Community, society, culture:

three keys to understanding

todays conicted identities*
M.uvi cv Gouvii vv cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales
The author redenes 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? The
author shows that neither kinship relations nor economic relations are sufcient to forge a new
society. What welded a certain number of Baruya kin groups into a society were their
political-religious relations, which enabled them to establish a form of sovereignty over a territory, its
inhabitants, and its resources. He goes on to compare other examples of more or less recently
formed societies, among which is Saudi Arabia, whose beginnings date from the end of the
eighteenth century; and he then claries the difference between tribe, society, ethnic group, and
community, showing that a tribe is a society, but an ethnic group is a community. His analysis
elucidates some contemporary situations, since tribes still play an important role in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Jordan, and so on.
I would like to invite you to reect with me on the content of what are probably the four
most used concepts in the social sciences, but also beyond, since they abound in the
discourse 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, can
we say that these four concepts are still useful to the production of scientic knowledge?
I think they are, but under certain conditions, which I will attempt to dene.
In the years since I worked among the Baruya of Papua New Guinea (between I,oo
and I,88), I have never stopped thinking about the content our discipline should assign
to these concepts. From the outset, something intrigued me. I learned from the Baruya
themselves that their society did not exist three or four centuries ago. But something
else struck me as well. The Baruya speak the same language, have the same kinship
system, the same initiation rites, in short, share with their friendly or hostile neighbours
what we would call the same culture. Lastly, having spent nearly seven years all told
with the Baruya, I sawthe profound changes that had occurred in both their society and
their personal or collective identities.
* Huxley Memorial Lecture, London, , November :oo8.
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I regard two facts as a stroke of luck. The fact that the Baruya have existed as a society
only for a relatively short time made me wonder: How do societies come about? What
are the social relations that bring human groups together and make theminto a society,
that is to say, a Whole that reproduces itself and its members? The second thing that
intrigued me was: If the Baruya and their neighbours shared the same language, the
same culture, and the same social organization, would the notion of culture enable me
to understand why all of these local groups claimed to constitute distinct societies, with
different names Baruya, Wantekia, Boulakia, Usarampia, and so on but which were
in a certain way all alike?
I therefore set out to discover how the Baruya society had formed and then, as I will
show you, I became fascinated by the problem and began to look for other examples of
societies that did not exist a few centuries ago. There is one with which you are all
familiar, the Tikopia, magnicently analysed by Raymond Firth, although he did not
raise the issue in his book (Firth I,o,a). But circumstances also led me to take an
interest in Wahhabism, and I discovered that Saudi Arabia had not existed before the
eighteenth century and only began to take shape in I,:.
Perhaps I should spell out immediately the nature of my problem. It has nothing to
do with the eternal question put by philosophers, namely the so-called question of the
foundations of the social bond. My question is purely of a sociological and historical
nature. I believe that human beings are naturally a social species. They did not have at
some point to begin living in society by making a contract or murdering a father. But
humans are not content simply to live in society. They produce new forms of social
existence, and therefore societies, in order to go on living. And as they transform their
ways of living, they also transformtheir ways of thinking and acting, and therefore their
culture.
Returning to the rst question and to the ideas that I had taken with me when I went
into the eld in I,oo, remember that we were in the I,oosI,8os and Lvi-Strausss
structuralismtogether with various brands of Marxismheld sway in Paris. Lvi-Strauss
sawthe incest taboo and kinship relations as having done no less than transport human
beings 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 to
culture the fundamental role of the relations humans engendered in the course of
producing their material means of social existence through the so-called succession of
modes of production.
Therefore, when I began searching my data for the social relations that had been
capable of welding the Baruya kin groups into a society, I started by examining the
nature of their kinship system and then the nature of the relations the kin groups
entertained 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 the
relations of production between these groups could explain the emergence of the
Baruya society, a newsociety whose structure and culture were in no way different from
those of the societies around them. I had to look elsewhere.
