Toward the House

In the chapters that follow, I shall explore the ethnic processes of Lese and Efe society. By ethnic process, I mean the ways in which these groups define themselves in opposition to each other. But this study goes beyond a simple description of the cultural features that comprise ethnic stereotypes. I want to discern how and why some features are more salient than others and to analyze the relationship between ethnicity and the integration of the Lese and the Efe in both symbol and practice. I shall thus be more concerned with analyzing culture as a conceptual scheme, as culture is constituted by models and metaphors. While I do not diminish the importance of extended case analyses and event histories and descriptions, I must admit that I pay more attention to the cultural structure and logic underlying Lese-Efe ethnic relations than to analyzing those relations as they unfold in practice. I give special importance to the idioms employed by the Lese in their symbolic constructions of society, idioms expressed in myth, narrative, and everyday speech.

I view ethnicity to be a historically constituted process in which the Lese and the Efe integrate themselves into a set of relations of inequality. Though we know very little about the relations between the Lese and the Efe in the distant past, the recent history of political and economic marginalization has, in Malembi, the site of this study,^[5] contributed not only to the intimacy and the cohesion of the partnerships but also to Lese conceptions of those partnerships as isolated and primordial. As we shall see, though the Lese have been subject to successive waves of Arab, colonial, and national oppression, many Lese men and

[5] "Malembi" is not an official designation of a village or group of villages. I use the name to refer to the villages in which I worked, scattered along the Malembi River.

women imagine that they have created their own isolation, and that they live in a peaceful society that is independent of outside forces and constituted entirely by Lese and Efe. As one Lese woman explained the infrequency with which the Lese interact with ethnic groups other than the Efe, "That is the way we are. We want to be alone. Every house to itself." The intimacy and nonviolence of Lese-Efe relations, based in large part upon their solidary juxtaposition to turbulent exogenous forces, stands in contrast to the many violent ethnic cleavages throughout the world, including, for example, South Africa (Vail 1988) and Sri Lanka (Kapferer 1988, Tambiah 1986). And elsewhere in Africa, C. Newbury's recent study of the Hutu and the Tutsi of Rwanda (1988), argues that historical changes in Rwandan politics over the past one hundred years have created greater ethnic solidarities and violent conflict. At the book's close, I will comment on the relative absence of violence between the Lese and the Efe.

However, my approach differs in at least one important respect from that of some anthropologists who have studied ethnicity (John L. Comaroff 1987, Vail 1988, Wilmsen 1990). Whereas many anthropologists take great pains to explore the actual historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of ethnic sentiments, I am concerned more with cultural representations than with ethnogenesis. Indeed, the bulk of this book is devoted not to a historical analysis of the genesis of ethnic identity but to a detailed ethnographic analysis of Lese-Efe social integration during the years 1985–87. The ethnography entails an analysis of how the historical circumstances of economic and political marginalization have resonated with cultural patterns of isolation—for example, the isolation of clans, houses, and gardens from one another—but I am less concerned with locating the motivations and genesis of Lese and Efe ethnic differentiation than I am with analyzing its composition and representations. These two areas of inquiry—historical genesis and cultural constitution—are, like process and structure, no doubt inextricably linked, but within the scope of this study, and within the scope of the data available to me, I place somewhat greater emphasis on my own observations, on the way the Lese group constructed and sustained cultural distinctions and social boundaries during the mid 1980s. Where and how can we locate ethnicity and the social processes that constitute it? How is identity culturally represented? And how are these representations made available to the anthropologist? Because I believe that ethnicity involves the asymmetrical incorporation of groups into a common social organization, I am especially concerned with uncovering

and analyzing Lese discourses about inequality. What are the images of domination, and the discourse about status through which relations of inequality between the Lese and the Efe are constituted? And how is the cultural discourse on inequality enacted in social practice?

In large part, the answers to my questions about the Lese-Efe relationship lie in a careful examination of the countless symbolic meanings that together constitute ethnic identity and the nature of interethnic interaction. This is a project that will, ideally, link up the historicity of ethnicity with its "primordial" constitution. Descent, I shall argue, is not of major importance to our understanding of Lese and Efe ethnicity, because Lese-Efe relations are neither conceived nor constructed at the level of the descent group, in this case, the clan. The Lese reckon descent patrilineally and organize their villages as clans. Within villages, the members believe they are genealogically related, though they cannot always discern the precise relationships and usually do not recognize a single apical ancestor. Furthermore, all clan members are ideally equal in status, with no household producing more goods than any other. The primary social function of clans is to unite and mobilize Lese men for war and marriage alliances and thus to mute inequality and social difference in the service of social solidarity. If the clan is the cultural model for equality, where, then, can we locate the model for inequality? Where can we find the images and forms of male-female and Lese-Efe relations? How are these relations culturally patterned?

