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Matter(s) of relations: transformation and presence in Pacific life-cycle rituals

Coordinator(s)


Pascale Bonnemère, James Leach, Borut Telban


Session presentation

Rituals in the Pacific region have been a sustained source of interest for Europeans. Anthropologists have regularly analysed life-cycle rituals, focussing on transformations of persons, as when young boys are transformed into adults and warriors in male initiation (e.g. Godelier 1982 [1986]), or on relations, as when the relations between the living and the dead are transformed in mortuary ceremonies (e.g. Weiner 1976). Both propositions: that rituals effect transformations of the person, or that rituals deal with relations, remain somewhat vague. Here, the emphasis that Pacific people place on specific engagements to bring about transformation, and to give the desired shape to relations, gives us a lead. In this panel, we would like to focus on how transformations are occurring. That is, to look for the modalities and devices, material or otherwise, used to enact, operate, stage, etc. the relations, and give them their form.

Within the overall frame of considering Pacific rituals that accompany the course of life as moments when relational transformations occur, we invite contributions that engage with two further suggestions. Firstly, as Bonnemère has argued (2014), a relationship cannot be transformed if the terms that compose it are not present, either directly, as in initiations, or mediated through objects that materialise it, as in mortuary rituals (e.g. Revolon 2007). Secondly, that the respective and shifting positions of subject, object, and/or agent are crucial to the outcomes of the rites. Careful consideration should be given to the positions of things and persons as transformative of relations, and in the process, as transformed and mutable in themselves. Contributors are further invited to consider the idea (emerging from the study of Melanesian life cycle rites) that the course of life is conceptualised as an ordered series of relational transformations. Such an idea implies viewing rituals that mark out life as a coherent set, and not as moments that can be analysed independently of each other. We hope these ideas will serve as stimulations or provocation for contributors.


Paper submissions are closed



Accepted papers


Doing it again: Transforming men and relations among the Ankave-Anga of Papua New Guinea



Pascale Bonnemère (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS)


Among the Ankave-Anga of Papua New Guinea, men have to go through an ordered series of three initiation rituals that start in childhood and end with the birth of their first child. In ideal terms, an adult man has to be a father and a maternal uncle. As a maternal uncle, he is responsible for the well-being of his sister's children but may make them very sick or infertile if he is dissatisfied with the prestations of game or pork his affines are supposed to give him when the children are young.
When analysed conjointly, the three rituals reveal a dramaturgy organising the acquisition of this capacity to act on and for others that women have spontaneously by being born female. Acquiring this capacity involves enacting successive transformations in the relations boys have with their mothers and their sisters.
An unchanging pattern underlies these relational transformations: it starts with re-enacting the current state of the relation and ends with making a gesture thought of as caracteristic of the new form of the relation. Re-enactment in this case implies the presence of the terms of the relations to be modified, hence the involvement of women in these rituals that have always been considered as all-male in the literature.

The questions raised in this paper revolve around the notion of "doing it again", focusing on this particular dramaturgy and discussing it in conjonction with the many ritual moments in which actions are repeated. What is the difference between the enactment of a relation and the repetition of an action? May reiteration paradoxically become indicative of a transformation?
After presenting the results of the analysis of the initiation rituals, the paper explores ethnographic material concerned with the beginning and the end of life, thus encompassing the whole life-course of a male individual.

Bedamini male initiation and marriage as transformation sequences.



Arve Sorum (University of Oslo)


Life-cycle rituals intend to affect, adjust, change or transform situations, persons and relations. This paper focuses on how certain social relations among the Bedamini in Papua New Guinea are given their form through ritual at selected moments of the-life cycle when relational transformations occur. Based on Kapferer’s (2005) discussion of the study of ritual in its own right as non-representional, ritualised moments in Bedamini male initiation and symbolic bride capture are conceived as a dynamic of structuration that change the existential conditions of persons in non-ritual reality. At those important ritual moments the direct presence of the agents are required, while their relative positions are mediated by objects and moods. Change and adjustment in relations can be described by focusing on staged acts, the communicative content of which is transmitted both visually, orally and emotionally. The effect intended is the formation, or reformation, of a relational field. Finally, Bedamini male initiation and marriage are consecutive parts of a sequence of transformations beyond its constituent moments, as initiation functions as a prerequisite to marriage. Initiation is the first term of the marriage proceedings, allowing for Initiation and marriage to be perceived as a coherent set of acts.

