godelier, maurice. community, society, culture; three keys to understanding todays conflicted...

Community, society, culture:three keys to understandingtoday’s conflicted identities*

Maurice Godelier École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

The author redefines three major concepts used in the social sciences: tribe, society, and community.He begins with his discovery that the Baruya, a tribe in New Guinea with whom he lived and worked,were not a society a few centuries ago. This made him wonder: How is a new society made? Theauthor shows that neither kinship relations nor economic relations are sufficient to forge a newsociety. What welded a certain number of Baruya kin groups into a society were theirpolitical-religious relations, which enabled them to establish a form of sovereignty over a territory, itsinhabitants, and its resources. He goes on to compare other examples of more or less recentlyformed societies, among which is Saudi Arabia, whose beginnings date from the end of theeighteenth century; and he then clarifies the difference between tribe, society, ethnic group, andcommunity, showing that a tribe is a society, but an ethnic group is a community. His analysiselucidates some contemporary situations, since tribes still play an important role in Iraq, Afghanistan,Jordan, and so on.

I would like to invite you to reflect with me on the content of what are probably the fourmost used concepts in the social sciences, but also beyond, since they abound in thediscourse of politicians, journalists, and the like. They are: community, society, culture,and identity. Given the multiplicity of their uses and the diversity of the contexts, canwe say that these four concepts are still useful to the production of scientific knowledge?I think they are, but under certain conditions, which I will attempt to define.

In the years since I worked among the Baruya of Papua New Guinea (between 1966

and 1988), I have never stopped thinking about the content our discipline should assignto these concepts. From the outset, something intrigued me. I learned from the Baruyathemselves that their society did not exist three or four centuries ago. But somethingelse struck me as well. The Baruya speak the same language, have the same kinshipsystem, the same initiation rites, in short, share with their friendly or hostile neighbourswhat we would call the same ‘culture’. Lastly, having spent nearly seven years all toldwith the Baruya, I saw the profound changes that had occurred in both their society andtheir personal or collective identities.

* Huxley Memorial Lecture, London, 7 November 2008.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 1-11© Royal Anthropological Institute 2010

I regard two facts as a stroke of luck. The fact that the Baruya have existed as a societyonly for a relatively short time made me wonder: How do societies come about? Whatare the social relations that bring human groups together and make them into a society,that is to say, a Whole that reproduces itself and its members? The second thing thatintrigued me was: If the Baruya and their neighbours shared the same language, thesame culture, and the same social organization, would the notion of ‘culture’ enable meto understand why all of these local groups claimed to constitute distinct societies, withdifferent names – Baruya, Wantekia, Boulakia, Usarampia, and so on – but which werein a certain way all alike?

I therefore set out to discover how the Baruya society had formed and then, as I willshow you, I became fascinated by the problem and began to look for other examples ofsocieties that did not exist a few centuries ago. There is one with which you are allfamiliar, the Tikopia, magnificently analysed by Raymond Firth, although he did notraise the issue in his book (Firth 1967a). But circumstances also led me to take aninterest in Wahhabism, and I discovered that Saudi Arabia had not existed before theeighteenth century and only began to take shape in 1742.

Perhaps I should spell out immediately the nature of my problem. It has nothing todo with the eternal question put by philosophers, namely the so-called question of thefoundations of the social bond. My question is purely of a sociological and historicalnature. I believe that human beings are naturally a social species. They did not have atsome point to begin living in society by making a contract or murdering a father. Buthumans are not content simply to live in society. They produce new forms of socialexistence, and therefore societies, in order to go on living. And as they transform theirways of living, they also transform their ways of thinking and acting, and therefore theirculture.

Returning to the first question and to the ideas that I had taken with me when I wentinto the field in 1966, remember that we were in the 1960s–1980s and Lévi-Strauss’sstructuralism together with various brands of Marxism held sway in Paris. Lévi-Strausssaw the incest taboo and kinship relations as having done no less than transport humanbeings from the state of nature to the state of culture. The Marxist gospel, for its part,advanced as an explanation of human history – once we had passed from nature toculture – the fundamental role of the relations humans engendered in the course ofproducing their material means of social existence through the so-called ‘succession ofmodes of production’.

