might there be, as I argue for the Lese, two or more coexisting models—say, a descent model for one set of social processes, a house model for another set? Gudeman notes,

One can only wonder how the history of descent theory might have appeared had theorists of the 1940's, instead of exporting their own market experience, used a model of the home and the hearth, as Evans-Pritchard's own foundational work suggested (1940:192, 195, 204, 222, 247; 1951:6, 7, 21,127, 141), or the local imagery of kin groupings. We might never have established such trust in the existence of the corporate descent group or even, for that matter, the lineage. (1990:184)

Gudeman's emphasis on the house helps us to find models that reflect local conceptions of social organization rather than those tendentiously formulated by anthropologists. But if a house model is to advance our ethnographic understanding, we have first to distinguish our use of the term "house" from other uses.

The importance of the house as a primary unit of social organization, or even as a model for the larger social order, has never been questioned in anthropology. Not only have ethnographers clearly pointed out that the architecture of the house is related directly to both cosmology and social organization (see Morgan 1881; Bourdieu 1971; Fernandez 1976; Feeley-Harnik 1980; J. Comaroff 1984; Blier 1987; J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff 1991), but also there is a strong interest in reconceptualizing the organization of some societies, especially Indonesian and Indo-European societies, as being of the "House" type (Lévi-Strauss 1979; Errington 1987; Pak 1986; Schloss 1988), or what Lévi-Strauss calls "Société à Maisons." In addition, there is a rich and extensive literature on households and their economic functions (see, for example, Guyer 1981; Wilk 1989, Heald 1991).

Lévi-Strauss notes the existence of societies throughout the world whose units of social organization are not easily defined by terms such as "family," "lineage," or "clan," as they have been used conventionally in anthropology. Unfortunately, the anthropology of Boas and

Kroeber, he says, "did not offer the concept of the house in addition to that of tribe, village, clan and lineage" (1979:174). Lévi-Strauss sees in the house an institutional form for the mediation of conflicting social structural principles, such as patrilineal and matrilineal descent, filiation and residence, hypergamy and hypogamy. This view has been followed by S. Errington (1987) in her study of how the house resolves contradictions between brothers and sisters in Indonesia, and by J. A. Boon (1990) in his study of Balinese twins.

It is clear that the "house," as developed in this literature, is suited to the characteristic kinship contradictions in island Southeast Asia, many of which are managed or reunited at the level of the house. But the concept of the house, in whatever context it is elaborated as a unit of social analysis, can help repair some of the problems associated with the preoccupation with descent rules, and it can illuminate new aspects of social organization and its symbolic representation. In Indonesia, for example, whereas a focus on descent would emphasize the differences between societies with distinct kinship patterns, a focus on the house reveals important continuities between unilineal and nonunilineal and exogamous and endogamous societies—according to Boon (1990), these may be transformations of one another. For the Lese, the conception of the house, as we shall see, leads us to consider social relationships and ideas obscured by descent; namely, the role of gender and inequality in constituting ethnic differentiation within the economy.

Despite the centrality of the household in the economic anthropology of Africa, a house model has not been systematized, and where it has appeared as a central metaphor it is usually employed as a component of descent organization (see Schloss 1988; Jones 1963; Mitchell 1956; Lloyd 1957). M. R. Schloss (1988) views the houses of the Ehing of West Africa as constituting distinct descent groups, and G. I. Jones (1963) and J. C. Mitchell (1956) analyze houses as constituted by unilineal extended families. In these cases, the house is not a local model for the society and the economy but rather an institution, a component of social structural systems, such as lineages and descent groups, whose relevance is to be found "on the ground" rather than in the realm of cultural modeling. The Lese house is relevant to both contexts. For the Lese and the Efe, the Lese house is where production, consumption, and distribution take place. Indeed, the house is the physical locus of economic interaction between the Lese and the Efe. But the house is also the locus of the symbolic organization of relations of inequality, including relations of ethnicity and gender. The house, then, is not only

a component of larger sets of social relations but a model that has to do with the conceptual organization of relations of difference as well as the organization of social practices. My treatment of the house and descent falls more in line with a few exceptional works in African anthropology: Enid Schildkrout's analysis of the domestic context of multiethnic communities in urban Ghana (1975, 1978), Jan Vansina's and Curtis Keim's political histories of the equatorial rain forest in central Africa (Vansina 1982, 1990a, 1990b; Schildkrout and Keim 1990), and M. Saul's recent study of the Bobo house in Burkina Faso (1991). Schildkrout finds that, in Ghana, social and cultural integration of ethnically diverse persons takes place in a domestic context, and Vansina and Keim both find that a house model of social organization among central African forest peoples made possible two contrasting ideological principles: the lineal and egalitarian groupings on the one hand, household and hierarchical groupings on the other. I will discuss these authors in more detail below. For Saul, the house, like descent, is a metaphor, a way of "expressing the idea of regroupment in space" (1991:78); for the Bobo, social behavior and political and economic rights are shaped by the house metaphor, but also by a number of other organizational principles, including descent and other patrilineal associations. For the Lese, too, the house is not the only conceptual system for social organization and classification, but the Lese restrict the organization of certain relationships (gender and ethnic) to the house, and others (those between Lese agnates and Lese men) to the clan, phratry, or lineage. These restrictions contrast with the social organization of the Bobo, for whom, as Saul notes, ritual and land associations, among others, can be based on any of a variety of organizational principles—as he calls it, "a kind of political game" (1991:97).

The house, as I shall use it, is also distinct from "family" or "household" in the sense in which these terms are generally understood—that is, the two terms are frequently distinguished, with the former referring to genealogically defined relationships, the latter referring to coresidence or propinquity (Yanagisako 1979). In the Lese-Efe case, however, houses are not defined by coresidence so much as by membership, with membership founded on common participation in the production and distribution of cultivated foods. Indeed, Efe men seldom reside or even sleep in their Lese partner's houses, but they are still considered house members. Because the partnership, and therefore house membership, is defined through individual Lese and Efe men, the children of Efe partners are not considered members of the house. Yet, at the same time,

Efe children often live in their father's Lese partner's house. Thus, neither lineage, propinquity, nor the family defines the Lese house.

One further point: it is frequently assumed that households have well-defined functions and have easily definable boundaries, yet the functions, activities, and organizations of households vary widely. In spite of all this cultural variation, "household" is still generally taken to be a uniform concept across cultures. S. J. Yanagisako, for example (1979:165), says: "Generally, [household] refers to a set of individuals who share not only a living space but also some set of activities. These activities, moreover, are usually related to food production and consumption or to sexual reproduction and childrearing, all of which are glossed under the somewhat impenetrable label of 'domestic' activities." And she points out that, because "all the activities implicitly or explicitly associated with the term 'household' are sometimes engaged in by sets of people who do not live together" (p.165), several anthropologists have suggested using alternative terms—such as "domestic group" (Bulmer 1960)—to refer to persons who acknowledge a common domestic authority: "co-residential groups" (Bender 1967) to designate propinquity, more specifically, and "budget unit" (Seddon 1976) to distinguish economic functions from coresidence.

I use an alternative term, "house," for a number of reasons. First, and most importantly, this is the best translation of the term ai , which the Lese use to describe the actual structure within which people live and within which economic activities are organized. Second, given the assumptions of coresidence inherent in the conventional use of the term "household," "house" is a less confusing term. Third, I do not wish to dichotomize a coresidential or domestic unit from a politico-jural domain. The house integrates entire ethnic groups and so has to be seen as part and parcel of the political and economic structures of society. Yanagisako (1979) and H. Moore (1988) note that anthropologists have only recently begun to explore relations of inequality within households as constitutive of domestic organization. Since the Lese house contains within it members of different ethnic groups, ages, and genders, it goes even further to draw our sights toward relations of social and political inequality at the level of the ethnic group.

Finally, although the term "house" as I use it in this study refers to an actual structure, it also refers to a model that has to do with the conceptual organization of ethnic and gender relations, as well as the organization of social practices. As I suggested in the Introduction, it is a source of core symbols as well as an arena for interactions structured by them. As for Gudeman, the model is a "detailed working out or

application" of a series of metaphors. A wide range of societies may model their society and economy after the house, but the house still remains a local model that we should not expect to find duplicated exactly in other contexts. The anthropologist should understand the "cultural sense" of each house model, for each will vary in meaning and function across cultures. Rural Colombians and the Lese both model their world on the house, but they use very different metaphors and images.

As we saw in chapter 3, the Lese house is the chief component of Lese life and thought. Built upon metaphors of the body and gender, the house becomes the center of relations of inequality between men and women, children and adults, Lese and Efe. As we also saw in the previous chapter, the relations between men and women are modeled upon the actual structure of the house (in which sticks support mud as men support women), and Lese-Efe relations are, in turn, modeled upon gender relations (in which the Efe, as a group, are feminized). In other words, the symbolic material out of which the Lese form an image of the Efe, and thereby a contrasting image of themselves, has its origin in perhaps their most basic social space: the home and the hearth. What could be a better source for cultural representations of inequality than that most fundamental form of domination and subordination, male-female relations?

One of the central arguments of this book is that Lese-Efe ethnicity and the forms of inequality associated with it are discernible in the Lese house. In addition to integrating the Lese and the Efe into a common function—the production, consumption, and circulation of foods—the Lese house is a means of grouping together and culturally structuring relations of ethnicity and inequality. This chapter explores two sides of the house: its symbolic representation, partly as revealed in Lese myths, and its role in the Lese-Efe economy. We will begin to see how Lese ideas about the house ramify to the production and circulation of foods and to the organization of the Lese and the Efe. In the myths, we find embodied a number of basic ideas about the house that are not explicitly brought out either in everyday discourse or in social and economic life.

The House in Mythology

Both the Lese and the Efe cosmologies include stories about an Efe ancestor, named Befe, who became an evil spirit, who still exists and continually plays tricks and carries out violent acts in Efe camps and

Lese villages. Befe is described as having the physical appearance of an Efe man, although he has a gargantuan penis several feet long. One Lese story about Befe explicitly represents the penetration of the Efe into Lese villages. The story tells of a Lese girl named Uetato who tries to find a place to sleep among her siblings, but because the house is so crowded, she has to lie down on a small area of ground inside the house. During the night, Uetato's brothers and sisters have diarrhea, in fact, so much diarrhea that it eventually chokes and kills Uetato. After she is buried, Befe comes into the village and uses his large penis to exhume her body. He first rapes Uetato's corpse and then goes on to rape each of the village houses by penetrating the doors.

Befe is especially dangerous because he comes from the forest and because he is sexually powerful. In everyday life, Lese men fear both that Lese women will be sexually attracted to the Efe and that Efe men will attempt to engage Lese women in sex. Befe is a projection of that fear, and Befe's physique and character are shaped by the Lese notion that Efe men have strong and uncontrollable desires for sex. It should have struck the reader by now that the "masculinization" of the Efe in this story stands in contradiction to the "feminization" of the Efe described in the previous chapter. As I shall elaborate later, the two characterizations are not contradictory, for just as Europeans managed their fear of Africans by infantilizing them, so do the Lese manage their fear of Efe male sexuality by feminizing them. Befe represents the Lese image of Efe sexuality in its most raw and unrevised form.

Perhaps the most important element of the story is the rape of Lese houses, for these are not only penetrable by the Efe, they are already penetrated, since the Efe are members of Lese houses. Another story, presented earlier in chapter 3, highlights the suggestion that Befe represents the incorporation of the Efe into Lese houses, and, indeed, that the Efe are essential to the formation of the Lese house. Recall that an Efe man teaches a Lese man that his wife bleeds every month not because she has a wound where there used to be genitals but because she is menstruating. The Efe man teaches the Lese about sexual differences, and, through a reversal of normative roles, produces the first Lese man: a child fathered by an Efe and mothered by a Lese. This story illustrates the bringing together of both nature and culture, sexual and cultural knowledge, as well as the establishment of the house, for all houses ideally contain a married couple with children and are defined as basic reproductive and economic units. The story also informs our analysis of the house through two reversals: in the first, the Efe man

and Lese woman engage in sexual intercourse, a reversal from everyday affairs in Lese-Efe life in which sexual intercourse between Lese women and Efe men is considered by the Lese to be a most heinous crime; the second reversal revolves around the pasa. The Lese woman lies in the pasa, yet the pasa is a meeting place for men only and is not an appropriate place for someone who is ill. Women should very rarely be in the pasa, and when they are ill they should be inside the house. Of course, there is no indication that these people lived in a house, and indeed my informants stated that the characters had not yet been given a house by God.

