South Coast New Guinea Cultures: History, Comparison, Dialectic

The communities of south coast New Guinea were the subject of classic ethnographies, and fresh studies in recent decades have put these rich and complex cultures at the center of anthropological debates. Flamboyant sexual practices such as ritual homosexuality have attracted particular interest. In the first general book on the region, Dr Knauft reaches striking new comparative conclusions through a careful ethnographic analysis of sexuality, the status of women, ritual and cosmology, political economy, and violence among the region's seven major language-culture areas. The findings suggest new Melanesian regional contrasts and provide for a general critique of the way regional comparisons are constructed in anthroplogy. Theories of practice and political economy as well as postmodern insights are drawn upon to provide a generative theory of indigenous social and symbolic development.

Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology Editors: Ernest Gellner, Jack Goody, Stephen Gudeman, Michael Herzfeld, Jonathan Parry 89 South coast New Guinea cultures

A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume

SOUTH COAST NEW GUINEA CULTURES History, comparison, dialectic

BRUCE M. KNAUFT

Department of Anthropology, Emory University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Victoria 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1993 First published 1993 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data South coast New Guinea cultures: history, comparison, dialectic Bruce M. Knauft p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in social and cultural anthropology: 89) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 41882 8. - ISBN 0 521 42931 5. (pbk.) 1. Ethnology - New Guinea. 2. New Guinea social life and customs. 3. Melanesians - Sexual behavior. 4. Melanesians - Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. GN671.N5K641993 306'.0995-dc20 92-12472 CIP ISBN 0 521 41882 8 hardback ISBN 0 521 42931 5 paperback Transferred to digital printing 2003

GO

Contents

List of List of tables Acknowledgments

figures

PaSe

vm

ix x

Part 1: Grounding 1 Theoretical and ethnographic context 2 Historical background and regional configuration

Part 2: Critique 3 Sexuality in the regional analysis of south New Guinea 4 The analytic legacy of homosexual emphasis: language, subsistence, and political economy 5 Women's status 6 Trends in comparative analysis

3 25

45 60 86 117

Part 3: Reconfiguration 7 8 9 10

Theoretical reconfiguration Marind-anim Symbolic and sociopolitical permutations Regional characteristics and comparisons

129 136 172 210

Appendix: evidence concerning Asmat homosexuality Notes List of references Index

228 238 252 288

Figures

1 2 3 4 5

Language-culture areas of south coast New Guinea Asmat bis-po\e Marind-anim gari sunburst ornament Purari kaiemunu Trans-Fly (a) sacred hawk stone (b) bullroarer 6 Kiwai horiomu costume 7 Elema hevehe mask

page xiv 73 145 174 186 186 198 202

Tables

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

South lowland New Guinea language families and presence/ absence of indigenous ritualized homosexuality page Geography and subsistence regimes of south coast New Guinea Leadership and exchange in south coast New Guinea Big Man society characteristics in south coast New Guinea Great Man society characteristics in south coast New Guinea Comparative estimates of female status in south coast New Guinea Female status and importance of male warrior prestige Female status and starch staple subsistence

49 63 78 81 81 106 108 109

Acknowledgments

The ethnographic analysis of south coast New Guinea has been a captivating field of study. My greatest acknowledgment is to the intrepid ethnographers who produced such detailed studies of this region during early decades of ethnographic research. Their timely commitment to extended fieldwork was extraordinary and carried out under logistical conditions that are difficult to fully appreciate from our own late twentieth-century vantage point. Second, I owe an intellectual debt to those contemporary scholars who have rekindled anthropological interest in the regional analysis of south New Guinea, and in particular to Gilbert Herdt, Harriet Whitehead, Shirley Lindenbaum, and Daryl Feil. Though this book is in part a critique of their work, it stands on their shoulders, and I have great respect for their efforts. Third, I thank several persons who have commented with care and insight on previous versions of this manuscript, in particular, Fredrik Barth, James Carrier, Donald Donham, Simon Harrison, Terence Hays, Gilbert Herdt, Raymond Kelly, Stuart Kirsch, Sherry Ortner, Andrew Strathern, James Weiner, Harriet Whitehead, anonymous press reviewers, and the members of the 1990 ASAO "Migration and Transformations" symposium. Their insights have helped sharpen my portrayals and analyses, though they bear no responsibility for this book's shortcomings. Members of my home Department of Anthropology at Emory University provided intellectual stimulation and logistical support; a thanks goes to all of them. Thanks also go to Jessica Kuper, anthropology editor at Cambridge University Press, and to Kathleen Much, editor-in-residence at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford.

XI

I thank Carole Welp for verbally translating many parts of the Dutch depopulation report and John Richens and Carol Jenkins for bringing publications concerning early Marind-anim medical history to my attention. The Crosier Missions supplied me and the Emory Library important publications concerning Asmat; relatedly, the comments of David Eyde and Tobias Schneebaum were helpful as I wrote the Appendix. Unpublished information on the presence or absence of ritual homosexuality in various south New Guinea societies was graciously supplied by Robert Depew, Peter Dwyer, Stuart Kirsch, Billai Laba, and Robert Welsch. Reference suggestions from James Baker and Anton Ploeg concerning particular aspects of west New Guinea history are acknowledged with appreciation. A large thanks goes to Deanna Knickerbocker for producing the map, to Robin Mouat for drawing the figures, to Lynn Gale and Judy Robertson for computer help in formatting the index, and to Marie Cantrell for help in proofreading. Great and cheerful help procuring bibliographic materials was given by Margaret Whittier and the Inter-Library Loan staff at Emory's Woodruff Library, by Kathryn Creely from The Melanesian Studies Resource Center at The University of California Library, San Diego, and by the several library staff members at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Permission to quote liberally from previously published materials is gratefully acknowledged from Ethnology, Grove Weidenfeld Press, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Macmillan Press Ltd, Oxford University Press, Stanford University Press, The University of Chicago Press, and Van Gorcum Press. A special thanks to Tobias Schneebaum, Mark Sexton, and the Peabody Museum of Salem, MA for permission to use their photograph of an Asmat ancestor skull on the cover of this book. The photograph (original in color) was taken by Sexton; it was printed in Schneebaum's Embodied Spirits: Ritual Carvings of the Asmat, (p. 50), published and copyrighted in 1990 by the Peabody Museum of Salem, MA. The skull, obtained from Buepis village, is from Schneebaum's personal collection. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford provided the ideal intellectual and logistical environment for the completion of this book during a fellowship year in 1991-92. My fellowship support from the Center was provided by their National Science Foundation Grant BNS-8700864 and supplemented by matching salary support from Emory University. Funding support for earlier phases of this research project was supplied by the Harry Frank

xii

Acknowledgements

Guggenheim Foundation in the form of a research grant and a Career Development Award. Funds for summer research in 1989 were received from the Emory University Research Committee. My final and deepest thanks go to my colleague and wife, Eileen Cantrell, and to my son, Eric. They have given me more energy to complete this project than they realize.

MAPI LANGUAGE-CULTURE AREAS OF SOUTH COAST NEW GUINEA §§§§§? mountains I language-culture areas

mm,d.

:S3S8® k- 5

STRICKLAND -BOSAVI Afea

0

i

100

i

200

i

300

i

KILOMETERS

Figure 1 Language-culture areas of south coast New Guinea

PART 1 GROUNDING

1 Theoretical and ethnographic context

How can anthropologists describe and compare ethnographic regions? Much information has been gathered since the nineteenth century that assumes a satisfactory answer to this question, but the problems that attend it are larger than ever. As emphasized from a politicoeconomic perspective, ethnographic regions are interwoven through trade, coercion, and economic dependence or political domination, particularly as states engage their ever-shrinking peripheries (e.g., Wolf 1982, 1988; Lomnitz-Adler 1991). As a result, the autonomy, divisibility, and uniqueness of ethnographic regions cannot be assumed. From a postmodern perspective, the ethnographic characterization of culture areas and regions is an artifact - the result of a Western academic discourse that projects its own cultural biases and assumes incorrectly that these characterizations reflect other people's reality (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988; Boon 1990). Culture area comparisons thus neglect the irreducible authority of indigenous voices and collapse them into pigeon-holed categories deriving from the analyst's own time, place, and disposition. What becomes untenable from both the postmodern and the politicoeconomic vantage point is synchronic objectivism: the assumption that cultures have coherent, stable traits that render them comparable within the analytic space of a timeless ethnographic present. In the current academic climate, few can deny the intellectual importance of these two critiques, much less their scholarly influence. How best to draw on their insights for purposes of regional characterization and comparison, however, remains problematic. Each critique, indeed, would seem to undercut if not eviscerate the other: the plurality of voices stressed in postmodern intertextuality is intrinsically opposed

4

Grounding

to the reductionism and homogenous perspective of both world system political economy and, to a slightly lesser extent, the longue duree structural history of the French Annales tradition.l This tension underlines the uneasy confluence between postmodernism and critical or Marxist theory that has recently developed in American anthropology, as reflected in the journal Cultural Anthropology and in a number of influential recent works.2 Though they are often melded together, these perspectives work from opposed premises: Marxist or politicoeconomic perspectives strive to identify underlying patterns through integrated analytic assertions, whereas postmodernism stresses fragmentation and disorder, both as an object of study and as a style of analysis. In recent works combining these perspectives, ethnographic authority is questioned by quoting diverse voices in a way that highlights their conflict, irony, and intertextual absurdity. This pastiche confounds the assumptions of received analytic categories and implies a highly critical analysis of social practices, particularly those of colonial or neocolonial agents, including ethnographers (e.g., Taussig 1987; Clifford and Marcus 1988). Restricted by its postmodern impetus, however, this criticism is often unable to progress beyond irony or parody and state a more positive alternative. The opposition often recognized between Marxism and postmodernism - postmodernism denying and Marxism embracing a vision of grounded criticism, transcultural humanism, and enlightened progress - makes them contradictory if frequent bedfellows in much current anthropological work.3 The problems posed by these competing critiques become increasingly apparent as more ethnography is considered for purposes of comparative regional analysis. The transparent factuality of ethnographic accounts cannot be assumed. Yet just how deeply and thoroughly must one question and contextualize their voices? (see Fardon 1990; Manganaro 1990). How and when does one stop analyzing the ethnographers and get on with the ethnographic analysis per sel If one ultimately refuses the objectivist leap, doesn't anthropology lose its center and become something else - intertextual art or representational criticism? On the other hand, a dedication to political economy, Marxism, or history in the longue duree makes a move into objectivity, but ultimately with a vengeance. These approaches have a tendency to grind up local trends and events into a universalizing theoretical mill. This problem increases at more general and inclusive levels of analysis; cultures become reflexes of a hegemonic world system and are stripped of

Theoretical and ethnographic context

5

distinctiveness.4 At what point should one assert the importance of local structures over larger regional or global trends? How do diverse subjectivities and cultural propensities compete with political or economic rationality in determining action? If one fails to address these questions, cultural process becomes an epiphenomenon of politicoeconomic structure; anthropology becomes economics or political science. This book engages the problems raised by postmodern and politicoeconomic theories with the spatial comparison of sociocultural formations. My goal is not to give up on comparative ethnographic analysis, but to drive it forward. In so doing, I draw heavily on the important work of Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1988a, 1990a-c, 1991a), Giddens (1979, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1990), Sahlins (1981, 1985, 1990), Ortner (1989, 1990a,b), and more generally on approaches that have been gathered loosely under the label of practice theories (Ortner 1984). At the micro-level or "on-the-social-ground," these approaches (notwithstanding their many differences) emphasize the relationship between structural constraint and agency or event. Thus, for instance, Bourdieu (1977, 1990a) introduces the notion of habitus, in which structure is both constituted by and constituent of practice; Giddens' (1979, 1984, 1987) notion of structuration5 stresses the recursive nature of social life and encodes the mutual dependence of structure and agency; Sahlins' (1981, 1985:ch.5) "structure of the conjuncture," suggests that historical development occurs as the interface between structural disposition and contingent event; and Ortner (1990a) discusses sociocultural hegemonies, which engage dominant cultural orientations with the historical possibilities of social practice. In these approaches, cultural logics are kept in play with, rather than reduced to, political economy on the one hand, and the contingency of personal agency on the other. As such, these approaches are in a unique position to mediate some of the important tensions between politicoeconomic and postmodern orientations in anthropology. To critically expand the theoretical relationship between culture and practice seems to me a promising avenue in anthropology at present. In theoretical work to date, the relationship between culture and practice has been less fully considered in its spatial than in its temporal dimension; theories implicating "practice" are not yet well developed for comparative ethnographic analysis.6 To develop practice theories in this respect requires, as Bourdieu (1990c:49) himself puts it, "thinking with them against them" - drawing on their insights to transcend some of their limitations. Criticism here presupposes appreciation. The

6

Grounding

following discussion of practice theories draws on the postmodern and the politicoeconomic critique of comparative analysis mentioned above and underpins parts 2 and 3 of the present volume, respectively. Research practice and postmodernism

It is evident from the postmodern critique of ethnographic objectivity that theories of structure and practice have paid insufficient attention to the historical and cultural assumptions that inform the information they use. This tendency poses particular problems when the ethnographic net is widely cast and a detailed comparison attempted of different regions. The relativity of ethnographic reports written in different time periods and with different personal and theoretical aims needs to be actively considered. Though this concern need not take over the analysis, ethnography needs to be critically appraised in terms of its historical context before the objectivist leap can be made.7 Of those authors mentioned earlier, Bourdieu (1988a, 1990a-c, 1991a) is the most aware of discourse pragmatics, and he cogently reminds us that "in the social sciences, the progress of knowledge presupposes progress in our knowledge of the conditions of knowledge" (1990a: 1). But though he is highly attuned to the academic politics of current disciplinary debates, Bourdieu is less concerned with how information has been encoded in the ethnographic and historical record. In this respect, practice theorists have not drawn sufficiently on the insights of Foucault (1984) and de Certeau (1988) concerning the archeological structures of our own episteme, and, particularly, the effect these have on how information is historically encoded as factual knowledge.8 Part 2 of this volume, chapters 3-6, illustrates the biases that result from an uncritical use of the ethnographic record when making a comparative analysis. This problem is particularly evident in recent contrasts drawn between south New Guinea and the New Guinea highlands. But rather than pursuing a critique through impressionistic or intertextual pastiche, I remain committed to an objectivist account; I take seriously the analytical problems raised by postmodernism, but I don't adopt postmodern theory as a basis of presentation or argument. As I hope to show, a systematic and detailed review of ethnographic evidence is not incompatible with and, indeed, is central to comprehending the relevance of postmodernism for comparative regional analysis. In the case at hand, the classic south coast ethnographies have been

Theoretical and ethnographic context compared as if on a par with those about core highland areas. But the south coast ethnographies were based on primary fieldwork conducted largely during the 1910s, the 1920s, and the 1930s, whereas the classic highlands fieldwork was initiated in the 1950s and 1960s. Highland fieldwork was first configured largely by the concerns and critiques of British structural-functionalism, on the one hand, and American cultural materialism, on the other. (By contrast, the symbolic-interpretive impetus in interior New Guinea took root particularly in the late sixties and the seventies in fringe as opposed to core highland areas [e.g., Wagner 1967, 1972; Schieffelin 1976].) Unsurprisingly, the classic highlands monographs tended to focus on issues of politicoeconomic and socioecological organization - Big Man politics, competitive exchange, clanship, politicoeconomic intensification, and the causal ramifications of these for issues such as gender relations.9 The classic south coast ethnography, in contrast, was shaped by the Victorian anthropological legacy of Tylor and Frazer. Their interests engaged turn-of-the-century British and continental European concern with diffusionism, on the one hand, and ethnography as the comparative natural history of native customs and beliefs, on the other (see Urry 1972, 1984:44-48; Stocking 1984). Guided by figures such as A. C. Haddon at Cambridge and R. R. Marett at Oxford (mentor to F. E. Williams), as well as Dutch and German anthropologists, early south coast ethnography was particularly focused on spirit cults, totemism, moieties, magic, and material culture.10 As discussed in chapter 4, evidence from south coast societies for highly developed systems of leadership and exchange was scattered and assigned to the background, despite the fact that politics was frequently rooted, among other things, in elaborate and competitive gift exchange, large-scale residential and military organization, and even systems of rank. More generally, the polar contrasts often drawn between core highland and south lowland New Guinea are in significant part a function of synchrony in comparison - the uncritical comparison of accounts gathered at different times and with different ethnographic goals and theoretical assumptions. As discussed in chapters 3-6, most of the prominent characterizations made of south New Guinea are highly inadequate if not incorrect for the south coastal regions. Many of these comparative assessments treat ethnographic accounts in an ahistorical manner even though some of them focus on developmental transformation at the level of manifest ethnographic content. Core highland areas of New Guinea are justifiably remarkable for