Setting Free the Son, Setting Free the Widow. Relational Transformation in Arrernte Life-Cycle Rituals (Central Australia)



Marika Moisseeff (CNRS - Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique)


In Australian Aboriginal society, personal identity is an evolving process whose successive mutations derive from a person’s aptitude to engage in new relationships. Both initiation rites and funerary practices act to mediate such relational transformations. Drawing on Spencer and Gillen’s material on the Arrernte, this paper establishes a parallel between the procedures put into effect to render a son autonomous from his mother in the course of male initiation, and those undertaken to emancipate a widow from her deceased husband. In both ritual operations introduce a relational distancing within a totality composed of two individuals whose antecedent, close physical intimacy, in the absence of such mediations, is apt to thwart the concerned person’s ability to become an autonomous agent capable of entering into new intimate relationships: the son’s marriage, the widow’s remarriage.
Both procedures entail the intervention of ritual objects closely connected to a man’s personal identity: on the one hand, the churinga he is joined with at the end of his initiation and which allows him to exercise responsibilities in fertility rites, and on the other hand, the corpse he leaves behind upon his death. Moreover, both operations lead to use of hair, substance deriving from but detached from the body, for relational purposes. In initiation, the young man’s assigned mother-in-law, a substitute for his mother, provides him with the hair that allows him to enter into new exchange relationships with other men. In the wake of funerary rituals, the dead man’s hair will be used to weld together those who collectively undertake expeditions to avenge his death.

Bodies, artifacts and spirits: transforming relations in Yolngu initiation and funeral rituals



Jessica De Largy Healy (CNRS - Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique)


In north-east Arnhem Land, at the two extremes of the male ritual life-cycle, during the first initiation ceremony and at death, the bodies of the boys and of the deceased undergo a similar process of transfiguration. Adorned with elaborate clan paintings and feather ornaments, while singing and dancing proceeds on the public ceremonial ground, they are made to resemble the groups’ most sacred objects seen to instantiate the powers of various ancestral beings. This presentation will be concerned with the material logics behind this transfiguration process which, by making people into ancestors, transforms the relations between individual and groups, between humans and non-human beings, and between the living and the spirits of the dead. I will also consider some of the changes that have occurred with the use of new technologies in memorializing the spirits of the dead and in expressing kinship and genealogical recall.

How the Tiwi construct the deceased’s postself in mortuary ritual



Eric Venbrux (Radboud University Nijmegen)


In this paper I will discuss Tiwi mortuary rites as a transformative, relational process in which the deceased’s postself is created. The Tiwi of North Australia review the character, relationships and life course of the dead person in their elaborate death rites. The performers fit their stories—‘told’ by means of lyrics, dance, gestures, bodily art and the plastic arts—into the frame story or central narrative representing the transition of the deceased from the world of the living to the world of the dead. A script inherited from the mythological ancestors has to be followed, but the participants link the conventional ritual events with their own stories and personal experiences put in metaphorical language and action. The close relatives of the deceased enact ritual roles according to their specific category of relationship to the dead person. That is to say, they have to opt for a certain bereavement status, thus being bereaved parents, children, grandparents, siblings or cousins of the deceased. The same accounts for the spouse and in-laws. Both actual and classificatory kin are part of the various categories of the bereaved. The dances and songs of each category have the specific relationship as their theme. Their dreamings or totemic clan affiliations are the subject of songs and dances, also. In other words, the actors construct a social biography of the deceased in their collective endeavour, defining the social loss and constituting the new spirit of the dead. More often than not, the songs composed for the occasion consist of a dialogue between the performer and the spirit of the deceased. At the conclusion of the cycle of mortuary rites (in the iloti, meaning ‘for good’) grave sculptures are erected; thereafter the deceased will be remembered as portrayed in the final rites.

