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Anthropological Theory
Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
Vol 3(2): 179198
[1463-4996(200306)3:2;179198;033161]

What is a sexual act?

Maurice Godelier
cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Translated by Nora Scott

Abstract
The author analyses the meanings that sexual intercourses between sexes take for the
Baruya, a population of inner New Guinea. There are two kinds of intercourses,
homosexual before marriage, heterosexual after. The relation between these two kinds
of sexualities refers to a set of representations, values, symbols and social practices
which are to show the social and cosmic superiority of masculine over feminine, of
man over woman and thus, in body practices, the superiority of one sex over the
other. The author shows that imaginary representations of the role of body substances
such as sperm, menstrual blood, milk, are a base to the superiority of men and
inferiority of women: these representations participate in the constitution of
individual identity and on the myths of the origin of cosmic and social order which
enhance the primacy of woman on man. The author shows that these datas dont
presuppose in any way the predominance of the symbolic on the imaginary, but rather
on the contrary.
Key words
body substances genders heterosexuality homosexuality imaginary male
domination sexual act symbols

When asked to define, on the basis of their professional experience, what a sexual act is
for them, the anthropologist and the psychoanalyst apparently find themselves in
distinct, but from a certain standpoint, similar, situations. Neither is in the habit of
observing sexual acts directly in the course of their practice. At first sight, it seems that
their experience consists of how people do or dont talk about sex. But the two probably
do not receive the same discourse and therefore are not interpreting the same realities.
There are exceptions of course, and Captain Cooks or Bougainvilles accounts of their
voyages in the 18th century describe the spectacle of Polynesians making love in full
view of an audience applauding or jeering their techniques or, as a gesture of hospitality, offering the European crewmen young women for their pleasure. Such descriptions
were proof for philosophers like Diderot that peoples closer than we are to nature saw
no harm or sin in making love. It was only with the progress of Civilization that we
began to feel uneasy and ashamed about sexual activity.1
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Today we have come a long way from such philosophical debates, and the much more
detailed knowledge we now have of the cultures and societies of Polynesia no longer
allow us to see Polynesians as being exempt from sexual taboos and conflicts. In using
the terms cultures and societies I am not referring to two realities that somehow stand
in opposition. By culture I mean the set of representations and principles which
consciously organize the different aspects of social life, together with the set of positive
and negative norms and the values that are connected with these ways of acting and
thinking. By society I mean a set of individuals and groups who interact on the basis of
common rules and values which govern their acting and thinking, and who regard themselves as belonging to the same whole, which they must reproduce as they pursue their
own self-interest. Moreover, this objective social whole, this community recognized as
such as well as this particular intersubjective culture, are already there in existence and
active at the birth of each individual.
It is the work of an anthropologist to go into the field and systematically create, by
participant observation, information on how the individuals and groups who make up
a society of a given culture represent to themselves if such is the object of the study
sexual relations between individuals of the same sex or of opposite sexes. Such a study
ought, of necessity, to lead the anthropologist to extend his or her observations to all of
the social relations that exist between the genders, beyond purely sexual relations: their
relationships with power, with wealth, within the material division of labor, in their rites,
and so on.
Unlike the psychoanalyst, perhaps, the anthropologist does not simply listen to what
people say to him or to each other in his presence, about sex and the sexes. His practice
requires him first of all to immerse himself, for months and years on end, in a local group
whose actions and interactions he will observe to the best of his ability. It goes without
saying that during these months of immersion there will be a lot going on around him,
and in most cases independently of him. These events will draw the anthropologists
attention or his attention will be drawn to them. This will lead him, through a systematic investigation, to trace these events back to the logic that underpins them, to the
causes people attribute to them, to discover the effects they entail for individuals and
the society, and the comments they inspire. While all of this has to do with speech, it
embraces much more. The anthropologists ear is thus tuned to more than the individuals he listens to and questions one after the other or one without the other. He must
also listen to the concerts of harmonious or inharmonious voices all expressing themselves at the same time in a given social context. He will then collate these solo or polyphonic discourses with the contexts that inspired them births, marriages, initiations,
murders, adulteries, feuds and so on and attempt to lay bare the logics behind the
representations and behaviors of individuals and groups, as well as the logics underlying
the social relations within and about which these individuals and groups think and act.
There is another difference still between the relationship that grows up between the
analyst and the analysand, and between the anthropologist and the people he lives with,
some of whom become his informants. It is the analysand who goes to the psychoanalyst in order to talk to him or her, to be listened to, so that someone will help him assume
himself. The anthropologist, on the other hand, usually moves in with a human group
without having been invited, and while she (or he) does not miss an opportunity to
listen, she does not miss a chance to speak either, to ask questions, both direct and
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GODELIER What is a sexual act?

indirect, and to interpret the answers she receives and the happenings she observes. In
the beginning, at least, she interprets these using concepts and models that are usually
and for the most part alien to the conscious awareness, to the culture of the people she
is living with and whose life she shares, for a time. Nevertheless anthropologists and
psychoanalysts are alike in that they must never, either in public or in private, take a
stand on what they are told or what they see. They cannot side with one part of the
society against another and must in no circumstances espouse and promote the interests
of some to the detriment of the interests of others.
The foregoing is meant to illuminate the way I will be approaching the subject of the
present article. The material I collected in the course of my anthropological fieldwork will
provide the starting point for the following attempt to analyze what sexual acts represent
for the Baruya people of Papua New Guinea. Allow me therefore briefly to introduce the
Baruya. Baruya is the name of a tribe living in a high valley in the mountainous interior
of Papua New Guinea. They were discovered by Europeans in 1951 and subsequently
pacified by the Australian colonial government. In December 1975 the Baruya became
citizens of a newly independent nation which gained membership of the UN. In 1951
they numbered fewer than 2000 and the group was divided into 15 or so patrilineal clans,
some of which were indigenous and others descendants of conquering groups. At that
time it was a society without classes or castes and without a State, but it did possess a
double hierarchy: one between the sexes, characterized by the mens overall domination
of the women; and one between the clans, founded on the primacy of the conquering
clans over the indigenous ones. Within each gender there was another hierarchy, which
among the men singled out Great Men, great warriors, great shamans or masters of the
initiations, and among the women great women, in particular female shamans and
women who had given birth to many children who had survived. I began working among
the Baruya in 1966 and since then have spent a total of nearly seven years with them,
most of the time in the same village Wiaveu, a few hours walk from the Wonenara patrol
post.
ON THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN AN ACT AND A DOMAIN OF
ACTIVITY, AND ON THE THREE ORDERS THAT COMPRISE HUMAN
REALITY