7

8

Grounding

their high population density and agricultural intensification; genuine differences existed and continue to exist between highland and south coastal New Guinea, as analyzed in chapter 10. There is also some truth to the self-fulfilling statement that societies deserve the theoretical orientations of their ethnographers; a dovetailing emerges between ethnographic approaches and the regions they best illuminate. Nevertheless, predisposing theoretical orientations and selective areal emphases tend to reinforce one another over academic time. This bias is magnified as the scale of analysis is increased and regional comparisons are attempted: it is all too easy to find polar contrasts between regions for which primary accounts were gathered at different times and/or with different ethnographic and theoretical agendas. Critically analyzing this process allows us to see more clearly how key "traits" become associated with ethnographic "regions": the New Guinea highlands become widely associated with Big Men, elaborate systems of competitive exchange, clanship, and heterosexuality, while the south coast becomes associated with Great Man leadership, restricted exchange, cross-totem affiliation, and homosexuality (Lindenbaum 1984, 1987; Feil 1987:ch.7; Herdt 1984a; Whitehead 1986; Godelier and Strathern 1991). As name and place become associated, characteristics thought to be "key" are inappropriately reified and then elevated as metonyms for ethnographic regions as wholes. This general trend has been critically exposed by Appadurai (1986). There has been a particular recent tendency for south lowland New Guinea to become sexualized in anthropological discourse. Prominent archetypes have emerged, depicting the area as a "homosexual" region populated by "homosexual societies" (Feil 1987:ch.7; Lindenbaum 1984, 1987; cf. Herdt 1984a, 1991). The homosexual practices of a few constituent societies are taken as the primary lens through which many other customs and beliefs of the larger region are viewed. In fact, however, most of the south New Guinea population belonged to societies in which ritualized homosexuality was absent (see chapter 3). Along the south coast, ritual heterosexuality was far more prevalent than ritual homosexuality or boy-insemination. As discussed in chapter 3, the important work of Gilbert Herdt (1981, 1984a, 1991, 1992) draws attention to Melanesian homoerotic customs and emphasizes their differences from customs and beliefs in the West. In terms of ethnographic history, it is quite understandable that Melanesian homosexuality was the focus of great attention during the 1980s, since this was the time that homosexuality came out of the closet

Theoretical and ethnographic context

9

in our own public and academic discussions.11 To assess anthropological trends in the context of other social concerns is not to disparage them, and it is not possible for the analyst to escape history in any event. In this regard, I note reflexively that my perspective, which emphasizes the powerful diversity of extramarital heterosexuality as well as the more limited distribution of homosexual orientations in south coastal New Guinea, has been influenced by the postmodern feminist consideration of poly sexuality, including its critique of eroticaphobia, phallogocentrism, and the uncritical attribution of discrete "sex" and "gender" categories.12 In this respect, my perspective extends Herdt's underlying impetus while at the same time targeting his approach for critical evaluation. One point deserves emphasis: Herdt is fully correct that homosexual and homoerotic beliefs and practices are an important topic of anthropological investigation. His insistence is underscored by the fact that anthropologists paid little theoretical or comparative attention to Melanesian homosexual customs from the late 1800s to virtually the 1970s despite their intensive analysis of many other Melanesian customs and beliefs during this period. Nevertheless, I am wary of extending Herdt's emphasis too far and assuming that sexuality is a "fictitious unity" or "causal principle," as asserted generally by Foucault (1980a:154). Hence, I do not use sex as a privileged point of entry for the wider ethnographic analysis of south coast New Guinea. Instead, I consider variants of sexual practice and gender relations as dimensions of larger sociocultural formations. As Herdt (1992: forthcoming) states in his preface to the second edition of Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, "sexuality must be analyzed as part of a whole, contextual, social tradition." By putting the complexity of individual experience back in its social and political context, the postmodern critique should not prevent analysis from being systematic. That absolute objectivity is impossible is beside the point; the goal is to move in the direction of clearer, more explicit, and more refined understanding. In opposition to the excesses of postmodernism, then, its own insights may be appropriated to illuminate rather than obliterate the nature of ethnographic regions and the extent of their differences. In Bourdieu's (1990a; cf. 1988a) terms, this goal is achieved by objectifying the subjective dimensions of our own analysis as a critical tool. We need increased sensitivity to epistemic relativity - a reflexive awareness of our diverse ways of knowing - without succumbing to

10

Grounding

ontological relativism. The latter, which views "being" as relative and questions the existence of any coherent reality to know about, paralyzes the anthropological endeavor (e.g., Tyler 1990; contrast discussion in Shore 1988). Though ethnography is always relative to the ethnographer's concerns, ethnographic differences are not simply Western projections. Ethnographic relativity is one dimension of anthropology to be continually wrestled with (and never "resolved"), but it should not compromise an alternative moment in which critical objectivism is embraced. Practice theories and political economy

The politicoeconomic critique of ethnographic comparison engages some of the important recent developments in theories of culture and practice. These developments will be presently discussed at a high level of theoretical generality to provide a broad basis for the empirical discussion that is developed in subsequent chapters. Readers more interested in ethnographic specifics or in middle-range theory may prefer to move on to page 16 and read the present section after considering the book's ethnographic analysis. In their various American anthropological formulations, theories of practice tend to champion the independent or at least the confounding influences of indigenous cultural structures vis-a-vis the political economy of an intruding world system.13 For instance, Ortner (1990a,b) and Sahlins (1981, 1990) suggest that local developments cannot be subsumed in the spatial hegemony of Western political economy; local structures and indigenous agency must be kept in focus. Donham (1990) similarly stresses the tension between internalist "historical" and externalist "epochal" analysis. These approaches stress that local cultural influences are not simply confronted and transformed by politicoeconomic intrusion, they rebound on and shape these intrusions, both locally and regionally. As if to provide more coherent resistance to politicoeconomc theory, however, theories of structure and practice tend to adopt a hegemonic view of indigenous structure itself. Structure in these approaches is generally held to be an all-encompassing "cultural logic" or "schema." Though the matter is one of relative emphasis rather than absolutes, practice theories do tend to rely too much on a Durkheimian notion of structural stasis at the expense of a more dialectical Marxist formulation.14 Bourdieu's theory, for all its interplay of structure, agency,

Theoretical and ethnographic context

11

and domination, places surprisingly great emphasis on structural hegemony and surprisingly little on sociocultural development or transformation (see critique by Harker et al. 1990:216f.). Bourdieu attempts to respond to this criticism and to the charge of tautology, but it is questionable whether he sufficiently counters them either in his many substantive analyses or on a theoretical level, for instance, when he writes (1990c: 118): The problem of change. I do not see where my readers could have found the model of circular reproduction which they attribute to me (structure —» habitus —> structure). Indeed, I could show how the opposition between statics and dynamics, structure and history, reproduction and transformation, etc., is totally fictitious, in so far as it is the structure . . . which constitutes the principle of the strategies aimed at preserving or transforming the structure. This assertion does little to alleviate the suspicion that structure, for all its internal dynamics and articulation through practice, remains selffulfilled unless impacted from the outside. For Sahlins (1981, 1985), structure can be transformed, but more from the outside than from the inside; if anything, it is the persistence of structure that causes change; structural categories are revalued in the light of externally imposed economic and political contingencies. What needs greater complementary attention is how structures feed upon changes that they themselves generate. It is important to show not only the effects of structure as a synchronic entity, but how structures self-transform from the inside how they respond dialectically to their own prior actualizations. There is a corresponding tendency for theories of structure and practice to attribute change-inducing motivation to political and economic self-interest. In the process, the active and transformatory power of symbolic formations is relegated to the background; Weber's Protestant Ethic is forgotten. Thus, though theories of structure and practice give strong weight to agency, the subjective power of this agency tends, particularly in the theories of Giddens and Bourdieu, to be confined to "power", "interest," "strategy," "schema," and control over various "rules" and "resources." Within such a conceptual armature, Western assumptions about motivation are easily accepted; interest is tacitly presumed to be self-interest, and it tends toward economic and political domination. Ironically, this assumption also smuggles itself into Sahlins' (1981:68-72) analysis of change, which transects indigenous cultural value with the somehow different "pragmatic" interests of actors when they apply signs in a world of political

12

Grounding

and economic contingency (cf. discussion of motivation by Ortner 1984:151f.). Bourdieu (1977, 1990a-c), Giddens (1979, 1984), Sahlins (1981, 1985), and Ortner (1990a) all attempt to transcend motivational reductionism by making culture categories of thought and symbolization the condition as well as the consequence of inequity in the social distribution of resources. Particularly important are Bourdieu's notions of symbolic capital and symbolic power, which expand upon a reductionist or vulgar Marxist emphasis on economic class interest (in which inequality is limited largely to the social relations of material production - contrast also Donham [1990]). But, as Harker et al. (1990:211) note, Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital tends, in the final analysis, to boil down to political capital after all, with politics . . . seen as a field of its own, a ghostly deus ex machina which works unseen behind the facade of appearance, or . . . as the ultimate form of capital, for which all other lesser currencies arefinallycashed in. It is as if the driving force of symbolization must be made to appear particularly "hard" - politically and economically authoritative - to justify culture as more than an epiphenomenon, more than superstructural fluff. Bourdieu (1990c: 106) notes this fairly explicitly: the use I make of the notion of interest, which can call forth the accusation of economism against a work which, from the very beginning (I can refer here to my anthropological studies), was conceived in opposition to economism. The notion of interest - I always speak of specific interest - was conceived as an instrument of rupture intended to bring the materialist mode of questioning to bear on realms from which it was absent and into the sphere of cultural production in particular. In essence, Bourdieu attempts to deal with charges of economism by asserting that his homology between the economic and the cultural was a tool to combat a simpler economic reductionism. But his position should be extended further, since the borrowed concepts of "interest" and "strategy" continue to smuggle in reductionist assumptions particularly the assumption that politicoeconomic domination, however it may "use" culture, is still paramount in the final instance. In short, the attempt to widen a more reductive material perspective to one that takes culture seriously has been limited by the very motivational contours it has borrowed for purposes of opposition. Thus, in analyzing conditions of change, Bourdieu's cultural capital and even Sahlins'

Theoretical and ethnographic context

13

(1981:78-81) "signs in action" are too easily fused with economic advantage and political domination. A reductive view of change-inducing motivation in practice theories points to a final and greater issue: the use of an omnibus notion of "structure" (see Sewell 1989). On the positive side, practice theorists use a dual notion of "structure" - structure is both constitutive of and constituted by action - as an effective tool in their drive to subsume and transcend pernicious theoretical polarizations, particularly those between objectivism and subjectivism, and, relatedly, between base and superstructure. All of the authors currently considered - Bourdieu, Giddens, Ortner, and Sahlins - would appear to subscribe to such transcendence, and we may generally concur with such a goal. But, there is a danger that in the rush to transcend these oppositions, the notion of "structure" becomes overly enlarged and coherent in order to fill the resulting conceptual vacuum. In the process, it is easy for structure to become overly hegemonic as well: a large and vague black box. This problem becomes particularly evident as spatial variation is considered - the comparative variation of structures across regions. Where, exactly, is the juggernaut of "structure" located, and where does one structure end and another begin? This question exposes the problems that stem from an overly systematized notion of structure and an overly coherent or even hegemonic cultural logic (e.g., Bourdieu 1990a).15 This problem lurks generally in approaches that replace the classic concept of "culture" - a highly relative but publicly shared symbolic formation - with a more hegemonic notion of structure that heuristically fuses the symbolic and the existential components of action. Ultimately, I find an overarching notion of structure too vague and thus restrict the concept to a symbolic and ideological field, that is, as "cultural structure." Languages do have grammars, and symbolic formations can be heuristically treated as having structures of symbolic logic that motivate and underpin their organization. To assume with Bourdieu (1990c: 126) that social action has structural rules and logic in the same way, however, is to blur the complex socio-symbolic interface. Social action emerges as the interplay between cultural orientation and individual motivation, on the one hand, and the contingencies and constraints of a nonsymbolic world, on the other. Insofar as the world of symbols and the world of physical bodies and materials are not isomorphic, their connection

14

Grounding

needs to be systematically teased apart rather than fused in order to assess their dialectical relationship. Instead of a broad notion of "structure," I favor an internally delineated concept of the "sociocultural formation." Within this, first and foremost, is the patterning - or structure - of ideation. This dimension of reality is ultimately grounded in people's minds: the symbolic impetus for the development of cultural formations and the subjective orientations of motivation, value, and driving cultural geist ("spirit"). On the other hand, the sociocultural formation holds in tension the effects of motivated action on bodies and materials - its aggregated "hard world" actualization. Subject to the laws of biology and physics as well as to the influence of culture, these actualizations have unintended consequences that can act as irritants and stimulate further symbolic elaboration. Culture, correspondingly, develops in part by the reappropriation of its own hard-world embodiments, as brilliantly illustrated by Kelly (1985) in his analysis of the Nuer conquest. The dialectical relationship between cultural impetus and its existential manifestation is a core dynamic of sociocultural development. This formation both draws upon and inverts Marxist base-superstructure models. In these, culture elaborates as it strains over time to reproduce and maintain objective social inequalities (Friedman 1974; Cohen 1978, 1988; cf. Donham 1990:ch.2). According to this line of reasoning, the social and political conservatism of cultural orientation exists in tension with infrastructural forces that make change inevitable. My own perspective retains this inherently disjunctive and dialectic relationship between subjective and existential dimensions of action. But the infrastructural, material, or economic dimensions of social life and even less so, a narrow focus on economic and class inequality cannot be assumed to be the ultimate prime movers of sociocultural development, even in "the final instance." If anything, analysis must start on the other side, with a consideration of cultural impetus. As emphasized by Weber (1958 [1904-1905], 1978 [1956]), social action is importantly influenced by the distinctive features of local symbolic geist. As reflected in the awareness of the early Marx (1964 [1844]; Marx and Engels 1970 [1846]), social relations are a reflex neither of productive forces nor of simple universal motives of social domination. This insight is at present becoming more prominent in post-Marxist anthropology (see Donham 1990; Roseberry 1989). The subjective dimensions of action, because they are culturally

Theoretical and ethnographic context

15

distinctive, are not easily reconstituted ex post facto, especially if analysis takes its point of departure from reductive motivational assumptions. By the same token, however, one must go beyond the manifestation of subjective impetus in action, as Weber did, and see how social and material results systematically rebound back on subjective orientations themselves. The material world is not reducible to symbolic formulations, even endogenously, and culture is always altered and compromised in its existential manifestation. Cultural impetus has important and often unintended consequences, as Giddens has rightly and repeatedly emphasized. For "the elementary forms of the symbolic life" as Sahlins (1985:148f.) puts it, this entails the risk of cultural action, which is a risk of the categories in reference. In action, people put their concepts and categories into ostensive relations to the world. Such referential uses bring into play other determinations of the signs, besides their received sense, namely the actual world and the people concerned. Praxis is, then, a risk to the sense of signs in the culture-as-constituted, precisely as the sense is arbitrary in its capacity as reference. Having its own properties, the world may then prove intractable. It can well defy the concepts that are indexed to it. Man's symbolic hubris becomes a great gamble played with the empirical realities. The gamble is that referential action, by placing a priori concepts in correspondence with external objects, will imply some unforeseen effects that cannot be ignored.

