‘Which Way?’ Big Man,Road Man,Chief: Bernard Narokobi's Multifaceted Leadership Career

ABSTRACT

Among the topics that Bernard Narokobi addresses in his numerous writings is the place of traditional Melanesian leadership styles in a modern Papua New Guinea. This article explores Narokobi's leadership status to show how far-reaching and multifaceted his leadership career was: he was at once a traditional Melanesian bigman, a chief, and a modern public figure. The actions he took in these roles were for him a matter of the highest principle, something that at times had severe political consequences. Because in Melanesia the scope of the ritual that takes place upon an individual's death is an index of their status, an analysis of the mortuary rituals undertaken upon Narokobi's death provides insight into the significance of his leadership at every level from his clan up to the national level of Papua New Guinean society.     

Roads to Inequality: Infrastructure and Historically Grown Regional Differences in the Markham Valley,Papua New Guinea

Roads are one of the most salient symbols of development and modernity for rural citizens of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Multinational corporations, members of parliament, and villagers frequently point to roads as a key to development. However, while roads routinely improve the incomes of those connected, many of their effects are far less scrutable. Here, we examine the economic and social consequences of two roads, the Wau‐Bulolo Highway and Highlands Highway, for two villages in PNG's Morobe Province, and consider the processes that make their outcomes so different. Tracing the history of the two highways and considering a contrasting pair of case‐studies, we explore how roads simultaneously bolster income and drive interregional economic divergence. We demonstrate how the spatial and historical contexts the Highways run through, coupled with the relationships of patronage and dependence they rely on, produce contingent social outcomes and shape local ambivalence towards the outcomes of roads.     

Community Archaeology as Knowledge Management: Reflections from Uneapa Island,Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Over the last decade the concept of community archaeology has become a worldwide phenomenon; a convenient tagline largely describing the involvement of non-archaeologists in the practice of interacting with, uncovering, interpreting, and presenting the past. A plethora of new definitions and methodologies have been postulated, a marked increase in public funds invested in such initiatives is notable, as is the development of more rigorous evaluation strategies. Using Etienne Wenger’s ideas about ‘communities of practice’ (1998), I argue that community archaeology can be conceived as a form of knowledge management. In doing so, this paper reflects on the interactions between a small research team and local community during six months fieldwork on Uneapa, a remote island in the Bismarck Sea, Papua New Guinea. It considers the sets of relations that emerged whilst fi?eld-walking, surveying, and excavating Uneapa’s monumental landscape, and discusses how local ideas and knowledge influenced and altered the project methodologies and research questions being asked. This paper also highlights the challenges faced when reifying such engagements into research outputs.     

A Pre-Lapita Structure at Apalo,Arawe Islands,Papua New Guinea

Stilt structures in the inter-tidal zone or over shallow water on fringing reefs are widely accepted as a feature of settlements of the Lapita cultural complex in Near Oceania. Claims for similar structures in a pre-Lapita context at the Apalo site in the Arawe Islands, New Britain, Papua New Guinea, have been queried on several grounds. Re-evaluation of the Apalo evidence, together with 10 additional AMS radiocarbon dates, establishes human activity associated with some form of structure and possibly with a ground stone axe about 400–500 years before the Lapita pottery occupation. The paucity of occupational refuse suggests a non-residential structure perhaps associated with water transport. Comparisons with the older Dongan midden site in the Sepik-Ramu basin suggest stilt structures were probably used there as well. An apparent shift in depositional processes between the pre-Lapita and Lapita use of Apalo could reflect changed sea conditions arising from increased ENSO activity.     

A possible early age for a diprotodon (Marsupialia: Diprotodontidae) fossil from the Papua New Guinea highlands

MENZIES, J., DAVIES, H.L., DUNLAP, W.J. & GOLDING, S.D., June, 2008. A possible early age for a diprotodon (Marsupialia: Diprotodontidae) fossil from the Papua New Guinea highlands. Alcheringa 32, 129–147. ISSN 0311-5518.

