Creating Difference: A Contemporary Affiliation Drama in the Highlands of New Guinea

CREATING DIFFERENCE: A CONTEMPORARYAFFILIATION DRAMA IN THE HIGHLANDS OF

NEW GUINEA

A S & P J. S

University of Pittsburgh

Issues of affiliation to groups, important in Papua New Guinea Highlands ethnogra-phy during the 1960s and 1970s, have since been overshadowed by other analytical concerns. But the issues have never gone away and they resound clearly in the life of people there, who are dealing with situations of rapid change that make the crafting ofaffiliations problematic and strategically important. We examine a case in which an affilia-tion event was staged in order to mediate between inter-ethnic claims on a child and to refurbish practices of securing these claims in the absence of brideprice payments or virilocal residence. The analysis points out how transactions that the actors engaged in fell ambiguously between the categories of gift and commodity, and how ties of nurturanceand food-giving continue to play a crucial part in representations and negotiations. At the core of the event was the extent to which the parties involved shared in the under-standings of the event at hand. This underlines the fact that transactions and meanings arealways inextricably linked together. Strategies are made meaningfully and meanings are madestrategically.

During the 1960s and 1970s a major theme in the anthropology of NewGuinea Highlands societies centred on issues of affiliation, seen variously interms of recruitment of groups, the claiming of identities by persons, flexi-bilities and shifts in such claims, and the constraints on choice deriving fromdemography, politics, or cultural ideas. One consensus emergent from suchstudies was that it is worthwhile to distinguish between ideas of descent asused ideologically and pragmatically to justify action or organize support foraction, and ideas of descent used to assign or claim identity as a member ofa category or group. This distinction enabled ethnographers to accommodateflexibility and choice at the level of ‘recruitment’ with fixity of rhetoric atthe level of politics or ‘social structure’. Flexibility was therefore written in asan important characteristic of practical social life and the constitution of socialaggregates in this part of the world.

Given this, it is particularly interesting to ask what has happened to thesesocieties, so intensively studied with one set of anthropological concepts inthe 1960s and 1970s, in the sphere of affiliation during more recent times.Since flexibility and choice were identified as significant factors in the earlierliterature, we might expect these features to appear also today. At the same

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2000.J. Roy. anthrop. Inst. (N.S.) 6, 1–15

time, with cash cropping and increasing effective population density, we mightexpect to find a contrary process, the tightening of social practices and theformulation of restrictive ‘rules’ governing such practices. Both practices can,in fact, be at work: individual persons may attempt to maximize their familyfollowings, while the collectivity seeks to restrict access to resources with rulesagainst ‘outsiders’.

We are concerned with the analysis of a case from mid-1997 among theKawelka people of Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands Province of PapuaNew Guinea.They have been the subject of intensive ethnographic work sincethe 1960s, and Hagen society in general was studied in the 1930s, soon afterinitial explorations in the Highlands, by the Lutheran missionaries Vicedomand Strauss (Strauss & Tischner 1962; Vicedom & Tischner 1943–8). Thus,we have by now quite a considerable depth of history in terms of which to consider the ethnography of this area. Here we show how ideas, both old and new, are brought into play or are created in novel situations, illustrat-ing the continuing ingenuity of people in the pursuit of their aims. The overall approach we take to these materials is influenced by practice theory,as initiated by Bourdieu (1977) and reviewed subsequently by Ortner (1984),among others.

Bourdieu’s approach was designed to avoid the mistakes of ‘determinism’ onthe one hand and the ‘occasionalist illusion’ on the other. He saw social actionneither as simply governed by rules nor as simply emerging out of the eventsof interaction. He interposed between rules and events his concept of thehabitus, allowing for both the influence of culture and the play of improvisa-tion and strategizing in social action; and he implied also the influence of polit-ical and economic considerations in the creation of social processes.The studyof practice, therefore, requires attention to case histories of what people do, aswell as how they explain and justify what they do. Practice theory argues for aconcentration on personal agency, on lived experience and on the individualas a mediating category between structure and event. It also attempts to resolvethe tension between materialist and symbolist explanations of social processesby showing how these may both apply in concrete cases (Knauft 1996: 105–39).Neither cultural logic nor political economy in itself accounts for social action,since personal agency is also at work, and this includes the gendered agenciesof both men and women.

Many writers have recognized, explicitly or implicitly, the importance ofthis perspective for understanding New Guinea Highlands materials, as wellas materials from elsewhere in Melanesia and further afield (e.g. Carrier &Carrier 1989; 1991: 8–26; Feil 1984a; 1987; de Lepervanche 1967–8; Scheffler1985).The recognition followed from the realization that principles of descentwere insufficient to account for the factualities of local group compositionand that all aspects of life were deeply affected by gendered practices ofexchange (e.g. Brown 1978; Feil 1984b; Josephides 1983; Lederman 1986;LiPuma 1988;A. Strathern 1969; 1979; M. Strathern 1972; 1988;Weiner 1982).Further, in attempting to understand exchange practices it is important tolocate the aims of the transactors as well as the overall cultural meanings ofthe transactions: to consider how people enter into exchanges in order toobtain certain results and in so doing may operate both within and betweencultural frameworks of meaning, especially in situations of change. Indeed,

2 ANDREW STRATHERN & PAMELA J. STEWART

historical change is an important context in terms of which to evaluate theinter-relations of structure and process.

