THE INTANGIBLE WEALTH OF PARTIBLE PERSONS1 VANESSA LEA State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), So Paulo, Brazil

INTRODUCTION For a variety of reasons, which will hopefully become clear in the course of this paper, Marilyn Stratherns writings have provided me with much food for thought over the years. One of the themes common to the Hageners with whom she deals and the Mebengokre of Amazonia is the overarching importance of wealth. Though they are of different kinds: shell wealth, pigs and money in the New Guinea highlands, versus names and heritable prerogatives in lowland South America, their circulation serves equally well to objectify relationships. Stratherns writings on Melanesia helped me to solve the conundrum of the super-abundance of wealth (nekretx) among the Mebengokre.2 Initially (1986) I regarded it from the standpoint of totemism, in levistraussian terms, that is, as the distinguishing features or emblems of Houses. However, the sheer proliferation of riches, entailing their apparent redundancy as emblems, made it evident that there was more to them than the distinctive heritage of Houses. Stratherns works (1988, 1999 & passim) have everted my understanding of the Mebengokres conception of property and ownership. What I now envisage as circulating are the partible aspects of persons rather than objects of wealth. The Mebengokre are an indigenous people situated in Central Brazil, with a population of approximately 6.300,3 inhabiting some nineteen villages in the states of Par and Mato Grosso. They are characterized by circular villages, with a mens house situated at the centre of the village plaza, or patio.4 The difference between matri-houses (or clans), located in a specific portion of the village circle in relation to East and West, versus mere dwellings (or houses), is invisible to the naked eye but clearly evident in the discourse of the Mebengokre. Women who are related matrilineally are expected to live either under one roof or in neighbouring dwellings; in either case they refer to themselves as being of the same House, or house location (kikre djam dj; house/ standing / place). In typological terms, the Mebengokre unequivocally approximate a gift economy rather than one based on commodities. However, the focus of this paper is on partibility and not on what constitutes gifts versus commodities. The discussion of gifts

2 has gravitated towards economics ever since Mausss canonical essay (1923-4), a tendency further advanced by Gregory (1982). Foster (1990:442 and 446) mentions women being compensated for keening with gifts or prestations of pork at mortuary feasts in New Ireland. Mebengokre women are likewise reciprocated for keening, and for dancing and singing with their relatives. There is no specific term for gift in Mebengokre. One can say that someone just (tu) gave him or her something, in the sense of a gift. The Mebengokre characterize nonIndians by the fact that absolutely everything has to be paid for (pjn) amongst them, even a glass of water. They define themselves in contrast to this as generous and as giving things to their relatives without exacting a return. I have avoided talking about the bestowal of names and the transmission of wealth as gifts precisely because, despite Mausss affirmation (1923-4) that the donor of a gift gives something of himself, Stratherns notion of partibility takes this idea a step further in the direction of personhood and away from the question of economics. The OUP defines a prestation as a payment in money or services that is due by custom, something totally inapplicable to the transmission of names and prerogatives. This same dictionary gives one of the meanings of bestowal as gift, so it should be kept in mind that I am focusing on constituting persons and not gift giving, for the latter still carries connotations of things rather than detachable parts of persons.

HOUSES, MATRI-HOUSES OR CLANS One of the reasons that I have insisted for so long on characterizing the Mebengokre as a house-based society (1995 and passim) is because this is how they describe themselves and also because, like house-based societies generally, it is a heritage of material and immaterial wealth that defines the distinctive identity of each matri-house.5 The position of the Houses is rooted in the mythological past but they do not have founding ancestors as such. Any female who emerges from a house, as from a uterus, is a descendant in a line stretching back to the origins of time. The Hugh-Joneses (1979, 1995) mention the metaphor of the house as a uterus in the northwest Amazon. The Mebengokre do not make this explicit, but the recursive nature of their matrihouses, positioned in relation to the path of the sun, makes the comparison with a uterus self-evident. The heritage or legacy of a House may be enriched by the incorporation of wealth from in-marrying affines who lack uterine descendants, or it may be

3 impoverished by theft.6 Ancestral feats, such as the slaying of the first non-Indian by a Mebengokre, also increment a Houses legacy. This historic episode originated the right to use a red hat in ceremonies, commemorating the trophy removed from the corpse of the victim. It can be described in English as an heirloom, not because a specific hat is handed down from one generation to the next, but because it is the right to wear such a hat that is transmitted. Heritable adornments are obtained, or made anew, for each subsequent user. Houses may thrive in terms of membership, occupying whole sections of a village circle, besides being distributed among numerous villages, or they may be annihilated by enemies who usurp their wealth. My research covered a total of twenty three Houses. There is consequently a huge demographic imbalance in the size of Houses. This is in no way correlated with the quantity and quality of the legacy of a Houses wealth. All Houses own personal names, adornments, songs and ceremonial roles. Their male members have the right to consume specific portions of meat and their female members have the right to raise certain animals as pets. One House provides the hereditary ceremonial leaders, key figures in all major rituals. Their specialist knowledge originated from a bat-boy adopted into the House when the rest of the bat people were exterminated by the Mebengokre. To another House is attributed the origin of formal friendship, ceremonial female wailing and even the pupils of the eyes. Others have less significant legacies.

NAMES AND NEKRETX

Among the Mebengokre, wealth circulates not as gifts between partners but as bestowals from an adult to a baby or child. What the two phenomena share in common is the distinction between a same-sex donor and recipient. The rationale of all major Mebengokre ceremonies is to confirm beautiful names, transforming their bearers into beautiful people.7 It is on these same occasions that adults transmit ceremonial roles to their same-sex successors. The Mebengokre onomastic system entails the distinction between the eponym: one whose name is transmitted to another, and the name-giver who transmits the name in question. Sometimes the eponym is simultaneously the name-giver, but when the eponym has already died (as is frequently the case) then the name-giver is not necessarily of the same sex as the name-receiver. Though heritable wealth is usually specific to one sex or the other, a woman may transmit the names and

4 prerogatives of a dead male relative to his successor and vice versa in the case of female names and wealth. The reason for placing names and prerogatives in the same category, as far as the Mebengokre are concerned, is that they are transmitted in an identical manner. Prerogatives are not inherited automatically by dint of birth; most of them are transmitted individually from one of their present owners to his or her heir.8 Otherwise they are lent out to a usufructuary who later returns them to the matri-house that owns them or, alternatively, the right of retransmission is simply relinquished to the owners. Certain objects, such as masks and gourd rattles, are stored in a specific matri-house, rather than belonging to any particular individual. It is difficult to give a synthetic picture of the baroque nature of Mebengokre nekretx. The diversity of feather adornments exploits to the full the rich biodiversity of the Amazonian forest and savanna, especially macaws, parrots and the yellow tailed japu. Besides representing a wide colour spectrum, different types of feathers are used: tail and wing feathers, down, small petal like feathers and large feathers, either whole or cut down the middle, on their own, stuck into wax helmets or in headdresses of many shapes and sizes. The partibility of birds and other animals is explored to the full. After eating the flesh of animals and birds, the men of a specific House use a toucan beak inserted through a hole in the lower lip, others use jaguar or monkey teeth necklaces, or belts of tapir hooves. Trophies obtained in the past from non-Indians inspire various distinctive adornments and bodily extensions such as mirrors hung from bandoleers, raised umbrellas, and cloth capes worn around the shoulders. The diversity of ceremonial roles and songs is too diverse to attempt to describe within the space of this paper.