Therefore, when I began searching my data for the social relations that had beencapable of welding the Baruya kin groups into a society, I started by examining thenature of their kinship system and then the nature of the relations the kin groupsentertained with each other as they produced the material means of their social exist-ence. I can tell you right away that I concluded that neither kinship relations nor therelations of production between these groups could explain the emergence of theBaruya society, a new society whose structure and culture were in no way different fromthose of the societies around them. I had to look elsewhere.

You will recall that the anthropology handbooks and our teachers at the timeexplained that, when we found ourselves faced with a society that was not divided intocastes, classes, or orders and governed itself without benefit of a state, we were dealingwith a so-called ‘primitive’ and kin-based society. In the field I quickly saw that theBaruya society was made up of fifteen patrilineal clans, and came to the obviousconclusion that I had found another kin-based society.

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All of these assumptions about the role of kinship or modes of production were tolose their status of scientific truths as my analyses progressed. I will begin with a briefsummary of how the Baruya society came into being.

Until the seventeenth century or thereabouts, this society did not exist. It stemmedfrom two acts of violence: two massacres, one sustained and the other perpetrated. Theinitial players were a group of men, women, and children from the various clans ofthe Yoyue tribe, which lived near Menyamya, several days’ walk from the home of thepresent-day Baruya. These men and women had left their village some weeks earlierand gone deep into the forest to hunt and bring back the great quantities of gameneeded to celebrate their initiations. While they were away, news reached them that allthose who had stayed behind, including the future initiates, had been massacred bywarriors from an enemy tribe at the behest of members of their own Yoyue tribe.

Too terrified to come back for fear of suffering the same fate, these men and womensought refuge with various tribes that might be willing to take them in, in other wordsto provide them with agricultural land and hunting territories. One group finally cameto the Andje, a tribe living in the Marawaka valley at the foot of the volcano MountYelia. There, one of the Andje clans, the Ndelie, agreed to take them in and to allowthem to use part of their territory. A few generations later, having exchanged womenwith their hosts and their children having learned the local language, which differedonly slightly from their own, the descendants of the original refugees made a secret pactwith their protectors, the Ndelie, to seize the lands of the other Andje clans. Theyinvited these clans to a ceremony in the course of which they massacred a great number.The rest fled, abandoning their lands to the conspirators.

At the outset the Baruya society appeared as a result of acts of violence – themassacres. But violence does not explain the mode of existence that the victims-turned-victors adopted in order to live and to reproduce themselves together. For that, therewas a need for social relations that, precisely, would gather them together and bindthem into a Whole. What were these relations? The answer was given to me one day bya Baruya man, but I did not understand it at the time. He said to me: ‘Moriselo, webecame Baruya when we built our own tsimia and initiated our own boys as warriorsand shamans’. What did his reference to the tsimia mean? Here I have to give you a fewethnographic elements, which underpin my statements.

In this region, when people from different societies but who speak the same lan-guage meet, they ask each other, ‘What tsimia do you belong to?’ This is another way ofsaying, ‘What society do you belong to?’ And then they ask, ‘What tree do you belongto?’ or ‘Who are the same as you?’, which means, ‘What clan do you belong to?’

Here we are on the trail of the social relations that gave rise to the Baruya society. Forwhat is the tsimia (see Godelier 1986)? It is the vast edifice that the Baruya or theirneighbours erect every three years or so to shelter a few of the most secret rites of theirmale initiations from the eyes of women and young non-initiates. The tsimia, theBaruya say – and I am using their categories here – is like their ‘body’: the poles are the‘bones’ and the grass of the roof is the ‘skin’. At the centre of the building stands animmense post at which all the roof beams meet. This post is called ‘Tsimie’ and issupposed to represent the Baruya clan ancestor. At the top of the post are affixed fourpieces of carved wood, which point in the four directions of the sky and are called‘nilamaye’ – the flowers (maye) of the Sun (Nila). Through them the Sun God isconnected with the Baruya initiates and future initiates assembled in the tsimia. I willadd a few crucial details to show the mythic signification and the nature of the symbolic