Once again we need to pause for a few preliminary remarks. Which sexual act are we
going to talk about, since in our culture the term covers a whole series of acts performed
alone or between two or even several persons of the same or opposite sex? To cite only
a few: masturbation solitary or mutual fellatio, cunnilingus, homosexual or heterosexual acts, copulation, sodomy or such gestures as stroking or holding a womans breast
or a mans testicles, or such signs as a certain smile or suggestive glances. These acts
constitute a catalogue of ways of relating with oneself and/or with others that entail a
visible use of the body. However, there are other sexual acts that occur entirely in the
imagination, with no visible bodily manifestations, and others that are clearly symbolic
substitutes for sexual acts that are not accomplished as such.
To give an example from the Baruya culture of an imaginary sexual act: one of their
most secret myths describes the mountain journey of the first woman, Kurumbingac.
Kurumbingac lived on her own, without a man, and with her lived a wild dog,
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Djou. One day she ate some fruit from a very straight tree and became pregnant.
The dog that was with her saw she was pregnant; and one night it entered her womb
through her sex and devoured the head of the fetus. The woman gave birth to a
headless child. It was a girl. She continued her journey and once again ate some fruit
from the same tree. Once again she became pregnant; the dog realized she was
pregnant and, one night, entered her womb and this time devoured the arms and
legs of the fetus. The woman gave birth to a dead child. It was a boy. Noticing blood
stains on the dogs body, she guessed that it was the culprit. The dog ran away, and
she set out in pursuit, up and down the mountains, seeking vengeance. At last the
dog found refuge at the back of a cave. The woman spotted its footprints, and her
spirit made trees grow up around the cave and block the mouth. Then she turned
away, leaving the dog to die.
However the dog had magical strength, and it split open the cave and its spirit
escaped, changing into an eagle, the bird of Sun, the father of all the Baruya. The
dogs skin and bones were left to rot in the cave, where they changed into various
kinds of animals which today are the game hunted by the Baruya in the forest and
along the streams, and which are eaten at initiations. Nevertheless, the dog went on
living as a dog, keeping its distance from men; today it lives on the slopes of Mount
Yelia, a volcano towering above the Baruyas mountains. The dog also became the
secret companion of shamans, and its spirit joins them whenever they perform the
war rites or intervene in cases of difficult childbirth.
Twice in this account we find the description of a sexual act that takes place between
a woman and a tree, that is here a male reality even before there were any real men. We
are in a world which, for the Baruya, corresponds to the time of the original shaping of
the world, to what they call the time of the Wandjinia, the dream men. This is both an
imaginary and a real world for the Baruya, while for us it is imaginary but unreal. We
regard this story as a myth, however it is not one for the Baruya because they believe
in it: it has repercussions on the way they organize their society; it gives rise to (what we
call) symbolic practices which take place in the male and female initiations.
The analysis of this story gives me the opportunity to recall that the imaginary and
the symbolic are two registers of human reality that, to be sure, cannot exist without
each other, but neither can the one be fused with or reduced to the other. The problem
therefore arises, on the theoretical level, of whether one of these registers plays a greater
role than the other in the workings of the practices we have observed. For psychoanalysts of the Lacanian school, the symbolic prevails over the imaginary. But in my opinion,
it is the imaginary present at the heart of a culture that prevails over the symbolic. For
the symbolic, properly speaking, is a reality that stands in for another reality, but it cannot
really take its place. I am not unaware that, in advancing this idea, I am challenging the
point of view that has been defended since 1950 by Claude Lvi-Strauss who affirmed,
in his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (1950), the primacy of the symbolic over
both the imaginary and the real. And in 1954, Jacques Lacan followed his lead.
Of course there are some practices, some acts or gestures in which the symbolic
features more prominently than the imaginary. Thus, when the Baruya hold the firststage initiation ceremonies for their boys, children of nine or ten who have just been
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torn away from their mothers and the world of women, one of the most secret rites takes
place deep in the forest, at the foot of a tall, straight tree decked with feathers and necklaces similar to those worn by the men. The small boys are lined up facing the tree. Their
sponsors, young unmarried fourth-stage initiates who have not yet had sexual intercourse with a woman, fill their mouths with the sap of a tree that grows nearby and
deposit the sap in the mouths of the boys. For the Baruya, this sap is, in a way, the trees
semen, analogous to the semen that the young men will later give the young initiates to
ingest. These ritual acts form a chain along which life-forces and powers flow from the
Sun, the father of all Baruya, to the tree, from the tree to the young virgin men, and
from them to the young boys who have just been separated from their mothers and
disjoined from the female world for years to come. The sap is therefore both the (imaginary) semen of the tree and the (symbolic) substitute for real male semen.
It therefore seems to me that terms like imaginary and symbolic refer to
components of reality the subjective reality of individuals as well as the intersubjective
reality of their relations with each other, which themselves unfold in the context of institutions, of objective, impersonal social relations which present themselves both as
domains of peoples activity and as components of their acts. One can, for instance,
make love entirely in ones imagination and, in this case, the imagination acts both as a
domain within which acts and scenes take place that utilize various representations and
symbols of what the sexes and sexual relations are for the person doing the imagining.
When one imagines having intercourse or performing other sexual acts the imagination
functions as a domain, and a certain number of representations function as symbols for
the mental acts performed in the mind.
But this subjective imaginary is not the same thing as the intersubjective imaginary
present in the kiss given by the young Baruya men who deposit the sap of a tree in the
mouth of the young initiate of whom they are the sponsor. This kiss is also a symbolic
act but one that does not take place wholly in the mind, as in the preceding example,
and whose performance entails the use of the body which externalizes the act, renders
it visible, makes it a public act. However this symbolic act yields up its meaning only
when the connection is made with the intersubjective, objective world of the Baruyas
culture, with their belief that the forest trees contain a life-force which links them to the
Sun. Their beliefs themselves lose their meaning if they are cut off from the social context
in which they operate that of the male initiations in other words, a collective social
practice through which the men claim to reproduce the boys outside a womans womb,
to instill in them the life-forces that come directly from the Sun without going through
women. It is in fact this desire for power and for social domination that is at the root of
their homosexual practices.
In this example the imaginary is central to everything involved, to the relations of
power and interests which do not belong solely to the domain of relations between self
and self, as in the case of desires satisfied in the mind only. Here we are in the domain
of relations between self and others, of relations which group the individual with others
who are like him, who share the same interests, in short, relations which separate and
bring together, and by this very fact divide society. And these relations must also necessarily be reproduced if one is to go on living in society if society, that particular society,
is to go on living.
The evocation of these stakes, these relations of power and interests, takes us to the
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heart of the third component which, together with the imaginary and the symbolic,
makes up the reality of human existence in all its aspects, subjective and intersubjective,
individual and collective, and which always unfolds in an established space and time, at
a particular place and time in the history of humankind and the evolution of the ways
they live, and ensures they will go on living. This third component has been improperly
called the real by some authors like Lacan.
In sum, every human act establishes a relationship at the same time between self and
self, and between self and others. Even when the others are not there in person, they are
already present in the individual since the existence of each person presupposes the existence of others. Every human act is at once conscious and unconscious, purposeful and
fated to have involuntary consequences. Every human act contains imaginary and
symbolic aspects whose importance varies with the domain of human existence
concerned and the kinds of relationships with oneself and others that characterize this
domain.
To give another example of the place of mental components (lide), in other words,
ideas, images and symbols in the production-reproduction of aspects of social reality:
simply bear in mind that you cannot get married without first having some idea of what
marriage is or without knowing, even vaguely, whom you are allowed or forbidden to
marry in your society. The obvious being said, marrying cannot be reduced to putting
into practice representations and positive or negative rules of conduct and action.
Marriage also entails a whole series of material and immaterial stakes concerning
relations of power and status between individuals or between groups, questions of inheritance and transmission of material goods or titles, ranks, knowledge and so on. In short,
everyone knows that the production-reproduction of social relations, ones productionreproduction of ones own existence and ones place in society involve constraints and
stakes which are not merely mental and, up to a certain point, contradict or oppose the
representations, resist them and even go so far as to eliminate them from real practices.
The domain of the imaginary thus appears to us as being made up of components,
dimensions, and materials of human life that, by means of thought, are either added to
or subtracted from a reality that extends beyond thought and thereby becomes transformed, hidden or even effaced. Yet this reality does not cease to exist or to act even if
it assumes other guises in the imaginary or even if it does not exist as far as thought is
concerned. The reader will now better understand why I cannot agree with those who
designate the three orders of human reality found in the three components of every
human act by the terms symbolic, imaginary and real. This triad has the disadvantage
of either robbing the imaginary and the symbolic of reality, or of stripping away all
specific content from what is labeled real with respect to the imaginary and the
symbolic. Such a real becomes indefinable, unthinkable, perhaps because it is cut off
from the symbolic and the imaginary and, according to Lacan, because it has been
expelled by them. It is a non-sense to reserve the term real to designate, in an exclusive
and privileged manner, one of the three orders that make up the reality of human existence. Nor is there any legitimate reason to decree that whatever does not fit into the
symbolic or the imaginary is impossible to define or unthinkable. On the contrary, with
the example of marriage and everything that is involved in this institution that extends
well beyond the imaginary, or with the example of origin myths where one can measure
the distance between true history and an invented one and whose political implications
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and crucial role in the establishment of the social order are immediately visible, we have
testimony that it is indeed possible to conceive and define this third order of reality
which extends beyond the imaginary.
The question is therefore not which of these three orders is real, but how much does
the reality of each of these orders weigh? What role does each play in the productionreproduction of human existence, which never is other than a social existence, an existence received from and lived out with others? Lastly, the symbolic appears to me as the
field of all the languages used by humankind: the languages of gesture, the body, and
speech. Symbols are an irreplaceable means of communicating and thus acting on oneself
and on others. But it is not the symbols that do the thinking in us, it is the mind that
thinks them and which talks to itself (and to others) through its symbols. The field of
the symbolic is thus distinct from and located within the fields of the imaginary and
that third order which extends beyond both.
Thought produces and fuels the imaginary and the symbolic, and at the same time
extends beyond them. The imaginary and the symbolic are both products of conscious
and unconscious mental activity that generate the representations, some of which may
give rise to social reality. They do not do this, however, without at the same time hiding
part of the meaning of the realities they engender. However strong it may be, the imaginary never contrives to cause what it conceals to disappear entirely and cease to act and
to weigh on the evolution of human existence.
Using this theoretical grid, I will now go on to say something about what a sexual
relation is for the Baruya.
WHAT IS A SEXUAL ACT FOR A BARUYA?

