WOMEN'S FACIAL TATTOOING AMONG THE MAISIN OF ORO PROVINCE,PAPUA NEW GUINEA: THE CHANGING SIGNIFICANCE OF AN ANCIENT CUSTOM

The Maisin women of northeastern Papua New Guinea are among the last coastal Papuans to tattoo their faces. This article first describes the techniques and social process of Maisin tattooing. We then examine the resilience of the custom in light of changes in puberty rites and notions of gender. We argue that these contexts have lost their cultural salience as a result of the Maisins' incorporation into the larger Papua New Guinea society. Tattooing has acquired new significance as a marker of cultural identity in a multicultural setting and as a sign of the Maisin people's commercial success as makers of indigenous art.     

ONE NAME,MANY GROUNDS: LAND,MARRIAGE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE AMONG THE OROKAIVA OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA

It is proposed, through an examination of published materials on the Orokaiva, that established and even competing models and concepts of ‘kinship’ and marriage (generalized and direct exchange, agnatic descent, clan, balanced reciprocity) have little or no explanatory power since they either do not fit the published facts or they predict the same results, despite published assertions to the contrary. An hypothesis linking relationship terminology, marriage ‘systems’ and land use is proposed. Some features in the ‘system’ of ‘kinship’ terminology appear to be expressive of the ideology of gardening rather than ‘kinship’ and marriage per se.     

THE FLIGHT FROM THE FEN: THE PREHISTORIC MIGRATIONS OF THE BOIKEN OF THE EAST SEPIK PROVINCE,PAPUA NEW GUINEA

This paper has two goals. Its specific aim is to establish the prehistoric migrations of the Boiken people of the East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, using a large corpus of Boiken settlement histories supplemented by linguistic, genetic, and ecological data. In the course of the analysis, a method of applying cluster techniques to detect underlying directional patterns in settlement histories is demonstrated. The migration history thus revealed fits well with the picture of Middle Sepik prehistory emerging from recent geoarchaeological research. At a more general level, the paper seeks to verify that the spatial aspects of Boiken settlement traditions are indeed historically accurate. This finding is of intrinsic importance for anyone attempting to understand the construction of ethno-historical knowledge, and particularly for regional analysts and historical ethnographers, who are often faced with reconstructing the diachronic dimensions of ethnography in regions of New Guinea where archaeological research is little developed. In the case of the Boiken, the migrations that emerge from ethnohistory help resolve the puzzle of why the symbolic culture of the Ndu-speaking Yangoru Boiken exhibits much closer affinities to that of the Torricelli-speaking Mountain Arapesh than that of any Ndu-speaking group, including some of the Boiken dialect groups to the southeast.