Payback: The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions

PAYBACK

PAYBACK The Logic of Retribution in Melanesian Religions G. W. TROMPF School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521416917 © Cambridge University Press 1994 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1994 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Trompf, G. W. Payback: the logic of retribution in Melanesian religions/ G. W. Trompf. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Retribution—Religious aspects. 2. Melanesia—Religion. I. Title. BL2620. M4T765 1994 299'.92—dc20 93-31388 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-41691-7 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-41691-4 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2005

In Reciprocity and in Hope dedicated to The Peoples of Papua New Guinea

Contents

Illustrations and tables Preface A b breviations

x xiii xviii

Preliminaries: T h e T h e o r y of Retributive Logic Revenge 2 Reciprocity 5 Explanations of significant events 7 The epistemology of rationality 10 Religion and retributive logic 14 The origins of retributive logic 16

1

I TRADITION' 1

Revenge Payback killing: general observations 25 Warfare as retaliation 32 War's pretexts and preludes: a case study—the Bena(bena) The causes of war Important variables in the logic of Melanesian warfare Spiritual revenge 56 Deities and spirits as sponsors of revenge Outer-directed sorcery Intra-village sorcery Sorcery and social control, with a case study (Mekeo) Discriminate homicide and general patterns of violence 78 Punishments 82 Legal Custodial Personally redressive and other Paying back animals and things 93

23

2

Reciprocity

97

Concessions for peace: gifts for alliance 97 'Compensation' 107 Demands for sacrifice 112 Obligation Oblation

3

Integrating and Explaining Significant Events Positive and negative reciprocity interrelated: a case study— Orokaiva 128 Explanations of weal and woe 131 Trouble and sickness Death Salvation from adversity

vn

128

viii

CONTENTS

II

CARGO CULTISM'

4

Reprisal

159

Payback against colonialism 162 The retaliatory element in cargo cultism 169 Myths of reversal Case studies: counterstrokes of a more traditional kind 'Classic' cargo cultism Alternative religions as opposition 207 From the classic cases to the modem faces of 'cargo cultism' The economics, politics and religion of biting back On resenting colonialism: Paliau and Yali Others and their bones of contention Alternative religions as respectable competitors 220 From cargo cults to independent churches From cargo cults to modem political fronts Cargo cult lo as punishment; and as totalistic reordering of society 232

5

Redemption

238

Acquiring and relinquishing—in grand style 239 Cooperation 248 Participation 251

6

Wishing a n d Explaining the Extraordinary

259

Reprisal and the search for redemption and partnership interrelated—the Pomio Kivung 259 Eschatology as explanation 266 Explaining dilemmas and puzzles 276 III

7

MODERNIZATION'

Recrimination—in 'Modern' Guises

288

The 'sinews of sectarian warfare' and related matters 291 Enforced change and legalized retribution 304 The regulative power of missions: its scope and effects Maintaining a new order: the phases of acculturation Traditional physical avengement revamped 322 Tribal warfare resumed Homicide: from yonder hamlet to urban hotbed—and back again Violence and crime, gangs and rebels: secularizing payback? 339 Violence and crime Gangs and rebels Vindictiveness without violence? Some illusions of modernization 354 Sorcery: new masks The arts of civilization

8

Making Money a n d Modernizing Reciprocities Peace-making and compensation 376 'Monetarizing' and 'modernizing' primal exchange patterns 383 New sacrifice, new communio 393 Bisnis na Wok ('Business and Work') 402

375

CONTENTS 9

Money, Morals, Meaning: Old Logics, New Retributions?

ix 410

Money as a payback medium: with special reference to Papua New Guinea 410 Modifying meanings of life and death 417 Trouble Sickness Death Well-being

Conclusions a n d Recommendations

457

Bibliography Index of Melanesian Cultures General Index

461 528 532

Illustrations and tables

PLATES 1 Warriors standing over a victim, Neu Mecklenburg, ca. 1889 (Meyer and Parkinson) 2 Roviana war canoes, New Georgia, 1930s (UCA Munda) 3 Wahgi warrior begins a mock attack at a Kongar, 1973 (Trompf) 4 Fuyughe 'pig-kill', ca. 1920 (Dubuy) 5 Fr Bohn encountering Fuyughe, late 1930s (Dubuy) 6 Wahgi shepherds and sheep, Wahgi Valley, 1948 (NGAR) 7 Silas Eto, the 'Holy Mama' of the Christian Fellowship Church, 1964 (Trompf) 8 Yaliwan reads the Bible at his hideout, Abukanja, 1981 (Trompf) 9 Mekeo sorcerers at a local celebration, Yule Island, 1985 (Trompf) 10 Morata settlers organizing compensation and tok sort to the University of Papua New Guinea, 1985 (Niugini Nins) 11 A cartoonist on police attempts to contain urban violence in Port Moresby, 1978 (PNG Post-Courier)

48 49 100 102 180 187 222 228 359 381 382

FIGURES AND MAPS Location of traditional religions: on the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands on the Solomons on Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu

x

20 22 22

ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES Model of migratory tendencies, rebound pressure, and tribal warfare

xi 51

Location of new religious movements: on the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands on the Solomons on Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu

156 158 158

Modern provincial arrangements: the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands

284

Location of cultures referred to in Part III: the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands

286

Modern provincial arrangements and location of cultures referred to in Part III: the Solomons

287

Modern territorial arrangements and location of cultures referred to in Part III: Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu

287

'Japs Gang' rising sun tattoo

348

TABLES 1 2 3 4 5 6

Aetiologies of typical trouble in select Melanesian traditions Wahgi kangekes ('wild spirits') Aetiologies of sickness in select Melanesian traditions Aetiologies of death in select Melanesian traditions Schematized spectrum of cargo cult reactions The aetiology of death, with post-contact adjustments

136 139 143 148 200 4;40

Preface

This book is focused on one significant set of themes in Melanesian religious life, but it also goes some way towards providing an introductory guide to the phenomenology and history of religions in the most ethnographically complex part of the globe. Melanesia still harbours over one quarter of humanity's known and discrete religions, and this work supplements my Melanesian Religion (1991) as another kind of overview. Retributive logic is so crucial an aspect of Melanesian culture, and of such universal significance, that a general study of it is long overdue. While the varied indigenous 'pre-contact' expressions of retributive actions and principles require careful analysis and comparatively more space, there is now a pressing need to assess how the emergence of new religious movements (especially the so-called 'cargo cults') and the impact of the 'great traditions' (particularly Christianity) have affected this side to Melanesian life. The research involved quarrying at an enormous granite cliff of wondrous yet multiveined materials. I can only hope that the splinters I have chipped off during fifteen years of labour will illustrate and make sense of the massive imbroglio. When James Frazer eked out his thirteen-volume Golden Bough (1890-1936) and Eduard Westermarck his two-volume tome on the Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1906), neither of them had any idea that the southwest Pacific contained the most complicated anthropological jigsaw puzzle on the earth's face. They would have been astounded to find that in this one volume alone just as many if not more distinct belief-systems have been referred to than either one of them discussed in their great monuments of erudition. Perhaps, though, I have been too sparing in my pages and too cryptic in my allusions towards the constituents of many and differing cultures. I occasionally look in despair xiii

xiv

PREFACE

at the vast archive of notes and observations in my filing cabinets, knowing that only tiny portions of what could be put in print are condensed into the following pages. Still, I note with a mixture of gloom and impatience that few general textbooks on comparative religion give more than a page to Melanesia, and what the region has to offer is typically buried under sweeping comments about 'primitive' traditions. Our chosen theme, that of payback or the logic of retribution, covers Melanesian ideas and practices concerning revenge, reciprocity, and the means of explaining events in terms of praise and blame, rewards and punishments. At first sight, readers might not perceive what this whole matrix has to do with the subject of religion, but one central purpose of this study is to demonstrate the connections. If one imagines that the study of revenge, for instance, has only to do with conflict theory, or research into the causes and nature of war, or the psychology of aggression, then the analysis of warriorhood religions, sorcery, punishments fortofew-breakage,'and other expressions of retaliation reflecting religious beliefs will help correct false impressions. And if one supposes that the consideration of positive reciprocities (such as gift-giving, exchange, compensations) is really only properly a concern for economic anthropologists, then here will be challenged some unwarrantable compartmentalizations of research, because the set of social realities being addressed demands a multidisciplinary approach. The book steadily moves away from traditional anthropological concerns, in any case, to those that are more sociological and historical, at the very least. What discipline does this study reflect most of all? I will have to explore on another occasion its implications for history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, politics, legal studies, philosophy, theology, let alone the comparative study of religions, and for such subdisciplines as oral history or ethno-history, the history of ideas, economic and legal anthropology, the sociology of new religious movements, social work, psychoanalysis, development studies, criminology, ethics, peace studies, pastoral theology, and missiology. Feeling pressed to name the discipline nearest to both my heart and intent, however, I understand myself above all to be an historian of ideas, beliefs, and consciousness, although this book reads more like historical or philosophic anthropology (which can be readily subsumed within the newer academic circuit of Religious Studies). The subtitle of this work refers both to logic and religion, in the hope that most readers will have got beyond denigrating religion as illogical, let alone passing off 'primitive' notions and rites as mere 'superstitions'. Drawing out linkages between logic, retribution, and religion from such a vast array of traditions, and allowing myself un grand tour d3horizon, is not necessarily preferable to the in-depth exploration of the same connections in one given culture. I have given more space to cultures in which I have personally spent a longer time researching, such as the

PREFACE

xv

Bena(bena), the Fuyughe, the Wahgi, and select coastal Papuan peoples; but the broad survey is necessary because researchers have bequeathed us too many detached analyses of isolated societies or social problems while shying clear of the 'general visions' now badly needed in developing nations—indeed, needed in the very countries that hosted many aspiring Western academics. One particularly acute problem, once a synoptic approach is adopted, is that of reconstructing worldviews. Investigators of 'other cultures' have the habit of writing as if they are able to render an objective account of a whole people's 'position' and very often do so as if the thoughts of the best informants of a given (perhaps 'already contaminated') area somehow encapsulate and speak for the society as a whole. Are these investigators presumptuous? Philosophers who have broached Jiirgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1972), or Donald Davidson's notable though less accessible essay 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (1973-74), or Talal Asad on the problems of representing collective beliefs (1979; 1983), will know these thorny issues only too well. Some have already doubted that other minds, others' mental worlds, let alone subjective feelings, can ever be 'truly' reconstrued, and transferred to the printed page. I am under no illusions about my own efforts at reconstruction (Trompf 1984a: 509-11), and about the possibility of outsiders 'inventing' others' cultures (Clifford 1986). Everything presented here cannot escape provisionality. Along with other social researchers, the historian of ideas has the primary task of a glorified translator, of communicating one world or audience to another. Once these basic efforts at intelligibility look promising, then the opportunity for deeper reflection about the nature of human thought, action, and their interrelation is likely to be seized; and any historian worthy of the craft wants to find out how beliefs and ideas are modified through time, and about the consequences of such changes. In a general Uberschau, one can only hope that the examples selected are placed in the right contexts, given justifiable emphases, and made to provide a balanced perspective. And, in this study, group views have been represented via the most esteemed local custodians of knowledge. What about religion? The following chapters contain some surprises, because I do not always follow standard tacks. I disdain reducing religion to a narrow preserve—just to do with beliefs in spiritual beings, for example, or with palpable sacred times and places—and attempt to show how religion has been (and still can be) integrally related to war and acts of violence in Melanesia, to the economics of reciprocity, and to other features of life one might ordinarily expect to be 'secular', 'mundane' or 'profane'. Religion has thus been conceived much more as a people's 'way of life' than merely worship or approaches to the 'non-empirical realm' in particular. At times, admittedly, certain beliefs, rites, and customs will

xvi

PREFACE

be acknowledged as more distinctly religious—so anticipating prevailing preconceptions—but at other times I have striven to educate readers out of circumscription. If a definition is needed for clarificatory purposes, religion in this book encompasses 'those concerns that most dominate people's acts, reasonings, and feelings, because they understand their cosmos to be affected by living agencies, spirit-beings, or other non-human forces, and because people regard these agents or powers as subject to human influence'. This definition shows me to be in sympathy with those scholars (such as W. A. Christian, T. P. van Baaren and very recently J. G. Platvoet), who stress the dynamic interactions between thought and action, between humans and 'the Other', and between the more recognizably distinct sphere of religion (or 'the sacred') and other dimensions of life. This book originated from a paper I wrote for a Melanesian Institute Conference at Goroka (New Guinea) in 1978 (cf. Trompf 1991: 51-77), and at Norman Habel's valuable suggestion I plodded on towards a full-scale study of Melanesian retributive logic. In the process the late Jan van Baal's comments on my first draft were extremely helpful; and for so generously sharing their wisdom I offer special thanks here to Ennio Mantovani, Wendy Flannery, and Darrell Whiteman (Melanesian Institute, Papua New Guinea); Esau Tuza, Willington Jojoga Opeba, Caleb Kolowan, Sione and Ruth Latukefu, Carl Loeliger (University of Papua New Guinea), the late Peter Lawrence, Eric Sharpe, Tony Swain, and Sibona Kopi (University of Sydney), Stuart Schlegel and Noel King (University of California, Santa Cruz), Jacques Waardenburg (Universite de Lausanne), Jan Platvoet and Anton Ploeg (Rijksuniversiteit, Utrecht), Patrick Gesch (then at the Anthropos Institute), and the intrepid Andrew Strathern (University of Pittsburgh), whose study comparing patterns of violence in the New Guinea highlands was being awaited as I finished this work. To acknowledge the riches of oral sources, I have employed a pattern of recognition I prefer to prevailing standards of social research by both naming my chief informants consistently and listing them in the bibliography. Investigations by my many students, especially at the University of Papua New Guinea, Goroka Teachers' College, and the Holy Spirit (Catholic) Seminary at Bomana, have been invaluable. Many ethno-historical insights from a field of study increasingly becoming familiar to researchers in Melanesia (through Tippett 1973; Denoon and Lacey 1981; Gewertz and Schieffelin 1985, White 1991 and Carrier 1992), are manifest in the following pages. For helping to refine my field methods I could not have done without: Camillo Esef, Umakive Futrepa, James Kai, Michael Wandel, Godfrey Yeruai, Louise Aitsi, Vincent Koroti and Tapei Martin. For their working companionship, their protection in moments of great danger, and for the hospitality offered by their families, I am deeply indebted. I gratefully acknowledge that most of the field research was funded by the Universities

PREFACE

xvii

of Papua New Guinea and Sydney; that the Macartney Hill Bequest (University of Sydney) was invaluable in helping to defray the costs of copyediting this large volume; that Elizabeth Wood Ellem and especially Roderic Campbell and Jean Cooney were meticulous in the copy-editing and proofing; that Connie Fulcher, Tapei Martin, Cletus Topa, Anne Crossley, Wendy Cummings, Louise Aitsi, and my two daughters Sharon and Carolyn, were all very worthy research assistants in Melanesia itself; that research assistants Raymond Maxent, Ruth Lewin-Broit and Raul Fernandez-Calienes were indispensable in completing revisions and documentations at Sydney; that Gabi Boutau, Vagoli Bouauka and John Roberts devoted so much care to the cartography; and that Irene Rolles, Margaret Gilet, Nancy Hickson, Judith Lauder, Jackie Gwynne, Michelle Holmes, Lyn Leslie, Nancy Koriam, Ranu Oala and Kila Pala (the most improved typist I know!) have spent hours agonizing over my drafts. Lastly, for bearing with me in all I do, and for keeping me well in the doing of it, I thank my wife, Bobbie. Garry Winston Trompf University of Sydney School of Studies in Religion; Research Institute for Asia and the Pacific; Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies

Abbreviations

A AA AAB AB ABC(TV) Ag AM An ANA ANGAU ANU APCM ASA ASAO B BCM BM BNG BNGAR BRA BRW Bu CFCR CL CMA CRNH

The Australian Anglican Archives of Papua New Guinea Austral-Asiatic Bulletin Arawa Bulletin Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Television Network) The Age Australian Museum (Sydney) The Anglican Australian National Archives Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit Australian National University Australian Pacific Christian Mission Association of Social Anthropologists Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania Bella Brisbane Courier-Mail Die Biene auf den Missionfelde British New Guinea (official statements) British New Guinea Annual Report Bougainville Revolutionary Army Business Review Weekly Bulletin Colony of Fiji, Commission Reports Catholic Liturgical Documents Commonwealth Magistrates Association Constitution of the Republic of the New Hebrides xvin

ABBREVIATIONS DKZ DZ EA ERU ESCAP Fam FEER FLNKS FS FT GG GL GV GW I IASER IG JO K KM KPJ LA LF LMS LRC LTM MA MCC MSC NBC NGAR NGM NN NSO NT NY OC OPM OT P Pac PAR PC

xix

Deutsche Koloniale Zeitung Deutsches Zentralarkiv Evangelical Alliance of the South Pacific Islands Educational Research Unit, UPNG Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific Family Far Eastern Economic Review Front de liberation nationale kanake et socialiste Fiji Sun Fiji Times German Government Green Left Government of Vanuatu Guardian Weekly The Independent Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research (PNG) Indonesian Government Le Journal officiel de Nouvelle Caledonie (Noumea) Kanak Die katholischen Mission Komisi Pembinaan Jemaat Lutheran Archives of New Guinea Laws of Fiji London Missionary Society Archives Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea Les temps modernes Melanesian Alliance Melanesian Council of Churches Mission(naires) du Sacre Coeur National Broadcasting Commission of PNG New Guinea Annual Report New Guinea Mission Niugini Nius National Statistical Office of PNG National Times Nius bilong Yumi Ombudsman Commission of PNG Organisasi Papua Merdeka Oral testimony Paradise Papuan Courier Papua Annual Report Papua New Guinea Post-Courier

XX

PG PIM PNA PNG RPC RT SDA SDF SIL SH SIIO SMH SPC TAPOL TL TM T-M TP UCN UPNG UT UTW W WMM WN

ABBREVIATIONS Provincial Government Papers (PNG) Pacific Islands Monthly Papua New Guinea National Archives Papua New Guinea (including Acts and official documents) Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary Rabaul Times Seventh Day Adventist Church Sub-District Files, Papua New Guinea Summer Institute of Linguistics Seli Hoo Solomon Islands Independence Order The Sydney Morning Herald South Pacific Commission British Campaign for the Defence of Political Prisoners of Human Rights in Indonesia The Times (of London) Time Magazine Telegraph Mirror The Times of Papua New Guinea United Church News University of Papua New Guinea (including documents) Uni Tavur The University This Week Wantok Wesleyan Methodist Mission Society Archives Workers News

PLEASE NOTE

Some citations of authors in the text are not in chronological order. In such cases, the ordering relates to the sequence of topics or cultural references discussed in the preceding sentence(s).

Preliminaries: The Theory of Retributive Logic

This book concerns itself with some of the more remarkable features of Melanesian life: payback killing or the taking of indiscriminate revenge on enemies; prodigious acts of generosity without guarantee of comparable returns; and intricate modes of explaining important social events, especially disaster, sickness, and death. It will be argued that vengeance, reciprocity and the means of interpreting social affairs are integrally related in most Melanesian worldviews, and that these traditional interrelationships help explain why Melanesia's adjustment to rapid technological and social change has its own special flavour. Behind the Melanesian pidgin term bekim (payback)1 lies the presumption that life, punctuated by dangerous feuding and competitions, coloured by the excitement of reciprocities and trade, is to be apprehended as a continuous interweaving of gains and losses, giving and taking, wealth and destitution, joy and sorrow, vitality and death. How Melanesians think about the significant events and situations affecting them, and how their thinking is translated into action, are points of inquiry covered by my phrase 'the logic of retribution'. Elsewhere I have used the idiom retributive logic of both biblical and Graeco-Roman beliefs about the divine distribution of rewards and punishments in history (Trompf 1979a: 93-106,155-74,231-41,285-95; 1979b: 21929; 1983a; 1990a; 1994). Here I define it as any logical framework of ideas 1

As a verb = to give back, to reimburse, to answer, or to average: as a noun = exchange, repayment, payment, payback, or revenge, in Papua New Guinea pidgin (Mihalic 1971: 66). For equivalents elsewhere, cf., e.g., Camden 1977, s.v. 'Pei', 'Bak', etc., and note the Solomonese peimbak. Pebek (im) is not commonly used in Melanesian pidgin(s), but gaining wider currency. Pay(-)back as a substantive is itself barely beyond English slang, receiving its heaviest usage among anglophones of the southwest Pacific.

1

2

PAYBACK: PRELIMINARIES

enabling people to give reasons for their retaliations and concessions, and to interpret the dramatic changes of human existence in terms of rewards and punishments, praise and blame. Human thinking, admittedly, is bound up with action and, for that matter, emotions; yet, in the following pages I will concentrate on styles of reasoning, setting the priority of this study on the way people explicate actions and attitudes, and only secondarily on external behaviour and emotional states. That Melanesians interpret vicissitudes of life in terms of requital or retributive principles is clear from published research, but the notions involved have not been thoroughly examined in their interrelationship as expressions of religion, and retributive logic has not yet gained recognition as an important crosscultural phenomenon. Retributive logic is endemic to humanity. Childhood experiences in every culture are quickly filled with rewards and punishments for doing 'right' and 'wrong' with the gifts and withdrawals of parental affection, with instructions about right behaviour and attitude (whom not to enrage, for instance, or how to recognize and account for the significant happenings in everyday life). Coping in any society requires the ability to estimate. Children come to 'test' the degrees of permissiveness in the human and natural worlds. When wanting their own way, they intuit when they are over-exasperating another, either giving in or holding on to their 'victory' in accordance with their current temperament or relative sense of security. In their play and widening experiences they come to appreciate an inchoate spectrum ranging from homely safety to real danger, and from pleasure to pain. All the basic principles of education and socialization to be found the world over presuppose and reinforce this incipient, infantine power of assessment or calculation. One misdemeanour incurs more parental wrath than another, and to acquire the simplest skills, such as walking and talking, is to learn to surmount levels of inadequacy by doing better. Simple notions of causal relation develop from the parents' or child's own threats: 'if you do that, I will do this!' It is in this 'ready reckoning' a primal casuistry usually learnt within the complex environment of a family and other humans, within a veritable forest of words, symbolic actions and fluctuating emotions, that one detects the child's furtive rehearsals of retributive logic (Piaget 1924; Ginsburg and Opper 1969: 72-116; Chomsky 1972: 13-33, cf. von Bertalanffy 1971: 208-09; Berger and Luckmann 1967: 58-71, 168-73). Revenge To feel inclined to pay back those who are ill-disposed towards us is to be human. Few there be who are 'enthusiasts for punishment' who become 'excited when publicly covered with opprobrium and infamy' (de Sade [1787] 1931: 326-7). Aggressive urges usually well up in us when faced with

THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION

3

condemning, unpleasant, threatening, or overbearing attitudes, when realizing we are being deceived, and especially when convinced that we have done nothing to merit some act of malevolence. Our reactions hail from those childhood experiences of frustration and fear, when we felt the drive, in our tantrums and stubbornness, to overcome the powerlessness of being young (Dollard et al. 1939; Megargee and Hokanson 1970, cf. Arendt 1970; May 1972). The will to revenge, however, is not a 'pure emotion' even if entailing such passions as aggression, anger, cruelty or lust. We can almost invariably give strong reasons why we want to pay back, and there is so often present that element of calculation, that intuited estimation of the 'price' that we think ought to be exacted. But of course any sense of proportion will vary with personality and culture, and the rationale for vengeance in one social setting may be entirely unacceptable in another. Where smallish tribes have been traditionally in armed-conflict, as in Melanesia, apparently vicious acts of reprisal—the killing of an unsuspecting child from among the enemy, for instance—will be socially accepted. Citizens of the large-scale pluralist societies of the West, by contrast, while still sending their soldiers to war, tend to pass off the 'precivilized' Melanesia as a scene of relentless 'feuds'; these moderns are more likely to locate the legitimate norm of payback with the elimination, certainly the weakening, of one's business competitors, or with the relatively peaceful struggle of classes and pressure groups to obtain power. That there is a universality of rationally justified recrimination, however, is beyond doubt (Fromm 1973: 272, cf. Simmel 1955).2 Retribution is not only something we contemplate, but also enact. How it is translated into action—how quickly, and in what measures—is an issue that can hardly be avoided here. With the loss of one's spouse through murder, for example, one would naturally feel impelled to kill the culprit in return, and to seek immediate requital. Various resentments may be harboured in the breast for many years, and groups, such as Melanesian villagers who see the foolishness of openly attacking an unwanted, betterarmed colonial administration, may bide their time until an opportune moment. When such a chance arrives, retaliation might not take a violent form, since payback has a thousand less-severe faces and can be as covert as robbery and scandalmongery, or as open as a public expose, a challenge of words, a refusal to cooperate, cursing, snubbing, sarcasm, or just plain unfriendliness. The relative severity of reprisals obviously hinges on the contexts. A range of payback 'mechanisms' can be detected in all spheres of human intercourse, being in play between individuals (competing 2

Please note that, in this book, payback is not automatically identified or syonymous with violence, or even aggression (both of which have their own special typologies). Thus, although I may appear to side with those denying human aggression is instinctual (e.g. Heller 1977: 32, 83), in fact I am not dealing here with aggression in general.

4

PAYBACK: PRELIMINARIES

brothers and sisters, rival peers, between husband and wife, young and old) and between groups (such as households, clans, factions, political parties, denominations, classes, nations, power blocs). Thus, the amount of satisfaction demanded is likely to depend on the number of people involved, as well as the issues at stake. The adult, moreover, will have learnt to be more calculating than the child. The infant's active payback can include physical violence—with stones and sticks—as well as a mere utterance or a releasing verbal revenge; yet adults have a wider choice of policies to follow, or 'more games to play' (Berne 1961: 98-115; 1964: 83-138), and they can give many more persuasive reasons to explain their rancour. Payback, at any rate, becomes increasingly attended by logic, as the life-cycle proceeds—or, better still, reinforced by more sophisticated forms of logic (A. Freud 1937; Homans 1951: 287; Sartre 1956: 221-23; Mead 1934: 30002; Scheler 1972: 43-78, cf. Schoeck 1966; Heidegger 1967: 326-29). Revenge and rationality are at no point more openly enmeshed than when the former is legitimized by broadly accepted values, when it acquires such a high-sounding name as 'redress', for instance, or is carried out by a 'justly indignant' punitive expedition. Alexandre Dumas could count on the sympathy of his European readers for his hero Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo, who with such native cunning brought ruin on those who wrongfully consigned him to the dungeons. Japanese warriors acclaimed those who had the equanimity to carry out public tortures on the enemy during wartime, and felt justified in scorning those who could not die like a samurai (Bergamini 1971: 959-60). Moral outrage or indignation, then, can lead to vengeance as an abounden duty, and can have effects as direful as the Nazi holocaust or as comparatively innocuous as a pressure to resign (cf. van der Post 1963). Tormented by the paradoxical nature of it all, the famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche fell into despair: humanity everywhere 'has sanctified revenge (Rache) under the name of justice (Gerichtigkeity ([1887] 1969: 73-74); now, it is a matter of subjective (even if sometimes legal) opinion as to which is which. Punishments based on socially accepted rules or laws, of course, which are apparently the inheritance of all documented societies, constitute a species of payback in the negative sense. The culprit to be requited, particularly if the crime is deemed heinous, takes on something of the status of an enemy ('an enemy of the people') who must be brought to heel. The types and degrees of punishment vary considerably across cultures and history, for 'sanctions' can either be negatively 'subtractive' or positively 'inflictive'. It is noticeably common that a (sizeable enough) group is prepared to put one of its own number to death for wrongs done, an extreme it traditionally applies to its military foes, or those threatening the very existence of the group or society from without. In human cultures, though, degrees of penalizing are developed (perhaps by trial and error, perhaps

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by pondering legislators) and the punitions always reflect some relation to the known possibilities of human revenge (such as torture, deprivation of rights, exile, shame, snubbing, subordination, labelling) and this is a relationship quickly enough understood, since punishments have been typically 'natural inventions' inevitably framed in terms of those negative manoeuvres people rarely like to see falling upon themselves. Legal principles and theories of punition, moreover, even in the most 'modernized' nations, are still expressed in terms of (negative) retribution, Vergeltung, and so on, as if a society has to 'get its own back' on those who have betrayed its dearest values. Law, we note, can hardly be confined to the judicial or arbitration system controlled by those of high social authority, or maintained by officialdoms; there is a multiplicity of law-making and rule-making levels in all cultures. Institutions, companies, 'grades', peer clusters and varieties of subgroups or subcultures are all capable of making their own regulations, as are households, or even individuals. Punishments can be meted out by all these sectors, within bounds that are calculated according to tradition. Significantly, again, almost none of the sanctions they employ—'sacking', the disallowance to pass from one degree of attainment to the next, consignment to bed for the night without a meal, and so forth—ever escape associations of vengeance or recrimination. The line between penalty and vindictiveness is often so blurred, indeed, that it appears failed students can be 'paid back' for their laziness, let us say, or workers fired for their unproductiveness, or unsuccessful seekers of promotion can be paid back for creating jealousy, and so forth (Pospisil 1956: 751; 1967a: 2-26; Peristiany 1967; Moore 1973, cf. Weber 1925: 124-76; Mayntz 1963: 103-20; Acton 1969). Reciprocity What of payback as (re)payment rather than revenge? What of rewards rather than punishments? Cynics like to affirm that humans generally find it harder to make sacrifices than to exact a price. This view compels, although misleading comparisons can produce false impressions, especially when one sets our reluctance to concede freely against our eagerness to say or do something spiteful. The fact is that constraints are usually placed on one's own wild, overreactive will to revenge, just as self-interest teaches against our being over-generous. Certainly, one cannot adjudge our basic tendencies in the abstract. Altered circumstances and varying experiences, to offer as flexible a generalization as possible, eventually leave us all with a scale of rewards to bestow and penalties to impose, and how we balance matters is again subject to temperament and culture, let alone intelligence and intuition. Such complexities! Yet, it remains true that to sacrifice something of one's own or one's self for the sake of others usually requires

