In the film “Character Formation in Different Cultures” narrated by anthropologist Margaret Mead, the viewer is presented with babies being bathed in three different cultures. Of particular interest is the way the first culture immediately sets itself apart from the other two, occurring down the banks of the Sepik river in New Guinea. A mother makes her way to the space with her own two children, the child of a neighbor, and a child nurse at her aid. Presumably the child is not her own, but rather is learning the important daily nuances involved in caretaking for the society as a whole, also functioning as an assistant in the communal duties of childcare. This mother is the only one of the three to involve outside-kin groups in what can be understood as a private ritual – private, at least from the perspective of the American mother and the Balinese mother. At minimum this is in part because the Sepik river as a bathing space, much like the care of the children, is communal. Additionally, the child is denied what we can loosely identify as an inalienable possession special to his person or his bath-time. Whereas the Sepik child is bathed in a manner imitative of adult bathing, the American mother gathers rubber toys specifically for the child’s amusement and the Balinese mother fashions together a shell necklace specifically for the child’s teething stage. Accordingly, the American and Balinese child may grow to have certain memories associated with these particular objects that can in turn trigger certain mental states (to include nostalgia), thus allowing the minor objects used in a lifetime of daily routines to qualify for fulfilment of the criteria of inalienability. Ultimately, in the case of the Sepik-based culture, the inalienability of the local river combined with the lack of an inalienable possession for the child to grow up with perpetuates a uniquely cultivated system of groups in which the viciousness of life is engaged with daily, not once forgotten nor feared.
Naturally the starting point of any possession talk must involve some aspect of ownership. In his bathing ritual, the American baby is given the freedom to grab anything he can get his hands on. Toys encourage his curiosity, and mother pledges to keep the atmosphere a safe place for him. Similarly, the Balinese baby is given a shell necklace for teething, and older children are encouraged to play with their younger siblings. Likely this teaching childcare duties as well as hierarchy: baby is bossed around by young child just like young child is bossed around by mom. Conversely, the Sepik child is not allowed to own anything as he is given a bath. He is somewhat stripped of individuality, as he is washed in the river in the same manner his mother washes the neighbor’s child. In the bath, he is the same as everyone else, he is naked, vulnerable, he is the neighbour’s child, he is his mother when she was a child. The river is a massive equalizer, achieving such a status by its fluidity. Heraclitus tells us water is always moving and no river is ever the same it was before – this makes the river symbolically an eternal source of motion and cleanliness.
This fluidity primes the river for its role in cosmological authentication. The danger presented by the river cements it. Mead tells us in her film that crocodiles are common in the river. This insight is key, as it serves to explain why bathing is a communal task and not a private one limited to within-kin groups only. The more people able to keep a lookout for danger, the safer the group. This insight also presents a satisfying reason as to why the amusement of the child while playing with water is not given much space in the mother’s mind. Each bath, deemed necessary for daily living, actually represents a great risk of harm or even death. In going naked into the river, facing danger in all their natural glory, each individual’s right to life is continually authenticated.
While these are certainly larger-than-life topics we are engaging with, I must note a few limitations of reality. It is truly unfair for us to draw any huge conclusions about the spirit of the Sepik people, the role of the river, and whether they are under the impression they own the land they inhabit or whether they believe that land is something larger than any individual and is beyond private ownership. Further research would absolutely clarify the matter; however, having said such, what we do know is that the river has a name that was given to it by the local people.
In an essay by esteemed anthropologist Annette Weiner, she examines the inalienable nature of the shells involved in the famously reported-on kula ring. We are told by Weiner of the importance of a name when it comes to such possessions, and we can understand that part of the value carried is symbolic.
For example, a name is typically given to a child without the child’s input. This name, then, serves as a reflection of the parental ideology, encoding ideas regarding what makes a good name and what sounds/associations are worth memorializing by giving them breath over the course of a lifetime.
Other times, when an individual performs some rite of passage in life that signifies a transformation (such as a marriage or some other grand accomplishment), a new name is chosen to cement that transformation. A name, then, can be understood to convey not only information about some individual’s ideas of meaning, but also notions of empowerment and ownership of the self. Therefore, in giving the river a name, the Sepik people claim a symbolic form of ownership over the space.
Weiner notes the power of naming in her discussion of the inalienable possessions used by kula participants: “All kula shells are ranked according to explicit standards of weight, circumference, length, and age. Only when certain armshells and necklaces meet the highest standards are they eligible for the top named category and only then is each shell given an individual name”. Once these shells are given a name, they become able to “carry the history of their former owners’ eminence creating their own specific identities through time”. We can note, then, that being able to “carry the history” is an essential aspect of what makes some possession inalienable.
Funnily enough, Weiner takes a moment to criticize a predecessor who irresponsibly carried history, claiming that Malinowski looks so much at the men playing kula that he forgets to look at the life and paths of the objects themselves, the shells! This informs us of a particular approach Weiner appears to condone: one in which the object itself is personified and treated as though it has been able to observe what has happened to it. The path of the shell is the sum of all its experiences, and if we can imagine attaching a camera to the object and following it, we can absolutely see the personality and the nature of the shell based on the atmosphere of the interactions in which its trade is facilitated. If we were to take a similar approach to the river Margaret Mead captured on film, we can envision how a personality can be attached to the body of water: this river-made-human would likely have something like: fond memories of some bathers, grudges against particular aquatic animals, questions regarding the practices of the nearby human life. In a way, this is how a database of history is pooled. Regardless of what happened to whom and when, the river was there and the symbol of it as well as its physical location throughout the course of history allows for the transcription and indexing of human information, or rather, information about humans.
At this point, it is important for the reader to note that this hypothetical thought experiment is not an argument that we witness the Sepik people deifying or sanctifying the river. In fact, Weiner tells us how the shells that make the kula ring go round themselves “lack sacred powers. Their legitimation does not come from an authority located outside ordinary social life. Neither gods nor mana nor ancestral spirits sanction the historical force of kula possessions” and yet we bear witness to people who meet the custom with high levels of honour, dignity, and respect. This allows for us to conclude that a society need not literally believe in the sacred powers of an object in order for that society to reap the benefits associated with these objects that possess the value and authority of a nigh-sacred nature.
Regarding authority, Weiner details that “authority is contained and limited by the very objects that validate it”. Let this serve, then, as justification for the idea that (literally) the Sepik river as an object contains (symbolically) powers of authentication. By undergoing the daily ritual of a bath, the individual is submerging his pure, unadulterated self in the power of the river, a power that has sustained generations. The proper scope Weiner advocates for analysis is one in which we are noting ‘layers’ of exchanges, which essentially build trust. Each bathing session, then, builds new levels of trust between outside-kin groups. Simultaneously, each bathing session builds a new level of trust between the river and the people – especially in the domain of the river’s assured physical existence. The river has cleaned generations of village people, and each of these individuals has built layers of trust, branching toward each other as well as the water. Imagine, then, the exponential reach! A romantic mind can picture its waters stretching across hundreds of miles with as much ease as it stretches across hundreds of generations.
Pushing romance aside, however, and returning to the reality of the people who live near the Sepik in New Guinea – giving a name to the river reveals an admittedly small but nonetheless present belief of ownership over it. This ownership is necessary vessel by which inalienability is transferred from the river to the names and generations of future peoples to follow. Additionally, the need for cosmological authentication, a right to life, is satisfied by the ever-present risk of death looming within the bathing waters. This risk, along with the absence of an inalienable childhood bath possession, are key identifiers in revealing a cultural expectation not too foreign after all: just as the river flows, carrying dirty bodies into the realm of clean every day for generations, so too the child will change and grow to carry his name across generations.