In the third Lese story, one that is widespread among the Lese of Malembi, relations between Lese women and Efe men are represented in a more subtle and complex fashion. The story begins with the myth of the first man, who had few human features. His body was vaguely like that of a man, but he had crops growing out of his hair folicles, and out of each of his orifices. His eyes, testicles, and heart were fruit. He could not eat, speak, defecate, or engage in sexual intercourse. As one informant put it, the first man "was a tree." But soon woman was sent by the Creator, Hara, to give man speech and human bodily functions. Once man had learned to eat and eliminate food, and had shed his treelike appearance, Hara built the man and woman a house and told them to have sexual intercourse. It is in the house that man became a complete biological and social adult. In the most complete version I heard, the myth was elaborated as follows:

Hara was his name. He was also called Bapili [Ba = already, ipili = turned upside down]; we black people also call him mungu [Swahili for God]. His son was Mutengulendu (literally, man all by himself a long time ago), also called Ngochalipilipi. Hara "put" [created] Mutengulendu, and then chased him away. Mutengulendu stayed in the forest and wandered around the forest. The girl Akireche discovered him in the forest. Hara also "put" Akireche. Hara put only girls. Her work was to dam water to get titi fish. Akireche went to the water, and she remembered something. Hara had told her, "Look for someone who is in the forest."

She said, "Today we are going to dam water farther down the stream than we usually go." When Mutengulendu heard voices he went down to the water. The day when the women went to the water, the other women said, "Today we will go really far downstream." The woman who went ahead went to find the man, and she said to her sisters, "There is a man here!" Akireche said, "This is my man, not yours." They began their return home, and Akireche said to her father, "I found a husband today." "Where?" "At this place in the forest." "Did he say anything?" "No. He had a lot of hair. There were yams and bananas and roots coming out of his

head. He is not like a person" [muto ]. This river was the Apukarumoi. The man was drinking this water. He wandered in the forest without a house. The father said, "Where did you see him?" "At this place in the forest." Hara was happy.

The name of God, it should be noted here, also means "turned upside down." Might we also expect other reversals to occur in the story? This first Lese man appears to be represented as his opposite, an Efe man. The first man is not like a muto. He is hirsute, a quality never attributed to Lese men, but which, for Lese, is a hallmark of Efe physical appearance. The story also introduces a forest/village dichotomy and gives the impression that the village area has boundaries, for it is only from a bounded area that the woman can go "farther" in search of the man. In addition, the man is said to wander in the forest, just as the Efe are said to wander in the forest, living in temporary huts and never building houses.

The story thus suggests a sexual association between Lese women and Efe men. Woman finds this man when she travels to the river. In Lese stories, women characters who go to the river go there to engage in sex or in acts specific to women, such as washing one's vagina or navel, or digging for shellfish. In a few stories, women who travel too far downstream actually lose their vagina or navel when it becomes detached from their bodies. In this origin story, woman is explicitly looking for a husband. And if we are to believe that the first man is a symbol for the Efe, the impending sexual relationship between the two people reverses the natural Lese order in which Lese women and Efe men are forbidden to engage in sexual intercourse with one another. The story continues:

Day broke. Hara gave white riga [weeds] to the girl, and said, "When you find him, cut his head hair, and when it falls down, put it in the mud, bury it in the mud. This hair will change into eji [liana cord used for constructing houses]. When you travel to the forest, you will use this to build a house." Then tell him to stick out his tongue. When he puts it out cut it down the middle. You will draw blood. Put the weeds on his tongue to stop the blood.

The Efe, of course, provide house-building materials for the Lese; they bring the liana cord and trees from the forest that the Lese use for the skeleton of the house. In this case, the integration of the first man, or shall we say, Efe, into the human world depends upon altering him severely, including cutting off his hair. Given what we know about the feminization of the Efe, it does not seem farfetched to interpret the cut-

ting of the hair as a symbolic act of castration. By cutting the hair, and presumably the crops growing out of his orifices, woman also begins to bring him into the realm of the farmer, making culture out of nature, incorporating nature into culture. The hair of the first man, like the rest of his body, is material to be cultivated (cf. Gudeman 1986:142–157 on the body as an economic metaphor). When it is planted in the mud, it grows, as the seeds of last year's harvest grow when replanted in the soil. The body is a metaphor for the composition of the world, as expressed in everyday life when Lese farmers refer to the first sprouts of their crops as "its hair." Woman is thus the farmer; she takes the forager out of the forest, away from foraging, and into village life.

The cutting of the tongue has to be seen as a sexual drama, in which the woman, having altered the first man, repeats the act of reproduction. Menstrual blood is drawn from the man but its flow is halted by the white substance. The process is identical to that found in the myths and rituals outlined in the preceding chapter, in which white substances, in the form of bark powder, or semen, stop the flow of blood and create life. Furthermore:

The girl came to find Mutengulendu and she said, "Stick out your tongue." When he stuck out his tongue she sliced it down the center, and began to cut his hair. She cut it all off and put it in the mud. She placed white riga leaves on his wound. When she put the leaves on it, she also put medicine on it, and he stopped bleeding. Right away he started to speak. Akireche returned alone to her father and said, "I cut his hair and his tongue, and he started to speak." The father said, "Go and build a gburukutu [Efe house], and then take the man inside." She went and built the house, and they came inside. Night came, and Hara gave them sleep. A lot of sleep. A machine came at night and cleared a huge area for the village, machines sent by Hara. The big village had big houses, without people, side to side, facing each other. But for all the houses there was only one pasa. They slept and slept and slept until midday. The woman woke up and said, "Open the door, night is over." When they left the house, they saw the big village, and they were surprised. The woman went to look, and so did the man. They thought there were people, but there were none. They went and saw good houses, and found a good one in which to sleep. They moved there. Night came, they went inside. They slept, and his penis would not stand up. Night came again and the penis would not stand up. The woman said, "I am going to Hara." Hara asked the girl if he urinated. "No. He vomits everything. He vomits his feces too. And his stomach is huge." Hara said, "It is good that you spoke to me. Go back. Return."

At this point, the first man is about to realize full adulthood in the Lese house. He has been removed from the forest and has made the

transition from living without a house, to living in an Efe hut, to living in a Lese house. Those with psychoanalytic concerns will be interested to note that his changes parallel the developmental phases outlined by Freud, from the oral, to the anal, to the phallic. From here:

Akireche returned, and Hara came to the periphery of the village to break mabondo [cut down a palm wine tree]. They all asked, "Who's cutting something?" He told her, "I am going to look." Mutengulendu arrived at the place. "Hey friend! Banai! Wait! Let us drink!" When he drank he began to vomit. Hara asked, "Why are you vomiting?" "My stomach does not like a lot of things inside of it." So Mutengulendu said, "I am returning." Hara said, "Come in the morning!" Hara returned as well. In the morning Hara arrived. Ngochalipilipi said, "My friend came." The woman said, "He is not your friend, he is your father." "No!" Ngochalipilipi said, "He is my friend, not my father."

The confusion over how the first man should address his father parallels the confusion over how Lese and Efe men should speak to each other. Most partners call each other either "my Efe" and "my Lese" or ungbatu , which means "partner" and is used exclusively to refer to the relationship between Lese and Efe partners. Often, however, kin terms are used because the Lese and the Efe adopt their partner's kinship universes as their own. The kin terms they choose to employ have connotations of both equality and inequality. For example, partners will address and refer to one another with the term imamungu , meaning "sibling" or "my mother's child." Imamungu indicates friendship and equality. The same is true of banai , as used in this story, a form of address that literally means "friend." Inequality also has its terms. Efe men may express their subordination to their partners by calling them afa , meaning "my father," and Lese men can refer to their Efe partners as maia ugu , meaning "my child." The difficulty of finding terms of address, as expressed in the myth, arises out of the contradiction between the dual idealized relations between the Lese and the Efe: inequality, on the one hand, intimacy and loyalty, on the other. Every Lese and Efe partner has to face the confusion of how to conceive of the other in terms of equality and inequality. Hara, as the one who brings Ngochalipilipi into the village and gives him a house, is no exception. Next, we see that Hara successfully completes the transformation of the first man, and, at long last, Lese society begins:

He came and found Hara and he saw that Hara had placed a board across a large gorge at the river. He became afraid. Hara said, "Climb up." "No. I will fall." Ngochalipilipi climbed up, and when he got to the center, Hara

said, "Now stop, and lie down." "I can't!" He lay down. "Turn your buttocks so it faces downstream." Hara came, cut an anus in Nogochalipilipi's buttocks, and feces came shooting out. Everything came out. Hara took the riga and placed them on the anus, and the sore healed. Hara told him to descend. One thing was left. He gave him palm wine, and he drank, and he gave more, and he drank more. He wanted to urinate. Hara said "take this riga and place them on your penis." He urinated right away. They returned to the homestead. In the morning she went to Hara and he asked her, "How did you sleep?" "His body has not moved mine, and his penis will not stand up." Hara told her to sleep naked. That night she slept naked. It was futile. Hara told the woman to tell her man to come to him. In the morning he went to Hara, and received medicine to place on his penis in case he wanted to urinate. When he returned, and he wanted to urinate, he placed the medicine on his penis, and urinated. The father said, "Give this medicine to your woman when you arrive at the homestead." When the woman took it she put it under her [in her vagina] for a moment, took it off, and put it in Mutengulendu's hand. Right away a fetus appeared there, and she had it many months, and gave birth to a boy.

Other stories concerning the origin of Lese people or clans do not include the Efe as central characters, but the plots are nonetheless linked to Lese-Efe relations. With only a few exceptions, these stories relate incidents of social fragmentation in which the Lese of a single clan split into smaller clans, which then split into smaller villages that may contain as few as one or two houses. According to my informants, the original clan in history was, like all clans, a single village, and this village constituted the whole of the Lese people. When I asked how many houses were contained in this immense village, my informants gave different answers. Some said that the Lese all lived in one giant house linked to a single pasa, and others said that they all lived in separate houses, but that they shared a single pasa. The disagreement is irrelevant, however, because the pasa is the symbol of the house, and since no house is complete without a pasa, the myths tell us that the Lese consider their ancestors to have been members of one house.

It is to more concrete concerns that I now turn, to examine the role of the house in political organization, and to address the question of how the house informs aspects of Lese everyday life not informed by the lineage or descent. The house and the actual terms of the economy provide the cultural foundation for the Lese-Efe partnerships and for the mythology just presented. Together each of these aspects of Lese society and culture will demonstrate that the Lese and Efe economy is a cultural economy right from the start, culturally modeled and represented. The economy is not founded on a command of resources or of

the power of one group to dictate economic knowledge or practice. Yes, there is a group that has more power than the other, but neither group inhibits the economic practices of the other. Before proceeding to the cultural model of the economy, we shall consider the Lese in light of some specific observations made by other anthropologists in central Africa.

Isolation and Political Organization in Anthropological Reports

One of the more striking characteristics of Lese village life is the absence of collective activities. Rather than encourage group activities, Lese society makes a distinct effort to isolate groups from one another. The smallest social unit is the house (ai ). In the Lese language, those social units more inclusive than the house are identified by one word, gili . Gili is a relative term of reference, and whether it refers to the clan or to the ethnic group is determined by context. Gili is an oppositional term with variations in meaning that are due, as Evans-Pritchard put it in the context of the overarching Nuer term cieng , not to "inconsistencies of language, but to the relativity of the group-values to which it refers" (1940:136). Gili , when appropriated, implies specific degrees of structural distance. Yet, for analytic purposes it is important to note that each of the social units considered gili has a definite empirical status. These units may be classified into the phratry (political alliances of intermarrying clans), the clan and the village (groups of people who may or not be genealogically related, although they believe they are descended from an unknown common ancestor), and the ethnic group (Lese or Efe).^[1] According to my informants, the Lese have always wanted their population, phratries, clans, villages, and houses to remain physically distinct from all others. For both the Lese and the Efe, phratries are opposed to other phratries, both politically and spatially. Not all Lese settlements are arranged in the same pattern, but an attempt is usually made to place clans next to other clans of the same phratry, with a greater distance maintained between phratries than between the clans of the same phratry. Before resettlement at the roadside, clans of the same phratry were usually located as much as several kilometers

[1] The Greek phratria , or clan, was in fact a subdivision of the phyle , or tribe, but in anthropological literature phratry has come to represent a collection of clans allied by marriage, and I use it in that sense out of convention.

from one another, and some phratries were located as far as a day's walk from one another.