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more conscious effort than to satisfy the impulse, when felt justified, to dispossess or subvert. Such self-sacrifice falls within the cooler ambit of reciprocities—of friendlier give-and-take, trade, domestic sharing, or the fulfilment of social and ritual obligations. This is a broad sphere of activity that calls for hard work and constant repair, vulnerable as it is to neglect or mismanagement and, thus, to the lurking, divisive forces of blame and vindictiveness (Mauss [1925] 1967; Lowie 1937: 233, cf. Levi-Strauss 1949; Becker 1956; van Baal 1975a). Positive and negative payback, however, can easily be taken as two sides to the same coin. Giving can not only occasion a sense of debt or obligation in others, or even embarrassment, shame or guilt; it is almost always attended by a measure of self-interest. The extent of one's generosity, in fact, is so often affected by the security of special friendships, or perhaps by the desire to buy favour, dominate sexually, taunt someone who deserves a pointed lesson, or just to keep up appearances before a person we secretly despise. It will often pay to be generous or full of good works, further, not only because virtue brings others' support (as well as its own rewards!), but also because it means one's competitors or enemies are disarmed. From a position of strength one's magnanimity can prey on the weak, and in moralistic cultures righteousness can be one way of maintaining personal superiority, even of putting down those we love most dearly. There is also the phenomenon of aggressive self-sacrifice that demands love by heaping it without moderation on select friends (Storr 1970: 110). Thus we can reward ourselves by rewarding others and yet injure those we surreptitiously choose to be untouched by our initiatives—a fact of life that makes the injunction to love one's enemies seem psychologically unbearable or politically impractical to the realist. Here, admittedly, we are edging towards erldless arguments over altruism and egoism (cf. Sorokin 1950; Rand 1961:81-83,117-23), or covert as against overt motivation; but, whatever the outcome of such altercations, the presence of retributive logic is not in doubt. It still persists when we simply feel and act upon the weight of our responsibilities; there is always the threat that we will be 'punished' by non-acceptance or by loss of sustenance or reputation if obligations are left unfulfilled. Few there are who do not feel bound to live up to expectations—as required by parents, for instance, or by some group, society conceived as a whole, or by the spirits or God— and we are for ever learning afresh how much they demand of us. Retributive logic, then, is a logic of human motivation. We may be going to do something in the future: our assessment of consequences in terms of retaliation or concession brings this logic into play. We may have exacted a recompense in the past: whether we recognize our real motives or repress them for a later rationalization, at some point we are pressed by the need to justify our action to ourselves. If it lacks a satisfying rationale, or if its

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basis has been called into doubt by some unquestioned moral axiom, our own logic or the judgments of others may find us ashamed or guilty. The logic does not have to be perfect or valid or sound, it simply has to appear that way or to be meaningful (and it is culturally relative, in any case). We certainly have to make sense to ourselves. Then again, our motivations are generally conditioned by an ethos which surrounds us and which we can even cultivate. Life usually blossoms when we are praised, given to, or readily accepted, so that we can afford to be mellow and self-giving. We are susceptible to resentment and depression if conditions are otherwise, and more than likely to worsen our position or self-estimation by overreacting. Life has its vicious circles; even in riding on the crest of a wave, there lies the possibility of falling either through another's jealousy or one's very own pride (Rosenzweig 1938; Flugel 1945: 114, cf. Rank 1932: 80-85; 1945: 245; Allport 1958: 3-46; Goffman 1959; Rokeach 1976; Laing 1970: 18-37; 1971: 83-86; van Sommers 1988). It has been helpful to isolate the dimensions of 'positive requiting' by concentrating on individual motivation; yet, who can deny that all these attitudes and thoughts lying behind actions are substantially conditioned by human groups and societies? Thus, it should not surprise if in the following pages we explore the fulfilment of obligation or other related expressions of morality as aspects of social reciprocity. Among the socioeconomic transactions and rituals that are characteristic of primal cultures, there are concessions, gifts and exchanges between mortals, and fascinatingly analogous interchanges between humans and the gods. Occasions of extraordinary hospitality and sacrificial rites are perhaps the most intriguing of all such would-be reciprocations, because of the apparently one-sided cost to the sacrificers and rewards heaped upon other agents. The group rationale for such phenomena are of immense interest as manifestations of shared retributive logic and as complex blends of altruistic and self-interested activity. Explanations of significant events The logic of retribution, to be sure, does not only cover one's own predispositions to reward or punish, but those of other people and of other forces as well. It is often these others who bring about and involve us in occurrences quite independently of our wills. Humans endow events with meaning; they recognize a change, especially when it affects them personally, and so distinguish changes for better and for worse; they also give reasons why changes, or any events accounted significant, have happened. That people put shapes or spatial images on events (referring to them, for example, as behind or in front, moving up or down, or curved, or in blocks) is an important subject for anthropological

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and psychological study (e.g. Jung [1912] 1956). More to the point, however, is that there is no known culture whose members do not explain the most important happenings in their lives in terms of rewards and punishments. The event of a death calls forth this explanatory mode in its sharpest form. Something or someone is blamed. Even if in Western culture the wrathful God and the spiteful Devil are less fashionable causal agencies, conceived over and against diagnosed natural processes, blame is assigned still—to an almost personified cancer, for instance, to an untrustworthy doctor, an ill-disposed member of the family, or even to the self-neglectful dead person. In the 'first world' West, of course, or even in the cancer wards of 'second world' provincial Russia, so brilliantly described by Solzhenitsyn, consensus explanations for death do not come easily, but in most societies it is of concern to the extended family or community that a single cause can be agreed upon. In virtually all small-scale societies, further, the crucial question will be whether the death was 'good' or 'bad', whether, for example, it appropriately completed a person's visible life or was the result of some outside evil. And the event of death hardly stands alone in requiring interpretation; serious trouble, sickness, various types of tragedies, as well as the blessings and good fortune that make up their opposites, are commonly explained in terms of a retributive logic. In the West it has been less and less characteristic to instance the divine distribution of justice in events, a tendency out of step with cultures still open to the inroads of spiritual powers. Certainly, a host of 'third world' peoples believe in the efficacy of sorcery and magic, the vengeance or blessings of ancestors or deities, and the existence of supernatural power behind either disaster or fecundity in 'nature'. Nevertheless, retributive logic can persist in a secularized garb (even in Marxist or atheistical consciousness), for weal may be ascribed to praiseworthy skill, cunning or plain commonsense, and woe to human folly. In any case, 'modern' as against 'archaic' people still retain their scapegoats, and have their 'folk devils' to blame (Cohen 1973, cf. Burke 1968: 445-52; Ryan 1971; Szasz 1973). In explaining the vicissitudes of life each culture has its storehouse of knowledge. Its custodians usually like to say 'I told you so', referring to precedent and precept. Hence, medical diagnoses, local lore, proverbs, poems to cover human situations, rites, customs, treaties, let alone tabus and laws, provide people with the scientia by which to explain events in terms of recompense. In some cases it will be concluded that a person has been requited by an intervention of the gods or the dead; in others it will be found necessary for the living members of the community to punish an offender; and so forth. The reasons given for such conclusions, and the assessments as to prices paid, form the most highly reflective and most communal side to retributive logic. Even in countries with secularized legal systems millions still take the commands of God or Jesus to have a higher

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legal validity of their own, and to have uncanny value in explaining eventualities too personal or profound to be covered by the law, whereas in thousands of traditional cultures, it may be the actual breaking of an important rule (taken as sacred) that brings on sickness even unto death. The modes of explanation we have been discussing, then, provide the cognitive basis or rationale for payback and reciprocity. Many of us may need these modes for psychological support, to justify ourselves, since we humans tend to 'project the sins that reside in our hearts, locating them far off, in others, in adversaries whom we then assail and persecute for our own guilt' (Roszak 1973: 131). On growing older, too, we draw increasingly on experience, particularly those 'sorry experiences' that quench the 'glad heart of youth' and hence our social poses come to take on their individual stamps (Kierkegaard [1851] 1941: 103). Most important of all, however, humans usually work with the interpretative frames they have inherited culturally, acting in terms of society's expectations and permissions; it is therefore tradition or socially accepted norms that most commonly serve to bind together the actions and explanations that interest us here. Thus, a warrior who believes his dead relative has been the victim of sorcery will have reasons for taking revenge, even though these may be barely comprehensible to a secularized Western mind. Some other person, assured that his own neglect has incurred the wrath of ancestors, and so brought trouble, will have good grounds for placating them with rituals and food offerings. One of the chief aims of this book, moreover, is to show that peoples of Melanesia invariably give reasons for certain traditional behaviour patterns, such as killing and eating their enemies, which many would deem irrational. The rational bases of revenge and reciprocity in their case are almost always consistent with socially sanctioned ways of accounting for significant events. This means, intriguingly, that their traditional acts, not only of giving and taking, but of homicide against enemies as well, were in some sense religious, or else bound up with worldviews and belief systems normally graced by that awkward, all-too confusing term 'religion'. Admittedly, this rather special religious integration of thought and action has been breaking up in a changing Melanesia. Besides, there are other cultures in which religious doctrines stand against violence and vindictiveness, thus making it plain that retribution and religion are not necessarily identifiable, and that the logic of retribution is not always religious. There are, in fact, several theoretical problems issuing from my use of the phrase 'retributive logic' (concerning rational thought and action, for one, and religion for another) that crave further (if somewhat more philosophical) analysis.

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The epistemology of rationality The logic of retribution is normally 'consistency logic'; truth is a datum rather than a problem, and the problem becomes how to interpret and act in the world with the accepted truths (Gibson 1921: 1). Some might wish to refer to this logic as a form of 'bounded rationality' (Brookfield 1972: 159-60) or even 'pre-logical mentality' (Levy-Bruhl 1922: 47-60), but such expressions are objectionable because every logic is culture-bound, and it is a pitfall of ethnocentricity to conclude that some peoples are generally less rational (or more rational) than others (Trompf 1980a: 340, cf. Lukes 1970: 194-213; Ling 1973: 144-45; Kleinig 1980: 91; Hollis and Lukes 1982). It is not necessary for us to adjudge retributive principles by canons of would-be absolutist logic at Oxford University, let us say. Nor is it initially helpful to subject any system of retributive logic to technical criticisms, let alone value judgements, until one discerns the part it plays in a society, whether it is psychologically or ethically supportive, whether it sustains an ecology, and such like. European logic has been extraordinarily useful for developments in nuclear physics and biochemistry, yet this does not mean that it is the only or governing form of logic in Western consciousness, nor more useful than apparently curious retributive logics of primal societies, for nurturing a balanced psyche. The most important first step is to recognize logics of retribution as styles of reasoning, to establish that they have a phenomenology as logical frameworks of ideas. We can tell this kind of reasoning is in play when someone gives reasons for fighting back or doing a favour, for blaming or praising, for inferring that a happy outcome was merited or that evil must be paid for 'with a price'. The task of the observer is to find out how all these lineaments fit together as a general pattern of thought, held together collectively or in the minds of individuals. It is hardly an easy task. Difficulties are compounded by the entrenched dichotomy between rationality and irrationality. There is a satisfying paradigm that sanity never produces rashness, and that people knock each other over the heads only when they are unable to control irrational impulses. Not only does it presuppose certain Western (Enlightenment) value-judgements, but it also tends to obscure a blatant existential fact: that non-rational factors are for ever at work while we are doing our thinking and reasoning (and vice versa). Now, one could hardly deny the unimportance of mental activity at times of extreme physical duress (in the midst of a fight, for instance); yet, what remains of real interest to the student of retributive logic is that people can almost always tell you why they were so vehement, why they did something that seemed so charged with emotion! They have reasons for their apparent irrationality, a simple truth which ought to make one wary of judging human behaviour, let alone

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thought patterns, by preconceived standards of normalcy (cf. Laing and Cooper 1971). This book unfolds on the assumption that people are reasonable in their own (or own culture's) terms, that every communicated thought is in this sense logikos (rational, logical), although some are impossibly difficult for outsiders to understand, and that even the verbalized dementia of the so-called insane can be unravelled into a coherence (Spiro 1964: 1-15; Whorf 1951; Bateson 1973: 167-308; Geertz 1975: 88-125; Kuper 1979: 646-50, cf. Maier 1908; MacMurray 1935; Parsons 1963: xlvii). To attempt to understand many thought-worlds without pre-emptive evaluation of their worthiness is to adopt what some would deem an 'intellectualist' stance (although it is just as readily described as a side to the phenomenological method, which requires a patient listening to people with other viewpoints and a 'bracketing' of our own personal presuppositions and prejudices). Some might protest, however, that we are being overly concerned with thinking rather than with the complex totality of the human, that 'rationality is really our rationalization' and that it is patently 'Eurocentric' to be oriented this way (Sahlins 1976: 72, cf. Rupp 1974: 174). Yet, to 'thank heaven' that 'there is a man left who has not learned to think' to use Jung's phrases ([1939] 1964: 529), is one of the few absurdities which cannot be tolerated in the cross-cultural study of the human being—if the remark means either that thinking makes minimal appearance in many (particularly primal) societies, or that the processes of thought found in them are essentially different from those in 'civilized' Western quarters. For, thinking is synonymous with being human, and forms of reflective thought are found in all cultures (despite relative degrees of objectification) (cf., for example, Payne 1899: 56-57). Admittedly, one might be tempted to demarcate a person's working reflective rationality from the fluctuating sea of 'stray thoughts'; even then, however, the intuition will remain that there is nevertheless a coherence (and a mirror of our personalities) in the thoughts and consequent actions we have never questioned (cf. Schutz 1962: 207-21). Is the logic of retribution, in any case, as a dimension of thought, consciously perceived and reflected upon by its users? As an abstraction, or as a separable heuristic category, almost never; for, it is the special task of the researcher to so isolate it. Insofar as persons are made aware of their own and others' motivations (from time to time), on the other hand, and realize their need to appeal to a shared framework of beliefs and values in their society, this logic has an existential reality. It is the common property of human consciousness, although its details vary throughout the globe. It only becomes a recognizable domain for both research and selfknowledge, though, when it is explored and rendered intelligible by the investigator's mind. The charge of 'essentialism' is inappropriate as a criticism of this interpretative process, just as it would be to any attempt at the hermeneutics of comparative rationality, unless prior postulations

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about the nature of retributive ideas and actions are patently forced on a mass of data rather than being induced from it. Referring more appropriately to its methodological role, the logic of retribution presents itself as a rubric to help explain human behaviour and draw cross-cultural relationships, and could be taken variously as a 'structure' (following LeviStrauss 1977), as an object of thematics (Freire 1972: 73-81), as an appropriate 'polythetic' representation (Needham 1974: 16; 1983: 62), as an 'assumptive world' or a component in each identifiable Lebenswelt (lifeworld) of individuals and groups (Husserl 1962:99,148-54,179; Frank 1963: 27, 29), or simply as a hermeneutical tool (Eliade 1969: 2-11). Certain scholars, admittedly, may not be ready to concede rationality (and definitely not tough argumentation!) to the apparently ignorant, superstitious, primitive, let alone to the obsessed, neurotic and schizophrenic, and will beckon us to the attractions of higher reasoning. When the Enlightenment philosophes glorified Reason as the force to quell darkness, however, they failed to appreciate that most rationality is 'grassroots'—banal, selfinterested, defensive, and cunning. But it is in investigating the rich diversity of what is rather than what ought to be, and thus of contextual rather than theoretical rationality, that we can now best appraise human nature while honestly testing the validity of our own logical assumptions. All this notwithstanding, let it be plain that, although I am discussing a very important slice of human experience, it is not what I take to be the whole scope of psychic life. To uncover reasons where one would not expect to find them is not to sanction the reduction of consciousness to rationality. By taking jealousy seriously as an avowed reason for an act of violence, for example, or self-hate as justification for the attempted selfpunishment of suicide, it does not follow that one must exclude all consideration of the emotions, or deny a role to the unconscious. Emotions not only constitute a huge and special field of study, but they are bound up with all significant themes in human thought and not just one. They also impinge on phenomena lying beyond the sphere of rationality, including ecstasy, trance, awe, grief, and exhilaration, on the one hand, and compulsive behaviour, mental blanks, trauma, senile dementia, and products of congenital brain damage, on the other. As for the unconscious, it could well be the deep, veiled causal principle behind the diverse styles of retributive logic, yet it remains a giant, unfathomable iceberg, which still leaves us with the daily laborious task of decoding 'other minds' (cf. Ryle 1949: 51-61). Myths and dreams, I concede, are ostensibly languages of the unconscious; in this present work, however, our concern is limited to both how they can provide the grounding for action, and what logical or explanatory force they possess once they have been cast out upon the sea of consciousness (Jung et al. 1964: 20-103, cf. Faguet 1911: 352-74; Jahoda 1970: 146-47; Frankl 1975: 33; Schneidermann 1981: 196-97).

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I hold, further, that the serious comparative study of retributive logic will provide a sound basis for a cross-cultural psychology that centres itself around the conscious rather than the elusive unconscious mind. I hasten to add how baffled African and Pacific students are by the Eurocentricism of Freud and the conceptual leaps of Jung, as well as by the deficient anthropological insights of both. Black and white thinkers need to communicate more fruitfully with each other about psychological questions (as south Asian Indians and white North Americans are now able to do in the new humanistic school of psychology) (Sutich and Vich 1969). This is possible only when a psychic denominator is isolated that is meaningful to the various parties involved and, thus, when the psychology of the conscious mind is rehabilitated (James 1904:477-91; Vinacke 1952; Johnson 1955; Thomson 1959; Bartlett 1964; Ornstein 1968,1972). This is one crucial means of recognizing and disclosing our common humanity, for in this rehabilitation we shall confirm that blacks and whites or citizens of technopolis and primal village are no less or more human than each other, neither one reflecting a psychic propensity markedly different from the other. Truly, the well-worn view that so-called 'primitive peoples' live in a state of half-awakened consciousness is a ghost of scholarship to be laid for ever (Trompf 1990c: 71, 84-89). The disputing of evolutionism here is not intended to be deconstructive but reconstructive. In defending a common human rationality a good deal in the pages that follow will involve the problematique of language and use of one tongue cross-culturally—in this case the English language of Europe. I remind readers, first, that all attempts at communicating other cultures involve such a difficulty, and that a certain violence is done by selecting one medium of communication. On second thoughts, however, any act of communicating like this can be born of years of experience at listening, and knowing what others want to have said about their beliefs and doings. A confidence arises, then, in the judicious use of many English terms—conceptual, economic, legal—that credit different peoples with a 'realm of equivalents' valuable for dialogue, rather than forever consigning others' Weltanschauungen to an 'alien beyond', to obscure frameworks only decipherable by anthropologists, or to a world that supposedly can never be contaminated, all rubrics concocted by Western generalists. In any case 'particularism studies are usually found based on some undisclosed generalist 'sub-text' about 'truth', and it remains a more honest and transparent course to meet the pressing need for reconstruction and intercommunication, albeit necessarily constrained by phenomenology, a sense of historicity and ethnographic accuracy. Constantly accentuating the fascinations of difference becomes a luxury when the world is bleeding to death through misunderstanding over such cultural basics as revenge and concession.

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Religion and retributive logic The logic of retribution is not intrinsically religious. We have already observed that it may be secularized: on considering exemptions and penalties meted out by atheistically oriented communist parties, one soon perceives how it has been a powerful tool of secularist politics. Retributive logic takes on its most obviously religious face when it appears as a modus explicandi; for, eventualities are so often related to the acts, decrees, or wishes of some supernatural agency, and human deeds evaluated by god-given standards. 'There has to be a reason' is even a very common Western reaction to a disaster, such as the crash of a passenger jet, and there is a persisting tendency to refer the inexplicable to the 'God-of-the-gaps'. Some dimensions of retributive logic, however, can be anathematized by the religious mind. When such logic is applied as plans and justifications for revenge, for instance, rather than as the means of interpretation, it has been deemed abhorrent in Christian theology. The Israelites, so long as vengeance was not directed against their own people (Lev. 19:18), viewed the defeat of wicked enemies, whether by themselves or others, as the justifiable recompenses of Yahweh (Deut. 32:35-43, Ps. 94, Jer. 51, etc.). Once the Jewish national identity lost relevance, however, as it did in earliest Christianity, revenge was left to God alone and found unacceptable in human hands (Rom. 12:19, Matt. 5:38-48). For different, though not entirely unrelated reasons, all forms of violence—acts of retaliation not least among them— have been (theoretically) disdained by Jains and Buddhists (Acharanga Sutta 1.4.2; Samyutta 5.9). Again, the spiritual mind is quite capable of treating the calculations and reciprocities of the marketplace with a curious indifference, or of condemning currently accepted economic systems as irremediably corrupt. Thus, one should be wary, not only of identifying religion with retributive logic, but also of neglecting the intriguing transmutations to which the logic of retribution can be subjected by the individual religious mind, and the degrees to which certain of its aspects can overshadow or modify others in given traditions. Some persons and some ideologies, to illustrate simply, are far more legalistically and punitively oriented than others (cf. Laye 1959; Furer-Haimendorf 1967; Montagu 1978; Harris 1978, cf. Fraiberg 1968: 242-64; Foucault 1977). When religious teaching places fetters on human revenge, however, it does not follow that the logical framework we have been describing has been impaired or its existence thrown into doubt. Assertions that Vengeance is the Lord's' or claims about the adverse karmic consequences of violence are still articulations of religious retributive logic. They differ in manifestation, but not in essence, from systems that demand homicidal payback against enemy tribes (Melanesia) or exact Allah's holy penalties with the severing of hands (Islam). It is simply that revenge, for one, is approached

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differently in different religions. Comparable variations emerge with patterns of reciprocity, too: even though some religions have never been integrated into one particular kind of socioeconomic order, none of them has kept silence on gift-giving, or relationships within the community, the fulfilment of obligations, or on the consequences of socially accepted and rejected behaviour. It is in this very last unit of concern, of course, that we can easily perceive how close retributive logic comes to the heart-beat of religion, at the same time apprehending how such logic hangs together. The view that it is worth doing the right thing and that one will suffer adverse consequences from doing wrong impinges both on the rationale of retributive action (revenge, reciprocity) and on the arts of explaining what has happened as a result of one's own or another's deeds. In analysing different aspects of the relationship between religion and retributive logic it is most helpful, in summary, to look for'points of integration and tension between the two. In another context I have written of the Khodja Isma'ilis, a Shi'ite Muslim sect of southwest India and east Africa, in which retributive logic and religion are almost indistinguishable. For the Khodja cultural system is 'a religion in which everything in the three worlds of earth, heaven and the underworld has a "price" ' (Trompf 1980b: 9). Actually, money has become among this people the visible indicator of religious evaluation. Money is not only crucial in defining where Power resides in the community on earth (which centres on the Aga Khan as the holy Hazar Imam, even incarnation of God), but the extent to which money is given or withheld decisively affects one's spiritual standing and even one's place in the after-life. In other cases, however, the claims of religion and of retributive logic sit very uneasily together. The particular doctrinal positions of any given religion can be compromised away when special situations, or nationalist considerations, put the belief-system under great strain, so that those who once felt the call to love suddenly feel duty bound to fight a war for the homeland, or to create a scapegoat out of people who threaten their projected image of society (cf., for example, van der Post 1956: 94-95; Bettelheim 1970:196-209). Quite often, of course, ideals are neither attained to nor practised by the majority of those in a religious tradition: it is intriguing how in societies used to hearing high-principled condemnation of revenge, there remain many and varied instances of vicarious payback (identification with contesters on a sporting field, for example, or with the fighting hero of a television play), which one might be tempted to characterize both as sublimated tribal warfare and peculiar outcrops of religion (Scott-Forbes 1974: 51-56; Atyeo 1979, cf. Glasner 1977: 21-22). Hence the analysis of retributive logic can disclose the relative effectiveness of a religion, perhaps even whether it has been able to preserve its integrity. Overall, such analysis concerns a subject central to phenomenology, and one that writers on religion neglect at their peril.

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The origins of retributive logic I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech is seventy-sevenfold. (Gen. 4:23-24) An ancient biblical poem, this triumphant boast testifies that retributive logic, and vengeance in particular, has a very long history. Already in the story of Cain and Abel, themes of revenge, offering, and the consequences of action are intertwined, revealing that the association of these elements with the origins of conscience and religion is far from new (Gen. 4:1-8, 9-16, cf. 9:5-6; Enuma Elish 2:1-3,3:9,4:12-17). Surprisingly, however, those would-be social scientists who have theorized about the origins of religion during the last two centuries, from Charles de Brosses to Weston la Barre, have hardly broached the matter at hand. Friedrich Nietzsche stands almost alone in making a brilliant if poetic and highly speculative attempt to link revenge, the language of barter, and the dawn of religious notions. 'Setting prices' wrote Nietzsche, 'determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking itself ([1887] 1969: 70). The principle that 'everything has its price' is primordial, and lays the basis for 'the oldest and nai'vest moral canon of justice' in prehistoric society: that 'every injury has its equivalent and can be paid back'. For Nietzsche punishments were at first mere mimics of the punitive acts of war, yet at length 'revenge was sanctified under the name of justice—as if justice were at bottom a further development of the feeling of being aggrieved' (73-74, cf. 71-74; Hobbes [1651] 1954: I, xviii; Maine 1861: 67100). Nietzsche's picture of 'Western Man' as an animal soul gradually turning against itself, leaving behind a world of brutal clarity for one of soul-searching and guilt-feeling, when warlike 'instincts were devalued and suspended' by the peace of more developed social organization (84, cf. Steinmetz 18923), opens up the fascinating question as to whether religion was born in the womb of violence rather than in the hushed, eerie encounter with the numinous. Despite the attractive view of certain prehistorians that Homo sapiens sapiens was nothing 'but a peaceable hunter-gatherer before the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago' (the Leakeys interviewed in TM 1977: 74; cf. Perry 1925: 64), a school of 'ethologists' or biologists of behaviour, led primarily by Komad Lorenz (1966) and Robeit Aidrey (1966), are now 3

S. R. Steinmetz's Ethnologische Studien zur erster Entwicklung der Strafe, a published doctoral dissertation from Leiden University (1892), is the earliest serious ethnographic study I know of blood-feuding in the so-called primitive history of human institutions. In the Dutch tradition, yet more missiological, note also Nordholdt (1960).

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contending that aggression is 'one of the most powerful of phyletic memories' from our animal past (Ardrey 1969: 43), and that biological evolution has extensively determined the nature of our 'souls' not just our bodies (for related discussion, see Carthy and Ebling 1964; Moore 1970; Hacker 1971; Montagu 1973; J. M. Smith 1974: 209-21 and 1978: 136-45; Heller 1977: 30-85; Alexander 1987; Groebel 1989). However, there are some questions, that can never be answered, and without a time-machine no one can penetrate back to real beginnings. The more speculative archaeologists have argued that even the 'proto-hominid' group known as the Neanderthals killed (and ate) one another and also anticipated an after-life (Constable et al. 1973: 104). About the primordial motivations of revenge and the supposed fate of the dead, however, the stones and bones remain silent. A variety of 'non-religious' causes for human conflict may be posited, such as the 'selfish gene' (Wilson 1975; Dawkins 1976, cf. Shaw and Wong 1989: 91-114), for instance, or the territorial imperative (Ardrey 1961), or pressure on food resources resulting from the last Ice Age (Birdsell 1957); but there is insufficient data to support generalizations, and we would naturally like to know the thoughts of our distant ancestors who had recourse to violence. The clues about human consciousness we gain from prehistory are too scarce and tantalizing, and have to be supplemented with references to social universals. With an air of resignation we soon find ourselves conceding that aggression and religion help us to define who and what a human being is and both, thus, are likely to be as old as humanity itself. To develop a personal logic of retribution, then, even one expressed more non-verbally than through words, is part of the condition of being a person and of surviving with a human group (Trompf 1990c: 129-33). A good many societies may seem to lack government or laws, yet no known society is without 'rules of some kind which everyone thinks it is right to obey' (Mair 1965:35, cf. Clastres 1976; Fortes 1983). If the rules are broken, the one who suffers will normally seek redress, so that notions of punishment, retaliation, equivalence, blameworthiness, compensation, and cause will quickly come to the fore, even in those societies that are decidedly more 'peace-loving' than others (cf. Lisitzky 1956: 211-98; Denton 1968). There are endless debates to be had about the most ancient correlations between social structures, rules, and ideas, as well as about their bearing on what we here term the logic of retribution. To learn whether the first incest prohibitions marked the earliest attempts at social organization, for example, as a 'remodelling of the biological conditions of mating and procreation' (Levi-Strauss 1971: 350, cf. Fox 1967:54-76; Fortes 1983) would throw light on the origins of tabus and ethics. To discover when the first 'grunt of disapproval' and 'non-symbolic act of bodily-punishment' was made (Malinowski 1947: 205), and whether antagonisms towards other humans sprang from attitudes to hunting (Goldman 1975: 44-76; Cartmill

18

PAYBACK: PRELIMINARIES

1983: 68-69) or out of grief over death (Spiegel 1978), or out of a gender 'division of labour' (de Beauvoir 1961: 85-120), perhaps even gender selective chemical substances (Barash 1977), would be to help explain the origins and persistence of war. To know if gift-giving was first connected with guilt, self-punishment, and the need to placate the spirits could lay bare the beginnings of sacrifice, even of 'work' and to confirm that hate was indeed the precursor of love I n the (phylogenetic) order of development' as Freud suggests (1979: 143), would indeed throw light on the origins of morality and social punishment (Brown 1959: 262-68, yet cf. Suttie 1960: 90-101). To establish also that, even before the neolithic stage illustrated by Catal Huyuk (Anatolia), people envisaged the conditions of postmortem existence and perhaps anticipated a judgment (Brandon 1967: 4-5), to confirm that for all primeval societies deaths were always thought to be killings of one sort or another (Hick 1976: 57), and to document how non-literate peoples have sought to classify events and items from time immemorial (Durkheim and Mauss 1969: 6-9)—all this would certainly take us to the roots of science and of human explanatory devices. To uncover the rationale of sacrifice, as Rene Girard has recently pretended to do (1977: 25, 89-118), moreover, might well allow us a glimpse as to how the various dimensions of retributive logic bear relationship historically (although whether Girard succeeds in establishing 'the fundamental identity' of Vengeance, sacrifice and legal punishment' and lays bare the true origins of myth and ritual, would make for a prolonged critique) (cf. Valeri 1985: 67-70). To find out, too, how prehistoric patterns of retributive logic related to humanity's first insights about God, an issue harking back to the earlier concerns of the Anthropos Institute, would be one way of fulfilling the great Father Wilhelm Schmidt's dream to understand religion (Schmidt 1931, 1934). But the mists of time are impenetrable and it has become increasingly unsafe to go on inferring the secrets of remote antiquity for elitist investigators of the present. Suffice it to say that logics of retribution abound everywhere in our own time. Like most conceptual tools of trade they are subject to modifications brought by encounters between cultures and by modernizing influences. It is to what one may examine today and can learn from the not-so-distant past (from the extraordinary Melanesian cultural tapestry) that we now wish to turn. Melanesia by itself, with its manifold primal traditions and its fascinating responses to Christianity and modernity, can both illustrate these preliminary generalizations in vivid detail and evoke from us a deepening analysis.