THE MAKING OF PERSONS

Parents fabricate the raw material of personhood that is subsequently constituted as persons, as such, by the cross-sex sibling of the mother and father, or by the grandparents. It was Melatti (1976) who first contrasted the genitors (M & F) and the name-givers as mutually exclusive categories among the northern J speaking peoples (a category that includes the Mebengokre). Relations to the father are dissolved when the individual dies. They are perishable as is the flesh. Women relinquish the names that they receive from their FZs and though men transmit formal friends to their children this is essentially a vicarious category of people, in sharp contrast to matrilineal links

5 which connect the living to the mythical ancestors, and to the origins of each matrihouse. The kinship terminology of the Mebengokre is referred to in the literature as Omaha. The mothers brother belongs to the same category as the maternal and paternal grandfather (nhnget), and the fathers sister belongs to the same category as the maternal and paternal grandmother (kwatj) [see diagram below]. It is exclusively these categories of relatives who transmit names and nekretx to their same-sex tabdjw. Ideally a man transmits names and prerogatives to his sisters son, and a woman to her brothers daughter. The cross-sex sibling relation of the Mebengokre is reminiscent of that of the Trobrianders in so far as it is the cross-sex sibling pair that creates persons in a non-sexual way.

Kin terms for female ego nhnget kwatyj ` nhnget kwatyj `

nhnget kwatyj `

bam

bam

bam

nhnget kwatyj `

nhnget djwoj

n kak

` kamy kanikwyj kamy

ego

` kanikwyj

kamy

kanikwoj

kra kak

tabdjwy `

kra

kra

tabdjwy `

tabdjwy `

tabdjwy `

Gloss of terms nhnget = mother's father, father's father, mother's brother mother's brother's son... nhnget djwyj = true nhnget ` kwatyj = mother's mother, father's mother, father's sister... ` tabdjwy = brother's children, children's children, ` father's sister's children's children... n = mother, mother's brother's daughter... n kak = pseudo mother bam = father... kamy = brother... kanikwoj = sister... kra = child (son or daughter), sister's child ('child')...

The thin line indicates name transmission

This diagram illustrates that, from the point of view of ego, the matrilateral cross-cousin is a classificatory mother (and ideally ones mothers namesake). This signifies that (seen the other way around) female egos patrilateral cross-cousins are her

6 classificatory children.9 Female ego must either return the names lent to her by her FZ to her FZDD, classified as tabdjw by both these women, or relinquish them to the owning House. The onomastic system eclipses the pseudo symmetry implied by the apparent reciprocity of a brother naming his sisters son and this sister naming his daughter. The brother returns his name to his natal House, producing a substitute for himself in the sense that his detachment from his natal House (in marriage) is compensated by his new head10 (kr ny; head new), the vocative term for sisters son or grandchild (man speaking). The sister supposedly reciprocates, naming her brothers daughter, but this name-receiver enjoys only lifelong usufruct of this name. It is as if she were incubating it, maintaining it for retransmission to the granddaughter of her name-giver, the heiress in the House where the name originated. When a name is transmitted from a woman to her DD, this name-receiver has the right to retransmit it to a tabdjw of her choice at some later date. In Hagen (Strathern 1999:112) it is the maternal kin who care for you only if you care for them. Among the Mebengokre, for the women to get back their brothers names and wealth for their sons, rather than retrieving them only for their daughters sons, they must treat them generously, giving them food from their gardens whenever possible. Men are explicit that they only transmit their names and wealth to their sisters sons when well treated by their sisters, otherwise they transmit usufruct of them to their grandchildren. Any self-respecting person has around ten names, but they may have as many as thirty. This also applies to their inherited prerogatives. This means that different types of enchainment are involved between donors and recipients according to whether one has to return (or relinquish) names and nekretx or whether one can use them to forge new relationships for oneself as their donor.11 It is significant to the Mebengokre when Strathern affirms (1999:138) that dispositional authority can be separated from other claims to ownership. The Mebengokre may possess names and nekretx as lifelong usufructuaries without the right to retransmit them, whereas one who receives names and wealth from ones own House has the right to dispose of them to a successor of ones choosing.

SUBSTANCE & ESSENCE

In the matrilineal Trobriands, mortuary payments eliminate a womans ties to her affines (Strathern, 1988:234). This is reminiscent of the fact that, among the

7 Mebengokre, ones relationship to ones paternal kin dissolves along with the flesh, when the names and other wealth are reclaimed by the matri-house that had lent them out to the daughter of one of its brothers (or sons). Strathern (1988: 251) aptly remarks that in some situations, such as paternal feeding on the Trobriands substance remains on the surface. What is within has no substance.12 As Nimuendaj (1939: 80) noted with reference to the Apinaj (Amerindians closely related to the Mebengokre), food and behavioural taboos performed by parents to ensure the wellbeing of their children involve a mystical link between them. This link dissolves at death whereas names and nekretx correspond to the spiritual essence of persons that is perpetuated beyond the space of a life-time. When a person dies, his or her names and nekretx revert to their place of origin (dj kraj; place origin or beginning): the owning matri-house, enabling them to be retransmitted to a living person, objectifying new relations. The foetus is formed predominantly, if not exclusively, from semen. Men from unrelated language families in the area of the Xingu park state in self-congratulatory terms how hard they must work to produce a child, the foetus being built up gradually over the course of repeated sexual relations. It is this same phenomenon that accounts for the possibility of multiple and thus partible paternity, with a principal father and another who has helped. 13 The practice of couvade, common across Amazonia, appears to me to be a mechanism for consolidating paternity.14 To practice food and behavioural taboos is a way of acknowledging ones paternal responsibility towards a child, a long term commitment. Once a baby is born, the relationship between father and child is objectified most forcefully not by something transacted between them but by behavioural and alimentary restraint on the part of the father. I was told of various fathers who had inadvertently killed their child by chopping down a tree or shooting a gun when it was still a new-born baby.