Lese, the elders say, should live apart from non-Lese, and members of different Lese phratries should meet rarely, and then only for war or marriage. Even members of different clans, though they should meet occasionally to drink palm wine, should live apart. (Some younger men told me that for the sake of the Republic, the Lese should live together with members of other ethnic groups, like the Azande or Mangbetu, but these same men also expressed fear that in a village with Lese of different clans and phratries life would be marked by violence and death.) On the next level, too—that of houses—the ideal is privacy, not communality: the members of different houses should neither cultivate, circulate, nor eat foods with one another. It is all right for meat to be shared between members of the same village, and sometimes between members of different villages, but cultivated foods should not be shared with other houses. The distribution of cultivated foods creates inequalities between givers and receivers, and all the Lese living in a given village should be socially and economically equal to one another. It is common, of course, and permissible, for the Lese to give cultivated foods to the Efe, because the Lese and the Efe are not intended to be equals.

Nearly every ethnographer and explorer to encounter the Lese, Efe, or other farmers and foragers of the Ituri has remarked that the farmer inhabitants tended to interact rarely with other ethnic groups (with the exception of the various Pygmy groups), and that they had no extensive political organization but sought to separate, rather than link, various social units from one another. Jan Vansina, for example, notes that southern central Sudanic culture, and Proto-Mamvu and Proto-Ubangian societies in particular, maintained house-centered political traditions. He points out that although marriage, ritual, and age grades among Proto-Mamvu societies established intervillage linkages, "the original southern central Sudanic culture had been one of herders and farmers living in dispersed settlements, where each household lived by itself without territorial leadership beyond the household. . . . There was therefore very little organization in Proto-Mamvu society beyond the extended household. There were Houses but no villages, no districts, and no big men" (1990a:171).^[2]

[2] In my own usage, I do not capitalize the word "house." However, when citing or discussing Vansina, who capitalizes the word, I shall respect his usage.

Paul Joset (1949), Helena Geluwe (1957), Edward Winter (n.d.), and Colin Turnbull (1983a), all of whom have conducted research on Ituri forest societies, have each commented on the tendency for villages to fragment into insular households, and on the infrequency of social and economic relations between houses, villages, and groups of villages. In his "Notes Ethnographique sur la Sous-Tribu des Walese-Abfunkotu," Joset describes the way in which villages feuded with one another, and houses feuded with houses, and how the feuds strengthened the internal stability of each of these social units and separated them further.

The Lese offer to our eyes a model of the tribal family, each community composed only, in effect, of one family, in the extended sense. Scattered throughout the immensity of the forest, living by themselves, without significant relations with others, engaged in chronic wars, these communities gave to their members an independent spirit which, having been conserved nearly intact, inhibited the unification of political organization. (1949:5, my translation)

Of the Bila farmers with whom the Mbuti Pygmies live, Colin Turnbull (1983a: 62) wrote:

A few villages offered a warm and friendly welcome to visitors, though even there, and even in the smallest of villages, there would always be some who voiced suspicions that the visitor was in truth some malevolent force seeking to destroy the village. And against all those who passed through, on foot or by car or truck, most houses had medicine hanging from the eaves to ward off the evil carried by "others," even kin from a nearby village.

The larger villages, consisting perhaps of thirty or so houses, showed the same manifestation of suspicion and concern with supernatural forces within themselves. Families, lineages, and clans clustered together in clearly recognizable units, each with its own meeting place, or baraza [the Swahili term for pasa], each with its own protective medicine. And as often as not, a single house could be found isolated on the outskirts of the village, or, sometimes, boldly established in its own special space right in the middle of the village. In the latter case it was most likely a blacksmith, always associated with the power to manipulate supernatural forces. Those isolated on the edges of a village were generally considered witches or sorcerers, though in the first instance they may actually have chosen to build their house there because they had no close kin or friends in that village. Even that in itself would be suspect, as would any preference for privacy.

Just as each tribe considered neighboring tribes to be masters of the craft of evil, accusing them of all manner of barbarity, including cannibalism, so each village suspected the next, and each household its neighbor.

As much as I am inclined to distinguish myself from these kinds of generalizations, one point became clear to me as my fieldwork pro-

ceeded: that many Lese, young and old, want to be disconnected, inaccessible, and remote, and that they want these separations to demarcate a variety of different levels of society. One way the Lese conceptualize their social organization is in terms of membership—in the house, the clan, and the phratry. As will become clear later on in this chapter, with the exception of the house, the members of each of these social units wish to have as little to do with one another as possible. Phratries oppose one another, as do villages and houses. Ideas about malevolence (a subject I shall take up in chapter 5), conspicuous in Turnbull's and Winter's work, are one expression of this opposition.

The Amba

The absence of indigenous political organization raises the question of whether a descent or corporate model is applicable to the ethnographic description of the farmers of the Ituri. Fortunately, we have an account, Winter's Bwamba. A Structural-Functional Analysis of a Patrilineal Society , which seeks to fit the Amba of the eastern Ituri in a structural-functional and corporate model. Because of numerous similarities between the two groups, Winter's work on the Amba is especially useful for analysis of isolation and the role of the house in Lese society. Amba witchcraft beliefs, marriage patterns, family structure, domestic economy, and even much of their language, in many ways resemble those of the Lese of Malembi. Winter and I studied very similar societies but we saw very different things. My criticism of Winter is that his structural-functional blinders led him to emphasize clans and egalitarianism among the Amba and to de-emphasize, even ignore, the relations between the Amba and the Pygmies with whom they lived.

"Amba" is, in fact, a large category that includes a group of people who call themselves the Lese-Mvuba. The Amba live in a section of the Ituri that, at the time of Winter's research, was the eastern border of the Belgian Congo, and today extends into western Uganda. Winter (n.d.:137) uses the term Amba to encompass a variety of linguistic groups: the Buli Buli; the Bwezi, who speak Bantu languages, and the Lese-Mvuba, who speak a Sudanic language. Importantly, the Amba maintain relations with Pygmy groups who speak the language of the Buli Buli. Though Winter pays little attention to the Pygmies, his oversight, which perhaps was due to his theoretical concerns, will inform our larger argument that a corporate model does not apply to the Amba and does not take into account interethnic relations.

Winter fits his data neatly within a structural-functional model of corporate descent groups and minimal and maximal lineages, and describes the Amba as having corporate groups. He defines the corporate group according to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's criteria: (1) adult male members come together for collective action, (2) there are group representatives such as chiefs, and (3) groups such as a clan or lineage possess or control property collectively. Winter concludes that the lineage system based on patrilineal principles of descent organizes all of Amba life.

It is undoubtedly true that the Amba organize much of their life around descent. However, given the criteria appropriated from Radcliffe-Brown, there is little evidence to suggest that the Amba have corporate groups. While the Amba reckon descent, as do people everywhere, there are few forms of collective action among descent groups. Winter discusses the "blood feud" as a form of collective action, but he presents few data to support the contention that blood feuds exist, or existed at a historical period before his fieldwork. The only evidence he cites of a blood feud is a story (apparently told to him) about a woman who murders her husband and is then beaten by the husband's brothers (n.d.:110). Regarding the subject of authority, Winter states that, "at most, a person may excercise authority over a group composed of himself, his own children, his brothers and their children," that there is no authority above the level of the village (n.d.:102). Elders exert influence, but they do not form a separate body within the community.

Usufructuary rights to land are limited to those who live in villages situated adjacent to the land, but these rights last only as long as the village (about seven years). Winter notes that land is so plentiful there is a "lack of interest in land" on the part of the Amba (n.d.:107). Rights to land are inherited solely from father to son, as is any other wealth. If there are no children, the land may be claimed by anyone, regardless of connection with the deceased's minimal or maximal lineages. Witchcraft beliefs pit houses, rather than clans or lineages, against one another so that there is considerable fission and very little fusion of clan members. In fact, farming is carried out at the level of the house:

The village does not function as a unit of production. As will be seen . . . agricultural production is carried out almost entirely within the immediate family. Even the polygynous family breaks down into its component parts for this purpose. There are no village working parties. In fact, each man and his wife carry out their agricultural activities by themselves (n.d.:85).

Winter goes on to note that consumption of cultivated foods and meat is also limited to the house. And beyond the level of the village, which

ideally consists of single clans, and which is identified by a single clan name, Winter finds no overarching sets of political alliances: the area occupied by the Amba is simply "a series of villages," the "villages are completely independent of one another," and "the village is the largest corporate group to be found in the traditional system" (n.d.:85).

For the Lese, as for the Amba, I would suggest that collective action is rare; nor is there much evidence to suggest the existence of corporate groups. Each village represents a single clan and contains from as few as two to as many as sixty residents. The Lese have no indigenous authority position beyond ritual elder of the village, and inheritance of property does not usually occur. When a man dies, his house is usually destroyed along with his property, and land is not inheritable. It is true, however, that clans, rather than lineages, are vital to Lese social life. Social identity and organization are reckoned according to clan membership, as are preferred and prohibited marriage alliances, and clans unite against other clans in cases of dispute, illness, and warfare. The Lese do not have groups we can easily define as lineages, nor do the Lese use lineal descent to organize social or ritual practices.^[3] There is little evidence to suggest that either the Lese or the Amba make sense of their world by applying a corporate model, in Radcliffe-Brown's sense, and there is much evidence to suggest that a more central organizing model is the house.

Yet no author, including Turnbull, has related this political organization, or lack of it, to the partnerships between farmers and Pygmies. Winter notes that the Amba and the Pygmies "have always lived in the closest association with each other" (n.d.:8); the Pygmies are made fictive kin of the Amba, and there is a forager-farmer relationship in which the Pygmies give meat to the Amba in return for cultivated foods and iron. But Winter takes his analysis no further—perhaps, in part, owing to his (and Turnbull's) concern with illustrating egalitarianism and solidarity. At the level of the clan, everyone is idealized to be alike, even interchangeable; the clan is conceived of as a group of adult males, and so there is a great sense of likeness among its members. Clans unite in opposition to other clans and can mobilize for collective action in the case of dispute or illness. Inequality is shunned at the level of the clan;

[3] W. D. Hammond-Tooke (1985) makes a similar point about the Cape Nguni in South Africa: "In fact, the important descent groups among the Cape Nguni would appear to be clans, rather than lineages. It is the common possession of the same clan name which gives certainty of common origin and place in the social structure. It is by virtue of clan membership that exogamic rules are defined and the (clan) ancestors invoked on the occasion of a ritual feast, despite the fact that the clan is widely dispersed and its members never come together as a clan. Thus the 'transformation' in descent group theory from clan theory to lineage theory (Kuper 1982) has been a retrograde step for Cape Nguni studies" (p. 90).

at one funeral, a Lese man proclaimed, "We are all Andisopi clan, we are all Zairians, we are all black people, we are all dying." At the same funeral a group of women shouted out, "On this day we are all the Andisopi clan, there are no foreigners here, we are all of one clan; on this day, we all have penises, we are one clan, one large clan." The clan, then, mutes relationships of difference, whether ethnic or gender.

Mangbetu-Meje Houses of Northeastern Zaire

There is an important distinction that must be made between the Lese clans/villages and houses and those of other societies in the Ituri. In Jan Vansina's historical construction, the villages in the Mangbetu and Budu region, near the Lese, consisted of a single house (Vansina 1990a: 172; 1990b: 78). He states that "Village communities were thought of as a single family whose father was the village headman, and the big men of each House were his brothers. The village was thus perceived as a House on a higher level" (1990a: 81). The Lese house, in contrast, is not a figuration of village or clan relations (the village being synonymous with the clan) but the model of a particular set of social processes that are not modeled by the clan.

