Gebusi - Sociopolitical Organization



Social and Political Organization. The Gebusi social and political order is extremely decentralized, with no secular leadership positions (i.e., no recognized big-men, headmen, senior elders, or war leaders). Adult men are surprisingly noncompetitive as well as egalitarian, and they are self-effacing rather than boastful; collective decisions emerge from general consensus. Settlements tend to act as de facto political units in feast giving and fighting, diverse clan affiliations among coresident men notwithstanding. Single-stage initiation and subsequent marriage confer full adult male status. There is Little if any social inequality between wife givers and wife takers; affines exchange food equally in ongoing relationships regardless of the balance of women in marriage between them. Food gifts and subsequent exchanges affirm social ties in a noncompetitive fashion both within and between settlements. Gebusi do not use bride-wealth, bride-service, or homicide compensation. They employ person-for-person reciprocity in marriage and sorcery retribution where possible. Gender relations are a significant dimension of Gebusi sociopolitical organization; communal male prerogatives include legitimate control of rituals, feast giving, bow-and-arrow fighting, and large-scale collective activity. Women frequently participate as singers but dance only at initiations, are generally excluded from spirit seances, and may be sporadically beaten without reprisal by husbands. Women seclude themselves in their section of the longhouse during peak menstruation and males harbor nominal beliefs of female sexual and menstrual contamination. However, such belief appears to be more a topic of ribald male joking than a source of personal anxiety. Many women exercise significant influence in spousal choice—norms of sister exchange notwithstanding—and marital harmony is the norm on a quotidian basis. Male views of women are ambivalent, ranging from a positive image of women as attractive sexual partners and helpers—prominently encoded in the persona of the beneficent spirit woman—to derogatory attitudes concerning the sexual, productive, and reproductive status of older women.

Social Control and Conflict. Warfare between Gebusi settlement communities was infrequent in contrast to systematic raiding upon Gebusi by Bedamini. Gebusi ritual fights between settlements sometimes escalated to club-wielding brawls but rarely to bow-and-arrow fighting; they seldom resulted in casualties. The same is true of fights erupting occasionally over nonreciprocal marriage and adultery accusation. The most virulent incidents of Gebusi social control and conflict stem from sorcery attribution. Unlike many New Guinea societies, Gebusi sorcery suspects are often publicly accused, forced to undergo difficult divinatory trials, and executed. Between about 1940 and 1982, 29 percent of female deaths and 35 percent of male deaths were homicides, the vast majority resulting from sorcery attributions. The 33 percent of adult deaths due to physical violence extrapolates to a yearly homicide rate of at least 568 per 100,000 over the 42-year period. Yet there is no evidence that sorcery packets are actually made or used by Gebusi; Gebusi sorcery is the projective attribution of deviance. Most older individuals are eventually accused of sorcery. The perception of impartiality in elaborate spiritual inquests corresponds with both the consensus of diverse clan members to execute of one of their own community members as a sorcerer and the lack of violent resistance or revenge by the accused's kin. Statistically, however, sorcery attribution and attendant homicide are most common between affines related via nonreciprocal marriage, with both wife givers and wife receivers killed in equivalent numbers.

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