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practices surrounding the tsimia and which lie at the heart of Baruya initiation rites.For the Baruya, each of the poles supporting the roof beams stands for a future initiate.Each pole was cut in the forest and carried to the tsimia site by the father of a futureinitiate. At a signal from the master of the initiations (a man from the Baruya clanaccompanied by the great shaman in charge of the initiation of shamans), all of thesemen in a single movement sink the poles representing their sons in the ground. Whatis remarkable is that these men do not line up according to ties of kinship but accordingto the village they come from, in other words according to sites of co-residence anddaily co-operation.

The question then is: What do the initiation rites mean for the Baruya’s life? Inpassing I would like to point out that Baruya women are initiated at the time of theirfirst period and at the birth of their first child. These initiation rites divide the wholepopulation, men and women, into age-groups whose members are supposed toco-operate with each other and respect their elders until the time comes for them tooto initiate their young people. In the course of the rites, the masters of the initiations,with the help of the ancestors and the spirits, predict those individuals of the newgeneration who will become the great warriors, great shamans, or great cassowaryhunters – in sum, the ‘great men’ (and women) on whom the society will be able tocount.

Something else is at stake in the initiations, which can be seen in the fact that onlythe clans that descend from the Yoyue ancestors as well as the Ndelie clan that initiallybetrayed their own tribe are responsible for ritual functions, on the pretext that theyalone possess the sacred objects and the knowledge needed to use them. The other clansthat allied themselves with the Baruya are thus excluded, while their children areinitiated by the victors. The rites are therefore the occasion to reassert the hierarchybetween the victors and the vanquished, a reminder of past history.

In light of these facts and many others that point in the same direction, the conclu-sion was clear. It is the initiation rites that enabled these groups to exist as a Whole intheir own eyes and in those of their neighbours – friends or enemies. In producing andreproducing the system of age-groups and the hierarchy between the genders and theclans, these rites involve all members of the society and assign to each his or her ownstatus, different but useful to all, according to the individual’s age, sex, and capacities.They are therefore what in the West would be called political-religious relations: politi-cal because the rites impose and legitimize a power structure, an order within societythat reserves its government for men; religious because the gods, the nature spirits, andthe ancestors are present at the initiations and co-operate with the owners of the sacredobjects in initiating the new generations. That was what the Baruya man was trying tomake me understand when he said: ‘We became Baruya when we built our own tsimiaand initiated our own boys as warriors and shamans’.

In the end, what the Baruya affirm and reaffirm at each initiation is their right toexercise together a form of sovereignty over a territory, its resources, and the beings thatlive there, a territory whose boundaries are known if not always recognized by theirneighbours. But at the same time, they assert and legitimize the right of men todominate women and non-initiates and to be the only ones who have the right togovern and represent their society. The aim and the sense of the male initiations isto fulfil the men’s desire to re-engender their sons without this time having recourse toa woman’s uterus. It is this desire that explains the men’s main secret, the practiceof homosexual insemination between initiates. For just as a man nourishes the foetus

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in the woman’s womb with his sperm, the young third- and fourth-stage initiatesnourish the new first- and second-stage initiates with their sperm, which has not yetbeen defiled by contact with a woman. This short example shows that it is impossibleto understand the nature of social relations without first understanding how theserelations are conceived and experienced. These ways of thinking, acting, and feelingmake up what we call a ‘culture’, which is inseparable from the social relations that lendit meaning.

Taking the analysis further, I will say that it is because this social order is founded onimaginary facts recounted in myth and enacted in rites mobilizing the whole Baruyasociety that relations and a feeling of generalized mutual dependence are created. It isthe belief in the existence and the truth of imaginary events that are said to havehappened in the beginning – such as the men’s theft of the flutes originally owned bythe women or the Sun’s gift of the sacred objects to the Baruya ancestor – that makesthe rites socially effective, capable of convincing people that everyone depends oneveryone else within one social-cosmic order.

