Fake It Until You Make It: Searching for Mimesis in Buka Village Politics

Contemporary Melanesian communities face difficulties both because of the withdrawal of government services and the continued influence of clientelism within the politics of the distributive state. A notable reaction to both these problems is the organisation of a broad class of groups that may be termed ‘parastatal’: informal organisations, often evanescent, which form around the state and its absence. These may often appear as ‘mimetic’ of recognisable state forms. Characteristically, the analysis of such ‘mimesis’ in Melanesia is framed by doubt that the emulation of state forms extends to the alleged rationality or ‘interiority’ of the state. Here, a case in which villagers in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville undertook to prosecute themselves for non‐payment of school fees is discussed in order to expose the substantial difficulties with understanding parastatal organisation in terms of ‘copying’. The case suggests integration of the villagers into the actually existing state system is much deeper than is often assumed.     

Coral Roads and their Sorcery: Lost Authority and Spectral Commodification in Buka

Sorcery in Buka, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, is understood as reprehensible in most present contexts, but it is also believed to have once played a constructive role in maintaining social order. This mytheme is important both to the analysis of how traditional systems of sorcery come to be rearticulated in postcolonial contexts, and as a means of understanding how villagers conceptualise social order itself. Here, an analysis of the selective means by which vernacular forms of sorcery are assimilated to the Tok Pisin term poisen is presented together with an examination of the history of institutions of social control in which sorcery is remembered ‐ and forgotten ‐ to have played key roles. In the past, sorcery would have been gavman blong peles, a ‘village government’, a power over and from people, accumulated by the hierarchical integration of lineages within houses known as tsuhana. Sorcery has been privatized and commodified, slipping out of control of traditional authorities, who now pursue a strategy of achieving power over land. Power from people entails, in the Buka context, sorcery or other forms of internalised violence; power over land entails the assertion exclusivist genealogical claims. The pursuit of such claims is mediated by courts, and frequently creates rifts in communities. Sorcery, once freed from its role as government, returns to haunt traditional authorities as the spectre of their former power, and as the spectre of resistance to their current power: to the extent that they emphasize the historical role of poisen, the more they are suspected of it; imagined as the anarchy of jealousies, poisen multiplies in proportion to their success in parlaying forms of traditional authority into economic and political advantage.