HOUSES VERSUS CLANS AND ANTHROPOLOGYS DISCOVERY OF THE BODY The social construction of kinship has occupied the lime-light during recent years in anthropology, though this is merely one perspective which should not exclude others. When I began fieldwork in the late 1970s, Melanesia attracted the attention of Amazonianists as an ethnographic region that had rid itself of the shackles of classical models imported from Africa, notably the ubiquity of descent as the basis of social organization (the latter exemplified by Fox, 1967). In the wake of the article by Barnes

8 (1962), Amazonianists set out to find models deemed more appropriate to local realities. What anthropologists discovered as a substitute for classical models was the body and personhood. A frequently cited article by Seeger, Da Matta and Viveiros de Castro (1979) represented the crest of a new wave in global anthropology rather than a definitive epistemological break. The body and personhood have prevailed locally (in Brazilian anthropology) for nearly three decades. What generally lurks behind both these notions is the question of subjectivity, a quintessential euro-american preoccupation, with the body figuring as the tangible starting-off point. There is no convincing evidence that the symbolism attached to the body is more significant in Amazonia than elsewhere in the world [see, for example, Strathern, M. (1988), Busby (1997), and Lambek and Strathern, A. (1998)]. Strathern has never been an enthusiastic advocate for the use of the term clan in Melanesia. Nevertheless, the analogies and contrasts with this authors writings on Melanesia, including her comparison of the patrilineal societies of the Highlands and the matrilineal regimes of the Massim seaboard, have led me, for the purposes of this paper, to reread the Mebengokre in the key of clans. Focusing on exogamy as a major defining characteristic makes sense of developing my analysis in these terms. Despite now recognizing the Mebengokre as matrilineal I find myself continuing to prefer to talk of Houses or matri-houses (subdivided into dwellings) as the term clan, in Amazonia at least, seems unable to disencumber itself of its Africanist overtones.15 Heelas (1979), writing on a neighbouring and linguistically related people, the Panar, described as spatial descent groups what subsequent researchers (Schwartzman [1987] and Ewart [1990]) described as clans. J.C. Crocker was equally hesitant about how to characterize the more distantly related Bororo, described by Lvi-Strauss (1958) as having matri-clans. S. Hugh-Jones (1995) reread the social organization of the Barasana in the light of Levi-Strausss writings on house-based societies, focusing on their houses rather than sibs (patri-clans), and this shows that the boundaries between social types are not as clear cut as one could presume, or even hope for.

MARRIAGE An additional motive for viewing the Mebengokre in the light of matrilineality is the flimsiness of marriage ties, something often associated with this type of social organization.16 Research into the question of marriage uncovered the fact that many elderly people of both sexes had had a series of marriage partners during the course of

9 their lifetimes, and few women have all their children with the same husband. Marriage is signalled by co-residence and economic cooperation. When it ends, at the instigation of either party, it is the husband who must find a new place to live, something that explains the anxiety of divorced men and widowers to remarry as soon as possible. In various parts of the world there is thought to be some kind of substance, such as blood, that connects descendants of an ancestor, preventing marriage occurring for a certain number of generations. It is as if the difference between the closure (bouclage) of elementary and semi-complex systems resembled an elastic-band that can be stretched to varying degrees. In the dravidianate systems that characterize much of Amazonia there are short cycles that may be repeated with each new generation, as with bilateral cross-cousin marriage. In systems like that of the Mebengokre, on the contrary, the closure of the cycle (or marriage to a cognate) is only permitted after the eradication of close ties. This could explain the all pervasive distinction between the true owners of names and nekretx and the usufructuaries who must return them to the owners, thereby effecting the dissolution of the relationship between donor and recipient, leaving the way open for marriage to take place once again between their respective descendants. The relationship of formal friendship (abundantly described in the

anthropological literature on J speaking peoples) can be analysed as a mechanism for eclipsing relationships (which could not otherwise be eradicated). Formal friends (krab djw) of both sexes are inherited patrilineally and are considered a sui generis category, being neither relations (ombikwa) nor non-relations (ombikwa kt). In a close-knit, mainly endogamous community, many people are related bilaterally to their village coresidents, making it difficult to acquire a supply of non-relatives among whom to find a spouse. Formal friendship contributes towards this possibility, though one should never marry a formal friend. As a woman, I ideally select one of my formal friends, of my daughters generation, as her husband. Formal friendship generally prevails over cognatic kinship relations and it is in this sense that it eclipses traces of kinship, reopening the possibility of marriage. A mother-in-law whose daughters husband is her formal friend continues to classify him as such, rather than as a son-in-law. She avoided him as her cross-sex formal friend and continues to do so as her daughters husband. The daughter in question acquired her own formal friends from her father and so her mothers formal friends are merely that, people who engage in a joking relationship with her.

10 Formal friendship originated, mythically, between two brothers and this institution can be analysed as involving the exchange of women between patrilines. This viewpoint is eclipsed by the empirical circulation of men among women. However, the possibility of complementary readings of the situation should be kept in mind. To appeal to what the Mebengokre say is of little help in deciding which logic is prevalent as I do not recall people arguing either that matri-houses exchange men or that patrilines exchange women. When asked where one finds a spouse, the Mebengokre and other J will sometimes say that one should marry someone from across the patio, but this seems to amount to no more than a metaphor indicating distance (spatial and genealogical). Nowadays young people are increasingly demanding the right to choose their own marital partners, as do non-Indians, and most marriages to a girls mothers formal friend involve first marriages. Despite the current lack of statistical importance of such marriages they are relevant to the comparison with Melanesia in order to reflect on the question of marital exchange. The prevailing residential norm of matri-uxorilocality17 means that effectively it is the men who circulate between the women (the opposite of the Hagener case [Strathern: 1975]). Strathern (1988) insists that the extraction of boys from the maternal house is not a question of turning them into men. The Mebengokre also used to remove young boys from their maternal home. They would then live in the mens house until marriage. Nowadays, perhaps due to the demise of warfare, they tend to go straight from their mothers house to that of the wife. From Stratherns (1988:262) point of view, a child reifies the cross-sex relationship between its parents, substituting for it, not being further reproductive; it does not replicate relations as does a gift between same-sex partners.18 However, when reaching adulthood a Mebengokre offspring will objectify a marital alliance with another House, being installed there if male, or attracting one of its male members to its own House if female. The opposition between cross-sex, unmediated exchange, as between a husband and a wife, versus same-sex, mediated exchange, exemplified by the ceremonial exchange of pigs between all male partners, does not easily summon up analogies with the Mebengokre. It has already noted that the foetus is built up gradually from semen, requiring repeated intercourse over the course of time. This does not mean that sexual relations are associated only with conception. Extramarital affairs are rampant and it is the men who, in public speeches delivered by male leaders, are urged to reciprocate

11 sexual intercourse with items such as meat, fish or glass beads. When I visited the field in 1994, my hostess informed me that someone was robbing (oaki) her daughter, sleeping with her at night, making no return in meat or work the following day. The exchange of sex for meat is a familiar theme in Amazonia.19 In the Mebengokre case, a womans present husband is expected to provide protein for her children, independently of whether he is their genitor or not. One can infer from this that the exchange of protein for sex is as much a part of marriage as of extra-marital affairs.

