GENERATIONAL DISCONTINUITIES
Dependency and Predation in a Papua New Guinea Case
Speaking generally of Etoro, Kelly remarks on the absence of dependency as a modulator of relationships: "The absence of a consolidated set of dependencies invested in a single key relationship (to parents, or to agnates, or to spouse) is a general feature of the Etoro socioeconomic system" (1993, 133). This includes relations with maternal kin. Now, in terms of a person's agnatic identity, relations with maternal kin are axiomatically cross-sex. From a comparative perspective, they seem to be much attentuated in Etoro. Maternal kin are not credited with the kind of investment in their sister's children that elsewhere makes persons dependent on them for growth and health. As we shall see, the way in that conjugal relations are conceived possibly lead Etoro men (we do not know about women) to downplay the cross-sex symbolism of links to such kin.
Kelly argues the general case with reference to the fact that there are no relationships in which persons can accrue the labor of others. At the same time, there is one relationship that sets up singular obligations: between husbands and wives (p. 135). The general substitutability (homosubstitution in Descola's terms) of persons that pertains elsewhere is set aside: husbands and wives have a binding sexual commitment to each other. This extends to a limited perception of economic dependency between them; we should also note that there is an essential combination of conjugal labors in the coproduction of sago (p. 108) and children. Nonetheless, this interdependence between the sexes seems not to become a model for parent-child relations themselves.[16]
On the contrary, Kelly is explicit about the devaluation of social dependency in relations between parents and children. There is no intergenerational transmission of rights in resources, eliminating as he says (p. 133) "any potential for parental control, dependencies, feelings of indebtedness, and holder-heir conflicts." If there are dependencies they are conceived in other idioms altogether, above all through the child's dependence on the father's vitality for its growth. Women are radically dependent on their fathers, as well as on husbands and brothers, to assist them with compensation to protect their lives should they become accused of witchcraft (pp. 235–236). But Etoro men "are not indebted to their mothers in the same way as they are to their fathers" (p. 71). While payments flow between affines, there is only minimal
Kelly claims for Etoro that "it is the transmission of life-force between the generations rather than gender that is employed to conceptually order the world and the cultural formulation of gender attributes is specified in the context of this life-force ideology" (1993, 71). No wonder, given the absent mother, fathers are free, so to speak, to regulate and distribute the life-force, which (the regulation and distribution) thus appears to the anthropologist as the organizing "social force."[17] However, note that Kelly only refers to gender when the sexes are distinct as men or women and there is an antithesis of some kind between them. This is despite the fact that his account is shot through with the "fundamental Etoro opposition … [between] homosexuality: heterosexuality:: growth, strength, and vitality: senescence, weakness, and death," with the secondary association of homosexuality with men and heterosexuality with women (ibid.).
For all that Etoro children "depend" on their own particular fathers for lifeforce, however, this is not built into a sequence of further dependencies. Despite the glorification of the father's sacrifice in vitalizing his children (especially his sons), it is not a process that the father completes. The control of products lies with those who complete their production (p. 204), and in the end the father exercises no such control over his children. It is handed over to others, as we shall see. The singularity (nonsubstitutability or irreversibility) of the father's relationship with his offspring is no more carried forward than is the singularity of his relationship with his wife. And what happens to the father also happens to his whole generation. In an echo of Barasana, there are, so to speak, only two generations: the growers and the growing. While there is a kind of complementarity between the generations insofar as the one grows at the expense of the other, and that displaced growth (in the child) is also evidence of the parent generation's vitality, this sequence closes with the second generation. There is no forward effect; it cannot be carried on.
Notions of substance become relevant here. With Hugh-Jones's caveat (Chapter 11), we may refer briefly to Collier and Rosaldo's (1981) point about the expenditure of body energy in "brideservice societies" by contrast with systems where valuables represent the accumulation of labor. The Etoro material problematizes the corporeal dynamics here. For the latter system requires an analogy (on the part of the actors) between the substance of the human body and the substance of valuables/objects. In a "bridewealth" society such as Hagen, for instance, growing fat is a sign of wealth. Etoro, however, do not seem to imagine such a body; on the contrary, growing fat has
In addition to the inert corporeal body, a person has two potent forms, both implanted by spirits, one a noncorporeal body and the other a soul (Kelly 1976). The noncorporeal body, ausulubo, is the vehicle that spirit mediums use to gain access to patrilineal spirits; it is also a vehicle for witches and is vulnerable to witchcraft attack. The condition of the ausulubo is evident in the visible (corporeal) body. Both bodies (corporeal and noncorporeal) are animated by hame, life-force, which imparts vitality to them and which is subject to increase and depletion. For men, hame is lost in two ways—by witchcraft, which eats it, and by their own acts of generosity, which make them bestow it on others. Etoro distinguish men from women in this regard because men's hame is concentrated in semen. This at once reifies their power and symbolizes the inevitable loss of power through its expenditure. In fact, they seem to have locked themselves into the logic of having to demonstrate their own plenitude by constant expenditure. So they pour their efforts into procuring shell valuables and inseminating youths in order to make obvious their own vitality. But they can only enlarge their demonstrated vitality by increasing the occasions on which they expend it; they increase the demonstration but lose the vitality itself.