Affiliations in general depend on a host of practical factors, and in particular can be handled through the medium of exchange payments, and bypresentations of goods designed to influence, modify, strengthen or subvertrules derived from the transmission of substance. Ethnographies exploringthese dimensions have led to a widespread recognition of degrees of flexi-bility in social arrangements, often arising out of warfare, shifting patterns ofco-operation, the wishes of individuals of either sex, the attachment of persons to localities, and competition between leaders (e.g. Kaberry 1967; A.Strathern 1972).

Although the anthropological debates of the 1960s on kinship and descentno longer occupy the front stage of theoretical discussion in Melanesianistethnography, conflicts about kin relations have moved into quite a central position in the contemporary lives of many peoples of Papua New Guinea,who have been exposed to massive concentrations of change since Indepen-dence in 1975, through urbanization, the growth of violence, the entry of the Christian churches, wage labour, migration, monetization and the com-moditized consumer economy, as well as the effects of new political and legal frameworks. Our case study from Mt Hagen in 1997 is set against the backdrop of these changes and shows us principles of conflict in action,centring on the ambiguous affiliation of a child and attempts to resolve this.

‘Buying’ the grandson: an attempted affiliation

R. is a leader of the Kawelka group in Hagen. His only grown-up son, H.,lived and worked in Port Moresby in 1997, and had involved himself in sexualrelationships with two women. One of these had a Chimbu (Highlands)mother and a Kerema (Papuan Gulf) father. The other woman was fromMendi in the Southern Highlands Province. Both women were living andworking in Port Moresby. H. did not have a customary or legal marriage witheither of these women. His relationships therefore reflected the fluid, transi-tory, inchoate character of contemporary urban liaisons (Zimmer-Tamakoshi1995).

From the relationship with the woman whose mother was from Chimbu,a male child was born. As might be expected from this triad of relationships,there arose jealousy, violence and tensions between the individuals involved,each of whom had different aims that they sought to reach in the relation-ship(s) as well as conflicting life ‘projects’. The child became a tool that theChimbu woman could use in her attempts to gain more from H. on behalfof her family, who knew that no brideprice had been paid.

When R. discovered that this male grandchild had been born he was eagerto secure the affiliation of the boy to the Kawelka group and was concernedthat the mother might take her son back to her Chimbu kin. His son hadtold him about the ambiguous relationship he had with the boy’s mother andwith his other partner, the Mendi woman, who was a co-worker with himat his place of employment and who was valued because of the income thatshe was able to bring to the relationship.

ANDREW STRATHERN & PAMELA J. STEWART 3

R. dispatched his lineage brother W. to go to Port Moresby and negotiate with the Chimbu woman to come to Hagen and bring the child with her. This was an effort to show her that the Kawelka kin wanted tostrengthen their tie with the male child and by extension with the motherand her kin. Owing to conflict with the Mendi woman and some of her kin,who were said to be prone to violence and had come to break up the fur-niture in his flat, the Chimbu woman had threatened to leave H. and takeher child back to Chimbu to be with her kin there. She had already beenliving separately from H. with her relatives in Erema, a suburban village area.Indeed, they had never set up a household together and H. had lived in a flatnext to the Mendi woman. This posed a problem for R. and his kin group,who did not want the boy to learn the Chimbu language as his first languageand therefore be more closely affiliated with his Chimbu kin than with theKawelka. (The fear here was related to the indigenous Hagen theory of personhood, since children begin to acquire noman, in the sense of ‘social consciousness’, when they first start to speak in words; Strathern & Stewart1998a.)

In an effort to secure the affiliation of the boy with the Kawelka, a feast(mumu) was prepared and the mother, the boy and some of the Chimbuwoman’s female kin were brought to Hagen to be honoured and to receivemoney. These acts were to show them the good intent of R.’s family grouptowards them.

Frozen beef for the feast was purchased in the town, along with greens andother vegetables and fruits.The money for these had been collected from theconcerned parties. A pig was given for cooking by W. (R.’s lineage brother),who had fetched the child from Moresby. This pig was to be given to theChimbu woman and her kin while the beef was distributed to the others atthe feast. The cooking pit was prepared in the style of an area to the southof Hagen,Tambul, rather than in the ordinary Hagen way because immigrantsfrom that region were assisting with the occasion as a part of R.’s supportgroup. Many people gathered for the feast, bringing foods to be cooked andtaking the opportunity to get to know the Chimbu boy and his mother.Theoccasion accordingly took on the character of both a community event andan experiment in inter-ethnic relations.

After the food had been cooked but before the distribution and formalconsumption, speeches were made to those gathered while the Chimbuwoman, her son and the female kin who had accompanied her sat on a squareof fabric in the centre of the encircling crowd. The speeches were made in the local language, Melpa, and in Tok Pisin for the benefit of the non-Melpa speaking Chimbu visitors. It was notable that when speeches weremade in Melpa it was said that the boy’s affiliation was being ‘bought’, whilein Tok Pisin the event was not spoken of as ‘buying the boy’. (We analyze this further below.) All who were gathered were asked to give something to the boy’s mother and her kin to show that they recognized the care theyhad been taking of the boy and that the Kawelka also wanted to show their care for him. The largest sum of money was given by R., the grand-father of the child. The second largest sum was given by E., the full sister ofH. (the father of the child).These larger sums marked the special relationshipthat these kin felt they had with the boy and the hope that they would


have a lasting tie with the child as a member of their group. H., the boy’sfather, was not himself present and it was not clear what his feelings wereabout these events. (His full-time employment in Moresby may have kept him from attending. Also, because of his continued relationship with theMendi woman he may have decided to avoid the event. His presence mighthave complicated the occasion by producing a tension that could have escalated into violence. By mid-1998 he was back in Hagen after some problems in his work situation, but was still not available for interviewing onthe issue.)