DOING SOMETHING WITH SOMEONE ELSE IN MIND The attempt to come to grips with the question of sexual asymmetry was something that accompanied me throughout my fieldwork. On a daily basis, nobody tells Mebengokre women what to do, but whenever the men go off hunting or fishing the women go to their gardens to fetch manioc because a proper meal involves the mixing of protein and carbohydrates (meat or fish served with manioc or potatoes). In this sense Stratherns (1988: 272) depiction of a Melanesian person doing things with somebody else in mind is a way of making sense of this. The triadic or trirelational terms are another concrete example of simultaneous perspectives. Such terms have only been detected so far among aboriginal peoples (McConvell 1982; Merlan 1989). To give but one example, in the myth concerning the origin of fire, the male jaguar, when talking to his wife (a female jaguar), refers to the Mebengokre child who he rescued from a tree in the forest, and decided to adopt, as akamrere, meaning your son who is also my son. The basic term for your child (regardless of sex) is entirely different akra (second person prefix (a) + child (kra). The Mebengokre have over twenty such terms that incorporate the relation of the interlocutor to the person referred to, besides the relation of the latter to the speaker, the relation between speaker and interlocutor being self-evident to those concerned (as in the example cited above).

ORGANICISM AND HOLISM Strathern (1988: Chapter 1) discusses how nineteenth century anthropologys enthusiasm for metaphors of organicism contributed to the reification of society in a way that does not find an echo in Melanesia. The Mebengokre use metaphors of organicism and holism (evoking the Chinese tao and Dumonts [1966] depiction of traditional societies like India). A Mebengokre village is described as a body with its

12 feet or base towards the East and its head or tip towards the West. There is neither North nor South; the patio is described as a belly with two equivalent sides (corresponding to what other peoples call North and South). There is nothing translatable as society but the Mebengokre translate the word kukrdj as culture. It could be glossed as body in the sense of the parts that constitute a whole, be they the parts of a myth or ritual, the components of ceremonial wailing or body parts. One woman described how she had brought the bones (kukrdj) of her dead daughter with her when her village had its location changed. Strathern (1988) advocates a homology between a composite individual and a clan body of persons. Foster adopts the term collective individual to characterize matrilineages in New Ireland, though Dumont [1971 (2006:58)] himself criticizes this expression as a facile intermediary between modern mentality and tribal societies.20 The French expression personne morale has been described by Lvi-Strauss (1984: 192-193) and by Dumont (2006: 55) as the equivalent of the corporate group in English. The rendering of the French expression into English of the moral person has never really caught on. However, it would be closer to Stratherns clan as a composite (or so it appears to me), than the expression corporate group, but perhaps this is due to the specific connotation the expression acquired in British anthropology. The expression corporate group still bears the connotation it acquired in mid-twentieth century AngloSaxon anthropology: having a spokesman and assembling together periodically, neither of which is applicable to the Mebengokre.

THE VILLAGE

A Mebengokre village has a cleared sun baked plaza whereas a Timbira village (a name referring to a number of closely related J peoples) looks like a bicycle wheel with the spokes corresponding to the paths from each dwelling to the centre, with the spaces in between filled with grass. The centre conflates the particularities of each and every matri-house, being a microcosm of Mebengokre culture. Each existing village conjures up the conception of the totality of Mebengokre villages with their interlocking contributions to ceremonial efficacy. For example, the village of Kretire (where most of my fieldwork was carried out) was unable to perform the great Bemp naming ceremony in the 1980s because it lacked a ceremonial leader. The solution was to bring one along from the neighbouring village of Jarina. Around the same period, when the village of

13 Pykany was formed, empty spaces were left around the village circle in the hope of filling them later on with the migration of people from the missing Houses. For a ceremony to be efficacious, not only must all the inhabitants of the village participate, either as performers or as audience, camped out in the patio, but the dead also come along to attend. The houses are vacated during the culmination of major ceremonies, from dusk until the following dawn. The living should not enter them on the risk of being killed by the dead. The dead may rejuvenate after death, but they then age and eventually re-die, being transformed into whirlwinds. Their spirit lingers on for as long as they are remembered by the living, after which time they subside into the anonymity of the ancestors. After several generations of serial eponyms, that is, people having the same name, the distinction between ancestors with the same name starts to become blurred. People remember the eminent ancestral eponym but lose track of all the subsequent bearers of the same name. The living bear their names either as the true owners (idji djwoj) or mere name-sakes (idji kajgo)21. For instance, one old man (named Meyre) told me that the present day Tedjware (Spear Leg) is so called only in name; he does not belong to the House of the mythical Spear Leg who acquired this name by killing people with his sharpened leg. Names are imbibed with the essence of their former users, stretching back to the mythical exploits of the ancestors, whilst they are simultaneously emotionally charged by the memory of individually remembered relatives who have died within the recent past, and continue to be missed by the living who they left behind. This renders names particularly susceptible to detachability. For as long as they live the Mebengokre continue to possess their names, whether or not they have retransmitted them to others, but names seem to depart with the soul (kar) when a person dies, though nobody explained this in these terms. The Mebengokre refer to those sharing the same name as the old versus the new so-and-so. When the old occupier of a name dies the dichotomy of old versus new is set in motion once again. Strathern (1999: 39) mentions the need for Hagen dancers to have the blessing of the ancestors. In my writings on the Mebengokre I have argued that they do not need an ancestor cult because they dismantle the ancestors and recycle their non-perishable parts their names and their wealth. In this sense the partibility of the Mebengokre person is more thorough-going than that of Hageners and other Melanesians, for it extends over into death.22 They used to perform secondary burials, but that practice had already been abandoned when I began fieldwork and little information was forthcoming.

