MOIETY – NOT MY FAVOURITE WORD
"In the evening we see the dark and the red glow. These were divided by the Dreaming into the two groups of skin names: Kingili and Wurlurru. The red ones are the Wurlurru and the black are Kingili. Each Warumungu person belongs to one of these two groups, and these in turn are divided into sixteen punttu." (Michael Jampin in Kimberly Christen "Aboriginal Business" 2008:248-249)
A key feature of the Warumungu cosmos - including the horizon at dusk - consists of Wurlurru and Kingili - two complementary opposite 'hemispheres'.
I was surprised, as i was drafting this work, to see the word ‘moiety’ come up as Word of the Day on my Dictionary app. It is not a common word nor a word that is easy to warm to.
According to Dictionary it comes from a Latin word for ‘middle’. I find that interesting since a 'moiety' social arrangement, in modern anthropology, is an instance of a wider category called 'dual organisation'.
Two complementary opposite hemispheres is how I regard 'moiety' - same as we have two complementary opposed parts to our brain - and both are necessary for a 'full-brainer'. There are a lot of 'half-brainers' around, though.
By way of illustration you could generalise and say that, just as modern life consists of a vertical arrangement, with an upper class on top and a working class below, some societies which have moieties have two complementary opposite halves side by side.
While it is tempting to see a hint of a moiety system in the two opposite “Left” and “Right’ parts of Westminster Parliament, that difference with a moiety system is that, in Parliament, only one side is in power at a time.
In a moiety system, both sides enjoy some power at the same time and no side enjoys all power at the one time. This keeps life balanced. When life starts to become unbalanced, some event will take place to ensure it returns towards a more balanced position as though twin 'governors' were in play.
Modern life is dominated by single and jealous governors - and lif is way out of balance as a result.
One of the Dictionary app meanings given for ‘moiety’ is “Anthropology. One of two units into which a tribe or community is divided on the basis of unilineal descent.”
The idea that moieties are ‘based on unilineal descent’ is exactly what i take issue with.
Behind this lies concerns about transposing categories (as part of a larger configuration of categories) from modes of thought which have cyclical notions of time and Being into modes which privilege linear notions of time and non-cyclical notion of Being.
If we could map both First Peoples and our own universes of meaning – or, better still, unconscious-in-culture arrangements, including our own - and relate these to our respective systems of signification, we may see some familiar matters in a new light.
Following my anthropological mentor the late Professor Jan Pouwer, for me the place of complementary opposition is fundamental if the forms of representation we craft are to do justice to the Ways of First Peoples.
The picture of life which can be crafted from Warumungu Ways according to a complementary opposite approach is very different to the type of picture which was crafted by modern Australian anthropologists from Radcliffe-Brown onwards.
While the 1901 fieldwork of Spencer and Gillen provided a very clear picture of the role of complementary opposite moieties - Wurlurru and Kingili - in Warumungu life, the role of descent based theory resulted in a different model being imposed on Warumungu peoples lives.
STANNER’S FIELDWORK
A careful examination of Stanner's fieldwork provides an important exception to the notion of the place of 'descent' in relation to the 'totem,'
In 1934, W.E.H. Stanner spent a productive if short time with Warumungu people and he found a remarkable exception to the picture of Spencer and Gillen regarding descent of the totem being, in some sense, fundamentally paternal.
Stanner had visited Warumungu people specifically to “… re-examine several tribes studied by Spencer and Gillen in order to obtain, if possible, more exact information of the local organisation, totemic systems and kinship systems of these tribes …” (Stanner 1935 1979:1)
He wrote of Warumungu people:
“Questions of spirit-children did not seem important to my informants. They seemed to reason from an established principle that a child “always” inherited (‘”took”) its father’s country and mangai, except in the case of marriage into the mother’s mother’s brother’s son’s daughter subsection. For example, an A1 man marrying an A2 woman has a C2 child, i.e. in the opposite moiety. This child could not inherit the father’s mangai. One informant said that such a child would be “nothing belonga me”. It would continue to live with its father, but could not inherit the father’s mangai.” (Stanner 1935 1979:29)
That is, Jappanangka (A1 ) marries Namikili (A2) and children are Jampin and Nampin (C2).
{Refer Diagram from Stanner page 11 in previous post.}
{Refer Diagram from Warumungu Picture Dictionary page 12 in previous post.}
Stanner also documented an actual case of this where, despite the father’s wishes that his son take his Wurlurru totem, there was a big dispute. The collective outcome overrode the father’s wishes:
“Everyone said the boy would have to take another totem of the Kingili moiety, and this is what eventually happened.” (Stanner 1935 1979:29)
In other words, the high correlation of mangaya between fathers and sons is an outcome of a very high degree of correct types of marriage (within a range). The best type, as Stanner notes, is that where a man’s son continues the totemic line without interruption.
You might be able to say, in such ideal situations, bodily and spiritual reproduction aligned.
In the case of second choice marriages, which may explain the exceptions noted by Spencer and Gillen, the degree of alignment is not ideal, but the resulting children remain within the same moiety as the father.
But, when life results in other choices having to be made, bodily reproduction and spiritual reproduction go badly out of kilter (from the viewpoint of the husband of the child’s mother).
The ideal arrangement – father and son having aligned mangaya relations – is an outcome resulting from a complex interplay of exchanges between men. Patrilineal descent of the totem, so called, is not a basic structuring principle of Warumungu life.