The Baruya have two kinds of sexual relationships: they practice heterosexual relations
between adult men and women, and homosexual relations between young male initiates. Certain indications point to the existence of homosexual practices between young
women as well, but we have few details and they are difficult to interpret in the present
state of our knowledge.
Let us start with the domain of heterosexual relations. In principle, a man and a
woman should not have intercourse unless they are married. But the Baruya do not
forbid the rape of enemy women: that is an act of war. Newlyweds are not supposed to
have sexual intercourse for several weeks. They must wait until the walls of the house
that has been built for the couple have become blackened with soot from the smoke
from the fireplace. The hearth, made of flat stones and clay, has been constructed by the
husbands kinsmen, and his wife must never step over it on pain of being beaten. Why?
Because her vagina would open over the fire, and the fire cooks the food that goes into
her husbands mouth.
When their house is finished and the fireplace built, the couple does not sleep there
right away. The first night, the young husband sleeps in the house for the last time with
the boys of the village, the second night the wife sleeps there with the village girls. Then
the couple can sleep together alone. But they may not have sexual intercourse for the
first few weeks. They may only exchange caresses. The man strokes the womans breasts
and has her drink his semen. There is, of course, an erotic side to these caresses and to
this act, but in the Baruyas mind, in their culture, this act is destined first and foremost
to build up the womans bodily strength and to create a sort of reservoir of semen.
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Because, for the Baruya, this semen will become the milk she will give to her children
when they are born. Here fellatio is therefore an erotic physical act, but its imaginary
dimension is clear: womens milk is transformed semen. Furthermore, the social import
of this act is equally clear: men are the true source of strength and life. Fellatio and the
ingestion of semen thus belong to the arsenal of means by which mens domination of
women is established and expressed. Cunnilingus, the reciprocal of fellatio, is strictly
forbidden. The very idea that a man might touch a womans vagina with his mouth is
scandalous for the Baruya and provokes screams and even vomiting.
Let us go back to the flow of time and life for a Baruya. A few weeks have passed,
soot has blackened the walls of the house, and the couple can now make love, have
coitus. They will lie on the ground, but in the female part of the house, the side near
the door. The other part, on the far side of the hearth, is reserved for the man, who sleeps
there alone or with his male guests. How do they go about it? The woman is underneath, on her back, for it is forbidden for a woman to straddle a man for fear that the
juices from her sex, her vaginal secretions, might run out onto the mans belly and spoil
his strength. Sodomy is not practiced, not even in the homosexual relations between
boys. We will come back to this point later. That takes care of the positions, but a little
more needs to be said about the places and times for heterosexual intercourse. Concerning the place, it is forbidden to make love in cultivated gardens and in certain parts of
the forest reputed to be inhabited by evil spirits, especially mountain tops and wet
marshy zones.
The idea is that hostile beings live in these zones which can attack people through
their bodies. The semen and the vaginal fluids that spill onto the ground might be carried
down into the depths of the earth by the worms and snakes, which would take them to
the chthonian spirits, who are usually hostile to humans. This explains why, for the
Baruya, adulterous relations, which usually take place in the secrecy of the forest, are
even more dangerous for the individuals concerned and for society as a whole than
legitimate sexual relations.
But place is not the only thing that matters, there is also the time. The Baruya forbid
love-making when it is time to clear the forest for new gardens, or when it is time to
filter and evaporate the salt. The Baruya use salt as a currency, but they also use it in all
of their rites and associate it with semen and the strength it confers. If people were to
make love during this time, the salt might not solidify and could not be exchanged. Nor
is it permitted to make love when one of the family pigs is to be killed. This might make
the meat watery. And it is unthinkable to have intercourse when the woman has her
period, because menstrual blood is the most dangerous thing of all for men. At the start
of her period, the woman leaves the house and spends several days in a hut situated well
away from all dwellings. She cannot cook food for herself because her hands are polluted.
The other women feed her. The day she returns home her husband goes hunting, and
deposits one or several birds he has killed on the doorstep of the house, and then he
leaves. When the woman arrives, she picks up the birds, one at a time, sets fire to the
feathers and runs the flames over her hands, then over her body, especially around her
genitals and her armpits. The acrid odor of the burning feathers and sizzling skin
depollutes her. Having done this, she can once again touch food, cook it and resume
marital life with her husband. The same decontamination rites are performed each time
she gives birth, which she does in a shelter made of branches erected downhill from the
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village. This space is totally forbidden to men and is the counterpart of the mens house,
which stands above the village, houses the young initiates and is off limits to women
and children.
This list of prohibitions limiting, and therefore delimiting, the spaces and circumstances in which heterosexual intercourse can legitimately be performed attests that, for
the Baruya, this is an act which implicates the order of both the society and the cosmos.
As a result, the Baruya feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility whenever they make
love. They approach this act with a mixture of apprehension and anxiety, sentiments that
seem to be shared by both sexes, although the men exhibit more anxiety than the women.
We will see the reason for this when we analyze the male homosexual practices.
We are not through analyzing the representations the Baruya have of coitus. The
Baruya think that making love usually creates children. But they also think that a woman
can be made pregnant by a supernatural being (which does not mean in this case an
immaterial being, but simply one that is not visible or not recognizable). In their origin
myth, we saw that the first woman got pregnant from eating the fruit of a male tree.
Here we need to pause for a moment and look at their representation of the role of each
sex and of the bodily substances in the conception of a child. For the Baruya, the child
is made primarily from the mans semen. The woman is a recipient, and the uterus is
represented as a sort of netbag into which male semen is deposited. This becomes the
fetus. But in order to grow inside the womb the fetus needs to be fed at regular intervals with the mans semen. This is why, when a Baruya woman notices the first signs of
pregnancy, the couple intensify their sexual relations so as to nourish the fetus.
In other New Guinea societies, this would be entirely taboo, and the couple would
have to refrain from sexual intercourse until the child was born. For the Baruya, the man
is therefore the one who both engenders and nourishes, and his semen nourishes the
woman as well as the child; not only before she becomes pregnant but after each
menstrual period, and after the birth of each child when she returns to the house. After
childbirth, the woman spends two or three weeks in the menstrual hut, where she
receives from her husband, from her brothers-in-law and her own clansmen game which
she must eat in order to replenish her blood. When she gets home her husband must
give her his semen to drink so that she can replenish her strength.
As important as semen is for the Baruya, however, it still does not suffice to make a
child. The mans semen makes the bones and the flesh of the fetus, but not its nose, or
its eyes, mouth, fingers or toes. It is the Sun who puts the finishing touches on the human
fetus in the womans womb. From a certain point of view, for the Baruya, every person
therefore has one mother and two fathers: the social father, the mothers husband; and