Avoiding undesired transformation: Shaping a newborn into a specific being among the Karawari of Papua New Guinea



Borut Telban (Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)


Among the Karawari people of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, procreation is assurance neither of child’s human appearance nor of kinship with the child. The shape, strength, and external appearance of a baby, the ways in which he or she will move around, and its future relationships emerge slowly during a long process of prenatal and postnatal care. The latter period includes very important five (for girls) or six (for boys) days after birth and is characterized by a series of practices, which secure that a new-born’s external appearance and his or her ways of doing things become identified with specific people and spirits. A new-born’s external appearance and his or her ways of doing things are simultaneously sharply differentiated from other beings, be they humans, animals or spirits. The aim of the paper is to shift the focus from the often discussed sexual intercourse, sperm, blood, and so on to other practices that shape the child’s body and make it into a specific being.

Kutapmu & Kurabu : ceremonial houses and yam mounds in Nyamikum (East Sepik Province, PNG)



Ludovic Coupaye (University College London)


While initiations ceremonies have not been held for the last two decades, Nyamikum people (as well as other villages in the Abelam-speaking area) still perform annual long yam ceremonies. Authors, such as Anthony Forge or Diane Losche have asked the relation between the two phenomena, often pointing out the symbolic reference to the role of male and female in human reproduction. Drawing on previous ethnographies on Abelam initiations and material culture, this paper attempt to re-read the role of the ceremonial houses and initiation, in the light of what yam cultivation and display suggest about the reproduction and transformation of people and plants.

The matter of existential relations. Growth, life-cycle, and the form of the world in Reite, PNG.



James Leach (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS)


In this paper, I present some of the life-cycle rites practiced by Nekgini speaking people on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. These rites have several fascinating aspects, including the consumption of substitutes for the growing child by their maternal kin. Interrogating the repeated substitution of specific game, domestic meat, artefacts, and garden food for a human body suggests that just as the materials and actions have specific effects on the emergent person, they equally have transformative effect on the maternal and paternal kin. In fact, the rites reconstitute a human world of exchange and morality among affines. I make the point that a focus on the individual and their transformation misses the mutual transformation of all involved. That is, instead of being ‘about’ the individual and the social recognition of their physical growth, these rites are existential in focus and concern.

Fangamu taego, or “to feed the caregiver”: opposed forms of relationality in a West Gao life-cycle ritual, Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands.



Johanna Louise Whiteley (London School of Economics and Political Science)


The West Gao lived-world is based upon the existence of a plurality of ontologically discrete categories – three matriclans known as kokolo. Due to the rule of matriclan exogamy, a West Gao father belongs to a different kokolo to that of his wife and children. During a feast known as fangamu taego, or ‘to feed the caregiver’, children present their father with gifts to acknowledge his care. The father then takes the opportunity to transfer property rights in the land of his matriclan to his children. However, these particular transactions are encompassed by exchanges, occurring between the two participating matriclans, which draw in the community at large.

Building upon Strathern (1988) and Foster (1995) I explore the ‘partibility’ of indigenous and imported products exchanged and distributed during the event, arguing that fangamu taego instantiates a balance between two opposed forms of relationality, namely, relationships flowing internally to each matriclan and relationships forged between matriclans. The extent to which the event achieves this balance is linked to the ‘positioning’ of the feast between marriage and death in the life-cycle. However, the relational opposition addressed by the exchanges is ultimately predicated upon ancestrally mediated relationships of emplacement with regard to a specific territory. This comes into focus during property-transfer element of the feast.

Ultimately, fangamu taego reproduces underlying differences between the participants in an exchange event, which somewhat paradoxically, celebrates the value inherent in bridging such differences. It therefore encapsulates the central socio-cosmic tension upon which social reproduction in West Gao is predicated.