You will recall that the anthropology handbooks and our teachers at the time
explained that, when we found ourselves faced with a society that was not divided into
castes, classes, or orders and governed itself without benet of a state, we were dealing
with a so-called primitive and kin-based society. In the eld I quickly saw that the
Baruya society was made up of fteen patrilineal clans, and came to the obvious
conclusion 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 to
lose their status of scientic truths as my analyses progressed. I will begin with a brief
summary of how the Baruya society came into being.
Until the seventeenth century or thereabouts, this society did not exist. It stemmed
from two acts of violence: two massacres, one sustained and the other perpetrated. The
initial players were a group of men, women, and children from the various clans of
the Yoyue tribe, which lived near Menyamya, several days walk from the home of the
present-day Baruya. These men and women had left their village some weeks earlier
and gone deep into the forest to hunt and bring back the great quantities of game
needed to celebrate their initiations. While they were away, news reached them that all
those who had stayed behind, including the future initiates, had been massacred by
warriors from an enemy tribe at the behest of members of their own Yoyue tribe.
Too terried to come back for fear of suffering the same fate, these men and women
sought refuge with various tribes that might be willing to take them in, in other words
to provide them with agricultural land and hunting territories. One group nally came
to the Andje, a tribe living in the Marawaka valley at the foot of the volcano Mount
Yelia. There, one of the Andje clans, the Ndelie, agreed to take them in and to allow
them to use part of their territory. A few generations later, having exchanged women
with their hosts and their children having learned the local language, which differed
only slightly fromtheir own, the descendants of the original refugees made a secret pact
with their protectors, the Ndelie, to seize the lands of the other Andje clans. They
invited these clans to a ceremony in the course of which they massacred a great number.
The rest ed, abandoning their lands to the conspirators.
At the outset the Baruya society appeared as a result of acts of violence the
massacres. 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, there
was a need for social relations that, precisely, would gather them together and bind
them into a Whole. What were these relations? The answer was given to me one day by
a Baruya man, but I did not understand it at the time. He said to me: Moriselo, we
became Baruya when we built our own tsimia and initiated our own boys as warriors
and shamans. What did his reference to the tsimia mean? Here I have to give you a few
ethnographic 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 of
saying, What society do you belong to? And then they ask, What tree do you belong
to? 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. For
what is the tsimia (see Godelier I,8o)? It is the vast edice that the Baruya or their
neighbours erect every three years or so to shelter a few of the most secret rites of their
male initiations from the eyes of women and young non-initiates. The tsimia, the
Baruya 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 an
immense post at which all the roof beams meet. This post is called Tsimie and is
supposed to represent the Baruya clan ancestor. At the top of the post are afxed four
pieces of carved wood, which point in the four directions of the sky and are called
nilamaye the owers (maye) of the Sun (Nila). Through them the Sun God is
connected with the Baruya initiates and future initiates assembled in the tsimia. I will
add a fewcrucial details to showthe mythic signication 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 future
initiate. At a signal from the master of the initiations (a man from the Baruya clan
accompanied by the great shaman in charge of the initiation of shamans), all of these
men in a single movement sink the poles representing their sons in the ground. What
is remarkable is that these men do not line up according to ties of kinship but according
to the village they come from, in other words according to sites of co-residence and
daily co-operation.
The question then is: What do the initiation rites mean for the Baruyas life? In
passing I would like to point out that Baruya women are initiated at the time of their
rst period and at the birth of their rst child. These initiation rites divide the whole
population, men and women, into age-groups whose members are supposed to
co-operate with each other and respect their elders until the time comes for them too
to 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 new
generation who will become the great warriors, great shamans, or great cassowary
hunters in sum, the great men (and women) on whom the society will be able to
count.
