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Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology #56
The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya
The Baruya are a tribal society in highlands Papua New Guinea, with whom Western contact was first made in 1951. During the last twenty years, Maurice Godelier has spent many long periods of time living among this people, and in this book he presents a detailed account of their lives and their forms of social organization. The focus of the book is on inequality and power in this classless society. Godelier discusses both the power that certain men (the Great men) have over others through their control of war, shamanism, hunting, and rites of initiation, as well as the extraordinary power and domination that men in general exert over women. He explores how this domination is produced and maintained, examining it in particular through a detailed study of male and female initiation. He also analyzes the role that sexuality plays in Baruya thought and theories, showing that in the Baruya view, every aspect of domination - be it (in Western categorization) economic, political, or symbolic - can be explained by sexuality, and the different role of the sexes in human reproduction. A major contribution both to the ethnography of Melanesia and to anthropological theory, the book will interest scholars and students of anthropology, as well as other readers interested in power and inequality, and in the relationships between the sexes.
- GenresAnthropologyNonfiction
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
About the author
Maurice Godelier
90 books44 followersOne of the most influential names in French anthropology who works as the Directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Best known as one of the earliest advocates of Marxism's incorporation into anthropology, he is also known for his field work among the Baruya in Papua New Guinea that spanned three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Among the many honors he has received are the CNRS Gold Medal and the Alexander von Humboldt prize. His major works include The Making of Great Men, The Metamorphoses of Kinship, The Enigma of the Gift, In and Out of the West, and, more recently, Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought.
Among the many honors he has received are the CNRS Gold Medal and the Alexander von Humboldt prize. His major works include The Making of Great Men, The Metamorphoses of Kinship, The Enigma of the Gift, In and Out of the West, and, more recently, Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought.
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April 9, 2011
The Making of Great Men: Male domination and power among the New Guinea Baruya is, nearly three decades after its initial publication, considered one of the most influential works of French neo-Marxist anthropology. With its place among the canon of Melanesian ethnography assured, and its author, Maurice Godelier, having built a prodigious career studying, and extrapolating from, the social and economic relations of the Baruya, the impending anniversary provides an opportunity to revisit this seminal work.
What is curious about the book, and perhaps it is the case with all ethnographic accounts recorded shortly after first contact, is the brittleness of the subject. Godelier’s Baruya are both artifactual and oddly ahistorical; centered in a sepia photograph frayed and yellowed at its edges, viewed behind the protective glass of time. To be sure, there are moments in The Making of Great Men when the contrast of history does emerge; indeed, these are often the moments of greatest clarity. But with regard to the subject, that which his lens has captured is only the starting point for understanding a far more relevant story; namely, the story of how ideology constitutes social reality.
Godolier began living and working among the Baruya in 1967, sixteen years after Jim Sinclair, an Australian army officer, had been the first European to encounter the group. The tribe’s two thousand members are horticulturalists in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Their primary crop is sweet potatoes, but they also rely on taro roots and domesticated pigs for subsistence. Game hunting is a significant social activity for the tribe’s men, but the fruits of their labors are consumed only during feasts and other ritual ceremonies. The Baruya are not self-sufficient and rely heavily on trade with other tribes to provide the materials necessary to make its tools and implements. In return, they offer their neighbors potassium salt, which has been cultivated, harvested, burned, and then distilled into exchangeable form. As depicted by Godelier, the tribe’s economy is completely subsumed into the collective consciousness, that feature which creates, defines, and legitimizes its social relations.
Emile Durkheim, the renowned French social scientist to whom, arguably, Godelier owes as much to his analysis as he does to the Marxist tradition, would have recognized in the Baruya what he called a ‘mechanical solidarity’. According to Durkheim, social relations organized in this way are characterized by “an intellectual and moral conformity.” Godelier describes that conformity of thought among the Baruya as the tyranny of the conceptual, which above all else legitimizes ideological violence perpetrated against the tribe’s female members. It is the “suspicion, denigration, denial, dispossession, expropriation by means of theft, murder, or imaginary forms of violence” against women, he says, that unifies and reproduces Baruya society.