But why do I say that the Baruya’s kinship relations and economic relations do notbind each person to everyone else and therefore gather these human groups into asociety? The Baruya used to exchange women between lineages and clans; and theseexchanges respected two rules: that the son could not repeat his father’s marriage, andtherefore could not marry a woman from his mother’s clan, and that two brotherscould not marry into the same clan. Notwithstanding pressure to diversify their alli-ances, I observed that no clan was related to all the others, even if one goes back fouror five generations. Furthermore, all lineages were easily capable of self-sufficiencywhile producing the indispensable surplus to barter with other tribes for what they didnot produce themselves. Neither kinship relations nor economic relations, then,created general ties of interdependence among all kin groups.

Prompted by the example of the Baruya, I would like to compare the births ofother societies, beginning with Tikopia (Firth 1967a; 1967b). When Raymond Firtharrived in Tikopia for the first time, in 1928, the island’s old political and religiousorganization was still almost intact. The society was divided into four non-exogamous clans, ranked according to the tasks they performed in the cycle of ritesensuring the fertility of the land, the sea, and human beings. The Kafika clan and itschief occupied the top rung. But the chiefs were not alone in performing the rites; thegods were at their side. In a note, Firth mentions that Tikopia did not exist a fewcenturies earlier. Human groups from other islands – Puka Puka, Anuta, Rotuma, andso forth – had settled the island at different times. These groups warred with eachother until an ancestor of the Kafika managed to persuade them each to take a rolein the cycle of rites connected with the work of the chiefs with the gods. Once againwe see that it is political-religious rites that integrate a set of human groups fromdifferent places into a Whole that makes a society.

The example of the Tikopia enables us to move beyond the limits set by the case ofthe Baruya. Another type of social hierarchy and another role played by economicrelations emerges in Tikopia. The chiefs in charge of the rituals were considered to beimbued with a divine nature, and the ancestor of the Kafika clan chief was regarded asthe Atua, the god of the island. The chiefs were spared the hardest productive tasks(which was not the case for the Baruya initiation-masters). At the same time, it was thechiefs who parcelled out the gardens and fields and who imposed and lifted thecollective taboos that punctuated the fishing and farming seasons. And had we visited



Tonga, Tahiti, or even Hawaii before the Europeans arrived, we would have seen thattheir chiefs and their lineages wielded even more power over the people and theeconomy than the chiefs in Tikopia. In Tonga, the eiki, the nobles, had almost absolutepower over the persons and the labour of the commoners and their access to land. Theparamount chief of Tonga, the Tu’i Tonga, was seen and honoured as the descendant ofTangaloa, the principal Polynesian god (Douaire-Marsaudon 1998). In Tonga, thenobles no longer involved themselves in any productive task. Their role was exclusivelyto perform the rites alongside the Tu’i Tonga, or to make war. Once again, it is theestablishment of political-religious relations that explains the foundation of thesesocieties; but the fact that those who exercise these functions are entirely detached fromproductive activities necessarily means that the economic relations between nobles andcommoners become essential to the production and reproduction of this type ofsociety.

Let us venture further abroad and closer to our own time. Saudi Arabia did notexist until it began to emerge in 1742 from the encounter between two men repre-senting two social forces: Mohammed Bin Abd al-Wahhab and Mohammed IbnSaoud. The first was a religious reformer who had been excluded from his tribalconfederation for preaching jihad against what he considered to be the bad Muslimspopulating Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holy places. The second was a local tribal chiefwho ruled a small city in Najd in the centre of Arabia and aspired to bring all of thesurrounding tribes under his rule as well. But in the Muslim world, no politicalambition can be fulfilled without the help of religion and no religious reform can besuccessful without the backing of a powerful political figure. Historians recount thatMohammed Ibn Saoud greeted Mohammed Bin Abd al-Wahhab saying: ‘This oasis isyours, do not fear your enemies. In the name of God, even if all of Najd wanted tobanish you, we will never forsake you’. To which Mohammed Bin Abd al-Wahhab issupposed to have replied: ‘You are the sheik of this oasis and you are a wise man. Iwant you to promise to make jihad against unbelievers. In return, you will be Imam,Leader of the Muslim community and I will take care of religious affairs’ (quoted byAl-Rasheed 2002: 17). At the time, the West had not defeated this part of Arabia (theNajd region), which the Ottoman Empire itself had not fully conquered. In the eigh-teenth century, the Wahhabist movement declared jihad on ‘bad’ Muslims, those whodared to interpret the Qur’an in their own interests (Vassiliev 2002). Today militantWahhabism sees as its enemies not only bad Muslims but Jews, Christians, andthe West.