Something else is at stake in the initiations, which can be seen in the fact that only
the clans that descend from the Yoyue ancestors as well as the Ndelie clan that initially
betrayed their own tribe are responsible for ritual functions, on the pretext that they
alone possess the sacred objects and the knowledge needed to use them. The other clans
that allied themselves with the Baruya are thus excluded, while their children are
initiated by the victors. The rites are therefore the occasion to reassert the hierarchy
between 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 in
their own eyes and in those of their neighbours friends or enemies. In producing and
reproducing the system of age-groups and the hierarchy between the genders and the
clans, these rites involve all members of the society and assign to each his or her own
status, different but useful to all, according to the individuals 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 society
that reserves its government for men; religious because the gods, the nature spirits, and
the ancestors are present at the initiations and co-operate with the owners of the sacred
objects in initiating the new generations. That was what the Baruya man was trying to
make me understand when he said: We became Baruya when we built our own tsimia
and initiated our own boys as warriors and shamans.
In the end, what the Baruya afrm and reafrm at each initiation is their right to
exercise together a formof sovereignty over a territory, its resources, and the beings that
live there, a territory whose boundaries are known if not always recognized by their
neighbours. But at the same time, they assert and legitimize the right of men to
dominate women and non-initiates and to be the only ones who have the right to
govern and represent their society. The aim and the sense of the male initiations is
to full the mens desire to re-engender their sons without this time having recourse to
a womans uterus. It is this desire that explains the mens main secret, the practice
of homosexual insemination between initiates. For just as a man nourishes the foetus
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in the womans womb with his sperm, the young third- and fourth-stage initiates
nourish the new rst- and second-stage initiates with their sperm, which has not yet
been deled by contact with a woman. This short example shows that it is impossible
to understand the nature of social relations without rst understanding how these
relations are conceived and experienced. These ways of thinking, acting, and feeling
make up what we call a culture, which is inseparable from the social relations that lend
it meaning.
Taking the analysis further, I will say that it is because this social order is founded on
imaginary facts recounted in myth and enacted in rites mobilizing the whole Baruya
society that relations and a feeling of generalized mutual dependence are created. It is
the belief in the existence and the truth of imaginary events that are said to have
happened in the beginning such as the mens theft of the utes originally owned by
the women or the Suns gift of the sacred objects to the Baruya ancestor that makes
the rites socially effective, capable of convincing people that everyone depends on
everyone else within one social-cosmic order.
But why do I say that the Baruyas kinship relations and economic relations do not
bind each person to everyone else and therefore gather these human groups into a
society? The Baruya used to exchange women between lineages and clans; and these
exchanges respected two rules: that the son could not repeat his fathers marriage, and
therefore could not marry a woman from his mothers clan, and that two brothers
could 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 four
or ve generations. Furthermore, all lineages were easily capable of self-sufciency
while producing the indispensable surplus to barter with other tribes for what they did
not 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 of
other societies, beginning with Tikopia (Firth I,o,a; I,o,b). When Raymond Firth
arrived in Tikopia for the rst time, in I,:8, the islands old political and religious
organization was still almost intact. The society was divided into four non-
exogamous clans, ranked according to the tasks they performed in the cycle of rites
ensuring the fertility of the land, the sea, and human beings. The Kaka clan and its
chief occupied the top rung. But the chiefs were not alone in performing the rites; the
gods were at their side. In a note, Firth mentions that Tikopia did not exist a few
centuries earlier. Human groups from other islands Puka Puka, Anuta, Rotuma, and
so forth had settled the island at different times. These groups warred with each
other until an ancestor of the Kaka managed to persuade them each to take a role
in the cycle of rites connected with the work of the chiefs with the gods. Once again
we see that it is political-religious rites that integrate a set of human groups from
different places into a Whole that makes a society.
