Giving Life, Giving Death by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

Crossed Hierarchy and Avoidance of Transparency

Do Baruya women therefore enjoy the same superior lucidity as Diotima, and is theirs, like hers, the dominant point of view? This would probably be granting them too much. For the origin myths of initiation show that in New Guinea, as elsewhere in the world, men are not naive either. Even if they do not say so in as many words, they know that the ritual is intended to rob women of the power to give birth to children. This, in fact, is one of the great secrets that Baruya men reveal to their initiates. In earlier times, they relate, it was the women who had possession of the cultural emblems of the community, who guarded the sacred flutes and organized the grand ceremonies, from which the men were excluded. But they were so inept, and sowed so much confusion, that the men had to steal the ceremonial totems from them, taking their place in order to restore social order.14 Of course, this inversion of the prerogatives of the two sexes, a commonplace of mythology,15 never actually occurred. But it is not only a belated justification of male domination. In showing that men know they occupy a secondary position in relation to women, it reveals the real origin of their current dominance, even if it is still couched in the language of myth. One detail of the Baruya myth is exceptionally significant: the men frankly acknowledge that they stole the sacred objects from the menstrual huts, which amounts to saying that these objects represented women’s reproductive power.16

The most remarkable aspect of all of this is perhaps the place that is granted to what is implicit and left unsaid, rather than to ignorance or a lack of information. Among neither the men nor the women is knowledge distributed unequally; to the contrary, the situation is one of shared knowledge, where each person knows what everyone else knows but without knowing whether everyone else knows it—and at the same time knowing that there is no need to try to know! It is as though everyone had spontaneously agreed to avoid what today is called “common knowledge”17 and its consequences, the perfect symmetry of information and the undifferentiation of members of society; as though the lack of transparency—the relative and mutual mistrust of others’ points of view, and the rivalry that accompanies it—were a lesser evil, or even a means of protection.

It would appear to be thus in every society in which initiation rites similar to the ones that I have described are found. And in Plato himself, the male exoteric discourse and its female esoteric counterpart, while intertwined, remain separate. But is this deliberate difference, and the contrast of light and shadow that it creates, the condition of a stable equilibrium and of a complementarity of the sexes that every institution should somehow seek to preserve? Or is it a mask designed to perpetuate an oppressive male order, which modern Western society, being more clear-sighted than others,

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