PART ONE

'Tradition'

Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild—and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the the sound of bells in a Christian country. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly in T. S. Eliot The Cocktail Party

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

PAPUA GUINEA

Location of traditional religions on the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (key opposite)

21

PAYBACK: 'TRADITION'

LOCATION OF TRADITIONAL RELIGIONS: KEY TO MAPS PART I Main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (opposite); the Solomons (overleaf); Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu (overleaf). The religions are those cited in Part I: shown by number on the maps, they can be identified from the accompanying key (below). Note: The Index of Melanesian Cultures provides an alphabetical listing of tribal cultures. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Biak-Numfor Waropen (-Yapen) Bukaua Bokondini (Dani) Dugum Dani Jale Tor Ye'in Ngalum Kapauka Mimika Asmat Kolepom/Kimaan Mappi Sawi Marind-Anim Muyu Wape Lujere Gnau Umeda Avatip Chambri/Tchambuli Bimim-Kuskusmin Warn (Dreikikir) Kwoma Arapesh Iatmul Biwat Sawos Mundugumor Abelam Ilahita Arapesh Wogeo Yangoru Negrie Kumasa Murik Lakes Buna Middle Sepik/ Angoram Banaro Manam Gainj Haruai Tangu Malala (Ramu) Bongu (Ramu) Tung (Ramu) Bosmun (Ramu) Begesin Garia Karkar Yam, Sengam Bilbil Ngaing Siassi

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Timbe Hube Kaileute Wain Wantoat Wompa (Laewomba) Atzera Mumeng Busamo Binandere (Orokaiva) Jaua (Orokaiva) Ioma (Orokaiva) Sangara (Orokaiva) Managalas Okena Maisin Nibita Wedau Dobu Bunama (Normanby) Trobriands Muju/Woodlarkls. Massim Wagawaga Panniet Bonarua Suau Mailu Si'ini Dovaraidi Keveri Hula, AromaVelerupu Motu Koitabu Rigo Roro Mekeo/Kuni Toaripi-Moripi Elema Purari (west Elema) Kerewe Kikori (Poroma) Kiwai Torres Strait Keraki Arube Suki Kubo Bibo Samo Gebusi Bedamini Biami

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

Etoro Kumula Bosavi (Kaluli) Onabasulu Yombi (Kutubu) Erave/Kewa Kukukuku Wiru Mendi Nipa Wola Huli Duna (Kopiago) Hewa Takin-Telefomin/ Telefgol-Urapmin 125 Baktaman 126 Enga (Ipili - west; Mae - central; Kyaka - east) 127 Melpa 128 Ni'i 129 Kaupena 130 Kalam 131 Maring 132 Narak 133 Wahgi 134 Tambul 135 Chimbu 136 Gimi 137 Daribi 138 Siane 139 Asaro/GahukuGama 140 Bena(bena) 141 Bundi 142 Hua 143 Kamano 144 Tauna Awa 145 Taiora 146 Kogu 147 Fore 148 Gadsup 149 Kunimaipa 150 Tauade (Goilala) 151 Seragi 152 Fuyughe 153 Wuvulu 154 Tulu 155 Ponam 156 Usiai 157 Manus 158 Tula 159 Baluan(Matangkor) 160 Loniu (Matangkor) 161 Mussau 162 Lemakot

163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

Djaul Nalik Tanga Tabar Tiang Madak/Mandak Sursunga Lamassa Tolai Baining Mengen Kaliai Lakalai Bakowih Lolo Kove Arawe-Kandrian Sengseng Haku Solos Halia Kiriaka Evo Torau Nasioi Telei Buin Siwai Monu-Alu (Shortlands) 192 Choiseul 193 Sambo (Simbo) 194 Roviana 195 Toa[m]baita 196 Lau 197 Kwaio 198 Iova (small Malaita) 199 Florida, Sau 200 Koaka 201 Gari 202 Moli 203 San Cristobal 204 Santa Ana 205 Baled 206 Houailou 207 La Foa 208 Lifu (Loyalties) 209 Banks Is. 210 Aurora (Aore) 211 Atchin 212 Malekula 213 Ambrym 214 Efate 215 Tanna 216 Anutyum 217 Fiji groups

22

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

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Location of traditional religions on the Solomon Islands, Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu (key p.21)

CHAPTER 1

Revenge

The islands of the southwest Pacific have been peopled for millennia. The New Guinea mainland was occupied some 40 000 years ago (Groube et al. 1986), tuber and tree crops being curated in the central highlands as early as 30 000 BP (Gosden 1992), and systematic agriculture developing during the seventh millennium BC (White, Crook et al. 1970; White and O'Connell 1982: 171-212; Shutler 1970: 39-46; Golson 1981: 55-64, cf. Bellwood 1978; Swadling and Kaidoga 1981). Today Melanesia comprises hundreds of linguistic and cultural groups scattered from western Irian Jaya to Fiji.1 It is an incredibly complex tapestry of small-scale, 'stateless' societies, which has resulted from the peculiarities of geography, many adventures in migration and, more to the point of this present study, from countless undocumented tribal conflicts and alliances. Although Melanesian technologies were comparatively elementary, people were skilled in the use of stone, wood, bark, bone, shell and sometimes potting clay; and their tools enabled them, not only to garden effectively, but to hunt and domesticate animals.2 In various quarters they engineered impressive house structures and bridges (Kembol et al. [1974]), erected megaliths and small artificial islands (Reisenfeld 1950; Ivens 1930); they also developed lines and systems of exchange, sometimes with special trade languages and maritime expeditions involved (Malinowski [1922] 1961; Brookfield and Dart 1971; Hughes 1977; Specht 1978; Dutton 1982). 1

2

The following pages avoid discussion of so-called 'Polynesian enclaves' within Melanesia (e.g. Anuta, Bellona, Futuna, Kapingamarangi, Ontong Java, Rennell, Sikaiona, Taku, Tikopia, and even the Lau Group), but takes Awa and Wuvulu to be included as 'fringe Melanesia', the latter receiving some discussion later. Mastery of iron-working in parts of West New Guinea (Irian Jaya) derived from the Sultanate of Tidor; cf. Kamma and Kooyman (1973).

23

24

PAYBACK: 'TRADITION'

As for religion, each society has emerged out of the misty past with its own mythology, ceremonies, music, iconography, customs, values and its own special understanding of the cosmos. Religion was crucial for group survival, for it was not an extraneous compartment of culture but the very stuff of life, all human thought and action issuing in the presence of numinous or preter-sensual forces, and in a community of the dead as well as the living. It is hard to generalize about Melanesia's religions. There are certainly common patterns and themes, but it is impossible to embroider hundreds of strands into a unified picture that does justice to the depth and colour of complex reality. This is why even writing an introductory work on just one aspect of so-called 'Melanesian religion' is fraught with problems; for one cannot say anything that is true of every society, and it is easy to distort the character of particular cultures cited, each one of which could absorb a lifetime's study. To complicate matters, Melanesian belief-systems have often been misunderstood by outsiders and treated superficially in descriptive ethnographies. Sacred knowledge has been the special preserve of its custodians, and there are very few good reasons why it should have been imparted in its 'purest forms' to the uninitiated, let alone to foreigners (Lawrence 1971; Chowning 1977: 1-3). Despite such great odds, however, we can now at least begin to make sense of the more distinctive features of Melanesian religion, with the time being ripe to unravel the vast entanglement of ethnographic reportage into a working synthesis. The notional frameworks categorized in the introduction by the phrase 'retributive logic' have manifested themselves in all the indigenous Melanesian religions I know. In each culture area one finds sanctions for revenge, systems of reciprocal trading and gift-giving between parties, and complex sets of reasons given to show why people experience trouble or blessing. In each the avowed motives behind payback and reciprocity are inextricably related to normative explanations of significant events. To a pronounced degree the members of each society share common assumptions and 'self-evident truths', even though leadership and specialization are necessary to make specific decisions and clarify particular situations. How each collectively held logical framework came to be as it is, of course, is virtually impossible to answer, although at least archaeologists, linguists and oral historians provide enough clues to show that so-called 'primitive' societies were ever-changing, not static (cf. Denoon and Lacey 1981). How Melanesian children come to absorb the values and insights of their societies is also a tantalizing subject for inquiry, and since Margaret Mead's Growing up in New Guinea ([1930] 1942) very little has been added to our knowledge of it (cf. Mead 1932; 1935: 66-92; Whiting 1941; Schieffelin 1990; cf. earlier, Riley 1925:28-93). But the patterns of thinking about retribution are certainly there in all their diversity; and it is the thesis of this book

REVENGE

25

that we can better understand the modern history of Melanesia, with its reactions to colonialism and its emergence in the arena of world politics, by analysing those forms of rationality that have been bequeathed by archaic, primal traditions, and which have made Melanesia the aged mother of a thousand fascinating religions. Melanesia has long been publicized for its tribal fighting, and many of its earlier expatriate visitors, especially missionaries, have long since returned to their homelands with tales of headhunting and sorcery. For many Christians these destructive features mark sinful heathendom at its worst; for European colonials they are proof of civilization's absence; for an older school of social scientists they confirmed the theory 'that peaceful relations were impossible among primitive man' (Ratzenhofer 1898: 13334); and for certain psychoanalysts the 'archaic "blood thirst" ' smacks of necrophilia and the return of the human to an animal-like existence (Fromm 1980: 33, cf. 27, 30-34). This lack of sympathy towards such tribal warfare and hostilities,3 moreover, persists in the current policies of domestic peace upheld by independent and neo-imperial governments. The reader is being asked, however, not to prejudge Melanesian traditions before seeking to understand them, or before learning methods and insights that facilitate understanding. Retaliation in Melanesia takes on many forms; although acts of homicide and sorcery stand out among them, and beckon immediate attention, revenge should be appraised within the broader context of Melanesian religion and consciousness, as we shall now demonstrate. Payback killing: general observations Melanesia spawned a profusion of warriors. It was expected of a man that he should defend his people and know how to use weapons. The killing of one's enemies, in fact, whether by stealth or in battle, was an honoured if not favoured pastime of able-bodied men, who proved by their prowess that they were fearless, strong, and not women.4 It is admittedly not wise 3

4

In the following pages, I tend to use the terms 'war', 'warfare', and 'feuding' interchangeably as all applicable to small-scale group fighting within and between 'culturo-religious complexes' or 'societies'. In cases of chains of single vendetta killings, however, the term 'feuding' alone (of the above three) is appropriate. Only in rare cases did women bear arms (e.g. among the Rigo and certain Orokaiva groups, Papua), although their verbal encouragement and moral support at battle times were important in many societies. In the follow-up of a rout (as among the Chimbu and Wahgi New Guinea highlands) women would raid enemy gardens. On the Orokaiva case (especially BNGAR 1899-1900: 91; Waiko 1985), women took enemy spears out of shields and held up fighting sticks to prevent enemy warriors from bringing down clubs on their men. Among the Umeda (Upper Sepik), women arrow-retrievers and spectator children were 'fair game' in field wars (Gell 1975: 21). For a West New Guinea (or Irian Jaya) case, see Boelaars 1981: 150 (Mappi).

26

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

to make exaggerated claims. The love of killing for its own sake is not characteristically Melanesian, and certain groups felt less pressure to raid, take lives or bring home heads than others. Certainly, one needs to recognize geographical and demographic variations. Most groups' warfare was almost exclusively concentrated on neighbouring tribes or units speaking the same language (Berndt 1964: 183-203), while other peoples—whether because they favoured raiding distant places (the coastal Marind Anim of Irian Jaya, for example, or the Kukukuku of the Papuan Gulf hinterland), or whether they made up tiny linguistic pockets (as around Madang, coastal New Guinea)—fought much less among their own 'kind' than with men of quite different tongues (van Baal 1966: 692-93; West 1968: 153-54, cf. Wurm and Hattori 1982: 7). Even if it is true that social units living on the smaller islands were commonly at war with one another at the time of European contact, moreover—as on the Saint Matthias, Tabar, and Tanga groups off New Ireland, for instance, or on the now famous Dobu Island in the d'Entrecasteaux archipelago (Dixon 1981: 6-8; Lamers 1935: 172; Bell 1934: 301-05; Fortune 1932: 36)—this obviously did not apply on the tiniest outliers holding single or solid associations of people (e.g. off Manus, New Britain, Malekula, Vitu Levu, etc.). There are also historical factors to account for: it may be that the intertribal conflicts documented for immediate post-contact times were as widespread as they were because they erupted in the wake of pre-contact epidemics. Diseases spread through the southwest Pacific from the earliest, coastal interaction between indigenous populations and the newcomers, and their fatal inflictions, frequently ascribed to enemy sorcery, would have demanded vengeance and thus war parties (e.g. Haddon 1932:105; Burridge 1960: 122-23, cf. Nelson 1971; Lacey 1981). Be all this as it may, killing was part of the game of Melanesian life, and to do it well enhanced a man's esteem. I vividly remember sleeping a night under the same roof as a Wahgi warrior (central highlands, New Guinea) who whiled away the hours by telling me how he had killed at least twenty of the enemy, and where his favourite places of ambush and confrontation had been. But if, for many, payback killing seemed 'a very good kind of sport' (Matane 1974: 5, cf. Vicedom and Tischner 1962: 145-55; Berndt 1962: 444; Matthiessen 1962; Peabody Museum 1963; Pouwer 1964; Gardner and Heider 1969; Heider 1970:99-133 and 1979:87-112; Orken 1973), it required to be played seriously because it could cost you your life. No matter how amusing the gloating or the recounting of episodes around the clubhouse fires, or how reckless a warrior might dare to be in challenging the enemy, killing was an act to win both personal and collective survival. Willing destruction of one's enemies was a kind of virtue, not just an obligation. Among the Iatmul (Sepik River), for example, homicide was highest on the list of male achievements, the first kill by a young man being

REVENGE

27

the occasion for the most complete celebration of the ritual called naven (Bateson 1958: 6-7). Male initiation normally instilled the necessity of killing enemies as an expression of both group loyalty and the perpetuation of ancestral ways. Among the Negrie (Sepik), initiates were conducted into an enclosure dominated by high poles with the skulls of victims placed Macbeth-like at the top (Gesch 1985: 232-40). One could claim to be a man among such societies as the Wompa ([Laewomba] Morobe) or Waropen (Yapen-Waropen area of Irian Jaya) only by acquiring a head, which was duly presented to clan ancestors, or, as among the Keveri (Milne Bay), by bringing back a finger as proof of your raiding party's success (Reitz 1975: 163-64; Sack 1976: 50-76; Held 1957: 225-26; Wetherell 1973: 39). Not only was abstention from homicide a strong reason for social rejection (captives sometimes being brought to the weak-stomached initiate for him to land his first blow), but one had to face the possibility of being overcome by enemies in return with the staunchest equanimity (e.g. Seligmann 1910: 552-53). As Jojoga Opeba puts it of his fellows, the renowned Orokaiva, 'to die for one's society and the well-being of the community is an individual sacrifice'. It was better to merit post-mortem prestige by dying bravely than to endure shame (meh) among the living as a coward (Oral Testimony [hereafter OT] 1978, cf. Jojoga 1983:8-45). Overall, the concern to eliminate foes was indistinguishable from paying back people who had been killing one's 'fathers' and 'brothers' over the years, although at no time was there a stronger urge to take life than when the enemy seemed to have committed a 'fresh' act of aggression. When a kinsman was suddenly 'a missing part removed from the whole' (among the Siassi Islanders), it was 'as if a hand had been wrenched from the body' and male members of his family often had but two alternatives: to meet their 'moral obligation by an atoning payback or to face ostracism' (OT: Kigasung 1978, cf. Schmitz 1958). For the Chimbu, it has been argued, one even falls 'guilty' (or at least under 'heavy liability', pring pangwo) until one repays the obligation to a clansman who has not had his slaying avenged (Irwin 197?: 280-81). Thus, no Melanesian society could afford to shun violence. There are no parallels with the alleged pacificism of Malayan Semai or Indian Chenchu, 5 nor with the one known exception of the Sawi of coastal Irian Margaret Mead evidently laboured under the illusion that the traditional Mountain Arapesh lived virtually without war ([1938-40] 1970:15), yet cf. Fortune 1939. The confusion probably arose because certain Arapesh clans did not engage in war, but in other specializations (OT: Narokobi 1985). One possible exception to the general rule I have stated are the Efate (Vanuatu) (cf. Thompson 1981: 3). Others include the Chambri of the Sepik River region, who put up little effective resistance to their Iatmiil foes, and whose headhunting was reduced to the ritual killing of bought captives (Mead 1950:101), and the Gebusi (Strickland River region, Papua), a people subject to Bedamini raiding and infiltration over at least a century before contact (Knauft 1985: 8-9, 12, 237-42, 321-22). These appear to be cases, however, of special imbalances that removed the possibilities of older inter-tribal and

28

PAYBACK: TRADITION'

Jaya (Richardson 1977: 53), were there sacrosanct places of refuge from pursuing assailants (cf. Latukefu on Polynesia 1974: 8). Admittedly, certain preconceived rules were often applied. We discover that the Iatmul, for instance, debarred the use of spears with a pronged fork in fighting upon the Sepik River from canoes, and it was tabu for an ambush to be carried out on any village in which drums were being beaten (OT: Dambui 1985). But anything approaching a formalized military code of ethics (as in the Indian Arthashastra, let us say) is rare. M. J. Meggitt, moreover, in his highly detailed analysis of Mae Enga warfare (1977: 16-21), writes that the 'great fights between whole phratries' which have been 'deliberately planned affairs' involving 'stylized displays of aggression' and duels between chosen individuals, were and remain infrequent. Armed conflict between clans, however, especially those living in close proximity, was both common and blatantly violent, with Meggitt's description of it fitting the general picture most readers will have of 'tribal war'. Most Melanesian societies, in fact, consisted of tribal groups or associations smaller than the Mae Enga phratry, and these were the ones that fought so intensely. Serious conflict was not uncommonly generated between such groups that had marriage relations, and it was almost always between sets of warriors who spoke mutually intelligible languages (cf. esp. Berndt 1964: 188-93).6 To generalize briefly, fighting broke out for certain reasons; it had its causes and its pretexts. It manifested itself in a surprise attack or more or less arranged confrontation, and when spears and arrows were not clouding the air in quantity, it could be kept going by threats, rumours and the felling of isolated individuals caught unawares. But this is to simplify; for, no worthwhile comment can be made on the cause of a particular clash

6

inter-group conflicts of a more typical kind. In Gregory Bateson's technical terms, cultural relations in these last two cases would be those of 'complementary' (as compared with symmetrical) 'schismogenesis', i.e. producing further and further submission (Bateson 1958: 176-77; Harrison 1973: 14). To ease the frustration of students, it should be pointed out that the choice of English (or European) terms to describe primary social groups varies among researchers, and can be affected by arbitrariness, personal choice, and ethnocentricity. For provocative surveys of the relevant literature, see especially Pouwer 1967; Godelier 1977: 70-81. Crucial for our analysis is the datum that segments of most primary groups (or tribes) lived in close proximity for security purposes, and pre-contact travelling was thus severely limited, despite a few possible exceptions to this rule (e.g. the Takin-Telefomin; cf. PNA—Taylor 193839: 249), and despite great differences in population density and environment (vast swamps to very high mountain valleys). That members of primary groups have other corporate allegiances, incidentally, to moieties, in-law connections (affines), allies, secret societies, and so on, is hardly being denied here. On the importance of certain Melanesian cultures for the developing study of complex kinship structures, especially Ambrym in Rivers's researches, see Langham 1981:189-90; and on the history of ideas about 'the tribe' especially Fried 1975. Various terms used for the primary group include tribe, clan, solidary group, security circle, sympathy group, community, war unit, jural group, kin group, parish, stamme, carpel, lineage, connubium, hamlet, susu, segment, cognatic group, even deme.

REVENGE

29

without inside knowledge about the long-term relationship between the contesting parties, or about the bearing group memories have on the conflict. Empirical accounts of the formal procedures, frequency, weaponry, and strategy of war, what is more, have only partial value in explaining conflict if little can be said about consciousness and underlying beliefs. The first rule of interpretation is to learn what a group may say about the maintenance of its own identity in a hostile environment over time, and to appreciate the beliefs and ideas that its members hold as they prove their right to survive. There is no better introduction to this cognitive side to the matter than through analysing notions of revenge. Killing was not carried out for the sheer love of it; it was virtually always an act to repay or satisfy some material grievance. But vengeance against enemies, in particular, was almost invariably backed up by appeals to legitimacy. Whether taken at the socially acceptable moment or not, it was normally sanctioned by those helping, perhaps paying the killers, or by those sharing the drive to assuage the sense of loss in ongoing 'revenge warfare' (Numelin 1950, cf. Wright 1965: 58-60). More personal vendettas were also backed up by reasons, although only those against an 'out-group' were typically countenanced and left without censure by the retaliatory own fellows (see below). A central claim can be made, indeed, that retributive actions (to pay back the enemy or punish some offender) constitute powerful expressions and integral parts of tribal religious life. It is simply not feasible to dissociate Melanesian war from Melanesian traditional religion: the two were interlocked, just as so-called 'economic' and 'political' forms have been 'religious'—Melanesians never conceiving them apart from the 'supernaturally given' order in which they were located. Violent punishment, too, arose from outrage against the violation of sacrally enshrined norms and rights. Even if warfare often attracted a number of 'hotheads', and even if warriors sometimes took revenge 'illegally' and without the sanction of their clan, or 'security circle' as Peter Lawrence (1984: 121-24) prefers it, the general connection between bloodshed and traditional religion requires honest recognition (Brown 1910: 141-51; Turney-High 1949: 1 50-51, 16667, yet cf. van Baal 1966: 756-57; Fromm 1973: 211, 269). Not that Melanesian traditional religions have been unable to survive without war and physical retaliation; this book is designed to show how these religions have been able to adapt and persist in spite of pacification. But they have nonetheless been seriously hobbled by colonial pacification in losing the sense of corporate unity experienced in a more threatened, war-racked world, and for not having the autonomy to execute severe retributive acts of their past. Not only can they be easily made to appear ridiculous to willing critics, but scholars can find it difficult to reconstruct their original integrity. In Nevermann's well-informed survey of traditional

30

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beliefs and practices in the Pacific, to illustrate, we learn that headhunting and cannibalism are 'obligatory', 'moral' and (at least) 'sometimes part of religious life' in Melanesia (1972: 112, 119), but he seems at a loss to know how to fill out these connections; while in many ethnographies of specific cultures, different chapters on 'war', 'law' and 'magic and religion' have sadly substituted misleading compartmentalization for a sounder, more organic approach. A reappraisal is required. Perceived to be so important by Melanesians, payback as revenge was bound to be played upon in the rituals and mythologies of their communities. In some cases a group collectively cursed their enemies in their absence. During the ceremony of Na Sai Na Vitu ('The Assembly of the Seventh Month') among the Gari of Guadalcanal Island (Solomon Islands), to take a fascinating case, warriors sat on the beach in an imitation canoe, tying knots in rope as they envisaged the strangling of foes, and later cut up long softwood sticks as they faced enemy country from a hill, naming the combatants they hoped would be beheaded in battle (Prendeville 1979: 28, 31). Significantly, to spice this complex integration of verbal payback and 'sympathetic magic', other components of this ceremony allowed for the momentary lifting of tabus, so that close kin and spouses could hurl insults at each other, a moment of ritualized vindictiveness known elsewhere (cf. Oakley 1972: 148; Kirk 1973: 368-69; Camp 1979: 79). As already stressed, initiation ceremonies were one-way thresholds into the adult world of strife, and even when some allied group co-sponsored initiations, the demands of blood revenge were rarely forgotten in ceremonial interaction. At the very arrival of such visiting co-participants in Santa Ana (Eastern Solomons), for an apt example, an armed and decorated 'challenge team' would rush down to the beach in 'mock' assault, before conducting the canoe-loads of guests to the great grandstand-like initiation platform. Doing this was not merely a matter of 'playing safe', but a vivid reminder that relations with the visitors had not always been so good in the past and might not be so in the future (Mead 1973: 76-78). As we shall see, exchange ceremonies between separate 'security circles' almost inevitably let loose the innuendo of inter-group antagonisms somewhere in the proceedings (chapter 2). Reflecting briefly on Melanesian mythology and saga materials, individual acts of requital and also traditional punitive expeditions are subjects commonly treated. Occasionally, the impulse to retaliate is symbolically identified as part of the cosmic order, serving to explain why things are as they are. Witness a better-known story told by the Roviana about their enemies the Simbo (on New Georgia in the Solomons). The Simbo suffered continual defeat at their hands and sought to capture the moon for an aid, but no matter how hard they tried to succeed, even with a bamboo tower built on the highest mountain, they failed to bring it down.

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They finished by throwing mud and stakes at its face, so marring its previously unblemished complexion out of bitter frustration (OT: Tuza 1978, cf. Beier and Chakravarti 1974: 59-60). As one finds in other parts of the world (Levi-Strauss 1976: 203; Lawson 1978: 518; etc.), numerous origin myths also reflect the revenge motif. The story of a cataclysmic flood as told in the Biak Island region (of Irian Jaya) is characteristic. The hero Kungu is nearly poisoned by his wife; having refused to take action against her, he makes the flood drown 'everybody' after his two nephews succeed in avenging her treachery. Only Kungu and his sons survived the (apparently local) deluge (Kamma 1978: 16-18).7 That revenge arises from anger and anger from offence is the subject of a thousand stories and songs (cf., e.g., Ker 1910: 84; Hannemann [1920s]: 20-21; Laade 1971: 53; McElhanon 1974: 40-41, 158-59; Blackwood 1978: 117-22; Spiro 1982:99; Young 1983a: 14,62-65; LeRoy 1985:210-12; Pulsford 1989: 58; MacDonald 1991: 320-21, 435-37). 'Keiwatika has killed the pigs!' runs a Lamech-like gloating at the end of a Melpa legend (New Guinea highlands)—by a widow who managed to despatch her husband's killer: He walked about as a murderer! But now I have killed him in his turn. You people, come and gaze on him! As he killed my man, so I have done to him! (Vicedom 1977:55) Not that most mythic or legendary material from Melanesia was about ordinary humans. So much of it concerns more-than-human beings, or specially empowered ancestors, such as the spirit-man of the Tiang people (Djaul Island, West New Ireland), who is punished and killed on a number of occasions—for passing a cane through a woman for stealing a pig and doing other things that humans ought not do (Taufi 1973: 5, 6-9, cf. Schwimmer 1973: 5 for parallel). As the spirits of the dead are understood to remain involved in the life of the community, one can also expect many stories of their displeasure (even thirst for blood), either warning against the neglect of one's own departed kin or reminding that ghosts of fallen enemies are highly dangerous (e.g., Wheeler 1926: 172-73 [Monu-Alu, or Shortland Iss]; Poignant 1967: 87-109; 1970: 22-30 [various], cf. van Baal 1947). One intriguing legend from Aurora Island (Vanuatu) actually incorporates these motifs into a narrative of the origins of warfare. After two young fellows had stolen food from the blind old Muesarava, singing a taunt against him, so the story goes, he became 'exceedingly angry, and 7

For other myths of a great flood as payback, e.g., A. Manke 1909: 97, 104-06 (Bongu, Madang); and many others collated by P. Chakravarti, UPNG. cf. also below, chapter 4 (on the Fuyughe, Papuan Highlands). For still more complex mythology, connecting the sun and moon with headhunting, for example, and concerning the origin of man, see van Baal 1966: 288-92, 249, 401-06, and for a selection of other pertinent materials, Landtman 1917; Burridge 1969a: e.g. 135, 149, 288-89, 294; Holtker 1974; Janssen et al. 1973: 81-88.

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plotted against the people of the place whence the two youths had come'. Blind as he was, Muesarava 'made fighting arrows of [dead] men's bones', and whereas 'his enemies' always failed to hit him, his own weapons struck down many 'and they all died' (Codrington 1891: 368-69). It is only when the ancestors are 'on' the weapons that revenge is secure, and here both the theft and an old man's helplessness serve to justify it. Thus, we should come to recognize how Melanesian religions embrace the furore and intensity of violent conflict. The carving of shields and arrows (each item or style of which could receive a special, powerful name!) (e.g. Mitton 1950; Rockefeller 1967: 24-25, 54-56; Sillitoe 1980: 495-96), the cries of victory, the magicians of war and the plumage of armed warriors in fearsome array—all have been as much a part of any Melanesian religion as spirit masks, funeral wailings, healers or diviners, painted dancers at a feast, let alone rites de passage, sacred truths or unquestioned values. War was not 'secular', and the actualizations of revenge, and not just the myths and rituals that reflect them, form part of the phenomenology of Melanesian religion. Warfare as retaliation When hostilities break out between two sides, the outsider is apt to regard the situation as arising de novo. And when Melanesians are asked today why given fights have occurred, they themselves are prone to give deceptively simple answers, to do with land-grabbing, for example, theft of pigs, rape, or perhaps sorcery. Rarer reasons are known to have been voiced: such as woman stealing (Fortune 1949:24), elopement (Layard 1942: 590), jilting a marriage suitor (Vicedom and Tischner 1962: 155), threats to a trade speciality (Mennis 1982a: 217), or even insults directed at gardens by a visiting tribal leader (Serpenti 1977:217-64). Perhaps the most common type of response, though still simplistic as it remains, is to give a narrative account, an informant telling how A was angered by the actions of B and led a raiding party to kill B or one of his associates (and did so in a way worth telling), the deeper or long-term reasons behind the act of revenge being barely touched. After years of interaction between 'subject' and 'ruling' peoples, these replies to outside researchers have taken on a stereotypical quality. As the handy means of evading contentious issues before the government authorities, such replies have been absorbed into preexisting explanatory frameworks to vulgarize the already dissolving subtleties and complexities of traditional perspectives. When it is blithely accepted, however, that Melanesians view human conflict in terms of disconnected, separate episodes, with acts that require revenge, followed by acts of vengeance (or satisfaction), supposedly forming a self-contained unit of affairs, only a half-truth has been swallowed.