Vansina's work on kinship organization is especially relevant to this study of interethnic institutions, however, because he suggests that different ethnic groups and clusters within the rain forest share a common tradition and are the product of complex interethnic interactions. Vansina argues that by the eighteenth century there were several different types of social organization related to the different historical traditions of three immigrant groups: the Ubangian ancestors of the Azande and Mayogo, the ancestors of Bantu speakers, and the Eastern Central Sudanic speakers—the ancestors of the Mamvu, Lese, and Mangbetu. The Ubangians did not maintain a strong political organization with chiefs, headmen, or war leaders, and their settlements were temporary and dispersed (Vansina 1990b:76). The Bantu speakers maintained three distinct levels of social organization: the House, the village, and the district. The Bantu House, in this case, was essentially an extended household that could incorporate members of a number of different lineages. Finally, the Mangbetu had a flexible and dispersed social orga-

nization (Vansina 1990b:77) with little leadership above the extended household. As these loosely organized groups met, they mixed their customs and social organizations, and they developed a common House-centered organization that provided the cohesion and hierarchy that had been absent from any one of these groups. The interethnic mixing about which Vansina writes echoes Evans-Pritchard's earlier historical account of the very complex ethnic composition of Zande society (1971:22–43). Precisely because the house is the locus of interethnic integration, it is a dynamic and historical social institution.

The similarities and differences between Mangbetu-Meje and Lese houses also help us understand the structuring of Lese houses. In contrast to the Lese house, the Mangbetu-Meje house, in the early colonial period, was structured around a core of members of a patrilineage (Schildkrout and Keim 1990:89). Whereas Lese houses resemble nuclear families with the addition of the Efe, Mangbetu-Meje houses could contain from one hundred to two thousand members. Although, like the Lese house, the Mangbetu-Meje house was not constituted by the clan or lineage, it often included as its members many nonlineage and nonclan individuals: in the Mangbetu-Meje case, this included wives, sisters, sisters' children for whom childwealth or bridewealth payments had not been made, slaves, and clients.

Despite these profound differences between the houses, it would seem that there are some fundamental similarities in the principles underlying Mangbetu-Meje and Lese houses: namely, the structuring of the house illustrates two complementary but opposing models. Schildkrout and Keim write: "Overall leadership of the Mangbetu-Meje House was determined according to two sets of principles. One set reflected the ideals of the lineage; the other attitudes towards the individual" (1990:89). In addition, paraphrasing Vansina, the authors describe contrasting ideologies: "The first set posited unequal categories of House membership such as elder-younger, patron-client, master-slave, male-female, and controlling lineage-junior lineage. . . . The second set assumed equality between the members of the dominant lineage and allowed the lineage to choose the most capable leader" (1990:90). For the Lese, in contrast, I have stressed that activities and leadership are not organized according to lineages or corporate groups, although clans are important for structuring marriage alliances, the building and settlement of villages, and warfare. I have also differentiated the Lese houses from those of these other societies by emphasizing that the house and extended kinship organization as villages and clans do not model

Before completing his house (right) a Lese man's Efe wife builds them a 
makeshift Efe hut. The Lese man has also built a  pasa  (center). 
Photograph by R. R. Grinker .

one another. Yet, the Mangbetu-Meje houses illustrate a pervasive social organizational concern in this region of Africa with managing coexisting principles of equality and inequality. The Lese oppose these two principles not within the house but between the house and the clan.

Inequality and the House

As a Lese proverb puts it, in the clan "leopards give birth to leopards" while in the house "we know each other not by our spots but by our noses." In other words, clan members are identical, but house members know one another by living cheek by jowl, by knowing one another's differences. The village is the level of approved similarity and equality, whereas the house is the level of approved difference and inequality. At the level of the "house," in contrast to that of the "clan," the Lese find inequalities in status and access to resources to be the normal state of affairs. The house is characterized by dependence, and by the relations of inequality engendered in dependency. These relations characterize the links between the Lese and the Efe and are made at the level of the house—the meeting place of birth, marriage, death, social inequality, and ethnicity.

Marriage and Lese-Efe partnerships are two sets of unequal relationships that are integrated at the house. These two unions are, in fact, the basic constituents of the Lese house. In the preceding chapter, I noted that the terminology used to describe and define the marriage of a man and woman, and the formation of a Lese-Efe partnership, are the same. Adult men are expected to maintain both of these unions in their new houses, and to serve as the protectors of the house members. Indeed, an adult man is himself like a house because he encompasses and protects the members. A central metaphor is "the house is a body." One informant said: "[The] house [ai ] is our shelter. We depend [ogbi ] on the bones [iku ] of our house. If you do not have a house, people will think you are not a man, that you have no family [famili ]. My house is like the pangolin [whose scaly skin is called its ai , or house]." Houses, in short, are vital to the integration of difference. Within the house, the Lese and the Efe, men and women, are simultaneously differentiated and unified. To quote Dumont in a different ethnographic context (1970:191): "In the hierarchical scheme a group's acknowledged differentness whereby it is contrasted with other groups becomes the very principle whereby it is integrated into society." Difference is itself constitutive of integration.

The emphasis on equality between houses, and inequality within houses, is illustrated by the restriction on the movement of cultivated foods between Lese houses and the distribution of cultivated foods to wives and Efe. Giving cultivated foods symbolizes the dependence and subordination of the receiver to the giver. Many Lese say that to give cassava or peanuts or potatoes to another Lese is tantamount to calling the receiver an Efe. Only the Efe, it is said, should ogbi —that is, lean on, rest upon, depend on—another Lese, as the Lese say the Efe depend upon them for cultivated foods. Since every Lese man and woman expects that he or she will be the equal of the other men and women in their village, it is not socially acceptable, in terms of equality, for the members of one house to be deficient and to request or need goods that they should have already. For this reason, the Lese rarely trade or share cultivated foods with the Lese of other houses. In fact, some of my informants defined the house explicitly as the unit within which production, consumption, and the sharing of cultivated foods occur. No one but a house member should produce or eat the foods that come from that house. Likewise, only house members can eat within the house. One informant said, "My house is where I eat, and no one else eats there. Even if I ask someone to eat there he won't, because he will

think I am trying to poison him, or raise myself over him [brag, iba-ni ]. The house is where a baby drinks his mother's milk and grows."

Conceptions of the Lese-Efe Economy

If the house mediates Lese relations of inequality, then we must seek its symbolic representation not only at the level of ideas and concepts but also in specific domains of social life, including the economy. Despite the range of Lese-Efe relations, the Lese and the Efe describe those relations as of the most impersonal and contractual nature. For example, both groups define their separate group identities as a matter of a strict division of labor between farming and hunting—an economic arrangement that is mutually beneficial: the farmers give cultivated foods and iron in return for the forager's meat and honey. The division of labor, along with the trade of goods that the Lese and the Efe say results from that division, is a central ethnic marker distinguishing the two groups, even though the farmers frequently hunt and gather, and most foragers know how to cultivate gardens (but rarely do so). The Lese accept the kinds of interactions discussed above, from child rearing to ritual to warfare, as more or less an associated, if not very important, part of the economy; the interactions are residual to the distribution of material goods, mere by-products of a meat-for-produce transaction. Members of both groups give the same definition: that they give things and get things; they act collectively, and the acts are embedded in economic relations. Together the Lese and the Efe give the impression that their relationship is founded on the giving and receiving of such items between groups.

For both groups, meat is by far the most highly valued good circulated. Some of my Lese informants say that the only reason that they live with the Efe at all is to obtain meat—and they even say that they are afraid to alienate the Efe because this might threaten the supply of meat. But the truth is that the Lese obtain most of their meat by themselves or from other Lese. Moreover, although the Efe provide much of the labor needed to cultivate the Lese gardens, my informants rarely mention the procurement of Efe labor as a defining characteristic of the partnership. Despite the Lese's silence on this aspect of the relationship, labor, as we shall see, is a vital part of the Lese-Efe relationship. The distribution of Efe meat to Lese partners symbolizes the participation of the Efe in the production and distribution of Lese cultivated foods. Labor aside, the Lese do not cite any of the other aspects of Lese-Efe

interactions as central components of their partnerships. Efe also help raise Lese children, are the main participants in Lese rituals, and, among numerous other things, serve as guards and protectors, but the Lese whom I interviewed treated these aspects as secondary to the giving of meat for cultivated foods. It appears that the intimate relations that constitute everyday practice between Lese and Efe are dissociated from the ideology of practice. This seems to me an anomaly quite at variance with what is commonly said about the "gift economy" (Bourdieu 1977:172), that the "good faith" economy is costly because societies spend so much time and effort developing concepts of kinship, marriage, reciprocity, and so on, to disguise self-interested and economic acts. The Lese and the Efe do just the opposite. They frame interpersonal interactions with one another in an idiom of economy. "Forager" and "farmer" thus become encompassing ethnic categories.

However, despite the fact that the two groups generally speak of their relationships in a way that sounds very much like trade and material exchange, the actual words they use to describe the circulation of goods say something very different: the vocabulary used tells us that the Lese and the Efe are not involved in a trade at all, but rather in a "division" of shared goods to those who hold rights in them. The vocabulary used and the ideology articulated are indeed contradictory.

The "Distribution" or "Division" of Foods

The Lese use three general concepts to describe the transfer of material goods between people: division (oki ), purchase (oka ), and exchange (iregi ). The verb oki , meaning, "to share," "to divide," "to give," refers primarily to transfers of goods for which reciprocity is generalized rather than direct or balanced. My informants translated the term oki into Swahili as -gawa (to divide), rather than as the more common Swahili term for the circulation of goods, -leta (to give, in KiNgwana; to bring in, in KiSwahili). This is because those things circulated are transferred between people who already have rights in them. For example, when a man offers his baby a piece of cassava to eat, he considers this a "division" of his foods, since all young children have a claim on the goods their parents produce. Oki denotes apportioning, distribution, and the possession of parts of a common good.

From here on, I shall thus translate oki as "distribution." Division might suffice, but it can imply an even or equal splitting up of goods which does not exist between the Lese and the Efe. Nor does "general-

ized reciprocity" capture the fact that access to goods is often unequal. The house merges the efforts of both Lese and Efe participation in the economy, but the individual does not necessarily get back what he/she puts in. Like a government that decides budget allocations, distribution is not always equal. Given that both the Lese and the Efe contribute to the foods of the house, redistribution might also be used, but redistribution implies that there is a single center from which all goods flow. Distribution has the advantage of implying a moral right, since distribution refers to the apportionment of goods held in common, as well as the potential for unequal apportionment.

The Lese and the Efe also consider the transfer of goods between trading partners to represent oki , or distribution, rather than purchase or exchange. Thus the Lese use the term oka , "to purchase," to express the transfer of goods between nonrelated Lese or between Lese and Efe who are not trading partners. When a Lese house gives cassava to a nonpartner, the Lese family views this transfer as a purchase of labor or some other form of reciprocity. Finally, for exchange (the term by which anthropologists have conventionally represented the relationship between the foragers and the farmers of central Africa), the Lese use the word iregi , which literally means "to turn around, to make into a circle." The Lese use this term only when speaking of the balanced exchange of identical or comparable items (swapping), such as when someone changes money from larger to smaller denominations or trades one knife for another. In short, the Lese-Efe relationship is founded not on exchange or purchase but rather on the distribution of common and shared goods.

The house is the single domain within which there are shared rights of access and consumption of cultivated foods. It is, in fact, the productive unit of the economy. Each Lese husband and wife cultivates a single garden together, usually with the help of their Efe partners. In polygynous houses, the two (or more) wives ideally plant separate gardens, but during very rainy seasons, when it is difficult to burn felled trees, they may work together in one garden belonging to their husband. When the wives are able to cultivate separate gardens, there is little food sharing between them. They will feed their children almost exclusively with the food produced in their own garden. If they cultivate a common garden, each wife will claim a portion of the garden as her own—as if there were separate gardens—and feed herself and her children with the food grown in that portion. But all the while, the Efe are present, in the Lese farmer's mind if not physically at hand, as participants in the garden. Even when Efe do not participate in the clearing

and harvesting of the gardens, they maintain rights to the crops grown there. And so it is safe to say that no Lese farmer plants a garden without the expectation that some of his produce will be distributed to the Efe. Lese men and women, and the Efe, depend upon the gardens for their subsistence.