Before addressing the last concept, ‘identity’, I would like to draw a number oftheoretical consequences from the foregoing analyses. First of all I was obliged toconclude that the Baruya were not a kin-based society. Their society has never been‘based’ on kinship relations. In fact, I think that there has never been any such a thingas a kin-based society. Nowhere in the world have kinship or the family served as thebasis and foundation of a society, even though throughout the world kinship relationsand all forms of the family have been essential components of social life.

Our analysis also enables us to clarify the difference between a ‘community’ and a‘society’. It is essential not to confuse the two concepts or the distinct social andhistorical realities behind them. One example will suffice to make this difference clear.The Jews of the Diaspora living in London, New York, Paris, or Amsterdam formcommunities within the societies and countries of Great Britain, the United States,France, and Holland. They live alongside Turkish communities, Pakistani communities,

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and so forth, each of which has its own life-style and traditions. On the contrary, theJews of the Diaspora who have left these countries to live in Israel are now living in asociety that they have created in the Middle East and which is represented and governedby a state whose borders they wish to see recognized definitively by the neighbouringpeoples and countries. This is what the Palestinians too want: a territory and a state.Once again, the criterion of a society is sovereignty over a territory. It is important tonote that all of these communities lead a social existence within the host society that ispeculiar to them. To give another example: all big cities in the world have a Chinatown,where Chinese continue to speak their own language, follow their own holiday calen-dar, and run restaurants. They form communities, but these are not societies.

In passing, I would also like to make a distinction which seems to have becomeobsolete for many of our colleagues: I call ‘tribe’ the form of society that is the Baruya’s,just as I call their kin groups ‘patrilineal clans and lineages’. And I call ‘ethnic groups’ theset of local groups in this region that claims to have a common origin and to come fromthe dispersion of groups that used to live in the vicinity of Menyamya. The Baruya callthis set of groups to which they know they belong ‘those who wear the same ornamentsas we’. But the fact of being conscious of belonging to these same sets of groups does notgive a Baruya access to either land or women and does not keep him from making waron the neighbouring tribes that belong to the same set of groups. We see from this thatit is only the ‘tribe’ that is a ‘society’ for the Baruya, while the ethnic group constitutesa ‘community’ of culture and memory, but not a ‘society’. This sheds light on the factthat, in order to become a society, an ethnic group today must sometimes manage toform a state that will ensure sovereignty over a territory. This is one of the demands ofthe Kurdish groups that are dispersed over several states. It was also a demand made bythe Bosnians and the Kosovars. Furthermore, in some cases, an ethnic group seeking toappropriate a state and a territory for itself alone decides to carry out ethnic cleansing.

In Western societies, in principle democracies, we observe two different responses tothe presence of various religious, ethnic, and other communities in the society: eithercommunalism, the British response, or integration, the French response. However,neither seems to have truly managed to resolve the problems raised by cultural andreligious diversity in modern societies.

Another theoretical conclusion can be drawn from these analyses. In the case ofthe Baruya, the economic activities and the social relations that implement them donot seem capable of producing societies. But in the examples of Tikopia, Tonga, andSaudi Arabia, we see that what are called ‘economic activities and relations’ seem toplay a very different role in the course of human history, particularly when socialgroups appear which ensure and control the political and religious activities. Theformation of concrete societies is therefore not explained by their modes of produc-tion, but instead, in all likelihood, it was the centuries-long development of newconcrete forms of power, which mixed, combined, or fused politics and religion, thatentailed the changes in the modes of production. Of course, from the moment thosewho have power depend on those who have none for their material existence, the tiesbetween economics and politics become reciprocal – which is roughly the reverse ofMarx’s hypothesis.

