The Lele of the Kasai by Mary Douglas

Author:Mary Douglas [Douglas, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Archaeology, Reference
ISBN: 9780415291040
Google: bE0GRAGGUrMC
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2003-01-15T04:47:07+00:00

VIII

BLOOD DEBTS

BLOOD DEBTS could be pursued by either villages or clans. For a village, this was but one of many other fields of corporate action. For a clan it was the one important context in which the corporate local clan sections were transcended by the idea of the unity of the dispersed clan. This is a paradox, since local clan sections were most active, most corporate, in blood debt negotiations. But certain principles involved potentially the whole clan. The latter admittedly never acted as a unit, but its member sections could not claim blood debts against one another, and any member of the clan had a potential right to accept blood compensation for any other. Thus clanship overrode residence as the essential criterion of rights and obligations, and the rights were sufficiently valued for clanship to be very much a live principle of alignment.

It took me a long time to realize that the blood debts which I continually heard discussed were rarely caused by acts of violence. They were mainly incurred when a woman died in child-labour after confessing adultery, or when death was attributed to sorcery or sex pollution. Clansmen of anyone definitively convicted of sorcery would have to accept responsibility for his blood debts. The rare killing by violence within a village or cluster of brother villages, would in principle be compensated. But killing a man of another village was a matter of blood vengeance between villages (see Chapter X), and not one to be dealt with between clans.

Payment of blood compensation was essential to the functioning of the village, since men once settled there were expected not to leave it and to live in peace. Jealousy about women was regarded as the main source of friction and adultery was heavily fined when it was known. The idea that adultery could have lethal effects brought secret cases into the open, and gave the injured husband an opportunity to seek blood compensation—a tendency in line with the general insistence that injuries should be made public, and disputes settled. Their method of settling these blood debts caused by adultery or sorcery promoted goodwill within the village.

It was such an elaborate and central institution that it developed a kind of social autonomy of its own. We can pick out a few of its functions, but its full contribution to the pattern of social life is impossible to evaluate. Many subsidiary institutions had grown up round it. Everyone had an interest in making it work. Something of the zest and satisfaction of a competitive game was felt in observing its rules, paying its forfeits, and taking its rewards.

Compensation was based on the principle of equivalence, a life for a life, a person for a person, interpreted in an institution called bukolomo, which I translate as pawnship.1 A pawn, kolomo, was a woman who had been paid over in settlement of a blood debt, or one of her matrilineal descendants. Only limited rights over her were transferred; she was not a slave; her own clan shared responsibility for her with her lords.

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