The term for ‘clan’ and its various subdivisions is ikupu. North Mekeo clans are patrilineal on the basis of continuous transmission of shared agnatic clan blood from fathers to children. It is the sharing of the same agnatic or male blood that defines the clan, for all of its members are regarded as ‘one blood’. Literally translated, the term ikupu means ‘closed’, and the term is used frequently in reference to the ritual procedures whereby men and women restrict the flow of substances in and out of their bodies. Men close their bodies by fasting and various types of abstention when they engage in magical practices that require manipulation of dirty, bloody residues of dead humans—the basic category of substances employed in most types of sorcery. Women correspondingly close their bodies in the period between their weaning of one child and their resumption of sexual relations with their husbands (see Mosko 1983, 1985: Chapters 4 and 5). Clans, like bodies, however, are not entirely closed, for if they were this would imply that they are endogamous (Figure 4). By rule, clans are exogamous and, consequently, open to one another through marriage and the resultant exchange of cognatic bloods. So just as women and men periodically open their bodies to the flow of substances in and out, including the substances of one another’s bodies, clans exchange parts of one another and thereby open their boundaries. Moreover, just as the inside and outside of the human body is bounded by the skin, a clan has a ‘skin’ too. It is commonly remarked that the women of a clan are the ‘skin of the clan’. On marriage, they (or parts of them) go out and into other clans. The part of a woman’s body that goes out of one clan and into another clan as a result of sexual intercourse and procreation is her blood, specifically into the bodies of her children.

It may appear to be contradictory that clans that are open to one another through the exchange of women’s or female blood are seen as being in some way closed. However, just as women and men periodically close their bodies, clans do the analogous thing by returning the blood previously incorporated into the bodies of their members through their mothers. This is accomplished in the context of reciprocal mortuary feasting. I have elsewhere (Mosko 1983, 1985) called this process ‘de-conception’. By returning the female blood of other clans that had rendered their own clan temporarily open, members of a clan close their boundaries to one another. In the long term, then, clans are closed bodies. And it is because they periodically close their respective bodies to one another that clans can reopen their relations through future marriages.

In sum, just as human bodies have open and closed modes of interrelationship, clan bodies open and close their boundaries to one another. Moreover, it is through the opening of their bodies that life is generated and sustained, and it is in the closing or severing of their relations that death occurs.