the Sun, a super-father who is the source of the sacred objects and the social and cosmic
orders. Let it be noted in passing that the wild dog that lived with the first woman, and
had at one time devoured the head and another time the arms and legs of the child in
her womb conceived after eating fruit from the tree (this one was not forbidden), fills
the role of anti-Sun. The wild dog is the force that twice undid what the Sun had done.
This opposition between the Sun and the wild dog is one of the deep structures of Baruya
thought and of their mythic discourse.
For the Baruya, not only is it the Sun that completes the body of the child in the
womans womb, it is also he who, in the beginning, enabled human beings to have sexual
intercourse and to conceive children. A myth tells us, in effect, that in the beginning the
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first man and the first woman had sexual organs and an anus that were walled up. The
Sun threw a flint-stone into the fire, and the stone exploded piercing the mans penis
and the womans vagina as well as their anuses. Ever since, humans have been able to
copulate and defecate. And that is why, in the opening ceremony of the large-scale male
initiations, all fires are extinguished in all villages and, in the secrecy of the big ceremonial house, the primordial fire is rekindled from a spark produced by striking together
two sacred flint-stones.
But there is another version of this myth, which ascribes the opening of the sexual
organs not to the Sun, but to the primordial woman. Seeing that their genitals were
walled up, the woman stuck a sharpened bone from the wing of a bat into the trunk of
a banana tree. Not noticing the bone, the man impaled his penis on it and cut himself
open. Mad with rage and pain, he snatched up a sharp piece of bamboo and with one
swipe sliced open the womans vagina. In this version, the woman indirectly opens the
mans sexual organ, whereas then he opens hers directly. The Sun has disappeared. Both
versions contain the idea that violence must be done to bodies in order for them to
function as sexual beings. It is beyond the scope of this article to explain the existence
of these two versions within the same culture, but it needs to be done.
We have quickly reviewed where, when and how to make love, but we do not yet
know with whom one is allowed or forbidden to make love. To learn this, we must turn
to the Baruya kinship system. At the center of their system, which is patrilineal and of
the Iroquois type, there is a zone that is off-limits to sexual relations, where to make love
would be to commit incest. It is forbidden for a Baruya man to have intercourse with
his sister, with his mother and with his daughter. And for a Baruya woman, with her
father, with her brother and with her son. However the terms father, brother, mother,
sister do not mean the same thing here as they do in the West, where the kinship system
is cognatic i.e. ones ties with the fathers and with the mothers ascendants are recognized as equivalent. For the Baruya, the terminology is of the Eskimo type, i.e. the
fathers brother has the same status as the mothers brother and both are called by the
same term (uncle), and the edifice of kinship links together nuclear families, but not
broader groups such as lineages or clans.
For the Baruya, on the other hand, all of my fathers brothers are also my fathers, and
so all of their daughters are my sisters. It is forbidden for me to have intercourse with
them and to marry them. Conversely, since all of my mothers sisters are my mothers
their daughters are also my sisters, but in their case I could marry them because they
have been begotten by men belonging to different clans and therefore do not share the
same sperm as do the patrilateral parallel cousins. Alternatively, I am allowed to marry
my fathers sisters daughters who are my patrilateral cross cousins. But I will not marry
my mothers brothers daughters, who are also cross cousins (but matrilateral ones)
because I cannot reproduce my fathers marriage and again take a woman from the clan
my mother came from and for which my clan has given a woman. But although I do
not marry them, I can allow myself to make sexual innuendoes or even frankly obscene
jokes with them. I can even tease them by grabbing at their breasts in public. All of this
goes on amid general laughter and no on-looker is shocked.
I have gone into these details in order to forestall any temptation to project our
western images of the father, mother, sister, brother, husband or wife onto what the
Baruya mean by terms which look to us like equivalents of our own.
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I will add that the Baruya normally refrain from talking about sex and alluding to
certain parts of the body. When men do mention these they use a coded language. For
example, to talk about the penis they use a word that designates a flat-tipped arrow used
to kill birds without damaging their plumage. Furthermore, a married couple must never
touch each other in public. Their kissing is forbidden. However, women smother babies
in kisses. In addition to this physical reserve, a married couple must also curtail their
speech and never show intimacy in public. The man and the woman cannot call each
other by name in public. The wife uses man when she addresses her husband, and he
uses woman to address his wife. Custom also used to dictate that any woman, alone or
in a group, who met a man or a group of men coming the other way must stop and avert
her face, hiding it under her backcloth cape. Before the arrival of Europeans, the space
was also crosshatched with a system of split-level paths, the upper being reserved for the
men and the lower for the women.
Before going on to Baruya homosexual practices I would like to come back to the
issue of incest because, for the Baruya, human society resulted from and is founded on
incest, whereas today incest is strictly forbidden. We have here a double view of incest
that engenders a fundamental ambiguity about this taboo.
To become aware of this duality, once again one needs to know the Baruyas myths.
Their most secret myth is the one I have started to tell: the story of the adventures of
the first woman. What happened after Kurumbingac walled the wild dog, Djou, in the
cave with the intention of letting him die?
Kurumbingac continued on her way and once again ate fruit from the tree, and gave
birth, this time with no problem, to a boy. The child grew up and later made love
with his mother and from their intercourse a boy was born and then a girl. Later the
brother and sister made love, and from their intercourse were born the ancestors of
the Baruya and all the people who live in New Guinea.
Humankind (for the Baruya, before the Europeans arrived, humankind meant their
neighbors and a few other inhabitants of New Guinea) was thus believed to have come
from two episodes of incest: between a mother and her son, and between a brother and
his sister. Nowhere is there any mention of fatherdaughter incest.
In sum, the myth tells us that, for the Baruya, women existed before men (but not
before the masculine-gendered tree), that it was necessary to have recourse to incest in
order to engender the first humans, but that subsequently this practice was forbidden,
and the order that now governs society was set in place. For the Baruya this order means
both a social order and a cosmic order. But this social and cosmic order is first of all an
order between the genders, a sexual order, and only afterwards is it an order between the
lineages, villages and tribes. It is also an order between humans and supernatural powers.
All of these orders are embedded in the body, which explains the Baruyas fascination
with incest. For them, human beings are a result of incest; but they have renounced
incest and now take husbands and wives from outside their own lineage. Interestingly,
the Baruya express their ambivalence about this state of affairs openly. They say that
anyone who dared to marry his sister would be like a dog, because you see dogs coupling
with their sisters. They say that, in this case, the man and the woman would have to be
killed and it would be up to their brothers to do this since that way there would be no
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call for vengeance. But at the same time they say that it is too bad you cannot marry
your sister because the brother knows his sister, he is not afraid of her; while the woman
who is going to become his wife, and for whom he will have exchanged his sister, is a
foreigner and always represents a threat.