A last point before going into the question of identities. Social relations exist notonly between but also within each of the individuals and groups involved in theserelations. That part of the social relations that exists within individuals is what I calltheir ‘mental and subjective’ structure, which is composed not only of representations



but also of action principles and prohibitions. The example of the Baruya initiationrites showed that at the heart of the mental portion of their social relations are cores ofreality that are (for us) completely imaginary. And the same could be said of biblicalmyths of the New Testament, which describes the brief passage on earth of a Godbelieved to have died for us on a Cross. We thus measure the huge role of the imaginaryin the construction of social realities and the subjectivities that experience and repro-duce them. But I would like to stress that there are also cultural facts which are broaderthan the local social relations in which the actors are involved and which have animpact on the history of their societies, for instance Christianity and Islam, two mono-theistic religions that arose centuries ago and which became a component not only ofthe culture and development of hundreds of local societies but also of the subjectivityof hundreds of millions of individuals whose only common tie is their religion.

With this allusion to Christianity, I will turn to the final part of my exposé, theanalysis of the changes that have occurred in the identities of people belonging tosocieties subjected to enormous pressures of all kinds coming from the West – military,economic, political, and cultural – like those experienced by the Baruya since, in 1960,Australia decided to extend its colonial power over this part of Papua New Guinea.

By ‘identity’, I mean the crystallization within an individual of the social and culturalrelations in which he or she is involved and which he or she is led to reproduce or reject.One is the father or the son of someone, for example, and this relation with the Otherdefines the relationship that exists between the two and at the same time within eachindividual, but in a different form for each: the father is not his son. This is thedefinition of the Social Ego that each of us displays to others. But there is another sideof the Ego, the Intimate or innermost Ego, which is formed by the positive or negativeencounters of this Social Ego with others. That is why each person’s social identity isboth one and many, fashioned by the numerous relations he or she has with others.

This definition applies to the Baruya as well. I am going to describe for you a fewstages in their recent history and let you hear the comments some of them made to meconcerning the changes occurring in their society. As we shall see, their history wasbound to bring the Baruya into conflict within themselves and with others, and toproduce what I call ‘conflicted identities’.

The Baruya, who until 1951 had never seen a European, even if, since the war in thePacific theatre, they were aware of their remote existence, were to become Australiansubjects just nine years later. In 1960, a military expedition was mounted by theAustralian government with the aim of pacifying the Baruya region: the Baruya werethen at war with their neighbours and enemies, the Youwarrounatche. At one and thesame time, the self-governing Baruya, who exercised their particular form of sover-eignty over their territory and themselves, were colonized and turned into subjects ofthe Queen of England. For a society to be colonized means quite simply that overnightits sovereignty is abolished and appropriated by others, in this case the colonial gov-ernment. The future of this society will henceforth depend largely on decisions madeby an outside power. In 1975, once again without having asked or really understanding,the Baruya ceased being subjects and became citizens of the state of Papua New Guinea,which was granted independence by Australia. But this does not mean that the Baruyarecovered their former sovereignty over themselves, or their old right to mete outjustice or to attack their neighbours and take their land. Now citizens of a multiculturalnation whose creation was needed to consolidate the existence of an artificially com-posed and newly independent state, the Baruya found themselves endowed with new

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rights and duties. The Baruya society did not disappear, but it ceased to be a sovereignsociety and instead became a local territorial group, featuring on the Administration’sofficial list of tribes.

In 1960, Australia built a patrol post and an airstrip at Wonenara, on the site whereBaruya warriors were accustomed to do battle with their neighbours. Soon afterwardsa missionary from the Summer Institute of Linguistics arrived to learn the Baruyalanguage in order to translate the Bible and to convert them to Christianity. In the sameyear, a young British officer burned one of the Baruya’s villages as punishment forfeuding, and in the fire were lost the sacred flint-stones used to rekindle the primordialfire during the initiations as well as the dried fingers of the hero Bakitchatche, who hadled the Baruya in battle against the Andje. In 1961, a Lutheran mission built a schoolattended by a few boys and girls from the Baruya and enemy tribes. But until 1965, theregion was ‘restricted’, that is to say, Europeans were forbidden to go beyond theprotective perimeter of the patrol post.

