Being and ‘Non-Being’ in Ambonwari (Papua New Guinea) Ritual

By focusing on children involved in the ritual practices in Ambonwari village, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, this essay compares two types of ritual: that of healing and that of male initiation. Like other life crisis rituals both deal with two dimensions of the Ambonwari life-world, that is with the living and the dead and, in a broader sense, with people and spirits. Though both are based upon the same cosmology there are fundamental differences between them. First, healers in healing ceremonies treat uninitiated children as ‘non-beings’. From the perspective of Ambonwari ‘selves’ or ‘beings’, children belong to this domain. They exist as extensions of their parents or carers, from whom they cannot be separated conceptually. Second, by examining the Ambonwari concepts of negation I show that healers do not approach the domain of cosmological non-existence: they are not concerned with the cosmogony of the Ambonwari life-world. The male initiation rituals do just the opposite, however. It is only in the male initiation ritual, seen as a cosmogonic event, that young boys are cut off from their parents and ‘thrown’ abruptly into a state of becoming. Unlike the healing rites, these rituals treat young boys as both Ambonwari beginnings and Ambonwari beings. I argue that Ambonwari initiation rituals are not concerned with symbolic death followed by rebirth, but with states of being. Initiation means that death becomes possible for a child. The initiated boy will now be able to die as an Ambonwari being.     

Knowledge,Morality and ‘Kastom’: SikAIDS among Young Yupno People,Finisterre Range,Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the extent of knowledge about HIV/AIDS among young Yupno women and men. Local understanding of sikAIDS is shaped by cultural, moral and religious concepts and processes that are based on social values and practices. Difficulties these young people face in accessing information about HIV/AIDS and using it to implement preventative measures — for example by obtaining condoms — have to be seen in the framework of ‘kastom’ and a moral discourse coined and influenced by the Lutheran Church. As the research shows, there is an urgent need for a broad and contextually sensitive approach to sexual health, including information about conception, family planning methods, and sexually transmitted diseases when planning awareness campaigns for teenagers in rural regions.     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

Sorcery and Warfare in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

Sorcery and warfare are closely interrelated in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrast to other areas of the Highlands, sorcery in large parts of the Eastern Highlands is considered to be an exclusively male domain, and violent retribution for deaths attributed to sorcery is primarily directed against other communities. Thus, sorcery accusations have the tendency to escalate to large‐scale inter‐group warfare, often causing additional casualties. Sorcery beliefs have undergone changes during the colonial and postcolonial era, with new forms of sorcery proliferating, and the zones of safety from sorcery shrinking, due to demographic and economic changes. Sorcery accusations were triggers for the resumption of warfare during the late 1970s and 1980s, and they remain pertinent to outbreaks of hostilities today. In fact, the majority of armed conflicts between 1975 and 2006 among a sample of Fore, Auyana, and Tairora communities in the Okapa and Obura‐Wonenara districts of the Eastern Highlands Province are connected to sorcery beliefs and sorcery accusations. These sorcery accusations are the result of uneven economic development and failure to deliver basic social services. When violence is threatened, local leaders try to mediate the hostility, but the state seems unable to offer alternatives for the peaceful settlement of conflicts.     

Plant microfossils in prehistoric archaeological deposits from Yuku rock shelter,Western Highlands,Papua New Guinea

Plant microfossil analysis was carried out on anthropogenic deposits from Yuku rock shelter, possibly occupied from before 14,200 cal. BP to recent times, in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Elaeocarpus pollen has extremely high percentages throughout. Starch residues of lesser yam (Dioscorea esculenta) and one or more, undifferentiated Dioscorea species were identified, suggesting processing of these taxa since first use of the site. The latter include Dioscorea alata, Dioscorea bulbifera, Dioscorea nummularia and Dioscorea pentaphylla. Pollen and phytoliths of banana (Musa) appear 5200 cal. BP. We cannot differentiate between naturally growing and cultivated yams and bananas. Putative truffle (hypogeous Ascomycotina) spores in the deposits suggest foraging of truffles.     

New Boundaries of Influence in Highland Papua: ‘Culture’, Mining and Ritual Conversions

This article considers the new boundaries of influence among Fuyuge speakers in the Udabe Valley (Central Province, Papua New Guinea [PNG]). These new boundaries have arisen through the conjunction of epochal shifts implicating the PNG State, and local forms of ritual. On the one hand the PNG State's particular advocacy of widespread resource extraction is coupled with its need to comply to signed agreements of international bodies such as the World Trade Organization. Both have consequences for the way boundaries are newly conceived with respect to the ‘land’ (‘landowners’) and with respect to ‘culture’ (‘cultural property’). On the other hand, peoples such as the Fuyuge create and recreate local boundaries of influence through the performance of ritual conversions ‐ as regards persons, place names, or collective names. At the same time a local Fuyuge perspective on ‘culture’ suggests that its boundaries be delineated, analogous to the definitions of boundaries for ‘landowners’ compelled by mining operations. The article highlights connections between these local changes and the current concerns of PNG academic scholars to mandate the protection of localised PNG cultural property, an outgrowth of current epochal alterations.     