Part Two: Economy

Labor

It is curious that so few Lese informants cite labor as a central aspect of their relations with the Efe. Despite their statements that labor is incidental, Efe labor is, for many Lese, highly desirable; the more Efe workers, the more likely it is that a garden will be large enough to provide for one's house, and for the Efe family linked to the house through its Efe member. Poorer Lese, with small gardens, may be unable to offer enough to keep active partnerships with their Efe, and so their Efe seek informal, often multiple, economic relationships with other Lese men. And just as wealthier men can afford to support a polygynous household, so too can they support more than one Efe partner and thereby ensure or expand their garden size. Although few men ever have more than one wife or Efe for very long, wealthier men sometimes try to maintain these multiple relationships.

Many of the researchers working in the Ituri have addressed the question of how much the Lese "rely" upon Efe labor for their survival. This question is of special importance because the Lese villages are so sparsely populated, and there are few children to help clear, cut, and weed. Bailey and Peacock have made the most definitive statement about labor in the Ituri. They note that, despite the desirability of Efe labor, the Lese are able to plant productive gardens without Efe labor:

There is much circumstantial evidence to strongly suggest that the Walese are far from dependent upon Efe labor for subsistence . There are two convincing lines of evidence. The first is that there are many people living within the tribal lands of the Walese, in the same habitat using the same techniques to cultivate the same crops, who have virtually no dealings with Efe whatsoever. These people, from various tribes that include the Babudu, the Miaga, and the Banande, subsist independently of the Efe, and, by their own admission and that of the Walese, have a higher standard of subsistence than most Walese. Indeed, the Walese are generally recognized by the people of other tribes as being, among other things, impecunious due in large part to the

draining relationship they maintain with the Efe. The second line of evidence is that there are numerous Walese within the study who have only infrequent contact with Efe. It is true that these are generally the poorer Walese; they maintain smaller gardens and sell very few, sometimes no, cash crops. They are less likely to want to spare the food to hire Efe or to trade for meat. Nevertheless, they can and do gain an adequate subsistence largely independently of Efe labor. These observations strongly suggest to us that the Walese do not require Efe labor. They may call upon Efe in an attempt to augment their living standard above bare subsistence—by enlisting Efe to increase the size of their gardens and to assist in harvesting and preparing cash crops—but they are not dependent for their livelihood upon Efe labor. (1989: emphasis mine).

The authors suggest rather explicitly that the Efe are a drain on Lese food production yet also state that those without Efe are generally poorer.

An obvious problem with the Bailey and Peacock analysis is that the discussion of subsistence is framed in terms of need or survival , concepts that, in the absence of social definitions of need are empty. Without investigations of needs as they are socially defined by the Lese and the Efe, and without detailed quantitative studies of Lese agriculture and labor, any assessment of necessity for survival on the part of the Lese has to be speculative. What we can state with confidence is that without Efe labor the Lese may cultivate smaller gardens. Since needs are everywhere culturally defined, and since people everywhere can find innumerable and innovative ways to make a living, I would suggest that such questions of dependence are not fruitful. A focus on ultimate needs might presume Lese-Efe relations to be an adaptation to preexisting conditions of reliance, rather than an outcome of creative efforts. In addition, whereas people certainly need food, many other activities, such as ritual service and witchcraft protection, are not limited to food production, yet they can be socially defined as labor.

Indeed, it may be fruitful to view Efe labor as vital not to the quantity of food production but to the Lese model of society and economy, a model founded upon the house. The actual structure of a Lese house only becomes a "house," in social terms, if it contains Efe and women. What do Efe and women do for the house? They produce . We can say that, with the exception of hired laborers, a person is a member of a house if he or she produces for it. Thus, when an Efe man works in the garden of his Lese partner, the actual act of labor signals that the latter is a social adult, that he has a house. I would also suggest that Efe labor is necessary for the symbolic and gendered incorporation of Efe

as female. Farming is a female domain, as evidenced not only by the place of farming in the Lese conceptual scheme of the economy but also by the fact that in polygynous marriages each woman maintains her own garden.

With regard to how much the Efe labor actually contributes to the success of the Lese gardens, the question of reliance upon Lese labor is itself misleading. Bailey and Peacock state that the use of Efe labor in the Lese gardens appears to put the Efe in a position to simultaneously enlarge Lese gardens and drain Lese foods. But this is the case only if we assume that those foods belong to the Lese; if I am correct in my arguments, these are house foods, not Lese foods. If one conceives of cultivated foods as Lese property, then the Efe are in a position to help or hurt the Lese; the Lese can be seen to make a choice as to whether or not to use Efe labor, given that they must pay Efe laborers who are not partners and distribute foods to their Efe partners. However, it is entirely plausible to conceive of the situation differently: the Lese can be seen to make a choice as to whether or not to allow Efe to practice agriculture on Lese land. The Efe, as I have shown, are a part of the domain within which cultivated foods are distributed. The Efe have a right to foods grown in the gardens of the house to which they belong. From the perspective of the Efe, and as expressed in the language used to characterize the circulation of cultivated foods between the Lese and their Efe partners as division or distribution, the foods belong to the Efe as well. Despite the fact that the Efe are ethnically defined as hunter-gatherers, it may be appropriate, for some analytical purposes, to consider the Efe to be farmers. Obviously the Efe know how to farm since they carry out all of the agricultural tasks necessary for successful cultivation. The Efe choose not to build their own gardens because they conceive of themselves as hunter-gatherers, and no evidence from any researcher working in the Ituri suggests that the Efe are coerced into a hunting-and-gathering subsistence. Instead of growing food in their own gardens, they use the gardens of the Lese. In this way, the Efe reap several benefits: they maintain their sense of ethnic identity, and because they need not always live near the gardens—as the gardens are protected by the Lese who own the land—they may continue living, hunting, and gathering in the forest. Working in a Lese garden assures Efe men and women that they will be able to acquire some agricultural foods, even in the unfortunate event of a food shortage. The Lese gardens are in essence cooperative house gardens from which the Efe can expect to receive a share of the harvest.

Agriculture and the Role of the Efe

Lese agriculture is described in detail elsewhere (Wilkie 1987), but it is necessary here to mention some aspects of agriculture that relate to the integration of the Lese and the Efe in a joint productive activity at the level of the house. The Lese practice long-term current cultivation of yams, manioc, maize, beans, rice, plantains, and peanuts. According to G. P. Murdock, the Lese fitted within the Sudanic complex, a complex that included "growing ambary, cow peas, earth peas, gourds, okra, roselle, sesame, water melons, and in the south oil palm, in addition to sorghum and millet" (1959:227), but there is little indication that the Lese of Malembi cultivated any of these crops, other than sesame. Following relocation, the Lese began to produce some rice, peanuts, and coffee as cash crops, and most men grow some coffee today in the hope that they can sell it for cash. But the Lese seldom grow more than a few different kinds of crops. Gardens are extremely small and produce barely enough to feed a single house (Bailey and Peacock 1989). Greater attention is thus paid to manioc and plantains, which can be planted and harvested at any time during the year, require little labor, and can be abandoned after a year or two without the feeling that a great investment has been lost.^[4] Few Lese cultivate the palm oil trees (Elaeis guineesis ), despite the fact that they are the major source of oil used for cooking meat and preparing the staple of cassava leaves (odu-pi ). These trees take up to seven years to mature, and most Lese, by experience and habit, do not expect to remain in one village for more than a few years. The Efe, however, travel to the forest areas to look for wild palm nuts, and these may be processed and distributed in the kitchen of the Lese partners. According to oral history, the Lese before resettlement obtained the majority of their palm oil from Budu traders and also acquired oil from siya trees found growing wild. The Lese have little contact with the Budu today, and so they are continually searching for oil, either at the new Dingbo market or from their economic partners, the Efe. Domesticated animals are rare; the Lese keep no cattle, and only a few have goats (Bailey and Peacock [1989] note that only a handful of 200 houses sampled owned even a single goat); however, most people own at least one chicken.

[4] In a 1916 report on plantain cultivation in the northeast Belgian Congo, Commandant Delhaise wrote of banana cultivation among the Rega who live to the north of the Lese: "They [the Rega] are content to stir the earth a little around the spot where the plant is to be planted. Most often, once planting is finished, no further attention is paid to the field. Sometimes one or two weedings are given if weeds develop too much" (Lacomblez 1916:127–128; also quoted in Miracle 1967:46).

The Efe often take an active role in the production of crops. Together, the Lese men and their Efe partners will clear gardens at a distance of between a few hundred meters and one kilometer from the village. They may clear up to two hectares, leaving one hectare fallow and seeding the other, but the average is about half a hectare of secondary forest each year. The same garden can be used for two years, after which time it is usually abandoned.

Lese plan their gardens in accordance with the rainfall cycle. Clearing is normally done in December and January, at the end of the rainy season, so that unwanted vegetation can dry and be burned in February during the dry season.^[5] During this time of the year, the Efe frequently make hunting trips from forest camps, but they can return to the villages periodically to help the Lese cut back the forest since most of these camps are within a day's walk from the Lese villages and rarely more than an eight-hour walk from the villages of the Lese-Dese. During other times of the year, the Efe camps are constructed closer to the road, sometimes within fifty meters, but rarely further than nine hundred meters, of a Lese village (Fisher 1986). Even in December and January, the best hunting season, the Efe rarely use more than about twenty kilometers of a given trail, beginning near a village, or village garden, leading through old garden growth to the camps from which the Efe begin honey collecting and hunting expeditions.

In most cases, Lese and Efe men clear the gardens and Lese women and Efe men and women plant the crops. This is done in March and April, although bananas and cassava are sometimes planted as early as November or December; the harvest begins in late June and continues

[5] The Lese classify their gardens into several types. The general term for garden, opu , describes an area in which food is currently being cultivated outside the village area; thus, banana and coffee plants cultivated within the village plaza do not constitute an opu . One is either in the village (ubo-ke ), or in the garden (opu-ke ), and there is no overlapping; in the event that someone lives in their garden they are said to be without a village. A garden area that has been hoed but in which no trees have been felled is called an ube (from the verb ube , to cut) a term that implies that cutting is required. The ubenatanga (from the verb ube , to cut, and the verb itanga , to uproot or weed) is a burned garden that requires weeding. Four terms describe gardens not currently under cultivation: (1) Ngoi , or opungoi , is secondary forest that has grown over a previously cultivated garden; (2) opukogbe is an area that has been hoed but left untended or uncut for one to two years; (3) gbakba is a general term that refers to any piece of land that at some point in the past was cultivated by one's fellow clan members; and (4) chacha refers in general to any old and abandoned garden that is open to use by anyone looking for a piece of land on which to cultivate food. The word chacha signifies that the prior holders of usufructuary rights over that land are not known. These classifications become very important in the allocation of usufructuary rights to land.

through December. The work of Lese men in the garden diminishes after clearing, and after peanut planting, but Lese women and Efe men and women, especially, continue to work in the gardens throughout the summer and autumn weeding, harvesting, planting rice (before the beginning of the heavy rains in August), and searching for potatoes or cassava for each day's meal (Wilkie 1987:116). At this time, an Efe woman's subsistence activities are, in large part, oriented toward the garden of her husband's Lese partner (if she is married) or her father's Lese partner (if she is unmarried), where she weeds and plants, and from which she receives cultivated foods. Efe men, meanwhile, if they are not hunting, spend considerable time caring for children, and preparing and cooking the food that their wives or sisters help to cultivate in the Lese gardens.

Once the foods are harvested, the distribution of foods between the Lese and the Efe begins. Despite the intricacy of Lese and Efe relations, food distribution is not marked by ritual or ceremonial activity. Transactions are usually made in Lese villages, but they may take place anywhere, at almost any time. Following the term oki , this is strictly a "division" or distribution of food, but in fact the transfers imply some recognition of reciprocal obligation. The distribution of foods consistently sustains debt and obligation between the parties, and there is a certain understanding of commitments, though vague and indeterminate, to continue distributing foods. These future distributions are not fixed according to time or to the quantity or quality of goods (see Sahlins 1972:194). This generalized and indeterminate reciprocity is made easier by the fact that the Lese and the Efe are transferring different kinds of goods—the Lese giving their garden produce and the Efe their meat and honey. By and large, the items given do not have any fixed or definite equivalence, but there are a few exceptions: honey, for example, should be reciprocated with cloth. There are no fixed amounts of honey or cloth, but the Efe expect that when they give pots of honey to their Lese partners, they will be given cloth. In general, the most important part of any transaction between Lese and Efe partners is an evaluation of the transfer as a social interaction, rather than an evaluation of the quantities of goods transferred. My Lese informants stressed the point that what was crucial to the structure and continuity of their relations was not so much the quantity of goods given as it was the act itself

of dividing up specific kinds of goods as an expression of loyalty and relationship. The same feeling was not so true of my Efe informants: they appeared to demand frequent and substantial amounts of cultivated foods, and they were quite aware of how much they gave and received.