These questions have been informed, to a considerable degree, by the house models Jan Vansina and Curtis Keim have proposed for the societies of the central African rain forest (Vansina 1982, 1990a, 1990b; Schildkrout and Keim 1990). Vansina's model rejects lineage and kinship as the central or only forms of political organization and argues strongly that the southern central Sudanic and Proto-Mamvu societies of past centuries, which included the Lese, maintained house-centered political traditions. More specifically, he describes the incorporation of slaves, clients, and other kinds of house members who are not necessarily lineage members. In other words, ethnic relationships might be found in the house rather than in the lineage. The house made possible two ideologies of social organization: an egalitarian ideology that reflected the ideals of the lineage (Schildkrout and Keim 1990:89) and a hierarchical ideology that reflected the ideals of the individual. The house was thus flexible enough to simultaneously permit a "coherent internal organization" as well as hierarchical relations between its members (Vansina 1982:175). My use of the house differs from Van-

sina's in some very important ways (see chapter 4); nonetheless, his model provides a basic theoretical foundation on which I have constructed this ethnography.

I shall argue that relations between the Lese and the Efe, as well as other relations of inequality, are organized at the level of the house. For the Lese and the Efe, the Lese house is where nearly all production, consumption, and distribution of foods take place. Indeed, the house is the physical locus of economic interaction between the Lese and the Efe, and therefore also the locus of social differentiation and potential inequalities. Lese houses are not coresidential units. They ideally contain a man, his wife or wives, their children, and an Efe partner who does not live in the house. 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. Houses are therefore not defined by coresidence or lineage so much as by membership, with membership founded upon the integration of Lese men, their wives and children, and Efe partners into common participation in the production and distribution of cultivated foods. As the center of relations of inequality—between men and women, children and adults, Lese and Efe—the house is symbolically significant in the Lese construction of identity and social boundaries. The house is built upon several interlocking metaphors, the most primary of which are "the house is a body," and "the Efe are female." The relations between men and women are, in fact, 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). Thus, the symbolic material out of which the Lese construct their ethnic and economic relations with the Efe has its origin in that which is closest to every Lese individual: the home and hearth, and the primary relationships contained there.

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 ethnic and gender relations, as well as the organization of social practices. It is a source of core symbols but also an arena for interactions structured by them. Although the core metaphors of differentiation are manifold, they all revolve around the house. The house provides for the Lese and the Efe the metaphors that inform ethnic differentiation, and that come to be experienced as primordial, everlasting, and axiomatic. This does not mean that houses and descent groups are not linked, or that one refers solely to domestic relations and the other to political

relations; it means merely that they are coexisting models: one for inequality, one for egalitarianism. The social organization is perhaps too complicated to be subsumed under one model, and so different aspects of the social totality are modeled by different idioms.

The important role of the house in Lese and Efe society leads us to rethink the Fortesian jural model. One of the legacies of structural functional anthropology is that anthropologists were pulled toward the study of politics in the "politico-jural" domain as distinct from politics in the domestic domain, usually the household (Fortes 1945, 1949). Public and private domains were analytically separated from one another and seldom linked (Yanagisako 1979, H. Moore 1988). What happened at the level of the household, for instance, could be accounted for by kinship relations, but what happened at the level of the clan could be accounted for by clan, descent, or corporate relations. As Evans-Pritchard suggested, "the relations between the sexes and between children and adults belong rather to an account of domestic relations than to a study of political institutions" (1940:178). Relations of inequality at the level of the household, including male-female relations, were not salient features of corporate groups, and so were relegated to the domestic domain. Even the numerous studies that focus specifically on households and their economic functions in sub-Saharan Africa (see Guyer 1981) tend to treat the household as a discrete entity "opposed to wider, exogenous, economic processes" (Heald 1991:131). This distinction between the household/domestic and the corporate/ political domains does not hold for the Lese and the Efe. We shall see that Lese houses are concerned not only with reproduction and child rearing but also with determining the structures and meanings of economic and political relationships, including the curious and often misunderstood ethnic relations between the foragers and farmers.