ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses a series of transformations through which aesthetic genres are put to the service of political ends. It deals with an ethnographic description of myth and song, and illustrates how meaning is acquired according to the context of use or performance. The transformations are mostly men’s activities; they allow, in a backward glance, the identification of a gender difference in men’s and women’s intentions for their actions, and identify basic discrepancies in each sex’s perceptions of the social meanings and cultural entailments of certain institutions and cultural texts. The chapter considers songs from two main perspectives, their symbolic creation of marriageable partners and their construction of an agnatic group in a political domain. Women’s courtship songs and men’s pig-killing songs appear to be engaged in a conceptual dialogue within the ritual/symbolic domain of their performance, implicitly making conflicting claims about the meaning of marriage.