Land Rights

At this point it is necessary to make some comments about land rights, especially the rights of the Efe. Efe have rights to the foods grown by the Lese house to which they belong, but access is not without restrictions. The Efe hold that partnership obligations entail reciprocal access to land. According to my Efe informants, while no Efe or Lese owns a particular plot of land itself, an entire Lese or Efe clan may own access to land. There are two main types of land: gbakba (previously cultivated land), and opu (active gardens). Just as the members of a certain Efe clan will feel free to travel into an area in which their fathers and grandfathers lived, so too will they feel free to travel into the gbakba areas they have previously occupied, or which their Lese partners currently occupy. This right of access, they assert, is consistent with a Lese man's right of access to land that was cultivated previously by his agnates. Gbakba lands are usually overgrown and considered to have become "forest." The Efe will frequently go into their Lese partners' gbakba without asking for permission, in order to uproot old cassava or potatoes planted previously by the holders of the gbakba. But for the Lese, no man has the right to enter another man's gbakba or alter it in any way, without permission of the holders of access to it (the previous cultivator or his nearest agnate). The Lese take issue when food is removed by the Efe from the Lese gbakba because they believe that they must either distribute food themselves, or, at the very least, give permission for the Efe to forage for food there. On a number of occasions, Lese men and women reprimanded the Efe who violated the rules, but they did not publicize the disputes or present them to be adjudicated by the local or collectivité chiefs.

The Lese are more strict about how they view rights of access to active gardens (opu ). If given permission, the Efe can enter the active gardens of their Lese partners. Indeed, the Efe frequently reside in the gardens of their Lese partners and are responsible for weeding portions of those gardens. Even so, when the Efe take food from those gardens without actually being given the food by the owners of the garden, the

Lese may consider it to be an act of theft (iba-ni ). Still, the Lese do not wish to publicize the theft by their partners or seek adjudication, since such legal action, they suggest, would cause the Lese and the Efe to split from one another and would "destroy" (ima-ni ) the relationship between the two groups. The most serious disputes occur when the Efe take food without permission from the gardens of the Lese with whom they are not associated or from gardens in which they have not worked as laborers. According to my observations, these constitute the most common kind of dispute in Lese-Efe society and are often adjudicated at tribunals.^[6]

Distribution as a Symbol of Loyalty

It is not easy to quantify exactly how much food is transferred between the Lese and the Efe, or, given the division of labor, whether one group actually depends upon the other for its subsistence. According to Bailey and Peacock (1989), the Efe get more than 60 percent of their caloric intake from cultivated foods given to them by the Lese. And the food is usually acquired when Efe actively participate in garden labor. This figure tells us just how important Efe labor is to the partnership, and to the overall economy, despite informants' reluctance to identify labor as a primary definitional characteristic of Lese-Efe relations. I do not have substantial data on how much food the Lese acquire from the Efe, but my impression is that the Lese receive very little of their subsistence from them. When the Lese do receive meat from the Efe, the amount given is always small. When I pointed out to my Lese informants that the Efe seldom give them much meat, they did not answer directly but simply said that the Efe provide them with other material benefits such as honey. Some figures I collected support my observations that the Lese receive little meat or foods from the Efe. In 1987, 29 out of the 39

[6] The Lese maintain customary rights to enter into the forest territory of their Efe partners. Lese men hunt and set traps, and women gather foods, only in areas that are inhabited by the Efe group with which they are associated. They travel on trails maintained by their Efe partners, and when they travel on longer trips, they spend nights in Efe huts, or in caves, situated along those trails. The Lese feel free to use the trails within a few hours' walk of their village to gather food and set traps. However, longer trips into deeper areas of the forest require some communication with the Efe. Before each of the long excursions into the forest that I have observed, the Lese informed their Efe that they would be traveling on the Efe trails. My Lese informants say that when they talk to the Efe about future trips into the forest, they do so in order to warn the Efe not to disturb the Lese snares; my Efe informants say that when the Lese talk to them about such trips, the Lese are asking the Efe for ruusa , a Swahili (KiNgwana) word meaning "permission."

houses (74 %) in the vicinity of the village in which I lived received some honey from an Efe partner, or from another Efe who may have struck up informal ties to a Lese house. Of the remainder, 4 houses received honey from other Lese, and 6 received none at all. In the month of July of 1987 (during the honey season, when most honey is circulated), only 9 out of 38 houses (24 %) received any meat, and 14 out of 38 houses (37 %) received some other kind of forest food from the Efe: kola nut (5 houses), opi fruit (3 houses), mushrooms (1 house), edible caterpillars (1 house), wild yams (2 houses), and palm oil nuts (1 house). Mark Jenike's superb data on meat acquisition (1988b), collected from a series of observations of Lese men made over a period of fifty-four days (between January 16 and March 2, 1986), show that these men received meat from the Efe in only 25 percent of the observations; in 37 percent of the observations, they received meat from another Lese; in 24 percent of the observations, they received meat from their own hunting efforts; finally, in 14 percent of the observations, they received meat from an unknown source. It is possible that Jenike might have reached a slightly higher figure had he sampled houses rather than men, but his figures, based on extensive fieldwork and observation, are consistent with my quite limited survey.

Neither the transfer of meat nor the transfer of honey explains why the Lese and the Efe interact with one another, or why they define their relationship in terms of the distribution of foods. Like the distribution of meat, the amounts of honey distributed are almost always small. But the transaction itself, in which a Lese couple gives an Efe a metal pot with which to collect the honey, and then gives a cloth to the Efe man upon the return of the pot full of honey, is a strong symbol of loyalty between Efe and Lese; of all items given by the Efe to the Lese, honey is the most consistently given. Yet honey takes second place to meat in the conception of the relationship. The giving of meat and honey for cultivated foods and iron implements is symbolic of the alliance between the two groups, but it is not necessarily the essence of actual Efe-Lese economic transactions.

The Efe also, from time to time, give mushrooms, wild yams and tubers, opi fruit, and kola nut. These are all considered by the Lese to be teti (luxuries), as honey itself is—foods that complement a more ordinary diet of garden produce. Honey is perhaps the most common of these luxuries, but it is available for at most two months per year and provides little nutrition. Obviously, honey is highly prized—many people say it is their favorite food and that they crave it. It is the only

En route to collect honey, an Efe woman decorates her face with bark 
powder, her ears with the calyx of a flower, her neck with a vine.
Photograph by R. R. Grinker .

forest good that Lese men, women, and children do not, and will not, gather by themselves.

The Efe are the sole gatherers of honey, but they have no monopoly on the production of meat. The notion propounded by previous observers, notably Joset (1949), Turnbull (1965b), and Duffy (1984), that the Lese villagers do not enter the deep forest and are poor hunters, does not hold for the Lese of Malembi. The Lese are indeed afraid of the forest, but they often venture into the forest to hunt and trap, especially when they are able to cooperate with the Efe. In July of 1987, for example, when the Efe were living farther away from the Lese villages in order to collect honey, I ascertained that about two-thirds of the men at Malembi maintained animal traps in the forest. Five men trapped the animals in cooperation with their Efe partners, and four men who did not set any traps in 1987 said that they had done so in cooperation with the Efe the previous summer. So far as I know, no data have been

published on the volume of the meat transferred from the Efe to the Lese. My observations of the few meat transfers during 1985 and 1986 lead me to believe that, even when the Efe give meat to the Lese, they give very small amounts. For instance, two of the Lese-Efe transactions that resulted in Efe acquisitions of kola nut and yams in July 1987 involved, in the first case, an Efe trading the skeleton of a small duiker (to be used in a soup), and, in the second case, one shoulder of a duiker.

A Moral Obligation to Distribute with the Efe

The symbolic meaning of the Lese-Efe distribution of goods also carried, for the Lese, a definite sense of obligation. Even though they do not always receive material goods in return for the cultivated foods they divide with the Efe, the Lese on the whole feel morally obliged to maintain the division. In 1987, in two Lese villages at Malembi, villagers gave cultivated foods to their Efe partners or partners' families almost every day for more than a month. According to the Efe who received these goods, the quantities given in each instance were large enough to support an Efe man, woman, and child for one or two days. Whether the sense of obligation is wholly altruistic is questionable: some Lese informants indicated that they find it difficult to refuse giving foods to their Efe partners because they view the relationship as fragile and are afraid to alienate the Efe:

One day he gives meat, and I give him food to feed his entire family. Later, I will finish all the meat in just one meal. Then when his food is finished, he will come to ask for more food—before he gets another animal—and you must give it to him. You have to give it to him because he is your Efe. He brought you meat, and maybe he will do it again. You are unable to refuse them. And you are afraid to make him angry, because then he will give the meat he does catch to someone else. Maybe he will no longer be your Efe.

Maruokbe, an elderly Lese woman who was quoted earlier in chapter 3, also stated that the Lese must give the Efe something when they come to the house. An important part of her statement is that she must empathize with the Efe partner in order to establish a quantity of cultivated food to be given.

Maruokbe, like other Lese, actually has in mind a certain customary amount of meat that she would like her house to receive. She thinks about needs, but not about supply and demand.

The Flow of Goods Between Houses

One result of the isolation of Lese houses and villages from one another is that even in times of hunger the Lese find little assistance in their own or in neighboring villages.^[7] This is in striking contrast to the norms of Efe food circulation. Different Efe groups transfer a variety of goods to one another, including cultivated foods obtained from their Lese partners. Between Lese villages the transfer of goods is limited to occasional reciprocity for the services of multivillage work groups at harvesting time, and the communal consumption of palm wine. Between houses, the circulation of cultivated goods is discouraged. A Lese man or woman will rarely share cultivated foods with any Lese who is not a member of his or her house, and any Lese man or woman, including elders, who asks for food or receives it, is thought to be like a child, or like an Efe. The Lese explicitly make the comparison between the dependence of elders and the dependence of children.

There is a Lese proverb:Akbedu-akbedu muragbua ita , meaning literally "It is not possible to mix the intestines of two akbedu [a species of monkey]"; that is, as my informants explained it, Do not mix together things that are already divided . My informants said that the proverb refers primarily to the house, and it is meant to discourage fellow villagers from sharing food with one another. Every village contains one or more houses, and these houses should ideally remain separated in their production, consumption, and distribution of cultivated foods. Each house is responsible for producing and consuming its own food, and the transfer of food from one to another is undesirable.

The evening meal demarcates the house boundaries. Although most people eat something at midday after returning from the garden, it is common for people to eat only one meal a day, an evening meal consisting of cassava and/or potatoes, and pounded and cooked cassava leaves (odu-pi ). Every house eats separately, and within each house men eat apart from women and children. Women and children may eat before the men eat, but often they wait until the men are finished and then eat whatever is left. When boys begin puberty, they begin to eat

[7] In cases of extreme hunger, parents may send their children to villages far from their own (up to 120 kilometers away). They may stay there for up to six months at a time (where they are fed entirely by the host family). Single men may travel 19 to 100 km to work at plantations where they receive free housing from the owners and are paid in palm oil, salted and dried fish, or money. In addition, they may obtain some agricultural foods from relatives living near the plantations. In most of these cases, the Lese obtain cultivated foods only far away from their own villages, and not from adjacent villages.

with their fathers in the pasa. The main exception to the confinement of food to houses that I observed was when a mother gave some of her house's produce to her married sons, and when, on one occasion, in an incompletely constructed village, married men shared cooking and eating areas with their fathers for lack of sheltered space. In this second case, however, the father ate food cultivated in his own garden, the son ate food cultivated in his, and their respective produce was kept in separate containers that their wives presented at mealtime specifically to their husbands; while eating, each man took one or two potatoes or cassava from the other's bowl. On several occasions, I observed a man to eat, with his father and with his son, pounded cassava leaves prepared by his and his father's wives.