The challenges, dissonances, and refractoriness of culture's own existential manifestation provide tensions that drive development in the symbolic formation itself. As a result, subjective orientations cannot be said to completely determine the hard-world dimensions of social action, though they exercise a tremendous influence on them. Rather, a core dialectic is constituted by the recursive qualitative impact that symbolic and existential dimensions of social action exert on each other over time. Along with internal cultural dynamics, this dialectic drives the endogenous development of sociocultural formations. As I explore in part 3 of this book, an awareness of this sociocultural dialectic allows one to delineate and expose for analysis a range of factors that tend to be polarized and then transcendentally fused in several theories of structure and agency. Chapters 8 and 9 illustrate ethnographically that indigenous sociocultural formations house an internal dialectic; it pits developing symbolic or ideological formations against the legacy of their own existential manifestations, which hence confront them as an Other. It is not only the case that symbolic or ideological formations are invariably compromised in practice, nor that

16

Grounding

their concrete results in social action are subject to the material constraints of the configuration of politicoeconomic, residential, and demographic organization. These existential embodiments themselves rebound on subjective value orientations as a provocative stimulant; they are reacted to and reappropriated in further symbolic elaboration. In Marxist terms, there is a dialectic between social being and social consciousness. The recursive tension between subjective impetus and its sociomaterial existence drives development in the sociocultural formation as a whole. What results is not failed cultural reproduction or simple alteration, but directional change. This development does not require the influence of foreign forces or events and is hence not dependent on external politicoeconomic imposition (although it does accommodate external influences as part of the existential conditions of social action). The present approach entails a theory of sociocultural formation that comprehends the generation of change, including transformatory change, from within sociocultural formations themselves. As discussed in chapter 2, the political and research history of south New Guinea make it particularly feasible to consider these issues without taking the external impact of state systems as fully into account as one would have to in most other world areas. The case at hand thus allows internal dialectics to be viewed with particular clarity. The dialectical relationship between symbolic formations and their sociomaterial actualization has had distinctive characteristics in each of the seven language-culture areas of south coast New Guinea. A striking diversity of political, economic, and religious forms have become elaborated within a broad compass of cultural and geographic features shared in common. The process of generative development has been similar in each case, and this provides an axis for cross-case comparison. A revised application of practice theories thus retains the possibility of comparison within and between regions while allowing for the exploration of local cultural diversity. The Melanesian ethnographic context

South coast New Guinea is academically framed by the history of Melanesian ethnography hinted at earlier. Anthropological knowledge concerning Melanesia is very diverse - gained over more than a century of research by different waves of scholarly and nonscholarly observers. As a result, there is no hope of finding rigid consistency between the ethnography of specific regions and theoretical or historical trends.

Theoretical and ethnographic context

17

Nevertheless, general patterns do emerge, and these have strongly shaped the Western perception of Melanesia's constituent regions. As the political history of Melanesian anthropology remains to be written, 16 a cursory review such as the present one will be open to criticism and compromise. Such historiography, however, is a critical prelude to the comparative study of Melanesia and its constituent areas. To rephrase Bourdieu (1990c:35) for an anthropological context, "the ethnology of ethnology is itself one of the first conditions of ethnology." In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Melanesian ethnography was pursued primarily as the comparative natural history of native customs, beliefs, and artifacts.17 A "Notes and Queries" style of ethnography was strongly propounded by A. C. Haddon. Trained as a zoologist interested in comparative natural history, Haddon organized the Cambridge expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898, converted to anthropology with a sense of zealous mission, and acceded to one of British anthropology's first regular academic positions, at Cambridge (see Urry 1982; Quiggin 1942). As Michael Young (1988:4) rightly comments, Haddon was "arguably the most influential British anthropologist in the first two decades of the century." Haddon took an eminent role in fostering the ethnographic study of New Guinea and adjacent areas of Melanesia, and his impact on south coast ethnography (which he himself inaugurated during his first expedition of 1888) was particularly great. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the interests of Haddon and of British diffusionist anthropologists included prominent concern with material artifacts, on the one hand, and with religious customs and beliefs, on the other. As Urry (1972:47) notes, the early edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology contained 245 questions on religion and only "a single descriptive sentence on the topic of 'social relations.'" In Melanesia, this concern articulated not only with the theoretical interests then applied to primitive societies (see generally, Kuper 1988; Stocking 1987), but also with the influential role of missionaries.18 Missionaries' religious interests, knowledge of local customs, and logistical support had a significant impact on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Melanesian survey ethnography (Langmore 1989; Whiteman 1983; cf. Knauft 1990a:258f.). Intellectually, missionaries and early scholarly observers shared literacy, education, and an Enlightenment vision of Melanesians as savages capable of improvement. Thus, for instance, they tended to ally in objecting to the depredations of the Queensland labor trade and in

18

Grounding

urging stricter government regulation of European traders and recruiters.19 While early Melanesian ethnologists such as Haddon and the early Rivers studied the slow processes of diffusion that informed their concept of evolutionary improvement, missionaries worked as agents of change to catapult their subjects into moral and social advancement. These objectives were seen as different ends of a developmental continuum; hence the easy linkage between them by early Melanesian missionary-anthropologists such as Codrington (1891) and in the joint academic-missionary volume edited by Rivers (1922) on Melanesian depopulation, the proceeds of which were dedicated to the Melanesian Mission. As Whiteman (1983:110) notes, early Melanesian survey ethnologists and missionaries shared a common moral interest in "salvaging" natives from coastal areas before they were degraded by contact with Western gun-runners, labor recruiters, and unscrupulous traders. It was their practical goals that differed: ethnologists wanted to preserve Melanesians for academic study; missionaries wanted to preserve them in order to save their souls. For reasons of practical accessibility, early ethnographic work was most common in insular Melanesia and along the coastal or riverine areas of New Guinea. At least until the contributions of Rivers (1914), it tended to view native customs as a potpourri of separate and diffusing traits (e.g. Haddon 1901-1935, 1920b; Lewis 1932). A potpourri view of culture is also characteristic of German survey ethnography and museum collecting in Melanesia, which gained an important if short-lived momentum until they were sharply curtailed by World War One.20 Prior to World War One and thereafter along the south coast, observers documented customs and beliefs as discrete if not autonomous facts, viewed not so much as parts of a social whole but as isolable entities for the armchair theorist to chart in patterns of regional diffusion. There was little emphasis on politicoeconomic interconnection or developmental trajectory, and the understanding of exchange was generally preMaussian, with rigid division maintained between religion, social custom, and material culture. In the years between the World Wars, progressively greater emphasis was placed on the study of Melanesian political, social, and economic organization. This shift was consistent with the legacy of Rivers and then Malinowski and with the general trajectory of British social anthropology over the first half of the twentieth century (Kuper 1983). In Melanesia, these trends were politically consistent with the dispossession of German colonies by the Australians and the increasing entrenchment of English

Theoretical and ethnographic context

19

and Australian colonial control in insular eastern Melanesia, the Massim, and large sections of the New Guinea coast. In these areas of Melanesia, anthropologists and government workers shared a common interest in native law, custom, kinship, and political organization: the interests of British structural-functionalism articulated with those of colonial administration (Asad 1973; cf. Said 1978). Though general, this linkage was far from uniform or straightforward across Melanesia. For instance, Malinowski's emphasis on the coherence and integrity if not rationality of indigenous customs and beliefs served at one level as a bulwark against the need for colonial intervention: indigenous communities that were "functioning" just fine on their own had little need to be tampered with by the authorities.21 The ethnographic structure given to such institutions did, however, provide an ostensibly rational framework on which colonial regulations could be systematically built or superimposed, and many ethnographers, including Malinowski, supported a British colonial policy of indirect rule (Feuchtwang 1973).22 How to impose colonial authority in an enlightened manner was of particular concern to administrators such as Hubert Murray, Papua's long-standing Lieutenant-Governor (West 1968:ch.lO; Griffin et al 1979:ch.3; cf. Lett 1949; Murray 1912). A more violent precursor to this orientation can be found in the rough-and-ready combination of exploration, documentation, and unilateral though "fair" imposition of order by Sir William MacGregor, who preceded Murray and governed British New Guinea from 1888 to 1898 (Griffin et al. 1979:ch.2; MacGregor 1897; Joyce 1971:chs.6-9). By the standards of the day, the Papuan colonial experience was humanitarian and liberal, with high tolerance for anthropological sensibilities. Murray, for instance, was an advocate of the professional position of government anthropologist, held for many years by the intrepid F. E. Williams (West 1968:ch.l0). More typical for English colonies was the attitude of naturalist-turned-administrator Charles Woodford, who governed the Solomon Islands for the British in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Woodford 1890; cf. Guppy 1887). In contrast to Murray and even MacGregor, Woodford had much less concern with "native welfare" and more with economic exploitation. On the assumption that natives were dying out anyway, little thought was given to studying or understanding them. Woodford engineered massive alienation of indigenous lands and paved the way for the institution of head taxes and forced plantation labor (Bennett 1987:chs.5-7).

20

Grounding

Similar policies were attempted by Albert Hahl and other administrators in German New Guinea. The Germans, however, were yet more violent and punitive in their efforts: though they developed a highly organized administrative and economic infrastructure in a few selected areas, such as Rabaul, most of their territory remained unexplored, uncontrolled, and subject to punitive raids and open colonial warfare (S. Firth 1978,1982; Hempenstall 1978). The tie between colonial administration and ethnographic documentation was nonetheless strong in German and particularly in Dutch Melanesia; it was most contentious and oppositional among the French. In both German New Guinea and Dutch West New Guinea there was a significant fit between military/exploratory patrols and ethnographic surveys (see Souter 1963:ch.lO; van Baal et al. 1984:44-54). With a few notable exceptions, such as the work of Richard Thurnwald, Felix Speiser, and the self-taught Paul Wirz, much of the early ethnography from German and Dutch Melanesia does not come from long-term in situ fieldwork. Instead, it derives from expeditionary surveys and more locally detailed accounts by nonacademic but highly educated government officials, missionaries, and commercial entrepreneurs. Among the Dutch, the link between colonial administration and anthropology was particularly strong, and intensive ethnographic instruction (with special emphasis on "customary law") was a regular part of training for Dutch officials (Ellen 1976; de Josselin de Jong 1960; Kennedy 1944; Held 1953). Regarding the French colonial experience in southeastern Melanesia, there was yet less concern with documenting or understanding indigenous customs, and - to put it baldly - much greater concern with killing or at least marginalizing the indigenous people who adhered to them (see critique in Guiart 1983; Weitzman 1985). This oppression was consistent with French nineteenth-century colonial policy and with the status of New Caledonia as an annexed part of France, first as a penal colony and then as a major site of industrial mining and colonization (see Aldrich 1990:ch.6; Connell 1987; Thompson 1984). Consequently, the ethnography of French Melanesia in the first half of the twentieth century was pitted against fervent French colonial interests. 23 It consists of the heroic work of a few select figures such as missionary Maurice Leenhardt, Maurice Lenormand, and later, the Marxist Jean Guiart. In the years before World War Two, the bulk of Melanesian ethnography was in the legacy of British functional and structuralfunctional traditions. With the benefit of hindsight, it is evident that

Theoretical and ethnographic context

21

important French counterthrusts were provided by the armchair ethnographic analysis of Massim exchange by Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1967 [1925]) and the pioneering work on person and myth by Leenhardt (1947). Additionally, there are important ways in which Dutch ethnography (though largely from Indonesia) pre-dated some of Levi-Strauss' structuralist concerns (see de Josselin de Jong 1972). Melanesia also provided the grounding point for several new theoretical emphases that emerged in English and American anthropology in the first half of the century. These included not only Rivers' (1914) important contributions to social organization and Malinowski's (1922, 1926, 1929, 1935) revolution infieldworkand functional analysis, but pioneering studies of socialization, gender, and emotion by Mead (1930, 1935) and Bateson (1936). The important and still-neglected work of Harrisson (1937) presaged and in some respects transcended important dimensions of anthropological postmodernism, that is, by combining an ironic pastiche of competing voices with a highly critical historiography and a solid base of documentary evidence - all within an experimental and highly evocative ethnographic format (cf. Taussig 1987). These works notwithstanding, the larger part of Melanesian ethnography from the 1910s to the 1940s combined the functionalism of Malinowski and the structural-functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown with the Firthian partitioning of society into discrete institutions (e.g., R. Firth 1936, 1939, 1940). These collective influences led to a proliferation of stolid descriptive volumes and articles on coastal and insular Melanesia during the inter-war years and beyond.24 Within these, ethnographic description was divided into separate topical units, with special emphasis on social and political organization. Correspondingly, spiritual beliefs and practices tended to be treated either through normative description of "cult" organization or through the decontextualized presentation of myths, stories, and legends, that is, as separate from both world view and social action.25 The structural-functional description of isolated ethnographic topics is highly evident in the influential first decades of Oceania, which began publication in 1930. In the post-World War Two period, a new geographic focus began in Melanesian anthropology. In the pre-war years, more than a million highlanders had been discovered in the fertile valleys of interior New Guinea; now their societies became available for anthropological research. The distinctiveness of this endeavor was linked to special features of colonial intervention and pacification; in world-comparative terms, highland New Guinea colonialism was both historically late and

22

Grounding

relatively benign. These twin facts greatly facilitated fieldwork by Western anthropologists. In the 1950s and 1960s highland New Guinea became a hot spot for fieldwork; though other features and directions of Melanesian ethnography emerged or continued, the study of highland cultures became preeminent (Hays 1992). Core highland areas of New Guinea stimulated a torrent of detailed and fascinating ethnographic studies in the fifties, sixties, and seventies.26 Highland New Guinea of the 1960s virtually inherited the African mantle as the locus classicus of tribal formations, and it generated a corpus of high-quality ethnography that rivalled or surpassed that of almost any other "pre-state" world area. This work continued to address issues of particular concern to British structural-functionalism, such as kinship and politics, but it was broadened by the concerns of American cultural materialism. It was also increasingly problem-oriented and tried to explain the linkage between various dimensions of political and socioeconomic organization. Important monographs by Meggitt, A. Strathern, M. Strathern, Reay, Salisbury, Berndt, Pospisil, Glasse, Ploeg, P. Brown, Rappaport, and others focussed on the relationship between social structure, politics, warfare, economic exchange, and ecology. Such work was progressively widened to include a consideration of gender relations and other topics.27 In the process, empirical grounds were laid for critiques of both structural-functionalist and materialist paradigms.28 By the mid 1960s, the principal highland groups had been studied, and fieldwork shifted perceptibly to the fringe highland and adjacent areas of interior New Guinea. Here the richness of Melanesian ethnography was augmented yet further. Though political and economic issues, rejuvenated by Marxist concerns, continued to dominate interest in core highland areas (e.g., A. Strathern 1982), American interpretive interests of the Geertzian era came more strongly to the fore in fringe highland and adjacent regions, as did interest in French structuralism. In the 1970s and early 1980s topical interest in fringe highland and other less densely populated areas of interior New Guinea shifted decidedly toward matters of cultural belief, cosmology, and ritual. This change is reflected in the symbolic focus of more than a score of monographs, beginning with those of Roy Wagner (1967, 1972, 1978), and including those by E. Schieffelin (1976), Feld (1982), Barth (1975, 1987), Gell (1975), Juillerat (1986), Tuzin (1980), Gesch (1985), Harrison (1990), G. Lewis (1980), Herdt (1981,1987a), Godelier (1986), Knauft (1985a), Shaw (1990), LeRoy (1985a,b), Weiner (1988a), and Meigs (1984), see

Theoretical and ethnographic context

23

also Kelly (1976,1977). Taken as a whole, the ethnography of interior New Guinea had by this time contributed substantially to most of the ongoing theoretical debates in anthropology, for example, concerning structuralism, cultural interpretation, gender and sexual identity, Marxism, exchange theory, and, more recently, colonialism and postmodernism. The trends of the present, though difficult as yet to judge, appear to include a rejuvenated interest in other areas of Melanesia, particularly the Massim, the Sepik, and insular Melanesia.29 This work both engages and reflects the longer contact of these areas with Westerners and the increasing anthropological interest in cultural history, on the one hand, and post-colonial identity, on the other. As part of this process, the rediscovery of historical material recorded by earlier ethnographers as well as missionaries, government officials, and explorers has begun. Yet to be determined is how the total corpus of Melanesian ethnography inarguably so rich and arguably so classic - is to be at once both the object and the vehicle of anthropological analysis. For ethnographic comparison, the question raised is a large one: how to begin configuring and comparing regions that collectively encompass perhaps one-sixth of the world's languages. This question is of increasing concern to Melanesianists as the embarrassing richness of primary ethnography is orchestrated within roughly defined regional perspectives. An accelerating trend towards regional analysis is evident in recent works on the New Guinea highlands by Feil (1987) and P. Brown (1978); for the Sepik by Gewertz (1983) and Lutkehaus et al (1990); for the Mountain Ok by Barth (1987) and Craig and Hyndman (1990); for the southern fringe "Mountain Papuans" by Weiner (1988); for the Massim's kula by Leach and Leach (1983; cf. also Damon 1990; Damon and Wagner 1989); for Vanuatu by Allen (1981); and tackled in a somewhat postmodern vein for Melanesia generally by Marilyn Strathern (1988). As more regional analyses are constructed, the criteria by which ethnographic areas are configured and then compared become increasingly important and open to scrutiny. What kinds of internal similarity and external differences are sufficient to constitute an area as an "ethnographic region"? How does one preserve the cross-cutting importance of both intersocietal connection and political, ethnic, or linguistic polarity? What criteria, if any, are adequate to designate regional "key features" or "key processes," much less a defined "culture area" for analysis? How is the historical dimension of ethnography to be dealt with - the effect of primary information collected at different intellectual periods and with different goals and biases?

