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By Root 770 0

and men as sacrifices. The people of Fiji saw the two as equivalent gifts, the woman who is “brought raw” to be married and the “cooked man” who is sacrificed to the god-king. In the mythology at least, “cooked men” were literally eaten. A Hawaiian myth in which a man manages to redeem his life with a substitute gift indicates that had he not done so he would have been killed and baked in an earth oven. Male life is an edible good to the gods, and among the polite greetings that a Fijian commoner can offer to his ruling chief is “Eat me”! In Polynesia the continued fertility of the land was taken to be a consequence of the women and men given to the god-king. Like the God of Abraham, the Polynesian gods remained the faithful genitors of the land so long as the gift of their increase was recognized by return gifts.

In aboriginal times, therefore—including those aborigines we take to be our own ancestors—male life was sometimes treated as a gift, and parents, kings, and gods were recognized as having the right of bestowal in that gift. The modern parallel may be what Wilfred Owen called “the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. For when the state replaces the god-king, male life is no longer baked in earth ovens, it is sent to the trenches. And while no gift ceremony accompanies enlistment (no sergeant says, “Who giveth this man?”), in our popular mythology it is the mother (or the wife if the man is married) who gives a man to the army. When a man actually dies fighting for the state, the newspapers all say the mother “gave her son,” and she is the one who receives the flag of her country handed across the coffin.

In each of these cases the boy or man who is given as a gift assumes standard functions of the gift: in the aboriginal examples, male life bestowed upon the Lord or god-king renewed the bond between that deity and the group, and ensured the continued fertility of flock and field. And although the modern state began to lose its appeal as an object of sacrifice after the First World War, we still recognize that the power of a collectively held belief can be increased by the man who gives his life in its name.

The woman who is given in marriage similarly takes on typical functions of the gift. She, too, establishes a bond (between clans or families), and as part of an ongoing system of kinship, she, like any gift, becomes an agent of the community’s cohesion and stability. In fact, the institution of the woman given in marriage makes for a rather striking example of what I earlier called “the old lovers’ quarrel between liberty and community.” For the fact is that marriages established through massive gift exchanges are more stable and enduring than those that are not; but by the same token, the partners (both men and women, but women in particular when they are the gifts) have significantly less freedom. Where there is no gift exchange, on the other hand, marriages are less durable, the partners more independent. So the choice: where the desideratum is community we find some people trapped in bad marriages; where it is individual choice we find some people growing old in isolation.

The Uduk, the tribal group I introduced in chapter 1, make a fine example of the side of this dichotomy in which marriage is not a constraining institution.* The Uduk are matrilineal; neither in structure nor in ceremony is an Uduk bride (or her fertility) given in marriage. In fact, there are essentially no marriage gifts, and according to Wendy James, the anthropologist who has done the most work with the Uduk, marriage itself “is only meaningful as a sexual relationship, publicly acknowledged and accompanied by a few well-defined but short-term obligations.”

Uduk women are very independent; they readily quit an unsatisfying union. Marriages typically last only three or four years. Not being the property of the men, not even gift property, Uduk women are self-possessed, literally and figuratively. “In myth, anecdote and popular expectation,” James tells us, “women often take