14 PARTIBILITY

Complementarity, a term found in most discussions of gender in Amazonia, gets us nowhere, and it is noteworthy that in the Gender of the Gift this term does not receive much attention. Strathern compares the importance of the relation between spouses in Hagen to the cross-sex sibling relation among the Trobrianders. The term dividual (in opposition to the individual) strikes me as appropriate to a Mebengokre married couple, characterized by a strict sexual division of labour, as has already been noted.23 Strathern (1988:259) affirms that among Hageners, spouses combine their distinct parts in a single enterprise. In a totally different context, Benzaquen de Araujo R. and Viveiros de Castro (1977) have noted that a paradox of modern romantic love is that it deindividualizes, producing a fusion of individuality. These authors talk of a dual individual, a phenomenon that produces an internal duality (such as body and soul).24 Strathern (1988) couches the discussion of partibility within the wider context of sociality, a term proposed in lieu of a reified notion of society. And one of the central arguments of the Gender of the Gift concerns the inappropriateness of portraying Melanesians as individuals in the euro-american sense. She argues (1999: 155) that: The partibility of the person (evinced in flows of wealth) is a counterpart to the person as a composite of the relations that compose him or her. This applies perfectly well to names and nekretx. A Mebengokre persons composite identity relates him or her to a variety of different matri-houses, minimally that of ones mother (ones own House) and of ones father. In the past, according to Strathern (1999: 99-100), Hagen women without natal kin (among other categories of people) were rubbish. To be rubbish meant having nothing to put on the skin the wealth that enhanced a person. I have described Mebengokre orphaned children as the paradigm of misfortune. They are visually recognizable as having no one to paint or adorn them, thereby having nothing to put on their skin. The flip side is that for ambitious leaders like Ropni, who recall Melanesian Big Men,25 marriage to an orphan has the advantage of acquiring a wife without the burden of affines, matri-uxorilocality and bride-service.26 Strathern describes how, in Melanesia, each person has a distinctive aggregate of adornments attesting to the relationships that constitute him or her as a person.27 She (1999: 38) characterizes the Hagen dancers attire as an assemblage from many sources. The crucial analogy is between the clan as an assemblage of men and each man as an

15 assemblage of men (his relations with others). In the Mebengokre case, the House constitutes such an assemblage, and the adornments of the dancer attest not to the persons own relations with others, because they were acquired during early childhood. They manifest the relations of the persons genitors with others thereby inaugurating relationships which a person can consolidate during the course of his or her lifetime. When Strathern characterizes persons as the object of their relations with others, rather than as pre-existing individuals (1988: 91, 93), it is as if she, together with the exegesis of Gell (1999),28 have provided me with an x-ray image of how people are constituted as composites of relations.29 Instead of focusing on what circulates in exchange, I am induced to focus on connecting relations. In order to express this idea it is useful to consider the ambiguity of the word property in English. Whilst it can refer to material objects that are inert, such as houses and books, it can also refer to the elements that constitute a person or thing.30 This ambiguity of the word property is fruitful because it highlights the idea of partibility. The Mebengokre say that they hold ceremonies in order to be happy. Name confirmation ceremonies not only display beautiful people but help to produce new ones. Strathern (1988: 320-321) observes that revelation constitutes a performance. These words evoked in my mind the high points in Mebengokre ceremonies which effectively reveal and put on show a myriad of relationships simultaneously, enacting a constellation of the relationships that manifest Mebengokre sociality in all its distinctiveness. Those who actively participate don their adornments which attest not only to the relations between donor and recipient, but also to those who obtained the raw materials to make them, those who manufactured them, to the women who painted the participants, to those who applied white and yellow feather down to their face and torso, to those who applied blue egg shell on their faces, to those who were willing to go on an extensive hunt to assemble the necessary meat for the final feast, to the women who cooked the ceremonial meat pies etc. In the chiefly sermons delivered for the benefit of the village, people are heeded to be one (ti pydji) for otherwise they are in danger of becoming enemies, something which leads to village fission. In this sense, not only is the person a composite, a microcosm of relations, so too is the House, and also the village itself, each according to its respective scale. Houses are linked by marriage alliances, by the flow and ceremonial display of wealth, by the circulation of names, nekretx and subsistence items. Each ceremony

16 exhibits a condensed version of myth and history (two categories undifferentiated by the Mebengokre). For example, the men sing a song learnt from the adopted mythological bat boy, dancers don a wig like headdress that originated at the time when a giant bird, the size of an aeroplane, was killed by two brothers and its feathers gave rise to all the species existing today. According to Strathern (1999: 36-37), Hagen people are explicit about the fact that one gives to recipients in order to receive in turn... Every gift recapitulates other gifts, evidence of the ability to animate relationships. The Mebengokre (and other J) say that one receives names in order to give them. And the bestowal of names and wealth, though more reminiscent of soul stuff31 than of material gifts, replicates other bestowals, relating the living not merely to their immediate donors, or eponyms, but to the ancestors in the mythical past. Discussing Damons analysis of kula, Strathern says (1988: 196) Valuables are metaphors for persons in that their circulation in the kula is the circulation of the persons name. There is another interesting play on words in English here, for name is simultaneously ones personal appellation and ones renown. For the Mebengokre, the circulation of names and nekretx enhance the renown of those who have such symbolic capital at their disposal. In order to legitimize the bestowal of any traditional item of nekretx the speaker always mentions the name of the owner who transmitted the prerogative in question, certifying the right to do so and attesting at the same time to the donors prestige. Mauss (1929) compared names to the soul. Various writers have mentioned that the Mebengokre used to be totally unwilling to say their own names; they still resist doing so today. It is as if one were stripped naked by pronouncing ones own name, revealing ones most intimate self.32 The name confirmation rite, held as the end of the ceremonies, takes place within the house of the children being honoured on that occasion. Anyone interested may go along to attend the event, and contestation of the right to confirm some specific name may arise, something which I witnessed. I also overheard various arguments about the contested use and ownership of specific adornments. Strathern (1999: 218) discusses the expansion of wealth in Melanesia more shells, followed by the introduction of money, gave men the impression that their power had expanded, but this entailed stepping up resources in order to maintain the value of wealth as a source of influence. This may help to explain why the Mebengokre are so