Speakers (W. and R. mainly) said that the money was to repay the motherand her kin for looking after the child and was to indicate that the child andthe mother could visit and stay for periods of time in Hagen in the futurewithout having to worry about the bus fares to travel there. The money thatwas given also indicated that the Kawelka kinsfolk could go to Chimbu forthe purpose of visiting the boy.

At the time of this feast no brideprice had been given, but there was apromise to pay an unspecified amount at some time in the future. It wasimportant for the mother of the boy to hear this promise. R. specificallyscheduled the question of brideprice for a later time, reversing the ordinarysequence of events, in part because a brideprice would be a much moreexpensive event, in part because R. could not know for sure if his son H. wanted to continue the relationship with the mother. Also, because of an inflation in brideprice payments, it would have been difficult to raise the sum needed at that time (P. Stewart & A. Strathern 1998). Many peoplewere short of cash because a great deal of money had been recently spent tosupport a Kawelka candidate in a national election, who unfortunately lost.In addition, the Kawelka had also recently raised and paid out a large com-pensation payment (26,000 Kina and 130 pigs) to the neighbouring Mokeipeople for the murder of a young man in a bar-room brawl (Strathern &Stewart 1998b).

Analysis: creating difference

R.’s actions in instigating this boy-affiliation occasion related to his own individual circumstances, to the position of his small lineage within its widerclan and to the political situation of his whole group, the Kawelka, withintheir territorial niche in 1997. Our analysis here is based on several conver-sations with him during our field visit of 1997 and background knowledgebased on previous conversations in 1994 and 1995.

R. is a polygynist, who has many daughters and through them grandchil-dren, especially by his eldest wife. But he has only two sons. One is H., theabsent focus of our case-history. Another son, by a different wife, died earlierwhile young. A third, by his last wife, is still young (of primary school age)and had to be nursed through repeated bouts of illness as a baby. In 1983–4R. sponsored a major performance of the Female Spirit cult in his locality,one of the aims of which was to promote the agnatic continuity of the clanthrough the production of sons, so his concern over this issue is patent, andwas shown when after the cult performance his youngest son was born. Atthat time he spent many months intensively helping to keep the baby alive.


In 1997 his concern for his only agnatic grandson was heightened further by the fact of the death of his own father earlier in the year, leaving him tocontemplate the fact (as he explained to us) that now he must be the one to ensure the extension of his agnatic line through the production ofdescendants.

This aim was related to his lineage position. His lineage brothers who live nearby have larger numbers of adult sons who are becoming short of land for planting coffee, and R. has extensive coffee gardens tended by wivesand co-resident kin. He wishes to have sons and grandsons to take over these claims and maintain them for the future, lest they be absorbed by hislineage mates. As a sponsor of the 1983–4 Female Spirit cult, R. achievedprominence for his lineage inside its clan, and the cult site is near to his ownsettlement; but this form of prestige has been on the wane for some timewith the ever increasing ascendancy of charismatic forms of Christianity inthe area. R.’s son H. is educated and in 1997 had a paid job in the capitalcity, Port Moresby. He was at this time, therefore, an asset to the lineage, buthe is also in general ‘disembedded’ from his clan by virtue of his schoolingand urban residence. R. indicated to us that he wanted to claim both H. andthe grandson back for his group. In particular, he wished to create a set ofconditions under which his son, H., would be more likely to return homeand take an interest in local affairs, including his own obligation to look afterR. in his subsequent old age, a theme to which R. frequently refers nowa-days. R. was thus attempting to overcome the spatial separation betweenhimself and H. by re-localizing H.’s interests, by trying to ensure that H. hada stake in local concerns, since otherwise he might simply stay in the town.On the other hand, he had no wish to stop H. from succeeding in urbanemployment, since R. saw that as a useful potential source of monetarysupport for himself in future. Rather he was aiming to re-locate H.’s familialconcerns.

The ‘traditional’ Hagen model involved here is that of the ‘men’s house’and the ‘women’s house’. Within a local community, according to this idea,prevalent in the 1960’s, men should build men’s houses that become a focusfor male sociality, while their wives’ houses would be scattered around in proximity to gardens and areas of pig-pasture. But in times of change thismodel of centrality shifts. Men can be seen as migrants, living elsewhere,perhaps again with other men, in employment on plantations, in factories orinstitutions. Their women’s houses now become symbols of centrality androotedness in the areas from which they came. The question ‘Where is yourwomen’s house?’ (niminga manga amb-nga nil morom) comes to mean ‘Where isyour real home, the one you will go back to when you leave here?’ R. wasattempting to set up a manga amb-nga for H., using the pieces of culture thatwere at hand. Moreover, H.’s sister E., along with her mother, assisted in thisprocess in an attempt to create a woman-centred pull on H.’s allegiances.Female agency, as well as male, was therefore involved in the collaborativeeffort to re-attach H. to his lineage by means of affiliating H.’s own son to the same group. The affiliation of both was at stake, in different ways.Setting up a manga amb-nga in this way is a contemporary approach to theproblems of dislocation and alienation resulting from urban education andemployment. The manga amb-nga becomes a ‘symbol at a distance’, used to


refer to attachments back at home when someone is away from home, ‘notthere’. By contrast, idioms of male substance, co-residence and co-operationcome into play when men are at home and are ‘in their place’, exhorted to contribute to discussions and material exchanges of wealth on the basis of‘being there’.

