Maurice Godelier

The making of great men : male domination and power among the New Guinea Baruya

Preface 1. Introduction to Baruya society Part I. Social Hierarchies in Baruya Society: 2. Womens subordinate position 3. The institution and legitimization of male superiority: initiations and the separation of the sexes Part II. The Production of Great Men: Powers Inherited, Power Merited: 4. Male hierarchies 5. The discovery of great men 6. General view of Baruya social hierarchies 7. The nature of man/woman relations among the Baruya: violence and consent, resistance and repression 8. Great men societies, big men societies: two alternative logics of society Part III. Recent Transformations of Baruya Society: 9. The colonial order and independence Conclusion 10. The ventriloquists dummy Bibliography Index.

Territory and property in primitive society

1) I should like to start by clearing up a certain number of ambiguities surrounding the term ’primitive society’. There are no theoretical criteria defining the boundaries of anthropology. Anthropology is concerned in the first place with all those societies that historians and economists neglect. The latter ignore these societies because we have no written records concerning them. Anthropology is a sort of trashcan of history; it deals with all those societies that demand personal acquaintance in order to be able to study them; that require that the researcher go and see for himself requiring participatory observation if he is to understand something of their functioning. There are, then, no theoretical criteria; but there are two practical ones. The first reflects a concrete state of affairs, namely the absence of written records, while the second constitutes a methodological imperative, namely the obligation to employ a method known as participatory observation. This is why anthropologists are confronted with an immensely diverse field, from the last bands of bushmen roaming the Kalahari desert, to the Masai, pastoral nomads of East Africa, to the village communities of Peru, India or Java. This broad diversity offers one advantage: it

Considerations theoriques et critiques sur le problème des rapports entre l'homme et son environnement

Le d6veloppement economique actuel parait impliquer de plus en plus un gaspillage des ressources naturelles et humaines. Ce fait met en question les conceptions courantes de la rationalite economique. II apparait et 1’exemple de la crise 6nerg6tique est eloquent en ce sens que les divers centres de decision economiques, en appliquant les regles du moindre cout et de la maximation des profits, cr6ent sans n6cessairement le savoir, un gaspillage des ressources economiques de la planete. Par ailleurs, ce gaspillage est complete par une pollution croissante de 1’environnement qui y ajoute d’autres effets n6gatifs. On arrive a une situation en partie oppos6e a celle du 19e siecle. Pour la premiere fois, I’axiome g6n6ralement accepte par les 6conomistes et les politiciens selon lequel le developpement economique entraine de soi, comme sa consequence naturelle, une amelioration de &dquo;la qualite de la vie&dquo; est mis en question publiquement. On aboutit deja a imaginer les moyens d’organiser la non-croissance 6conomique pour sauver a la fois 1’environnement naturel et la qualite de la vie sociale.

Anthropology, History and Ideology

MG: It’s more than that. On the one hand, it’s a fact that, for Marx, one should go beyond visible patterns, observable relations, and that scientific analysis proceeds in terms of structural levels. This reference shows that Marx is our contemporary; that his work, in the 19th century, represented a break with respect to other pre-Marxist forms of scientific thought. But, on the other hand, what I believe is fundamentally at stake is that Marx, somewhat as the linguists try to define the object of language through the diversity of languages, wanted to set out a theory of the functions of what makes a society exist as such. He put forward

The Appropriation of Nature [1]:

In the first part of this article (Godelier, M. 1978, pp399-421) we have only outlined a provisional inventory of some forms of the appropriation of territory and natural and humanly-altered resources. We have purposely grouped them into broad systems of the exploitation of nature, into modes of ’subsistence’ and not modes of ’production’. The mode of production of a society is primarily characterized by the social relations which determine the forms of access to resources and the means of production, organize the labour processes and determine the distribution and circulation of the products of social labour. Of these three functions of the relations of production, we have only dealt with a few

The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya@@@Space, Text and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet of Kenya.

As well as being the first major anthropological study of the Marakwet, Space, Text and Gender strikingly illustrates how the idea of a cultural text can aid the analysis of ethnographic material. Dr Moore focuses in particular on the relationship between the organisation of household space and gender relations, and on the ways that relationship is changing as a result of wage labour and education. She does not, refreshingly, treat household space as a direct or distorted reflection of social relations, but combines instead insights of Geertz, Ricoeur and Foucault with material drawn from Marxist and literary-critical approaches to develop a new theoretical perspective. This seeks to analyse the organisation of domestic space as a cultural representation linked to the social and economic conditions within which it is produced and maintained. The book provides a striking example of what anthropology has to offer to the study of contemporary, culture and will attract many with no specialist interest in Africa.

Stone tools and steel tools among the Baruya of New Guinea. Some enthnogrophic and quantitative data

one of the traditional inter-tribal trade routes; after thirty days’ march through extremely rugged mountain country, he finally caught sight of the first Baruya village, in the Wonenara Valley. Contact was pacific, and almost unstrained. In his journal, Sinclair speaks admiringly of the fine gardens of sweet potato and taro grown by his hosts, of their ingenious use of pipe-lines for irrigation, their immense fields of salt cane, and the numerous saltprocessing workshops. He also notes the abundance of shell ornaments, and points out that all the men carried steel tools, axes and machetes, which they had procured by trading their salt with neighbouring tribes, who had themselves obtained them by trade