In 1966 I arrived in Wonenara. At the time, only one Baruya had converted toChristianity, a young man who acted as an informant for the missionary-linguist whohad come to translate the Bible. But the first pupils of the Lutheran mission school werealready preparing to leave for the city to pursue their studies in religious high schools.I questioned one of the young men who were leaving about what he thought of Baruyacustoms. He said to me: ‘I spit on the elders’ pul-pul, on their customs, it’s shit’.

In 1968, the Baruya held large-scale initiations, at which time an old warrior, Bwa-rimac, addressed me in public, shaking a stone club. He said to me: ‘Moriselo, you seethere what made our force. But today our clubs have been bought by the Whites assouvenirs. To them we showed the branches and leaves. To you we have just now shownthe trunk and the roots’. Which goes to show how conscious he was of his identity andculture.

In 1979, after independence, the Baruya resumed initiating their children, but alsocontinued to send growing numbers of them, boys and girls, away to school. In 1983,enemies of the Baruya, the Youwarrounatche, decided to take back the airstrip, andkilled several Baruya, one of whom, Gwataye, was a friend of mine: they shot him fullof arrows while one of them battered in his face with a big rock, saying: ‘May your spiritgo back to Bravegareubaramandeuc’, in other words to the place where the Baruyaancestors lived when they were still Yoyue and had not yet been massacred by theirbrothers. The police arrived at the scene by helicopter, but did not dare land and simplyburned a Baruya village by dropping grenades.

In 1985 the Baruya again initiated their children and in 1988 they initiated a numberof shamans in the course of rites that are carried out once every fifteen years. I waspresent. Then everything came to a halt until 2006 when, after a pause of twenty-oneyears, the now-Christian Baruya began once more to initiate their young people (butthis time without piercing their noses), to the astonishment of all their neighbours, whohad ceased their initiations. The same year they also resumed initiating new shamans.In the interval, the Baruya had stopped making their salt-money and had used the landto plant coffee, which they export but do not drink. Having lost the use of their airstrip,which was still in the hands of enemies armed no longer with longer bows and arrowsbut with Kalashnikovs, they have built a new airstrip inside their territory in order toexport their coffee and to be able to leave their valley. This all-too-brief summary ofnearly a half century of history gives you a good idea of the changes that have occurredin the Baruya’s ways of thinking and acting – in their identities, in sum.



The young man who had told me that he spat on the ancestors’ pul-pul came homefor the 1985 initiations dressed in European clothing and holding a job with the forestservice. Breaking every rule, he stepped in front of the masters of the initiations andlectured the initiates and elders: ‘What you are doing is good; perform the rites. Whatyou are doing is what the Whites call “caltcha” [culture], that is where our force is, thatis what you must rely on when you are in the cities, alone, without work, withoutfriends, hungry’.

In 1988, I participated in the installation of new shamans, which lasted nearly amonth and mobilized a large portion of the population. But for the first time some hadrefused to participate. Then a group of men and women came to me and asked me towrite their names in a notebook, each time adding a biblical first name – David, Sarah,John, Mary, and so forth. I wrote these down, and when I asked why, they told me thatthey were all waiting for the next missionaries, whatever their denomination, so theycould be baptized. When I asked: ‘Why do you want to be baptized?’ a young man witha forceful personality answered: ‘So we can be new men and women’. When I asked:‘What is a new man?’, he answered: ‘Two things: following Jesus and doing Bisnis’.

Twenty-one years later, all of the Baruya are Christians. Five different ProtestantChurches care for their souls and some Baruya have already joined three differentChurches. Of course all of these decisions taken by individuals alone or collectively arechoices, designed either to preserve something of their past on which they can still relyor to adhere to something new that will also be of help in the future. The Baruya areChristians, to be sure, and citizens, but at the same time they are still at war with theirtraditional enemies; and that is also perhaps what they were reaffirming when in 2006

they built a tsimia and carried out rites, though now redefined to be sure and somewhatsimplified.