In reifying vitality in semen and shells, Etoro men also seem to have locked themselves into an imagery of own-growth/alter-growth. For a man's own growth is best demonstrated in the extent to which he grows others. This bestowal is one-way. It would seem that it is men's ambition to make boys and women fat while keeping themselves thin. But not too fat. Witches become fat by preying on the hame of others, and, with their augmented supply, they produce fat babies known by their size as witch-children. Thus it is the hame that is augmented or depleted in acts of intercourse and witchcraft. As Kelly tells us, semen is more a source of vitality than a material that adds to flesh. It is almost as if Etoro felt compelled to inseminate boys, because the body is such an ambiguous metaphor for growth. There is a comparative point here: semen is not everywhere the same kind of body "substance."
Etoro think of starch staples as satisfying hunger but not as nourishing (Kelly 1993, 159); they do not grow people in the same way as the game hunted by men do. Meat is also held to augment the child's flesh, blood, and skin, which are provided by the mother in procreation. But women do not
For the father (in-law) is incapable of animating the children of his children, by a double deprivation. First, in the case of sons generally, the role of their insemination is taken over by agnates and older men in the initiation lodge, and the sons do not reach the point of being able to transmit semen until they have had this nonpaternal infusion. Second, in the case of daughters and younger sons, it is the husband who will complete the father's job by inseminating brother and sister together. If mothers stand for the impotence ("absence") of fathers, daughters stand for the impotence of sons. Other men help remedy the latter where none can remedy his own.
I have rendered this material from the point of view of older middle-aged males (cf. Robertson 1996). Kelly suggests that the dominant ideological thrust in fact comes from younger middle-aged men, men "in their prime," especially after they have been initiated and turn from becoming recipients to donors of semen (1993, 186), the category from whom spirit mediums are drawn, with an interest in the circulation of semen and shells, tokens of their aspirations to virtue. Let me relate a brief encounter. The kosa ceremony (pp. 408 ff.) draws together hosts and guests typically related through marriage. An initial display of hostility is followed by a guest who presents marsupials to a cross-cousin or affine; in return the hosts give the guests a meal. Kosa dancers are young men, while hosts are older men: it is from older men that expressions of grief are drawn, for which they are compensated with shells. But the recipients of the shells are often the next generation—not the older men who wept, but their "sons." It is younger men who demand shells from the dancers. In short, the compensation given by junior-generation dancers is collected for the hosts by men of their own (junior) generation (p. 410). I note that while the ethnographer may refer to these items as compensation, they are not directly comparable to the kinds of payments familiar from other regimes where compensation substitutes for substance loss. Kelly insists that payments are given to assuage grief, not to counterbalance the expenditure of semen.
In the eclipsing of the senior generation[19] we perhaps see something of the way in which older Etoro men think of the junior generation as predatory
There are two modes to the relationships here. From the point of view of the gender positions involved, I conclude that these relations (whether between men, between women, or between men and women) are construed as same-sex when the flow is seen as one of benefit and virtue, and cross-sex when it is one of predation and depletion. In the former, beneficiary and donor are presented as mutually masculinized (acquire vitality and virtue), while in the latter the relationship becomes asymmetrical and the victim in each case (the one who loses vitality) is feminized.[20] When the recipient of semen is a youth, the donor can see himself as engaging in a same-sex flow of vitality among males; but for an older man, beyond his prime, the situation becomes ambiguous. When his daughter marries, the final act of generous bestowal is the point at which most vitality is extracted from him. The donor is also victim. As the recipient of other men's shells he is "victim" to these men's predation on his children. At the same time, I have suggested that he is like his wife in that he himself is acting as an agent of depletion—receiving the shells of other men—without by this stage being a beneficiary of vitality; the shells he gains are simply treated as "surplus" to be disposed of among kin (Kelly 1993, 391).
In this comparison between different Etoro relations, as I have contrived it, it is the predatory tendencies, not the (work-based, nurturant) interdependence, of the conjugal pair that offer an analogy for cross-generational relations. Maternal kin hardly enter into the picture; at least from a man's point of view it is as though they were shielded from the full metaphorical implications of cross-sex imagery. Nurture in turn receives little metaphorical elaboration. Depletion and augmentation of the body, not its substantial composition, is the focus of aesthetic attention.