The Flow of Goods Between Villages

The Lese with whom I lived also maintained a normative standard against the circulation of foods between villages and between phratries. This has historical roots. I noted earlier that the Lese villages have always been highly independent residential and productive units. Before relocation, they were situated as far as fifteen kilometers from one another, and the area they occupied was in almost complete isolation from other ethnic groups, with the exception of the Efe. Clans clustered together into phratries, and the Efe clans, with whom the Lese traded, clustered along with them. After relocation, when villages were situated much closer together, the Lese continued to maintain the old values of insularity and self-sufficiency, and sought to continue their relations with the Efe rather than with other Lese, or non-Lese. For example, Lese men and women seldom admit knowledge of the Efe trading partnerships of other Lese houses or villages. The partnerships are said to be the personal affairs of each house, and although everyone knows everyone else's Efe networks, they feign ignorance for the sake of the idealized economic independence of houses.

Only on certain specific occasions is it permissible for the Lese to obtain some cultivated foods from other houses or villages. One occasion is the harvesting of peanuts, when members of the same phratry help one another, in what amounts to work parties; the current owner of the garden reciprocates directly for the help he or she was given by giving the helpers small bags of peanuts. Food may also be shared in the event that someone passes by another's village for talk or gossip and finds the members of that village in the process of eating. In such cases,

the villagers will ordinarily offer food to the guest. However, I have never witnessed a villager prepare food especially for a guest; not only would this be an insult to the guest, it would be dangerous. People fear that meals prepared for them may contain poison or witchcraft substance. Some communal meals are eaten at occasional rituals or dances, at religious meetings held by missionaries in distant towns, and at peace-making ceremonies. I shall present one such eating ceremony in some detail in the next chapter, a ceremony in which two men who had not seen or spoken to one another for more than two decades tried to end their hostilities by eating a communal meal. Commensalism is a gesture of friendship and trust, for a man would never eat the food of another man if he felt that the other had murderous intentions. This has significant effects within the village. Since people fear most those who live in their own villages, they do not wish to eat their fellow villagers' cultivated foods.

The primary form of communal consumption between houses of the same village, and between villages of the same phratry, takes place under the palm tree when drinking wine. Some trees will give enough wine to last several weeks, and the owner of the tree has the social obligation of sharing it first with fellow clan or village members, and after that with fellow phratry members or, rarely, with members of an adjacent phratry. Wine drinking is strictly a male activity, and it commonly starts early in the morning, sometimes before the sun rises. Men gather together, and while they drink, they talk about the quality of the wine and tell stories of other palm wine trees, and they tease the women who beg to be given a drink. There are strong strictures against drinking palm wine alone, and people only infrequently do so (various myths express the moral that palm wine must be shared within the village). Even the group drinking is done in moderation, since most wine is sold for cash. Ordinarily the owner of the palm wine tree and the fundi (a Swahili term meaning an "expert" or "wise" person, who in this case is the person, not necessarily the owner, responsible for draining the wine and putting it into cups) decide to give certain men or villages a single day out of the week when they may drink the wine as their guests. These men are usually elders of neighboring clans within the same phratry as the owner of the palm wine tree. Women of the same village can also come to drink, although they are given the wine only if the men have finished theirs, or if they have paid for it. The Efe are excluded from the early morning palm wine parties, and are rarely given palm wine to drink at any time (the Lese frequently accuse the Efe of stealing

the Lese palm wine). Besides palm wine, there are other forms of alcohol made with a still, including kaikbo , a liquor made from cassava, corn, or rice, and njerekuma , liquor made from plantains. These can be bought with Zairian currency, and consumption is, of course, limited to those who can afford to pay.

Circulation of Nonedible Goods

The strict standards governing the circulation of foods between houses, villages, and phratries do not apply to the circulation of nonedible goods such as money, tools, shoes, and bicycles. Items of this sort are frequently circulated between members of different villages, as well as between houses. It is significant that, whereas requests for money from the members of one's phratry are easily denied because money can be hidden, and the amount owned is very often kept secret, requests for more easily seen nonedible goods and for the loan of something from someone who, himself, has borrowed it, are often difficult to refuse. At Andingbana village, for instance, a man lent a hammer to another man; within a few days, in a sequence of intervillage loans, the hammer had traveled fifty kilometers and changed hands five times. In such cases, owners often have a difficult time retrieving their borrowed goods, and, in the event of a public dispute, are requested by the local chiefs to accuse the last one known to be in possession of the item, rather than the first borrower who set the item on its course. Placing blame on the person who does not return the item rather than on the individual to whom the item was originally lent helps preserve peaceful relations among villagers, since the original borrower is often a fellow village member, and the final one a stranger or distant acquaintance.

One reason that requests to use, to give, or to sell noncultivated or nonedible goods are difficult to deny is that things like radios, bicycles, and shoes are public knowledge, and moreover, it is unacceptable for one person or house to have a greater number of goods than other houses in the same village. One Lese man who worked at a plantation earned enough money to buy a bicycle but instead of bringing it home to his village he stored it at another village some distance down the road. He told me that if he brought the bicycle home his "brothers would ruin it"—by which he meant that he would be obliged to share the bicycle with his fellow clan members, and that the bicycle would wear out quickly from overuse. One sharing legend tells of a widowed man who asked a fellow villager for the "use of his wife's vagina," and,

when the villager refused him, he and his family split apart from the village, and renamed it "Andikufengope" (that is, "the people who refuse to give vaginas"); the village retains that name today.

Lese legends of village breakups, like that of Andikufengope, abound; most of them have to do with the refusal of one or more members to share noncultivated goods (usually meat) with a member of another village, but the refusal to share within a village has perils, mostly because of the jealousy with which villagers view perceived differences in productivity. In part, the jealousy is related to beliefs in supernatural malevolence: villagers express their jealousy through their fear of being accused of bewitching the more wealthy. It is not at all uncommon for poor villagers to be taken to tribunals on charges that they used witchcraft or sorcery to cause the misfortune or death of others. Lese men and women also complain of a lack of affection and loyalty among village members, and sometimes they threaten to leave their settlements, saying if relations between coresidents were truly loving, they would all be equal.

It is not considered to be improper for one village or phratry to exceed another, nor are the different villages that constitute the phratry expected to remain always at the same level of productivity. They are not partners, but neither are they openly competitive with one another. Fellow phratry members certainly conflict with, are jealous of, and wish ill upon one another, but they do not see one another as inherently harmful or hostile. Although economic successes in other villages are viewed with ambivalence, no Lese plans or hopes to benefit from them.

Relationships within the village are thus full of much of the tension and conflict that might otherwise exist between different villages or between two different populations. F. G. Bailey has noted the extent to which gift giving among equals generates stressful and conflict-laden social relationships:

A gross difference in power and in status usually has the effect of putting people so far apart, that they cannot compete (although they may, of course, seek to use one another). Hence the paradox and, I suppose, the tragedy: people remain equal because each one believes that every other one is trying to better him, and in his efforts to protect himself, he makes sure that no-one else ever gets beyond the level of approved mediocrity (1971:19–20).

Bailey's statement applies to the Lese, where villagers seek their economic relationships at the level of their own house, and within the Lese-Efe partnership. It is as if the Lese were saying: I should not give to you

because you should be inherently equal to me. The circulation of goods has profound social consequences because it is linked to ideas about egalitarianism, hierarchy, and competition. The Lese are competing with one another not so much for actual resources as for equality.

Sharing Meat

Meat, like cultivated foods, is not something to be transferred between villages, nor is it something to be given by the Lese to the Efe. However, in contrast to cultivated foods, meat should be shared between Lese houses. One possible reason why this is so is that acquiring meat is frequently a cooperative effort, unlike the growing of cultivated foods. Lese men do sometimes hunt or trap alone, but often several men from the same clan leave the village together and help one another to hunt or set snares. It is thus profitable to distinguish between sharing and distribution. Both entail a moral obligation to transfer foods, but while the latter term refers to allocation on the basis of rights to a common good, the former connotes the spirit of the gift. Meat symbolizes kinship, brotherhood, and the spirit of giving between equals. Cultivated foods, however, have a potency due to the common participation of unequal house members in garden labor. Meat invokes the clan and common descent, cultivated foods speak of gender and ethnicity.

When a Lese man captures an animal on his own, he keeps the best parts, usually one or two hind legs, and gives the rest to other members of his clan. He may give the entrails to a dog if a dog was involved in the hunt. A single house will almost never acquire a piece of meat without sharing some of it with members of other houses, even with those who did not help in the hunt. One informant, Nestor, idealized the meat sharing between members of the same clan: "No one kills an animal for himself. You killed your brother's animal, and your brother killed yours. Ubotedi killed meat for Ngote, and Ngote killed meat for Ondekomvu, and Ondekomvu killed meat for Ubotedi."

So important is the sharing of meat that failure to do so can indicate a lack of mutual kinship and affection. Clan schisms are commonly attributed to the failure of the clan members to share meat, or if not meat, then other noncultivated goods such as wild fruits or mushrooms. Moreover, the Lese are well acquainted with the legends of what happened in the past to break up villages that were once united. The following legends, the first four collected from different clans within the same phratry in my study, the fifth from a clan of a more distant phratry

outside the study area, all have the theme of fragmentation caused by not sharing.

1. We [the Lese-Dese] are all from Sudan. From there we left because of wars of men, who came to burn everyone's beards. We arrived at Mount Menda. We left Menda over a fruit. We had one tree with many branches, and the nduku fruit would fall off and everyone would divide them. Then only one remained. One woman had a house at the bottom of a hill, and she was sitting in the house because she had a new baby. The nduku fruit fell, and rolled into her house. People returned from the gardens and saw that the fruit was gone. Where did it go? they asked. The husband of this woman said, "It fell and went inside my house, and my wife ate it." From there we all split up. (Andingire clan informant)

2. Andikose and Andifuru were one. The old men went to the forest every day and killed many animals. The young men went to the forest every day but came back with furu mushrooms only, the kind called furu. The young became angry that their fathers did not give them enough meat, and so they left in sadness. The old men had beards, and so took the [clan] name Andikose (kose = beard), and the young men took the [clan] name Andifuru. Now we are separate villages, but once we lived under one pasa. (Andikose clan informant).

3. Andikose [clan] was with Andisopi [phratry]. We split over a genet. We had separate places for our houses, on the sides of the pasa. We set a trap, and one man killed the genet. He told his child, "Go give this piece of the genet to your father's brother [the man's elder brother]." The child took a long route, and passed a fallen tree. He sat on it, and ate all the meat himself. When the child returned, he said that he had given the animal. The older brother prepared banana alcohol and brought it to his younger brother to drink. He saw the genet skin and said, "Why didn't you give me any?" The man told his brother that he had sent meat to him. They asked the child, and he said he had given the meat. They found the Akawakawa tree on which the child had eaten the meat, and they saw the pot and the bones. The brother said, "This is very bad—will we leave each other like this?" One Andikose [man] left to go to the BaBudu people, the other began to live with Andisopi villages. Now we all call ourselves Andisopi. (Andikose informant)

4. Long ago all the Andisopi were together. One day, they set traps. They killed animals. There was a woman, Okato. The Andisopi went to look at the traps, and near the village a tree stump stubbed the toe of one boy. "Oh! My foot hurts! Why did this happen? I am hurt because of a trap, and the women don't even give us the meat they cook!" Okato heard this problem. She said, "Why are they stating our names? We will not cook their food." Okato took some meat, and cooked it in a huge pot. After two days of cooking, the meat was ready. She cooked a lot of bananas, and when everyone was in the pasa, she came to the pasa and put the meat on the ground. They all split up after this to go on their own. The men were saddened by

this, and so Andisopi split up to live in separate villages. (Andisopi informant, Andimoma clan)

5. Andikefe and Anditara. [clans] of the Andipaki [phratry] split up at Akbera. There was an Andikefe woman who married a man from Anditara. She [already] had a small child. When she arrived there she found [married] a man with bananas called njeru. "I found these in an old garden." He was putting njeru (ripe, sweet bananas) into four clay pots. He put water in the pot, and they ate the njeru after two days. The water was sweet. They ate three pots and one remained. Her brother's wife was in the village [indicating that a sister exchange had taken place, hence the Andikefe woman's brother's wife is a member of the Anditara clan]. She [the Andikefe woman] went to her garden but left her child behind. When she came home she found that the last pot of njeru had been eaten. She asked, "Where are my njeru?" The husband said, "My sister gave them to our child." The woman became angry and asked how they could have eaten the njeru. without permission. She said, "If it is this way, you should kill my child." After this, the whole Andipai [phratry] left to go to Menda. (Andipaki informant)

Not only in legend but in everyday life, the failure to share, especially meat and other noncultivated foods, causes unified groups of Lese to split into two or more villages. The difficulties of sharing are highlighted in the fourth legend, in which a woman serves food improperly; instead of serving some meat to each man sitting underneath the pasa, she places the entire pot of meat at their feet. The men refuse to eat the meat, leave the pasa for their respective houses, and then establish separate villages. Reflecting on the story, one informant stated that men will not eat meat that has not been rationed for them: one man might eat more than his share;^[8] another informant, referring to the same legend, stated that men will not eat meat such as this because it is "cooked with sadness"—that is, the characters of the story are afraid that the woman put poison into the meat. These legends, symbolic representations of the genesis of intervillage conflict, tell clearly of competitiveness, anger, selfishness, and the suspicion of evil intent; even more striking is the fragility of the relationships between groups that once lived together—fragile because Lese social relationships are intrinsically antagonistic and opposing. These are tales of woe, of clans splitting up and individual Lese houses remaining alone. The greatest dispersion takes place among those who are similar to one another, the greatest integration among those who are different.