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Certainly, empirical observation will bear out that specific acts taken to be aggressive will provoke reaction, and it is probably most helpful in analysing the logic of revenge killing to begin by isolating the characteristic pretexts and preludes of armed retaliation. A careful examination of the manner in which a group prepares for revenge, or becomes aware that confrontation to redress losses is inevitable, will hopefully lead one beyond inadequate aetiologies (beyond pat, journalese statements that 'this particular event' led to 'that particular response') to deeper questions concerning Melanesian consciousness and religion. This is hardly to deny that theft of land or pigs, and the rape and pirating of women, do not provide reasons appealed to very readily, reasons for paying back the enemy. Clearly, an individual act of manslaying, in this sense, is a pretext par excellence. Closer, more painstaking research, however, would also disclose that although Melanesians obviously distinguish particular ruptures—remembering them by those vitally involved (those who 'own the quarrel' as the Mae Enga put it [Meggitt 1977: 30]) or by the magnitude and immediate consequences of the clash—they also show awareness of chains or networks of events, and thus of longer-term group relationships important for a sounder causal analysis of war. Pretexts and preludes, then, ought not to be mistaken for causes, though in each culture all are integrally related as parts of a 'tradition' as familiarized sequences of events in the socio-religious life of a particular people. War's pretexts and preludes: a case study—the Bena(bena) To discuss pretext and prelude in depth, I have chosen an example from my own research among the Bena(bena) (eastern highlands, New Guinea) into the phenomenon of 'payback running' (or genefafaili) in the high grass country east and north of present-day Goroka. The whole region of Bena speakers is made up of separate 'autonomous tribal groups' with hamlets (mainly made up of patrilineages) being scattered throughout each tribe's territory (Langness 1966). The hamlets certainly have access to a wider support group, through which wars are waged and alliances forged, but the occupants of each are fully aware of their relative geographical proximity to the settlements of other (often enemy) tribes. Payback running is a symptom of inter-tribal hostilities while being focused on particular centres of residence. I was fortunate enough to interview a payback runner, an elderly woman named Aubo, in 1973. Aubo had married her stepson Piaruka, following the death of her first husband. When Piaruka fell ill, she was debarred from seeing him; then, as she returned from the gardens one afternoon in July, she was informed he had died. Her husband's other relatives began gathering at the hamlet Kalagefagheai (on the southern side of the Bena Bena

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River) for the lamentations. Aubo slept with them, but early the next day, as she described it, a special wind (bunemeha'a) entered her body and she began to shiver. Her dead husband had taken control of her. It was not the first time she had been seized this way, for when her biological sevenyear old son, Ethaphuthapa, had died of suspected poisoning, the wind had come in full force. So, she was not frightened, but she was not herself. Friends of her own age group secured a special bark called yahuba, yet it was a younger man who, biting it, spat its juices on her back as her trembling intensified (cf. Langness 1965: 262; 1972a: 955-56). In an instant she began running and everybody was after her. It was the implicit belief that, as the man's death had been caused by an enemy sorcerer, his spirit would eventually find its way to the culprit's hamlet. On many occasions a runner, after much meandering, would 'arrive' somewhere, a place facing the enemies from whom an indiscriminate payback killing would be exacted (although only when the time was opportune). To bring the exercise to a close, the followers would perform the curious act of passing across the runner's shadow, all frantic activity then ceasing and the possessing spirit given leave. Aubo told me that in her own case Piaruka's presence gave her great strength, yet drove her through the bush in a most haphazard fashion. At one point she sank down in a place where she believed sorcerers hid and smoked, all her impulses to move being momentarily lost. But she knew her husband's power was still in her, and with juice bespattered on her back, she was away again. In this particular case, however, tradition was thwarted. Found some six miles (almost 10 km) from her home sprinting along the Highlands Highway, forty-year-old Aubo and her followers were arrested by the police for inciting tribal war, with her shadow being 'crossed' in the ensuing melee (cf. Trompf 1979c: 131-32). Traditionally, a dead person's spirit could seize any member of the clan known well in life, but nowadays only close kin are possessed. 'My kinsfolk knew and believed that the spirit would enter me!' Aubo cried, for Piaruka had once said he would enter a friendly relative. Now she felt his spirit had been unhappily released without his killers being identified, and he was not expected to return in this role. If the Bena often appear uncertain or strangely uninterested about the final condition and influence of the dead, such running amounts to one kind of rite of passage into the spirit order. With this last act of distinct involvement among the living, the newly departed reveals the crucial knowledge on which revenge for his or her death will be based. Even if some Bena groups distinguish between soul (frenonua) and spirit-ghost (fre), and think of the former proceeding to an order, with villages and pigs, like the present one, and of the latter being free to come and go where it wishes, the seizing of a runner by a fre is always seen to be an individual carrying out one last act of aggression on behalf of the group (OT: Rasinakafa 1980, cf. Langness 1965: 263).

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This example beckons some reflection. It is an extraordinary sequence, which, for those participating, serves to explain a depressing fact of life, while at the same time indicating what should be done about it. A fatal sickness was not 'natural'; that is a typical Melanesian understanding. Someone rather than something has been responsible. A spirit then irrupts within the community to make plain the legitimacy and necessity of revenge, and becomes director because it smells the odour of its killer. The group is ready for that convulsion; one is tempted to view the Bena payback run as a paradigmatic if controlled rage against the 'human situation' when humanity's awful mortality has been unmasked. Death elicits from them a primal outburst that satisfies the pressure to rebel against death itself, just as with the Baktaman (further west in the central highlands), who ravage a newly dead warrior's gardens and kill his pigs and dogs for food, out of a compelling, collective anger over his death (Barth 1975: 149; cf. pp. 95, 368). Still more than this, the whole set of actions by the Bena meets the desperate need to blame and punish. Thus, the event and consequences of fatal sickness are integrally tied in with reactions to enemies, to the threatening, outside forces that have made up the well-known traditional instability of the eastern highlands (Langness 1972b: 171-85, cf. Berndt 1964: 188, 193-94; Watson 1967: 53-104). An outsider, quite perplexed, might ask why that connection is made at all; but for those within the culture the same malevolent powers that can be appropriated by the enemy to bring defeat or death by the spear can also cause disease. To set the record straight, however, payback running does not automatically produce war among the Bena. Not only may the spirit lose the culprit's scent, but even with a clear identification of the hamlet involved, retribution may be put off for a long time. Accounting will have been made, nevertheless, and the characteristic chase, so boisterous and noisy, stands as a ubiquitous threat towards the offenders, promising future requital for their outrages. Who had died, and which people had been found culpable, though, can affect what follows. The fatal sickness of a 'bigman' or manager (for the Bena have no hereditary chiefs) would stir clans to war or raiding more promptly than other tragedies, yet a runner's divination to a traditionally friendly tribe, or one rather too formidable at the time, would dictate patience. And it was not a matter of applying a less subtle principle, simbaten, known on Vanuatu's Malekula Island, where the first fatal reprisal following a death was considered an immediate 'equalizer' between warring 'clans' (Layard 1942: 599), nor is revenge based strictly on notions of 'the same kind of person'—a woman for a woman, a bigman for a bigman, as among the Haruai in the New Guinea Schraeder Range (Lindergard [forthcoming]). Equivalences for the Bena are forever a matter of debate, and can be adjusted to suit the kin connections and interests of each hamlet (the male members of which are in recurrent pursuit of a

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consensus interpretation of events). The identity of a killer may actually be learnt, to go further; yet, even if one of his associates or kinsfolk is ambushed, it does not follow that he himself has then ceased to be a key target in later clashes. In any case, someone expected to form part of an avenging party or 'revenge group' might prefer the death of a person other than the recognized killer, being related to him by marriage bonds from some previous alliance (and thus being cast like a troubled Hector against an Ajax) (cf. Fortune 1947a: 108; Berndt 1964: 196-97; Glasse and Lindenbaum 1969). If identities are not known, of course, as is usually the case with sorcerers, payback running only isolates the hamlet involved, not individuals. At odd times, admittedly, death by sickness did not generate Bena payback running at all. The wasting away of an irresponsible person, or even his being felled by enemies, could be considered the result of his own susceptibility; while the demise of an elderly man, despite signs of sickness, simply evokes acknowledgement of a life lived 'completely'. Such cases apart, however, the Bena are highly prone to interpret any sickness that brings death as the end-product of sorcery or a nalissalobo (sorcerer). War does not stop short when warriors leave skirmishing, but it continues under cover by sorcerers who smoke, whisper spells, and manipulate coastal shells to kill their victims. Thus, even a wounded warrior who eventually dies is a victim of sorcery; enemies are quite capable of sneaking in close to his hamlet after dark, and his groaning enables a sorcerer to 'catch' his voice, and to use it to worsen the damaged part (OT: Rasinakafa 1980). Set in context, then, payback running is a first step in showing how impossible it is to understand Bena warfare without comprehending Bena religion. Fusing the two, there is a logic of retribution that encapsulates and legitimizes deep feelings of fear and hatred toward the obstacles of life, that satisfies the passion to find and blame causal agencies of death or sickness, and that channels these feelings and issuing attempts at explanation into corporate action. This logic does not consist in abstract reflection but in the range of notions that is traditionally, yet dynamically integrated into the acting-out of an event—the pursuit of a possessing spirit. This frenzied rush, we must admit, is only one of an (albeit small) number of possible preludes to fighting, and we must concede that it resulted from but one of the pretexts of war: sorcery. It is also only one facet of Bena religion. But this special scenario points beyond itself to a whole outlook on life, a total perspective in which violence and the consciousness of the spirit world are inseparable, physical acts never being reducible to a pragmatic secularity nor religion to a special compartment concerning ritual and belief in so-called supernaturals. At this point we are under pressure to reconsider the causes, let alone outward manifestations, of war in terms of traditional Weltanschauungen, and then go on to such related matters as magic, sorcery, and other forms of retaliation.

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The causes of war The study of payback syndromes, though not to be confused with the study of warfare or human strife in general, must concern itself with the generation of conflict. As we have already cautioned, however, the generation and cause of conflict may not be the same. The ancient Greek historian Polybius, for example, has bequeathed us a time-honoured distinction between the cause, pretext and beginning of wars (Historiae 3.6.1-7.3; 22.18.6; cf. Trompf 1979a :83-84), instructing us that the first steps to open up hostilities, or the immediate pretexts and excuses for taking up weapons, can only be deemed the causes (aitiai) of particular conflicts in the most superficial sense. Thus, the fashion of listing land-grabbing, theft, rape, and so on, as causes of fighting provides only the shadow of a genuine aetiology which lies rather in the past histories of relationships between the groups involved in any strife. These relationships, if they had been immemorially unsavoury, were dominated by the issue of assuaging the loss of life itself, and thus by the most basic question of all: the survival of a human group among hostile neighbours. The longer-term nature of these relations can be reconstructed by the most arduous oral historical investigations. There are, of course, group traditions about the origins of particular clans, and even about their wanderings in the more distant past. What concerns us here, however, is the continual process of 'score-keeping' that has been kept in vibrancy during the history of each group's interactions, such shared memories not being easy to come by. The tallying has been the special preserve of those who are in the business of survival itself, and who have constantly adjusted their estimates as they confer over new developments. One thing remains clear: traditional group (especially tribal)-relations were in a constant state of flux, and one simply has to be an entrenched inhabitant of a 'male clubhouse' to pick up all the nuances and shifts of opinion from day to day. Who, however, can now provide such intimate experiences? Social change has had the better of empirical scholarship, it seems; for, even where the anthropology of actual war has been undertaken it has been under conditions already affected by European intrusion. In pre-contact times matters were complicated by a much greater movement of warring communities than has applied since the (stabilizing) colonial period (Denoon and Lacey 1981), and the more the movement, it seems, the more drawn out the contests were likely to be. A tribe losing men and resources in one confrontation might in fact take years of careful preparation for a revenge comeback that would satisfy them (e.g. Waiko 1972 and 1983). Among attempts to record traditional histories, with a welcome emphasis on the ongoing process of 'military costing' and reasoning in the light of new events, Inge Riebe's study of the Kalam (central highlands, New

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Guinea) is probably the most detailed (yet cf. Healey 1985a). The Kalam present us with the kind of segmented society helpful in introducing traditional Melanesia in broad terms. They make up a culturo-linguistic block of 10 000-15 000 persons, occupying four major valleys and gardening in a relative abundance of land 5000-6000 feet (1520-1820 m) above sealevel. Local groups identify themselves by place names (twenty-five in all), and it is each 'aggregate' (bSogpek) that is the 'support group' crucial for revenge killing (and for the forging of alliances along cross-cousin ties of kinship) (Riebe 1968: iv, 13, 16, 22, 24-27). Riebe attempts to document 'case histories' of 'fighting sequences' involving some of these aggregates between the early date of 1914 (more than twenty years before contact with the outside world) and 1962. Her stresses, though less with an eye to religion than suits this present study, properly centre on the warriors' lively memory of key incidents, gains and losses in the past, on their calculations and recalculations of the 'score' through time, and on their payments for services rendered (since owners of Kalam quarrels can hire killers, who are compensated either for success or tragic failure). Above all, she conveys the existentially exciting and absorbing character of war from the protagonists' viewpoints, thereby hinting at a religious dimension that observers who have never been involved in small-scale war find hard to apprehend. Riebe readily confesses to the (virtually unavoidable) defect of writing about the motives of people on one side of an ongoing conflict, while treating the enemy involved like a 'blurred mass' (1968: 88). Yet she has rightly chosen to understand complexes of human violence first of all from an historical perspective, rather than to impose abstracted principles of interpretation on complex interactions that finally elude them (cf. 1968: xi-xx; 82). One recalls R. G. Collingwood's dictum that history is mostly about purposive causation, and that wars are as much the outcome of human intentions, thought, and planning as anything (1939: 285-88; 1946: 309-15, cf. Dray 1959-60). Riebe's approach pushes the analyst beyond the mere stratagems, the brutal facts of violent retribution, the stereotypical listing of pretexts, towards a deeper comprehension of worldviews. Such a methodological stance, nevertheless, is out of tune with many recent anthropologies in which we find a refusal to base any general theory of causation on local or traditional rationality. Social scientists want to rest their cases on objective principles or models that do justice, not just to the particular cultures they choose to research, but comparative ethnography as well (cf. Barnes 1962: 5-9; Langness 1964: 142-50). Sharing this basic assumption that true explanations emanate from a high plane of sociological abstraction, in fact, some Western scholars hold that it is only a 'cultural-ecological' paradigm that is adequate for interpreting warfare in atomized or small-scale societies. Upon analysing inter-tribal conflict

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in Maring society (central highlands, New Guinea), for example, A. Rappaport has argued that warfare and religion are both ecological mechanisms that regulate crises of over-population and protein levels, or which produce a constraining cycle between the potential excesses of hostility on the one hand and the advantages accruing from both pigkilling rituals (which generate peaceful relations) and the non-violent redistribution of land on the other (1967:224-42; 1979, yet cf. Salisbury 1975: 128-31; Knauft 1990: 270-71). Having researched in the same area, but focusing more with war than religion, A. P. Vayda puts process before motives even more unabashedly, to maintain that, if revenge helps to account for the early phases of fighting (= our 'pretexts'), it is economic or wider ecological factors (population pressure, food shortages) that best explain the whole 'system' and reveal war as 'an adaptive response' (1976: 33-41, cf. 1961:346-56; 1968:86-87; 1971:1-24; Harrison 1973:26-27; Sexton 1973). In one form or another these interpretations are (structuralist-) functionalist. They are worked out on the prior understanding that there must be a purpose for war, let alone religion, but that this rationale, far from being identified with the motivations of the people themselves (whether expressed individually or collectively), can only be grasped by practitioners of modern science, who can locate all phenomena in the social pattern of things and see social benefit in what is apparently dysfunctional or maladaptive. Marxist analyses of 'primitive' war, too, reflect a fairly comparable method, placing emphasis as they do on the struggle for resources rather than on a phenomenology of grievance (e.g. Modjeska 1982: 50-108);8 while there are certain aggression theorists who have abstracted war into a 'safety valve mechanism' once again to circumvent the awkward complexity of concrete reasonings (e.g. Coser 1956:48; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1984: 113-217). More moderate and sensible general analyses adopt the factorial approach (adding to revenge as the cause of war such factors as status enhancement, politics, economics, specifically religious requirements, and pleasure [Oliver 1989: 424-36]), although it proves more useful, we maintain, to interpret the role of all these within 'the revenge complex'. It is not our business here to present some general theory of warfare, let alone conceive the whole raison d'etre of any or various Melanesian religions. Suffice it to say that such functionalist, ecological and reductionistlooking approaches fail to pinpoint the specific relationship between motivations and actions, treating 'real causes' as one step removed from the purposes or consciousness of people—the agents of history themselves. In reaction, C. R. Hallpike has recently tried to redress this lopsidedness 8

Modjeska's, however, is a more sophisticated, latter-day Marxist analysis; yet cf. Malinowski 1920: 10-12, for an earlier assault on Marxist interpretations of war. Note also non-Marxist stresses on the survivalist and economic aspects of war, see Fortune 1949: 24; Elkin 1953: 170; Glasse 1959: 274, and so on—approaches recently under attack by Hallpike.

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by a detailed account of what he describes as treachery and butchery among the Tauade, especially the Goilala tribe in the Papuan highlands. Yet, he himself has pressed far too far in the opposite direction, especially by overplaying the (so-called 'Heraclitean') passion of these Papuan highlanders, who are supposed to 'kill for the pleasure of killing' (1977: 7)— and, thus, by underestimating the role of rationality or legitimation. Although he recounts narrative episode after episode of homicidal brutality (from Administration and oral sources) (1977: 93, 196-231), the possibility that meaningful reasons explain why persons become so enraged that they take life, or that religious preconceptions might govern their deeds, never seems to be countenanced. As I have contended elsewhere, however, simply because the Tauade 'describe their own volitional acts in terms of urging from their insides, it does not follow that they are less rational, only that their rationality is different from others' (Trompf 1979d: 155, cf.. 1980a: 340-41; Gutul 1977: 13-14). We find a more balanced approach, and one avoiding the worst dangers of the ecological, psychologistic, or highly theoretical orientations (just discussed) in the writings of L. L. Langness, who has worked among the very people considered in our case study, the Bena(bena). Admittedly, Langness succumbs to the typical pitfall of confusing causes with pretexts, and also fails to challenge the brash claim (made well before Hallpike by the Africanist J. Barnes), that research in New Guinea suggested 'a great[er] emphasis... upon killing for its own sake' (1972b: 176-77). One of his main purposes, however, has been to characterize a healthy interest in child psychology, male-female tensions, consensus preconceptions and the way war is 'one of the most critical variables in any understanding of New Guinea social structure'. His reconstruction of the general ethos, then, is all to the good; except that warfare and conflict are still described as if religion is only tangential to them, or as if beliefs, rules, or rituals we conveniently deem religious belong to a compartment more or less distinct from 'secular' military or blatantly physical activity. War, for Langness, is basically a matter of force, not of thought, and along with most universitybased ethnographers operating in the central highlands since the 1950s, he is much more interested to see how conflict reflects social organization and structure rather than general attitudes towards life (1972b: 180-82; 1964: 128; Steadman 1971: Hayano 1972, yet cf. Koch 1974: 67-90, 136-178). Some anthropologists, then, do not make it easy for us to connect violence with rationality and ideas. An old (and apparently unsolved) question, what is more, still keeps rearing its ugly head: do people usually act first and think to justify themselves later? Yet, I will simply stand by my opening methodological analysis of these problems, while adding that in traditional Melanesia revenge as 'notion', 'rationale', or even 'norm' was already integral to culture, and already inscribed into the prevenient

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(or emergent) 'history of relationships' between two or more groups to condition individual urges or brutal deeds. It has been expressed in Papua New Guinea pidgin thus: what is 'essential for salvation' or survival is 'the strength to succeed in the fight against enemies' (strong bilong winim arapela long pait) (Fugmann 1977: 125); and it is no more nor less my purpose here than to establish that revenge was continually being taken for reasons that had already been discussed by a particular batch of people, since ongoing military exchanges demanded, not merely ongoing strategy, but reflection on significances and imperatives deriving from transpired events. One learnt not only how to act (within certain limits/after a certain fashion), but also consensus reasons why one acted or reacted, and was required to do so, so that an amount of premeditation concerning violence was a cultural 'given', a parcel of tradition I am daring to call (part of) a logic or set of logical principles, which was waiting to be backed by emotion, anger, and bodily response once a typical pretext arose. The general justifications for revenge had already been articulated prior to any actualization of it, dire actions without such legitimacy being deemed 'criminal' (or possibly 'accidental') (Malinowski 1926: 125). Thus, even though some peoples may be more 'affective', 'excitable' or more easily 'pent-up' than others (cf. Mead 1972: 226-27; Murphy 1957: 1032; Steward 1958:206-10), the case for the uncontrolled passions and irrational outrages of one Melanesian society or another is unfounded. The next step in our argument will have begun to look obvious. It is necessary to begin filling out the dimensions of these logics of retribution. More requires to be said about the inextricability between negative retribution, religion, and inter-group warfare; and then to go on to flesh out all the possible ramifications of the retributive frame of reference, by examining forms of non-physical violence (such as sorcery), legal sanctions, the recourse to personal retaliation, and then those reciprocal and explanatory sides to the whole matter we have earlier introduced (cf. Preliminaries). Some important variables in the logic of Melanesian warfare To return to the Bena(bena) as such an indicator, it is useful to examine the payback complex we have already begun documenting among this people alongside comparable textures from other cultural tapestries. Here I shall focus on points of comparison directly to do with war and armed conflict, singling out those issues that have obvious bearing on motivations and the connections between religion and the most visible expressions of warriorhood. First, and most generally, we will fail to find among each Bena group any notion of initiating armed hostility for its own sake. What Brian du Toit has written of the Gadsup (farther east) (1975: 77, 86-87) applies nicely to

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the Bena and also to most other Melanesian corners: 'hostile actions, an attack or an ambush, are always an act of retaliation [that is, against those outside one's own primary community]'. These hostilities, moreover, as long observed by analysts of so-called 'primitive warfare' (such as Seligmann 1910: 542; Vertenten 1923; Wedgwood 1930:5; Marett 1933:47-48), generally manifest in the middle stratum of three socio-geographical spheres of conduct. In the sphere closest to oneself, the Veritable home-circle' made up of kin by blood, the tabu 'Thou shalt commit no murder' is fundamental. On utter strangers, by contrast, in the sphere most removed, there is barely reason to endow any humanness at all and thus no qualms about killing (highly untrustworthy) trespassers. Between the neighbouring groups in the middle range there remains the ongoing pattern of 'tit-fortat' and shifting alliances, which settles down to be part of the combatants' traditions. Only rarely do we come across segments of a culturo-linguistic complex owing allegiance to a central authority (the paramount chieftaincies of Fiji and the Trobriands, of course, being the notable exceptions); thus, warfare as an act of rebellion was far from characteristic of traditional Melanesia (yet cf. Gluckman 1963; 1970 on Africa). Secondly, usually because there is a blurred line between the living and the dead, the one who has just died is drawn into the vortex of the retaliatory measures. Bena payback running, for instance, can be seen as a divinatory exercise as well as a means of making sure the spirit is not lost or distracted before it gives crucial support. Divining techniques are one method for explaining death as a significant event (cf. chapters 3,9), and the procedural variations are enormous. Among the eastern Toaripi (Papuan Gulf), for example, close male relatives waiting by the corpse traditionally took turns to sit in the jungle at night, watching for some sign (a flying fox's movement, a firefly) to indicate the direction of the enemy sorcerer's origins (Koroti 1974: 2-3). The Mendi (southern highlands) ask questions to help pin down the identity of killer-sorcerers by whispering questions down a bamboo tube connected to the skull of the buried cadaver; and in collective dream sessions on the mountaintops, where slumberers lie tied together by cordyline in longhouses (and under the supervision of a 'dream-master'), someone is expected to see enemy culprits in his or her sleep (Lornley and Eastburn 1976). In several New Guinea Island societies a divining pole is held lightly by the bereaved, and the dead is understood to jostle the holders until it points towards the guilty parties, in the past towards enemy centres (Trompf 1991: 94). Other cultures looked to specific birds, which were supposed to call the names of culprit sorcerers (Williams 1928: 127, 268), and still others for the tracks of ghosts after powder had been left on new graves (Keysser 1911: 143). Thirdly, the Bena example presents us with the phenomenon of alleged spirit possession in the service of armed retaliation. This feature is unusual

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for Melanesia; one may discover analogues around the region nonetheless. A tawakanim among the Wantoat, to cite a case, is a specialist in holding a divining bamboo or tawak (Morobe). When a man succumbs to a fatal sickness, the tawakanim blows pieces of the dead man's hair into this short and special bamboo length until he is shaken by the deceased's spirit. His momentum built up, he too, like the Bena pa/back runner, will start off at extraordinary speed towards the culprit's settlement (Kaima 1983: 9). Among the Malalas farther west (hinterland Madang), a comparable procedure is slowed down by the fact that the specialist must let the spirit guide him from the bamboo, while he somewhat awkwardly runs with it sideways. Although this is less obviously a case of possession, the group going with him to reach the suspected hamlet will then return home singing a nauwa, an eerie song that is alleged to take over and weaken the enemy warriors, so that they will too often leave their residences and be less heedful in looking after their women and children (OT: Kokon 1983; cf, Gesch 1985: 191). If in these societies possession was accepted as happening beyond ordinary control, in others there may have been an element of pretence. Ongka, a reminiscing Melpa bigman, talks of this kind of possession phenomenon more cynically: 'When someone died, it was often in fighting or by an enemy's sorcery, and we would think of revenge. At the funeral one of the men would pretend that a dead man's spirit had entered him; he shook and said "He! He! He! He!" in the hope the spirit would turn vengeful', before sacrifices were made to secure the help of all the remembered male ghosts in reprisals (Strathern 1979: 52). Genuine possession or not, this was still ritualistic activity to work up the will to avenge among those devastated by a death, just as with the Hube 'death magician' (hafec bapa) (Morobe), who flayed the corpses of the slain down to their skeletons during funerary rites in order to be worked up or 'daemonized' by their heightened animosities, allegedly giving immense strength to the group in its pursuit of blood revenge (Gerber 1978: 61-62, 64). Occasionally such spirit possession was more than just a prelude to war, so that, until someone was 'seized' (as on San Cristobal, Solomons; Fox and Drew 1915: 169), warriors would not set off for battle (see below on Etoro). Fourthly, the armed coterie in the wake of a Bena payback runner reminds us that we need to consider the solidity of the revenge group. Traditional revenge was seldom a matter of 'self-help' (cf. Sack 1974a: 78, 86). Only a few people, admittedly, were almost automatically drawn into working collusion after a given death (usually close agnates of a patrilineage) and these operated as an 'executive' to secure wider clan or tribal support, or to hire and pay off ambush killers, let us say—as is well documented for highland groups (Vicedom and Tischner 1962:156; Berndt 1964: 191), and for the Toa[m]baita and Koaka in the Solomons (Hogbin

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1964: 59-61; Idulusia 1979: 23). For, it was natural that subdivisions of a whole political unit or tribe were bound to feel the particular death of one from among their own numbers more keenly; thus, an onus often first fell on an initiating party, which might even have been ready to act on its own.9 Forces were usually widened, however, although how two or different sides came to have the shape and backing they had depended on important variables. The most fundamental of these were social structure, residential patterns, and the historical conditioning of alliances and power balances. Each Bena tribe, to take our test case, was managed and kept in viable unity by competing bigmen from various hamlets, one of whom in one of these residential clusters was deferred to more than the others in such matters as fights and feasts. Under such egalitarian circumstances, separate subgroup initiatives were more likely. But many Melanesian societies, particularly those on the coasts and in the islands, possessed hereditary chiefs (occasionally 'noble families' as on Manam Island), and thus inter-group operations required the sanction of special figures who, for all the rules of etiquette and sacral mystique surrounding them, had not necessarily earned prowess by dint of hard work and battle scars as typical highlander 'influentials' had (cf., e.g., Seligmann 1910: 692-700; Wedgwood 1934: 373-79; Murray in PAR 1937-38: 33-34; Rimou 1983: 2). As for residential status, the apparent Bena norm was the patrilineage in a separated hamlet, marriage being exogamous (outside the whole tribe) and thus with women who, hailing from tribes who might not always remain friendly, were forced to dwell virilocally (where the male lived) and to be recurrently suspected of disloyalty (Meggitt 1964: 218-25). This, admittedly, is the most common pattern in Melanesia; yet, some endogamy was known, or mixed exogamy-endogamy (e.g. Brown 1960a: 33; Berndt 1964: 188), and there were also societies in which men were expected to spend at least some years living and working among their brides' people (e.g. Malinowski 1927: 8-24; Tuzin 1976: 93-995, cf. Murphy 1957: 103334). On Dobu, in fact, although it was not true that a couple was bound to 'live in alternate years in the village of the husband and the village of the wife' (Benedict 1935: 98; yet cf. OTs: Edoni 1983; Brunton 1983), there were pressures for an irregular oscillation between the two places until one of the partners died (Fortune 1932: 21-93; Uberoi 1962: 59). The Dobu situation, however, introduces another variable, since these marriages take place within the 'war unit' or district, which is rather larger than is characteristically Melanesian and consists of up to twenty villages cooperating against enemies (Fortune 1932:35-36; Benedict 1935:95). That only reminds 9

Some cases of individual action are exceptional. For example, on /a/ritual homicide among the Ilahita Arapesh, see below, and on the hiring of a ramos warrior to carry out individual killings among the Iova on small Mala(ita) for a 'blood bounty' of valuables and a pig, see Rimou 1983: 5; cf. Keesing 1978a: 50-70; Keesing and Corris 1980: 17-25.

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one that social structure and residency custom can combine into the one complicating factor. Even in a central highland society such as that of the Huli, where warfare and shifting alliances do not look so dissimilar to Bena and other highland standards, one discovers a surprisingly greater degree of choice as to where males should settle down, and with whom they should fight, producing more 'cognatic' bonds (as R. M. Glasse refers to them, 1968), than in other patrilineal cultures.10 Significantly—one might say commensurately—Huli society was also unusual for possessing cultic centres (cave shrines for sacrifice) resorted to by whole clusters of tribes, and manned by a priesthood that could have become powerful enough to produce a tribal confederacy (Gayalu 1979: 19-25, cf. Jojoga 1983: 3041 on Orokaiva; Thomson 1894: 342 on Fiji, for comparative materials). As for the 'historical' conditioning of alliances and power-balances, which has brought with it much more fragmented than broader unities in Melanesia, this variable can hardly be held in isolation from the others nor from a general analysis of war. Certain group activities, such as headhunting raids (which were usually propelled for distinctly religious reasons), brought previously antipathetic tribes into temporary military cooperation to cross long distances by low-lying land or sea (e.g. Held 1957: 198-201; van Baal 1966:693-95; Tippett 1967:147-60). From various corners one gains the impression of 'united fronts' between one culturo-linguistic block and another—the Tolai against the Baining (Rascher 1899: 295-303, 346-50), the mountain Orokaiva against the Managalas (Schwimmer 1973: 123-24), the Halia versus the Solos on Buka Island (Parkinson and Meyer 1894: 28, 30, cf. plate 28), the Abelam slowly encroaching on the Arapesh from the southeast (Forge 1965-66:24; Tuzin 1976:73)—even though within each block feuding went on repetitively. In the highlands, too, tribes (as among the Wahgi) who shared 'common ancestors traced through legends or . . . past historical alliances' were much less likely to join issue or let quarrels drag on indefinitely (Kerpi 1975: 15, cf. Reay 1974: 205; Kai 1979; Kondwal and Trompf 1982: 88-95). In most eastern highland areas, however, alliances were much more frequently made and remade and thus brittle, with the Bena being most notorious for their unnerving willingness to massacre as many of the enemy as were vulnerable. Since remnants took refuge with more secure tribes after such devastations, Bena social structure has been rendered all the more difficult to analyse (Langness 1966: 14547). Behind fighting in many other areas, to complete this bird's-eye view, 10

Although, as Arum Matiabe has argued of the Huli (OT: 1983), knowledge of one's relations twelve generations deep enables the warrior to know when and with whom to fight, despite rather flexible residency patterns. Other examples of cognatically (or 'ambilineally') bonded societies include the Choiseulese (see Scheffler 1965:139-78), the Garia and Begesin (Madang hinterland), the Bosmun (lower Ramu) and the Haruai (Schraeder Range), cf. also Nevermann 1972: 105.