Style and self‐making: String bag production in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The looped netbag or bilum is one the most culturally significant of everyday objects in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Made exclusively by women, bilum are also iconic of female productive and reproductive labour. In this article, I analyze how growing social stratification is expressed through the types of bilums young women produce and wear. I argue that the choices that young women make about what kinds of designs, shapes, colours, and fashions to incorporate into their bilums can tell us a great deal about their desires, experiences, and imaginings. While previous analyses have focused on the bilum as an ambiguously gendered object expressing complex ideas about sexual difference, I argue that bilum style increasingly indexes complex ideas about geography and social location, materializing contemporary Papua New Guinean ‘imaginaries’ of space.     

‘Turning Sex into a Game’: Gogodala Men's Response to the AIDS Epidemic and Condom Promotion in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Rugby league is the national sport of Papua New Guinea and the game's huge popularity and international profile has been used in recent condom promotion campaigns in the nation's fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I argue that the promotion of condom use through rugby league requires a national campaign strategy that includes understandings of condom use and masculinity at the rural level. I demonstrate this through a study of Gogodala men's understandings of the epidemic and condom use in Western Province. The Gogodala are a Christian‐based society and many blame the national condom promotion strategy for an increase in promiscuity and for ‘turning sex into a game’. Condom availability in this rural area continues to be restricted to a family planning program that promotes Christian values and excludes unmarried men. I explore the male condom dilemma where young men are more concerned with avoiding accusations that their sexual behaviour puts them at risk of contracting HIV despite acknowledging the preventative value of using condoms. In this context young men disassociate themselves from the disease and condom use through a process of calculated risk or risk minimisation.     

Clan Claims: Land,Law and Violence in the Papua New Guinea Eastern Highlands1

Land has become the source of new end more complex disputes in Papua New Guinea in recent years. Economic opportunities associated with government programs and multinational corporations have altered land values in rural districts. This paper examines how in the context of such shifting attitudes toward land, competing groups in an Eastern Highlands district use both law and violence in their confrontations. One component of the legal strategies pursued includes the elaboration of clan stories to legitimize claims before the courts. Yet, while rural elites and their families may desire the support of the law in their economic pursuits, the realities of intergroup violence set limits on the likely success of this approach.     

‘Fighting from the fields’: developing the British ‘National Farm’ in the Second World War

The Second World War had a profound impact on British Agriculture, with state intervention at an unprecedented level cementing the idea of a ‘National Farm’ in both the popular and the governmental psyche. Critical attention has recently begun to refocus on this period, adding to the somewhat celebratory meta-narratives written in the official histories. Drawing from the practice of micro-historical research and recent work in geography that seeks to understand the production of the landscape ‘from within’, this paper explores how ‘small stories’ can afford an appreciation of the ‘complications of everyday existence’ and bring greater depth, nuance and understanding to these ‘larger’ historical events and their influence on the British countryside. Utilising oral histories from farms in Devon (UK), the paper explores the micro-geographies which shaped as well as destabilised the national farm message as it was translated into the local context.     

‘White Skins‘, ‘Real People’ and ‘Chinese’ in Some Spatial Transformations of the Western Province,PNG1

To understand more fully contemporary forms of colonialism in PNG I argue we need to move our analysis beyond local narratives of encounters with Europeans to include narratives about non-Europeans. Through a consideration of Kamula accounts of Europeans, especially missionaries, and Chinese I show how the Kamula model two quite different experiences of colonialism. In one, local people are able to transform Europeans into analogues of themselves and in the other, currently more associated with the Chinese, the emphasis is on difference, rather than on commonalities. These interrelated representations of two distinct kinds of colonialists are, in part, complex signifiers of national, and especially local, concerns about ‘development’ based on logging. I outline how these accounts of Europeans and Chinese express the different forms of power which are currently deployed to transform space in the Western Province. I conclude by speculating that to understand these powers adequately we may need to follow Latour and Callon and extend our analysis of colonialism to include non-human agents.     

‘We Live Like This’: Local Inequalities and Disproportionate Risk in the Context of Extractive Development and Climate Change on New Hanover Island,Papua New Guinea