24

Grounding

The present work sheds a distinctive light on these questions by considering the Papuan language-culture areas of the New Guinea south coast. Long known to Oceanists as a "flamboyant" region of Melanesia where headhunting, elaborate cult enactments, and various kinds of ritual sexuality were practiced, this area was, in the first part of the twentieth century, subject to intensive ethnographic documentation. Indeed, as discussed in chapter 2, early anthropological interest in this area combined with late Western intervention to yield a corpus of published ethnography that rivals that of any comparably sized pre-state coastal area. The detail of these accounts enables a comprehensive comparative analysis of the region's constituent language-culture areas. This documentation allows us to push beyond the postmodern lament that ethnography is an inextricable melange of others' metaphors and our own. Nonetheless, the material calls equally for a critical historicist examination. As exemplified in subsequent chapters, analysis of the south coast New Guinea ethnography illuminates issues of central concern to theories of culture and practice as discussed earlier. My purpose in part 2 of this book (chapters 3-6) is to evaluate existing generalizations about south New Guinea and to elucidate general properties and pitfalls of comparative analysis. This exercise entails detailed and critical ethnographic reassessment. My goal is to illuminate the process by which regional analyses are themselves elaborated, refined, and transcended over time. Though I attempt to penetrate the relativity of ethnographic comparison, I remain committed to a documentary view, and I liberally use quotations from primary sources to let the tone and flavor of their observations shine through. In part 3 (chapters 7-10), I construct an alternative regional analysis of the language-culture areas of the New Guinea south coast as they existed in the early colonial era. In so doing, I attempt to maintain a tension between substantive ethnographic analysis and larger theoretical concerns. This book is intended neither as an exhaustive regional analysis of early colonial south coast New Guinea nor as a critique showing the impossibility of comparative analysis. It is rather an ethnographic reconfiguration and counterbalance to existing generalizations about this region, a commentary on the tensions and the value of regional analysis in general, and a plea for more open consideration of the historical nexus within which ethnographic comparisons are located. In theoretical terms, I explore a model of the dialectical relationship between cultural impetus and sociomaterial existence.

Historical background and regional configuration

The Papuan or nonAustronesian language-culture areas of south New Guinea undulate along the coast for over 2,500 km, stretching from the Elema language-culture area in the east to the Asmat regions in the west (see figure 1, after Wurm and Hattori 1981). Most of this extensive coastline is an inaccessible maze of swamps, mangroves, muddy tidal flats, and sand bars, connected by innumerable shifting channels and occasional reefs. Buffeted by strong winds and surf, complex currents and tides, this murky boundary between land and sea was resistant to easy landing and contact by sailing ships, and even shallow-draft steamers of the twentieth century had difficulty navigating the everchanging coastline (e.g., Chalmers 1895; Butcher 1964; see Cook 1955:1:408^11). In many areas, when one finally arrived at coastal villages, they could even then be reached only on foot across an extensive area of mud or swamp.x Apart from difficulty of access, south coast New Guineans had a strong reputation among nineteenth-century Europeans as marauding headhunters and cannibals - as savages who would decapitate and eat visitors at will.2 Headhunting of enemies was in fact practiced along the entire nonAustronesian south coastal area, except by the Elemaspeaking groups, and Europeans in the nineteenth century could easily be victimized by such violence once they left their boats.3 To the logistical impediments and danger of south New Guinea was added a dearth of resources that might be profitable for colonial entrepreneurs (see BNG Annual Reports; McLaren 1923). The alluvial coast gave no prospect of mineral deposits. Coconuts and timber were difficult to obtain in any quantity and were unprofitable, and trade in bird-of-paradise plumes and crocodile skins was arduous and produced

26

Grounding

uncertain returns; contacts were highly sporadic and limited largely to a few Chinese and Malay traders in the western half of the area. The nineteenth-century labor trade was a general failure in the region; in contrast to many other coastal areas of Melanesia, where indentured laborers were recruited extensively to work in Queensland sugar plantations, such recruitment was so difficult as to have been virtually nil along the Papuan south coast.4 Lack of economic potential or profit thus combined with difficulty of shoreline access and a strong reputation of indigenous hostility to keep all but a very few Europeans away from Papuan south New Guinea in the nineteenth century and, in many places, well into the twentieth century. By contrast, most of the world's other coastal areas were intensively contacted by Western powers and their agents in the seventeenth or eighteenth century (Wolf 1982). At maximum distance from Western metropoles, most of the Pacific, including the coasts of Australia, insular Melanesia, and the Massim, was intensively contacted by traders and labor recruiters (or settlers) during the nineteenth century. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, areas along the northern and eastern New Guinea coast were finally subjected to intensive labor recruitment and attempts at large-scale "pacification" by German armed forces (Hempenstall 1978; S. Firth 1982). The coasts of northwestern New Guinea had long been subject to Indonesian slave trading, which articulated with the eastern periphery of southeast Asian trade in cloth and spices (Galis 1955; Redlich 1876; Held 1957:16). But the Papuan south coast of New Guinea continued to receive surprisingly little political or economic influence until at least the 1890s. Only at the far west of the southern coast, in the Kamoro or Mimika areas, did regular contact with Chinese, Indonesian, or Dutch traders precede this period (Miklouho-Maclay 1874; Pouwer 1991:206). As a region, the nonAustronesian south coast of New Guinea appears to have remained effectively outside the purview of state political economies for longer than any other major non-arctic coastal population. Early history of the Papuan Gulf and Fly River areas west to the international border

In the 1880s and 1890s, the Reverend James Chalmers of the London Mission Society became the first European to establish regular contact in the eastern south coast areas, traveling laboriously westward among Elema, Purari, Kiwai, and eastern Trans-Fly peoples (Chalmers 1895, 1903a,b; see Langmore 1974, 1978).5 Other explorers had charted the

Historical background

27

coasts and ascended the rivers, including D'Albertis, who journeyed far up the Fly River in 1876, but none of these expeditions involved much social contact with indigenous populations. 6 The killing of the pacifist Chalmers, along with his companion the Reverend Oliver Tomkins and their party of eleven at Goaribari Island in 1901, capped the lay perception of the south coast as a region where contact with indigenes was highly dangerous and best avoided (Langmore 1972,1974:ch.5). In 1884, the eastern part of the south coast became part of the British New Guinea Protectorate; in 1888 it was annexed by England along with the rest of British New Guinea, which stretched west to the 141st meridian. The Fly River and Gulf regions of this territory were several days sailing from the administrative center in Port Moresby, the harbor of which was itself not discovered until 1873 (Moresby 1876a). The south coast was distant as well from gold prospectors, who constituted the greatest, if transient, commercial influx into Papua further to the east (Nelson 1976). After annexation, the de facto exclusion of traders, planters, and labor recruits from south Papua was reinforced in a series of ordinances by Lieutenant-Governors MacGregor and, later, Murray. Reacting against the unprofitable and violent entanglements of British colonial government with the labor trade in eastern Melanesia, MacGregor and especially Murray prevented long-distance labor recruitment, outlawed trade in guns and liquor, and severely restricted land alienation (Griffin etal 1979:chs.2-3; Parnaby 1964:ch.6; West 1968; Murray 1912). Though bitterly resented by commercial interests, these dicta were supported by cost-conscious British and Australian colonial governments as well as by the London Mission Society, the region's primary source of Western religious influence. There was insufficient promise of profitable commerce or exploitation for entrepreneurs to contravene these policies systematically or on a large scale, especially westward along the south coast. Official restrictions thus combined with lack of exploitable resources and difficulty of access to make the Gulf of Papua and the Fly River areas the coastal backwater of what was itself one of the world's most economically undeveloped colonial territories. Between about 1890 and 1920, government control was gradually established through sporadic and quite laborious patrols (Hope 1979; Beaver 1920; Lett 1935:pt. II., ch.4). In the populous Elema area, closest to the government center in Port Moresby, a Gulf Division headquarters was established at Kerema in 1906, and a Delta Division headquarters was established further west at Kikori in the eastern Kiwai

28

Grounding

language area in 1913 (Mair 1970:30; Hope 1979:43ff.). Mission stations had by this time also been established in both areas. By 1920, the main conduits of outside influence remained visits by a very few government officers, widely dispersed missionaries, and a few transient and unsuccessful traders and would-be planters (ibid.; Langmore 1989; McLaren 1923). Plantation work was most developed, at least in relative terms, among Elema, where dried coconut - or copra - was produced. In 1918, the area was targeted for various development schemes, including rice plantations. Local men were required to work but fervently resisted, and about 200 a year were temporarily jailed (Williams 1923a: 10, 42f.; Mair 1970:121f.). About the same time, a cargo cult called the Valaila Madness broke out and was gradually suppressed (Williams 1923a; Worsley 1968:ch.4; Cochrane 1970:ch.4). By 1923, there were 476 acres of Elema land under rice cultivation. Nevertheless, "as with the compulsory coconut planting, rice cultivation had little impact on the economy of the Gulf Division because there were no marketing arrangements" (Cochrane 1970:40). All rice-growing in the area was subsequently abandoned (Mair 1970:122). Outside influence spread slowly westward. Between 1912 and 1930 there were but three commercial ventures in the Delta Division, which encompassed the Purari and eastern Kiwai language areas: a copra and rubber plantation which was founded near Kikori in 1914 (and struggled until being liquidated and auctioned in 1929); a saw mill and trade store in the Purari, begun in 1922; and a short-lived palm-spirit enterprise from 1920 to 1923 (Hope 1979:vii; Maher 1961:41ff.). For much of the eastern south coast, nevertheless, a temporary period of "sign on" labor at a plantation, distant town, or boat became gradually more common for young men during the 1910s to 1930s. The western Kiwai area was contacted by Chalmers, who established a mission base on Kiwai Island in 1896. In the 1880s there had been hope that some of the pearlshelling and beche-de-mer waters of the northern Torres Strait might be included as an area of economic development in British New Guinea, but the area remained under the control of Queensland. A permanent government post was set up among the western Kiwai at Daru in 1893, but the area languished economically (Beaver 1920). There was even less development in the Trans-Fly area, which was for many decades patrolled from Daru. No Europeans lived there when Williams wrote the preface to his monograph on the region in 1935

Historical background

29

(1936:vi). A government station, a mission post, and a school were finally set up at Rouku near the Morehead River in 1951 (Ayres 1983:14). The history of the Trans-Fly and Kiwai language areas from 1900 to 1950 is sketchy at best, but published accounts suggest there was very little in the way of economic development. Until at least World War Two, the main Western influence was the suppression of headhunting, a trickling influx of Western goods, Christianization that was superficial outside of a very few established mission stations, and sporadic and largely unsuccessful attempts by a few outsiders to establish trading or commercial projects (e.g., McLaren 1923:ch.7). Though outside commercial ventures were minimal, Kiwai did adopt Torres Straits sailing techniques to extend their lively indigenous trade yet further, and Western goods, when available, were considered purchase items of major value (Beaver 1920:77, 163-165; Landtman 1927:211-217). A similar pattern occurred much further east among the Elema, who borrowed Motu sailing techniques to extend their indigenous trading networks during the colonial era (Williams 1977c). In 1925, the entire colony of Papua, with an indigenous population of perhaps one million scattered over 90,000 square miles, was administered by thirty-six field officers (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991:21, 41). Within this territory, the south coast areas in question were the most remote, expansive, and understaffed; they had a combined officer staff of a half dozen or so. Langmore's (1989:283ff.) London Mission Society register for New Guinea from 1874 to 1914 lists but nine resident missionaries stationed along this section of the south coast, and several of these succeeded each other rather than working contemporaneously. Though young Papuan men might sign on for a period of work at one of the few plantations, contact with outsiders was sparse and sporadic in many areas well into the twentieth century. It was politicoeconomic disinterest that stimulated burgeoning ethnographic attention to south New Guinea from 1910 to the late 1930s. This followed on the keen interest of zoologist-turned-ethnologist A. C. Haddon (Urry 1982). Haddon visited parts of south New Guinea briefly in 1888 and organized the large Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits a decade later.7 As one of the first anthropologists with a regular academic position, Haddon recognized the unique persistence of precolonial customs in southern New Guinea and promoted their ethnographic study (e.g., Haddon 1897). This promotion is reflected in his mentorship of Landtman's research among the Kiwai

30

Grounding

from 1910 to 1912 and in his fostering of, and writing introductions for, other important monographs concerning the region. 8 Haddon (1927:ix) begins his introduction to Landtman's Kiwai monograph by stating: Many years ago my friend, Dr. Gunnar Landtman, came to see me at Cambridge, and as soon as we had greeted one another, he said, "I will go anywhere in the world you like to send me" . . . It did not take much consideration on my part to make a suggestion [to study the Kiwai]. Jenness wrote in 1920, Every student who goes out from England to work amongst the [New Guinea] natives turns naturally to Professor A. C. Haddon, and I, like many others, am indebted to him for much counsel and assistance. (Jenness and Ballantyne 1920:12f.) During the 1920s and 1930s, government contact, trading, and coconut plantations inched forward in influence along the south coast. At the same time, Papua's intrepid government anthropologist, F. E. Williams, completed his monumental studies of the Purari delta peoples (1924), the Trans-Fly region (1936), and the Elema (1940) (see Schwimmer 1977; Griffiths 1977). Combined with the weighty monographs of Landtman (1917, 1927; cf. 1933), compendium work by Wirz (1934b), and books by missionaries such as Riley (1925), Holmes (1924), and Chalmers (1895, cf. 1903a,b), these volumes provide an extraordinarily rich corpus of information concerning the eastern south coast languageculture areas during the early stages of colonial contact. Most of these accounts are written following Haddon's "Notes and Queries" style of ethnography, in which synoptic coverage of diverse topics is attempted (see Urry 1972; Haddon 1905).9 Within his perspective, "traits" and "customs" were isolable units rather than interactive parts of a developing social system. In relative topical emphasis, most extensive treatment was given to ritual, ceremony, and related dimensions of myth and totemism. The preeminent south New Guinea monographs based on fieldwork in the first half of the century - those of Landtman (1927), Williams (1924, 1936, 1940), and van Baal (1966) collectively devote more than half of their prodigious bulk to matters of spiritual belief and cult activity. These emphases followed the early interests of Frazer, Durkheim, and others such as F. E. Williams' teacher at Oxford, R. R. Marett, who was particularly interested in the evolution of magico-religious beliefs.