We will leave our analysis of sexual relations between men and women here and move
on to an essential piece that is needed to complete our picture of Baruya society: the
sexual relations among members of the same sex, and particularly, homosexual relations
between men. Strictly speaking, these do not take place between men, but between
pubescent adolescents and small boys who have just been separated from their mother.
A Baruya man must be married, and a married man cannot have homosexual intercourse
with a boy. There are no bachelors by choice. Some men live alone because they were
married and are now widowers. Nevertheless, there are very rare cases of men who never
marry because they are hermaphrodites. They entered the Mens House as boys, but as
the years passed their penis did not develop. As they had taken part in the secret rituals
of the male initiations the men were obliged to keep them in the Mens House, and they
are thereafter known as man-women. But a normal man gets married. Since once he is
married he makes love and his penis enters a womans vagina, it can therefore no longer
enter a boys mouth.
Male homosexuality among the Baruya is thus strictly confined to the world of boys
and adolescents. But these sexual relations are one-way only. It is the third and fourthstage initiates, young men between the ages of 15 and 20 having reached puberty, who
give the boys their semen to drink. Yet sometimes, and this is a closely guarded secret,
young boys can give their own semen to one of their group if his body has become very
weak, if he seems on the verge of losing his strength and his life. Several things are worth
noting here. As far as homosexual acts between men and the uses to which they put their
bodies are concerned, sodomy is completely excluded. The Baruya say that it was only
after the arrival of Europeans that they discovered people could sodomize each other.
Bursting with laughter, they explained that it was a soldier from one of the northern
tribes, where the homosexual practices included sodomy, who had offered money to a
young Baruya, explaining what he wanted him to do. Afterwards, the Baruya went
around the tribe explaining in each village, in the Mens Houses, what he had just done
in exchange for money, remarking that it had hurt and it was not a pleasant experience.
Since then people talk about it, but no one does it, not men with each other and even
less a man and a woman.
Homosexuality in the Baruya culture thus fundamentally provides a basis on which
to construct and affirm power relations between the genders and the generations. In a
way it is therefore more a political activity than an erotic one. For the young boys cannot
refuse the semen they are given, and should one try to do so, he is killed. His neck is
broken: his death disguised as a hunting accident, or the unfortunate result of a fall from
a tall tree. His mothers and sisters must know nothing. So from one generation to the
next, there circulates a male substance that is always emitted by the bodies of young men
who have had no contact with the world of women for years. This substance, free of any
female pollution, is at once the source of the mens superiority over women, the source
of human life, and the strength men give women so that they may overcome the original
weakness of their female body and carry out their tasks, bring children into the world,
work in the garden, carry heavy loads on their head, etc.
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But who, among the inhabitants of the Mens House, are the partners in these homosexual relationships? The donor must not belong to the lineage of the boys father or his
mother. Therefore the semen comes from beyond the circle of consanguines. The circle
closed to homosexual relations corresponds roughly to the space forbidden to heterosexual relations (the space of incest). Sperm, like women, must come from outside. The
couples in the Mens House are therefore formed of an older boy and a younger boy.
Between them one can observe many expressions of tenderness, many gestures which
are delicate, reserved and modest. Here there is room for desire, eroticism and affection.
It is very important to note that, from the age of 9 until the age of 20 or 22, Baruya
boys are no longer under the direct authority of their father but in the collective charge
of the older boys. The father has practically no more say in their upbringing. A male
group replaces him. The children are raised, educated and beaten by the older boys.
Often their mothers, recognizing their childrens cries, urge their husband to go up to
the Mens House and stop the beating. The father usually does not listen to his wife. If
he finally gives in to her insistent pressure, and goes to the Mens House, he is insulted,
ridiculed and even physically threatened by the 20-year-old warriors: We are treating
your son just like you and your co-initiates treated us when we were in his place. So get
out of here!
A Baruya boy loves his mother, loves his mothers brother because he cannot say no
to him, sometimes he loves his fathers brothers because he can always go to them for
help and protection, but he does not have much love for his father. The Baruya admire
the Great Men, the great warriors, the great shamans and above all the masters of ceremonies. One gets the impression that the machinery of their male initiations and the
group of young initiates take over the fathers role in the everyday socialization of the
boys. This all-male group is supervised by Great Men who, on exceptional occasions,
ensure certain functions warfare, shamanism and so on thus representing forces
serving the general interest.
Nevertheless, the female world has not totally vanished from the circle of the Mens
House. It is present for each initiate in the form of two young men, usually young
unmarried men from the mothers clan, who act as his sponsors. It was one of these who
took the child on his back when he was torn from his mother at the beginning of the
initiations and carried him, under a hail of blows, the two or three hundred meters
symbolically separating the group of mothers and sisters who had brought the small boys
for the group of men waiting for them. This moment is the last time the mother touches
or sees her child at close range for the next 10 years or so. Thereafter the man who carried
the child on his back, and shared the blows raining down on them, looks after him
during all initiation rites and then for the rest of his childhood and adolescence until
the third-stage initiations. During this time he calms his fears, takes care of him when
he is hurt, holds him on his lap. In short, he behaves like a mother within this world of
men. The female function moves out of the world of women.
We are starting to get a better sense of what all of these ritual and (for us) symbolic
practices mean, and the role they play in the construction of the social order that reigns
in Baruya society. What the men aspire to do is clearly to re-engender the boys independently of the world of women, erasing the fact that they were born from the womb of
a woman. From a certain standpoint these rituals constitute a male reappropriation of
the process of reproducing life, the essential stages of which take place in the female
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body. In the course of the initiations the mens group via the masters of the kwaimatnie,
the sacred objects which cause bodies to grow, drum into the boys the idea that they are
superior to women, that they must protect themselves from women, that they must stop
thinking about their mothers loving touch and so on. In short, they manufacture a male
personality that is gradually amplified in the boys imagination as the image of women
is derided, belittled and humiliated. But it would be to thoroughly misunderstand
Baruya society to think of the opposition between men and women as a simple opposition between two components one positive and the other negative of social and
cosmic reality.
The Baruyas deepest secret is that woman came before man. It is the women who
invented the sacred flutes, the secret name of which, revealed to the initiates, means
vagina. It is the women who invented the bow and clothing. In short, the Baruya recognize that women originally had infinitely greater creative powers than men. But they
explain that this creativity was a constant source of disorder, that the women, for
instance, turned the bows the wrong way around, killed too much game, and so on. The
men were obliged to step in and establish some kind of order so as to save society. They
did this by using violence on the women. A myth tells how the men became aware of
