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mission as there are descendants born of the same mother, matrilateral grandmother, and great-grandmother. Each network founds a circuit of exchanges between givers and takers of a wife who transmits life. The task of each woman is to transmit life to her husband's group, and the individual owes his/her existence to this. Patri-virilocal residence being the rule, the in-married woman is expected to ensure the physical continuity of her husband's patridescent group through a fertility which is handed down to her matrilineally. Indeed, transmission of life becomes legitimately possible only after matrimonial alliance with the handing over of the bridewealth. The husband's patrikin gives a compensation to the wife's matrikin for each child born and for the services the chid is rendering; this takes place at the successive changes in the life and social identity of the descendant. Because of this, the uterine transmission of life is essentially spoken of in terms of exchange. |
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The corporeality that characterizes the mother-child relationship is the idiom in which the Yaka express their uterine descent relations. Only (semi-) siblings who "come from the one womb," together with their genitor, genitrix, wives, and unmarried children, share bonds of warmth, trust, and mutual help in the household. The domestic realm, as well as the seclusion in the rites of passage, and the relations between the diviner, the afflicted individual and/or clients, are based on maternal relations and, consequently, on bodily contact, food supply and cooking, commensality, and so on. Through these same bodily activities, uterines and co-initiates, diviner and clients may share their vital force and weaken or strengthen each other. |
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Socially speaking, uterine kin are represented by ego's uncle (mother's brother). great-uncle (mother's mother's brother) or great-granduncle (mother's mother's mother's brother). These avuncular relations are also figured in terms of this tree metaphor. The primary uncle is called "uncle from the top" (leemba dyamathaandu), the great-uncle is called "uncle from the middle" (leemba dyamakati), and finally the great-granduncle is the "uncle from the base or at the roots" (leemba dyamasina). Normally it is the primary uncle who actively assumes the avuncular role (buleemba), delegated to him by the uncles at the ascendant generations. This tree metaphor is transposed to the human body: the youngest descendants are the "buds" of the arm and the body. Referring to the brother of their mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother and her uterine ascent, people spontaneously point to their left wrist, elbow, shoulder, and over their shoulder to their back. For the Yaka, left is to right as uterine relations to agnatic ones. The maternal uncle is thus an instance of mediation and differentiation. Bonds through maternity (such as "male mother,'' "male wife," "male source," ngwakhasi) and alliance (as representative of the bride-givers) meet in his person. |
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Just as the divinatory capacity is transmitted by way of uterine heredity, so the relationships that the diviner establishes with his clients are predominantly of a uterine type. In this way he is the antipode of deadly sorcery, which needs to call on the fatal complicity of uterines and of the maternal uncle in particular. The diviner situates himself with regard to the subject of the oracle and the clients as a benevolent maternal uncle, through an almost physical bond. |
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