Historical background

31

In its south New Guinea version, this early twentieth-century ethnography described discrete ethnographic features, which were then largely left to the armchair ethnologist at the university to put together in a wider comparative mosaic. The goal of this comparison was to chart the evolution of cultural forms by reconstructing patterns of trait diffusion and migration across ethnographic regions. Haddon devoted much time and effort to the tracing of hypothetical cult diffusion and racial migration patterns in south New Guinea (e.g., Haddon 1920b, 1924, 1927, 1936; see 1911). The corollary of this sometimes dubious diffusionary reconstruction was that the ethnographer as fact-collector had both the freedom and the illusion of freedom from comparative and theoretical concerns. The accounts of Williams and Landtman thus emerge as description for its own sake. In Williams' case, his later work wrestles with Malinowskian functionalism (he attended Malinowski's London School of Economics seminar during a research stay in 1933-1934 [see Williams 1936:viii-ix; 1977a]). Williams eschews more than a tenuous integration among sociocultural features, however, and he takes frequent dry delight in citing disparate social and cultural facts that resist a larger coherence. As he states with typical self-effacement in the preface to his Trans-Fly monograph, The old-fashioned monograph, then, which aims at an all-round description of any given people or culture, is something like a long and perhaps ill-assorted menu from which the anthropological diner is invited to take what tempts him. It is open to question whether this is the best method of dishing up one's results . . . But, for good or ill . . . [this] method has been adopted here. (Williams 1936:x) Williams' remarks effectively describe the classic south coast monographs from nonAustronesian Papua. Early history of the west New Guinea south coast The western half of the New Guinea south coast was formally claimed as part of Dutch New Guinea in 1828. By then the region had already been known by Europeans for several centuries, including an early landing by Carstenz in 1623. His reception, however, had not been friendly: The natives attacked without warning, tore one man to pieces, killed eight others with arrows and spears, and wounded the remaining seven. More than one water party met this kind of reception. (Souter 1963:7)

32

Grounding

Little contact was made with indigenous populations of the region in subsequent centuries, and even the perspicacious Captain Cook was unable to make friendly contact, being forced to withdraw by an attacking party when he attempted to establish relations along the Casuarina coast in 1770 (Cook 1955:1:408-411). Not until the twentieth century was significant contact made with the bulk of the population along the south coast of Dutch New Guinea, as there was little to gain and much to lose by interaction. From a colonial standpoint, the Dutch had acquired west New Guinea as an impenetrable buffer against foreign access to their lucrative spice trade further west; they showed very little interest in lowland New Guinea as long as no other foreign powers did either (Bone 1964). This lack of influence contrasts with the extensive slave-raiding and trade in firearms that affected regions of the Vogelkop or "Birds Head" peninsula of Dutch New Guinea further northwest (Galis 1955). Conjoined with political and economic networks of southeast Asia, this commerce had been going on for centuries via Chinese, Indonesian, and Dutch traders; by the mid-1800s, Ceramese Islamic traders had appointed nominal local representatives or "rajahs," who used their access to firearms to lead followers in slave-raiding incursions against neighboring and inland groups (Miklouho-Maclay 1874; Strachan 1888:chs. 11-15; Miedema 1984, 1988a,b). In the early twentieth century, "rajahs" were also appointed in the far west of the nonAustronesian south coast, particularly in the westernmost part of the Kamoro area, where swampy sago areas were relatively scarce (Pouwer 1991:206f.). This political connection to outside areas prompted trade of slaves, local foods, and resin for outside ironware, textiles, earrings, and beads (ibid.). Developments such as these were absent among the quagmired coastal areas of the populous central Asmat and further east along the south coast, which even the intrepid Malay traders frequently shunned as too logistically difficult, violent, and unprofitable. The bulk of the southwest coast population had but sporadic contact with and little influence from outsiders at the close of the nineteenth century. Like the British and Australians in Papua, the Dutch wanted to keep their administration expenses to a bare minimum in their unproductive New Guinea territory. Wanting to hold title to the area without actually governing it, the Dutch left west New Guinea under the indirect and practically fictitious rule of the Sultan of Tidore until virtually the

Historical background

33

mid-1900s (Bone 1964; see van Baal et al. 1984:56; Souter 1963:ch.lO). The first Dutch presence along their portion of the lowland south coast was provoked by British protests in the 1890s that the unpacified Marind-anim were being allowed to conduct long-distance headhunting raids across the international border into British New Guinea. The Dutch finally responded in 1902 by setting up an armed post among the Marind-anim at Merauke (South Pacific Commission 1952-1953:102104; Pratt 1906:ch.2; cf. Haddon 1891). Renowned for their headhunting and flamboyant sexual customs, the Marind-anim were gradually pacified and missionized by the Dutch during the next three decades (South Pacific Commission 19521953:102-122; see Vogel and Richens 1989). Their precolonial way of life has been painstakingly and exhaustively reconstructed by van Baal (1966) on the basis of Wirz's (1922-1925, 1928) early monographs and van Baal's voluminous correspondence with Father Jan Verschueren, who was fluent in the language, sensitive to Marind belief and custom, and lived many years in the area. Van Baal's 988 page monograph on the Marind-anim, Dema, holds a special interest for ethnographic history. Van Baal was himself the administrator of the Merauke district, starting in 1936, and was later the Dutch Governor of West New Guinea as a whole. Having written an anthropological dissertation on the Marind from secondary sources at Leiden in 1934, van Baal later resumed his efforts to more thoroughly reconstruct the precolonial features of Marind culture - features that he, in his administrative capacity, had been charged with controlling and curtailing. Few have sustained the contradiction between deep anthropological study and the strong exertion of colonial influence as has van Baal,10 who became a professor of cultural anthropology at Utrecht and has published many significant books in this capacity (e.g., 1975, 1981, 1982,1985 [with van Beek], 1986,1989; see Ploeg 1987,1991). Second and relatedly, van Baal reconstructed Marind culture through an intricate and very dense evaluative sifting of information supplied by other observers - observers who had little or no anthropological training. This information is both multitudinous and of highly uneven quality. By contrast, van Baal was academically trained as an anthropologist but was unable to conduct much systematic fieldwork, especially in the important coastal regions, during his posting among the Marind (van Baal 1966:9). His ethnography is hence a rich and sometimes frustrating melange of competing points of view through which ethnographic facts are slowly and often incompletely reconstructed. The

34

Grounding

ethnographic information that is corroborated, however, is wonderfully elaborate as well as exhaustively examined. In format, van Baal's monograph follows those of Landtman (1927) and Williams (1940) in providing a topical ethnographic overview while devoting the vast bulk of the work to issues of cult life, ceremony, and mythical and spiritual belief (see also Wirz 1922-1925,1928).n Outside the Merauke district, foreign social contact along the lowland south coast of Dutch New Guinea was extremely spotty until the mid twentieth century. Until 1925, official contact was limited to a few exploratory and mountaineering expeditions passing to the interior and a few missionaries attempting with much difficulty to establish a foothold.12 The biggest influence was likely Malaysian, Chinese, and a few intrepid European traders seeking crocodile skins and especially bird-of-paradise plumes. From 1905 to the early 1920s, thousands of bird-of-paradise skins were obtained from New Guinea for sale in Europe, and some of these were taken from the southwest lowlands. Whereas the Australians outlawed this trade from an early period, the Dutch did not prohibit it in west New Guinea until the mid 1920s. Hunting had all but ceased by 1928 (Kirsch 1991:35). A government post was established in 1925 among the Mimika in the northern Kamoro-Asmat region and another in the late 1930s at Kolopom Island, known at the time as Frederik-Hendrik Island (Trenkenschuh 1982a:25; Serpenti 1977:9 [1965]). In the Kolopom region, the extreme difficulty of penetrating extensive swampland retarded the first official visits even to the largest villages until the late 1920s and 1930s. Serpenti (1977:9), the region's principal ethnographer, states that Europeans regard the region "as one of the least attractive and accessible districts of New Guinea," and he notes, in the ethnographic present of 1960, that many villages had remained for protracted periods outside effective government control "until quite recently." His monograph describes the remarkable gardening and ecological regime of the Kolopom, and, in the Dutch tradition of descriptive ethnography, he provides informative synopses of social life in tightly organized topical segments, examining, for example, stages of the life cycle, feasting, and the several Kolopom levels of residential organization and social structure. In the populous central Asmat area further west, a government post was first opened in 1938 and abandoned during the Japanese occupation in World War Two. It was re-established only with the founding of a mission post by Father Gerard Zegwaard in 1953 (Zegwaard 1982;

Historical background

35

Trenkenschuh 1982a; Sowada 1961:ch.2). At the time, the Asmat were still unpacified, and they remained so to a significant extent for another decade, as reflected in the death of Michael Rockefeller among them in 1961 (Machlin 1972; cf. Rockefeller and Gerbrands 1967; see Dongen 1982). Ethnographic information on the Asmat was collected at an early period of contact by Zegwaard himself13 and is supplemented by doctoral theses completed by Eyde (1967) and van Arsdale (1975; see also van Arsdale 1978) and eight informative volumes of An Asmat Sketch Book published by the Crosier Missions between 1972 and 1984. Important works on Asmat art are also available, sometimes combined with discussions of spiritual belief and cosmology.14 Schneebaum (1988) has also authored an intriguing and highly personal account of his experiences among the Asmat, and Sowada (1961) has written an English compilation of material from early Dutch sources. For present purposes, the Asmat information is more problematic than that from the other south coast language-culture areas. None of it has been published as a standard ethnographic monograph, and virtually all of it is unindexed. The theses of Eyde and van Arsdale concentrate on materialist concerns of ecology and labor activity respectively, and Eyde's work in particular has valuable information on social organization and warfare. On many other issues, it is hard to know how much can be generalized from passing commentaries. The same is true of the intriguing collage of accounts published in the Asmat Sketch Books for a primarily nonanthropological audience. Happily, this series contains English translations of important Dutch ethnographic manuscripts by Zegwaard (1978, 1982; Zegwaard and Boelaars 1982). The Kamoro or Mimika of the northern Asmat language family have been studied by Pouwer (1955, 1956, 1975, 1991; see further references in van Baal et al. 1984:124-127). South coast ethnography past and present

The difficulties of the Asmat ethnography notwithstanding, the range and quality of information concerning the various language-culture areas of coastal south New Guinea are impressive - and only the major sources have been cited here. Indeed, it is arguable that just as the region was perhaps the last major section of tropical or temperate coast to be regularly influenced by Europeans or other agents of state societies, so its "tribal ethnography" is perhaps the richest of any comparably sized coastal area. Most of the region's constituent language-culture areas were subject to intensive ethnographic study

36

Grounding

within a decade or two of regular contact and pacification by Europeans. Just as strikingly, however, the richness of this primary ethnography declines markedly after the early colonial period. Very little has been published about the colonial and post-colonial development of south coast New Guinea. The principal exceptions pertain to developments among Asmat and Purari. The former were reported with great commitment by the Crosier Missions, while Robert Maher (1961, 1967, 1984), in pioneering work on social change, reported on developments among the Purari between the 1950s and the 1970s (cf. for the Elema, Morauta and Ryan 1982). A further exception, but one that rather confirms the rule, is Williams' much-cited study and later reflections on the "Valaila madness" cargo cult in the elema district (Williams 1923a, 1934; see also 1935a,b). These writings remain disconnected from Williams' monumental work on "traditional" ceremonies among the Elema and the neighboring Purari (Williams 1923b, 1924, 1939a-c, 1940; cf. Cochrane 1970:chs.2-4).15 For one part of the Trans-Fly area, an exceptional account of local developments from an indigenous perspective has been published in article format by the Papua New Guinea researcher Billai Laba (1975a,b). Further ethnographic data have been presented more recently from the Trans-Fly area by Ayres in an unpublished thesis (1983) and in a confined ecological study by Ohtsuka (1977a,b, 1983). Selected studies for the Elema also exist.16 But trends of contemporary development along the south coast remain largely unpublished by anthropologists. For the Indonesian half of the region (what was formerly Dutch New Guinea), research on this topic is now largely prevented by governmental regulation (see Gietzelt 1988). The contemporary situation in Merauke and among the Asmat has been described on the basis of surreptitious travels by the journalist George Monbiot (1989:chs.3-4, 8-9; see also Hughes-Freeland 1989 and Dutch and Indonesian references in van Baal et al. 1984:ch.9). For the extensive Trans-Fly, Kiwai, Purari, and Elema areas in Papua New Guinea, however, this lack of public documentation is due to disinterest or disinclination among anthropological fieldworkers themselves. With the exception of Maher's 1961 work, no monographs have been published on any of these south coast New Guinea culture areas taking developments during the colonial or post-colonial periods directly into account. 17 This neglect contrasts

Historical background

37

with the richness of earlier ethnographic attention, and it greatly deserves to be remedied. South coast New Guinea as an ethnographic region

How should south New Guinea be configured for regional analysis? Arguably, the definition of a region and its constituent areas is inextricable from the ethnographic and theoretical goals of analysis. As French Annales historian Marc Bloch suggested in 1913 (1971:122), the very notion of a bounded region for analysis depends on the theoretical problems one is concerned with. It could be suggested that coastal south New Guinea has important geographic as well as cultural features that, as will be discussed in chapter 10, have shaped its comparative history in the longue duree (see Braudel 1973; 1980a). These are particularly the relative ease of water transport through coastal inlets, swamps, and deltas: the same features that were impervious to larger Western sailing craft were ubiquitous roads for the large and small canoes so deftly paddled by Papuans. In many coastal areas, abundant stands of wild sago palms - rich in starch but low in protein (Ruddle et al. 1978) - were complemented by maritime or riverine faunal resources. In the context of water travel and transport, this resource base provided the potential for large-scale political affiliations or residential aggregations despite a relatively low population density in the coastal region as a whole. A great diversity of sociopolitical formations developed alongside the elaborate ritual and cult systems that made the region ethnographically famous. Linguistically, the south coast region (see map on page xiv) is comprised of Papuan or nonAustronesian language families that contrast with Austronesian languages found immediately to the east and further to the west. Early observers quickly noted the contrast between "Papuans" and "Melanesians" - the former extending from the eastern boundary of the Elema language family westward across the south lowlands (Seligmann 1910:1-6; Haddon 1920b). Geography varies between these areas as well, with inland ranges and hilly or mountainous ecozones coming much closer to the sea in Austronesian than in nonAustronesian areas of the south coast. Coastal versus inland language-culture areas are arguably differentiated on the basis of saltwater as opposed to freshwater ecozones, but here the boundaries of the coastal region are more tenuous. Coastal peoples do seem to have exploited a greater range of maritime fauna than their inland counterparts, and they tended to sustain larger

38

Grounding

settlements and larger population densities as well. Political and ethnic asymmetries paralleled these differences, with coastal populations raiding "bush" ethnic groups along significant portions of the south coast (e.g., Beaver 1920; Landtman 1927; van Baal 1966:ch.l2). Though more ephemeral to grasp, coastal areas also appear to have sustained a greater internal coherence and integrity of their cultural beliefs and organizations than most of the smaller and shifting groups of the interior, such as the Muyu or Yonggom and the Kamula (Schoorl 1957, 1988, 1991; Kirsch 1991; Wood 1982, 1987). But the coast-versus-bush distinction is in many places a gradient rather than a boundary, which begs the question of the similarity between coastal populations and those of adjacent Jaquai, Gogodala, and Boazi peoples, among others. Of equal importance are the practical realities of ethnography: there are few substantial accounts published concerning peoples on the inland side of the coastal language families. Exceptions could be suggested, particularly for the Jaquai and Gogodala,18 and on the Papua New Guinea side of the border there is hope for future monographs on regions abutting coastal language families.19 In published accounts, however, the ethnographic picture of the large region immediately beyond the coastal language families remains sketchy. By contrast, the coastal culture areas are "of a piece" in being both well documented in published accounts and described for the most part in a similar "classic" ethnographic format at roughly similar stages in the early colonial history of each area. This circumstance lends itself well to comparison of a number of features across the range of coastal language-culture areas. It is thus for ethnographic as well as geocultural reasons that the New Guinea south coast is configured for our present purposes as infigure1. Just as there are no totally natural boundaries for south coast New Guinea, so, too, the decision to adopt an expansive east-west configuration as opposed to a narrower but more "vertical" one stretching further inland is to some extent based on analytic choice. Admittedly, the present configuration is undertaken in part as an exercise to recontextualize the existing perception of south New Guinea as an area. But as discussed in chapter 3, ritual homosexuality was not practiced by most south New Guinea lowlanders even when interior lowlands groups are considered. Ritual homosexuality was present along the central south New Guinea coast and extended inland from the Kolopom, Marind, and Trans-Fly peoples north to the Strickland-Bosavi area. 20 Features of comparative method as well as ethnographic content are

Historical background

39

brought to light by comparing a wide geographic area along an east-west coastal axis to one that extends from a narrow coastal section inland to the northeast. The difference between these two overlapping regions is itself sometimes unclear in existing accounts, with features of one region generalized to implicitly characterize the south lowlands as a whole. It is in part for this reason that the boundaries of the present analysis are clearly demarcated. Language family and culture areas The culture areas shown in figure 1 correspond, except for the four language families that compose the Trans-Fly area, to the Papuan language family boundaries delineated for New Guinea by Wurm and Hattori (1981). These regions also conform in rough measure to the existing "monographic" division of the south coast region - that is, the division of the region into populations subject to separate and rigorous scholarly monographs by Williams for the Elema (1940), the Trans-Fly area (1936), and the Purari or "Namau",21 by Landtman (1971, 1927) for the Kiwai; by van Baal (1966) following Wirz, Verschueren, and others for the Marind-anim; by Serpenti (1977 [1965]) for the Kolopom; and by Zegwaard (1959, 1978[1953]), Zegwaard and Boelaars (1982[1954]), and Eyde (1967) for the Asmat. Although dividing the south coast region into these component areas has a linguistic and cultural as well as scholarly "reality," we must not lose sight of the legitimizing impact of discrete culture and associated ethnographer designations. Thus, for instance, the "Kiwai" region of the early colonial era is often considered to be archetypally described by Landtman (1917, 1927, 1954). Yet Landtman's fieldwork was conducted in the western sector of the Kiwai language family and his account deals almost not at all with the many groups in the eastern half of this large area (see Wirz 1934b; Beaver 1920:chs. 17-20). Similarly, with the partial exception of the Kamoro (Pouwer 1955), the large Asmat language family encompasses many variants outside of its central area that are not well documented (see discussion in Eyde 1967). The present consideration of "Asmat" thus focuses on the main central Asmat population. Also for convenience, the Trans-Fly area is here considered as a single unit, though it in fact comprises four small language families that are not well known enough to consider separately for present purposes.22 Chain-link permutations of symbolic and political practice cross-cut south coast language-cultural areas and provided a basis for interaction