A fossil diprotodon jawbone coated and impregnated with a well-cemented fine breccia or tuff was recovered from weakly consolidated Pleistocene lacustrine sediments near Yonki in the Papua New Guinea highlands. The fine breccia includes angular rock and mineral fragments derived from country rock, accretionary lapilli and clay minerals. It does not include any identifiable primary volcanic material. The presence of accretionary lapilli and lack of volcanic clasts suggests an origin by phreatic eruption—an explosive eruption driven by the violent escape of gas. Minerals in the fine breccia have an age of 13.2 ± 0.2 Ma, middle Miocene, as indicated by ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar analysis. This is the age of the country rock that was blasted by the phreatic eruption. Igneous activity in the Yonki area is thought to have ceased at 7.4 Ma (younger age limit of Elandora Porphyry; late Miocene), and so it is likely, but not certain, that the phreatic eruption occurred not later than 7.4 Ma. The jawbone, as far as can be told from its poor condition, is dentally similar to the late Pliocene and possibly Pleistocene ‘Kolopsis’ watutense recovered from other sites in New Guinea. Probably, the jawbone, or the living marsupial, was buried in the fine breccia at the time of the phreatic eruption, and its remains were subsequently reworked by river erosion and redeposited in the lacustrine sediments. Recrystallization and loss of primary texture in some of the bone may be a result of heating at the time of, or preceding, the eruption.     

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.     

Josephine's Journey: Gender‐based Violence and Marian Devotion in Urban Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang, Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender‐based violence. While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women living in Madang, this article shows how Mary empowers her followers to resist violence, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, is instrumental in sanctioning women to tolerate violence. Josephine's ‘journey of violence’ reveals not only Josephine's turning to Mary, but more so, her negotiations with values belonging to different cultural logics. Caught between ‘tradition’, Christianity and ‘modernity’, Josephine and other Catholic women engage in painful processes of self‐analysis and self‐transformation to adapt to and change their situation. In these processes, Mary is used as a role model.     

From Blood to Oil: Mining,Cosmology, and Human Sacrifice in Central New Guinea

This article explores the intersection between cosmological history and mining geography among the Oksapmin of West Sepik Province. I show that the recent intrusion of mining activity into the local area has catalysed a revival of indigenous religious traditions to explain the occurrence and ownership of the precious materials believed to exist within the ground. Through an analysis of these parts of local cosmological history used to explain contemporary mining, I also seek to ethnographically and historically position the Oksapmin as a hybrid culture mutually influenced by the intersection of two overlapping regional cultural spheres: the Min cultural region, based on the ancestress Afek to the west, and a western highlands model based on sacrificial ritual to restore the vitality of the biocosmos, to the east. This builds upon earlier research done by anthropologists in the area that, on the one hand, portrays the Oksapmin as an anomalous ethnic group in the Min culture area and, on the other hand, that has stressed links between groups lying on either side of the upper Strickland Gorge. I also argue that the Oksapmin, Duna, and Bimin groups all shared a unique trans‐Strickland cosmological identity characterised by the pursuit of world renewal by means of human sacrifice.     

Social Signaling and the Organization of Small-Scale Society: The Case of Contact-Era New Guinea

Small-scale society furnishes the bread and butter of archeological research. Yet our understanding of what these communities did and how they achieved their purpose is still rudimentary. Using the ethnography of contact-era New Guinea, this paper presents a “social signaling” model of small-scale social systems that archeologists may find useful for contextualizing and interpreting the material record of these societies. It proposes that the organization of small-scale society was oriented, among other goals, towards biological and social reproduction, subsistence optimization, and military defense. To advance these multiple collective interests, however, these communities had to deal with three problems: an optimality problem, a conflict-of-interest problem, and a free-rider problem. The optimality problem was solved with a modular (or segmented) social structure, the conflict-of-interest problem by a process of social signaling, and these two solutions together operated to resolve the free-rider problems they created. In addition to explaining the structure and function of small-scale societies, the model provides a unified framework that can account for the ceremonial behaviors, core cultural conceptions, and leadership forms that these societies generated.

