Baruya people

The Baruya are a people of the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They were extensively studied by French anthropologist Maurice Godelier between 1967 and 1988.

Description

In 1973 there were approximately 1500 Baruya people living in the Wonenara and Marawaka valleys.[1] They have been described as characterised by a strong inequality between males and females; all their organisations, institutions, and myths present male domination. They have traditionally practised a ritual in which boys give fellatio to young males and drink their semen, to "re-engender themselves prior to marriage".[2] According to French anthropologist Maurice Godelier,

Within sacred objects, which are the exclusive property of some clans and which only some men are allowed to touch and to handle, two types of power are united: feminine powers, the life powers of which the men are supposed to have exproprietated women in imaginary times, and masculine powers, powers of death and war received directly from the spirits of the forest. But in the eyes of the Baruyas, women remain for ever the owners of the powers of which the men have dispossessed them, even if they have lost their usage. It is for this reason that the men violently separate the boys from the world of women and must initiate them in the secrets of the powers of which they have dispossessed the women. The Baruya men justify this expropriation by saying that the first women did not know how to put their powers in the service of the community.

However, according to a 2016 study by Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke, "male domination is no longer ideologically inscribed in the superiority of semen by analysing the symbolic shift that both semen and menstrual blood have undergone and showing how closely tied this shift is to a new organisation of gendered roles and places within Baruya society".[3]

Studies and film

For seven years between 1967 and 1988, French anthropologist Maurice Godelier, assistant of Claude Lévi-Strauss, lived among the Baruya people and studied them.[4][1] Godelier invited Australian ethnographic filmmaker Ian Dunlop, of the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit, to film their initiation ceremonies, which was produced as a nine-part series called Towards Baruya Manhood in 1973,[1][5] as well as another 13-part series.[6]

References

  1. ^ a b c "Towards Baruya Manhood". National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Archived from the original (catalogue entry) on 9 February 2018. Retrieved 18 June 2020.
  2. ^ Goody, Jack (24 July 2007). "The Labyrinth of Kinship". New Left Review. Archived from the original on 16 April 2013.
  3. ^ Malbrancke, Anne-Sylvie (2016). "WOMEN DON'T HAVE TESTICLES: The 'making' of masculinity among twenty-first century Baruya (Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea)". Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde. 62. Frobenius Institute: 69–89. ISSN 0078-7809. JSTOR 44243087. Retrieved 26 December 2025.
  4. ^ Grazia, Alfred de (25 October 2013). "Venus and a Cosmic Serpent in Papua-New Guinea". q-mag.org. Archived from the original on 4 December 2013. Retrieved 26 December 2025. I am translating here from his book: Au fondement des sociétés humaines; ce que nous apprend l'anthropology.
  5. ^ "Towards Baruya Manhood". therai.org.uk. 20 September 2011. Archived from the original on 16 July 2011. Retrieved 26 December 2025.
  6. ^ Fiske, Pat. "Taking Pictures". Australian Screen. Retrieved 26 December 2025.

Further reading

  • La production des Grands Hommes. Pouvoir et domination masculine chez les Baruya de Nouvelle Guinée, Ed. Fayard (1982). (The Making of Great Men. Male domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya, Cambridge University Press, 1986).
  • TOWARDS BARUYA MANHOOD Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine A film that describes the stages and rituals of reaching manhood in the Baruya Tribe.
  • Resources on the Baruya language
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.