17 avid to obtain new sources of wealth, including everything from digital watches and film cameras to aeroplanes. Nowadays, a marriageable bachelor needs to be more than a good hunter who is not lazy; ideally he is a wage-earner who can buy industrialized goods for his relatives. The term nekretx is used nowadays to designate industrialized goods that enhance persons in a similar way to names and prerogatives. Precious adornments, as in so many other places in the world, are now being converted into commodities. The most valued item in the 1970s and 1980s was a headdress made of blue macaw tail feathers that could be sold for the equivalent of a rifle. Nowadays there is a ban on the selling of artifacts made from feathers, bone and animal teeth, and wages paid to public servants (teachers, administrators etc) are assuming increasing importance as an avenue to acquiring industrialized goods that are ever on the increase in Mebengokre communities. The partibility of persons may help to fathom the Mebengokres anxiety about the possibility of being transformed into non-Indians. The elders blame the young for fascination with the ways of life and wealth of non-Indians; it is, however, generalized. From the point of view of the composite person, the more one relates to non-Indians the more one adheres to their way of thinking and of acting. This may also help to make sense of the political rivalry between leaders. The regional governmental director of Mebengokre villages to the west of the Xingu river is a Mebengokre who left his home community for the city over a decade ago. In the mid 1990s, some people in the villages told me that the man in question was becoming a non-Indian. In various instances this Mebengokre may approve of some measure that it then rejected by the chiefs and leaders in the villages. They make it clear that they are the ones who control decisions at the village level, and not this city dwelling Mebengokre.

GENDER

On a daily basis it is the circulation of protein and horticultural items that objectify relations, plus, increasingly, industrialized goods which flow exclusively from men to women. The hunter or fisherman turns over his catch to his wife and it is she who distributes both meat and garden produce, attending to the upkeep of the circuit of relationships not only with her consanguineal kin but also with her husbands relatives (primarily his mother and sisters).

18 Among the Hageners it is all male ceremonial exchange (moka) that eclipses the input of women to the production of the pigs that circulate in this context, allowing men (personally and collectively) to monopolize access to renown and prestige. Prior to official contact with the Mebengokre in 1953, they used to engage in warfare with enemy peoples and other groups of Mebengokre, besides attacking non-Indian settlers for the obtention of shot guns and other goods. Various elderly warriors with whom I talked boasted proudly how they had killed a number of people in revenge for the murder of one of their relatives. This inflationary measure, for instance, killing five people to compensate one death, clearly increased a mans reputation for valour and hence his prestige. Similarly, when adults were killed, their children were brought back as captives to be adopted by the Mebengokre, incrementing particular families and Houses, besides bringing prestige to the capturer. What is nowadays at issue in considering sexual asymmetry is mens monopoly of external relations with non-Indians. The men say that they have now learnt to fight with words rather than clubs, alluding to their warfaring past to justify why they monopolize access to wages, political representation with governmental agents, trips to the cities for the sale of craft goods etc. Only the names of men circulate nationally and internationally and they are able to augment their prestige by the amount of industrialized goods that they bring back to the villages in their diverse relations with the outside world. On formal occasions, men deliver speeches clutching a rifle or leaning on a war club, a stance that evokes detachable phallic symbols. The term bodily adornment is preferred by Strathern to ornamentation, for she considers adornments as extensions of the person rather than something worn merely for decorative effect.33 It is noteworthy that whilst Mebengokre men designate their ZC and grandchildren (tabdjw) as new head the women carry their BD and granddaughters (tabdjw) astride their shoulders during ceremonies, with its head protruding above theirs like a new shoot [see photograph].

19

It is hard to resist including babies as partible aspects of women. As soon as young girls are able to stand they begin to straddle their younger siblings on one hip. Childbearing begins shortly after puberty, and when mothers are breast feeding their last infant they may help to breast feed the first offspring of their eldest daughter. One can interview men in relative privacy but one can almost never talk to a woman who is not simultaneously child minding. Grandmothers even sleep with one or more of their daughters children when the mother has more than one small child to tend. In a myth, a mother throws her child into a bush of thorns after it denounced her extra-marital affair to its father. The men find it easy to conduct extra-marital affairs, as long as they have goods with which to reciprocate the relation, whereas women are too encumbered by child-care after they lose the relative sexual freedom of their adolescent years. I arrived in the field with the view, inherited from the ascendant generation of anthropologists, that women make babies and men make culture. Strathern (1988:311 pace Sacks [1979]) pithily describes this as an ethnocentric illusion. Years later, reading the Gender of the Gift, it at once became recognizable that the depiction of women in Amazonia reflects that of women in Melanesia in publications of the same period (post World War II), not because of what was found on the ground, so to speak, but due to the assumptions of researchers. It is the anthropologists who have relegated the women to the periphery, next but one to nature. The separation of men and women from the more abstract question of gender was fundamental in order to recognize the Houses for what they are.

20 Although Mebengokre men play a somewhat greater role in ceremonies, realized in the village plaza, the women have active roles in all ceremonies, often on an individual basis in accordance with inherited prerogatives. Male dancing and singing is usually accompanied by a tiny group of such women. There is a male and a female version of one of the naming ceremonies (m bik), and the most popular naming ceremony (kwr kang) is presently the one in which men and women participate on an equal basis. Stratherns (1988) concern with agency and impingement helped me to formulate the argument that the question of who performs which roles and dons which adornments is determined not by the men or by the women themselves. They have no greater say in the roles they perform than actors in a play can dictate their own lines. Ones personhood is constituted through the names and nekretx that one acquires from individual donors within the Houses that form the village circle. Far from being peripheral, an inappropriate term that continues to be banded about in the literature, the Houses encapsulate the plaza in so far as it is their distinctive heritage that determines what goes on there during major naming rituals. I hope to have shown how Stratherns writings have contributed to a different focus on Mebengokre material, and also to have indicated some of the directions in which they can offer new perspectives for reflecting on Amazonia through the prism of anthropological research on Melanesia and vice versa.