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one must be aware of various kinds of shifts affecting the pattern of conflict: this includes migrations (Jojoga 1981), quests for asylum (Strathern 1972a: 90; Kondwal and Trompf 1982: 102-04), the formation of moieties (Layard 1942: 589-98), or of factions in groups which have become too cumbersome (Reay 1959a: 32; P. Brown 1960b: 4; Hau'ofa and Trompf 1974:235). Highly significant for interpreting the relationship between war and religion in all this is a simple datum: that of keeping alive territorial claims and maintaining a sense of identity and prowess, which were invariably recorded with great (why not say sacral) seriousness in narrative and song (Kolia 1974-93). We are in a better position to turn to the immediate preparations for war as our fifth variable, and thence to the actual exercise of violence itself. Among the Bena, assaults were typically unpredictable. 'Survive or be struck down' was a commonly cited proverb, and warfare was usually a matter of early morning hit-and-run raids (Langness 1972b: 142-52). Plans there were in the men's house, and certainly priority set by an undeviating, daring pursuit of the ends, as if a warrior should be ready to involve himself in an attack 'with all his soul' (OT: Rasinakafa 1980; cf. van Baal 1966: 720). But there were no war-drums nor slit-gongs, as beaten by the Tolai and Ilahita Arapesh, for instance (Sack 1974a: 90; Tuzin 1976: 47-48); no intimations of war by calling messages down the valley, nor casting of spells on battle weapons, as with the Wahgi (Eilers 1967; Kerpi 1975: 17); and neither, for that matter, were preparatory omens taken, such as through cracking fingers for auspices, as with the eastern Motu (OTs: Meba, Kopi 1977), or testing for possible traitorous intentions by any warrior collaborator, as among the Mae Enga (Brennan 1977:48-49). In several other respects Bena preparations were comparatively simple. Their abstention from sexual intercourse before battle was characteristically Melanesian; there was no confidential soul-searching with close relatives (no expression of the warrior's 'wishes and desires and hopes; of his unrepaid debts and unfulfilled obligations' before war) about which we hear from far away Malekula, for instance (Deacon 1934:220-21), because all signs of unsureness were to be quelled. Artwork devoted to weapons was basic and not 'magical' in its own right, while it was not presupposed that particularly powerful warriors were privileged with the protection of special ancestors, as believed, for example, by the Toa[m]baita (Idulusia 1979: 30). Fundamental to the Bena, however, as to all Melanesian societies, were traditional repertoires for (religio-)'psychological preparation' of actual entry into the field of combat or into exposure, the preparation to get back at the foe (cf. Wallace 1968: 172-78). We come, sixthly, to the outward forms of inter-group fighting. Here one will be asking questions about the kind of particular scenario that is more common in a given culture. Bena warfare, for a start, was comparatively

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brutal and unceremonious, since unpredictable ambushes were 'favoured' over field fighting; in any case, the object in either raiding or battle was a decisive routing, by which hostilities would hopefully subside for a comfortable period (Langness 1972b: 142-54, cf. Fortune 1947a: 109). Farther west through the highlands, by contrast, one hears more of 'ceremonial warfare on cleared battle-grounds' with leaders haranguing from both sides, and sometimes with 'renowned fighters' jousting in plumed groups (in clement weather!) until one was 'caught off balance' to fall victim, after which the rest of his clan would seek safe ground until the next round on the morrow or a few days later (e.g., Salisbury 1962: 25; Gardner and Heider 1968; Ploeg 1969: 161-65; Meggitt 1977: 16-21). On the other hand, there is the overall momentum of conflict to contend with. Certain Bena tribes dominating lower-lying sweeping grasslands, interestingly, who were not cramped into the upper Bena River valley, found themselves able to acquire large tracts of territory (over 20 km2 each). The relative absence of restraint in war clearly contributed to this; victors had no compunction about driving losers into refuge elsewhere, burning their hamlets, killing those too slow to escape, and taking over gardens (Langness 1966: 146). In all probability the most successful of these 'miniimperialists' managed to push back the Asaro groups into the landlocked valley they presently occupy west of Goroka. If other Melanesian groups achieved less territorially, much the same ferocious intent prevailed among them, as the more recently contacted highlands amply indicate (Nilles 1950: 40; Read 1955:253; Ryan 1959:268; yet cf. Berndt 1962:233). A characteristic across the board, in any case, was the 'chain-effect' of payback killings, which, while either peace negotiations or a severe loss might temporarily interrupt the procession of avengements, viciously cycled on without foreseeable end. An early German commentator on the Tolai was even of the impression that new spurts of vendetta activity could be so easily set in motion, because one (apparently unemotional, calculated) way of stating a complaint (if a man's wife had been stolen, for example) was to go out into the jungle and spear the first outsider encountered: 'The victim's relative pass on the [new] misdeed and general murder and terror spreads until revenge for the first misdoing [the theft] has reached the person responsible' (Hahl 1897:75). Even accounting for exaggeration, this suggestion of criss-crossing lines of ill-blood helps us to confirm the general picture in traditional Melanesia of a conditioned, readily triggered antagonism towards 'the other', of the easy dispensability of the enemy, and a conditioned indifference by warriors towards the act of killing as such (which Heider found so remarkable among the Dani ([1979: 107-08, cf. 81-82]). The recurrence of war, therefore, naturally solicited a strong sense of 'duty' in the male. It was something one had to engage in because it had

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Tigak warriors on a payback raid, photographed standing over their victim, Neu Mecklenburg (New Ireland), in about 1889. (photo: from Meyer and Parkinson, plate 24)

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Roviana war canoes, photographed at New Georgia in the 1930s. Canoes such as these took part in the famed headhunting expeditions to the west, as far as Bougainville, (photo: UCA Munda) long been 'the fashion of the fathers' who were in any case thought to maintain their presence among the living, thus 'colonizing' the sense of obligation. And women were drawn into this turmoil as much out of the likelihood of falling victim themselves to outside spears as to strong male psychological pressure to prove their loyalty (cf. Lea and Lewis 1976: 73). Revenge was not personal, and, being corporate, was morally binding. For, being both these, vengeance is a crucial ingredient in 'tradition'. Nothing is more obvious about Melanesian statelessness than that small bundles of humanity keep bumping into each other, seal their conflict of interests by the shedding of blood, and sink into 'customary' patterns of

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enmity and alliance as expressions of their 'total concerns' or identity (cf. also plates 1-2). James Kai is probably the first Melanesian to have constructed a theoretical model of mini-war syndromes, with his study of the turbulent zone around Kup, at the meeting of the Chimbu and Wahgi highland culture areas. Presented in a simple diagram, and assuming a slow westward-moving tendency for most groups over the last 150 years, his conclusions are shown in the diagram opposite. This paradigm may not fit situations in other areas, particularly if the terrain is more rugged or settlements more dispersed, but it is a useful tool for testing them; and Kai's explanations are uncluttered, since he takes the rate of homicidal payback over any other factor to be the chief determinant in group relations. Most telling is his assessment (made while in the unusual position of district historian to the Chimbu Provincial Government) that these movements are recognized in oral traditions as an 'order of life' or an aspect of 'cosmos' in which men must play their stalwart part over the generations (1979; OT: 1980; and cf. Silata 1985, 1986). To conclude these comments about the external forms of inter-group clashes, we would do well to note how conceptions of space in each circumscribed 'world' can contribute to the settling-down of patterns of warfare. War between those speaking the same language, to exemplify, may be relatively lessened if a (nonetheless divided) society is small, or can sometimes think of itself as 'one' against outsiders—as with the Chambri vis-a-vis the Iatmul, Sawos, for example, since a Chambri warrior's success in headhunting against any of these 'strangers' from surrounding territories can bring him renown throughout all Chambri communities, even from those currently hostile to his own village (Gewertz 1977: 172-73, 178-81). Remember, also, that people could not pass through every part of their own traditional 'territory' without circumspection, because of dangerous spiritual forces in eerie swampland, dense undergrowth, or even sorcerers' traps at tribal boundaries. If one wonders why war parties rarely took certain circuitous routes, which would have made their raids all the more surprising, the reason often lay with fear of unknown forces in the 'chaos' of the bush. Each Fuyughe tribe (in the Papuan highlands), for instance, believed its domain was supervised by a protector-spirit (sila), with its lairs near the mountain-tops. Consensus in all the groups had it that to travel into another tribal area via the wild, scraggy mountain-heights constituted an act of trespass, and was likely to result in a sila's fatal attack (Trompf 1981b: 14). In this sense, cosmic conceptualization made its contribution to the typically balanced, see-saw quality of most Melanesian conflict. Seventh, there are variables concerning the immediate outcome of violent conflict. The prime object of each episode of Melanesian warfare was usually to take at least one life, but there are specific questions to be asked

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Taiora Orana ceremonies, and the like), ritual objects can be sold in bits and pieces to make wealth (or mis, to cite a key purpose for the Mandak malangan masks of New Ireland) (Lawrence 1964a: 16-19; Unero 1977; Brower 1980: 161-13). And, as more research reveals, social structures can no longer be interpreted sui generis, but need to be related to myth, totem, ancestral and generative spirits, ceremonial groupings, and so on, in each case (e.g. Scheffler 1965: 244-56; Forge 1972: 531; Gewertz 1983; Gesch 1981; Keesing 1982a: 75-111, cf. Levi-Strauss 1970: 312-32). Certain hermeneutical adjustments have already been made, then, which anticipate my call here for both a non-compartmentalized and 'emic' approach to traditional Melanesia (cf. Platvoet 1982: 16-17). The thematic rubric we term retributive logic is but one handle upon this methodology to absorb and distil complex intersections within culture and indigenous consciousness. In the task to develop a 'holistic' approach, clarity may well suffer; yet, to convey reality, unfortunately, 'clarity is not enough' (Lewis 1963), and the evocation of such 'slippery customers' as feeling, emotion, and effervescence should never be baulked.

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These arguments can be further developed by examining the phenomena of 'compensation', an element once again linking the spheres of retaliation and economic exchange through the group accounting of scores, obligations, debts, and expected returns. 'Compensation' 'Compensation', a word deriving from the Latin compensatio, denotes the giving of an appropriate 'equivalence' to make amends either for wrongdoing or for being forced to deprive someone of their life and liberty. In legal terms it means the attempt or requirement to 'make up' for an illicit deed or 'give back' an equivalent of what has been unlawfully 'taken'; while in the context of warfare, compensation refers to payments (in kind or money) to the wives and families whose spouses or male members have been victims on the battlefield (Brand 1968 for background). Compensation of the first kind, as fines or penalties usually applying within the security circle, has already had space under the heading of punishment, although we cannot presume such concessions were always forced out of a wrongdoer, since they could also spring from a person's feelings of remorse for having violated rule and custom. For better comprehension, however, this first kind is better termed 'restitution' (M. Strathern 1972b: 25). As to the second kind, any followers of contemporary news reports in Melanesia will hear next to nothing about a company of fighters paying back its own allies, and would be excused for forming the opinion that compensation denotes payments or acts of contrition between war-groups, or as if there were wellused traditional devices to pay 'blood money'. In fact, although already having alluded to some instances, such enemy-to-enemy transactions were rare in traditional times, and have only recently achieved prominence because administrators, missionaries, and local peace-makers in the trouble-racked New Guinea highlands hailed them as the alternative to revenge killing (see chapter 7). In the past, by comparison, compensation was much more typically the indemnification of one's allies for their services, risks, and serious losses. As Gordon (1981b: 910-12) summarizes, 'generally the situation was one in which no blood money was paid between two enemy groups. Where blood money was paid, it was not seen as an alternative to payback', even if the recipients of such Wergeld in some cultures (e.g. Huli) thereby precluded themselves (but not others!) from exacting vengeance (cf. A. Strathern 1972a: 139; Gabi 1973: 181-83; Chowning 1974: 72; 1977: 47-49; Kamiali 1984: 1-24). There are some people, however, whose peace-making activity could involve payments to both allies and foes, even if the former were naturally assuaged before the latter. Daryl Feil has recently argued that an evolved difference between eastern and western highlands cultures of Papua New

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Guinea is that the latter, beginning from the Chimbu, make provision for enemy-to-enemy compensation (1987: 88-89; cf. 1979: 359). Take, for example, certain procedures of the Mae Enga. Following an inter-tribal/ clan war, the amount of pigs and valuables gathered together to secure temporary peace with enemies will be determined by loss of life incurred against the two major contestants' allies. Once the compensation process is under way, the 'owners of the quarrel' wisely settle matters without delay, appropriately indemnifying clan helpers and allies for any death by giving pigs, and by rewarding them for their services with pork. Non-clansmen who managed to retrieve the body of a clan member also need to be paid. There remains the pressing duty to pay back those who have offered refuge. Enga women hate the prospect, not just of death, injury, and being remarried by leviratic arrangements to men they do not like, but of being forced to flee with their children during the fighting and to live 'for a long time on charity [but really very much under obligation] in another person's house' (Meggitt 1977:144,124-25, cf. 99). With such compensation to allies being widespread in Melanesia however, Mae Enga practice is hardly unique (cf., e.g., Riebe 1968: 24; Strathern 1981; Sillitoe 1981:11-16; Merlan and Rumsey 1991). On the other hand, the Mae make an unusually greater use of homicide appeasements to enemies; that is, from victors to losers. One pretext for such action is that warring sub-groups often belonged to the same phratry (chapter 1), and victors can exploit these wider connections to get compensation gifts to a major enemy group (and thus perhaps keep legitimate any foothold they may have on enemy soil). Another spur to such compensation comes when a relative of a deceased man is able to visit the killer's group with immunity because he is also related to it. Such an inviolable visitor may touch a large pig, formally announcing: 'This pig will eat the head of our dead man!' thus hastening an appropriate offering by jogging memories about a very crucial debt (Meggitt 1977: 199-20, 124). Negotiation for such inter-clan homicide compensation, needless to say, can be extremely precarious, especially in unstable military situations. Mae Enga bigmen, if serious about it, will make sure that warriors still smarting under the impress of hostilities do not attend the formal offer of appeasement. Although parties at a compensation ceremony leave their weapons off the dancing ground, there is a constant fear of treachery or violent irruption. The hosts first share cooked pork to calm those due for donations, and after much rhetoric by leading warriors about long-deferred or apparently forgotten liabilities, the moment comes to relinquish the precious pigs. Meggitt's reconstruction of the scene is striking, because he recalls that, over and above tension between compensators and compensated, scuffling can result between the recipients of the payment and those to whom these recipients owe pigs or obligations. These 'creditors' in fact, can try to drag pigs from the women allotted to receive appeasement, but

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their 'husbands intervene and loud arguments explode around the danceground. Women throw stones, men scuffle and swing pig stakes. Elders intervene to disarm the combatants before blood is shed and the brawling escalates into serious fighting' (Meggitt 1977: 134, cf. 118-20, 130-36). Men forever walk a 'tight rope', then, between ritualized aggression and genuine violence, between magnanimity and belligerence, between giving and taking life, or between receiving and meeting their obligations and debts. The situation was forever altering. If run-of-the-mill exchanges were always under way and changing the balance of affairs, no one would want to assert that compensations between enemies ever finalized good relations. In such a ceremony as the one just discussed, indeed, the normal quota of (forty) pigs might not be offered. This may be because the initiating donors (or hosts of the ceremony) predict that they can escape completing the payment during the course of future instabilities. Pigs for this and the covering of other insults can, in any case, be skilfully re-diverted by senior men towards the culminating, major Enga exchange known as the Te; the final destiny of the beasts, therefore, reflects a 'ceaseless struggle' or an imbroglio of reciprocities involving ambitious men and tenacious [sub-]clans in the pursuit of prestige (Meggitt 1977: 22-23, 120-37; Feil 1984: 38-40). Significantly, too, moves towards compensation are affected by more obviously religious considerations. In a stalemate between two warring clans it will usually be the allies who will begin to sue for peace, the major contestants not wishing to show cowardice to their ancestors. During all stages of negotiation, naturally, close agnates of any deceased will be contending that only blood can assuage the loss, mindful as they are of ghostly vengefulness, while for their part the compensators will pay the relatives of killed bachelors a higher payment, sensing danger from the ghosts of the untimely dead. Overall, Enga compensatory ceremonies are just as much placatory sacrifices as anything. Every segment of them— especially the impressive songs opening them, the communion meal between the two parties, and the 'fighting with words'—is consciously acted out in the presence of the dead as well as the living (Meggitt 1977: 115-19, 138; Brennan 1977: 47-49; Lacey 1973). The Mae Enga situation neatly illustrates how the two sides of bekim, of taking life in military struggle and granting of it within the restraints of ceremonial, are related and interwoven in thought and action. For practical purposes, of course, it was always useful for both the pressures of war and the economic capacity to compensate to be assessed together. In some societies, in fact, the southern highland Wola and the Solomon Island Choiseulese for a notable two, sub-groups seeking revenge would be hard pressed to get a large military action out of their leaders if they did not look like being able to pay the debts inevitably incurred

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(Sillitoe 1981: 74-78; Scheffler 1964: 796-97). Yet, in traditional Melanesia war and 'economics' were not considered beside each other as secular modes of operation. They were ancestral ways and served ancestral purposes: and they were logically tied together by essentially religious conceptions of payback. Considering common Melanesian worries over the ghosts of the slain, many acts of compensation amounted to the careful keeping of tabus rather than the giving of gifts. An Orokaiva manslayer, to illustrate, could not join others to eat the flesh of his victim for fear his own genitals would swell, his joints become twisted, and his head turn bald. The club he used for the kill was exchanged for another man's: for several days he drank only unclear water muddied by a non-slayer and abstained from taro cooked in a pot and sexual intercourse, until it was time to eat the same purificatory suna stew that was given to young men when they re-emerged from initiation seclusion. Before this ceremonial eating, at least among the Binandere grouping, the reparatory attitude is taken to an extreme. 'The slayer climbs into a certain tree which contains a nest of . . . large and aggressive . . . "green ants" . . . He crouches in a fork of the tree, branches are broken off and laid over him so that he is almost completely covered and thoroughly bitten' (Williams 1930: 173-75, cf. also Barth 1975: 151 on the Baktaman). These actions are deliberately cleansing, but before all they are defences against his victim's ghost, the slayer having to suffer for his success. In other societies, killers slept in separate huts for up to a month (southern Massim) (Seligmann 1910: 557-58), or had need of apotropaic sacrifices (Kwaio) (Keesing 1982a: 131), or else weapons bringing death were exchanged, discarded or even 'punished' (Frazer 1922: vol. 3, 165-70). Still other compensatory actions claim attention in their own right, for sitting obliquely to the typical rounds of warrior and exchange activity. Among these are the fascinating gisaro dances of the Bosavi. As Schieffelin asserts, this dancing is usually undertaken by a small coterie of males, who may choose a (non-funerary) ceremonial occasion, especially a bridewealth presentation, to carry out their actions. The gisaro group, in fact, may be somewhat heterogeneous, some of the dancers lacking strong kin connections with the parties negotiating a marriage; yet, they have in common a membership of the same security circle (or longhouse community), and make off in procession with a 'wedding party' to perform in the longhouse of another group. Since this other group will have had hostile relations to the dancers' own community at some stage, it is precisely these tensions of the past that gisaro is designed to recall. The object of the dance is to bring on such a feeling of sorrowfulness from the audience that they burst into tears, to the point that they demand su (compensation for loss or injury) from the visiting performers! (Schieffelin 1977: 25, 161-96; Feld 1990).

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This phenomenon will seem paradoxical. The Bosavi possessed traditional institutions to compensate for certain individual killings, since after an aggrieved group identified a murderer or sorcerer and successfully dispatched him in a raid, they would be only too willing to round off their actions with a presentation, usually of pork. Discriminate inter-group homicide was thus distinguished from indiscriminate, with sorcerers being pinpointed by sick persons about to die or by mediums conducting eerie nocturnal seances (Schieffelin 1977: 78, 98, 103, 213, 222). The Bosavi considered that the offering of bridewealth, moreover, was itself a type of compensation (fud). A clan had lost a woman and, after all, in virtually all Melanesian societies the sending of a woman in marriage is viewed as an act of exchange itself, or a gift, even the 'supreme gift' as F. E. Williams put it (1936: 168; Schieffelin 1977: 59-61,198-202). But ihegisaro dance was strikingly distinct in that visitors enacted it with the express purpose of putting themselves and their own community in the position of having to grant compensation for carrying out so sorrow-inducing an act. The dancing evokes an opposition scenario between longhouse communities that have inflicted raids on each other in the pursuit of individual culprits. Memories of tensions mount with the 'beauty and pathos' of the dances, which are put on by performers who, though painted, are deliberately bedraggled and bearing a mass of long cordyline leaves on their backs. The hosts, in being moved to tears, are perforce sufferers, so that they then try to burn the dancers and their costumes with tapers lit from the longhouse fires, 'in angry [but nonetheless ritualized] revenge for the suffering they have been made to feel'. Compensation is demanded of the dancers, and yet it is they who endure the greater physical ordeal, for they could be savagely attacked if the defenders with them are not quick enough. Nevertheless, if the gisaro has been carried through to its denouement and has not broken up in uncontained violence, it is the performers who complete it by passing around items of compensation to their hosts, perhaps a small knife, or shell necklace, 'to soothe the feelings and terminate the anger', and to 'establish reassurance of the mutual spirit' as they leave. In this way they help render the other ceremonial transactions (usually marriage) a fait accompli and have also put pressure on the hosts to plan sending their own vulnerable dancers in a return of 'equivalence' (wel) (Schieffelin 1977: 24, 194-95). Above all, gisaro reflects the social reciprocations entailed by marriage. Different communities, linked together through constant exchange and 'countless minor gifts of food' between the respective relatives of a husband and wife, were also susceptible to ruptures because of sorcery and violent actions. Gisaro was the specially detached piece of drama that compensated for the human tragedy, but it also reaffirmed in action rather than philosophic reflection that the essence of life lay in the excitements and rhythms

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of give and take, elation and pain. Key myths as to why gisaro is danced among the Bosavi, for instance, or when sorcerers first became objects of killing confirm in orality what the gisaro articulates as drama, that the processes of retribution or reciprocity themselves are already meant to be valorized above mere routine, and already endowed with more than mundane significances (Schieffelin 1980; cf. 1977: 20). Not that compensation always has to be expressed in ritual or typical reciprocity. It can also show up as some 'act of mercy' to forestall aggression or punition. Usually, however, the self- or group-interest behind such actions is palpable: a captured rather than a killed woman can make a good wife; a young boy caught from among the enemy could be adopted as an asset. Among the Wagawaga (southern Massim), for a good case, tearful women took off their skirts and flung them on any boy they could not bear the warriors to dispatch, and a man of the same totem group as a captive could have concern for this special allegiance to ransom him with valuables (Romilly in BNGAR 1887a: 36). But here we approach aspects of the different but related subject of sacrifice. Demands for sacrifice Obligation Peace-making, compensation, and grand-scale ceremonies constitute major processes of outer-directed giving, though not exhausting them. What more can be introduced about reciprocity between human groups, however, we shall present through discussions about reciprocation within one's own security circle and between spirit powers and their venerators. The Melanesian security circle normally takes in more than the extended family and cluster of closer relatives within one's tribal area, for it incorporates trusted in-law relationships (arising mostly from exogamy) and special-exchange partnerships as well. Under such connections, people grow up learning how to behave towards close relatives and note those from whom to expect the choicest gifts; they learn which are the more pleasant families or groups with whom to make untroubled exchanges of foods and goods. The nature of this genuine comfortableness is also forged into strong feelings of obligation between families and lineages over long periods of time. Family members learn the subtleties of giving, not to repay with exactly the same amount, let us say, if that is considered unseemly, but with a little more or less (as with the Manus), even much more or less (as with the Kove). They learn to assess equivalence, or to gauge whether somebody has been given an inadequate amount at a feast, whether someone is too greedy or has failed to meet their obligations. They learn to interpret pointed hints, or repeated rumour and gossip about families

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not doing enough (Trompf 1975a: 76-81; cf. Watson-Gegeo and White 1990; Brison 1992). Precise estimations of value are lacking, as natural in economies not 'fully' monetarized, so that especially in each act of giving between very friendly families there is no expectation of 'immediate return' and the givers 'do not [always] consciously calculate the value of the products' by toting, pricing or budgeting in ways familiar to so many modern urban-dwellers. But this 'general reciprocity' (cf. Friedl 1975: 22), which interestingly involved many more transactions in cooked food (rather than raw, as with outsiders), is nevertheless a family's focus for a sense of balance, achievement, and pride of place in the cosmos, and thus requires a continuous general reckoning by its members. In this ethos, Melanesians have had social pressures upon them to be relatively egalitarian, and to make sacrifices for the community and its survival. Competition is hardly precluded, and men also find that they are materially rewarded for their greater contributions. But in such small-scale societies one cannot exceed certain collectively estimated limitations in a rampant undermining of 'production rivals', and in any case land arrangements and the very technological difficulties of production itself almost always withhold this possibility. Some accumulation of 'personal' wealth goes uncondemned, perhaps, provided the rich man is generous with his possessions, and by generosity such a man can enhance his prestige enormously; but the absence of benevolence or hospitality and the preoccupation with acquiring personal possessions lends reasons for others' scorn poured out upon niggardliness. The big are big precisely because they make others dependent on them as splendid bestowers and as organizers of bestowal. In reality, the chief, bikman, wealthy manager, or influential specialist, are often symbolic representatives of the group, thus being brokers or embodiments of spiritual power beyond ordinary human reach. Even in those homogeneous small-scale societies we find in Melanesia, it is necessary for somebody to have this auctoritas, special knowledge, or supernaturally sanctioned power, for the organization of ceremony and maintenance of peace, as well as for the master-strokes of vendetta (cf. Sahlins 1963: 285-300; Guiart 1963; Burns et al. 1972: 104-12; Hogbin 1978; Standish 1980; Godelier 1982a; Jaeschke 1978: 154-58; Prendeville 1983; Lindstrom 1984; Lederman 1986; Strathern 1987; Godelier and Strathern 1991). And on the other hand, we can hardly be left denying that those who do not succeed in productiveness and exchange, who have lost and owe only dues, are without spirit-laden influence, let alone distinctly 'economic' clout, in their societies; they are 'nothing men', worse still 'rubbish men' (as the highland pidgin has it) (Vicedom and Tischner 1962: vol. 2, 49-51, 149-50; Strathern 1971: 132, 205; 1982b) or worst of all 'slaves' (cf. chapter 1). Thus, on the one hand, there is the quality of sharing, mutual benefit

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and support, cooperation, and the constant passage of smaller gifts within and between residential communities; yet, on the other hand, men may be jostling competitively for prestige and authority in the midst of exchange complexities. A 'feel' for the hopes, joys, excitements, and anxieties that go into actualizing these motions, and an intuiting of the transactions involved as parts of a cherishable vital way of life (rather than mere networks or organizational mechanisms to be plotted), is badly needed in scholarship. After all, reciprocation has long been the object of indigenous pondering and gnomic truth. 'Our life is like the sea', mused a Lolo elder (west New Britain), 'it goes up and it comes down, it goes and it comes and there is no end to it' (Janssen 1974: 4). 'Of seasons', runs the Jaua (Orokaivan) proverb, 'there are always good and bad' (OT: Jojoga 1983), both sayings being as true of the ceaseless interactions within security circles themselves as of any other process. There also exist in most cultures those key utterances encapsulating a sense of complete well-being and fairness in day-to-day reciprocations, or a rounding-off of some important sequence of transactions, as found in the Tangu mngwotngwotikil ('all's fair!') (dwelt on by Kenelm Burridge 1960: 58-59) and the ejaculations kable ('fine!') among the Wahgi or namo ('good!') among the Motu (Ramsey 1975: 87; Clark and Lister-Turner 1924: 107). In all this ongoing interplay and assessment, particularly within the security circle itself, food and traditional money are crucial factors. Food is not the mere object of economic transactions, but is (symbo-)logically, even magically, the instrument of changed social relations. It is integral to the way people do their costing and frame their reasons for taking initiatives that will make, sustain, or break existing associations. Traditional money and valuables joined food as a less common and usually secondary means of calculating transactions of a day-to-day nature. Whether shells (such as the famous kina, toea, tambti, cowrie, and clams), feathers (including feather coils), dogs' or fish (even whales') teeth, axeheads, stones, or snails, these items of exchange value were never detached from 'the regenerative processes of human life' (Weiner 1977: 231; cf. Quiggin 1949: 149-86; Hocart 1972; Tanaka 1981; Chowning 1983; Whiteman 1984: 94-95). In the passing on of both food and valuables there was almost endemically 'the force of nature', which was rarely embodied in gifts themselves so much as in 'the complex of social relations and the constraints of the gained dimensions upon these relations' (Thompson 1987: 76). The 'paying back' involved in daily exchanges, then, is not just the handing over of abstract, impersonalized denotations of value, as in monetarized society (cf. Marx [1857-58] 1973: 156-59, 221-25; Weber 1946: 331), but forever entails for givers and takers the sense of fulfilling obligations, and thus the heightened awareness that their (economic)