The example of the Tikopia enables us to move beyond the limits set by the case of
the Baruya. Another type of social hierarchy and another role played by economic
relations emerges in Tikopia. The chiefs in charge of the rituals were considered to be
imbued with a divine nature, and the ancestor of the Kaka clan chief was regarded as
the 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 the
chiefs who parcelled out the gardens and elds and who imposed and lifted the
collective taboos that punctuated the shing and farming seasons. And had we visited
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Tonga, Tahiti, or even Hawaii before the Europeans arrived, we would have seen that
their chiefs and their lineages wielded even more power over the people and the
economy than the chiefs in Tikopia. In Tonga, the eiki, the nobles, had almost absolute
power over the persons and the labour of the commoners and their access to land. The
paramount chief of Tonga, the Tui Tonga, was seen and honoured as the descendant of
Tangaloa, the principal Polynesian god (Douaire-Marsaudon I,,8). In Tonga, the
nobles no longer involved themselves in any productive task. Their role was exclusively
to perform the rites alongside the Tui Tonga, or to make war. Once again, it is the
establishment of political-religious relations that explains the foundation of these
societies; but the fact that those who exercise these functions are entirely detached from
productive activities necessarily means that the economic relations between nobles and
commoners become essential to the production and reproduction of this type of
society.
Let us venture further abroad and closer to our own time. Saudi Arabia did not
exist until it began to emerge in I,: from the encounter between two men repre-
senting two social forces: Mohammed Bin Abd al-Wahhab and Mohammed Ibn
Saoud. The rst was a religious reformer who had been excluded from his tribal
confederation for preaching jihad against what he considered to be the bad Muslims
populating Mecca and Medina, Islams holy places. The second was a local tribal chief
who ruled a small city in Najd in the centre of Arabia and aspired to bring all of the
surrounding tribes under his rule as well. But in the Muslim world, no political
ambition can be fullled without the help of religion and no religious reform can be
successful without the backing of a powerful political gure. Historians recount that
Mohammed Ibn Saoud greeted Mohammed Bin Abd al-Wahhab saying: This oasis is
yours, do not fear your enemies. In the name of God, even if all of Najd wanted to
banish you, we will never forsake you. To which Mohammed Bin Abd al-Wahhab is
supposed to have replied: You are the sheik of this oasis and you are a wise man. I
want 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 by
Al-Rasheed :oo:: I,). At the time, the West had not defeated this part of Arabia (the
Najd region), which the Ottoman Empire itself had not fully conquered. In the eigh-
teenth century, the Wahhabist movement declared jihad on bad Muslims, those who
dared to interpret the Quran in their own interests (Vassiliev :oo:). Today militant
Wahhabism sees as its enemies not only bad Muslims but Jews, Christians, and
the West.
Before addressing the last concept, identity, I would like to draw a number of
theoretical consequences from the foregoing analyses. First of all I was obliged to
conclude 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 thing
as a kin-based society. Nowhere in the world have kinship or the family served as the
basis and foundation of a society, even though throughout the world kinship relations
and 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 and
historical realities behind them. One example will sufce to make this difference clear.
The Jews of the Diaspora living in London, New York, Paris, or Amsterdam form
communities 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, the
Jews of the Diaspora who have left these countries to live in Israel are now living in a
society that they have created in the Middle East and which is represented and governed
by a state whose borders they wish to see recognized denitively by the neighbouring
peoples 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 to
note that all of these communities lead a social existence within the host society that is
peculiar 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 become
obsolete for many of our colleagues: I call tribe the formof society that is the Baruyas,
just as I call their kin groups patrilineal clans and lineages. And I call ethnic groups the
set of local groups in this region that claims to have a common origin and to come from
the dispersion of groups that used to live in the vicinity of Menyamya. The Baruya call
this set of groups to which they know they belong those who wear the same ornaments
as we. But the fact of being conscious of belonging to these same sets of groups does not
give a Baruya access to either land or women and does not keep him from making war
on the neighbouring tribes that belong to the same set of groups. We see from this that
it is only the tribe that is a society for the Baruya, while the ethnic group constitutes
a community of culture and memory, but not a society. This sheds light on the fact
that, in order to become a society, an ethnic group today must sometimes manage to
form a state that will ensure sovereignty over a territory. This is one of the demands of
the Kurdish groups that are dispersed over several states. It was also a demand made by
the Bosnians and the Kosovars. Furthermore, in some cases, an ethnic group seeking to
appropriate 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 to
the presence of various religious, ethnic, and other communities in the society: either
communalism, the British response, or integration, the French response. However,
neither seems to have truly managed to resolve the problems raised by cultural and
religious diversity in modern societies.