This study examines the local processes, effects, and responses to large‐scale logging and agricultural development efforts in subsistence communities on New Hanover Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Recently, New Hanover became the site of three special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover approximately 79% of the island. The proliferation of SABLs within PNG is an outcome of recent national development initiatives promoting a significant increase in the production of commercial agricultural crops such as oil palm and biofuel. Accordingly, SABLs are designed to facilitate the development of long‐term commercial agricultural industries in rural locations across the country through the conversion of forested lands and the simplification of communal land tenure, for the purposes of private lease. However, SABLs have simultaneously provided a convenient loophole around more restrictive national forestry policies and thereby become attractive to traditional logging interests in the Asian/Pacific region. Consequently, many SABLs across PNG have failed to produce viable agricultural development or broad local benefit. It is within this context, that this study pays particular attention to the experiences of women and lower‐status landowners living through the processes of SABL conversion, during the El Nino drought of 2015. The study details the statuses and roles of these groups within the overall development process, the ways in which their social relationships changed in the context of development, why these groups were particularly vulnerable to the broad livelihood effects of forest conversion and drought, how they adapted to these effects, and what their hopes were regarding the future of the development project and life on the island. This study adds to current theoretical interests on emerging neoliberal frontiers of land and resource control by examining these SABL landscapes on New Hanover as contemporary examples of land grabs and documenting the very real local level consequences of this phenomenon. The study is also particularly significant in light of the growing threats to forests and forest‐dependent livelihoods and the recognition of the importance of local forest practices to global sustainability.     

Settlement fortification in village and ‘tribal’ society: Evidence from contact-era New Guinea

Using ethnographic data from contact-era New Guinea, this paper seeks to advance an understanding of the logic of settlement fortifications—i.e., the principles governing their design and operational functioning. This issue has been largely neglected because the principles involved seem so obvious: fortifications function to improve the security of a position by impeding an attacker’s efforts to penetrate it. For village and tribal societies, though, this can be an oversimplification. In these communities, people are generally most dependent on their settlement fortifications at night, when they are home and asleep; yet the cover of night is precisely when settlement fortifications are at their most vulnerable to penetration. What the New Guinea evidence reveals is that settlement fortifications were designed not just to keep attackers out but, even more important, to keep them in once they had penetrated and launched their attack. Defenders could then rally and annihilate their assailants, creating a powerful deterrent against attack in the first place—the best defense of all. These findings are applied to an early Late Woodland site in Ohio to illustrate their potential for informing an archeology of war.     

Food Markets in the Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea: Actors, Power and Rural Development Geography

Discussions of rural development in the highlands of Papua New Guinea have often centred on coffee, and been couched either in narrowly economic terms or in class analysis terms. Fresh food marketing has received less attention, although it is an important activity for many highland people. An approach which takes into account the subjectivity of actors, and the contests of power which permeate markets, is explored in this paper. The history and present forms of fresh food marketing in the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea are then outlined. The author concludes by arguing for a geography of rural development, which is based on close attention to social interaction at the local level, coupled with an awareness of global structures provided by non-universalist political economy.     

‘Working for’ and ‘Working’ among Western Arrernte in Central Australia1

This article discusses some conflicts between kin‐ and market‐based society as they are reflected in the lives of Western Arrernte in and around Ntaria (Hermannsburg). Both political economy and cultural analysis provide accounts of concomitant ‘problems about work’ and training initiatives in remote communities. Neither brings together, however, the issues of economic marginalisation and a history of cultural difference with its own transformations. This discussion takes its departure from the Arrernte's attempts to reconcile kinship service (‘working for’) and paid employment (‘working’) in everyday practice. It demonstrates that this attempt is part of broader change concerning the ways in which hunter‐gatherer people in Australia have been compelled to adapt to a world of cash and commodities, and waged employment. In this discussion, the focus is on remote indigenous Australians today.     

The Last Big Man: Development and Men's Discontents in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Big Men achieve that status by making good things happen for others as well as for themselves. In the minds of many Papua New Guineans development promises a direct route to becoming Super Big Men and Women. Mostly, however, it produces inequality and conflict. This is striking in places peripheral to major developments and in situations where not everyone benefits (e.g. compensation to ‘local landowners' - narrowly defined by mining companies - and lucrative urban employment - enjoyed only by the few, mostly male elite). Uneven development pits men and women, parents and children, and whole communities against one another as those less fortunate fail to match the generosities or competition of more prosperous exchange partners. In this article, I look at development through the eyes of one self-proclaimed ‘last Big Man’. As a youth, Ruge participated in male initiation and worked for the colonial outsiders, hoping to manipulate both old and new systems. He married several wives in the tradition of past Gende leaders but chose one because she had been to school, knew the ways of Europeans and had a keen business sense. In spite of what looked like the right moves and a sincere concern for his followers, Ruge could not prevent his society from being ravaged by inequality or help a growing number of bachelors afford expensive brideprices as more and more village girls married wealthy strangers from other parts of Papua New Guinea. In the end, a clan brother killed Ruge in an argument over land, making Ruge a victim to capitalist development's indifference to local traditions of family, reputation, and leadership.     

‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany's Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War

This article analyses the impact of the First World War on Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. I argue that the war was a turning point for the nation's gay movement, as it provided a central ideal – comradeship – which altered the ways in which homosexual rights organisations defined homosexuality and masculinity. A militarised rhetoric permeated the language of gay rights groups in the 1920s, providing a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimise ‘friendship’ and secure civil rights. The article relies on the publications of three major homosexual rights organisations recently collected at the Schwules Archiv und Museum in Berlin.