the power contained in the womens sacred flutes and decided to take them:
One day, while the women were away, the men sent one of their group, a young man,
to steal the flutes that were hidden under some skirts stained with menstrual blood.
The man thus broke a major taboo in order to capture the flutes. He put one of them
to his lips and drew forth a wonderful sound. Then he put them back where he had
found them. When the women returned, one of them wanted to play the flute, but
no sound came out. So the women gave the flutes to the men, who play their sacred
music on them. In another version, the women threw the now mute and useless flutes
to the ground. The men picked them up, and the flutes have played for the men ever
since.
In another narrative we are told that cultivated plants sprang from the body of a woman
assassinated by her husband and secretly buried by him in the forest.
From her cadaver grew the first cultivated plants. The man ate some, and his body,
which had been black and ugly, became shiny and fine-skinned. Later, assailed by
people wanting to know how he had got such fine skin, he led the men and the
women into the forest and had them take cuttings from the plants that had grown
out of the body of the dead woman and shoots of bamboo which they used to make
knives and so on. This is how horticulture came into being.
All of these accounts say the same thing. That women are more creative than men but
that, for the sake of society, men have used violence on them by stealing the flutes, and
by mentally assassinating them. All of these acts of violence inflicted on women in the
mythic accounts, in thought and by means of thought, go together with and legitimize
a whole series of violent acts which are less mental and less imaginary. In effect, Baruya
women do not inherit land, the main means of production. They are not allowed to
carry weapons, the main means of repression. They do not have access to the sacred
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objects or to the sacred knowledge, which give men a monopoly on the (imaginary)
power to act on the conditions of the reproduction of society and the cosmos. Last of
all, they do not dispose of their own person and body at the time of marriage, and they
do not pass their name on to their children.
The imaginary violence inflicted on women in the rites thus goes hand in hand with
real violence, which is psychological, physical, symbolic, political, material, and perpetrated on a daily basis. The Baruya stress that this curb on women must not be removed,
for the womens powers did not disappear after the men made off with them. Women
might recapture them at any time. That is why it is necessary, generation after generation, to initiate the boys and to circulate among them the male force contained in their
semen when it is emitted by a virgin body that has never had intercourse with a woman.
For the Baruya, the wild woman, who roams the forest alone and sets upon men, is the
cassowary. That is why the Baruyas great cassowary hunters are Great Men. But the
cassowary hunter may not spill the blood of his prey. Instead, he must catch it in a noose
trap, where it strangles to death. Then he must give the meat to the initiates to be
consumed in the Mens House. One can imagine all of the unresolved issues present in
the Baruya mans representation of the woman: admiration and jealousy of her powers,
and contempt for her weakness. But this contempt can never be unmitigated.
An indication of this ambivalence is their representation of menstrual blood. The
Baruya language has a special word for this female blood distinguishing it from the blood
shared by men and women. The idea that even a few drops of this blood could fall onto
a mans belly or defile his food terrifies the Baruya. At the same time, they know that a
woman who does not menstruate will not have children, and having children raises the
mans standing. One can see the ambivalence. Everything they say points to one idea.
Not that one must kill the father, but that one can never really kill ones mother. One
can only half-assassinate her.
In these accounts, the imaginary is caught in the act: its work consists of adding, by
means of thought, to one side of the real that which has been subtracted, by means of
thought, from the other side. We see the Baruyas imaginary male ancestors, the duplicates of the Baruya, robbing the original women of their powers that were stronger than
theirs and adding them to their own. We see them stealing the flutes, which are vaginas,
and adding them to the mens bull-roarers, which they whirl over their heads during the
ceremonies and which are the voices of the Yimaka, the forest spirits. The Yimaka are
said, at the time of the Wandjinia, to have shot magic arrows at some men. These arrows
became the bull-roarers, the musical instruments that are played along with the flutes
during initiations. But these arrows also gave men powers of death: the power to kill
enemies in war and game when hunting. Todays men thus imagine themselves as the
masters of the two combined sets of powers, those that originally belonged to the women
and their own. This whole imaginary arithmetic of addition and subtraction goes on
against the backdrop of a belief, the belief that these powers that were stolen from the
women could at any moment return to the women and be taken back. This belief
contains more than just an imaginary fear, it also contains the apprehension of a possible
reality.
It would be a mistake to think that this social order, which continually presupposes
and fosters the domination of one gender over the other, of men over women, is devoid
of conflicts or resistances. Women can be seen putting up various forms of resistance, of
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refusal to submit to all of these constraints. A woman can forget to cook her husband
food for several days. Or she can refuse to make love for weeks on end, even if it means
being insulted and thrashed. But the man must be discreet, because everything can be
heard in a Baruya village. The neighbors might laugh at them, and the man comes out
of it humiliated. But she can do worse. Sometimes a woman may pretend to be willing
to make love, but only in order to collect the semen running down her thighs, which
she will fling into the fire with a curse. Usually the man will commit suicide because he
believes he has been bewitched and is doomed to die.
Nevertheless such acts of resistance do not mean that, before the Europeans arrived,
women as a whole, or certain individual women, had envisaged a different social order,
had had some counter-model in mind. The very idea of their son not being initiated
horrifies them for, they say, no girl would want to marry him. We have come full circle.
Mens greatest strength thus does not lie in violence, in all the kinds of violence they
perpetrate on women. It lies in the fact that men and women alike share the same
representations of the body, of life, of the cosmic order. In short, their strength lies in
their subscription in different forms to be sure to shared imaginary and fantasy
worlds. It is these shared beliefs that are the greatest source of the mens strength, which
does not reside within themselves but in the womens contradictory consent to their own
subordination. When a Baruya woman watches the menstrual blood run between her
thighs, how can she not believe she is responsible for that of which she is the victim
responsible and guilty? In the end, all discourse on the body ultimately imposes silence.
You have only to see and experience yourself through this imaginary to have no alternative but to keep quiet and consent.
It seems possible to conclude with a number of general propositions. All of our
analyses lead back to one basic point: in all societies sexuality is pressed into the service
of many realities economic, political and so on which have no direct connection
with sex or gender. In the Baruya culture if you are born a woman, and not a man, you
cannot inherit land, you cannot carry weapons, you do not have access to the sacred
objects and you are deprived of the social, material, psychic or symbolic capacity to
represent the society and to identify yourself with the common good. Above and beyond
the personal, individual and collective subordination of women to men, of one gender
to the other, one can also observe the general subordination of one area of life, sexuality
in both its forms sexuality-as-desire and sexuality-for-reproduction to the necessities
dictated by the reproduction of other social relations such as economic or political.