Another theoretical conclusion can be drawn from these analyses. In the case of
the Baruya, the economic activities and the social relations that implement them do
not seem capable of producing societies. But in the examples of Tikopia, Tonga, and
Saudi Arabia, we see that what are called economic activities and relations seem to
play a very different role in the course of human history, particularly when social
groups appear which ensure and control the political and religious activities. The
formation 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 new
concrete forms of power, which mixed, combined, or fused politics and religion, that
entailed the changes in the modes of production. Of course, from the moment those
who have power depend on those who have none for their material existence, the ties
between economics and politics become reciprocal which is roughly the reverse of
Marxs hypothesis.
A last point before going into the question of identities. Social relations exist not
only between but also within each of the individuals and groups involved in these
relations. That part of the social relations that exists within individuals is what I call
their mental and subjective structure, which is composed not only of representations
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but also of action principles and prohibitions. The example of the Baruya initiation
rites showed that at the heart of the mental portion of their social relations are cores of
reality that are (for us) completely imaginary. And the same could be said of biblical
myths of the New Testament, which describes the brief passage on earth of a God
believed to have died for us on a Cross. We thus measure the huge role of the imaginary
in 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 broader
than the local social relations in which the actors are involved and which have an
impact 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 of
the culture and development of hundreds of local societies but also of the subjectivity
of hundreds of millions of individuals whose only common tie is their religion.
With this allusion to Christianity, I will turn to the nal part of my expos, the
analysis of the changes that have occurred in the identities of people belonging to
societies subjected to enormous pressures of all kinds coming from the West military,
economic, political, and cultural like those experienced by the Baruya since, in I,oo,
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 cultural
relations 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 Other
denes the relationship that exists between the two and at the same time within each
individual, but in a different form for each: the father is not his son. This is the
denition of the Social Ego that each of us displays to others. But there is another side
of the Ego, the Intimate or innermost Ego, which is formed by the positive or negative
encounters of this Social Ego with others. That is why each persons social identity is
both one and many, fashioned by the numerous relations he or she has with others.
This denition applies to the Baruya as well. I am going to describe for you a few
stages in their recent history and let you hear the comments some of them made to me
concerning the changes occurring in their society. As we shall see, their history was
bound to bring the Baruya into conict within themselves and with others, and to
produce what I call conicted identities.
The Baruya, who until I,,I had never seen a European, even if, since the war in the
Pacic theatre, they were aware of their remote existence, were to become Australian
subjects just nine years later. In I,oo, a military expedition was mounted by the
Australian government with the aim of pacifying the Baruya region: the Baruya were
then at war with their neighbours and enemies, the Youwarrounatche. At one and the
same time, the self-governing Baruya, who exercised their particular form of sover-
eignty over their territory and themselves, were colonized and turned into subjects of
the Queen of England. For a society to be colonized means quite simply that overnight
its 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 made
by an outside power. In I,,,, once again without having asked or really understanding,
the Baruya ceased being subjects and became citizens of the state of Papua NewGuinea,
which was granted independence by Australia. But this does not mean that the Baruya
recovered their former sovereignty over themselves, or their old right to mete out
justice or to attack their neighbours and take their land. Now citizens of a multicultural
nation whose creation was needed to consolidate the existence of an articially 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 sovereign
society and instead became a local territorial group, featuring on the Administrations
ofcial list of tribes.