Such ideological violence underpins other acts of actual violence committed against women in the tribe, most prominently forced marriage. Unlike many other Melanesian societies, social relations among the Baruya are completely dependent on the direct exchange of women in marriage. Only a woman provides the equivalent of another woman, even if exchanged among lineages only in successive generations. If a man of marriage age has no sister to give in exchange for his wife, then he will later provide his daughter in marriage to the family from which his wife came. This method of reproducing kinship, according to Godelier, negates the necessity of wealth accumulation, and discourages the emergence of so-called ‘big men’, individuals who, in other tribes, control the allocation of tribal resources by exploiting the labor power of men who need bride wealth in order to marry. In a society without big men, political power is not derived by means of economic power, the argument that lies at the heart of Godelier’s analysis. For the Baruya political power is both achieved and inherited through a complex rite of male initiations, which themselves are controlled by a small number of the tribe’s fifteen clans.
For the contemporary reader unfamiliar with the literature of traditional anthropology, what is perhaps most striking about the portrait of Baruya society is the way in which men are ‘born again’ by the tribe, or more specifically, by other men. In another egregious act of violence against women, at around nine or ten years old, every boy is taken from his mother to live the next ten or more years of his life, until he marries, in a men’s house, completely separated from women. During this time, boys are reborn as men through the intervention of other initiates, older men, and the spirits. Their rituals are elaborate and Godelier explains them in great detail, even revealing how homosexual pairings in the men’s house, when younger initiates drink the sperm of older initiates, play a role in the process of rebirth. Though just one of many rituals situated in the larger context of initiation rites, the case of sperm is important. Later, after marriage, the sperm of the man will be responsible for nourishing women after menstruation, completing the development of the child inside the womb during pregnancy, and for strengthening women post-partum.
The symbolic and actual power that sperm has among the Baruya cannot be underestimated and is only matched in degree by the revile with which they understand the woman’s menstrual blood. “Every aspect of male domination,” notes Godelier, “can be explained by sexuality.” As in all societies, he says, bodily substances speak, even scream, and for the Baruya, the menstrual blood as opposed to the sperm, is the basis for oppression. “Of all languages, body language has the advantage of extinguishing discourse, interrupting the flow of words, and stifling verbalization in a subjectively experienced consent that is equally an acknowledgement of the rightness of things as they are. For indeed, a Baruya woman has merely to see the blood start to flow between her thighs for her to hold her tongue and mutely consent to whatever economic, political, and psychological oppression she may be subjected to.”
The oppression of woman in Baruya society is also legitimized through foundational myth. The case of the use and understanding of musical instruments provides no better example. Men alone are empowered to use the tribe’s two primary instruments, the flute and the bull-roarer. The instruments are completely hidden from women and children and if a woman even catches a glimpse of one of the instruments, her offense is punishable by death. Yet the women and children often hear the men using the instruments at their exclusive ritual ceremonies, especially those surrounding male initiation. The women are told, and believe, that the sounds are the voices of the gods communicating with the men. What’s most striking about the case of the musical instruments, however, is that the Baruya men believe that it was the creativity of woman that was responsible for the first flute. Seeing that her creativity could be destructive, the men took the flute from her and improved upon it, allowing its powers to be used to the advantage of both men and women. In the case of communicating with the gods, musical instruments make it the proprietary knowledge of men alone, despite the fact that the original power belonged to women. On the surface, it seems counterintuitive that such a myth would be willingly embraced by men, but Godelier convincingly shows that for the men there is a constant need to embrace yet deny the role of women in the reproduction of life, thus the appropriation of boys and instruments alike.