40

Grounding

across linguistic and cultural boundaries - as reflected in trading linkages and cult diffusions. It is thus somewhat artificial to use bounded language-culture areas as discrete units in comparative analysis. Further, the key locales where intensive ethnographic fieldwork was done almost invariably become the center points for positing contrasting cultural units; cultural homogeneity is easily assumed to expand outward from an ethnographic site until an adjacent area of intensive ethnographic study is reached. Conversely, however, establishing fieldwork/culture/language areas remains a convenient if not mandatory point of departure in comparative analysis: one has to extrapolate from whatever good data points one has. Being explicit about the limitations of these data points and their geographic, historical, and ethnographic context is preferable to the common tendency to make regional comparisons that are vague about the units being characterized and compared. In its time frame, the present work follows prominent recent analyses of south New Guinea as well as the bulk of currently available information, and focuses on practices and beliefs that were indigenous, that is, those prevalent during the late precolonial and early colonial era. In the late precolonial and early colonial era, the principal Papuan language families of coastal south New Guinea exhibited significant cultural similarities. These can be summarized as including: (i) fervent mythic-cosmological beliefs in the need for fertility regeneration, and (ii) the close articulation of fertility beliefs with: (a) highly elaborate ritual enactments employing costumed or artistic embodiments of mythic or ancestral beings (b) elaborate heterosexual and sometimes homosexual fertility and rejuvenation rites23 (c) feast-giving (d) warfare, particularly in the form of headhunting, to both reflect and augment the spiritual and social force of the local group Variations on these themes generated crucial cultural divergences along the New Guinea south coast; distinctive local axioms of social and spiritual rejuvenation articulated subsistence, political economy, gender, and warfare as well as myth and ritual in unique areal configurations. The larger pattern was one of regional themes cross-cut by areal

Historical background

41

gradients of cultural and sociopolitical permutation (Knauft 1985b, 1989a). How one might conduct a structuralist or "transformational" cultural analysis on a regional comparative scale has baffled many anthropologists and no satisfactory plan of attack has yet presented itself. Though Sahlins (1981, 1985) and others have stressed the interface of cultural structure and history, how this interface may be combined with systematic comparison among adjacent language-culture areas remains unclear. The lead of Levi-Strauss (1964-71) himself is largely unsuccessful in this regard, devolving as it does into a comparative panoply in which New World myths are all transformations of each other in a dizzying and irrefutable pattern. How to compare differing areal configurations of cultural structure and sociopolitical practice thus remains an important question requiring further theoretical development. The second part of the present work uses criticism to clear an ethnographic path for such a study; the third part initiates it.

PART 2 CRITIQUE

Sexuality in the regional analysis of south New Guinea

Appadurai (1986, 1988) has suggested that pairing conceptual labels with ethnographic places easily compromises our understanding of local cultural variability. A few focal traits and their presumed correlates are often taken as metonyms to represent an entire ethnographic region, thereby reducing appreciation of its cultural richness and complexity. As these designators become routinized, they are easily taken for granted and used to generate or justify other idealized features attributed to the region. Concerning south New Guinea, strong emphasis has recently been placed on the indigenous practice of ritualized homosexuality or boy-insemination (Herdt 1984a, 1992; Lindenbaum 1984; Feil 1987:ch.7). As will be discussed in chapter 4, these authors have also used male homosexuality as the conceptual centerpiece for analyzing a wide range of other presumed practices in south New Guinea, including a supposed dearth of competitive exchange, decentralized leadership, restricted marital reciprocity, and low (or high) female status. Herdt's (ed. 1984) initial emphasis on south New Guinea ritual homosexuality was more than justified by the fact that homosexuality in Melanesia had been neglected for many years as a topic of comparative or theoretical study. Quickly, however, other writers have taken homosexuality as a point of orientation for south New Guinea as a whole. Lindenbaum (1984:342) posits societies of the highlands and south lowlands of New Guinea as ideal types and suggests, "The broadest contrasts among Melanesian cultures emerge, then, from a comparison between the so-called semen groups of the Lowlands and the Highland cultures in which semen is not the ritualized stuff of life." More recently, she has extended this dichotomy and elaborates "a

46

Critique

contrast between semen-focused societies in which male homosexual behavior occurs during initiation rites and 'heterosexual' societies in the central and western highlands that lack semen exchange" (Lindenbaum 1987:222). Analogously, Schiefenhovel (1990:415) categorizes as "sperm cultures" those Melanesian societies in which ritual homosexuality was practiced. Whitehead (1986:87) generalizes that "among the south coastal people . . . an individual inseminator is selected for each boy, a married man or older bachelor with whom the boy has regular contact. In addition the boy must at times participate in collective insemination activities in which he receives semen from a number of his elders." These widespread characterizations are ensconced further in Daryl Feil's analysis of lowland south New Guinea gender and political economy through the lens of what he repeatedly terms "homosexual societies" (1987:ch.7). Lindenbaum (1987) has also argued for conceptualizing "homosexual societies" for south New Guinea, and Herdt (1991:606) has recently stated, a seemingly absurd representation - that the whole of a culture is homosexual finds credence in generalizations, both old and new, to the "homosexual societies" of New Guinea. Are these purely rhetorical representations? I think not.

As Herdt (1992) himself implies in other contexts, however, we may question the advisability of characterizing entire societies by a few selected precolonial sexual customs. Doing so inappropriately gives sexuality preeminence over other dimensions of society and culture, and, as I will show, singles out some types of sexual practice rather than others. Ritualized homosexuality as an areal designator?

In his edited volume Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, Herdt (1984a) placed strong conceptual as well as titular emphasis on ritual dimensions of homosexual practice. Melanesian homosexuality was considered a cosmological as well as an erotic orientation, mandated by life-force beliefs that insemination was necessary in order for boys to become men. Homosexual practices were regularized in ritual practice, especially as a precursor to male initiation in the context of a male warrior cult, and became a practically universal part of the male life cycle in a significant percentage of Melanesian societies, especially those of south New Guinea (see Herdt 1984a, 1987a:ch.7,1987b, 1991:pt.2). Herdt's concept of Melanesian homosexuality as ritualized was

Sexuality in the regional analysis

47

important on at least two counts. First, it highlighted the type of information the contributors to his edited volume - mostly mid-career or elder anthropologists, largely trained in the methods of status-androle ethnography - had to offer (see Knauft 1987b:157f.; cf. 1987a). Second, by emphasizing the actual transmission of semen in rituallyordained sexual orgasm, Herdt guarded the ethnographic study of homosexuality from the accusation levelled at Dundes (1976, 1978) and others of conflating latent but unexpressed homosexual desires with actual sexual behavior. In his preface to the second edition of Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (1992), Herdt reformulates his terminology and questions the concept of "homosexuality" in general. For indigenous Melanesian homosexual customs, he suggests "boy-insemination" might be a more effective descriptor than "ritualized homosexuality." This altered language softens or blurs the distinction between Melanesian practices and less cosmologically enjoined boy-insemination in many other areas of the world, such as ancient Greece (Dover 1989; Halperin 1990; see, similarly, Adam 1986). However, the homosexuality described in Herdt's edited volume was indeed distinctive for its cosmological and ritual prominence. Along the south coast, as considered in the present book, homosexual practices that fall under the rubric of boyinsemination also qualify as ritualized homosexuality. Hence, I retain the concept in its original form. Though the nature and quality of ethnographic data may always be debated, available information makes it highly questionable that ritualized homosexuality (or boy-insemination) was in fact prevalent across lowland south New Guinea. The custom was by all accounts entirely absent among the Purari and the Elema (Williams 1924, 1940:428). To the west, ritual homosexuality was also undocumented and doubtful in the populous central Asmat area; it was absent further west among the Kamoro and present in a distinctive or "partial" form southeast along the Casuarina coast. Since information concerning Asmat homosexuality is not widely known, a compilation and analysis of it is included as an Appendix to this book. For the Kiwai language family, there is strong evidence that ritualized homosexuality was absent or limited to a few far-western Kiwai settlements, where it may have been adopted as a transient practice from adjacent Trans-Fly peoples (Beardmore 1890:464). As discussed elsewhere in detail (Knauft 1990a), perceptions to the contrary reveal an intriguing legacy of historical and ethnographic misattribution of

48

Critique

Trans-Fly sexual customs to Kiwai peoples. The absence of ritual homosexuality among Purari and Elema as well as Kiwai language families disconfirms Herdt's (1987b:448) suggestion that uin the Papuan Gulf region of New Guinea, it [ritualized homosexuality] was universal."1 In all, ritualized homosexuality was present along the south coast among Casuarina Asmat, Kolopom, Marind, and many of the Trans-Fly peoples; it was absent among the Kamoro, Kiwai, Purari, and Elema. The populous central Asmat should probably also be included in the latter group as a negative case, but since the data are circumstantial, it is conservatively considered as "unknown" for comparative purposes (see Appendix). The relative size of populations that did or did not adhere to ritualized homosexual customs can be estimated by using the population figures compiled by Wurm and Hattori (1981). Though necessarily imperfect, their tabulations are culled from a large array of survey sources, systematically cover all the language groups in New Guinea, and are blind to the question of the presence or absence of homosexual practices. If we use their tabulations, the south coast language-culture areas where ritualized homosexuality was present had a combined population in the order of 27,509. By contrast, the population of the Elema, Purari, Kiwai, and Kamoro tabulates as 73,175. These figures suggest that under thirty percent of the south coast population were members of societies that indigenously practiced ritualized male homosexuality. The discrepancy would be greater if the central Asmat were included as a negative case. Given that demographic changes have certainly occurred in the colonial and postcolonial period, one cannot assume that these figures give more than a rough estimate of precolonial populations. Whatever changes and reporting inaccuracies these data may reflect, however, there is every reason to expect that they occur similarly in the estimates for both groups of societies, that is, those among which ritualized homosexuality was and was not practiced. This being the case, it appears quite reasonable to assess the relative size of these two populations on the basis of Wurm and Hattori's data. It may be objected that many inland societies where ritualized homosexuality was practiced are not included in the present coastal survey. Nevertheless, comparative estimates of the entire south lowland population practicing and not practicing ritualized male homosexuality do not significantly alter the conclusion (see table 1).

Sexuality in the regional analysis Table l a . South lowland New Guinea language families and presence!absence of indigenous ritualized homosexuality (RH) Family/languages

RH

Asmat-Kamoro Asienara Casuarina Coast Asmat 8,559 Central Asmat Citak Asmat Iria Kamoro

non-RH

22,457 4,784 8,400

900

700

Schneebaum 1988 (see Appendix) Pouwerl955; Herdt 1984a: 30

1,000 29,500

Lowland Ok Yonggom Ningerum Iwur South Kati North Kati Awin-pa Awin (Aekyom)

Kirsch p.c. Welsch p.c.

2,200 4,000 (l,100)b 4,500 8,500 6,500

Pa

Kaluli Kasua Kware Onabasulu Tomu River East Strickland Agala Konai Nomad Gebusi Samoe Honibo Kubor Boazi Boazi Zimakani Suki (isolate) Kayagar Kolopom Yaqay Warkay-Bipim Yaqay

Reference

800

North Asmat Sempan Awyu-Dumut

Bosavic Sonia Beamid

Unknown

Kirsch p.c. Kirsch p.c. 1,500

(409) 4,200

S0rum 1984; Kelly 1976 Schieffelin 1976 Freund 1977

967

(400)

Depewp.c.

199

Ernst 1984, 1991

433

(300) 300 400

450

(700) (1,100)

Knauft 1986,1987b Shaw 1990

(650)

Dwyerp.c.

1,962 (1,062) (1,000)

Busse 1987

7,200

3,300

Serpenti 1977, 1984

(300) 9,000

Boelaars 1981

49

50

Critique

Table 1 cont Family/languages

RH

non-RH

Unknown

Reference

Yelmek-Maklew Marind Bian Marind Marind

(900) 7,200

van Baal 1966, 1984

Morehead & Upper Maro River Pahoturi River

3,250 2,000

Williams 1936 Williams 1936

Eastern Trans-Fly Bine Gidra Gizra Miriam

470

(1,700) 1,650

(600)

700 1,100 1,350 1,450

Porome (isolate) Tirio Turama-Omatian Waia (isolate) Inland Gulf Kamula (isolate) Gogodala Ari-Waruna Gogodala

Landtman 1917; see Knauft 1990b B. Labap.c.

1,000 1,000 Wood 1982

300

(3,500) 7,000

Wirz 1934a; Crawford 1981

Kiwaian

22,700

Knauft 1990b

Eleman Purari (isolate)

35,575 6,500

Williams 1940 Williams 1924

Totals

60,592 RH

100,824 non-RH

78,261 Unknown

a

Special thanks are due Terence Hays for his keen suggestions concerning the organization of this table, and to Robert Depew, Peter Dwyer, Stuart Kirsch, Billai Laba, and Robert Welsch for their respective personal communications concerning Aekyom (Awin); Kubor and Samo; Yonggom and Kati; Gizra; and Nigerum. b Parentheses indicate unconfirmed but presumed cases. c Bosavi language families reside in hilly or mountainous areas adjacent to the lowlands; their inclusion here as lowlands groups practicing ritualized homosexuality is methodologically conservative for the argument presented in the text. d Wurm and Hattori's categorization of Beami includes Bedamini and Etoro. e Shaw, primary ethnographer of the Samo, has stated that ritual homosexuality was absent (1990:29nl, 154nlO). Informal reports from other sources in contact with Samo, however, suggest it may have been present among at least some Samo groups.

The totals show that the lowland south New Guinea population known or believed to have practiced ritualized homosexuality would have to be increased by sixty-six percent (adding 40,232 to an existing

Sexuality in the regional analysis

51

total of 60,592) to match the population known or believed to have not followed this custom. If the "presumed" cases are omitted (those listed in parentheses in table 1), the population among which ritual homosexuality was practiced would have to be increased by more than 100 percent to equal the population among which it was absent. ("Presumed" cases are those contiguous with several other groups in which ritual homosexuality is known to have been present or absent, though its presence or absence is undocumented in the specific group in question.) The several undocumented and inestimable cases make unclear the exact boundaries of ritual homosexuality in south lowland New Guinea. It is likely that several of the larger language families in the "not known" category fell partly if not altogether outside the purview of ritual homosexuality (e.g., the Aywu-Dumut linguistic group, southeast of Dani and southwest of Mountain Ok; and the Inland Gulf and TuramaOmatian language families, south of Simbu and southern highland areas respectively). These groups, in addition to areas documented as not having practiced ritualized homosexuality, make it extremely unlikely that the practice could have predominated in lowland south New Guinea as a whole. Overall, available evidence suggests that more than three-fifths (62.5 percent) of the population of lowland south New Guinea lived in societies in which ritualized homosexuality and boy-inseminating practices were normally absent. Even apart from the problems of labelling whole societies as "homosexual" in the ethnographic present on the basis of precolonial male sexual practices, the notion that lowland south New Guinea was generally associated with ritual homosexuality is empirically erroneous. This finding prompts examination of other customs that are being overlooked in these formulations and the historical patterns that have shaped the ethnographic sexualization of south New Guinea. Ritualized heterosexuality as an areal designator?