The Magic of Money and the Magic of the State: Fast Money Schemes in Papua New Guinea

As Keith Hart (1986) articulated in his neat phrase ‘two sides of the coin’, money and the state are inextricably intertwined. However, academic discussions of the state tend to fall under the heading of ‘governance’, with implicit reference to democratic ideals, while money is regarded as ‘economics’, a field dominated by ideas of the market. In this paper, I use material from U‐Vistract, a mass Ponzi scam to show how quasi‐magical ideas of money and wealth have grown out of the disillusioning experience of the state in its failure to deliver ‘development’. These imaginings of prosperity entail a different kind of state, based on the moral reform of Christian citizens and political leaders and the reorientation of the banking system to deliver benefits to ordinary people. As the Royal Kingdom of Papala, U‐Vistract sought to be seen to be like a Christian state and so deceived its investors into thinking that they were participating in a moral project that would allow them to redress the short‐comings of the Papua New Guinean state. As the scam took on the appearance of the state, so the state came to be seen as a scam.     

Jumping Fish: Engendering Contestation and Development on the Waterways of the Aramia River in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Set in the Aramia River basin, this article explores the intimate and interactive relationship between communities in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, and the water that dominates the environment in which they live. Located amongst tidal rivers, creeks and lagoons, Gogodala villages sit high on ‘islands’ of land. In this environment, water is the site of seasonal change and the space of movement. The Aramia River is synonymous with an ancestral figure called Sawiya who travelled in her canoe, naming, creating and populating the water and land of the area. As the ‘mother of all fish’, Sawiya controls the movement and abundance of fish and other aquatic resources. Water is embodied in Sawiya, whose capacities to both nourish and punish are the basis of seasonal variations in fish, and in the colour and clarity of water in the local lagoons and rivers. Set against the backdrop of the Ok Tedi Mine and recent logging operations on the Aramia, the article explores some of the ways in which water and its resources are defined and experienced in this rural community and the impact this may have on the exploitation and development of natural resources in PNG.     

Legislating the Melanesian Way: Bernard Narokobi and the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

A common criticism of Bernard Narokobi is that his vision of the ‘Melanesian Way’ was vague and imprecise. This article argues against this claim by describing the activities Narokobi undertook as the head of the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea (1975–8). Using the example of his suggested revision of adultery laws, this article shows that Narokobi realized his abstract vision of the Melanesian Way in the most concrete and specific way possible: by attempting to reform the law. Much of Narokobi's legal reform work was unsuccessful, but a full understanding of his philosophy can only be achieved by reading his legal work alongside his published writings like The Melanesian Way.     

Trade's Value: Relational Transactions in the Papua New Guinea Betel Nut Trade

The betel nut trade in Papua New Guinea is big business. Betel nut, a mild indigenous stimulant, is considered the ‘green gold of the grassroots’. It is the country's most significant domestic cash crop and, in terms of rural incomes, a rival to the dominant export cash crops. Its sale is an important livelihood strategy in both rural and urban areas, the most visible manifestation of a flourishing informal economy. In betel nut marketplaces money ‘flows’ and ‘overflows’, traders wield large wads of cash, and vast sums change hands. Whether seeking their fortunes or only tinned fish, people trade betel nut first and foremost to make money, but such interests in trade do not automatically displace other forms of value. This paper is concerned with marketplaces and trade in contemporary Papua New Guinea and what is conveyed in those transactions between buyer and seller. Against the often impersonal and utilitarian rendering of trade, this paper seeks to foreground the sociability of trade and the multiple forms of value that may be simultaneously attached to monetised market transactions. This is not to conceal the discrete, unenduring, and competitive dynamics of trade, which prominently feature in many betel nut transactions, but instead to examine an important dynamic often overlooked. Market transactions, far from being asocial, or even socially destructive, have the capacity to generate and sustain diverse social relations including those of kinship and friendship.     