If at the base of all uneven social relations lies the expropriation of power that formerly belonged to another group, the fact remains that its existence can only continue through the consent of the oppressed. Accruing consent, for the Baruya, is a matter of not only convincing women that their condition is natural and inevitable, but also of threatening violence. There are moments, however, when women resist. The practice of infanticide, while not explored in depth, appears to be a common way in which Baruya women declare opposition to insufferable husbands, its logic being that fertility is the province of the man alone. Another practice of resistance involves women sharing their breast milk with unrelated children and other young women. Since the Baruya believe that breast milk is made by ingesting men’s sperm, sharing that milk with others is a way of sharing that power among those without power. James C. Scott, the eminent professor of political science and anthropology as Yale University, would suggest this resistance is a sign that women have not consented. Godelier, however, sees the absence of a female counter model to male dominated social relations as the most persuasive evidence of their acceptance of the status quo.
While the static picture of endogenous Baruya life prior to first contact is fascinating, it is the story of warfare that sheds light on the process of specialization and, ultimately, the making of great men. Sometime in the 1930s, the Baruya were forced to defend their very existence against a withering attack, as pronounced in its ferocity as any war in recent memory. What the Baruya, twenty prior to first contact, didn’t realize was that this assault was likely the direct consequence of deepening ties between coastal tribes and Europeans. The demographic and economic expansion that the former undertook set into motion a chain reaction of wars that ultimately threatened the existence of highland tribes far removed from the coast. Interestingly, intensified competition for resources alone was not the only harbinger of the white man. In the 1940s, steel tools began to work their way inland by means of trade and exchange. Production expanded and new patterns of land use took shape. For Baruya society, increased warfare and exotic materials were an ominous foreshadowing of what the future would hold.
For Baruya men, however, warfare and steel tools represented as much opportunity as peril. While ordinary warriors contented themselves with severing the right hand of their victim before painting their own body with its blood, the most esteemed of warriors, great men whose prowess on the battlefield was known far and wide, used victory in war to appropriate the strength and power of their enemies, a feat accomplished by cooking and eating the limbs of the vanquished. Away from the front lines, the great shamans intervened in the battle through their power over the spiritual world, casting evil spirits in the direction of enemy territory while defending their own villages from those evil spirits sent by enemy tribes. And for the tribe’s most productive of gardeners, war was an opportunity to support the great men through increased production, a feat made easier by newly acquired technology. These great men did not count themselves any wealthier than other members of their tribe, in fact, the great warriors among them usually had fewer wives. But these men, warriors and shaman alike, enjoyed great prestige because of their ability to protect the tribe against external threats.
Maurice Godelier, was afforded a privileged glimpse of a culture that was already experiencing profound changes. Those changes were brought about by Australian colonial pacification efforts, Christian missionaries eager to impose their own beliefs and values, and then later, in 1975, by the creation of the independent state of Papua New Guinea. By the time he arrived, there was no more war. The great warriors of the past were elders, men who could only relate their stories as modulated by time. If Godelier’s Baruya are at the center of an aging sepia photograph, then it is their stories that surely would allow the imagination to fill in the details with color. While the empirical data in The Making of Great Men is strong, it is not possible to read the text without wanting more of the color of the individual. Were Godelier’s structural Marxism not so resistant to the idea that the individual might in some small way shed light upon the group, the book would be more complete. To understand the psychology of the moment at which a mother gives away her son, not to talk to him again until he is a grown man with three or four children of his own, or the individual decision that leads a young man to throw himself to death in a raging river after being sexually assaulted by a woman, would be infinitely valuable. The conspicuous absence of the individual voice is disappointing.