The rights in the reincarnation of the mangaya lie not with the moiety amongst whom, under ideal conditions, the men have their Being signified by a particular Dreaming but – rather – the rights in the reincarnation of mangaya lie with the men of the opposite moiety.
In other words, this is not a case of patrilineal descent but of a kind of double helix spiralling dance between interrelated complementary opposites. The locus of responsibility lies not with an individual, nor with fathers and sons, but with counterbalancing significant others.
In his Warumungu land claim report Justice Maurice came to a conclusion:
"This conclusion means that those Aboriginal people who can be recognised as traditional Aboriginal owners of land in this land claim will be those who were always able to say, of the relevant parts of the claimed land, 'That is my country' as distinct from those who could only (sic-R) say 'That is my mother's country', or 'father's mother's' or 'mother's mother's', and so on. In this way, the words of ordinary speech - whether among Aboriginal people in Aboriginal languages or between Aborigines and non-Aborigines - and the recognition of Aboriginal land rights will coincide in the manner which common sense would suggest." (Maurice 1988:130)
We are dealing with a different social universe to that of Western common-sense. And this different social universe is one which life itself has spun, following a much higher ‘logic’ of survival than those forms of logic familiar in the Age of Reason.
Stanner realised the importance of his conclusion regarding moieties not being patrilineal based:
“In other words, both moieties and sub-sections descend matrilineally and indirectly. This is of the greatest theoretical interest …” (Stanner 1935 1979:13)
To understand why the straight up and down notions of descent are secondary to a more complex interplay of forces requires an appreciation of the dynamics of exchange between groups – an appreciation of something which it took modern anthropology some time to realise lies at the very foundations of most known forms of marriage.
Firstly, in the early days of modern anthropology, there was an expectation that patrilineal descent would play a fundamentally important role in First Peoples lives. Life was a straight up-and-down matter, with marriage taking place to form new families.
Since the time of the fieldwork of Spencer, Gillen (1901) and Stanner (1934) new light was shed on these dynamics by the theoretical work of Levi-Strauss. His late 1940s and 1950s work on the Elementary Structures of Kinship demonstrated that, the father-son relationship, in kinship systems, is logically secondary to that of a child’s Mother’s Brothers.
Incest taboos served as directives to exchange between groups (and groups of men according to Levi-Strauss). Unlike modern modes of life, where marriages require no relationship between the families of husband and wife, these incest-taboo based directive exchanges have remained an important part of First Peoples Ways of life into contemporary times.
Radcliffe-Brown (who privileged the nuclear family and descent as part of his conception of social structure) had raised the problem of the curious role of the influence of the Mother’s Brother. Why should this man have any influence? For Radcliffe-Brown, this man was a sort of male Mother.
Very briefly stated, and contra early 20th century Western ideas, Levi-Strauss demonstrated that the group who exchange a women to another group retain a strong right in the child of that woman. This strong right can override that of the father.
Accordingly, the Mother’s Brother was not a secondary “add-on” to an imaginary basic nuclear family (mother, father, children), but a necessary and prior condition to that family being able to be formed at all.
One group of men forego their ‘rights’ in the women of their group - ‘sisters’ - in order to enter into exchange relations with another group which does the same and thus both groups obtain ‘wives’. Life transcends itself and reaches new heights. The simple workings of biology (if this is indeed a viable alternative in earlier times) are transformed by a system of signs.
So, to return to Stanner’s exception, when a Jappanangka man married a Namikili woman (both of whom are in the Wurlurru moiety) the children of that union do not ‘belong’ to the Jappanangka man (or his Wurlurru agnates) but to the Kingili group. And the identity of the children is that into which they would have been born if the mother had married the correct way.
While the realities of life have overridden the ideal – and a less than ideal marriage has taken place from the orthodox perspective – the price for this ‘shortcoming’ is not an additional burden on members of Kingili group.
Balance is restored to life by assigning the children a mangaya identity as would have been the case if a ‘proper’ marriage had taken place.
And the reason for this is plain to see – there have been a host of other and prior exchanges which have taken place in order for that Namikili woman to be born. Her children should be born into a predetermined place in life. To default on the complex exchange relationships would call many other done deals into question.
There is always a reigning system of reciprocities in social life and this has a major influence on how life is to be interpreted.
The process by which First Peoples align a contradiction between events and cultural codes is well known. The strong tendency is to preserve the cultural code rather than to rework the cultural code in light of the event.
Aram Yengoyan provides a good account of this:
“By structure I mean the rules, models, and codes which are mental constructs and may occasionally be verbalised. Structures pertaining to social and symbolic institutions are paramount in Aboriginal cultures for it is these models or codes which govern behaviour and establish the range of choice. In the Aboriginal case, not only does structure dictate events in that the event is a response to the structure, but when events are wrong, such as marital arrangements, the event is changed to conform to the rule of marriage. The conception of choice has little or no impact on structures, since the latter are considered as givens and thus choice and the accumulation of options does not determine structures.” (1976:121-122)
It is this feature which makes First Peoples Ways incredibly resilient to the blows which come between how life is ideally lived and what has to happen for life to continue.
By the same token, First Peoples do not sacrifice their realities in order to comply with rigid Western frameworks forcefully imposed from without.
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