Bwekasa: The life-giving sacrificial rites of Trobriands Islanders, living and deceased



Mark Mosko (Australian National University)


In the indigenous ritual life of Melanesians, mortuary rites occupy a certain pre-eminence among all types of life-cycle rituals in that they affect critical transformations of the interpersonal relations, not only, I suggest, among living persons but also those linking people with ancestral and other spirits. In the Trobriand Islands, however, mortuary sagali distributions as described thus far (e.g. Weiner 1976, Damon and Wagner 1989) are not the only rites enacted with the aim of regulating relations between living mortals and spirits. At numerous junctures in his writings, Malinowski mentions how virtually all public ceremonials performed by chiefs, village leaders and ritual experts on behalf of whole communities are formally initiated by the presentation of specific ‘oblations’ (ula’ula) donated in the first instance by community members at large to the officiating magician, portions of which are then given by him sacrificially to those baloma ancestral and other spirits of Tuma, the land of the dead, with whom he is personally connected by dala lineage and other ties. (These latter offerings given by magicians to spirits are actually known by a term separate from ula’ula – bwekasa – which does not appear in Malinowski’s published writings or his field-notes.) Malinowski never attempted an interpretation or analysis of ula’ula (or bwekasa) offerings other than to suggest that such rites served to maintain generally harmonious relations between the living and the dead. This is puzzling, however, insofar as he also staunchly maintained in his writings that the spirit recipients of those oblations, which are mandatory preliminaries to virtually all magico-ritual acts, are not considered to be the effective agents of those activities. As far as I am aware, none of the subsequent string of Trobriand ethnographers have till now examined ula’ula and bwekasa offerings in the context of either life-cycle or other ritual contexts. In this paper, based on recent field studies at Omarakana, I attempt such an analysis, describing how, through ula’ula and bwekasa sacrifices humans and spirits give substance and form to the life upon which both are dependent, and in so doing animate the relations between the worlds of the living (Boyowa) and of the dead (Tuma).

Wealth circulations and ritual system: the processing of sociocosmic relationships in Wallis Island (Western Polynesia)



Sophie Chave-Dartoen (Université de Bordeaux)


I have stressed the sociocosmic character of the Polynesian society of Wallis in a long term study of the life cycle rituals and the specific way the components of the person are ritually elaborated and transformed all life long. The Wallisian sociocosmic world displays an extensive, complex and intricate system of relationships. In such a relation-based conception of the world, humans and things are defined by the particular settings of the relations that constitute them and give existence to them.
Plants (yams and kava for example), animals (pigs) and other kinds of wealth (such as mats, barkcloth and money) are used for meaningful relationships to be perceived, lived, evaluated but also established and modified. Thus, they enter complex, interconnected circulation and semiotic systems. I will show that these systems work as processors of the relationships framed by everyday and ceremonial circulations and by the ritual culminating moments, when efficiency of action and dynamics of social renewal are stemming from the World-beyond.
In such a world, based on a complex economy of relationships, the fundamental principle of the society - which is the backdrop of its deep and essential logics and values - appears to be the ritual system, more precisely the system of meaningful circulations that make these relationships personally perceivable and socially existing. This paper wishes to enlarge the path towards the comparison between Polynesia and Melanesia and offer an opportunity to look more closely at some of their important common social and cognitive features.

Material relations in Anga rituals



Pierre Jean-Claude Lemonnier (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS)


Based on the ethnography of Ankave, Baruya and Sambia initiations, here analysed as particular operational sequences, the paper will deal with only three of the many questions raised by the comparative study of Anga male rituals:

1. Contrary to what Lévi-Strauss proposed, objects do not participate in ritual in "loco verbi". On the contrary, objects and material actions do in rituals what words only could not “do”. Therefore, what is the specific role of material actions (and objects and techniques) in Anga rituals?
2. How can we describe and understand the family resemblance displayed by this series of Anga male rituals, that clearly combine similar ritual operations comprising a same repertoire of elementary ritual “bricks” (not yet to be defined as “ritems”)? It is clear that Anga rituals are transformations of each other, but is there a “structure” that engenders the variants observed?
3. In what respect do these three variants correspond (for lack of a better term) to the strikingly different context in which those rituals (Ankave vs. Baruya-Sambia) reorganize relations between humans and between humans and the unseen?

