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ABSTRACT
This paper introduces this special issue and analyses Papua New Guinea and Australian initiation and death rituals as moments of relational transformations. Although the general argument is not completely new, it has often remained an undemonstrated statement. The paper hence focuses on the specific ways people make these changes effective and express them in their rituals. It is suggested that an invariant modus operandi is in play in which, for a relation to be transformed, its previous state must first be ritually enacted. Towards the end of the ritual, the new state of the relationship is itself publicly enacted through a manifestation of the form the relation takes after the ritual. The paper suggests that a relationship cannot be transformed in the absence of the persons concerned. The relational components need to be either directly present, such as in initiations, or mediated through objects, such as in death rituals.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank James Leach and Borut Telban for their insightful comments and suggestions, Jessica De Largy Healy and Eric Venbrux for pointing out relevant materials on Aboriginal Australia, and the anonymous reviewers for encouraging me to engage in a comparison of initiation rituals in Melanesia and Australia.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Rituals performed for boys usually demand the engagement of more people and resources and are more complex and numerous than those for girls (Lutkehaus and Roscoe Citation1985; Telban Citation1998, 196–207, and Moisseeff, this issue). It has also been reported that while the first are said to trigger reproductive maturity, the rituals performed on the occasion of first menstruation celebrate an event that has already occurred. Often, people say that girls spontaneously mature while boys need to be assisted by ritual means. The same reason is provided for places where female initiations are not organised.
2. In the 2014 workshop, P. Bonnemère, F. Brunois, L. Coupaye, J. De Largy Healy, J. Leach, D. Monnerie, S. Revolon, and B. Telban participated. In 2015, besides the convenors and the authors of this issue, the participants were S. Chave-Dartoen, L. Coupaye, S. Galliot, P. Lemonnier, D. Monnerie, M. Mosko, and A. Pickles.
3. Venbrux’s article in this issue reveals another type of ‘materialisation’ we did not think of, namely a singer who speaks in place of the dead.
4. Since then, several such initiations have been organised, but I was not in the field at the time. Thus, Ankave initiation rituals are not obsolete, and Christianity, which is poorly established in their valley, has had no observable influence on them.
5. The question of making visible the outcome of an action in or on a person’s body has been dealt with by several Melanesian specialists, in particular, M. Strathern (Citation1988, 241) but also, for example, Hirsch (Citation2001, 244–245), and earlier A. Strathern (Citation1975).
6. The Angans, whose number is around 100,000, are divided into some 50 local groups speaking 12 different languages. According to studies by linguists, geneticists, and anthropologists, they could have a common origin, which could go back as far as 10,000 years BP. As demographic pressure and endemic warfare drove them from one valley to the next, their languages, social organisations, systems of representations, and modes of using the environment evolved in different ways. Several of these groups have been the subject of long-term anthropological fieldwork: Kapau (Blackwood), Baruya (Godelier), Sambia (Herdt), Iqwaye-Yagwoia (Mimica), Ankave (Lemonnier and myself), and Kamea (Bamford).
7. The reasons for not having looked at women’s activities during male initiations were linked to the assumptions of Western academic anthropologists, but not exclusively so, as feminist scholars tended to present it (for details on this topic, see Read [Citation1982, 67–68] as well as Bonnemère [Citation2004, Citation2014a, 164]).
8. Gewertz and Errington’s (Citation1991) work is an exception, but their observations of the place of women in male initiations did not really call into question previous analyses.
9. Repetition does not here refer to ‘repetitive forms of behaviour that are carried out on socially prescribed occasions’ on which most specialists base their definition of ritual (Hicks Citation2010, xvii), but about the re-enactment of a relational configuration which allows its transformation. It is thus a process rather than actions or simple behaviours, which links together different stages of the ritual, illustrating the ordered series that it constitutes.
10. For example, the smearing of red pandanus seeds and red clay on the head and shoulders of the boys when they emerge from a corridor of branches is no doubt an enactment of their birth, and the smearing of yellow clay by women when the boys come back from the forest, fully adorned, clearly re-enacts their mother’s anointment of their bodies with the same clay when they were born.
11. We would have to add ‘and for the sister to be a paternal aunt’, but this is not the case since her role is much less prominent than that of the maternal uncle. This asymmetry is for the most part linked to the role of the maternal kin in the child’s well-being. Relations with the maternal kin are prevalent throughout life and even beyond (see Bonnemère Citation2015, 169–173; Lemonnier Citation2006, 324–354).
12. For a discussion of iteration and repetition (although not in ritual contexts), see M. Strathern (Citation2013, 193–198).
13. I am grateful to Eric Venbrux who pointed this ethnographic example out to me and to Helena Meininger who translated the short article in Dutch that Venbrux wrote about this collar (Citation2000, 94).
14. As Keane wrote in Citation2009, ‘it is because things in their very materiality exceed any particular concepts, times, and projects, that they persist across different concepts, times, and projects’. Here, the same bowls – which only differ in size – stand for different kinds of dead persons, thus extending their use as it were inside the concept of death, but also exceeding their single referent.
15. I use the past tense here since the last female initiations were performed in the late 1990s (Hermkens Citation2015, 16).
16. See also Lemonnier’s recent analysis of the objects used in male initiations that ‘allow important beings of the past to be present among the living’ (Citation2012, 78).
17. Such an assignment does not imply he will be effectively married to this woman’s daughter.