I thank Gabriel Coutinho Barbosa for his comments on an earlier version of this paper and an anonymous friend for his helpful suggestions. I am grateful to the CNPq for the research grant that allowed me to attend the conference for which this paper was originally written, and to the FAPESP for subsequent reimbursement. Above all I am grateful to the Mebengokre for their hospitality and their patience. BIBLIOGRAPHY BARNES, J. A . 1962. African models in the New Guinea Highlands. Man (N.S.) 62, 5-9. BENZAQUEN DE ARAUJO R. and VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, E. 1977. Romeu e Julieta e a origem do Estado. In: G. Velho (ed.) Arte e Sociedade. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. BUSBY, C. 1997. Permeable and Partible Persons: a comparative analysis of gender and body in South India and Melanesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) 3/2: 261-278. CARSTEN, Janet e HUGH-JONES, S. (eds.) 1995. Introduction in About the house: LviStrauss and beyond. Cambridge: CUP. CROCKER, J. C. 1977. Why are the Bororo matrilineal? In Social time and social space

21 in Lowland South American societies (ed.) J. Overing (Actes du XLII Congrs International des Amricanistes, vol.2). Paris. DESCOLA, Philippe. 1993. Les lances du crpuscule. Relations Jivaros, HauteAmazonie. Paris: Plon. DUMONT, Louis. 1966 (1979). Homo Hierarchicus. Paris: Gallimard. _____ 1971. Introduction deux thories d'anthropologie. Paris: Mouton. _____ 2006. Introduction to two theories of social anthropology: descent groups and marriage alliance, edited and translated by Robert Parkin. Oxford: Berghahn. EWART, Elizabeth. 2000. Living with Each Other: Selves and Alters amongst the Panar of Central Brazil. Ph.D. Thesis, University of London. FOSTER, Robert J. 1990. Nurture and force-feeding: monetary feasting and the construction of collective individuals in a New Ireland society. American Ethnologist Vol. 17: 3, pp. 431-448. FOX, Robin. 1967 (1996). Kinship and Marriage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. GELL, Alfred. 1999. Strathernograms, or, the semiotics of mixed metaphors. In: The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. Edited by Eric Hirsch. London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press. GREGORY, C.A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. Londres: Academic Press. HEELAS, R. 1979. The social organization of the Panara, a G tribe of Central Brazil. Ph.D. thesis, Oxford University. HUGH-JONES, C. 1979. From the milk river. Cambridge: CUP. HUGH-JONES, S. 1995. Inside-out and back-to-front: the androgynous house in Northwest Amazon. In: About the house: Lvi-Strauss and beyond. J. Carsten and S. Hugh-Jones (eds.). Cambridge: CUP. _____ 2001. The gender of some Amazonian gifts: an experiment with an experiment. In: Gregor, T. e Tuzin, Donald (org.) Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. LAGROU, Elsje Maria. 2007. A Fluidez da Forma: arte, alteridade e agncia em uma sociedade amaznica. Topbooks Editora, Rio de Janeiro. LAMBEK, Michael e STRATHERN, Andrew (eds.). 1998. Bodies and Persons: comparative perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LEA, V. 1986. Nomes e nekrets Kayap: uma concepo de riqueza. Ph.D. thesis, Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. _____ 1992 M bengokre (Kayap) personal names - total social facts in Central Brazil, Man, Vol. 27 (NS), no 1:129-153. _____ 1995 The houses of the M bengokre (Kayap) of Central Brazil - a new door to their social organization. In: Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds.) About the house Lvi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge University Press (CUP). _____ 1997. Eavesdropping on a crossed line between the Manambu and the M bengokre. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO). Vol. 27 n0 3: 179-214. Paper presented at the Satterthwaite colloquium: Amazonianists and Melanesianists, Cumbria, England, April 29th May 1st 1994. _____ 2001. The composition of M bengokre (Kayap) households in Central Brazil. In: Beyond the visible and the material: the Amerindianization of society in the work of Peter Rivire. Laura Rival and Neil Whitehead, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pages 157-176.

22 _____ 2002. Multiple paternity amongst the M bengokre (Kayap, J) of Central Brazil. In: Cultures of Multiple Fathers: the theory and practice of partible paternity in Lowland South America. Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine (eds.). Gainesville: editor of the University of Florida. _____ 2005 The great name confirmation ceremonies of the M bengokre of Central Brazil, and the fabrication of beautiful people. In: Estudios Latinoamericanos 25, Polish Society for Latin American Studies, Warsaw-Poznn, pages 87-101. LVI-STRAUSS, Claude. 1958 (1977) Chapters VII and VIII. Structural Anthropology. London: Peregrine Books. _____ 1973. Anthropologie Structurale Deux. Paris:Plon. _____ 1984. Paroles Donnes. Paris: Plon. MATHIEU, Nicole-Claude (ed.). 2007. Une maison sans fille est une maison morte : la personne et le genre en socits matrilinaires et/ou uxorilocales. Paris: Maison des Sciences de lhomme. MAUSS, MARCEL. 1929 (1969) LAme, le nom et la personne. Oeuvres Paris: Minuit. Vol. 2: 131-135. _____ 1923-4 (1968) Essai sur le don. In: Sociolgie et Anthropologie. Paris: PUF. MCCALLUM, Cecilia. 2001. Gender and sociality in Amazonia. Oxford: Berg. MCCONVELL, Patrick. 1982. Neutralisation and degrees of respect in Gurindji. In: Languages of Kinship in Aboriginal Australia, J. Heath, F. Merlan and A. Rumsey (eds.). Syndey: Oceania Linguistic Monographs. MELATTI, J.C. 1976. Nominadores e genitores: um aspecto do dualismo Krah. In: Leituras da Etnologia Brasileira. E. Schaden (ed.). So Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional. MERLAN, Francesca. 1989. Jawoyn relationship terms: interactional dimensions of Australian kin classification. In: Anthropological Linguistics. XXI (3-4): 227263. NIMUENDAJU, C. 1939 (1983). Os Apinay. Belm, Par: Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi. Oxford English Dictionary. 2002. Second Edition on CD-Rom Version 3.01. Oxford: Oxford University Press. RIVIRE, P. 1974. The couvade: a problem reborn. Man n.s. 9 (3):423-435. RIVAL, LAURA. 1998. Androgynous parents and guest children: the Huaorani couvade, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s. 4: 619-642. SCHNEIDER, D. and GOUGH, K. 1961. Matrilineal Kinship. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. SCHWARTZMAN, S. 1987. The Panara of the Xingu National Park. Ph.D. thesis, Chicago University. SEEGER, A., DA MATTA, R. E VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, E. 1979. A construo da pessoa nas sociedades indgenas brasileiras. Boletim do Museu Nacional NS 32.: 219. SISKIND, J. 1973. To Hunt in the Morning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. STRATHERN, M. 1975. Women in Between, Female roles in a male world: Mount Hagen, New Guinea. London: Seminar Press. _____ 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. _____ 1999. Property, Substance and Effect. Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone Press.

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The title of this paper is also the title of my book, presently in press at the University of So Paulo. An earlier version of this paper was given at the Joint Annual Conference Ownership and Appropriation of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA), the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand (ASAANZ) and the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS), realizado na Universidade de Auckland, Aotearoa/Nova Zelndia. Convenor: Lisette Josephides, Queens University Belfast. Anthropological Relationships as Appropriations and Investments ASA-sponsored panel in honour of Marilyn Strathern.

