As a cultural outsider, one of the questions swirling around in my head looking for an answer was: Why did Chácobo husbands and wives live in separate dwellings or separate rooms?

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Then one day the answer came.  It was obvious.  The living patterns or cultural forms illustrated below were designed to prevent husbands and wives from becoming “one-flesh,” a form set forth in Genesis 2:24 and reinforced by Jesus who said “they are no longer two but one” (Mark 10:8; Matthew 19:6).

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The Biblical text clearly sets forth a universal Ideal which Jesus later reaffirms, a cultural ideal which man and society have the capacity to reject and replace with forms designed to cancel the universal.  The following forms or living patterns clearly reveal the Chácobo had canceled God’s Ideal, the nuclear family, replacing it with a form Jesus called the “household-of-five, the fifth member being the in-coming son-in-law (Luke 12:52-530).

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The function of the new forms was to cancel (a), the structure of the nuclear family, (b), the structure of individuality, (c), the structure marriage, and (c), the structure of the husband-wife relationship. Since they had the freedom and power to cancel these Ideal structures, I would classify the living patterns illustrated above as being sinful rather than being “neutral in essence” as postulated by contextualizers like missiologist Charles Kraft.

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For the Chácobo, natural individuality expressed in the sphere of freedom was replaced with ascribed functions with the goal of equity and conformity.  Covenantal marriages made in the sphere of freedom did not exist. Instead, there were contractual marriages, the contract being between a potential son-in-law looking for a wife and in-laws looking for a food provider. The structure of Chácobo marriage and individuality made it impossible for a Chácobo “woman to become a ‘wife’ in the full sense of the word” (Herman Dooyeerwerd).  The structure of the husband-wife dyad which makes the husband “the head of the wife” was rejected, thus leaving the Chácobo leaderless. Finally, there was the restructuring of the nuclear family, a process involving the canceling of the husband-wife dyad as the dominant dyad and replacing it with the biological dyad of mother-daughter. 

 

Now the particular biological dyad that replaces the covenantal dyad of husband-wife will vary from culture to culture because their environments are different. This means the “traditions” and forms of each culture will be shaped by “the elements of the world, and not after Christ” who declared “they are no longer two but one” (Colossians 2:8; Matthew 19:6).

 

In the case of the Chácobo, it was their need for manioc beer and the environmental abundance of manioc which selected the mother-daughter dyad to be the dominant dyad of the nuclear family.   The result was a society “organized on mechanistic principles ...[in which] every part must be made to function smoothly within the totalitarian whole.” 

 

This ideological shift from the covenantal to the biological manifests a spiritual phenomenon. It is all about canceling a life-way which promotes freedom and self-actualizing and replacing it with a life-way which mechanizes a society by ascribing to each member a function. The mechanization of Chácobo society resulted in the deletion of the concepts son-in-law and in-laws from their lexicon. It its place they inserted the term “raisi,”  a legal term signifying mutual duties, rights, and obligations agreed upon by both parties  of the marriage contract. 

 

To express the phenomenon of replacing innate positive universals having meanings which are fixed and constant for negative particulars having meanings which are in constant flux because they are shaped by necessity, linguist Kenneth Pike coined the term  “Etic Divergence” aka the Replacement of a Divine Ideal for a Negative Particular selected by the environment. 

 

What represents an Ideal structure, a structure which Jesus defended, was the importance of the husband-wife dyad within the nuclear family. When Etic Divergence takes place, the Ideal dyad which promotes individuality and self-actualization in the field of freedom will be replaced by a “one flesh” biologically dyad contextually selected. Its function will be to satisfy a specific need in the field of necessity. Whatever biological dyad is selected, it will be environmentally selected from a field of seven possibilities as  illustrated below.

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Now when it comes to the thousand of tribal societies that exist in the world, according to socio-biologist Desmond Morris, "Something has happened to it [people groups] to hold it [them] back, something that is working against the natural tendencies of the species to explore and investigate the world around it.”  Clearly, Morris has no idea as to what the “something” is.

 

That “something,” we propose, involved their cancelation and replacement of positive universals structured in the  unconscious mind for life-ways shaped by the “material elements of the world which do not accord with Christ” (Col 2:8). The Bible gives us the answer. 

 

Rejection of the Divine Ideal by a society leads to and necessitates a restructuring of society, beginning with the structure of marriage, the structure of the nuclear family, and the suppression of individuality. For the Chácobo, the restructuring of marriage meant the rejection of “husband as head” ( Ephesians 5:23) and the total rejection of leader-follower status positions, except in a situation where know-how and competency were needed. In such cases, the temporary leader would be called the “owner” of the project.  When the project was terminated, so did the role of being a “leader.”

 

The Chácobo restructuring of the nuclear family, in the words of Morris, was "working against them."   

 

Convictions

1. There exists a Divine Ideal form to the structure of individuality, marriage, the husband-wife dyad, and nuclear family. The  Ideal is structured in the unconscious mind and revealed in the Bible. 

2. Man has both the power and freedom to reject these Ideal forms. And rejection leads to and necessities a replacement. 

3. Membership in the nuclear family is not a variable. Christian theologian Herman Dooyeweerd points out: “Membership is absolutely restricted to the parents and their offspring in the first degree.” For contextualizers like Kraft, membership in the family is a variable.  For such, “There is no such thing as an absolute set of cultural forms....that would imply the existence of some sort of absolute cultural structure (i.e., some set of absolute cultural forms) are so misleading that they must be abandoned.” 

4. Whenever a society choses to diverge from the universal and “goes its own way” (Acts 14:16), it will attempt to create a defensive systems against anxiety. First, it will replace the husband-wife dyad with one of the above biological dyads, a dyad that “fits” the environment; secondly, it will increase the size of the family by adding new members. This it does by simply classifying collateral relatives as family member as illustrated below.  But in so doing, it rejects the Rule of Contradiction.

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 5.  Any divergence from the covenantal "one flesh" principle of husband and wife will              necessitate, as illustrated above, a restructuring of the nuclear family by classifying              collateral relatives as “brothers” and “sisters,” “fathers” and “mothers,” and “sons”

     and daughters”.  

 

 

Gilbert Prost

April 14, 2021

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