[8] Generosity is restricted to the extent that a giver of food or meat must specify the quantity to be taken. When offering food to someone it is inappropriate to extend a bowl or plateful of food and leave the decision of what quantity to take to the receiver.

A Lese man (left) who has trapped a duiker gives some meat to a fellow 
clan member's Efe partner (center).  Photograph by R. R. Grinker .

Good and Bad Efe

The conflicts inherent in the circulation of goods between persons result in constraints on distribution and sharing. Cultivated foods are given to those who are supposed to occupy a subordinate position in a hierarchy, whereas meat is given to those who are equals or kin members. Obviously, when the Efe give meat to the Lese the transfer does not imply equality between the Lese and the Efe. But neither does it imply inequality. From the Lese point of view the transfer does imply a recognition on the part of the Efe of a common bond between the Lese and the Efe, one that is often framed in kinship terminology. Thus, it is the flow of agricultural goods rather than the flow of meat that helps to construct hierarchical relations. The Lese emphasis on meat sharing within Lese villages explains why the Lese define "good Efe" or "bad Efe" (Efe irembe , or Efe inda , respectively) in terms of meat sharing. The Efe, the Lese's classificatory kin, are good Efe if they give meat, bad Efe if they do not share meat. In the same way, Lese village members are good or bad depending upon whether they distribute their meat with their fellow Lese villagers. Meat sharing is, very clearly, an act of friendship, loyalty, and kinship rather than an act of dependence on a source of nutrition . The Lese want to receive meat not because they are

unable to get it themselves, but because they desire expressions of loyalty and affection. The Efe are obliged to give meat to the Lese not because the Lese will not hunt or trap, or because meat functions as a tribute to a higher status group. In giving meat, the Efe are doing only what is expected of any kin or village member. If we were to examine the Lese concern for sharing meat between Lese and Efe in isolation from the social meanings that Lese attribute to sharing meat among themselves, we might overemphasize the significance of meat in defining the Lese-Efe relationship. The sharing of meat is a symbol of brotherhood; the sharing of cultivated foods is a symbol of inequality.

Meat is to Cultivated Foods as Male is to Female

The difference between meat and cultivated foods parallels the differences between male and female roles in Lese-Efe society. In chapter 3, I described how meat is symbolically classified as female, in the sense that it is red and wet and is integrated into Lese symbolic representations of women and reproduction. The acquisition of meat, however, like the acquisition of women, is a male activity. Cultivated foods are symbolically classified as male (in the sense that they are white, hard, and dry), yet the acquisition of cultivated foods is a female activity. Women cultivate the gardens and play no role in hunting or trapping, other than occasionally to travel with their husbands to the forest where they prepare food while their husbands go off to set or check on their traps. Lese men view women as of lower social value than men, and they also view farming as having a lower value than hunting. It follows that meat acquired and distributed by men (often as the result of a cooperative effort among agnates) is channeled into the clan, which is idealized as a solidary organization of men. Women's goods represent private interests, the interests of the house; while men's goods represent public interests, the interests of the clan or village.

In childhood, boys learn from their fathers and/or father's brothers about hunting and trapping as a collective venture, and they are told the legends that attribute clan disruption to selfishness and the refusal to share meat. When hunting or whittling arrows, agnates are thus brought together in a common activity. Groups of boys frequently go off to the edge of the villages to hunt mice, rats, and other small animals. Hunting expresses an opposition between men and women, and it mediates oppositions between men. Girls, however, are taught to help

the mothers in house activities and to keep cultivated foods within the houses.

Although men will work in their gardens, farming becomes the domain of women and Efe. One who "cuts down" the forest (clears a garden) is male, one who works in a garden is female. Lese men thus identify themselves as farmers to the extent that they have harnessed the forest, cut it back, and encroached upon it with their houses and villages. In fact, when a man wishes to clear an area of forest, or a gbakba, he first builds a small pasa, or begins building a house within the garden itself. While women, children, or Efe work on the garden, he will (ideally) refrain from cultivation and remain under the pasa fashioning tools or building an animal trap.

The gendered separation of farming and hunting is expressed as well in the uneasy relationship between hunting-trapping and sexual activity. Every clan has its own special rules, but all without exception have strong restrictions against men engaging in sexual intercourse while they are hunting or trapping. Generally, this means no intercourse from the day before setting the traps until the day the traps are examined (from three days to one week later). The sexual restriction extends to any contact with sexual acts: at Dingbo, a violent dispute erupted when it was discovered that a couple had had sexual intercourse on the sleeping mat of a man from a neighboring village; the man who owned the mat had set his snares but had yet to investigate them, and though he himself had observed the prohibition against intercourse, his sleeping mat and therefore his own trapping skill were spoiled.

Furthermore, although there is some variation in the prohibitions, according to whether one uses metal trapping wire or the indigenous kinga cord that grows wild in the forest, the prohibitions generally equate failure at trapping with things slippery (the vagina). A snare that is slippery will not hold the animal. One informant from the Andingbana clan gave the following description: "People used to set more kinga traps before we had metal. If you had a trap you wouldn't eat catfish, or squash, or anything slippery, because then the animals would slip out of the trap. My father told me also not to put my hand under a bed, or on top of a drying rack, and not to eat with dirty hands while the traps are set." A man from the Andimoma clan said, "One week before setting the trap, you will stop having sex, and three animals must be killed before you can have sex again. If you don't have sex, you can make [innumerable] traps from the same tree, and it will not ruin the tree." A man from the Andibeke clan said, "When you have set traps,

you cannot eat elephant skin, or gbara-ta [a kind of leaf]. If a woman is sad she will rub banana peel on your kinga. You cannot eat anything slippery. I was also told that, with regard to the Lese practice of setting up spear falls for the killing of large animals, the restrictions were even more severe, including prohibitions on sexual intercourse for several weeks. I do not know whether these prohibitions were actually followed.

The sexual contradiction in Lese men's conceptions of hunting should be fairly obvious by now: Lese men idealize hunting as a masculine activity and yet they feminize the hunters. I have already commented on a distinction between the good itself and its acquisition. Meat, for instance, is a female substance but its acquisition is male. Given the denigration of the Efe as female, the association between meat and women helps explain why the color of Efe bodies is paired with the color of meat. But how can the Efe be denigrated as female when they are identified with such a male activity? The resolution is that hunting simultaneously represents low and high status. Efe men are denigrated because they hunt and do not build houses or clear gardens of their own. Similarly, Lese men who hunt too much are denigrated as Efe. But a Lese man who is able to capture meat is idealized as a successful farmer who, by virture of his success, has the time to hunt, and, moreover, can do so in a more technologically advanced way—with traps rather than with the simple bows and arrows of the Efe. A Lese man who hunts makes a statement to the world that he has a house, that he has women and Efe who are taking care of his garden, that he has command over his social world.

Conclusion: The Circulation of Interactions

Lese intragroup relations and Lese-Efe relations have to be analyzed together because each depends on the other for its particular forms and functions. Each set of relations presupposes the other. We have also seen that the house model of the economy is composed of many metaphors that have to do with maleness and femaleness, equality and inequality, and the symbolic incorporation of the Efe into Lese life. The house model encompasses not only the production, consumption, and circulation of foods but also the relationship between the two ethnic groups.

One of the curious aspects of the Lese-Efe relationship is the number of different kinds of interactions that take place between affiliated Lese

and Efe, in contrast to the more limited number of interactions between Lese of different villages. This "social exchange," for lack of a better term, is in part a function of the ethnic integration of the Lese and the Efe that takes place in the house. The Lese of different villages within the same phratry have only a few activities they can carry out together. They may drink palm wine together, participate in rituals with one another, and on rare occasions organize work parties for harvests. They may meet at tribunals to discuss local affairs, meet at the market to gossip, and may sometimes sell secret medical potions to one another. These are ideally strictly Lese activities, in which Lese interact with other Lese. The Efe do not participate in these activities. They do not attend tribunals together unless an Efe man or woman is accused of a crime or must serve as a witness. The Efe do not drink palm wine together and seldom attend the market or participate in work parties.

But if the Efe are forbidden from those kinds of activities with the Lese, they and their Lese partners have a wide range of other mutual activities permissible to them as fellow house members but forbidden to Lese of different villages. Some of these activities, such as administering medicines and raising Efe children in a Lese house, are of a very intimate nature, and the Efe are also allowed more freedom in personal exchanges. They can argue with the Lese (usually without fear of violence), and they can work together about the house. Between the Efe and the Lese there is also, as we have seen, a regular division of meat and cultivated foods, quite different from the restrictions on such transfers, either by gift or purchase, between Lese of different villages. It is customary for Efe to go with their Lese partners on hunting, fishing, and trapping trips; they provide music for Lese dances; they protect their Lese from witchcraft; Efe girls prepare and cook food for their father's partners. They also cooperate with the Lese to name one another's babies; and when an Efe dies, the Lese provide burial cloths. It is also noteworthy that, whereas the intervillage transactions that do occur between the Lese usually are of a pecuniary nature, such as brideprices and cash payments for noncultivated goods, and may be carried out once and never again, the material transactions between the Lese and their Efe partners usually involve the distribution of goods and the performance of services and are carried out in the context of an ongoing partnership.

The freedom in the range of interactions between the Lese and the Efe may be related to the fact that inequality between the two groups is institutionalized in the house. To the extent that inequality is a key

concept in comprehending the range of interactions within the house, the interactions can be seen as distributions in a Maussian sense. Anthropological orthodoxy accepts that gift giving often establishes social and political links between persons in relations of domination; it is also not uncommon, aside from certain relations of domination, such as those of tax and tribute, for the givers to be superior to the receivers. From this, we would expect that, where there are constraints against forms of inequality, there would be constraints on exchange and gift giving specific to those forms. Indeed, cultivated foods, though not highly valued by the Lese as a cash crop or exchange item, are strongly valued in symbolic terms. The transfer of cultivated foods from one party to another generates relations of inequality between persons, and so there are many restrictions on the movement of these goods between Lese. We would also expect that, from the point of view of both the Lese and the Efe, where hierarchy is already accepted by the parties as a legitimate form of social and political relationship, there will be fewer constraints on the circulation of goods. The circulation of goods will not threaten relations of equality between givers, because the givers are not expected to be equals. By the same token, there may be fewer constraints on the variety of interactions that occur between unequals. The Efe have the freedom to walk in and out of their partner's villages and gardens, to help care for children, and to help in various kinds of village work, because their inferior status is almost never openly questioned. Both dissenting voices among the Lese about Efe inferiority and overt expressions of resistance against hierarchy among the Efe remain as "hidden transcripts," to use J. C. Scott's phrase (1990), and rarely enter into the dialogues about interethnic relations. The Lese-Efe relationship can be seen in the analytical framework of gift giving to constitute a semiautonomous field of social action (Moore 1978) in which the Lese carry out interactions with Efe that, within their own social group, are unacceptable or jeopardize idealized relations of equality.

In the next chapter, we will see just how dangerous competition and inequality can be. We will see that in witchcraft, as well as in economics, the Efe are valued because they transcend the social boundaries that separate and protect the Lese from one another.