Ceremonies as operating processes in the transformations of relations - a view from Northern Hoot ma Whaap, Kanaky New-Caledonia.



Denis Monnerie (Université de Strasbourg)


In the Kanak world of New Caledonia, and arguably elsewhere, the transformations of social relations effected by rituals/ceremonies depend to a large extent on articulations of current "everyday" life and ceremonial moments. By comparison with the former, the latter – a process performed in specified places over relatively short periods of time - create a considerably higher density and intensity of sociocultural life. My Kanak interlocutors often reflect about it. They call it the "Kanak system". (Which is different from the colonially defined "coutume/custom"). They practise it for cycle of life, local and regional ceremonies.
The presentation will stress its dynamic of co-action implicating humans and non humans, its verbal and non verbal relational transfers, its largely dyadic fractal aspect, and the way in which it transforms relations. This paper is part of an ongoing research to provide an anthropological definition of this system. Although close to ritual, exchanges and network models, it should and can be more relevantly described in a way both consonnant with its emic concepts and in a wider etic perspective : that of an operating process.

On Ritual Actions, Efficacy and Relations : the Samoan Tattooing Ritual and its Changes



Sebastien Galliot (Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS)


While images of Polynesian tattoos are almost saturating popular representations of masculinity, gender and pan-ethnic pacific islands identity through multiple visual media such as advertising, TV shows, clothing, literature, theatre, fine Arts, etc., its ritual implementation seems to have been abandoned in favour of either reinterpretation of ancient iconography, or relocation of the Samoan ritual.
The latter is manifested by widely varying configurations. Based on a 27 months of fieldwork in Samoa and in the Samoan community in New Zealand as well as among tattoo artists of Samoan descent, this paper will address the Samoan tattooing ritual settings with a careful look at matters, substances, actions and agents. By showing to which extent this ritual presents itself as a « technical system » (Gille 1979), that is to say a system in which there is a close interdependence that links together the various components of the technology at a given moment in history, we’ll engage in a discussion on ritual efficacy and the interplay between agents, their relationships and technical actions and matters in the Samoan tattooing ritual.
By doing so, we’ll address the transformation of the ritual and to which extent it reflects broader social changes and transformation of relationships that can be given to see within the ritual time-space.


References:

Gille, B. 1979 « La Notion de ' système technique '. Essai d'épistémologie technique », Technique et Culture I : 8-18.

To Excel at bridewealth: Microsoft Office and the tabling of relations in Goroka



Anthony Pickles (University of East Anglia)


At a bridewealth payment in the compound in Goroka where the groom lived and worked, the groom (and clan-members from Lufa District) assiduously kept a note of contributions from relatives and staff. Next day, after the modest exchange was over, the groom used one of the office computers to compile a spreadsheet that detailed all the guests, their contributions and the material form in which they came, and, in a separate column, their value in Kina. Contributors were divided into ‘colleagues and their families’ on the one hand, and ‘family and outside help’ on the other. The division of personnel and the rendering of contributions into a monetary value necessarily involved a reworking of relations. And because they took an enduring electronic form, their transformation was anything but vague. Based on insights gleaned from a series of interviews with the groom, I explore the composing terms that brought about this marriage and that define a spreadsheet, and look at how this all too familiar tool of decontextualization can be used to distil local significances. To get there I ask: in terms of positioning subject, agent and object, what was the intended effect of monetising contributions, subtotalling and grand totalling them? Also, if life is ordered by a set of rituals, what enduring place, if any, do colleagues occupy within their categorical ghetto? Finally, what kind of a record is a spreadsheet, what influence is it expected to exert over future attempts to order relations during other life-cycle rituals?