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activity is conditioned by social and more-than-human expectations. The measuring of possibilities, liabilities, and status is more continuous and less fitful than is common in the West, and worked out within an ordained cosmic scheme of things (Herskovitz 1960: 108-78; cf. Lawrence 1984: 13133; Gregory 1982: 41-70). Such 'socioeconomic systems' (cf. Firth 1954: 4; Redfield 1955: 23-26) are hardly without their 'incentives and rewards'. Within the constraints of the relative egalitarianism they cultivate, there is always competition for higher status, and in chiefly societies there is a prior acceptance that select individuals merit advantages over others. In Melanesia, political leadership or management is generally held by those who have acquired more of a personal control over the flow and distribution of exchanges. These persons have done so, however, usually because of their own remarkable sacrifices. They are basically patrons, who acquire prestige as generous circulators of wealth, putting others in their debt and inducing services as 'payment' for their patronage. No one could attain to high status, or live up to an inherited position of eminence, without edging others into service. Supported by agnates or members of his extended family, a man might start by hosting a feast to put the members of other clans or sub-clans in his debt, or he might attract a return of obligations by contributing more to a large group presentation of wealth. But the procedures for achieving personal hegemony varied. Whereas with tanepoa 'aristocratic' power on Manam Island (Madang Province, New Guinea) hereditary rights were crucial (Wedgwood 1934), across the central highlands organizational skills to compete with potential rivals were more fundamental than being a bigman's son (cf. Standish 1980). On Malekula and in other Vanuatu contexts, by comparison, we find 'clubs' with a hierarchy of grades, men buying themselves into lower ranks with an appropriate payment to a sponsor, and then climbing higher 'with heavier expenditure and greater display' (Deacon 1934: 49, 198-200; Layard 1928: 142-43). Ian Hogbin (1934b) has documented a process of Melanesian individual 'social advancement' in his work on Guadalcanal society (Koaka, Solomons). A 'man of moment' (mwanekama) earns acclaim only by lapses into the most straitened circumstances. Emerging as a potential leader in his lineage, married and usually around thirty years old, he will press many of his 'close relatives and neighbours' into his service, to harvest, raise pigs, and build a new house for his acts of hospitality. In organizing a feast his generosity will set tongues wagging. At one feast, given by a certain Atana, Hogbin counted '257 separate presentations', and after this occasion of 'conspicuous consumption', the host 'was left with the mere remnants for himself, just a few bones and one or two cakes' (so Herskovitz 1960: 46869). Such an ambitious man will begin afresh, working for the time when he becomes patron of a dance festival, and then truly emerges as a

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mwanekama, to whom the whole community owes a great debt, and whose reputation has peaked (Hogbin 1934b: 305). To secure the 'psychological and material advantages' of a community leader, with 'special ornaments associated with his rank' and power to deploy assistant kinsmen, great personal sacrifices and striking acts of generosity were mandatory, as was typical throughout Melanesia (Herskovitz 1960: 470; cf. Hogbin 1938-39: 323-25 on Wogeo; Oliver 1955: 216-25 on Siwai; Schwimmer 1973: 94-98, 104, 109 on the Orokaiva). The most characteristic paradigm for leadership in Melanesia is the cultivation in others of debts and obligations and of one's own prestige by magnanimity. Differences between pre- and post-pacification conditions are not to be forgotten here. Drawn-out processions of husbandry, exchange, feasting and upward mobility will flourish only under conditions of stability. Traditionally they were always vulnerable to serious disruption by war, and a diachronic perspective needs to be developed in research. Outside investigators in post-pacification contexts will be impressed by the extent of non-violent competition, trading, display, and dance; yet, mobilization for positive reciprocity will be accentuated the more open hostilities are rejected. The famous Kula trade 'ring' for example, worked only fitfully when war was common fare, and operated never so well as when the early missionaries established a new cross-tribal aegis (Maclntyre 1983; cf. Brunton 1975; Egloff 1978). Oral traditions from the Wahgi Valley indicate that actualizing such a grand summation of the Kongar was a truly staggering, never-to-be-forgotten achievement in pre-contact times, so much greater was the chance that whole clans could be dislodged from settled lands, even fleeing over considerable distances as refugees (e.g. Kondwal and Trompf 1982: 103-05). Under less stable traditional conditions, groups were readier to find excuses for not fulfilling their obligations, even if it meant taking the consequences militarily. Pacification, thus, made the fulfilling of obligations more operationally normative, and the enhanced possibilities for inter-group 'feasting and dancing' created the impression of 'social development' (cf. Hambly 1925).l Oblation What, now, of the oblationary, propitiatory, atoning, or placatory side to sacrifice? The sacrifices required for 'pooling' resources and the rise of an individual 'tribal banker' seem less distinctly religious (Sahlins 1963: 1

Note also the emergence of new 'classes' of men able to manipulate blossoming systems and thus to obscure the previously important role of chiefs or traditional leaders. What happened with the rise of 'big lenders' in the Sukwe organization on the Banks Islands (Vanuatu) is a good case in point (Deacon 1934: 49, 198-200; Layard 1942: 142-43, cf. 688, 692-93).

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188-89), yet they must not be analysed in a false isolation from transactions between humans and the spirit powers. These human-to-human economic relations we have been discussing, in any case, can be shown to 'rest on moral foundations . . . far more than we ordinarily suppose' (Firth 1951: 144), and they were always related to the fundamental issues of group struggle, and thus to the group legitimations of negative payback towards some and positive reciprocity towards others (cf. Godelier 1982a: 272-73). Getting used to a given context, one will soon be able to perceive how the most balanced and intense reciprocity reigns between friendly outgroups or those linked by marriage affinities, while a susceptibility to unevenness, broken contracts, and deceit prevails between groups with previously fractured relations (Sahlins 1963: 19). All these human and deceptively secular activities and propensities, however, can be properly understood only when they are viewed in the wider context of the sacrificial mentalite. How and when reciprocations, gifts, and offerings were first given in time immemorial and whether gods or humans were the first recipients are unanswerable questions; all we need to acknowledge here is a relative comparability and indigenous parallelism between dealings in the two spheres. In each set of dealings lies the concern that the other party should not be neglected, but instead pleased, if the business of life has required them to come to terms with each other. Thus, behind each there also lie general assumptions that offence to those with whom one has frequent and normally rewarding interaction can only bring trouble. Moreover, ritual encounters with the spirits call for the greatest scrupulousness when the members of a whole security circle or large segment of it have to reforge their relationship with these agencies, sometimes in the presence of members of allied out-groups. Such dealings with the 'spirit-other' were crucial for the life of the mini-nation (Mantovani 1977), and were usually tied in with the biggest exchange transactions between human groups. More flexibility, occasionally noticeable offhandedness, however, is likely to be found in human-spirit relations within households or extended families, whereas towards the gods of most other tribes or foreigners indifference is typical (unless trade opportunities, perhaps even the trading of deities themselves, dictate otherwise). Coping with unwanted or inimical powers In Melanesia, then, it is very rare to find the 'owners' of deities or ancestors ever paying them back negatively for their uncooperativeness, as when Africans smash fetishes that cease to be 'odedient servants'. Nor can a Melanesian become like a great Jain yogi, 'whom even the gods fear' (Smart 1971:103). Admittedly, on the death of his father a Manus head of household will cast aside the skull of his grandfather into a lagoon, because only fathers can be venerated as 'Sir Ghosts'. Only the father's skull can hold

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pride of place, in a carved wooden bowl on rafters above the entrance of a family house. Both 'illness and failure in fishing' are ascribed to the father's 'just wrath', and only he demands 'confessions of sin', whereas the ghostly grandfather deserves discarding for failing to protect his son from death (Fortune 1934: 1, 165). Admittedly, too, Melanesians are known for a pragmatic change of deities or cults (e.g. Canadian Broadcasting Commission 1974 on the Mendi; OT: Garuai 1975 on the Torau). Among some peoples, techniques for killing dangerous ghosts are to be had (Nevermann et al. 1972: 108, 110; Chowning 1975: 87), and the spirits of complete outsiders were sometimes denigrated contemptuously as objects of 'mere superstition' (Trompf 1981b: 24). In general, however, the gods and spirits in one's own language area were typically treated with the greatest respect, the despoliation of their sanctuaries, if considered at all, being done as a most extreme act of both vengeance and risk (e.g. Barth 1975: 149 on the Baktaman). The spirit-world called for care and caution. Melanesia's manifold deities, demigods and ancestors shared with humans the potential for harm as well as welfare, and no traditional religion thus far studied in the region lacked procedures to placate certain spirit forces that might prove dangerous. Most frequently among these were place-spirits and the ghosts of the recently deceased. 'Place-spirits' (PNG pidgin masalai), very often fearful inhabitants of stagnant pools and eerie locales, were usually thought capable of killing. In Wape lore (a west Sepik culture), for instance, the dreaded Kelfene can smell out a menstruating woman as she approaches his pool of water, bringing on a fatal haemorrhage, and can kill any child who dares to complain of hunger while in the bush (McGregor 1965: 5). Sometimes coupled with such beings are spirits connected with winds and birds, to which various sicknesses are ascribed (see chapter 3 on the Wahgi), and what may be termed monsters, demons, ogres, and ghouls appear sporadically in the spiritual 'rogues galleries' of different belief complexes (e.g. Bulmer 1965: 136-37; Hesse 1982: 143-86). The incursions of such forces were not only averted by good precautionary advice, but by acts of appeasement. If many appeasement rites to such 'spirits of the environment' are minor, some involve considerable, even elaborate, mobilization of resources. Before the restless one-armed, one-legged masalai of the giant Elam Bari (between the highlander Siane and the Chimbu), a few pigs were slaughtered whenever conditions were too wet or too dry, his mollified temper being thought to improve the weather (OT: Knight 1977). Elsewhere, as with the spectacular Hevehe ceremony among the coastal Elema, 'spirits of the environment' are actually allowed temporary residence in the villages (under the guise of masked figures). Once sufficiently 'fed and fostered', however, they are 'killed' with arrows, their masked symbols heaped up

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and burnt in the most matter-of-fact fashion, and their remains cast into the ocean to be taken by the monster Hevehe of the sea (Williams 1940: 372-84, cf. 162-68). In contrast to the more typically nervous handling of such 'nature spirits', the Hevehe rites show how some of these powers could be manipulated and cyclically integrated into human affairs, by being feted and thus appeased before being disposed of, and expected to return for the same enactment a score or so years later (Eliade 1958b: 33-35). Comparable, if less playful, ceremonies can be found elsewhere (cf. McGregor 1982: 4089 on the Wape). The other class of dangerous spirits worth assuaging were ill-disposed or vengeful ghosts, particularly of those individuals spiteful in life, badly treated at death, or bent on hunting their own killers. Post-mortem animal slaying and funeral feasts, organized by the deceaseds' uterine kin, were the most characteristic acts of placation (e.g. Meggitt 1965: 112-13 on the Mae Enga), although feelings of recrimination could spark rare acts of desecration against a dead man's belongings (e.g. Meggitt 1977: 31), or of women being buried face down to prevent them from interfering in a man's second marriage (e.g. Reay 1975: 4 on the Wahgi). Ritual reciprocities with helpful powers More common than appeasement and apotropaism, however, were offerings, rites of 'honouring', Veneration' or 'worship', and 'sacrifices' in the contexts of feasts performed before superhuman beings that were capable of benefiting rather than threatening the primary group. Expectedly, the principle of approach was one of reciprocity or do ut des ('I give in order for you to give back'), and spirit-beings were not adored for their own sake but pleased in the hope of gift, concession, or reconciliation (see, e.g., Codrington 1891:118-19; van Baal 1975b: 5-6, 10-15; Scheffler 1965: 250; Keesing 1982a: 46-48, 191; cf. Platvoet 1982:183-84; Trompf 1983a: 132; 1988a: 211 for background on terms and hermeneutical principles). Prima facie, an offering or sacrifice, as 'a gift to the gods' is an instance of 'unbalanced reciprocity' (cf. van Baal 1976); yet, in the views of the sacrificers themselves, almost always, there are real returns to be had, while the cajoling of invocations, the additive power (dare we say 'magic'?) of specialized procedures, and the enactment of whole rites, are believed to bring blessings to the negotiators. Here we are speaking of 'sacrifices' loosely—and appropriately for Melanesia—as any giving to the spirits to bring about some benefit. If such sacrifices to benevolent spiritagents were not always to secure actual material returns, they were almost endemically connected with the quest for power as life and vitality—for mana (mina/namana), or the equivalents of what is evoked by these key Solomonese terms—in order for the achievement of concrete blessings, of prestige and renown, well-being, and security to become possible. The urge to persuade and manipulate escaped possible shallowness and a bludgeoning

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air, though, for being typically hedged about with ritual caution and relational propriety (Trompf 1991: 15, 81). The forms of sacrifice to gods and spirits, of course, if we broaden the compass of the 'sacrificial' to include token acknowledgements, gifts, and minor offerings, are highly variegated. Even remembering ancestral names could be a small gratuity, as when a Roro prayerfully ran off his genealogical chain in the hope of securing a good fishing catch (Navarre in MSC 1888-89: 90-91). Ritual purification, as when a Mekeo will fast before visiting the sacred ancestral site of Isosobapu as a pilgrim, also betokened a start at engagement in 'mystical' reciprocation (Aitsi and Trompf, fieldnotes 1973-74). Verbal confession of wrongdoing was a concession to spirits as much as to one's fellows, since a spirit's propensity to punish even the most carefully hidden misdeeds could require assuagement (cf. Pettazzoni 1934). An evil deed, such as adultery, might be thought to jeopardize a whole group before the spirit-powers, and might need to be confessed ritually by specialists. The Roviana priests, or hiama, for instance, coupled such confessions with the offering of pork, yam, or tapioca pudding on an altar for the gods, even though the perpetrator of a heinous wrongdoing might have already paid compensation or been put to death (Pratt 1986: 21). These last details go to show, moreover, that by far the most widespread and distinctive types of offering or small sacrifices involved the setting aside of food for deities or the dead, or the special slaughtering and/or sharing of a victim in their supposed presence. Many sacrifices in the broadest sense, then, consisted of smaller food offerings to ensure that ancestors did not feel left out of human proceedings, or to remind them that the living were hoping for some 'gifts'. Select morsels from a feast were left aside for the dead to enjoy: a Trobriander, for instance, placed them in a bowl outside the family house, the dead relatives visiting from Tuma (the Isle of the Blessed') to partake of them at night, perhaps in the body of a dog or a pig (OT: Entonia 1972). The Wantoat (Morobe) left such offerings at those secluded caves or trees believed to be frequented by ancestors. In this same culture, as in various others, such as the Chimbu, the first-fruits of garden produce were left aside as 'thanksgiving' to the ancestors (Kaima 1980: 81-82; Nilles 1978: 5), and earlier writers interpreted the Fijian rites known as mandrali as 'thankofferings' of food after successful catches or hunts, or remarkable deliverances from danger (Williams and Calvert 1858: 181; cf. Hocart 1929: 189). Small offerings were even made to the dead to bring on helpful dreams—the Orokaivan Jaua leaving out food for this purpose within the house (OT: Jojoga 1983)—and to alleviate pain or the prospect of further accident. A southern Fore wounding his foot with an axe, for example, could ascribe his trouble to the spirit inhabiting the tree he had cut, quickly handling the suspected offence by rubbing pig-fat on the trunk and hanging

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shells or other valuables from its branches, as well as eating a medicinal meal (Lindenbaum 1979: 56; cf. 1971: 283). As for sacrifices of victims, the size and significance of the rites and the slain varied greatly. If a single bird would be informally despatched to entice back the wandering soul of a sick clansman, a single pig butchered to heal the breach between two exogamously related families (Luzbetak 1956: 92 on the Wahgi), the offering-up of a single dried-out marsupial to a lineage's ancestral skull could be the highpoint of a major ceremony, as among the Baktaman (Barth 1975: 87-88). Various ceremonies in which single or a few animals are slaughtered for whole clans (documented so well for the Ipili Enga by Gibbs (1975: 50-75, cf., e.g., Fox 1924: 113; Keesing 1978a: 33 for other quarters) contrast with scenarios in which clans put very many beasts to death; while if in some sacrificial rites an altar is obvious, and its positioning of decisive significance, in other cases this element is lacking (cf. Aufenanger 1969: 92-94). Greater and 'classic' sacrifices

Strangely, little has been written on sacrifice as such in Melanesia, and this may simply be because traditional shrines in which creatures had their throats cut before some idol, with parts of the victims being held up as 'consecrated propitiations' are noticeably rare in the region. Older ethnological formulas as to 'the nature and function' of sacrifice do not seem to apply so readily in the region (Trompf 1991: 65-67). Piacular or expiatory motifs are not prominent, and formalized approaches to a point of intense 'sacralization' (with the dispatching and offering of a victim), followed by a steady withdrawal from such dangerous intercourse with 'divinity' are uncommon (cf. Hubert and Mauss 1964: 19-49). But then ritual and conceptual variation in other parts of the world, especially black Africa, have already undermined the Eurocentrisms of older schools in this connection (Bourdillon and Fortes 1980; Heusch 1985). One is left attempting an apt selection of diverse materials. Certainly there are interesting Melanesian rites in which animal slaying is performed to affect whole clans or tribes for the better. The habu, a preliminary example, is a Daribi ceremony performed because an angry ghost is assumed to be responsible for a significant enough amount of sickness among women, children, and pigs. Marsupials must be hunted down and their bones burnt to propitiate the spirit suspect, although the ghost himself is not accused of the sicknesses. Instead, the hunters impersonate him in their hunt, blaming the trouble on the marsupials they shoot, which are thus transformed (through Daribi metaphor) into sacrificed 'scapegoat ghosts' of appeasement (Wagner 1972: 152-53). Such cross-signification between human and victim is known in a few other sacrificial contexts. At the end of the great Wahgi Kongar, for one, a single,

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plumed dancer, with round pig-tusks against his brow, 'takes on the "essence" of the pigs' ancestors' before the spectators, thereby hinting at the cultural assumption that 'men appeared in the world before pigs' (pers. comm. Reay 1987). From the Lombaha or Ambai Island (Vanuatu) comes the news that pigs with circular tusks take on the identity of ancestral spirits; the more a man can kill of these, the more soul-stuff he acquires and ancestor-like he becomes (Allen 1987). A more common element of the Daribi sacrifice, however, is the dispatching of several victims to improve or foster human-spirit relations, though not through a hunt. In highlands contexts we find sacrificers of pig-batches seeking the protection of place-spirits, such as at the Lake Iba-Kuyama and the cave Gebeanda, centres of sacrificial ceremony for more than one Huli tribe (Gayalu, 1979: 19-21; OT: 1977), and not for placation only (see p. 118). And there is no reason to overlook the renowned large-scale pig-kills here, which have already been awarded the title 'sacrifice' from time to time (e.g. Bulmer 1965: 142-44 on the Kyaka Enga; Modjeska 1982: 102-08 on the southern highlands Duna; cf. Lowman-Vayda 1971; Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976; Healey 1977; 1985b: 157). These mass slaughters are not just for the human recipients of pork; the events are demonstrations of power before deities and/or the dead, and the 'trophies' of previously successful feasts, usually pig-jaws, as in the case of the Kongar were strung up prominently when the ceremonies were being prepared or actually performed, for the pleasure of spirit participants. Application of the term 'sacrifices' comes the more easily, too, when we learn that in other and associated cultic acts, pigs were killed before altars and under shrines. Mention has already been made of the large Kumai pestle altar (Wahgi), which was smeared with pig's blood before battle (chapter 1), and Bulmer learnt that some Kyaka Enga sacrifices were formerly discharged in special 'ghost shrines', which had all collapsed in ruins by 1955 (Bulmer 1965: 158; cf. Kale 1985: 61). Although unusual, pigslaying on Malekula occurred before ancient rock monuments of various kinds, 'monoliths, dolmens, stone platforms, cairns, and . . . stone circles', probably erected by a people long prior to the island's current inhabitants and such action was 'of a sacrificial nature', having 'as one of its main objects the prolongation of life after death through identification with ancestors, whose memories are kept green by the existence of the monoliths which they have themselves caused to be erected and which their spirits are said to inhabit after death' (Layard 1936: 123-24; 1942: 257-59, 333-35, Campbell 1976: 444-48). In some rare instances, moreover, the slaughtering of pigs and other creatures was actually centred on altars, being carried out by specialist priests. Because of its real interest, one such sacrificial cult has been studied in depth, that of the Toa[m]baita (on north Malaita), and has been recently researched by two young scholars from the area itself.

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Toa[m]baita sacrifices were held in two clans' sacred glade known as biu, which was surrounded by a low stone wall and separated from the adjacent dancing ground by a line of trees. The biu, although also the name given to the men's club-culthouse, was in fact a graveyard, but one in which no women, children, nor even ordinary male members of the community were permitted burial, but only 'priests . . . war lords and other men of status' (Idulusia 1979: 24-25). At the back of the biu lay what was recognized as the collective burial spot of the remote dead, before which lay the largest fire altar, while in the foreground lay the graves of main ancestors of the given clan (or biuiwane). Although warriors could stand surrounding this enclosure, witnessing and supporting any of the ceremonies, only the priest (or 'man of prayer' wane nifoa) was permitted within it, and his procedures varied according to the context. During the main ceremonies (maama), which were usually in honour of a single dead priest or a line of them (and which could also entail celebration of the collective ancestors' contributions to victory in war, or their role in bringing death to a selected enemy), cultic procedures were elaborate. Before the graves of the named departed, the wane ni foa 'cut open the pig, burnt part of it on the altar while saying a prayer to the ancestors'. The rest of the pig could be shared by male participants. On the main fireplace, however, dedicated to the distant ancestors, a whole pig was burnt to ashes in a fire of special kwau wood (the unusual case of a fully burnt holocaust), and the priest dared not eat any part of it (Suruma 1979, cf. Idulusia 1979: 19). In this culture domesticated pigs were 'actually reared consecrated to the ancestors at the piglet stage', being given 'personal names', and were returned to their true owners, then, in sacrifice (Idulusia 1979: 16). Women, incidentally, were never allowed to eat any pork other than from hunted wild pigs, whereas in rites performed for domestic needs (foa mu), and thus for protection of children, crops, and so on, the priest could share part of the sacrificial victim with the male supplicants. Under other circumstances, again, when wrongs or offences within lineages or along marriage lines were to be righted, supplicants gave the priest an opossum or small pig for sacrifice without expecting any right to partake. Such an offering could be an act of contrition or as a petition asking the ancestors to disclose an unknown offence, which had brought trouble, or else it might ratify one's effort at reconciliation, some compensatory gift also being sent to an offended party (Suruma 1979: 10-12; cf. Layard 1942: 689; Hogbin 1970b: 74-76, 105-10; Keesing 1977: 7-9; 1982a: 39 for comparative material from other Solomon contexts and Vanuatu). Reflecting on Melanesian sacrifices, some basic points should be emphasized. First, transactions between humans and the spirit-world are usually conceived to be analogous to those between (living) humans. One key reason for this conceptional relationship is the typically 'lateral' or

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'horizontal' character of the 'non-empirical' spirit-order of the cosmos vis-a-vis mortals (Lawrence and Meggitt 1965: 9-12; Lawrence 1984: 1-4, 200-03). Far from being awesomely transcendental, spirit-powers constantly impinged on human affairs in a variety of observable (and, thus, temporarily 'empirical') forms, in the dancing of masked figures, the tone of sacred flutes, the noise in the dark, the call of a bird, the howl of dogs, luminescent fungus, fireflies, surfacing fish, snails, the silence of sacred stones, or the eeriness of glades, cemeteries, and higher, uninhabited terrain (Trompf 1979c: 123). Through special experiences and the environment, then, these agencies were understood to make their 'reality' and 'interest' known, and so elicited the reciprocal responses of humans. The dead, moreover, especially those whose names and roles within recent generations remained within group memory, were not normally thought to be beyond the ambience of ongoing reciprocations and exchanges. Each culture was bound to have its own methods for acknowledging and identifying spirit involvement (see chapter 3), and thus its own cultural repertoire for appropriate response (cf. Mbiti 1969 for African parallels). Second, virtually all the Melanesian rites that are sacrificial according to the criteria discussed above, along with other ceremonies, are 'rituals of redress' (see Shorter 1972: 143 on comparable African phenomena). If revenge wars are waged to rectify imbalance and make up for tragic loss; if punishments both physically and socially make up for the damage brought by wrongdoing; if processes of exchange also reflect the relative 'squaring of accounts' or the 'making good' of debts, sacrifices are also redressive and restorative. Something needs to be set right, remedied, repaired, or balanced out; and, because the distress, damage, grievance, abuse, or unevenness involves the spirit—not just the human order— sacrifices 'capture' and 'affect' the totality of interactions conceived to apply in the appropriate situations. They are as crucial as any related phenomena for reinforcing retributive logic; for, persons who have once found sacrifice useful in the removal of anxiety, will feel insecure for rejecting similar procedures whenever the threat of the same old problems seem to loom (Homans 1951: 325). Third, sacrifices are all the more significant as religious data for sucking social, economic, political, and military elements into their 'flames' in moments of impressive Gestalt. It is surely far too one-sided to emphasize the factors of 'destruction' and 'alienation' in Melanesian sacrifice (so Gregory) if that means that the conceptualizations and feelings of the sacrificers themselves (as against a method to distinguish gifts-to-men from gifts-to-god) are going to be obscured (thus, against Gregory 1981: 644-65; cf. Feil et al. 1982: 340-42, 548-49). After all, it was not the killing of victims nor the releasing of certain items from human exchange that were crucial as such in these traditional worldviews (cf. Girard 1977), but

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the readjustments, the relief, the rectifications, the 'pay-offs' that these actions made possible in human or spirit-human relationships. Fourth, care is required in analysing how the phenomenon of humans acting as victims reflects a given grammar of retribution. Certain minor mutilations to the body, as we maintained earlier, were not conceived as punishments. In fact, they might just as easily be deemed sacrifices, that is, actions through which those closest to a recently dead person express their utter sorrow, sometimes to prevent the deceased turning malevolent, sometimes vicariously identifying with the newly departed's suffering. Among the Gadsup, both men and women are known to sever their own first joint of a finger at the loss of a loved child (du Toit 1975: 123), and the practice of self-amputation at lamentations is known from a variety of highland contexts (e.g. Burton-Bradley 1975: 49; Hallpike 1977: 235-36, 245). With the Dani, young girls closest to the deceased were chosen for this finger-joint removal, and since such mutilation was believed 'necessary to placate the ghosts', Heider reckoned it the 'only real sacrifice connected with Dani ritual' (Heider 1979: 125; cf. Barth 1975: 43 for Baktaman practice). Human victims of war and cannibalism were also conceived to be sacrificial victims in various societies. Fiji is best known for the formalization of human sacrifice, slain victims being carried to stone-ringed enclosures, where priests offered the corpses to the deities before they were eaten (Rice 1910: 78; cf. Hocart 1952: 178). The Marind-Anim, on the opposite side of the Melanesian region, have been of great interest for having a rite of human sacrifice that at the same time legitimates anthropophagy. In the secret male cult of Rapa, a young girl was engaged in sexual intercourse by cult members and then thrown into a fire ignited by long red sticks. The victim's bones, painted red, were stored away. The myth concerning the origins of fire was thereby thought to have been enacted, and in the form of a sacrifice meant to perpetuate cannibal raids (van Baal 1966: 118-25, 139-42). Other sacrificial themes include those of 'substitution', or of satisfying sharp pressures for scores against enemies by sacrificing an 'equivalent'. On Malekula, for example, if 'empty stomachs and faint nerves' drove a group to sue for peace, it could actually send one of its number as a (male) sacrifice, to be slaughtered, cooked, and eaten by the enemy (Layard 1942: 599-600, 619-20). A less spectacular yet more poignant instance of this is found with the well-publicized 'peace children' of the Sawi (Irian Jaya), these being given from one group to another as a guarantee against further conflict, with their lives in forfeit if and when relations broke down (Richardson 1974: 38; cf. Lyon 1921: 24-27; Landtman 1934: 103-12 on comparable Kiwai data). And to Iova blood bounty and Waropen ransoms, as related materials, we have already alluded (chapter 1, n. 9). Sometimes human sacrifices seem to have been instituted rather apart from the context

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of war and exchange. The Tung (Madang) sacrificed their first-born daughters to the deities, a practice recalling the ancient Phoenicians (OT: Banaku 1983; cf. Exod. 22:29b, Ezek. 20:25-26). There were doleful fates awaiting females in a variety of procedures connected with death; with girls strangled at the deaths of Efate chiefs (Vanuatu) (Gill in Moss 1925:202-03); Sengseng women killed to accompany their spouses (and occasionally their dead children) to the after-life (Chowning 1974:156), or Lemakot widows of New Ireland strangled and thrown on their husbands' funeral pyres (Biro in Bodrogi 1967). The aged and infirm of Fiji had to be prepared for strangulation if it was necessary for the survival and strength of their people (Cowan 1982: 2). On close investigation these sacrificial forms are not tangential to the workings of reciprocity broadly conceived, since they amount to fulfilled obligations rather than extreme injustices. Lastly, one ought not to forget the sacrifices of heroic behaviour. During the instabilities of pre-contact days a group's defenders were frequently exposing themselves to very serious risks on behalf of others, and in that sense daring deeds, let alone deaths, were accepted as great personal sacrifices. To retrieve the body of a fallen fellow, for example, before it was mutilated or stolen, was an especially hazardous enterprise. It was not anybody's task, and only true (or biological) brothers or the closest friends were likely to persist with such an extremity. Cases are known, too, in which brave men who inadvertently discovered the dead body of an allied tribesman would dispatch themselves rather than leave the impression that they were culpable, in order to avoid a reason for tribal war (Reay 1987b). Somewhat circuitously we have arrived at an important area of research barely touched in anthropological liteature concerning conceptions of love between humans (and between humans and the spirits). Sexual love aside as tangential, our discussion of sacrifice allows us to transcend individual and cultural differences to make a simple yet valid assertion about the role of love in traditional Melanesia. Melanesians lacked 'the concept of the person' in the broad sense, perhaps, since people outside their own families or primary and affinal groups were thought 'less-than-human' in varying degrees. Conceptual equivalents to agape and divine love are also conspicuously absent; for, despite various myths about so-called dema deities or culture heroes who had to die to make the present biocosmic order possible, Melanesians are not known for adoring their deities (Flannery 1979: 16465; Aerts 1983: 418; Prendeville 1983). To forget the role of friendship and special affections, however, would be absurd, and it is sad that, with a few exceptions (Kenneth Read's brilliant book The High Valley being one of them), only a few scientific studies have provided us with relevant insights (Read 1966: 141-246; cf. 1967: 199; Burridge 1957: 177-84). About the actualities of love as caring in Melanesia, we possess only one unusual overview (Mordaunt 1979), by which traditional attitudes of concern, mutual support

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and the fulfilment of obligations within groups are likened to the preChristian Hebrew concept of hesed (kindness, mercifulness). At this point we can perceive how one useful approach towards a distinctly Melanesian definition of love, and one helpful in the dialogue between indigenous religions and Christianity, is to conceive love in terms of personal sacrifice. How much one is prepared to suffer losses on behalf of another, or to take risks, even be willing to give one's life and limb, lends greater precision to the location of love as caring (while bearing in mind the need to distinguish it from hotheadedness for one's side in war or reckless selfmutilation, to 'prove' one's fidelity) (cf. Chowning 1974: 157). Most societies fostered regulations that made sure that group members had to show concern for others ('or else'), so that traditional love as caring or sacrifice was much less a personal moral or spiritual quest than the result of social pressure. A Wain youth (Morobe), for instance, on bringing home his first bird, already knows that failure to share his catch will cause all his subsequent shooting to go awry (OT: Okona 1977). To celebrate hunting achievements among the coastal Arapesh, the hunter would seek to contribute parts of his quarry to as many families as possible in the hamlet. If it could not go around, spare fish, meat, or sago would be added, as a sign to all who should not be forgotten that 'one person's achievement was everybody's' (Berry 1983: 5). We can hardly gloss over such communal sharing, even while admitting that disapprobation and gossip always show up when lack of the sharing spirit is evinced, and should note that in some societies such as the Tulu (Manus north coast), failure to make an attempt to rescue a fallen close comrade on the battleground was actually punishable (in the Tulu case by dreaded shaming) (Moha 1983: 4). The full gamut of recriminatory and reciprocal actions has been run, and it remains now to draw threads together, to show both how positive and negative reciprocities can be interrelated and how they connect with human reflections. We shall do this first by focusing on the moulds of a particular society, demonstrating how the various filaments already isolated can be exemplified in a given concrete case, and then by examining the explanatory and epistemological force of traditional retributive logics.