Institutionalized sexual liaisons in the form of extra-marital heterosexual coitus or ceremonial heterosexual hospitality were pronounced in all the Papuan language-culture areas of the south New Guinea coast, excepting only the Elema at the far eastern end. 2 Much of this heterosexual practice was highly ritualized. South coast heterosexual practices were wide-ranging:

52

Critique

(a) Among Purari, extra-marital coitus was ceremonially routinized and subject to collective ritual arrangement among men and women. Ritual heterosexuality was especially elaborate following successful headhunting raids and included procurement of armshell valuables from sexual partners by women (Williams 1924:211-214; Holmes 1924:172,175). (b) Among Kiwai, coitus was undertaken frequently to obtain mingled sexual fluids for diverse fertility purposes. Largely promiscuous sexual intercourse for this purpose culminated the most important fertility rituals, the mouguru, and combined on other occasions with collective heterosexual hospitality (Landtman 1927:ch.24). Ritual coitus was also conducted by older husbands and wives to obtain sexualfluidsfor other spiritual strengthening purposes. (c) Among Marind, extra-marital heterosexual intercourse was undertaken at most large-scale feasts and ceremonies, that is, for a diverse array of strengthening and fertility-inducing purposes (van Baal 1966:808-818). Some of these sexual rites were collective - among groups of married men and women; others involved sexual intercourse by several men in succession with one or two young women. A South Pacific Commission Report (1952-1953, 1955) concluded that the great frequency of ritual heterosexuality precipitated a high rate of primary sterility among Marind women in the precolonial era (see also Vogel and Richens 1989). (d) Among Trans-Fly peoples, ceremonial heterosexual hospitality and wife-lending were pronounced (Williams 1936:24,159-60). (e) Among Kolopom, ceremonial sexual intercourse occurred between married men and prepubescent girls who had been betrothed to adolescent male initiate novices. The sexual fluids obtained were rubbed on the initiate novices to promote their growth. Promiscuous heterosexual intercourse among married persons (as well as with girls) took place on the occasion of final mortuary feasts and headhunting expeditions (Serpenti 1968,1977,1984). (f) Among Asmat, regular wife-exchange between distantly related "bond friends" was practiced, sometimes in a large-scale ceremonial context. More general and promiscuous heterosexual intercourse, for which women collectively decorated themselves, was undertaken following headhunting, after erection of a men's house, at the closing of feasts celebrating the elaborately carved bis ancestor poles, and in times of great social or cosmological threat (Zegwaard and Boelaars 1982:21-23; Eyde 1967:205-210; Schneebaum

Sexuality in the regional analysis

53

1988:83; Kuruwaip 1984:14; Sowada 1961:95, van Kampen 1956:7376). Among most of these groups, ritualized heterosexuality was strongly associated with cosmological and social fertility as well as with feasting and warfare. In those areas where ritualized Ziomosexuality was also present, extra-marital heterosexual practices were arguably given cultural, mythic, and ritual emphasis at least as strong as homosexual ones. For south coast New Guinea, an emphasis on "semen-exchange" and "semen-culture" belies the very strong emphasis on mingled male and female sexual secretions obtained through heterosexual intercourse. Perhaps a more appropriate term than "semen-exchange" would be "sexual substance exchange," or "reciprocal exchange of sexual fluids," which do not encode a male bias. Cultural emphasis on ritualized heterosexuality in south coast New Guinea contrasts strongly with groups of the western New Guinea highlands, where heterosexual avoidance, including heterosexual taboos and female pollution beliefs, was much more in evidence. In light of this contrast, Lindenbaum's (1987:222) assertion seems most curious, i.e., that the "homosexual" orientation of the south lowlands was diametrically opposed to a "heterosexual" emphasis in the highlands. Focus on lowland heterosexuality brings out the importance of women in analysis. In many south coast groups - including particularly the Purari, Kiwai, Elema, and to some extent the Marind - women took a strong initiative in establishing sexual and marital relations (see chapter 5). In some cases, women could take the initiative in nonmarital exchange of sexual fluids and had a degree of ownership over valuables thereby obtained. Female status could be quite high, as indicated by sexual choice, female property ownership, and positive cultural valuation of female sexuality and fertility. This possibility is obscured by assuming that lowland fertility cults epitomize male domination and that male ritual homosexuality is the dominant trope, that is, betokening men's cultural appropriation of female reproductive powers. This bias is further reflected in the female status implications of describing lowlands marital systems in a "prescriptive" mode. As discussed below, the current analytic tendency is to relegate the structural role of south New Guinea women to one of "sister-exchange," by virtue of which women easily become passive objects of prescriptive rules rather than active agents in marital transaction (contrast Cantrell n.d.). The unwitting backgrounding of women

54

Critique

through an emphasis on male homosexuality is highlighted by the fact that female homosexuality has been documented in none of the south coast culture areas under consideration.3 The characterization of sexual patterns, let alone whole societies, as "semen" or "sperm" cultures reifies a biased ethnographic presentation of culture as an exclusively male province. The cultural salience of pronounced extra-marital heterosexuality in south coast New Guinea is also attested by historical developments. Although homosexual customs died out along most of the coast, as Lindenbaum (1984) effectively notes, extra-marital heterosexual exchange elaborated during the colonial era in several south coast areas. In contrast, using homosexuality as a culture-region designator tends to construct an ethnographic present around sexual customs of little relevance to most south coast cultures today. Ultimately, however, ritual heterosexuality harbors several of the same analytic traps that befall ritual homosexuality. First, depicting south coast New Guinea through the lens of ritual heterosexuality would metonymically represent it on the basis of a single focal trait and its presumed correlates, thereby reducing appreciation of the region's ethnographic richness and complexity. Correspondingly, it would "sexualize" the area. By concentrating on sexual practices that seem exotic from our own cultural viewpoint, other dimensions of indigenous action and belief are too easily seen as correlates of these unusual customs (contrast advancements made by Whitehead 1986). Third, taking ritual heterosexuality as a master trope would imply generalities for south lowland New Guinea based on the populous groups of the coastal region. Who is to say that a coastal reference point for south New Guinea is better than one restricted to a smaller portion of the coast but extending inland to selectively encompass additional regions where ritual homosexuality was practiced? Fourth and finally, it is difficult to force gradations of cultural emphasis into binary categories. This is particularly true concerning features as intimate and interpersonally variable as sexual orientation (see Herdt and Stoller 1990). Such complexity was particularly evident among peoples such as the central Asmat, where the apparent absence of ritualized homosexuality is thrown into relief by voluntary, reciprocal, and age-symmetrical male homosexuality (Eyde 1967:206; see Appendix). The importance of individual choice and its variance from an ostensible cultural prescription of homosexuality have also been documented among Gebusi (Knauft 1986, 1987a), Onabasulu (Ernst

Sexuality in the regional analysis

55

1991), Bedamini (S0rum 1984:331), and Kolopom (Serpenti 1984:305),4 and in insular Melanesia at East Bay (Davenport 1965, 1977; but cf. Herdt 1992). Neglecting such interpersonal complexity easily underwrites a blanket assumption that semen exchange encodes age-grade inequality and requires structural balancing by marital, labor, or sexual exchange (e.g., Creed 1984; Lindenbaum 1984). In the process, reciprocal homosexuality among age-mates is analytically neglected or presumed to be a function of introduced change. Analogous criticisms could easily be made concerning ritualized /jeterosexuality: that it collapses a wide range of inter-regional and interpersonal variation into a single sexual "type." Rather than asserting one or another mode of sexual practice as archetypal of south New Guinea, we can consider the confluences that these divergent characterizations both reflect in the ethnographic record and evoke in the history of ethnography. First, however, it bears emphasizing that the analyses of Herdt, Lindenbaum, Whitehead, and Feil have been path-breaking, influential, and important. By generating provocative hypotheses with laudable scope and theoretical ingenuity, they have re-awakened comparative interest in south New Guinea that had lain largely dormant since the days of A. C. Haddon. As might be anticipated, this surge of interest promotes more careful study and the possibility of alternative configurations and regional characterizations. As I will discuss in chapter 6, it can be expected that idealized contrasts between ethnographic regions will be compromised as the ethnographic evidence within each region is considered more closely and critically. Much of the motivation for this reanalysis comes from historical developments within anthropology; emphases shift with changing academic agendas and Western cultural developments. It is this process in the ethnographic context of south New Guinea to which we now turn. Ethnographic sexualization of south New Guinea

Since the 1920s and 1930s, it has been known that diverse or "flamboyant" forms of ritual sexuality were practiced in much of south coast New Guinea, as documented for the Marind and the Gogodala by Wirz (1922-25, 1928, 1934a,b), for the Purari and the Trans-Fly peoples by Williams (1924, 1936) and for the Kiwai by Landtman (1927). Yet it was only half a century later, in the 1980s, that homosexuality became central to general and comparative assessments of the region. Drawing on a groundswell of interest in feminism, the 1970s saw issues of gender and sexuality catch fire in anthropology. By considering

56

Critique

gender in a comparative ethnographic context, a wealth of pathbreaking volumes emerged.5 Though many directions evolved, the twin motives of exploring cross-cultural sex-role variation and exposing gender domination were among the most prominent. By the 1980s, these twin goals broke further ground in advancing the anthropological study of homosexuality, which had remained in the ethnographic closet for many years. This interest was undoubtedly fuelled by the Gay liberation movement and a heightened public awareness of AIDS (e.g., Greenberg 1988:ch.ll; Adam 1987; Seidman 1991:ch.6). It is consistent in this context that Herdt's strong and prolific scholarly emphasis on Melanesian homosexuality during the 1980s has drawn widespread attention.6 The historical underpinnings of his comparative assessment of Melanesian homosexuality are also understandable in this context, though they are by no means either reducible to or tainted by it. First and foremost, Herdt emphasizes the rich distinctiveness of Melanesian sexual practices and erotic attractions. In addition to its great ethnographic contribution, this salutary relativism confounds lingering assumptions that sexual orientations normative in the West are natural or universal. Herdt has made this point forcefully in several of his recent publications (1987a: 199-206, 1987b, 1991; Herdt and Stoller 1990; Stoller and Herdt 1985a,b). Correspondingly, Herdt emphasizes that insemination of boys was not aberrant but culturally expected if not required as a dimension of male socialization in a number of Melanesian societies. This undercuts the persistence of Western psychiatric notions that homosexuality may be inherently abnormal or socially dysfunctional.7 Third, Herdt contrasts Melanesian and Western homosexuality with respect to life-cycle development. He emphasizes that Melanesian homosexuality did not produce a permanent or exclusive same-sex orientation, being frequently transitional to exclusive heterosexuality in subsequent marriage (Stoller and Herdt 1985a,b). Finally, he stresses that Melanesian homosexuality was age-graded, asymmetric, and prescriptive rather than undertaken reciprocally between age-mates in a voluntary fashion (e.g., 1984a, 1987a:ch.7,1987b: 448-450,1991,1992). Herdt contrasts ritual homosexuality implicitly and in a few places explicitly with a scenario of Western Gay culture in which individuals volitionally express a long-lasting if not permanent homosexual orientation through reciprocal sexual liaisons with partners from their same-sex cohort (1987a:203-4; 1987b:448, 451-2; 1992). Herdt's portrayal in his comparative essays and papers thus suggests the following antinomies:

Sexuality in the regional analysis Melanesian male homosexuality -ritualized/prescriptive -normative -asymmetric, nonreciprocal inserter/recipient relationship -age-structured/stratified -often transitional to bisexuality or heterosexuality

57

Western male homosexuality -optional/free-choice -minority status (e.g., Gay) -frequently reciprocal inserter/ recipient relationship -frequently age-symmetric -often non-transitional or mutually exclusive with heterosexuality

These contrasts have rhetorical as well as scholarly functions: (1) they undercut the notion that homosexuality cannot be normal or viable as a general sociocultural practice, and (2) they show that not just sexuality but Ziomosexuality is cross-culturally variable. As the range of homosexual variation within Melanesia is considered, however, the strengths that cultural relativism gives Herdt's analysis emerge also as a weakness. Herdt shows great sensitivity to this issue in his path-breaking exposition of individual differences in Sambia sexual and erotic orientation (Herdt and Stoller 1990). But this moment of individual relativism is in tension with Herdt's general comparative assessments of Melanesian homosexuality (e.g., 1984a, 1987b), particularly when he attempts to deal with individual variation and crosscultural comparison in the same work (1991). This conflict engages a frequently occurring general problem of comparative analysis: features that appear adequate for a broad comparative analysis become inadequate as the scale of analysis is reduced and patterns of local variation are considered more closely. If indigenous Melanesian homosexuality is considered on a large comparative scale - as a relatively homogeneous bloc in implicit contrast to an assumedly coherent Gay culture in the US - Herdt's characterizations hold in the main. But when regional variations are confronted on a smaller scale within Melanesia, his characterizations appear overgeneralized as well as geographically overextended. Herdt (1984a, 1991 :pt.2, 1992) defends his comparative model of Melanesian homosexuality in part by skimming over or attributing to introduced change evidence of Melanesian homosexuality that was mutual, age-symmetric, or optional. As mentioned above, however, a variety of these descriptions apply to some forms of homosexuality among Asmat, Onabasulu, Kolopom, Gebusi, and Bedamini, as well as in East Bay, at least during the colonial era. As David Halperin

58

Critique

(1990:ch.3) has recently argued in the context of ancient Greek homosexuality, the designation of homosexuality as ritualized creates a risk of underplaying or homogenizing the complexities of erotic attraction. Though Herdt certainly agrees,8 the same caveat applies equally to "boy-insemination" in the Melanesian context. At a finer-grained scale of analysis, then, we are led beyond Melanesian homosexuality, even in its precolonial guise, as a singular "it entity" - an entity that Herdt has helped create and now would seem to defend for Melanesia while at the same time attacking the topicalization of homosexuality more generally (see 1991, 1992). This parallels in a Melanesian context the awareness of diverse homosexualit/es that has emerged so powerfully for the US in the work of Bell and Weinberg (1978). The south New Guinea coast exemplified a diverse and overlapping range of heterosexualities, homosexualities, and bisexualities. These erotic modalities were not uniformly ritualized, prescriptive, agestructured, tied with warrior cults, or bound up with initiation socialization practices. It can no longer be taken for granted that "the Sambia type of ritualized homosexuality occurs widely in the southern coastal and southwestern areas of New Guinea" (Herdt 1987a:201). Rather than devolving to a disagreement about categories, definitions, or Western tropes - or, worse, leading one to give up comparative analysis altogether - such differences should be recognized as an expected outcome of changing the scale of comparative analysis. Though such questions may appear for the generalist to be quibbles, they expose larger theoretical issues. As the notion of sexuality is increasingly relativized, the conceptual categories upon which it is based become increasingly problematic. Postmodern feminists such as Butler (1990) suggest that the oppositional reification of sex/gender categories itself contributes to their categorical asymmetry and reproduces an intrinsically flawed view of gender and sexuality. As she puts it, "the internal paradox of this [sexual] foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the very 'subjects' that it hopes to represent and liberate" (1990:148). Arguments in some ways analogous are made by Marilyn Strathern (1988) for New Guinea gender relations. These criticisms can also be directed at the reification of ritualized homosexuality or boy-insemination in Melanesia. As Sedgwick (1990) has recently pointed out in her critical study of homophobic epistemology, the tendency to polarize gender categories is a necessary stage in the awareness of alternative sex-choices but should

Sexuality in the regional analysis

59

itself be transcended in a greater awareness of sociosexual plurality. The modernist tendency to place the sexual in a "privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge" (ibid.:3) is easily projected into areas such as south New Guinea in the over-sexualization of their indigenous cultures. It is for such reasons that the rest of this book does not assume south New Guinea sexualities as a classificatory preeminence but views them inductively in conjunction with other dimensions of social relationship and social inequality. On the one hand, south coast sexual orientations need not be emotionally bleached by straining to link them isomorphically with prescriptive sister-exchange, low intensity subsistence production, sexual antagonism, or some other sociological or psychological feature. They may be appropriately treated as creative erotic expressions in their own right, flamboyantly and distinctively heterosexual and sometimes also homosexual. On the other hand, the marshalling of south New Guinea as a counter against Western homophobia has already been orchestrated by Herdt. It is time now to go beyond both implicit global binarism and irrevocable particularism, and to look for processes of interconnection that articulate sexual practices with other ethnographic specifics in a developmental framework.

