ABSTRACT
Asking questions about slave descent and the Berosaina as slave descendants was quite challenging in Beparasy. This chapter provides answers to the following questions: Why do free descendants consider slave descendants as unmarriageable ‘unclean’ partners? And how do they ascribe someone’s clean or unclean status? To answer these questions the author use his wide-angle (i.e., historical) and normal (i.e., ethnographic) lenses. The Berosaina’s wealth and tompontany status were apparently never sufficient for them to be judged ‘marriageable’ by free descent families. Beparasy villagers could only describe the procreation process in vague terms, but their views seemed very similar to that of their immediate southern neighbours, the Bara, as reported by Richard Huntington. The case of ‘ancestries mixing’ mentioned to the author was the mixing that would occur in the free descendants’ ancestral tombs if they had to bury lambo-tapaka children.
