‘The breaking of the ear’

Maurice Bloch’s brilliant book chapter on the house in Zafimaniry culture mentions a phenomenon called tapa sofina or ‘the breaking of the ear’ (2012: 74). The Zafimaniry, Bloch explains, are a group of swidden cultivators living in high-altitude forest in Madagascar (swidden cultivation, also known as shifting cultivation, is a form of agriculture in which areas of forest are cleared and burned to create temporary fields for growing crops; after a few harvests, the fields are left fallow to restore the soil's fertility). The chapter describes how houses are of great importance to the Zafimaniry. The building of traditional houses is closely bound up with their ideas of what we might think of as marriage. Bloch explains that:

Marriage without a house is a contradiction in terms, simply because the Zafimaniry notion which I choose to translate as 'marriage' is distinguished from other forms of sexual union precisely by the existence of a house. This is reflected in the fact that the normal way of asking the question corresponding to our 'are you married?' is phrased, literally, to mean ‘Have you obtained a house with a hearth?’ (ibid: 72).

I will continue to quote Bloch at length here, firstly because he presents his research and argument so effectively that I can’t improve on it by summarising, and secondly because all the rich ethnographic context and detail he provides is useful for understanding ‘the breaking of the ear’. He writes: 

The process which leads to marriage begins… before the construction of the house. The beginning of this process is the sexual affection and intercourse which occurs between very young people indeed. The Zafimaniry seem to want to place particular stress on the chaotic, fluid and fickle character of this type of relationship, largely, I feel, to contrast it with the stability and immobility ultimately achieved by a successful union represented by the house. Ideally, out of chaotic promiscuity will emerge a more stable monogamous relationship based on mutual affection and this will lead to the partners establishing a house with a hearth.

In fact, there is often much less spontaneity than would appear in the creation of stable marriages, for the parents of the couple may have arranged a marriage between them while they were still only babies. If so, however, this agreement will be kept secret and the couple will merely be subtly encouraged towards each other by their parents, in the hope that they will begin the marriage process seemingly on their own initiative. The reason why this strategy is often successful is that the parents of such a couple go out of their way to patch up the relationship between the two when it threatens to break up, while on the other hand they may actually secretly encourage the demise of other liaisons…

Whenever a boy and girl are clearly attracted to each other and are having intercourse more regularly with each other than with anybody else, either they or their parents (depending on the part played in the relationship by the sort of parental strategy I mentioned above) may want to transform the relationship into something more permanent, something for which the English word 'marriage' offers a loose translation.

The first step along this path is the recognition, by the parents of the girl, of the fact that she is having sexual intercourse with a particular boy…This recognition needs to be understood partly in terms of the very strong taboo which forbids adjacent generations from having knowledge of each others' sexual activity, especially if the representatives of these adjacent generations are of different sexes.

The first stage in this revelation occurs when the mother of the boy tells the mother of the girl of their children's liaison and when, in turn, the mother of the girl tells the father. This process is called tapa sofina, or the breaking of the ear, because first the girl's mother and then the girl's father have their ears 'broken' by having to take cognisance of their daughter's sexual activity and thereby break the taboo.

After the 'breaking of the ear' the girl may, from time to time, spend the night at her husband's house and need not any more take too elaborate precautions of secrecy’ (ibid: 72-4).

For Bloch, then, it is the force of the ‘very strong taboo which forbids adjacent generations from having knowledge of each others' sexual activity, especially if the representatives of these adjacent generations are of different sexes’ which makes the force of the breaking of the ear so pronounced, even though presumably, especially when the parents approve of or have been involved in the arrangement of the marriage, it is good news for those whose ears are broken.

There don’t seem to be comparable taboos around the older generation learning about the sexual activities of the younger one in the British middle-class culture of which I am a part, but when friends I know who are the parents of older children share the news of their finding out about those children being involved in romantic relationships, they so do with lowered voices and obvious excitement, all of which suggest that this discovery is somewhat confidential and by no means an ‘ordinary’ event. Sometimes their children make a special point of telling them, for instance coming to find them specifically for that reason or waiting for a time when there are no other people around. They seem to be conscious that a breach of normal conversation is taking place. There is a kind of ‘breaking of the ear’ which forces the older to ‘take cognisance’, though it is not so formalised or ritualised as with the Zafimaniry.

Bloch goes on to describe how in Zafimaniry society, the breaking of the ear precedes the ‘breaking of the eye’ or tapa maso.

This involves a major ritual where the family of the boy visits the family of the girl and acts on his behalf. It seems the only absolutely essential ritual of marriage. The central part of the ritual is when the bride and groom appear together shamefaced in front of her parents, thereby making public, especially to her father, their sexual relation. In return for the breaking of the taboo (another word for tapa maso is alafady. the removal of the taboo) the groom gives a small sum of money to the girl's parents. Then the parents of the girl will bless the boy and the parents of the boy will bless the girl. After that the girl may have sexual relations in her own house. The 'appearance' of the couple together will then be repeated in a minor way when the new spouses together visit the houses of a variety of senior relatives of both the groom and bride (ibid 74-5).

Bloch continues:

Ideally the tapa maso should be followed by yet another ritual called the fananbarana or 'making evident'. In many ways this ought to be the most important marriage ritual; it should involve many people and requires a big feast. However… it is almost never done nowadays and I have never seen it. It should occur at the house of the bride and involves the husband giving a formal acknowledgement of his sonhood to his parents-in-law and later the bride doing the same for her parents-in-law at their house’ (ibid 74-5).

I want to circle back briefly to the idea of the breaking of the ear. Although again it is the breach of the taboo which gives the breaking of the ear particular force in the Zafimaniry example, it seems to me that we are often having our ears broken and breaking the ears of others in less specific ways, for instance when we receive or impart news in general, but particularly when that news has a major impact or is of real significance. Also, although there is not a taboo, we sometimes feel a reluctance, or a resistance to imparting news that we suspect the receiver might find difficult. That resistance has to be overcome. It is as if the release of the pent-up energy of keeping the news, or the release of gravitational potential energy that comes from heaving the news like a boulder up over the barrier of our own reluctance and letting it fall down the other side and into the other’s perception is enough to break their ear with the force of its impact. There is a audible kinaesthetic force to the release of news.

The ear is particularly relevant here too because often news cannot be followed readily by a ‘breaking of the eye’ and demonstrated visually or made otherwise evident like the relationships Bloch describes. We often hear about things that have happened before the consequences are otherwise obvious. Hearing news over the radio, for example, might feel too commonplace, ordinary, and impersonal to constitute a breaking of the ear, and yet sometimes learning about major events (like the outcome of an election for example, or the news of an international conflict) can feel like a breach of the mundane receipt of information and produces significant shifts in our lived reality. In this sense, the idea of the ‘breaking of the ear’ does seem relevant to everyday life, and so may be extendable far beyond the sphere of Zafimaniry sexual and marital relations from which it emerges.

Reference

Bloch, Maurice. 1995. ‘The Resurrection of the house among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar’ in Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds.) About the House: Levi-Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 69-83.