CHAPTER 3

Integrating and Explaining Significant Events

'Payment' in the form of gifts and sacrifice ostensibly constitutes 'positive' activity to heal breaches brought on by antagonism or unbalanced relations; war and sorcery, by contrast, are exercises of 'negativity' (cf. Gouldner 1960: 161-66; Sahlins 1965: 139-49; 1972: 191; Schwimmer 1973: 6, 111-12). We are now to see how the two profiles of Melanesian life can be juxtaposed and interconnected in a given complex of 'payback logic', so that instead of considering cultural components, one society is analysed in more depth to illustrate the integrative power of retributive principles. Erik Schwimmer has produced an ethnography eminently suited to this purpose, following his research on the Sangara, a mountain Orokaiva group of east Papua. Although Schwimmer's work was undertaken well after contact, he has still been able to educe certain notions of mediation and opposition underpinning the traditional Orokaivan mine (exchange system), and to show how they were key aspects of a coherent understanding. His openness to symbolism, mythological charters, and the various implications of reciprocal activity also allows him to explicate the mine in broadly socioreligious rather than narrowly economic terms. Positive and negative reciprocity interrelated: a case study—Orokaiva Putting it succinctly, the mountain Orokaiva conceive all significant social intercourse to be commenced and maintained by the mediation of gifts, and 'they ascribe all breakdown in social relations to an antecedent breakdown in exchange relations' (Schwimmer 1973: 49). In their oscillating moments of war and peace with surrounding javo wahai (which F. E. Williams [1930: 161-65] translated as 'tribes') war was a time of marauded 128

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gardens and severe food shortage, and peace a time when enough produce made feasts possible. Various myths, especially those concerning the ravaging Totoima (who is eventually revenged for his iniquities, and the primordial devouring of whose subdivided body meant all Orokaiva country would be populated with wondrous speed), indicate that the 'original' norm was peaceful settlement, which was then shattered by a breach of amity—by murder, for example, or theft (Schwimmer 1973: 53, 55, 114-16). The present order of things still reflected the momentous issues in Mo tempore (cf. Eliade 1959: 68-115): a pre-acceptance of the peaceful ideal thus motivated efforts to cease hostilities with neighbouring tribes or to maintain unabated reciprocity within one's own; outrages and wrongfulness, ravaging by the enemy or a spoiling of relationships, on the other hand, called forth revenge and anger when they were due. Attempts at positive reciprocity were most susceptible to a breakdown when the contradictory desires for reparation and revenge were evenly balanced. A truce ceremony (peka), then, when 'two tribes would meet in armed force on some common ground . . . to exchange gifts of pigs and ornaments', could turn out to be another stratagem for killing more enemies (Williams 1930: 166). In any case, if peace negotiations did prove fruitful, and a feast was arranged that would involve one community hosting another, a game of strategy continued in which the hosts, especially, had to balance sacrifice with self-interest. The hosts slaughtered a number of pigs and presented raw taro for the guests, and the latter alone ate and took away the food, but in their generosity, which admittedly implied that it was they who sought forgiveness, the hosts often saw themselves making expiation for being rather too successful in war, and invariably tried to impress the visitors with hospitality so as to put them in debt (Schwimmer 1973: 88, 122, 124, 153; Iteanu 1983). It was Orokaivan wisdom, moreover, to put others under obligation 'as much as possible without suffering undue expense, while at the same time enhancing [one's] own status'. The recipients were sensible to offer their tokens of 'forgiveness' in return, openly removing the spells they had directed against the hosts' gardens to ensure the increase of taro for future feasts (Schwimmer 1973: 48, 60). The forging of alliances, moreover, not only entailed exchanges of 'material' gifts but also reciprocal marriage arrangements and the use of affinal links in negotiation. The first emissaries of the peka were women who had married in, or been captured from the other tribe, and subsequent feasts were normally an occasion for marriage negotiations. Marriage itself opened up avenues of positive reciprocity (cf. Blythe 1986: 802 for this as a common Melanesian theme). A new wife made a gift of a pig to her husband's sister and their relation as sisters-in-law was then marked by the mutual term of address bi (penis); the main gift of husband to wife was access to garden land (its withdrawal denoting divorce); in time, the

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exchange of taro between women (and thus families) would bind newly married females into the security circle and provide the 'starting mechanism' for trading partnerships with outsiders. On the other hand, marriage transactions were often precarious. Because wife-capture and elopement were common and were reckoned retaliatory acts, the giving of the bridewealth (dorobu), even when the result of peaceful transaction, was traditionally a 'payment for anger' to placate for the loss of a member from the group; pigs were sacrificed as the typical 'institutionalized means whereby a negative cycle of reciprocity can be made positive' (Schwimmer 1973: 210, 215, cf. 10, 90-92,113, 118-20,131-36; Williams 1930:135-36,166). Among the coastal Okena (to the northeast of Schwimmer's study), the groom's parents shouted their displeasure at paying so much for a woman, and even though the marriage would usually eventuate, spears were thrown and skirmishes often ensued (OT: Aruga 1979). Williams documented similar struggles among the Orokaiva on the occasion of marriage transactions with 'the attempted dragging away of the bride by her people' and 'the damaging of the husband's village' (1930: 149). Marriage illustrated the bi-valency of payback; of taking within an ongoing history of reprisals and of giving in a continuous process of exchange. Above all, (non-human) food as gift and sacrifice is the mediator of positive reciprocity. Taro, especially when cooked and cut, suggests the household hearth, the feminine, the woman's womb and the taro goddess. Its giving not only binds families of the group, but also husbands and wives of particular families, since Orokaivan mythology associated the nurturing of the taro with childrearing. Totoima's wife protected her children from her husband's cannibalism, hiding them beneath the same uprooted weeds used to shelter young taro from the day's heat (Schwimmer 1973: 112-18). Pig, by contrast, denotes masculine virility, or, more generally, ivo (strength, power), an Orokaivan concept crucial for the sense of group well-being and identity. Ivo is ultimately derived from such culture heroes as Totoima and Pekuma, who first bestowed it on mankind (it was from Totoima's dissected body that ivo was given to the ancestors of the tribes for them to multiply). This power is thus connected, on the one hand, with butchered cannibal victims or with any warrior's death (when ivo departs from a person and can be transferred to someone else) and, on the other, with pig sacrifice, which expiates and compensates for losses in battle and marks a (temporary) order of peace to cover spilt human blood. The cutting up of the animal 'victim' 'effectively bestows ivo on guests, provided that they carry the meat away with them, and also upon the hosts, provided that they remove the debilitating influence of any deleterious magic' (Schwimmer 1973: 147; cf. 63-64, 69-70, 144). As for the killing of enemy victims (especially those from outside one's own grouping or confederacy, who were the objects of cannibalism), this also carried sacrificial

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implications. All acts of open inter-group homicide, in fact, even those between members of different tribes within the same wider grouping, were meant to see a transference of ivo, of power from the slain to the slayer. The victim was to give his killer his name, and tell something about himself. Among the Orokaivan Jaua on the coast, it has been shown, the captive or likely victim spurted out all he could tell about himself as quickly as possible, sometimes going through the finest detail as a last embarrassment and taunt against the enemy (OT: Jojoga 1983). To die well was a great sacrifice on behalf of one's own tribe, but it was also an event that transferred life to the victor, who would endow the name of his first victim on himself (and of others on his children), and undergo compensatory purification on each slaying to avert a hostile spirit (Schwimmer 1973: 78; cf. chapter 2). The more the interlocking of this world of revenge and exchange are explored, therefore, the more they are found to be underpinned by worldviews that explain them, or to be defended by modi explicandi legitimating them (cf. also Iteanu 1990). This whole sphere of explanation has not been escaping our attention, but it now needs its own special attention. The (negative) will to retaliate and the (positive) will to concede and sacrifice, we have confirmed, are bound up logically, or integrated into coherent logics of retribution. It is very tempting to deem this continual preoccupation with 'costing' or 'give-and-take', in fact, to be central to Melanesian religion broadly conceived (Trompf 1991: 19-21, 51-77), yet our task here remains incomplete if we do not show how this assessment in motion is inextricably linked with the ubiquitous urge to explain human and biocosmic events. Explanations of weal and woe Crises brought on by trouble, sickness, and death represent the most significant events or situations in any society, along with the moments of salvation constituting their opposites. These events, especially those threatening survival, have always required explanation as the basis for practical problem-solving, and it is in the various ways Melanesians accounted for them in terms of rewards and punishments that we find the most complex, most noticeably intellectualized manifestations of retributive logic. Through this, Melanesians developed science, an ordering of thought that prepared them for change and induced them to action. Any attempt to identify this science with 'magic' would inevitably bear superficial results, in arbitrarily confining a society's ideas about cause and effect to a narrow sphere, and in confusing science with technology. This scientia or way of knowing is different from the naturalistic or mechanistic outlook so influential in the West, but not exaggeratedly so. Certainly, Melanesians almost invariably

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asked 'who caused' a given situation rather than 'what', but reference to purposive, personal agencies still has its appropriate place in Western causal thinking and, their culture-specific premises notwithstanding, Melanesians obviously apply reasoning power (or a mixture of logic and intuition) to their problems, just as Westerners do. The old distinction between (primitive) pre-logical and (modern) logical is obfuscating and detracts from our common humanity; it is more productive to differentiate types of knowledge. Gnomic knowledge, for example, which involves the gathering of immediately perceived experiences into proverbial or pithy truths, better describes Melanesian methods than do such terms as 'analysis' or 'inductive reasoning' (cf. Jolles 1930: 156-67). (Socio-)'mythic thought' has its merits too (Leenhardt 1979: 162-65, 195). It betters Lucien LevyBruhl's rather too influential yet surpassable categories—his earlier somewhat denigrating one being 'pre-logical' (1922), and the later rather unsuitable one, 'mystical' (1938)—because it evokes recent, less pejorative analyses of myth as a special mode of human rationality. Interestingly, the Melanesianist Maurice Leenhardt was among the first to approach this truth in ethnographic fieldwork, subsequently questioning Levy-Bruhl's position when at the Sorbonne (Leenhardt 1949: vii-ix; Clifford 1982: 20102; yet cf. van der Leeuw 1937; Hallpike 1976; 1979). The old, unfortunately widespread presumption that 'primitives' are 'more suggestible' than 'civilized moderns' and more credulous and lacking in critical judgement likewise needs radical modification. Actually, the first serious psychological studies of this greater suggestibility were on Melanesians—by Woodworth (1910) on the Torres Strait islanders and Thurnwald (1913, 1924) on the Tolai and Buin—but the approaches were hardly experimental by recent scientific standards (cf. Moelia 1933: 74-77). The most we can now affirm is that accepted cultural preconceptions appear to make Melanesians more accepting of alleged happenings and causal connections that are less likely to be credible to urbanized Westerners. Yet, that comes to very little! In any case readers are here advised to 'bracket' their possible prejudices about the special (some might say psychoticlooking, let alone 'irrational') features of Melanesian thought (Natanson 1973: 57; cf. la Barre 1970: 49), to explore instead how logical relations as traditionalist Melanesians themselves cognized them help account for their own or others' actions (cf. also Bergson 1962: 148-55). Certainly, there is justice in describing Melanesian thought as 'nonnaturalistic', but again let us be cautious. Long ago Malinowski showed of the Trobrianders that magical techniques to prepare for fishing in safe shoals were virtually absent, whereas complex rites existed to guarantee success in dangerous and deep waters (1948: 25-35; 1965: 70,238-39). If such plain pragmatism can show up, notions equivalent to 'natural' or 'accidental' often claimed to be absent from Melanesian thought, have some

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airing also. The Bena feel no anger over the quiet death of an old man or woman; they just acknowledge it as 'natural' or 'fitting' with the ejaculation uyailotol (OTs: Rasinakafa; Futrepa 1973); a Wahgi sees no significance in a slight bruise or stubbing of the toe; for such events 'just happen' (olim erlim) (OT: Worn 1978); and Ann Chowning has claimed of the Sengseng that they hold some deaths to 'occur from natural causes, including disease and accident' (Chowning 1974: 173). In this final part of our discussion, however, we are confronted with logical intricacies that make exhaustive treatment impossible. Confronting special or exceptional circumstances, primal peoples have means of subtly adapting their frames of reference to meet the case, the new situation becoming fully intelligible only when 'the whole story' of 'what happened' has been told in a certain way, with particular nuances and emphasis intimated. Is it so different in the West? To communicate something of this mainly reflective side to retributive logic, I will be deliberately selective in my cultural references—to avoid a method too magpie-like and thinly spread—and I will treat in turn interpretations of trouble, sickness, death and then 'blessings' (such as prosperity, fertility, and success). What follows, let it be clear, is not a general overview of Melanesian epistemologies or of every traditional principle of cause and effect, or of thought-styles revealing the 'common' structures of the Melanesian mind. Our humbler task, rather, is to delineate how Melanesians claim to make sense of critical changes in their lives and their people's fortunes. Although doing this may bespeak an endemic human need for satisfactory responses to basic existential questions, the material surveyed will be but segments of indigenous reflections, not wholes. While the major examples of explanatory type will not be left as disiecta membra, always being related back to the 'payback complex' they are not intended as distillations of 'authentic culture' or a society's 'essential meanings' (cf. Juilleret et al. 1980: 17; 1982: 350; Asad 1979: 623; 1983), but simply documentations of grassroots interpretative repertoires. Trouble and sickness 'Trouble' (pidgin: trabel, wari) is an unfortunately loose (but nonetheless Melanesian) expression to cover a range of difficulties, running from conflict between two individuals (such as relatives or spouses) to patent social disasters (such as famine, war-ravage, volcanic eruptions, or cyclones) that can also bring sickness and death. Collectively, a group may image 'generally adverse circumstances' calling for a response when a sufficient spate of misfortunes (ranging from sickness to their own number on to animals) befalls specific families. Or it may be that trabel as ill-feeling is perceived to be the cause of sickness, with health only being restorable when bad relations are dispelled.

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A Wahgi example will expose the issues to do with this last, more localized, and very typical kind of situation. The seances known among these people have as their prime purpose the resolution of familiar conflicts. A female specialist (golmolk) is the medium for spirit contact; once the darkness comes, with the fire lying extinguished and an attitude of waiting unifying the participants, an audible whistling, which seems to pass through her, conveys messages from the departed relatives. One seance I documented was precipitated by the sickness of a baby girl in the Zagaga tribe (1976), yet the procedures connected the child's condition to a quarrel. The medium's analysis of the situation was very complex, and all the more so because of new post-contact developments in the society. It all started some time before the sick child was born, when A (who was her grandfather) went on a visit to another tribe. While A was away, he left two kinsmen, B and C, in charge of his twin sons, D (who was the sick child's father) and E. Now, at this time D's wife had recently had a son and the payment for the boy was due. (This is a payment made to the wife's kinfolk when the child is formally named, somewhat similar to a brideprice, but considerably less). As arrangements for this celebration were being discussed, C became very angry with D. The reasons for this anger had to do with the nature of the extended family relationship that now arose because B and C had been entrusted with D and E. Because of this relationship, D and E were expected to behave like elder sons and help B's son and C's son. C, however, felt that they were favouring B's son and doing nothing for his own son. D and E had, in fact, just helped B's son to build a house. And now the celebrations for the payment of the child were being discussed in the hamlet where B and his son lived. C was furious, therefore, and all the more so because there were signs of a departure from tradition at the celebration (there was to be beerdrinking). So C boycotted the celebration. And D was deeply disturbed by the fact that C hadn't appeared at the naming of his son. Now, a year after these events, D's second child, the baby girl, was sick. After the whistling of five identifiable relatives during the seance, the golmolk made it plain that D and C should come together to confess their resentments, which in turn had made C's dead relatives cross enough to harm the child. Thus, a sickness had been explained, but also a family quarrel was brought out into the open. Reconciliation was the prescription for the infant's recovery. The need was answered by killing one pig in the bush (kipe kong), in the presence of the interested ancestors, and the subsequent distribution of pork among the parties concerned. As a postscript, though, it should be mentioned that the late arrival of a reconciliatory truckload of beer led to a midnight brawl, which marred the tradition and re-enlivened the conflict (Trompf 1991: 68-69).

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In the above instance trouble did not arise without the involvement of the ancestors, who form part of its explanation. Whereas a Westerner would normally exclude the motivations of the deceased in accounting for some friction, the Wahgi (as most other Melanesian peoples do) count them as primary in many key situations, lying behind visible individuals as invisible causal agents who can move the feelings of the living one way or another. In the domestic 'conflict resolution' that we have just discussed, interestingly, although the existence of ill-feeling between two present and recognizable individuals is not being bypassed or explained away, the reference to these invisible causes enables both parties to avoid losing face by involving a third factor—a non-observable conflict allegedly affecting the child—to urge them into settlement. On the other hand, this sort of appeal to direct spiritual interference has produced some curious rationalizations, especially by those seeking to avoid culpability for their own actions. In a near-contact case, for instance, a worried husband was found asserting, en route to a golmolk, that he had beaten up his wife with the blunt side of his axe because a spirit of the dead or disembodied soul (minman) had made him do so (Luzbetak 1956: 85). Passing on from such domestic, often minor, cases of trouble, to analyse explanations for disasters befalling whole groups, we can expect that the ascription of spirit-powers with destructive tendencies will be all the more apparent. Thus, in the eyes of the Mae Enga, for example, some great loss, successive military defeats, a rise in the death rate of pigs or people, a high incidence of disease such as leprosy or yaws, or serious crop failures will induce a whole clan to perform a collective, emergency ritual to appease the ancestors under the full moon. Such a rare ceremony marks the very opposite to the Wahgi Kongar as the celebration of ancestral blessing even if the same sorts of logical principles apply. Relations within the community of men and spirits demand urgent repair in the Enga case, so that an admission of the ancestral spirits' justifiable payback against the living leads to a propitiatory rite, in which clan-culthouses are renewed, clansmen lavish themselves with plumes and wealth to please the dead, pork is distributed to hunters and visitors (neighbouring groups remaining at peace when this event is on) and the sacred clan-stones known as the 'eggs of the sun' are gently rubbed and smeared with ochre while an 'expert appeals to the clan ancestors to refrain from injuring the living' (Meggitt 1965: 117, cf. 114-18). This is not to say that such apotropaism is absent from more positive celebrations among the Enga or elsewhere; for, a common Melanesian assumption has it that general trouble arises if such rituals are not properly performed. With the Kongar, for instance, certain conditions must be met—intra-tribal relations must be in order, the pigs fat; the moon rightly positioned, the hosts generally well, the central pole of the last bolim fertility house properly recovered from a stream—for the

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Table 1 Aetiologies of typical trouble in select Melanesian traditions Types of trouble Adverse weather drought rainfall (unexpected)

Causes ascribed

Cultures

angry spirits or rainstoppers garden made in spiritplace

Halia (Buka)

Loss losing one's way in the diversion or 'bite' of jungle bush-spirits person's disappearance offended dead (total and unusual) Marriage difficulties adultery barrenness illicit endogamy marriage breakdown wife theft Disasters (actual/potential) village burnt

woman's disappointment with arranged marriage sorcery love magic failure to pay brideprice inter-village love magic

Mengen (New Britain)

Orokaiva, Ioma (Papua)

Narak, Jimi Valley (New Guinea highlands) Buin (Bougainville) Timbe (Morobe) Sursunga (New Ireland) Haku (Buka) Karkar Is. (Madang)

ritual neglect of ancestors Wantoat (Morobe) or enemy sorcery

rewards of the ancestors to be celebrated. And certain details have to be attended to with meticulous care, otherwise there is the danger, as one bolim custodian put it, 'of no fertility in the time ahead' (OT: Munil 1973). Countless illustrations of comparable thinking from the region could be added, although one's eyes should be keen for the many attenuations. Sometimes trouble will be blamed on the ritualists for failing in their placatory measures; the Trobrianders will blame the magician if he does not stop the hurricane, for not remembering the spell correctly, or the rite, or for not having held strictly to the tabus of his profession (Malinowski 1948: 54-55). On the other hand, some rituals going awry would be treated like bad omens, as when smoke from a funeral pyre spread through a Choiseulese village, in spite of the 'priest-chief's command to the fire to "go straight up!"', an anomaly which betokened the ghost bringing trouble and not the specialist's error (Anon, n.d: 3). Then again, general trouble for a group can be associated with poor leadership (as it can in any society). And trouble to a particular leader (the loss of a wife, for example can force him to drop out of a prestigious role, as among the Tauna Awa of the

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eastern New Guinea highlands, because he has failed to manage in a total sense—not deploying his skills and authority to control the forces of destruction as well as those of fertility and wealth (Hayano 1974: 18-26; cf. Lindenbaum 1979: 99). As illustrated in table 1, various kinds of trouble—the failure to pay a brideprice, the burning of a hamlet, lack of success in hunting, the loss of something valuable (perhaps a straying pig), damage to an important item for livelihood (such as a canoe)—may all be initially related back to customarily accepted 'probable explanations'. The explanations listed diagrammatically in table 1 we take as typical, or the ones most likely to be invoked, but without precluding other possibilities being admitted through debate, consensus, or specialists. These explanations are, therefore, those that are normally vocalized initially, after a given set of adverse circumstances has presented itself, and which will satisfy most but not each and every individual case. The characteristic modes of thought reflected, to be sure, remain recognizably steady. They lie with underlying assumptions about the workings of some living (not impersonal or 'natural') agencies, unless these latter have been brought into being by humans or spirits. If human, the pinpointed or alleged causer himself or herself is usually blamed and deemed to deserve a punishment; if a spirit, the causer is understood to have acted justifiably (or defensibly). In this second case, culpability falls on those who bear the brunt of the trouble for having failed to fulfil obligations, take precautions, and so on. The explanations will not always appear so distinctly religious, although that only confirms the need to broaden one's understanding of what religions encompass. What of sickness? Sickness is both a special type of trouble, yet also one possible prelude to death; its association with one or the other depends on the kind of ailment. A wound sustained in war yet subsequently bringing death was usually attributed to sorcery, as we saw with the Bena. A healed wound, or a salvation in the sense of being hit defectively or in a less vulnerable spot, will often be reckoned the work of a protective dead relative, who also assists the healer. A Wahgi warrior, for example, will be told through seances who it was who saved him from a fatal wound or occurrence. In one case I know it was said that the man's dead sister watched over him. She cared as he bled, while the rite called minmanui was performed for him. A fowl was killed so that his soul (minman) could smell animal rather than human blood and be enticed back into his body. A feast of meat always denotes reward and reconciliation for the Wahgi, and to assure the ancestors' intervention when they are most needed. Admittedly, Wahgi tribes used to ascribe their general victory over enemies to a collectivity of ancestors or to the powers behind their sacred stones (chapter 1), but the saving of a wounded man was left to those 'dead ones' closest to him, including the ancestral female nurses (OTs: Wandel, Kumai, 1976).

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As well as wounding and their consequences in military contexts, there were injuries inflicted by one member of a primary group on another (which could be reckoned as a justified act of redress, or else blamed on inciting spirits), and there were minor cuts, bruises, and the like (which, if not passed off as insignificant, could be deemed minor interferences of place-spirits or non-human trickster-figures (e.g. OT: Mond 1973 on the Wahgi). What interests us most at this point, however, are sicknesses that amount to the failure of the bodily processes, though without denying that some sorry ailments, such as tropical ulcers, may derive from small lacerations or bites of the skin. Classifications of sickness vary with each society. In some the medical tradition is rich indeed, as was shown of Fiji early on by Dorothy Spencer (1941), when she produced the first serious monograph on a traditional Melanesian medical system, and later of other cultures such as the Papuan Motu (Kopi 1979), the Gnau, and other Sepik groups (Lewis 1975: 154-330; Mitchell 1982: 7-11), the highlander Gimi and Huli (Glick 1963; Goldman 1981; Frankel 1986), and the islander Mengen and Moli (Panoff 1970; Foye 1976). In such cultures causal explanations vary more considerably than elsewhere, and diagnosis becomes a veritable art. Not that explanatory simplicity signals cultural inferiority, since any society's tendency to complexify one area of thought as against another has to do with the 'ecology of the religion' as a whole. Certain groups scattered as wide apart as the eastern Toaripi (coastal Papua), the Bosavi, the Bena, the cultures around Dreikikir and beyond (in the Sepik), hold all fatal sicknesses to be the work of sorcerers and the spirit-forces they conjure up, yet among these peoples the arts of sorcery identification, let us say, or group reflection on the dead person's life and his associates are far from simple (cf., e.g., Koroti 1974; Siaoa 1976; Schieffelin 1977: 58-59, 101-09; Minda 1983: 5). Among the Wahgi, to return to our most used exemplar, one finds that the explanatory emphasis is less on the precise details of the illnesses than on the spirit-powers likely to have caused any of them. The magicians share a code of medical knowledge that connects certain states of sickness with at least twelve mostly harmful 'wind'-spirits (kangekes) out of a total of sixteen such beings (see table 2). They must also take into account that, although the ancestors are basically friendly, the recently departed are easily offended through lack of respect or tabu breakage (as golmolk seances reveal), and that sorcerers can be behind the channelling of malevolent powers. They have 'classes of causes', then, somewhat similar to the Gnau (according to Gilbert Lewis's intricate analysis), but while the Wahgi have many more spirits to be concerned about, Gnau medical lore is much richer in connecting specified spirits' activities with various foods they care for, and also with animals and clan linkages (1975: 171, 174, cf. 1980: 136-37).

INTEGRATING AND EXPLAINING SIGNIFICANT EVENTS Table 2

Wahgi kangekes ('wild spirits')

Name of spirit kupel kondol mondo tinma kora kangenji toipal kangenanu hump arimp bang hum kolang barimp jingan wim

139

Symptoms stomach ache fever one-night fatal fever shivering to death, with delirium fever with dream visitations of the spirit at night harmless; whistles and passes by at dusk, but does no good body scars appearing yet without physical injury inflicted same effect as kupel, but spirit lives in the mountains only bush spirit; exceptional for being harmless stomach ache and chest pain swelling along with stomach ache; bush spirit harmless mountain spirit (diff. fr. sorcery) harmless mountain spirit stomach ache and chest pain (but definitely different spirit from arump) same effect as tinma but operates in valleys only picks up discarded food and makes the discarder get fatter or thinner unto death

With so many kangekes to take into consideration in the Wahgi case, the magician as diagnostician operates on the assumption that one of them has caused the sickness, until consultation procedures reveal otherwise. They possess various techniques for probing beneath the surface; the kunjeyi could set some sweet potatoes before the patient, for instance, piercing them with a sharp stick, posing alternatives before each prod, and deciding on the answer by the softness or toughness of a given tuber. In every case the final reason concerns a spirit agency, and pig(s) of appeasement would require killing (with a payment of pork and valuables made to the magician). Curing was not just a matter of bodily but also total change to the better, and of driving out a malignant oppressor. A demon threatens a victim, it is believed, because the latter has intruded on his realm or met him in the dark, while a dead relative's reprisals follow either negligences at his or her funeral and in group remembrance or wrongs against living persons he or she continues to love. Comparable themes and beliefs will be found in every Melanesian tradition I know. In analysing the 'syntax' of any retributive logic, especially in its application to sickness, one should never neglect the consensus norms and the manner in which the young are warned not to trespass against them. Mention has already been made of that class of causes behind sickness to do with the reprisals of the dead—if they are angered or if a community rule has been violated. In everyday community affairs it was hardly uncommon for behaviour considered offensive to the ancestors and rule-breakages

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to be picked up by the elders and, thus, punishments openly exacted by the living. There were certain rules in some societies, after all, that could only be broken in public. On Tanga Island, for instance, one would face the death penalty for refusing; to bow before the Kahltu dok (or sub-clan leader), or for not sitting on a platform that was below his.1 But in many cases in all societies, offences were committed that might go undetected by the group or punitive authority, and it was typically assumed that the dead—whose presumed existence helped cultivate the 'Melanesian conscience'—would act in their own right to requite wrongdoers. Advice to the young not to do certain things, then, often took into account that there were various misdemeanours that could be enacted privately, yet would merit retribution via sickness—or 'the punitive aspect of disease' as F. E. Williams puts of Lake Kutubu thought (1976: 259)—if they lay unexposed. This is not to say that there were not other tabus or strictures, however, the breaking of which did not so much bring punishment as horror and annoyance, as well as the fear and belief that such violations or pollutions would incur subsequent ill-health. Sexual intercourse constitutes the classic example of a (normally) concealed action that could result in trouble. It was held in most cultures that a member of a war-party put himself and others in peril if he was involved in sexual activity before battle. But, depending on the culture and circumstances, badly timed or wrong engagement in such activity was also believed to bring on sickness. Elders among the Mengen, to illustrate, taught young men that sexual intercourse, forbidden to them before marriage, would lead to slackened skin and premature ageing (OT: Mordaunt 1979; cf. also Minda 1983: 7 on the Warn), and typical would be the Bosmun attitude to such matters (in the lower Ramu River valley) in keeping adolescent and unmarried boys and girls away from each other through custom and surveillance (OT: Kapi 1983). It is always useful to discover, however, whether a given group differentiated between sexual actions that were questionable within the security circle, the carrying out of which would augur sickness or punishment, and those same actions done out of sheer bravado against enemies. Various cultures expected male adolescent bands to spend time in mobile isolation before initiation and marriage, and if any one of them happened to rape an enemy woman it was more than likely to be accepted by the elders as a useful though rather reprehensible experience (e.g. Williams 1940: 78-79, 82; Mead 1930: 154). Apart from such cases, however, and setting aside those cultures (such as that of the Trobriands) in which a measure of premarital sexual freedom was allowed (Malinowski 1927: 1

The Kahltu dok was not strictly a chief, that is, leading by hereditary right, but had the power to choose his successor from among his sister's sons (Funmatloau 1983: 2, cf. Bell 1934).