In mobilizing support for this aim, R. also needed to overcome the divisive tendencies inherent in a polygynous household. In this regard thefamily’s ‘misfortune’ of lacking sons has been fortunate in the sense that it has minimized competition over increasingly scarce land. A great deal of the help received for the affiliation feast came from married daughters bythree of R.’s wives, all of whom attended and brought food and money, sharingalso in the cooking of beef and its consumption. E., the immediate sister ofH., gave the highest single contribution of 40 Kina (apart from R.’s own 200 Kina) towards a total of 510 Kina in all. The presence of an agnatic linearound which the interests of R.’s wives and their daughters can cluster isessential for their own future interests, hence their support. (Daughters areindeed an asset, because bridewealth is received for them and they also returnto their natal group to help their mothers in various situations, as they didhere.)

The Kawelka as a whole are an enclave group, occupying a territory they had vacated in the early years of the twentieth century after defeats inwarfare and to which they returned after colonial pacification in the 1950s.Their land is fertile and valuable and close to the town, allowing extensivecash-cropping and easy access to services and consumer goods. Around themare groups of a different local Government Council and parliamentary elec-torate. (As mentioned, they put up a candidate for election in 1996 and hadspent considerable sums in campaigning on his behalf, only to fail.) They are a somewhat hard-pressed group, in need of numbers, and to this end R. was able to declare that his feast would provide the group with anothermale member who would be entered as Kawelka in the government ‘contractbook’ (census) for voting (political elections are an immensely important part of life in the Highlands) and tax-paying. (They themselves have becomeinternally more complex in the last twenty years, taking into themselves immigrants from Tambul who have brought their own speech and customs,as we have noted above.)

All of these aims can be seen as ones of creating difference at increasingscales. R. wished to differentiate his agnatic line from others; to secure hislanded interests; to differentiate his lineage from others in the clan; and toassist in differentiating the Kawelka from their neighbours, avoiding theirabsorption into the political arenas of others.

His task presented some difficulties. The affiliation of a grandson wouldordinarily follow from: (1) the marriage of a son by payment of bridewealthto the mother and her kin; (2) the proximity of the bride’s group, at leastwithin the same Council or language area; (3) the residence of the wife onher husband’s territory, and (4) the continuing good relations with wife’s kinexpressed in matrilateral payments for children. In this instance conditions 1–3were absent and 4 was partially secured through this feast. H. was not marriedto the grandson’s mother and he had not helped much to look after the babybecause of his other involvements.When W., R.’s lineage brother, went down


to Moresby he had a hard time, as he narrated in Tok Pisin at the affiliationoccasion, to get to see the boy’s mother and to persuade her father to let herand the child travel up to Hagen to ‘see the faces’ of H.’s people and thus laythe foundations for ‘kinship’ with them. The boy’s mother, as we have seen,did not belong to Hagen, but was of Kerema (Gulf Province) descent by herfather and related to the Chimbu people through her mother. Potentially, thegrandson could be claimed through any of these connections; whichever setof ‘kin’ invested most in his upbringing would be able to claim him. Themother had lived in a squatter settlement area on the Brown River road,Erema, in Moresby, and now would be taking the boy to her mother’s placein Chimbu Province to the east of Hagen. The Chimbu female kin, whoattended without any of their male kin and without the Kerema man, haddone most of the practical work of caring for the boy and feeding him. Hewas already ‘differentiated’ in their direction: the money offered them wasintended partially to re-balance this situation. The food and money thereforecorrespond to factor 4 above, to make good relations but also to demarcatethe ties involved. Lacking factors 1–3, R. had to rely on a new application of4, transforming it from a single part in a flow of exchanges into a mechanismto stop the pulls of overall homogenization of ties and to instigate a contrarydifferentiating pull in his own direction.

The new multi-site, multi-ethnic situation in which families find themselvesin places like Hagen is therefore altering the conditions for the creation ofkinship as differentiated relationship rather than as homogenizing substanceties. It is transaction that works on substance, differentiating persons throughwealth. This was so in the past, and then as now the opportunities for indi-vidual agency led to complexity and flexibility, but these opportunities arefurther compounded or confounded by the unravelling of packages of prac-tices (such as 1–4 above) and the need for improvisation and re-use of partsof them. The boy-affiliation described here also represented a re-scripting ofan ancient custom, symbolically linked with the origins of groups, known askng maepokla, the ‘maepokla pig’ gift.

