Forbidding and Enjoying: Warlpiri Taboos

This chapter systematically analyses Warlpiri taboos showing how they can all be dispatched into four contexts (socialisation rituals, totemic relationships, mother-in-law/son-in-law relation, death) and four domains (space, language, sexuality and goods, especially food). Each combination of a context and a domain virtualises forms of obligations and ritual transgressions, which connect all taboos in a hypercubic way (see chapter 6). In that underlying entanglement of prohibitions and transgressions, any structural dualism seems to be conjured. Taboos become a way to create human and non human heterogeneous temporality, both as a vertical transmission – in the succession of generations re-enacted through socialisation and mourning rituals – and as a horizontal differentiation perpetually redefining these modalities of alliance and of ritual interdependance between the totemic groups. Everybody has an interest in reproducing a balance that respects the Law and pressing others to do the same, as well as giving what he/she has so that others will reciprocate. Such a social pressure partly explains the refusal to accumulate and the systematic circulation of all possessions, cars, clothes, etc., although it does not prevent conflicts. In fact, a certain dissensus is valued. First published in French in 1991.