This ends my account, which mixes the lives of individuals with that of their society,but I would like to conclude by stressing once again that anthropology is more neces-sary than ever in the world in which we live. Neither molecular biology nor nanotech-nology is going to teach us what it means to be Shia or Sunni or Pashtoun, or explainthe history of Western colonial expansion. As anthropologists, we have to do fieldwork,remain conscious of the position we occupy, conduct systematic studies over the longterm, with the co-operation and insight of those with whom we have come to live andwork; and we have to subject our methods, analyses, and conclusions to constantcritical reflection. All of this makes anthropology an indispensable discipline forgaining a slightly better understanding of the globalized world in which we live and willcontinue to live.

But today’s world is pulled in two directions. No society, great or small, can hope foreconomic development without becoming daily more bound up with the world capi-talist system. But paradoxically, as their economies integrate the capitalist system, wesee these societies demanding greater sovereignty over their own political and culturaldevelopment either by reinventing traditions or by rejecting the Human Rights of theWest. This two-pronged movement of economic integration and reassertion ofnational or local identities is the new context in which we will be practising our trade.And it is a context that we can and must understand.

Anthropology therefore has a fine career ahead of it, even if it takes the death of a fewof its old celebrated ‘truths’. For my part, I plan to continue to analyse various forms ofsovereignties that human groups have devised and imposed – on themselves and others– throughout history.

Maurice Godelier10


NOTE

Translated by Nora Scott. I would like first of all to thank my colleagues at the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute for having made me a Fellow and asking me to give this year’s Huxley Memorial Lecture. It is, as youcan well imagine, not only a great privilege but also a great pleasure to have this opportunity to share a fewof my convictions concerning the ever-greater importance of anthropology for the world in which we areliving and going to live.

REFERENCES

Al-Rasheed, M. 2002. A history of Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: University Press.Douaire-Marsaudon, F. 1998. Les premiers fruits: parenté, identité sexuelle et pouvoirs en Polynésie Occiden-

tale. Tonga, Wallis et Futuna. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme, Centre national de laRecherche Scientifique.

Firth, R. 1967a. Tikopia ritual and belief. Boston: Beacon.——— 1967b. The work of the gods in Tikopia. London: Athlone.Godelier, M. 1986. The making of great men. Cambridge: University Press.Vassiliev, A. 2002. The history of Saudi Arabia. London: Saqi Books.

Communauté, société, culture : trois clés pour comprendre les identitésconflictuelles d’aujourd’hui

Résumé

L’auteur redéfinit trois grands concepts utilisés dans les sciences sociales : tribu, société et communauté.Son point de départ est le fait que les Baruya, une tribu de Nouvelle-Guinée avec laquelle il a vécu ettravaillé, ne formaient pas une société il y a quelques siècles. Cette découverte l’a conduit à se demandercomment une société voyait le jour. L’auteur montre que ni les liens de parenté ni les relationséconomiques ne sont suffisants pour donner naissance à une nouvelle société. Ce qui a soudé un certainnombre de groupes de parenté baruya en une société, ce sont leurs relations politiques et religieuses, quileur ont permis d’établir une forme de souveraineté sur un territoire, ses habitants et ses ressources.L’auteur poursuit en comparant d’autres exemples de sociétés d’apparition plus ou moins récentes, parexemple l’Arabie Saoudite dont les débuts remontent à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Il éclaircit ensuite ladifférence entre tribu, société, groupe ethnique et communauté, en montrant qu’une tribu est une sociétémais un groupe ethnique est une communauté. Son analyse fait la lumière sur certaines situationscontemporaines, dans la mesure où les tribus jouent encore un rôle important en Irak, en Afghanistan, enJordanie et ailleurs.

Professor Maurice Godelier is Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He iscurrently working with a group of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians to set up a comparativeresearch programme on the processes and contexts that laid the grounds for the development, at variouspoints in history and in various parts of the world, of the forms of sovereignty which appear to us today asproto-states or states.

EHESS, 54, Bd. Raspail, 75006 Paris, France. [email protected]



godelier, maurice. community, society, culture; three keys to understanding todays conflicted...

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