Vicedom and Tischner (1943–8 vol. 2: 243) described this as a payment to the mother’s kin of a pig and for a first-born child a shell valuable also.The father killed one of his pigs and distributed its meat to the mother’s kin, whom he had invited for the occasion. Vicedom thought that the necessity to make such a payment was a relic of matriarchy. We can see it,however, simply as an expression of the aim of differentiating the child from the homogenizing influence of its substance, shared with both father’sand mother’s side. Vicedom went on, however, to point out also a deepersignificance. The pig killed was a sacrifice, and was eaten commensally by both sides of the kinship network. The child was taken under the protectionof the spirits and the living kin all expressed goodwill towards it, so that itsgrowth would be enhanced. By implication the spirits involved are the spirits of the paternal group, a point which is made more explicit in a sepa-rate text on the meaning of sacrifice in Strauss’s study of Hagen religion(Strauss & Tischner 1962: 60–1). Strauss writes that those who have shared asacrificial meal are described as ‘fed by the originary force (mi )’, or as ‘thosewho have eaten the maepogla’. Maepogla refers to the act of a parent bird ingiving food to its nestling and the image relates to the idea of an ancestral


bird, typically a Harpyopsis eagle, giving meat to its young or to the first baby boy born from an egg who becomes the founder of a given tribe (see also Stewart & Strathern forthcoming). In other words, the sacrificial mealalso establishes the commonality of substance of the child with the paternalkin through the mythological anaphora to the primal scene of the ancestorbird feeding its young.

The historical resonances of this sacrifice are found here also in R.’s ceremony. It was thought very important that the kin meet and see oneanother’s faces and, by implication, that all show goodwill to the child. Thiswas a difficult feat, for the child had to be extracted from a different socialmatrix and brought expensively by plane to Hagen. And a pig had to beoffered to the mother’s kin, even though these were Seventh Day AdventistChristians who do not eat pork (in theory). The offering of a pig to themother’s group, even though beef was provided to the rest of the feast participants, marks the importance of pork as the food that comes into beingbecause of the hard work of women who feed, nurture, and care for pigs, much as they do for children. It also represents in an attenuated formthe element of the maepokla sacrifice. In this case the pig was not shared on the spot, but its recipients promised to distribute it to their kin back in Chimbu. R. thus aggregated the boy’s kin on both sides, as far as possible,and disaggregated them by the differentiating payment of money. An ancient sacrificial form was pressed into service for a new and explicit pieceof social engineering, made necessary by the vicissitudes of ‘disembedding’.R.’s effort was therefore directed at re-embedding and re-localizing what had been disembedded and de-localized by circumstances of change. He wasalso creating an interplay between homogeneity and heterogeneity that wasbased on maepokla logic, stretched to accommodate the contemporary world.

The complexities of this situation were further reflected in the linguisticusages noted earlier.To the Chimbu kin it was not politic to declare that thepayment was made as an affiliation, partly because more could have beendemanded. Hence this was not stated directly in the Tok Pisin speeches madeto them. Internally, however, among the Kawelka, R. had to enunciate hisaffiliative aim in order to explain his requests for support. The complexity ofthe linguistic situation was used in order to pursue subtly different rhetoricalstrategies within the same arena: a logic of differentiation in Melpa, and ofcommonality of interest in Tok Pisin.

Discussion

The case history presented here lends itself to a contemporary reconsidera-tion of issues that preoccupied ethnographers of the Papua New GuineaHighlands in the 1960s and 1970s. The narrative indicates ‘the perils ofpatriliny’ in circumstances where people are disembedded from local clan lifeand the ways in which older persons try to ‘re-embed’ younger ones by meansof providing them with ties and obligations at home. This process has beengoing on ever since labour migration began in the Highlands in the 1950s,and as with other places in New Guinea (e.g. Manus, Carrier & Carrier 1989)the chief aim involved is to secure access to a flow of wealth from the urbansector back into the rural area from which migrants come.


The problems are heavily compounded when the migrants begin to set upties of their own in the towns and engage in inter-ethnic sexual liaisons.Thepotential for them to be both dis-located and re-located increases exponen-tially in the circumstances. In our case-history, R. was attempting to reducethis complexity of H.’s affairs by relocalizing him through the affiliation of his son. He was trying to pull the situation back into a frame that was local, governed by transaction, and was in accordance with patrilineal‘rules’. Yet these ‘rules’ could not possibly operate in any ordinary fashion here. Hence the creative reversal of temporality and the use of a sacrifice both to mediate tensions between the inter-ethnic categories of persons atthe affiliation event and to establish a tie between the grandson and theKawelka’s own sacred origins. R. was drawing on both old traditions of thinking about substance, sacrifice and affiliation, and his own contemporaryunderstanding of the dangers of absentee sons and polyethnic permutationsof ties between people. R. was using the old ‘rules’, but he realized that the‘game’ was in a sense new, so he creatively reshuffled the elements in orderto achieve his ends.

It is here that practice theory comes into play, since it is only when werecognize R. as a self-conscious player, working with norms and trying tomatch them with situations, that we can recognize his actions for what theyare. Further, he was not alone in this enterprise, but was supported by someof his lineage brothers and in particular by the collectivity of his wives anddaughters, all of them intent as he was to secure his lineage’s land claims for the future. In symbolic terms, R. wanted the continuity of his lineage; inpractical, material terms he wanted to secure his land claims. Both aims cometo the same thing, since land and identity are linked.