What emerges is the place of sexuality within the structure of a society, both within and
beyond any personal relationship between individuals when they find themselves in front
of a father, mother, son, daughter, husband, brother, sister, wife, friend or enemy.
This general subordination of the sexual domain is realized, among other ways, by
the elaboration and implementation of a set of imaginary and symbolic representations
of the body and the sexes. From the start it is the sex which gives the body its identity,
makes it like or unlike other bodies and makes it at least externally a woman or a man.
Besides the flesh, blood and bones that everyone possesses whatever their sex, there are
differences in the organs and substances that one sex possesses and the other does not.
One has a penis the other a clitoris, one secretes semen the other milk, or menstrual
blood.
Among the Baruya, as we have seen, semen is thought at the same time as the source
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of life, as a force in itself and as a food that gives life its force. It is the opposite of
menstrual blood, which endangers this force that is above all the source of mens strength,
constantly threatens to make the cultivated fields barren, to turn the salt to water, to
cause the group to meet with defeat in war and so on. But this blood is not only the
negative opposite of semen: the Baruya know that a woman must have menstruated in
order to be fertilized. Thus life, children, mens standing, the strength of their lineages,
all in some way depend on the womans periods. Hence the ambiguity of these representations and oppositions, and the ambivalence of the Baruyas attitudes towards them. In
short, through these representations of the body, sexuality is constantly enlisted to testify
to the order that reigns in society or to testify to the order that should be reigning.
In sum, bodies, gender, and sex all work like ventriloquists dummies, which speak
words that do not originate with them to an audience they do not see with their blank
gaze. So it is not only sexuality and desire that are fantasized in the relations between
individuals and within society society itself is fantasized in sexuality. For the body
extends well beyond the domain of language. As the prevailing social order, and the even
more imaginary purportedly cosmic order, become embedded in the body they take on
different guises and hide their original nature, ultimately reducing individuals to silence.
These shared cultural and social representations of the body form a ring of constraints,
as it were, around each person, which from the start dictate the way he or she experiences him or herself and experiences others, appropriates him or herself and appropriates others. This ring of representations, of positive and of negative norms which
constitutes as many constraints concerning the body, operates much like the impersonal
sheath of the individuals intimate being, like an anonymous mental ego shared with all
other egos of the same sex, a common and impersonal ego inscribed in the singular ego,
in the personal ego from birth if not before.
Sexuality-as-desire always springs from an ego that contains the other. Not only the
other of the same sex or of the opposite sex, but all others insofar as they are the source
of the shared norms, representations and values to which each individual is subjected by
birth in the forms ordained by his or her sex. And it is not only sexuality-as-desire that
is subjected in advance, it is also sexuality-for-reproduction. But we must be wary of
misinterpreting the notion of reproduction. It is not their species that humans strive to
reproduce. It is the social group to which they belong, the social relationships within
which each new person they engender will take his or her place. When Freud declared
that the characteristically aggressive behavior of the male, the human male, served to
ensure the reproduction of our species because it made it possible to overcome female
passivity and resistance, he was advancing a biological view of reproduction, whereas
that does not seem to be the goal human beings are pursuing when they reproduce.
This remark provides a good opportunity to recall that, in most societies which now
exist on the face of the earth and in practically all of those that have gone before, desire
is not recognized as the necessary starting point for a legitimate union between the sexes.
You will marry a woman because she is a cross cousin, or because she is from the same
caste, or the same village, and because that is where society dictates you must choose
your wife. That does not preclude desire, even between people who did not know or
desire each other before the marriage. But in such conditions, spontaneous desire is seen
more as a potential threat to legitimate unions and to the application of societys norms,
of its law.
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When a young Baruya girl menstruates for the first time she is allowed to refuse the
game and the gifts sent by her fianc, who has gone hunting for her with his kinsmen.
If she rejects these gifts, she rejects the marriage. This is a very serious matter, but it is
a right that she can exercise once in her life. Thereafter she can never break the tie, except
by dying. If, once married, her desire draws her to other men, she can be put to death
or be forced to hang herself. Desire is thus systematically repressed, and pressed into the
service of reproducing the social order, perpetuating the lineages, and producing their
alliances. It is only of late in the evolution of western societies and a few others that individual desires have been entrusted with the heavy responsibility of choosing the other
in order to reproduce oneself and the society. Perhaps this is why the question of desire
has become so paramount in western societies today.
When one sees the role played by the Baruyas male initiations in manufacturing the
male personality and setting the distances they must keep from women, one understands the importance of Freuds suggestion that religion is the last, and in this sense
the necessary, instance of power insofar as power always involves the subordination of
sexuality, which is a constant source of discontent in all cultures.
Finally, this analysis of Baruya culture paves the way for two conclusions of a more
general nature. Society is inevitably constructed on the foundations of the sacrifice of
something that is deeply ingrained in human sexuality: this something is its fundamentally asocial character. Humankind is obliged to make social material out of sexual
material. In this sense, we could conclude, with Lacan, that there is very little sex in a
sexual act. But in reaching such a conclusion I believe we run the risk of blocking out
an irreducible fact, namely, what sex brings which enables sexuality to comply with the
metamorphoses imposed on it by all societies and all cultures. Sex brings pleasure, jouissance. With your sexual organs you can pleasure yourself, be pleasured by others and take
pleasure with others. This is a fundamental fact and a force, and it is this force which is
placed at the service of society or turned against it.
But sex also brings suffering. Pleasure, frustration, and suffering: it is into these bodily
states induced by sexuality that, at any moment, all states of the society, all of its fantasies,
like all states of the individual, and all of his or her fantasies, can burrow and take root.
Sexuality is the privileged body site where the logic of the individual melds with the logic
of society, where ideas, images, symbols and conflicting interests are embodied. It is
also there, along this suture, that the two kinds of repression organize themselves which
enable the individual and society to exist and subsist, the two kinds of repression which
engender the unconscious life of the mind: repression as the dressing up as something
else of everything in sexuality that is not compatible with peoples conscious activities,
and repression as the disguising of everything in the content of these social relations
which wounds, which unevenly affects individuals and the groups to which they belong
by virtue of their occupation, their function, their culture, their caste, or their clan.
It is not certain that psychoanalysts know how to go about untangling the intertwined
but distinct effects of these two kinds of repression in the discourse of those whose words
talk to them. Nor is it certain that anthropologists are capable, with the methods they
possess, of accessing the full inner alchemy which transforms collective fantasies into
individual fantasies and vice versa.

