Warfare,Social Organisation and Resource Access Amongst the Wosera Abelam of Papua New Guinea

In the precolonial period warfare was endemic amongst the Wosera Abelam and social organisation was sufficiently flexible to permit the movement of people between villages and groups, and their full incorporation into their host societies. In the contemporary context of increasing population pressure, and in the absence of warfare, a significant response is a general tightening of the rules governing group membership and resource access. This response, it is argued, may represent a shift from a patrifilial system of social organisation to one based on patrilineal-like principles, resulting in a legacy of marginalised immigrant lineages of three generations or less of village residence.     

The Risks and Uncertainties of Migration: an Exploration of Recent Trends amongst the Wosera Abelam of Papua New Guinea

This paper reports on ongoing research on migration and circulation between the Wosera sub-district, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, and the island province of West New Britain. We examine the pressures contributing to increased family migration and longer-term, possibly permanent, migration from the Wosera. While rising resource/population pressure and stricter forms of land tenure arrangements are altering patterns of out-migration, the situation for long-term and temporary migrants in West New Britain is becoming less certain as land shortages begin to limit opportunities for further settlement and indigenous landowners become less tolerant of migrants from other provinces. We discuss these influences on migration patterns within the context of emerging social stratification of Wosera society, and consider the implications for both migrants and non-migrants.     

Reto's Chance: State and Status in an Urban Papua New Guinea Settlement

According to the ‘state‐in‐society’ model developed by Joel Migdal, states cannot be analytically regarded as separate from the societies they govern and have to be viewed in their social contexts. Migdal's model has been well received by scholars discussing governance and, especially, social control, in Melanesia. An anthropological qualification which could be applied to the model is that local elements of state in Melanesia are socially permeable, since their employees are likely to come from the communities they serve. This permeability arguably contributes to a mutually transformative relationship between state institutions and local groups whose praxis is informed by exigencies of kinship and community. Heuristically viewing the colonially planned ‘village court system’ in Papua New Guinea as an element of state in terms of Migdal's model, this paper presents a narrative of the appropriation of a village court into community sociality and individual aspirations for status in an urban settlement in Port Moresby. Ethnographically, it suggests that an application of the state‐in‐society model in the Papua New Guinean context, at least, must allow recognition of the way colonially and neo‐colonially introduced institutions have been appropriated into the praxis of local communities, and thus must preserve a sense of the transformations both of the institutions and the social life of those communities, to be analytically viable.     

Another Kind of Gold: an Introduction to Marijuana in Papua New Guinea

Widespread as marijuana has become in Papua New Guinea (PNG), little ethnographic investigation has been done on problems raised by its cultivation, consumption and traffic there. In this essay, we survey the legal contexts of its production and circulation both in PNG and throughout the Pacific. We assess how the drug has been depicted in the regional literature. While our primary focus is on PNG, our point in offering these broader perspectives is to begin to outline political and comparative issues suggested by the arrival of this substance on Pacific shores. Our overall goal is to encourage rigorous and comprehensive discussion of the ambiguous relationship among society, the state and global capitalism that the drug constitutes, in addition to the many other, rather smaller‐scale problems raised in each of our four essays about the ongoing construction of and debate about its meaning at the local‐level.     

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.     

Kamula Accounts of Rambo and the State of Papua New Guinea

This paper contributes to the ethnography of masculinity and the media in PNG. I outline some changes in Kamula men's understandings of masculinity as they are registered in accounts of conflicts between state security services, the Kamula, Rambo and other actors. Outlining this history shows how Kamula men are increasingly entangled in forms of state power and violence that are partially defined by new myths of masculinity expressed in Melanesian readings of Rambo. The paper describes how some of the power effects linked to Rambo are transferred to Kamula men. I argue that in their accounts of Rambo the Kamula are also exploring different models of sovereignty and state power.     

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.