Reading The Making of Great Men, its English translation is excellent, profoundly brings into focus the temporality and even trivialness of some of the most pressing social and political debates of our time. While tempting to see savagery in practices such as infanticide, suicide, or cannibalism, we need look no further than the most famous of French anthropologists, Claude Levi-Strauss, to understand the pitfalls of cultural judgment. Despite our contemporary sense of cosmopolitanism and our professed celebration of diversity, relativity is still an easy target of political scorn, used to both condemn and marginalize. It is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that our own ‘culture wars’ are fairly insignificant expressions of ideology in service of power, and not the universal struggle between good and evil that they are so often portrayed to be. © Jeffrey L. Otto June 26, 2011
What is curious about the book, and perhaps it is the case with all ethnographic accounts recorded shortly after first contact, is the brittleness of the subject. Godelier’s Baruya are both artifactual and oddly ahistorical; centered in a sepia photograph frayed and yellowed at its edges, viewed behind the protective glass of time. To be sure, there are moments in The Making of Great Men when the contrast of history does emerge; indeed, these are often the moments of greatest clarity. But with regard to the subject, that which his lens has captured is only the starting point for understanding a far more relevant story; namely, the story of how ideology constitutes social reality.
Godolier began living and working among the Baruya in 1967, sixteen years after Jim Sinclair, an Australian army officer, had been the first European to encounter the group. The tribe’s two thousand members are horticulturalists in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Their primary crop is sweet potatoes, but they also rely on taro roots and domesticated pigs for subsistence. Game hunting is a significant social activity for the tribe’s men, but the fruits of their labors are consumed only during feasts and other ritual ceremonies. The Baruya are not self-sufficient and rely heavily on trade with other tribes to provide the materials necessary to make its tools and implements. In return, they offer their neighbors potassium salt, which has been cultivated, harvested, burned, and then distilled into exchangeable form. As depicted by Godelier, the tribe’s economy is completely subsumed into the collective consciousness, that feature which creates, defines, and legitimizes its social relations.
Emile Durkheim, the renowned French social scientist to whom, arguably, Godelier owes as much to his analysis as he does to the Marxist tradition, would have recognized in the Baruya what he called a ‘mechanical solidarity’. According to Durkheim, social relations organized in this way are characterized by “an intellectual and moral conformity.” Godelier describes that conformity of thought among the Baruya as the tyranny of the conceptual, which above all else legitimizes ideological violence perpetrated against the tribe’s female members. It is the “suspicion, denigration, denial, dispossession, expropriation by means of theft, murder, or imaginary forms of violence” against women, he says, that unifies and reproduces Baruya society.
Such ideological violence underpins other acts of actual violence committed against women in the tribe, most prominently forced marriage. Unlike many other Melanesian societies, social relations among the Baruya are completely dependent on the direct exchange of women in marriage. Only a woman provides the equivalent of another woman, even if exchanged among lineages only in successive generations. If a man of marriage age has no sister to give in exchange for his wife, then he will later provide his daughter in marriage to the family from which his wife came. This method of reproducing kinship, according to Godelier, negates the necessity of wealth accumulation, and discourages the emergence of so-called ‘big men’, individuals who, in other tribes, control the allocation of tribal resources by exploiting the labor power of men who need bride wealth in order to marry. In a society without big men, political power is not derived by means of economic power, the argument that lies at the heart of Godelier’s analysis. For the Baruya political power is both achieved and inherited through a complex rite of male initiations, which themselves are controlled by a small number of the tribe’s fifteen clans.
For the contemporary reader unfamiliar with the literature of traditional anthropology, what is perhaps most striking about the portrait of Baruya society is the way in which men are ‘born again’ by the tribe, or more specifically, by other men. In another egregious act of violence against women, at around nine or ten years old, every boy is taken from his mother to live the next ten or more years of his life, until he marries, in a men’s house, completely separated from women. During this time, boys are reborn as men through the intervention of other initiates, older men, and the spirits. Their rituals are elaborate and Godelier explains them in great detail, even revealing how homosexual pairings in the men’s house, when younger initiates drink the sperm of older initiates, play a role in the process of rebirth. Though just one of many rituals situated in the larger context of initiation rites, the case of sperm is important. Later, after marriage, the sperm of the man will be responsible for nourishing women after menstruation, completing the development of the child inside the womb during pregnancy, and for strengthening women post-partum.