Brideprice and Prejudice: An Audio-Visual Ethnography on Marriage and Modernity in Mt Hagen,Papua New Guinea

The relationship between bridewealth and women's autonomy is not only discussed amongst anthropologists, development practitioners and other scholars but also amongst brides themselves. Women continue to embrace such marital exchanges, despite their knowledge of ‘modern’ development discourse about the constraints of the practice on women's status and its links to gender-based violence. This paper provides a visual exploration of contemporary brideprice practices and women's autonomy in Mt Hagen. We draw on scenes from our ethnographic film (An Extraordinary Wedding: Marriage and Modernity in Highlands PNG) to explore deliberations and developments that occurred in the case of a particular marriage that took place in 2012. We argue that the institution of brideprice has the potential to enhance the visibility of some women and the importance of their contribution to their own and husbands' kin groups. Despite current tensions regarding brideprice, it can serve as an avenue for the enhancement of women's political participation. The particular brideprice exchange featured in our film, raised concerns for the participants, which we consider in terms of three questions: Does brideprice commodify women? Does it play a role in gender-based violence? Is it inimical to aspirations for modernist individuality? We discuss the importance of bekim (‘return gift’) and suggest that this practice challenges the notion of brideprice as a commodity transaction. We argue that, while there may be an association between brideprice and gender-based violence, brideprice, in and of itself, is not causative of violence. The marriage represented in the film, and discussed in this paper, reveals the creativity of participants in adjusting the values inherent in the customary practice of brideprice to their contemporary aspirations.     

New world complex societies: Recent economic,social, and political studies

Archaeologists working on the complex societies of Latin America have made impressive empirical advances on a number of fronts during the past five years. This article focuses on economic, social, and political issues, using the following topics for organization: intensive agriculture, demography, exchange, households, urbanism, chiefdoms, and state-level polities. For each topic, I review recent archaeological research and summarize pertinent theoretical issues. Unfortunately, the heavy accumulation of new archaeological results is not matched by the conceptual advances that are needed to explore the analytical significance of the data.     

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.     

Great Ancestral Women: Sexuality,Gendered Mobility,and HIV among the Bamu and Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

Faced with a potentially devastating epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Papua New Guinea (PNG), sexuality and mobility have become a focus of national research and prevention programs. In Gogodala and Bamu communities in the Western Province, gendered mobility and sexuality intersect with ancestral narratives that form part of a wider series of Hero Tales found in the southern regions of PNG and Irian Jaya. In this paper we highlight the way these stories detail the travels and activities of female ancestors – known as Sagalu among the Bamui and Sawiya among the Gogodala. We outline the way such ancestral figures are now linked to understandings of contemporary STIs such HIV/AIDS as well as gendered mobility and sexuality more generally. Among the Bamu such links are sometimes directly asserted, with Sagalu represented as the origin if not cause of a uniquely defined variant of HIV/AIDS. Among the Gogodala, however, HIV/AIDS is predominantly understood as something external to the Gogodala and unrelated to ancestors like Sawiya. To explain this difference we note that, historically, Gogodala women have been less mobile and less transactable than their Bamu counterparts who have continued to enact unique understandings of the intersection of heterosexual marriage, gendered mobility, and illness. We argue that the mobility and sexuality of gendered ancestors is salient to understanding these contemporary enactments and their potential implications in light of the HIV epidemic in PNG.     

The Politics of Media Infrastructure: Mobile Phones and Emergent Forms of Public Communication in Papua New Guinea

Recent work in anthropology proposes that the ethnographic study of infrastructure offers a productive way to think about how states and corporations, citizens and consumers, all define their relations and obligations to each other. This article considers the politics of media infrastructure in Papua New Guinea (PNG) by tracing the moral economy of mobile phones. It focuses on (1) how mobile phone users have taken to social media to express dissatisfaction with the dominant mobile network operator, Digicel, a privately owned foreign company; and (2) how the PNG state has attempted to regulate the use of mobile phones and social media through cybercrime legislation and registration of Subscriber Identity Modules (SIM cards). Consideration of these two issues – matters of concern that gather publics around them – enables an assessment of the promise of improved telecommunications and social media, in particular, to make government in PNG more accountable and transparent.