In I,oo, Australia built a patrol post and an airstrip at Wonenara, on the site where
Baruya warriors were accustomed to do battle with their neighbours. Soon afterwards
a missionary from the Summer Institute of Linguistics arrived to learn the Baruya
language in order to translate the Bible and to convert themto Christianity. In the same
year, a young British ofcer burned one of the Baruyas villages as punishment for
feuding, and in the re were lost the sacred int-stones used to rekindle the primordial
re during the initiations as well as the dried ngers of the hero Bakitchatche, who had
led the Baruya in battle against the Andje. In I,oI, a Lutheran mission built a school
attended by a few boys and girls from the Baruya and enemy tribes. But until I,o,, the
region was restricted, that is to say, Europeans were forbidden to go beyond the
protective perimeter of the patrol post.
In I,oo I arrived in Wonenara. At the time, only one Baruya had converted to
Christianity, a young man who acted as an informant for the missionary-linguist who
had come to translate the Bible. But the rst pupils of the Lutheran mission school were
already 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 Baruya
customs. He said to me: I spit on the elders pul-pul, on their customs, its shit.
In I,o8, 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 see
there what made our force. But today our clubs have been bought by the Whites as
souvenirs. To them we showed the branches and leaves. To you we have just now shown
the trunk and the roots. Which goes to show how conscious he was of his identity and
culture.
In I,,,, after independence, the Baruya resumed initiating their children, but also
continued to send growing numbers of them, boys and girls, away to school. In I,8,,
enemies of the Baruya, the Youwarrounatche, decided to take back the airstrip, and
killed several Baruya, one of whom, Gwataye, was a friend of mine: they shot him full
of arrows while one of thembattered in his face with a big rock, saying: May your spirit
go back to Bravegareubaramandeuc, in other words to the place where the Baruya
ancestors lived when they were still Yoyue and had not yet been massacred by their
brothers. The police arrived at the scene by helicopter, but did not dare land and simply
burned a Baruya village by dropping grenades.
In I,8, the Baruya again initiated their children and in I,88 they initiated a number
of shamans in the course of rites that are carried out once every fteen years. I was
present. Then everything came to a halt until :ooo when, after a pause of twenty-one
years, the now-Christian Baruya began once more to initiate their young people (but
this time without piercing their noses), to the astonishment of all their neighbours, who
had 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 land
to 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 arrows
but with Kalashnikovs, they have built a new airstrip inside their territory in order to
export their coffee and to be able to leave their valley. This all-too-brief summary of
nearly a half century of history gives you a good idea of the changes that have occurred
in the Baruyas ways of thinking and acting in their identities, in sum.
Community, society, culture 9
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The young man who had told me that he spat on the ancestors pul-pul came home
for the I,8, initiations dressed in European clothing and holding a job with the forest
service. Breaking every rule, he stepped in front of the masters of the initiations and
lectured the initiates and elders: What you are doing is good; perform the rites. What
you are doing is what the Whites call caltcha [culture], that is where our force is, that
is what you must rely on when you are in the cities, alone, without work, without
friends, hungry.
In I,88, I participated in the installation of new shamans, which lasted nearly a
month and mobilized a large portion of the population. But for the rst time some had
refused to participate. Then a group of men and women came to me and asked me to
write their names in a notebook, each time adding a biblical rst name David, Sarah,
John, Mary, and so forth. I wrote these down, and when I asked why, they told me that
they were all waiting for the next missionaries, whatever their denomination, so they
could be baptized. When I asked: Why do you want to be baptized? a young man with
a 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 Protestant
Churches care for their souls and some Baruya have already joined three different
Churches. Of course all of these decisions taken by individuals alone or collectively are
choices, designed either to preserve something of their past on which they can still rely
or to adhere to something new that will also be of help in the future. The Baruya are
Christians, to be sure, and citizens, but at the same time they are still at war with their
traditional enemies; and that is also perhaps what they were reafrming when in :ooo
they built a tsimia and carried out rites, though nowredened to be sure and somewhat
simplied.