The flexibility and creativity shown here by the actors are not new. Theyare expressions of the same capacities and tendencies observed by ethno-graphers in the 1960s. But the situation of historical change today brings theelement of improvisation clearly into focus. This in turn could lead us to re-think the context of colonial control in which the ethnography of the 1960swas done as one that similarly elicited earlier responses of cultural and socialimprovisation following pacification and the expansion of exchange networks. Most generally, the approach to social action that we have used herecorresponds closely to the idea of human action propounded at a general theoretical level by Holy and Stuchlik in the 1970s. In their Introduction toThe structure of folk models, they stressed two viewpoints: first, that we musttake very seriously what they called ‘folk models’, which include models ofthe person. This part of their proposal seems strongly to favour the emicdimension. In their formulation folk models appear largely in the guise ofknowledge, including understanding and information about rules.The secondviewpoint, however, is that ‘the social sciences should be based on the conceptof man as an autonomous, intentional and skilled agent’ (1981: 26).This allowsfor a generative study of the emergence of social forms, somewhat along thelines of Barth’s (1966) work, and takes as problematic the relationship betweennotions and actions, seeing that relationship as dialectical. Turning specificallyto the domain of kinship they invoke Scheffler on Choiseulese practices:‘Scheffler asserts that norms as such have no meaning unless they enter intotransactions between individuals and groups’ (1981: 27).The task, therefore, is


to relate folk models and the performance of activities to satisfy goals andinterests. Holy and Stuchlik’s announced interest in seeing things in this wayis also to set up comparisons between systems that reveal their differences andthe reasons for these differences, rather than their similarities; but we can addhere that such difference itself implies similarity in certain domains.

Persons therefore instantiate and perform notions or folk models, andcannot do otherwise, even if they are breaking norms; but they also act asintentional agents with goals of their own. Intentionality in turn can be quitecomplex. In this vein we have discussed, both from R.’s accounts and ourinterpretation of his accounts, the various motivations we think he had, incorrespondence with different arenas of sociality, for sponsoring the boy-affiliation ceremony. The aims involved may be clear and simple, or inchoateand complex. We have been tackling here a case-history made complex bythe flux of historical change in the community. R.’s anticipations of results from his ceremony may prove to have had only a fragile foundation, and thisbecause neither his agency nor that of others is encompassed within a set of binding institutional norms. Moreover, the ‘disembedding’ processes ofmodernity are likely to act against his plans (cf. Gewertz & Errington 1996).What we have seen is improvisation and the creative reshuffling and re-scheduling of pieces of folk models in the pursuit of a set of interests or goals.

At this point we can also learn by looking back at the literature of the1970s with another purpose in mind. The questions we have dealt with byreferring them to Holy and Stuchlik’s notion-action scenario were signaledalso in the title of a 1976 book, Transaction and meaning: directions in the anthro-pology of exchange and symbolic behavior (Kapferer 1976). In this volume, R. F.Salisbury raised an important point for contexts of change that bring togethercategories of people who do not necessarily share folk models or do so onlypartially. He first posed a very general question: ‘Can one understand thebehavior of two individuals better by looking at each one separately, or byconsidering them as two poles of a dyad?’ (Salisbury 1976: 41). The answerto such a question might be simply that it depends on what one is seekingto learn by using one or the other perspective, and also on whether such adistinction is itself part of the knowledge (folk model) of the actors them-selves. But Salisbury’s specific purpose is to apply his question to contexts ofchange, in which it becomes especially crucial to consider the transactors aswell as the transaction (where transactor equals conscious goal-seeking agentand transaction equals a model of relationality that enters into goal-seekingaction). So he asks another question: ‘what are the constraints on bargainingthat prevent exploitative behavior. . . . when transactors are not members of asingle moral community?’ (1976: 45).

Salisbury’s question was posed here along the lines of the formalist economic anthropology of the day, with emphasis on bargaining, but it is stillrelevant to events such as R.’s boy-affiliation ceremony. Here, we cannot speak of bargaining in a strict sense, but of a kind of pre-bargaining, a settingof frameworks within which the participants might see themselves as bar-gaining within the future. For example, there was no stipulated request for anamount of money to be given and there could consequently be no tellinghow successful the actual amount given would be in influencing future events.


But the frameworks R. attempted to set were indeed intended as constraintson future behaviour, and his effort was precisely constructed in terms ofmaking a semblance of moral community and giving it verisimilitude bymetaphorical and metonymical means.

Looking at the event as a social performance or drama and the acts withinit as intended performative acts can therefore help us to conceptualize theevent itself in theoretical terms. Some of the performative elements wereovert, as when the gift of money was said to set up good relations betweenthe parties, enabling them to ‘see one another’s faces’, to produce later performances along similar lines. Other elements were more covert, but none the less cogent, in terms of the maepokla-symbolism of the pork gift.But with respect to these less obvious aspects of the communication involved,the problem of the lack of shared folk models arises. Unless the Chimbu recipients shared the same implicit logic as the Hageners in this regard, thecommunication would fail. Herein lies both the genius and the risk of whatwe have called improvisation, which occurs in contexts when there is no scriptand the actors are creatively cobbling together a constructed set of actions tomake the script as they go along. This cannot work unless there is both thebasis for achieving a structuring of elements and sufficient open-endedness for people to test their rhetorical strategies.The trope of ‘improvisation’ there-fore applies very well here, in an arena where there is less emphasis on a set of spectators who make an evaluation and more on the next anticipated performance by the actors themselves.