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GODELIER What is a sexual act?

Note

1. At Tonga Both men and women seem to have little knowledge of what we call
delicacy in Amours; they rather seem to think it unnatural to suppress an appetite
originally implanted in them perhaps for the same purpose as hunger or thirst, and
consequently make it often a topic of public conversation, or what is more indecent
in our judgement, have been seen to cool the ardour of their mutual inclinations
before the eyes of many spectators. (James Cook, Journal on Board of His Majestys
Bark Resolution, in J.C. Beaglehole (annotated edition) The Journals of Captain James
Cook on his Voyages of Discovery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19551967,
vol. 3, p. 145.)
Labillardiere tells us that one day, at Tonga, having chanced to enter a native
dwelling, he surprised a member of his crew allowing himself the greatest liberties with
one of the prettiest persons on the island, and that under the gaze of the head of the
house, calmly sitting in the midst of his household. (J.J.H. de Labillardiere (1799)
Relation du voyage a la recherche de la Perouse fait sur ordre de l Assemblee constituante,
pendant les annees 1791, 1792 et pendant la 1re et la 2e annee de la Republique francaise. Paris: Jansen, vol. 2, p. 130.)
References

Godelier, M. (1976) Le Sexe comme fondement ultime de lordre social et cosmique

chez les Baruya de Nouvelle-Guine. Mythe et ralit, in A. Verdiglione (ed.)
Sexualit et pouvoir, pp. 268306. Paris: Payot.
Godelier, M. (1989) Sexualit, Parent et Pouvoir, La Recherche, special issue on
sexuality 20(213): 114155.
Herdt, G. (1981) Guardians of the Flutes. Idioms of Masculinity, a Study of Ritualized
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Herdt, G. (1982) Rituals of Manhood. Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Herdt, G. (1984) Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of
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Herdt, G. and R.J. Stoller (1990) Intimate Communications. Erotics and the Study of
Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Knauft, B. (1987) Homosexuality in Melanesia, The Journal of Psychoanalytic
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Lvi-Strauss, C. (1950) Introduction luvre de Marcel Mauss, in Marcel Mauss,
Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. English
translation: Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, translated by Felicity Baker
(1987). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Malinowski, B. (1931) The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia. London:
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Mead, M. (1931) Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow
Quill Paperbacks.
Meigs, E. (1984) Food, Sex and Pollution, a New Guinea Religion. Piscataway, NJ:
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 3(2)

Strathern, M. (1987) Dealing with Inequality. Analysing Gender Relations in Melanesia

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Address: Directeur dEtudes lEHESS, 54, bd. Raspail, 75006, Paris, France. [email: godelier@ehess.fr]

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