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 explain
the history of Western colonial expansion. As anthropologists, we have to do eldwork,
remain conscious of the position we occupy, conduct systematic studies over the long
term, with the co-operation and insight of those with whom we have come to live and
work; and we have to subject our methods, analyses, and conclusions to constant
critical reection. All of this makes anthropology an indispensable discipline for
gaining a slightly better understanding of the globalized world in which we live and will
continue to live.
But todays world is pulled in two directions. No society, great or small, can hope for
economic development without becoming daily more bound up with the world capi-
talist system. But paradoxically, as their economies integrate the capitalist system, we
see these societies demanding greater sovereignty over their own political and cultural
development either by reinventing traditions or by rejecting the Human Rights of the
West. This two-pronged movement of economic integration and reassertion of
national 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 ne career ahead of it, even if it takes the death of a few
of its old celebrated truths. For my part, I plan to continue to analyse various forms of
sovereignties that human groups have devised and imposed on themselves and others
throughout history.
Maurice Godelier 10
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NOTE
Translated by Nora Scott. I would like rst of all to thank my colleagues at the Royal Anthropological
Institute for having made me a Fellowand asking me to give this years Huxley Memorial Lecture. It is, as you
can well imagine, not only a great privilege but also a great pleasure to have this opportunity to share a few
of my convictions concerning the ever-greater importance of anthropology for the world in which we are
living and going to live.
REFERENCES
Ai-R.suvvu, M. :oo:. A history of Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: University Press.
Dou.ivv-M.vs.uuox, F. I,,8. Les premiers fruits: parent, identit sexuelle et pouvoirs en Polynsie Occiden-
tale. Tonga, Wallis et Futuna. Paris: ditions de la Maison des sciences de lHomme, Centre national de la
Recherche Scientique.
Fiv1u, R. I,o,a. Tikopia ritual and belief. Boston: Beacon.
I,o,b. The work of the gods in Tikopia. London: Athlone.
Gouviivv, M. I,8o. The making of great men. Cambridge: University Press.
V.ssiiivv, A. :oo:. The history of Saudi Arabia. London: Saqi Books.
Communaut, socit, culture : trois cls pour comprendre les identits
conictuelles daujourdhui
Rsum
Lauteur rednit trois grands concepts utiliss dans les sciences sociales : tribu, socit et communaut.
Son point de dpart est le fait que les Baruya, une tribu de Nouvelle-Guine avec laquelle il a vcu et
travaill, ne formaient pas une socit il y a quelques sicles. Cette dcouverte la conduit se demander
comment une socit voyait le jour. Lauteur montre que ni les liens de parent ni les relations
conomiques ne sont sufsants pour donner naissance une nouvelle socit. Ce qui a soud un certain
nombre de groupes de parent baruya en une socit, ce sont leurs relations politiques et religieuses, qui
leur ont permis dtablir une forme de souverainet sur un territoire, ses habitants et ses ressources.
Lauteur poursuit en comparant dautres exemples de socits dapparition plus ou moins rcentes, par
exemple lArabie Saoudite dont les dbuts remontent la n du XVIII
e
sicle. Il claircit ensuite la
diffrence entre tribu, socit, groupe ethnique et communaut, en montrant quune tribu est une socit
mais un groupe ethnique est une communaut. Son analyse fait la lumire sur certaines situations
contemporaines, dans la mesure o les tribus jouent encore un rle important en Irak, en Afghanistan, en
Jordanie et ailleurs.
Professor Maurice Godelier is Directeur dtudes at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales. He is
currently working with a group of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians to set up a comparative
research programme on the processes and contexts that laid the grounds for the development, at various
points in history and in various parts of the world, of the forms of sovereignty which appear to us today as
proto-states or states.
EHESS, , Bd. Raspail, Paris, France. godelier@ehess.fr
Community, society, culture 11
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