The affiliation drama here, which was executed in the performance modalities of paying, giving and sharing, can be further illuminated by ref-erence to debates about gifts versus commodities in Melanesia generally.J. Carrier (1992: 185) has pointed out that in some instances ‘the very designation of a transaction as one of gifts or of commodities fails to captureimportant points of ambiguity or dispute’ between the parties to the exchangethemselves.As we have seen, R.’s transactional acts were presented alternativelyas ‘buying’ the boy’s affiliation or as simply creating a basis for shared goodwill between the boy’s Hagen and Chimbu kin. It is worthwhile to note here also that transactions aiming at producing an affiliation can be seen both from a ‘commodity’ and from a ‘gift’ viewpoint, particularly in cir-cumstances of commoditization of social relations, such as are in train inHagen today, but also in the precapitalist contexts themselves: indeed, Gell(1992: 143) has argued that commodity exchange was an important featureof traditional Melanesian society, and along with ‘sharing’ was distinct fromgift exchange. Finally, it is clear that individuals do attempt, even if obliquely,to ‘bargain’ over the results of transactions, both by negotiating the frame-works involved and by manipulating the amounts of goods given. R., forexample, wished to make a relatively small payment to secure an affiliation-claim on the boy while avoiding or postponing the question of a larger brideprice to be paid to the boy’s mother. Although the precise context andthe methods of bargaining employed reflected the contemporary circumstancesof inter-ethnic relations between Hagen and Chimbu, the element of ‘bargaining’ itself is not new, since it was present at least in the manipulationof temporal sequences of transactions in the past also, so that the timing of aparticular event was crucial.


Folk models in these contexts become tools whereby people attempt todefine the stage for future performances. Notable here is the use of ideas aboutfood and its distribution. Food and its giving through nurturing is an impor-tant component in Hagen folk models of kinship and identity, as it is also inmany parts of the world (A. Strathern 1973). It can represent both similarity,because of the cross-cultural prevalence of ideas linking food, the body, iden-tity and nurture, and difference, because the precise ways in which nurture issaid to operate vary between cultural contexts. Pace Holy (1996: 10), it cantherefore serve as a useful dimension for comparisons. The point here is thatR. was attempting to use a food gift in order to promote a particular valueand a claim expressed through that value. In other words, he was assertingsimilarity through it, performing an act that contained within itself a prin-ciple of efficacy and thus an assertion of community. But the act may havebeen received in quite a different spirit by the recipients, depending on howthey categorized it. Douglas (1996: 128) has recently stressed that ‘similarityis relative, variable, and culture dependent’, and if the Chimbu recipients ofpork classified the transaction differently from R., his implicit intentionswould neither be communicated nor would they be effective. It is likely,however, that there was sufficient similarity for a modicum of communica-tion to have taken place. Had the act been within an already bounded moralcommunity sharing a symbolic universe, the level of communication andeffectiveness would of course have been higher. Future transactions will alsodepend on this same issue, as well as others, and a shared folk model will notguarantee agreement, but it will help to define the parameters within whichany agreement could be negotiated. R. was also using a money gift as a bridg-ing mechanism, but the same point applies as for pork. While both moneyand pork are clearly important for both Hageners and Chimbu people, whatmatters is how they, as transactors, saw the specifics of their transactions, andthis in turn depends on both the details of their respective folk models andtheir intentions as these were embodied in their actions.

Overall, therefore, a final theoretical conclusion is apparent: that we cannot separate transaction and meaning. ‘Interpretivist’ analyses of exchangeare sometimes counterbalanced against ‘transactionalist’ ones, as though thesewere alternative frames of analysis. Our discussion here negates this putativeantithesis, insisting on a synthesis that is encapuslated in a view of action which recognizes both strategizing and the creation of meanings: strategicmeaning-making and meaningful strategies.

NOTE

We wish to thank both the University of Pittsburgh and the James Cook University of NorthQueensland for financial help with fieldwork in 1997 and 1998.We thank also the anonymousreviewers of this paper for their numerous helpful comments.

REFERENCES

Barth, F. 1966. Models of social organization (Occasional Paper 23). London: Royal Anthropolog-ical Institute.


Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice (trans. R. Nice). Cambridge: University Press.

Brown, P. 1978. Highland peoples of New Guinea. Cambridge: University Press.Carrier,A.H. & J.G. Carrier 1991. Structure and process in a Melanesian society. Reading: Harwood

Academic Publishers.Carrier, J.G. 1992. The gift in theory and in practice in Melanesia: a note on the centrality of

gift exchange. Ethnography 31, 185–93.Carrier, J.G. & A.H. Carrier 1989. Wage, trade, and exchange in Melanesia. Los Angeles:

University of California Press.Douglas, M. 1996. Thought styles: critical essays on good taste. London: Sage.Feil, D.K. 1984a. Beyond patriliny in the New Guinea Highlands. Man (N.S.) 19, 50–76.——— 1984b. Ways of exchange: the Enga Tee of Papua New Guinea. St Lucia: University of

Queensland Press.——— 1987. The evolution of Highland Papua New Guinea societies. Cambridge: University Press.Gell, A. 1992. Inter-tribal commodity barter and reproductive gift-exchange in old Melanesia.