I began research with the Mebengokre in 1978 and have returned periodically ever since. 3 According to data from the Instituto Socio-Ambiental http://pib.socioambiental.org/pt/povo/kayapo/180. 4 In reality the mens house is a little off-centre by dint of reference to the memory of the existence of two mens houses in some villages, one slightly to the west and the other slightly to the east of the plaza centre. Each present day mens house is considered to be the offshoot of one or other of abandoned villages with a western or eastern mens house. 5 In certain parts of Africa either lineages or clans are designated as houses, a point discussed by Carsten and Hugh-Jones (1995). 6 See Lea (1997) for analogies between names among the Mebengokre and the Manambu. 7 This is dealt with in greater detail in Lea (2005), as are names in Lea (1992). 8 Strathern (1988:108) discusses the question of personalized knowledge in relation to the Malo. This is another theme that is common to Melanesia and Amazonia. 9 Male ego classifies his patrilateral cross-cousins as sisters children (tabdjw, opposite sex siblings children and grandchildren). This is the only genealogical position that is referred to differently by male and female ego. 10 Kr can be glossed as a rounded form. It applies not just to the head but also to the glands penis, fruit of the banana tree, grave mound etc. 11 Another term used by Strathern that could be useful for analysing the loaning out and returning of names and nekretx among the Mebengokre is that of enchainment. According to this author: The enchainment (indebtedness) established by the gift is an outcome of transaction itself: only as donors and recipients are the partners unequal (1988: 206). 12 Elsewhere Strathern (1999: 264 note 5) comments that It would be tempting to recover a theological definition of substance (spirit essence) that allowed one to talk of [the] material and immaterial form of it [my parentheses]. 13 This question is elaborated in greater detail in Lea (2002). 14 For alternative explanations see Rivire (1974) and Rival (1998). 15 Strathern criticizes the supposed distinction between an emic and an etic interpretation (1988: 309), and it is not so much this that is at issue in my case as the inability to remove the tarnish from the term clan. 16 See Schneider, D. and Gough, K. (1961), and Mathieu (2007). 17 This is dealt with in greater detail in Lea (2001). 18 Gell (1999: 47-48) likewise insists on the necessity to contrast replication, linked to same-sex mediated exchanges and substitution in cross-sex unmediated exchanges; the former is cumulative whereas the latter is merely reproductive. There seems to be a distant echo here with Lvi-Strausss (1973, chapter VII) criticism of the nuclear family

24

as the elementary unit of kinship. This author introduces the wifes brother in order to set the mechanism of exchange in motion. 19 See, for example, Siskind (1973). This obviously stems from the specific gender constructs in Amazonian societies. Among the Mebengokre only men hunt and only women have gardens and so women depend on their relationships with men to obtain meat. Besides this, as sexual intercourse is geared to towards rapid ejaculation, part of womens satisfaction comes from the prestations made by men in exchange for sexual intercourse. 20 Foster attributes this expression to another publication of Dumont to which I lack access at the time of writing this. 21 Idji signifies name and djwoj can be glossed as owner or the true one. Kajgo can be glossed as only in name, as when a brother is mean to his sister, being a brother in name only. 22 The Yanomami (a non-related Amerindian group spanning northern Brazil and southern Venezuela) cremate the corpse and consume the ashes mixed with gruel. They eliminate the dead literally whereas the Mebengokre eliminate them symbolically, by extracting their reusable components. 23 Strathern (1988: 348) states that she adopted this term from Marriott. In principal something dividual could be subdivided, but the term seems to be used by Strathern only in relation to duality, making it all the more appropriate to apply to a cross-sex couple, though she herself does not use it in this sense. 24 Lagrou (2007: 338) cites an interview with a Kaxinawa man concerning funerary endocanibalism. He says that when a women dies, her husband ate her things, in private..; (O marido dela comia as coisas dela. Particular n). He chopped them up and cooked them in a small pot and then went off alone to eat them in the gardens. And when a man died it was his wife or wives who ate his thing. (Agora se morria homem, mulher que comia coisa dele). Amerindians do not tend to make euphemisms of this sort; supposedly they were for the benefit of the interviewer. One can only infer that it is the genitals that are consumed. It is relevant here not only in terms of partibility, but in terms of a spouse having exclusive rights to dispose of his or her partners genitals, reinforcing the hypothesis that they constitute a dividual. 25 In the 1980s, with the revenue obtained from the extraction of gold and timber, leaders began to compete in the acquisition of goods such as aeroplanes, cars and houses. In these terms, Raoni has little material affluence, but this has been more than compensated by his circulation, personally, among world leaders. 26 Descola (1993: 211) notes that, among the Achuar, of Ecuador, this strategy is considered mean precisely because it entails shirking relations. [U]ne femme nappartient jamais compltement son mari, qui doit composer sans cesse avec ceux qui la lui ont donne et conservent sur elle des droits inextinguibles. La seule faon de ne pas encourir cette dette perptuelle est dpouser des orphelines, recours sans gloir et propre aux mesquins (suri), hommes aux coeur sec qui peuvent rgner sans partage et sans frein sur les dlaisses de la fortune. 27 In the words of Strathern (1999: 41) Men dance with assemblages [of feathers] almost identical in appearance, but each will have drawn on his own unique constellation of relations to do so...We witness an outcome: the results or effect of mobilising relations. 28 Gell (1999: 35, my brackets), in his essay entitled Strathernograms, states that terms are [to be] treated as constituted out of the relationships in which they participate.

25

Strathern (1999: 135) describes the Melanesian person as a condensed product of relations, a composite. Furthermore (1999: 39, my brackets): The [dancers] decorations are a composite of itemsEach constellation is unique. Strathern (1999: 276 note 29) comments that she brought together (1988) two distinct analytical categories, the composite person, singular but divided, and the collective, undivided, individual. 30 The OUP (1999) definition of property includes the following: 5. An attribute or quality belonging to a thing or person: in earlier use sometimes, an essential, special, or distinctive quality, a peculiarity; in later use often, a quality or characteristic in general (without reference to its essentialness or distinctiveness). 31 Hugh-Jones, S. inspired my use of the term soul stuff. He notes that children receive soul stuff or spirit essence both through the fathers semen prior to birth and through the receipt of paternally derived names soon after (2001: 255). 32 McCallum (2001: 23) notes in relation to the Cashinahua, a Pano speaking people spanning either side of the frontier area between Brazil and Peru: A true name is very intimate; pronouncing it out loud is like exposing ones genitals, in that it gives one shame (dake). 33 Strathern affirms (1999: 301, note 1) that self-decoration is misunderstood as clothing or ornament.

29