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195-200), sexual transgressions within the primary group—above all, adultery and incest—had spirit, not just human, sanctions against them. With the Tangu, for example, such misdemeanours were often followed by an alleged encounter with a ghost, the man involved thus being induced to confess what happened to a friend or elder, in order to avoid the sickness that followed such undiscovered events (Burridge 1973: 98). As for masturbation, in various societies—I can think of the Negrie for one— elders warned youths that it would impair the health and seriously reduce one's chances of growing into a strong warrior (OT: Gesch 1979). Hardly need one be reminded that it is helpful to learn the nature and role of the spirit-agencies held to cause sickness in any given society, especially because some are quite distinct from offended dead or from malicious spirits such as some of the Wahgi kangekes previously discussed. Occasionally one finds gods whose roles are particularly concerned with ethics and the punishment of rule-breakers. The Huli, for instance, talk of Datagaliwabe, a great being independent of the dama deities or demigods. Datagaliwabe's 'special province' was to punish 'breaches of kinship', to penalize 'lying, stealing, adultery, murder, incest, breaches of exogamy,... taboos relating to ritual... [and failure] to avenge the deaths of kin slain in war' (Glasse 1965: 37). His punishments included sickness, along with accidents, wounds, and death. If we are to press the investigation further, however, querying whether the 'real gods' of a society are in fact its 'disease-makers', as Frazer put it (1922: vol.1, 341), we would be forced to admit that some explanations for sickness in virtually all Melanesian religions place the stress less on the role of spirits and much more on the malevolence of some human (usually a sorcerer) or a special contagion or 'pollution'. On closer inspection, admittedly, it will usually be found that sorcerers putatively rely on an ability to summon and direct spirit-agencies to do their service, and pollution is more than often said to arise from the breaking of a tabu with which spirits have a crucial interest (Douglas 1966: 114-36; Meigs 1978). Sorcery will be returned to again (under the heading of death, since fatal sicknesses are so often ascribed to it). It remains true, however, that many serious illnesses (especially those from which people are not expected to recover!) are attributed to sorcery attack. Poole (1981: 62-63) estimates, for instance, that up to 11 per cent of traditional 'aetiological suspicions in the case of serious illness' among the Bimim-Kuskusmin (west Sepik hinterland) pinpoint sorcery, a significant datum quite apart from whether there has been an increase in the enactment and fears of sorcery in the area since contact (chapter 7). It was held among the Tor (Irian Jaya), to take another example, that although lethal sorcery was very rarely directed inwardly, 'against one's own deme- [or clan]-fellow', milder sick-bearing sorcery (soeangi) was more often thought to be traceable to someone near

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at hand, since anyone could be a soeangi practitioner and so take out a personal grievance (Oosterwal 1961: 265-66; cf. A. Strathern 1984a: 86-87; and 1984b: 34 on the Wiru). As for pollution, sickness was normally connected with it when persons or things that should otherwise be kept widely separate were somehow brought into contact. Pollution, it follows, could be one device of sorcery, because, as among the Tor just mentioned, a sorcerer could pick as his poison some substance (such as female menstrual blood) that was believed to be devastating for menfolk to touch or eat. In the main, though, notions of sickness consequent upon pollution apply to cases in which people fail to take proper precautions, or in which they are unfortunate enough to expose themselves to the 'dangers' of contamination. Fear of women's menstrual blood is apparently the most prevalently enunciated fear of contagion in Melanesia, and not infrequently associated with it are male beliefs that the very sight of blood from the vagina or of a child being born could bring debilitation, serious back pains, weakening of the limbs, etc. (cf. Lindenbaum 1973). But it should be remembered that males may become highly contagious as well. A Roro who has touched a corpse, perhaps not using some protective banana leaf at the mortuary rites, is likely to be placed under a fast or special diet by the chiefs (Trompf and Aitsi, fieldnotes at Rapa village, 1974). A Tolai initiate or member of the Dukduk secret society is highly charged with dangerous spirit-power if he has just come from the Tariau (the society's sacred space ringed with dried coconut palm leaves); he must purify his body with special lime, especially for the sake of women, and must eat from a banana leaf carefully set aside until his condition has passed (ToBata 1983:1). Sickness follows contamination because a tabu has been broken, and the delict must necessarily be requited unless purification techniques are available. Along with the retributions of the dead, deities and other spirits, then, and the reprisals of sorcerers and witches, pollution can be appealed to as yet another form of payback affecting human health. An introductory approach to this area of aetiology and epistemology has been sketched out in table 3. It indicates for the lay reader where the balance of explanatory emphases lies over a random sample of cultures, even though the intricacies of each culture's system are not shown, and the varieties of sick-bearing spirit-agencies—sky beings (of the Trans-Fly), sea spirits (of the Massim), and so forth—not exhausted. There are many other considerations worth exploring, however, when detailed work can be done. One would like to know, for instance, whether the reckoning with possible causes of sickness in a given culture has something to do with the human urge to satisfy curiosity—the 'need for the intellectual life to be fulfilled', as Levi-Strauss would have it (1972: 1-10, cf. Durkheim and Mauss 1969: 10-15, 27-30)—and, thus, with a certain interest in classifying

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Table 3 Aetiologies of sickness in select Melanesian traditions Sickness Head headache headache (serious) Throat cough

Typically alleged cause

Culture

someone else's personal jealousy ancestors warning

Tolai Taiora

hit by an offended ancestral spirit on the head

Bosmun

attack by ghosts of recent dead

Taiora

cough (bad)

inadvertently dropping food near the Mengen holes of allegedly non-eating crabs

throat blockage

sorcery put in food

Bosmun

eating ancestrally forbidden fruit

Orokaiva (Ion

consuming a 'wild spirit' of a wild taro sorcery

Tolai

stomach ache

trespassing on place-spirit's ground

Lamassa

sharp pain (stomach, head)

ancestral anger on the clan of the sufferer for not paying attention to the ancestors personal enemy's (imitative magic) throwing of a spear

Ponam

right-sided chest pain

forest- or water-spirit angered

Motu

malnutrition

sorcery

Halia

Abdominal pains etc. stomach upset/ vomiting swollen stomach

side pain

Skin ailments (tropical) skin ulcer

Buin

Koitabu

eating forbidden fruit

Haku

grile skin rash

passed on from past generations (by ancestors)

Sursunga

boils

trespassed into place-spirit's ground

Haku

return of 'wild spirits' of the bush (in cycles) sorcery, or possession by angry ancestors enemy's 'real poison' (sorcery) angry ancestor or 'wild spirit', if eating strong-smelling food or whistling in the vicinity of the ancestor's grave or spirit's swamp

Malala

Fevers malaria

Haku Taiora Narak

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Table 3 (cant) Sickness

fever

Typically alleged cause

Culture

trespass on place-spirit's ground ghost of the recent dead bent on capturing a soul seasonal changeover brought by wind (spirit) enemy sorcery grievance of a particular ancestor

Mengen Sursunga Malala Taiora Biwat

Lower parts of the body etc. diarrhoea eaten food jumped or walked over Wantoat by a bigman, magician, sorcerer, rainmaker, uncle, cousin or swollen legs (and/or abdomen)

Mental problems in adults unconsciousness

restlessness

dizziness insanity

stepped on, or jumped over something sorcelized trespassed on place-spirit's ground, or stole something

Bosmun

spirit (tutana virakit) forcing a face-to-face encounter person's spirit roaming and evil spirit preventing its return

Tolai

trespassing on the ground of 'place-spirit', which takes hold of the person's spirit angry ancestors looking at you directly in the eyes past wrongdoing, or sorcery sorcery, or a place spirit attack on an isolated person possession by evil or 'wild' spirit

fits Women's stigmas menstruation barrenness deformed child at birth Eve of contact illnesses influenza tuberculosis

Sursunga

Karkar Is. Tolai

Bosmun Hula, AromaVelerupu Tolai Biwat

consumption of a betel nut special to a wild spirit

Tolai

birth of the new moon sorcery

Karkar Is. Wantoat

pregnant mother ate ancestrally forbidden fruit

Karkar Is.

angry ancestors send evil spirits

Timbe

tabu breakages

Malala

INTEGRATING AND EXPLAINING SIGNIFICANT EVENTS

145

things. One would like to know of the relative pull of such concerns, even though aetiologies are applied and reflected upon out of a practical need to decide who is doing the paying back, and whether sacrifices, compensatory gifts, punishments or retaliations are required. Of vital additional value would be insights into the nature of a given language, as to whether terms referring to sickness and its causes relate to wider retributive issues. Among the Huli, for example, illness is a source of metaphor for talk about hostilities and reciprocities; actions and words can be said to 'poke the heart', to illustrate, and the term for compensation or indemnity is the very same one used to mean recovery from sickness (dabi) (Goldman 1981: 57-58). The focus has thus far been on various reasons given why sickness befalls individuals. Yet we hasten to add what has been hinted all along, that local modi explicandi are integrally related to diagnostic, divinatory, and healing techniques. The explanatory plot will tend to thicken, naturally, when questions have to be asked as to why a patient continues to be sick or why his soul continues to wander from his body after initial assessments, healing, or anti-sorcery techniques, or placatory rites have been carried out. The researcher must therefore seek to learn how treatment fits in with aetiological thinking, looking to see whether specialists are prepared to set aside one technique or medicinal herb for another, or ready to find new causes to blame (perhaps an undetected sorcerer, perhaps an unconfessing patient), or whether they are just as likely to fly into a rage for having failed (cf. Chalmers in LMS 1884: 7 on Motuan healers). It would also be important to learn whether more store was set by the correct performance of the healing or apotropaic rituals than by the attitudes of the wouldbe curer(s) and their supporters or by the contribution of the sufferer; and 1 know of no researchers who have found whether, among the concerned relatives who surround a seriously sick person, there are notions of death as a kind of 'fate' that eventually befalls every individual, quite apart from the fatal illnesses.2 Death Death, the profoundest of all life's mysteries, evokes a variety of profound Melanesian responses. In terms of retributive logic, these tend to fall into three general categories: general explanations for humanity's mortality, explanations of specific deaths, and beliefs about the condition of the dead. Each will be discussed in turn. Who gets the blame for humankind's mortal condition quite expectedly varies across the Melanesian board. To bring disparate mythological 2

cf. also factors for research, e.g., the psychology of fear (Metais 1967: 131-96; Herdt and Stephen 1989) and of contagion (Fastre 1937: 188), the role of self-blame (e.g. Boelaars 1981: 116), and the practical changing of medicines (Schwimmer 1973: 75). See also Worsley 1982.

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material together, however, it is fair to claim that blame is most commonly assigned to humans themselves, even though death may only become a reality when some higher power pays back human beings. Thus, according to the Erave (northwest Papuan Gulf), a sky-being bestowed the gift of immortality on the snake because people had not been patient enough to help him out of the predicament of being suspended between sky and earth (OT: Posu 1977). Humanity pays for its neglect. For the Daribi (south Chimbu), death resulted from a curse by Sau (a culture hero, not a god), who was ashamed after frightening a woman by penile penetration (Wagner 1972: 36-37). Death as a consequence of the first sexual intercourse is the meaning of the Genesis-like Wahgi myth about the first two people, Taimel Dam and Taimel Mam, who could wish for any food to come to them without exertion, until their sexual union brought labour, difficulty, and disease (OTs: Yeki, Kanangl 1976). No punishing spirit is mentioned in this myth, yet it is the woman of the two who is most responsible, for she accused Taimel Dam of laziness and wanted 'to do hard work' (= sexual intercourse, and also childbirth, in parabolic language). A more metaphysical-looking myth with much the same meaning (and anti-female implication) comes from the Mae Enga. Only the sky people had drunk from the Creator Aitawe's 'water of life' (yalipu endaki) in primordial time, and so obtained food and opulence without toil. When they colonized the earth they attempted to supply this precious liquid to humans, but 'Alas, . . . the mothers gave their newborn breast milk, and thereafter all the burdenless accoutrements of the sky world were, of necessity, exchanged for the care and toil known to the earthling' (Brennan 1977: 16). In a spirit rather more comparable to Genesis again, to cite another example, the Kapauka put the blame for mortality on a man of violence and 'bad behaviour'. The creator God Ugatame was once partly in the form of a young girl who was raped by this man in the Kapaukas' main valley. 'Because you are bad, beating and raping people', she castigated, as she gave the man a piece of wood, 'I give you flies, death and darkness. You take It' (Pospisil 1958: 16). Whatever the many variations, the imputing of culpability and acknowledgements of death as either appropriate or unfortunate retribution are widespread in Melanesia, as well as most primal mythologies of the world (cf. Staudacher 1942: 43-44; Schmitz 1960: 25356; Godelier 1972: 200 on the cosmic separation motif). In cosmoi in which spirits can die (and be avenged), the world of the gods above is capable of collapsing and killing all below, as in Bukaua understanding of eclipses as portended deaths of mighty beings (Lehner 1930: 31, 111-12; Aerts 1983: 21; cf. van Nieuwenhuijsen-Riedman 1975:114-16 on the Suki; Meggitt 1977: 63, 65 on the Enga). Specific deaths, like particular sicknesses, are almost always the results of payback—of sorcery, the enemy (usually with sorcery's help), the

INTEGRATING AND EXPLAINING SIGNIFICANT EVENTS

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vengeful dead, disturbed masalai, or of a wrathful person driven by a power beyond himself. Admittedly, the members of one security circle or tribe have little interest in earnestly exploring the rationale behind the deaths of outsiders or enemies. If some happen to be captured or taken into the group, moreover, their death at the hands of either captors or temporary hosts will normally not need reflective interpretation (cf., e.g., Barth 1975: 147). Both dying and disease among one's own people, however, are almost invariably the subject of serious efforts at interpretation or divination. This is not to say that deaths or diseases among one's own primary group are always considered the result of unfair, unfortunate, or undeserved retribution. On the contrary, some people fairly beg for reprisal through their offensive actions, and if any such annoying individuals are thought to have been brought to heel by sorcery then this provides a reason for accepting sorcery as a useful part of the social system (chapters 1, 7), or a reason for not striving to kill any witch or sorcerer in one's vicinity. Thus, a death can be seen to result from a person's misdemeanours, a failure to keep tabus (for which, of course, he or she may be directly killed by his or her own people), the breaking of social ties, wandering foolishly in dangerous places or across battle lines, and so on, and any one of these may be identified as the real cause (or as tru as it is in pidgin). But most commonly, particularly when a sickness ends in fatality, thoughts wandered in the direction of outside, enemy sources of spiritual revenge. In all Melanesian cultures people still discuss likely causes of a death for days, and it is normally very important for a group to arrive at a conclusion that embodies a 'consensus view' (see table 4).3 Perhaps the kinds of distinction demanding our astuteness here concern the possible conceptual differences between rule-keeping and moral qualities. Will a person's personality or special faults count for more than that person's possible infringement of rules when it comes to explaining his/her death? And will it be much more likely for a prestigious person's death to be blamed on outside factors and not on his or her own mistakes? How a group answers these questions is crucial for its members and for their relations with other groups, as well as being grist to the mill for any student of culture or religion. As revealed in the first chapter, many consensus explanations for death in Melanesia result from post-mortem divinatory techniques, yet these procedures more often than not make more specific what has already been decided in principle, and it now becomes the task of identifying the village originating sorcery, let us say, or perhaps even the sorcerer in particular. 3

For help with the survey behind tables 1, 3 and 4,1 thank Beka Aisak, Cornelius Bagomas, Yatosa Binot, Louise Kawei, Cathy Kingkei, Ellie Markuas, Ahne Masina, Mirian Mileng, Paul Momong, Mary Nianfop, Lilian Takoi, Afito Unero and Ties Watts. For table 4 I injected some material from Burton-Bradley and Julius (1965: 22-25). cf. also Williams 1936: 254-55 (Keraki, Trans-Fly); Young 1971: 136-37, cf. 90-91 (Massim).

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Table 4 Aetiologies of death in select Melanesian traditions (Deaths other than those resulting from fighting) Type of death

Typically alleged cause

Culture

jealousy (from a man who could not marry the mother)

Karkar Is.

death in childbirth

cause of one woman's jealousy of childbearer, or result of evil done towards deceased in-laws

Narak (fringe Wahgi)

sudden death when young

stepping over a sorcery plant

Tolai

or haunted by a ghost

Siwai

sorcery

Susunga and Karkar Is.

accident

witches

Malala

fall (from tree or height)

sorcery, or dead relative caused a slipping

Halia and Tolai

drowning (jumping in water unexpectedly)

sanguma sorcery attack

Bosmun

ancestral anger

Ponam

enemy using spirits, i.e. sorcery

Mengen

sorcery

Bosmun

Children's deaths stillborn child

Sudden and unexpected deaths sudden death

object falling on victim from above Death by non-human creatures death by snakebite wild pig bite (during hunt)

Narak spirit-protector of wild pigs angry; too many have been killed and hunter has failed to seek prior ancestral protection broken tabu by sleeping with wife Orokaiva (Ioma) prior to hunt

shark crocodile Severe internal pains prior to death terrible pain in the stomach or heart (= variang) pig-bel (disease from eating badly cooked pork)

sorcery sorcery

Lamas: Bosmu

sorcery (poisoned substances) entering the body

Tolai

flaunting rules of the deities

Haku

sorcery

Malala

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149

Table 4 (cont.) Type of death Exhaustion etc. death following a dance

Suicide suicide

Old age ordinary old age Special classifications death after a very prolonged illness

distinctly strange deaths

Typically alleged cause

Culture

'breaking a string' (= akukubu), because of sorcery, or failure to put on protective power worn by dancers (mainly for winning a woman)

Tolai

shame shame and/or unfaithfulness wife is beaten, and she is incited to kill herself by her dead relatives evil spirit sent by enemy caused by ancestors who also died by suicide and want company worry

Sursunga Tolai Wantoat

'natural'

Malala and Mengen

ancestral or place-spirit annoyance sorcery

Tolai

breakage of ancestral tabus

Tolai

Karkar Is. Malala Biwat and Bosmun

Lamassa and Haku

Such techniques vary widely. We have already noted the collective Mendi dream sessions on mountain-tops in the southern highlands (in chapter 1). Other procedures include: payback runners, as among the Bena(bena), Wantoat and others, which we have long since discussed; clairvoyantdivinatory gifts of prophetesses or ga'in of Murik Lakes (Tamoane 1981); group-holding of a diviner's log among the Nalik, Mengen and in other coastal and island New Guinea settings, in which the log allegedly jumps this way and that, eventually pointing its way towards the sorcerer's hamlet (Maralis 1981: 26-30; Trompf 1991: 95, 103), and so forth. In one electrifying lecture the Motuan scholar Sibona Kopi (1983) added to our knowledge of these matters when he described how, as a mere novice and just wishing to understand his own people better, he went to the cemetery at night with

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PAYBACK: TRADITION'

a small group of kinsfolk after his sister's death. Upon meditating for a half-hour, he claimed, he heard the sound of a twig snapping beneath the ground, felt the atmosphere chilling off around him as if he were 'in an air-conditioned room', and found his visual field turn topsy-turvy. Out of a 'swirl' before him appeared his sister, naming the specific sorcerer who killed her. It is a name that Sibona, as a Christian and as a public servant in the 'modern' capital of Port Moresby, refuses to disclose. Yet his recounting of the vivid experience, together with the way he handled the hyper-critical questions of his largely Western audience (who kept asking him whether he was on drugs!), makes one wonder whether outsiders have underestimated the capacity of Melanesians to arrive at very specific answers to questions about sorcery, and to that extent be less indiscriminate about their traditional revenge activity than has ordinarily been supposed. To conclude this section, it will be useful to make brief comments on Melanesian beliefs about the after-life. I have written in some detail about these elsewhere, distinguishing between those peoples who conceive rewards and punishments to be dispensed in the next world and those with alternative models (1979c: 132-34; 1991: 44-46, 73). There are only a few Melanesian belief-systems with ideas of both a 'heaven' and a 'hell'. The Erave, for instance, held that all warriors who died on the battle-field, and women who devoted their lives to supporting them, would proceed after death to live in a (heavenly) red place with the sky-people. Those who died in any other fashion, as well as uncooperative wives, were doomed to an earthly brown 'hell' where they forever felt estranged (OT: Posu 1977, cf. Seeman 1862:401; Erskine 1867:248 on Fijian parallels). Such comparability with Christian conceptions, however, is very rare, and in any case the military frame of reference makes the Scandinavian Valhalla (with its Celtic and Vedic analogies) a better correspondence than the Christian 'heaven' and 'hell'. A rough comparison may be drawn between Erave and Huli notions, perhaps: even though the Huli have very hazy ideas about the ultimate destiny of most people, they insist that the ghosts of slain warriors go to Dalugeli, 'a celestial resting place' worthy of their valour (Glasse 1965: 30). But traditional pictures will vary enormously, perhaps because in most cases they are primarily meant to validate the known order of the living, and are not conscious exercises in metaphysics. Sometimes the retributive implications are striking. Many of the highlander Chimbu buried recognizably wicked people away from the ancestral places (Nilles 1977: 83); the eastern Motu, on the coast, if we can accept the reliability of early missionary evidence, believed the 'good' to proceed to the land of plenty in the Gulf, while 'worthless fellows' remained at Poava and Udia, small islands near Boera, waiting for the goddess Kaivakuku to have mercy (Chalmers in LMS 1880:19; cf. Trompf 1991: 44-45,50). On Wuvulu Island

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(at the fringes of Melanesia) the unworthy dead had to eat the waste of the blessed in a dripping-pit hell until the puala spirits were satisfied they had been punished enough (Lagerkrantz 1980: 3). In these cases the next world involves rewards and punishments befitting one's early performance. In most others, however, the ethical connection is clearly absent. According to the Wahgi, for instance, all dead persons will find themselves in much the same situation, in spite of the fact that they will carry their personality traits (some of which are inimical) with them, and in other societies where notions of reincarnation may be found, they are not tied in with any doctrine of karma (Lawrence and Meggitt 1965: 11). Some peoples talk of double souls, the wild one returning to the bush and the preferred one proceeding to the spirit world (Fischer 1965; Jachmann 1969). For the Roro, to take yet another view, one could not share in the peace available by the sea at Cape Possession if one had come to some hideous, unexpected end (being speared from behind, or being taken by a crocodile); for the Muju or Woodlark islander (Papua), by comparison, arrival at the paradisal Turn depended on the skill with which one rode the primordial serpent across the sea, and on bearing the right tattoo marks around one's arm, not on right behaviour or the nature of one's death (Trompf 1979c: 132-33). Salvation from adversity: experience of blessing and well-being Trouble, sickness, and death can be eluded, and it is quite admissible to use the terms 'salvation' and 'redemption' to denote the physical escape from such adversities, especially since most usages in the Bible, the body of texts most associated with these terms, refer to salvation very concretely as deliverance from enemies, from death (or the pit of Sheol), grave difficulties, and the like. Only limited research has been undertaken on this topic; yet, enough exists for one to assert that fortunate and unforeseen freedom from trouble and danger is almost always attributed to invisible spirit powers (cf. Hviding 1988: 37; Mawe 1989: 44-45). The dead relatives closest to the person involved, and considered most mindful of his welfare, are the most popularly recognized source of succour. Still, the role of the powers handled by magicians in war, and of war-gods themselves, is not to be forgotten, while certain cultures, the Fuyughe for one, believe the separate territories of each tribe are guarded by wary protector spirits (sila), who are likely to harass or kill trespassing raiders who try to use the wilder, rugged terrain as a route for an ambush (Trompf 1981a: 14). Whether or not there have existed types of 'thankofferings' to the spirits for their aid or for unexpected liberation, however, is not easy to say in general terms, so neglected has this topic been in ethnography. Certainly, healers were paid for their services, but they usually received them in advance of results,

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just as the many offerings and sacrifices we have already discussed were normally much more important in themselves than any follow-up rites or gifts—if their placations happened to work. (If they did not work, it would either be assumed that the rituals had not been performed properly and should be repeated, or that another ritual or solution should be found.) When there was experience of benison and security, however, especially when shared corporatively, then group pressures would arise to celebrate and to test prestigious magnanimity with other groups. In this sense great festivals of generosity and extensive involvement in exchange, as well as the signs of commanding, Virtuous' leadership (e.g. Hau'ofa 1971: 165-66; cf. Clastres 1976), betoken confidence in spirit-powers for their support, and thus an explanation for success in terms of rewards they bring to the material world from beyond visibility. To capitalize upon the reflections of Gernot Fugmann (1977: 124-25), salvation in a Melanesian context means that the contractual relations between human and human, humans and the other forces, are 'cupped together' or held in a unity and harmony against disintegration. The very experience of this is what makes for happiness and exhilaration; the group experience of a joint sense of wellbeing is crucial in actualizing, let alone motivating, the collective celebration of 'blessing' (cf. Bergmann 1974; Loeliger 1977). In all their manifoldness, however, the world of Melanesian explanations is of less interest when isolated from such expressions of negative and positive reciprocity we introduced in chapters 1 and 2; for, these explanatory modes are inseparable from the mental activity that measures losses against gains and decides either to retaliate or to concede. Explanations determine 'costing', and it is precisely because of the way one views the known order that one tends to follow certain courses of action. On the other hand, retributive logic might seem only to cover a bundle of reasons for paying back others, either with hostility or friendship, until one perceives these reasons to be utterly interlocked or commensurate with modes of explaining significant events. It is no longer feasible to argue that Melanesians kill enemies just to survive or to satisfy either their aggressive urges or their yen for strategy. It is no longer defensible to claim that Melanesians trade and exchange gifts out of what some Westerners term 'purely economic or political' motives. They do these things because of their worldviews, or because of the various ways by which they come to understand the nature of things. Melanesian traditional life is a totality, which is paradoxically military, economic, political, religious (let alone social and psychological) at one and the same time (Leenhardt 1979; cf. Levi-Strauss 1972: 222; Godelier 1977: 215; 1982b). I am impelled to add here 'philosophical', because it is precisely a style of reasoning and a primal scientific outlook I am seeking to identify. Traditional Melanesian logics of retribution have been the working equivalents to the West's natural or mechanical laws,

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153

but they are to be seen as analogous only while admitting that they presume the existence of the 'preternatural'. That they admit assumptions about non-human spiritual 'interferences', and speak about these intrusions in a way foreign to many Westerners and others, does not make them irrational, and thus non-logical, after all. They remain logics based on indigenous premises, and if they are basically 'religious' (in the broad sense we have delineated, thus impinging on all aspects of a given social order), this is nothing novel in the world; it is only that an analysis of them in the southwest Pacific may well best serve to explain what is distinctive about Melanesian cultures, both in particular and in general.

PART TWO

'Cargo Cultism'

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in the tremor of struggling revolt. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness The Native is not, I fear, very logical. Alexander MacColgie Gibbs in T. S. Eliot The Cocktail Party

i

r

132'E

PACIFIC

M

OCEAN

~6'S

ARAFUHA

57

Ta

:i,

SEA

Wabag , Mt

f

43Goroka

42 Kainantu

39 40

41

AUSTRALIA

CORAL SEA

Location of new religious movements on the main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (key opposite)

300 km

157 LOCATION OF NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS: KEY TO MAPS PART II Main island of New Guinea and adjacent islands (opposite), the Solomons (overleaf); Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu (overleaf). The movements are those cited in Part II: shown by number on the maps, they can be identified from the accompanying key (below). Note: The Index of Melanesian Cultures provides an alphabetical listing of tribal cultures. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Biak Waropen (-Yapen) Kaowerabej Airmati Nimboran Dani Kapauka Kapaour Mimika Asmat Roku (Morehead) Kikori (Porome) Kukukuku Elema Toaripi Roro Mekeo Tauade Fuyughe, Seragi Koiari Motu, Rigo Hula, AromaVelerupu Massim Suau, Bonarua Jeannet Is. Daga

27 Muju/Woodlark Is. 28 Trobriands 29 Managalas 30 Binandere (Orokaiva) 31 Jaua (Orokaiva) 32 Sangara (Orokaiva) 33 Koko(da) (Orokaiva) 34 Hube 35 Kabwum 36 Yabim, Kate (Huon pen.) 37 Kanosia (Nomu, etc.) 38 Atzera 39 Taiora 40 Kamano 41 Fore, Ke'efu 42 Bena(bena) 43 Asaro/GahukuGama 44 Bundi 45 Wahgi 46 Chimbu 47 Dene 48 Siane

49 Huli 50 Wiru 51 Enga (Mae - central; Kandep, Tombene - south; Kyaka - east) 52 Sissano 53 Negrie-Yangoru 54 Manam 55 Tangu 56 Karkar 57 Bogia (Sepa, etc.) 58 Begesin 59 Simbai 60 Yabob 61 Yam, Sengam 62 Sek (Gedaged) 63 Ngaing, Gira 64 Garia 65 Bilbil, Siar 66 Baluan (Matangkor) 67 Usiai 68 Manus 69 Lavongai, Tigak (New Hanover) 70 Bali-Vitu (Unea Is.) 71 Tolai

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Baining Sulka Lolo Arawe-Kandrian Ablingi Is. Mamuse Mengen Halia Kiriaka Kopani Nasioi Torau Roviana Langalanga (Are-are) Kwaio Ndi/Nggeri Guadalcanal groups Gari Lifu Espiritu Santo groups Aoba Raga (Pentecost Is.) Tanna Fiji groups

158

PAYBACK: CARGO CULTISM'

SOLOMON ISLANDS

Malaka Is.

San Cristobal Is.

tOOkm

I

I

-

;

I

t

i

l

WalltsRotuma-^ ^>. Banks I&.

Futima*

Espiritu Santo" Malekui

T

a