The symbolic and actual power that sperm has among the Baruya cannot be underestimated and is only matched in degree by the revile with which they understand the woman’s menstrual blood. “Every aspect of male domination,” notes Godelier, “can be explained by sexuality.” As in all societies, he says, bodily substances speak, even scream, and for the Baruya, the menstrual blood as opposed to the sperm, is the basis for oppression. “Of all languages, body language has the advantage of extinguishing discourse, interrupting the flow of words, and stifling verbalization in a subjectively experienced consent that is equally an acknowledgement of the rightness of things as they are. For indeed, a Baruya woman has merely to see the blood start to flow between her thighs for her to hold her tongue and mutely consent to whatever economic, political, and psychological oppression she may be subjected to.”
The oppression of woman in Baruya society is also legitimized through foundational myth. The case of the use and understanding of musical instruments provides no better example. Men alone are empowered to use the tribe’s two primary instruments, the flute and the bull-roarer. The instruments are completely hidden from women and children and if a woman even catches a glimpse of one of the instruments, her offense is punishable by death. Yet the women and children often hear the men using the instruments at their exclusive ritual ceremonies, especially those surrounding male initiation. The women are told, and believe, that the sounds are the voices of the gods communicating with the men. What’s most striking about the case of the musical instruments, however, is that the Baruya men believe that it was the creativity of woman that was responsible for the first flute. Seeing that her creativity could be destructive, the men took the flute from her and improved upon it, allowing its powers to be used to the advantage of both men and women. In the case of communicating with the gods, musical instruments make it the proprietary knowledge of men alone, despite the fact that the original power belonged to women. On the surface, it seems counterintuitive that such a myth would be willingly embraced by men, but Godelier convincingly shows that for the men there is a constant need to embrace yet deny the role of women in the reproduction of life, thus the appropriation of boys and instruments alike.
If at the base of all uneven social relations lies the expropriation of power that formerly belonged to another group, the fact remains that its existence can only continue through the consent of the oppressed. Accruing consent, for the Baruya, is a matter of not only convincing women that their condition is natural and inevitable, but also of threatening violence. There are moments, however, when women resist. The practice of infanticide, while not explored in depth, appears to be a common way in which Baruya women declare opposition to insufferable husbands, its logic being that fertility is the province of the man alone. Another practice of resistance involves women sharing their breast milk with unrelated children and other young women. Since the Baruya believe that breast milk is made by ingesting men’s sperm, sharing that milk with others is a way of sharing that power among those without power. James C. Scott, the eminent professor of political science and anthropology as Yale University, would suggest this resistance is a sign that women have not consented. Godelier, however, sees the absence of a female counter model to male dominated social relations as the most persuasive evidence of their acceptance of the status quo.
While the static picture of endogenous Baruya life prior to first contact is fascinating, it is the story of warfare that sheds light on the process of specialization and, ultimately, the making of great men. Sometime in the 1930s, the Baruya were forced to defend their very existence against a withering attack, as pronounced in its ferocity as any war in recent memory. What the Baruya, twenty prior to first contact, didn’t realize was that this assault was likely the direct consequence of deepening ties between coastal tribes and Europeans. The demographic and economic expansion that the former undertook set into motion a chain reaction of wars that ultimately threatened the existence of highland tribes far removed from the coast. Interestingly, intensified competition for resources alone was not the only harbinger of the white man. In the 1940s, steel tools began to work their way inland by means of trade and exchange. Production expanded and new patterns of land use took shape. For Baruya society, increased warfare and exotic materials were an ominous foreshadowing of what the future would hold.