In Barter, exchange and value (eds) C. Humphrey & S. Hugh-Jones, 142–68. Cambridge:University Press.

Gewertz, D. & F. Errington 1996. The individuation of tradition in a Papua New Guinea modernity. American Anthropologist 98, 114–26.

Holy, L. 1996. Anthropological perspectives on kinship. London: Pluto Press.Holy, L. & M. Stuchlik (eds) 1981. The structure of folk models. New York: Academic Press.Josephides, L. 1983. Equal but different? The ontology of gender among the Kewa. Oceania 53,

291–307.Kapferer, B. (ed.) 1976. Transaction and meaning: directions in the anthropology of exchange and

symbolic behavior. Philadelphia: ISHI Publications.Kaberry, P. 1967. The plasticity of New Guinea kinship. In Social organization: essays presented to

Raymond Firth (ed.) M. Freedman, 105–23. London: Cassell.Knauft, B.M. 1996. Genealogies for the present in cultural anthropology. London: Routledge.Lederman, R. 1986. What gifts engender. Cambridge: University Press.de Lepervanche, M. 1967–8. Descent, residence, and leadership in the New Guinea Highlands.

Oceania 38, 134–58, 163–89.LiPuma, E. 1988. The gift of kinship: structure and practice in Maring social organization. Cambridge:

University Press.Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural anthropology. New York: Basic Books.Ortner, S. 1984. Theory in anthropology since the sixties. Comparative Studies in Society and

History 26, 126–66.Salisbury, R.F. 1976. Transactions or transactors? An economic anthropologist’s view. In Trans-

action and meaning: directions in the anthropology of exchange and symbolic behavior (ed.) B. Kapferer,41–59. Philadelphia: ISHI Publications.

Scheffler, H. 1985. Filiation and affiliation. Man (N.S.) 20, 1–21.Stewart, P.J. & A. Strathern 1998. Money, politics, and persons in Papua New Guinea. Social

Analysis 42, 132–49.——— & ——— forthcoming Origins versus creative powers: the interplay of movement and

fixity. In Emplaced myths: the spatial and narrative dimensions of knowledge in Australian Aborigi-nal and Papua New Guinea societies (eds) A. Rumsey & J. Weiner.

Strathern, A. 1969. Descent and alliance in the New Guinea Highlands. Proceedings of the RAIfor 1968, 37–52.

——— 1972. One father, one blood: descent and group structure among the Melpa. Canberra:Australian National University Press.

——— 1973. Kinship, descent, and locality: some New Guinea examples. In The character ofKinship (ed.) J. Goody, 21–33. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 1979. Gender, ideology, and money in Mt. Hagen. Man (N.S.) 14, 530–48.Strathern, A. & P.J. Stewart 1998a. Seeking personhood: anthropological accounts and local

concepts in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea. Oceania 68, 170–88.——— & ——— 1998b. A death to pay for: individual voices. University Park, PA: Penn State

Media Sales.Strathern, M. 1972. Women in between. London: Seminar Press.——— 1988. The gender of the gift. Berkeley: University of California Press.


Strauss, H. & H. Tischner 1962. Die Mi-Kultur der Hagenberg-Stämme. Hamburg: Cram, deGruyter & Co.

Vicedom, G.F. & H. Tischner 1943–8. Die Mbowamb. (3 vols.) Hamburg: Friederichsen, deGruyter & Co.

Weiner, J.F. 1982. Substance, siblingship and exchange: aspects of social structure in New Guinea.Social Analysis 11, 3–34.

Zimmer-Tamakoshi, L. 1995. Passion, poetry, and cultural politics in the South Pacific.Ethnology 34, 113–28.

La création de la différence: un drame d’affiliationcontemporain dans les Hautes Terres de Nouvelle Guinée

Résumé

Les questions d’affiliation aux groupes, importantes dans l’ethnographie de la NouvelleGuinée Papouasienne dans les années 60 et 70, ont été obscurcies depuis par d’autres préoc-cupations analytiques. Cependant ces questions n’ont jamais disparu pour autant et ellesressortent clairement dans la vie locale où les gens font face à des situations de changementrapide, qui rendent la réalisation astucieuse d’affiliations problématique et strategiquementimportante. Nous examinons un cas où une procédure d’affiliation a été mise en scène afinde procéder à la médiation de revendications inter-ethniques au sujet d’un enfant et derestaurer des pratiques visant à garantir ces droits en l’absence de payments de dot et de rési-dence virilocale. L’analyse montre comment les transactions entre les acteurs occupent uneposition ambigüe entre les catégories de don et de commodité, et comment les liens crééspar la procuration de soins et de nourriture continuent à jouer un rôle crucial dans lesreprésentations et les négotiations. Le degré où les parties en cause ont une compréhensioncommune d’un évènement est au coeur même de cet évènement. Ceci fait ressortir le faitque les transactions et leur significations sont toujours inextricablement liées. Les stratégiessont porteuses de significations et les significations sont créées stratégiquement.

Dept. of Anthropology, 3HO1 Forbes Quad, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA


Documents

Creating Difference: A Contemporary Affiliation Drama in the Highlands of New Guinea