Pascale Bonnemère's contribution to ESFO 2025 conference

The temporal connection of Baruya female and male rituals

Abstract :

The ethnographic material collected by Maurice Godelier among the Baruya between 1967 and 1988 comprises genealogies and field notes on every possible topic. These notes have all been digitized. With his agreement, I began working with this material, as well as Ian Dunlop’s films on the 2nd to 4th stages of Baruya collective male initiations that involve the building of a huge ceremonial house. My general and long-term objective is to understand the place of women in this male ritual cycle, an approach that has proved fruitful for interpreting the Ankave –another Anga group.

Unlike the Ankave who have no separate female initiation, Baruya also organised female rituals (sanginie) when at least two girls reached menarche around the same time. The last such rite was held in 2010 and was filmed by the Baruya filmmaker Koumain while I was there. Baruya women say that the objective of the sanginie female ritual is to celebrate the young girls’ entry into adulthood and to forcefully convey their future roles as wives and mothers.

At the same time the sanginie is held, young men who had been designated years before as the girls’ future husbands but have not yet completed all the stages of their collective initiation have to go through an individual ritual. Here, I will present a comparative analysis of both to understand how they are linked.