For Baruya men, however, warfare and steel tools represented as much opportunity as peril. While ordinary warriors contented themselves with severing the right hand of their victim before painting their own body with its blood, the most esteemed of warriors, great men whose prowess on the battlefield was known far and wide, used victory in war to appropriate the strength and power of their enemies, a feat accomplished by cooking and eating the limbs of the vanquished. Away from the front lines, the great shamans intervened in the battle through their power over the spiritual world, casting evil spirits in the direction of enemy territory while defending their own villages from those evil spirits sent by enemy tribes. And for the tribe’s most productive of gardeners, war was an opportunity to support the great men through increased production, a feat made easier by newly acquired technology. These great men did not count themselves any wealthier than other members of their tribe, in fact, the great warriors among them usually had fewer wives. But these men, warriors and shaman alike, enjoyed great prestige because of their ability to protect the tribe against external threats.
Maurice Godelier, was afforded a privileged glimpse of a culture that was already experiencing profound changes. Those changes were brought about by Australian colonial pacification efforts, Christian missionaries eager to impose their own beliefs and values, and then later, in 1975, by the creation of the independent state of Papua New Guinea. By the time he arrived, there was no more war. The great warriors of the past were elders, men who could only relate their stories as modulated by time. If Godelier’s Baruya are at the center of an aging sepia photograph, then it is their stories that surely would allow the imagination to fill in the details with color. While the empirical data in The Making of Great Men is strong, it is not possible to read the text without wanting more of the color of the individual. Were Godelier’s structural Marxism not so resistant to the idea that the individual might in some small way shed light upon the group, the book would be more complete. To understand the psychology of the moment at which a mother gives away her son, not to talk to him again until he is a grown man with three or four children of his own, or the individual decision that leads a young man to throw himself to death in a raging river after being sexually assaulted by a woman, would be infinitely valuable. The conspicuous absence of the individual voice is disappointing.
Reading The Making of Great Men, its English translation is excellent, profoundly brings into focus the temporality and even trivialness of some of the most pressing social and political debates of our time. While tempting to see savagery in practices such as infanticide, suicide, or cannibalism, we need look no further than the most famous of French anthropologists, Claude Levi-Strauss, to understand the pitfalls of cultural judgment. Despite our contemporary sense of cosmopolitanism and our professed celebration of diversity, relativity is still an easy target of political scorn, used to both condemn and marginalize. It is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that our own ‘culture wars’ are fairly insignificant expressions of ideology in service of power, and not the universal struggle between good and evil that they are so often portrayed to be. © Jeffrey L. Otto June 26, 2011
January 11, 2024
tres interessant bravo msieu godelier
October 20, 2011
"هذه الاساطير تُظهر ليس فقط العنف الذكوري ولكن تشتمل ايضا في ذاتها على افعال عنف حقيقي وايدولوجي ورمزي يفيض في كل اشكال الفكر (...) هذه الافعال موجودة في الطريق الذي يتعرج كي لا تقابل المرأة الرجل وفي طريقتها في الانحناء داخل بيتها وفي عادتها الا تنظر ابدا لرجل في عينه عندما تتحدث اليه وفي عادة ان تخدم الرجال اولا وفي كل حركات وممارسات الحياة اليوميةالتي تصبح علامة السيطرة الذكورية ووسيلة اعادةانتاج خضوع النساء ، افكار اصبحت حركات وافعال اصبحت ردة فعل جسدي واضف الي ذلك قوة العادات والتقاليد وكل هذه الافعال اليومية تشتمل على نواة العنف الايدولوجي والعنف الرمزي الذي يلقي بأثره على الفرد ، كل الافراد، ويؤثر على الوعي وفي الوعي وما وراء ذلك"
ترجمة عن صناعة الرجال العظماء، السلطة والسيطرة الذكورية في فبائل
Baruya بغنيا الجديدة (السكان الاصليين بمنطقة استراليا)
ترجمة عن صناعة الرجال العظماء، السلطة والسيطرة الذكورية في فبائل
Baruya بغنيا الجديدة (السكان الاصليين بمنطقة استراليا)
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