The analytic legacy of homosexual emphasis: language, subsistence, and political economy

Several authors have recently used ritualized homosexuality as the basis for elaborating a series of generalizations about south New Guinea. These posit homosexuality as a crucial correlate of marital, political, and economic practices presumed general to the region. Ritualized homosexuality in the central portion of the south lowlands was indeed linked to the belief that male initiate novices should be inseminated to give them male life-substance for growth and maturation (Herdt 1984a). In the comparative south New Guinea literature, this notion is expanded; ritualized male homosexuality is reasoned to reflect male autonomy from women in both cultural reproduction and male status acquisition, notwithstanding the strong countervailing emphasis on ritual heterosexuality along the south coast. Lindenbaum (1984:339, 343) and Feil (1987:ch.7) correspondingly reason that male cultural autonomy in "homosexual societies" engenders lack of male status dependence on female productive labor, with men's status being dependent on their own semen-exchanges rather than on surplus production of valued foods or material goods (cf. Whitehead 1986). As a result, south lowlands production systems are said to support only direct rather than delayed exchange, for example, entailing person-forperson exchange in marriage and warfare rather than large-scale wealth exchanges in bridewealth or homicide compensation: Homosexual societies are thoroughly 'egalitarian' in ethos. Restricted, direct and balanced exchange predominates; asymmetrical or delayed reciprocity has no place in social arrangements. (Feil 1987:178) As for political economy, these portrayals correspond with claims that: No homosexual society has a ceremonial exchange system based on intensive, surplus production from which male prestige and renown are gained, (ibid.: 179)

Language, subsistence, and political economy

61

As a result, south New Guinea has "production systems . . . of very low intensity" (ibid. :177). It is pointed out as support of this reasoning that ritualized male homosexuality tends to co-occur with sister-exchange. Such a correspondence holds for the Trans-Fly, Kolopom, Jaquai, and inland groups such as Boazi and Gebusi but is contravened by Kamoro and eastern-central Kiwai and appears problematic among Asmat, and, further inland, Etoro and Bedamini.1 In all, the entailments and correlates of ritual homosexuality are seen as homologous with the political decentralization and fragmentation the authors presume are characteristic of lowland south New Guinea. They correspondingly assert that these societies are "small in size" (Lindenbaum 1984:343), are divided into "numerous tiny language families" (Whitehead 1986:90), "inhabit precarious environments" (Lindenbaum 1984:343), and are "marginal in terms of subsistence, and are demographically tenuous" (Feil 1987:177). Such generalizations have a selfsustaining effect; Feil writes (1987:178): "As Lindenbaum perceptively remarks, the 'precariousness of survival is matched in homosexual societies by the seemingly precarious "struggle" to create masculine identity'." Such generalizations reflect the current comparative perception of lowland south New Guinea political economy.2 Before I evaluate them in more detail, it may be noted, first, that they follow the 1960s legacy of Peter Lawrence and Mervyn Meggitt (1965) by viewing lowland New Guinea as the polar opposite of the New Guinea highlands. Feil, Lindenbaum, and Whitehead all develop their models for south New Guinea on the basis of presumed highland/lowland antinomies. Second, these generalizations tend to collapse the societies of rich coastal areas with those of more sparsely settled lowland areas further inland. Third, like many of the recent Melanesian theoretical models, these were developed by researchers whose New Guinea fieldwork has been primarily in highland areas of interior New Guinea. Language family size

The populations of language families documented by Wurm and Hattori (1981) for coastal south New Guinea range from more than 47,000 for Asmat-Kamoro and more than 35,000 for Elema to 22,700 for Kiwai, 8,100 for Marind-anim (cf. van Baal's 1966:24 estimate of 14,50016,000), 6,500 for Purari (cf. an estimate of 10,000 or more by Maher 1961:17; cf. Williams 1924:4), and 3,300 for the distinct geocultural

62

Critique

Kolopom Island area (cf. Serpenti's 1977:9 estimate of 7,000). The area that mostfitsthe "tiny language family" thesis is the Trans-Fly, composed of four language families ranging from 1,350 to 4,650 speakers.3 Ease of communication along the coast facilitated the spread of language, and Williams (1940:26, map) notes that Eleman dialects were mutually intelligible for 200 km along the seaboard. Some south lowland language families further inland were also substantial in size; Wurm and Hattori (1981) estimated the largely unstudied Awyu-Dumut language group to have a population of 29,500, and the Lowland Ok's population to be 20,300. Though not as large as the bigger highland groups, these language families are commensurate in size with those in many other areas of New Guinea. Collectively, south lowland language families cannot be characterized as small or fragmented, and this is particularly true of the more populous coastal areas. In Sepik areas to the north of the highlands, many language families are significantly smaller than those of the south lowlands (ibid.). The average language family population for south lowland groups among which ritualized homosexuality was absent was 21,268 (from table 1, chapter 3). This number compares to an average language family population of 4,530 for south lowland language families among which ritual homosexuality was practiced. The former category is more than four and a half times larger than the latter. 4 These data strongly support the notion that language families among which ritualized homosexuality was practiced were relatively small. But they also greatly reduce the applicability of this assessment to south New Guinea as a whole; the large language families in which the custom was absent constitute the great bulk of the south lowland population. Subsistence

Reliance on sago as a starch staple is commonly assumed to indicate low-intensity food production in south New Guinea (see generally Ruddle et al. 1978), but evidence is equivocal for coastal languageculture areas (see table 2). In Brookfield's assessments of Melanesian subsistence intensity, three of the forty-four places considered are from the New Guinea south coast (Brookfield with Hart 1971 :ch.4; cited hereafter as Brookfield). Of these, Kolopom is assessed as having "high intensity," and Marind-anim assessed as "partially intensive," with respective intensity rankings of sixth and twelfth out of the forty-four entries. Ritual homosexuality was practiced in both of these culture areas.

Language, subsistence, and political economy

63

Table 2. Geography and subsistence regimes of south coast New Guinea Geography

Subsistence

Reference

Asmat

Mangroves; swamp; rainforest

Sago/fish

Kolopom

Swamps; manmade isles; floodplain forest Grassland; savanna; woodlands; swamp

Taro/yams

Eyde 1967 Arsdale 1975,1978 Serpenti 1977

Group

Marind-anim

Sago and yarns3

van Baal 1966:16-21; Brookfieldl971:98f., inn.

Barraul958:16f Trans-Fly

Grassland; savanna; woodlands

Yams/tarob

Kiwai

Mangrove swamp; raised alluvial deposits

Sago/fishc

Purari

Mangrove swamp; rainforest Beach; rainforest

Sago/fish

Elema

Sago/taro/yams

Beaver 1920:88; Williams 1936:17, 218. Beaver 1920;154, 160,214f.,250; Brookfield 1971:95 Williams 1924:10-12; Holmes 1924: ch.20 Williams 1940:12-14

a

Brookfield (1971:95, 98-99,109) tabulates the Marind-anim starch staple as sago, with important subsidiary dependence upon yams (cf. also Barrau 1958:16f). b Sago is found in the Oriomo Plateau of the eastern Trans-Fly area (Ohtsuka 1983:26, 117-119), but the general Trans-Fly pattern documented by Williams (1936) features yam and taro cultivation with a dearth of the highly-prized sago. Root-crop staples shade into sago dependence north among the Wiram (Williams 1936:220) and throughout the Kiwai area, with progressively exclusive reliance on sago among the eastern Kiwai and Purari (Beaver 1920:88,154). c Among Kiwai, sago is lacking only among far western settlements such as Mawatta, where there is only one sago swamp area and a dearth of sago production (Beaver 1920:75; Landtman 1927:65).

The Kolopom cultivated yam and taro in man-made garden islands reclaimed from the swamp by piling layers of clay and floating grass on a floating bed of cut swamp reeds (Serpenti 1977:ch.4). Island beds were laboriously constructed to ensure proper moisture levels for various crops and different seasonal conditions. To further maintain proper soil temperature and moisture content, the entire cropped area was regularly covered with thin layers of mud fertilizer sifted through net strainers and then overlaid first with humus and then with dried grass compost. Tuber production was especially important for competitive mortuary feasts (ndambu). Kolopom subsistence intensity is rated on Brookfield's scale as higher than that of core highland societies such as Enga and Simbu, and he notes that the Kolopom exhibit "one of the most remarkable cultivation systems in all Melanesia" (Brookfield 1971:106,113).

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A significant degree of agricultural intensity was also found among some sago-dependent peoples of the south coast. The Marind-anim made prismoidal garden ridges, up to one and a half meters high and surrounded by drainage ditches, in which smooth-trunk sago palms were planted (Barrau 1958:16, 37; Brookfield 1971:109). Brookfield rates Marind-anim cultivation as "partially intensive," that is, as exhibiting "either the presence of intensive practices over a significant part of the total productive system, or else of a generally high level of technical competence in land management which leads to the partial creation and maintenance of a tame ecosystem." He notes that Marind subsistence "serves as a reminder that people depending on wild food [such as sago] are not necessarily at the most primitive technological level" (Brookfield 1971:109). As van Baal (1966:20) suggests, Marind cultivation practices beg comparison with those of the Kolopom, especially during the precolonial period, when gardening and feast-giving were highly developed: gardening, to-day rather insignificant, was important in the old days, when feasts were frequent, which made the availability of great quantities of kava and bananas as well as of yams and taro an urgent necessity. Enquiring further into the matter, he [Verschueren] found that formerly not only did every man have a garden from the time he was an ewati [adolescent bachelor initiand], but that he always had more than one, and that even a number of women made their own gardens.

Elema subsistence combined sago processing with intense gardening and pig husbandry. Elema had a population density of approximately fifty persons per square km in the coastal area, making it commensurate with that of many eastern highland areas. 5 Though it has been rarely noted until recently (Kelly 1988:150), the pig population per capita among the Elema was equal to that of the Mae Enga of the highlands (see Williams 1940:12). The social significance of pigs for the Elema is poignantly captured by Williams (1940:llf): the village pig is . . . the living symbol of wealth . . . He is the means of cementing friendship, of maintaining proper relations between kin; and at every social and ceremonial gathering of importance his dying squeals are pleasantly audible. A large supply of them [pigs] all round makes for a social and ceremonial activity, and so they are highly prized. At the same time, and as a consequence, they give rise to a good many disputes and quarrels. Indeed the principal sources of joy and dissension in the life of Orokolo males are their women and their pigs.

This description parallels common claims about the role of pigs in the New Guinea highlands. In the Trans-Fly area, where ritual homosexuality was strongly evident,

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the staple foods were small and large yams. Among Keraki (the Trans-Fly group studied by Williams), the collective houses built to store the yams could be well over 100 meters long - with a width of about a meter and a height of about a meter and a half (Williams 1936:233). Ayres (1983:70f.) cites patrol officer L. A. Flint as measuring one yam storehouse almost 200 meters long. Stored food supported massive competitive feasting exchanges, in which the amount and size of tubers given were carefully tallied. Williams calculated that the average family of one man and two wives amassed and put in storage 1362 kg. (3,000 lbs.) of small yams each year (1936:227). The number of yams was carefully recorded in an elaborate base-6 counting system: one dameno (considered the "bare minimum" for a family's seasonal efforts) equalled 6 x 6 x 6 x 6 = 1,296 tubers for storage. Among Trans-Fly peoples as well as Elema, Kolopom, and Kiwai, the piles of food given in feasts could be enormous. Keraki display racks presenting the food comprised up to two and a half kilometers of fence line heaped with produce (Williams 1936:231-235). One of the less extensive feasting racks was estimated to hold an exchange display of at least twenty-five to thirty tons of yams. That the seasonal Trans-Fly biotic environment could support significant food production is further evident in Harris and Laba's (1982) discovery of prehistoric garden mounds and large-scale drainage ditches in the southeastern Trans-Fly area. Among Kiwai, sago was the starch staple except in the far west of the language family (Beaver 1920:88, 160-162). But yams and taro were highly important for large-scale ceremonial giving and display. Intensive cultivation practices were used for feasting gardens, including fencing from pigs, shading seedlings, and extensive drainage ditching (Landtman 1927:67-68). Sago itself was frequently cultivated rather than harvested wild (ibid.:6S, 101). To judge from Landtman's lengthy description (ibid. :ch.5), crop cultivation was culturally important among Kiwai as well as being linked to political achievement. It may also be noted that land was reclaimed for settlement sites in some eastern Kiwai areas through compost heaping and stockading (Butcher 1964:146). Root-crop cultivation was relatively undeveloped among Purai and Asmat, who both relied on sago and fish. This subsistence pattern did not compromise the intensity of their economic and political development, however, which among Purari included significant rank divisions and hereditary chiefs (Williams 1924; Maher 1974). Purari produced

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prolific amounts of surplus sago, which was traded to visiting Motu trading parties. The Motu arrived in large lakatoi ships up to eighteen meters long and typically stocked with over a thousand earthenware pots and scores of shell valuables (Seligmann 1910:115). The visitors were hosted for about a month while their Purari hosts amassed sago for exchange. A large pot was traded for about thirty-five kg. of sago, and a large armshell valuable could be obtained for between 110 and 150 kg. of sago in plaited bags. The ships each returned carrying between twenty-three and thirty-one metric tons of sago {ibid.). In essence, Purari surplus sago production underwrote a significant proportion of their trading partners' subsistence needs and procured for themselves large numbers of pots and armshell valuables. Purari villages were extremely large and could attain a size of more than 2,000 persons (Maher 1961:32). Asmat villages could swell to more than a thousand persons (Sowada 1961:16), and Schneebaum (1988:168) came across one Asmat longhouse ninety meters in length.6 Among Kiwai - for which early population figures were not collected - the huge communal living houses could be more than 150 meters long (Landtman 1927:5).7 The significance of these residential and political aggregations in societies relying on sago as a "low intensity" subsistence base is considered further below. Statements that south New Guinea was ecologically "marginal" or "precarious" may be misleading or inaccurate, particularly for the coastal regions. Available information suggests there was no significant protein deficiency among coastal groups, as most of them had substantial access to maritime and riverine fauna or to savannah or inland forest game as well as to plentiful sago or tubers. A plentiful diet of diverse food sources has been noted explicitly for the Marind (van Baal 1966:19; see Luyken 1955), the Trans-Fly area (Ayres 1983:8; see also Ohtsuka 1983), the Purari (Williams 1924:2, 81), the Kiwai (Landtman 1927:64), and the Asmat (see van Arsdale 1975,1978). Subsistence was precarious primarily among Kolopom, whose intricate cultivation system was highly susceptible to floods and drought (Serpenti 1977:ch.2). In areas where sago was the starch staple, fish and sea creatures ranging in size from tiny prawns to huge dugong provided important and often regular protein supplements. A number of early observers noted that south coastal populations were physically more robust as well as more residentially aggregated than their inland "bush" counterparts (e.g., Beaver 1920). Whether the predatory headhunting practiced by several coastal populations against their inland neighbors

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was facilitated by nutritional, demographic, or ecological advantage is difficult to say with certainty, but such a pattern is plausible. Overall, subsistence intensity was relatively high among Kolopom, Marind, Elema, and possibly among prehistoric Trans-Fly peoples. In all of these areas, root crops were significant food sources. A tenuous subsistence base is evident only among Kolopom. It is important to note that where subsistence relied heavily on sago and was technically low in intensity, low intensity of economic exchange or sociopolitical life did not necessarily follow. The ability to produce quickly a large and easily-stored food source such as sago was complemented by ease of water transport. As a result, groups such as Purari, Kiwai, and Asmat were able to aggregate considerable populations in very large villages for residence, feasting, and/or for warfare. Among Marind, Elema, and Kiwai, ease of sago procurement also freed labor for cultivation of root-crop gardens, which were important for feasting and competitive exchange. In short, the scale and organization of political life were not rigidly dependent on the extent or intensity of starch staple procurement. Gift exchange and leadership South coast patterns of exchange and leadership diverge strongly from characterizations of them as economically nonintensive and politically decentralized. Kiwai Among Kiwai, who have been erroneously considered to be a "homosexual society," large gaera feasts were held yearly in preparation for mouguru heterosexual fertility rituals (Landtman 1927:ch.26). These feasts were held by one or more leaders who had taken an oath upon being challenged by a rival leader to reciprocate the gifts of a previous feast. In preparation, leaders had special large gardens cultivated, reserving their entire produce for distribution at the event. More generally, "an enormous quantity of food must be supplied, during which hardly any regular work can be done, except bringing home provisions from the gardens" {ibid. :383). Among eastern Kiwai, Butcher (1964:223) observed one feast at which twenty pigs and forty sago bundles, each over three meters in height, were presented. Beaver (1920:180) estimates that at least ten to eleven tons of food were distributed at one feast he attended. At the event itself, a large tree was cut down and transported whole to the ceremonial ground, where it was

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replanted and festooned with huge quantities of food. Landtman (1927:389) notes: An enormous mass of garden produce is hung up on the different parts of the gaera tree: on the stumps of the several branches, on the platform [bamboo structure to support the tree and frame its base], on every spot of the outer bamboo structure, wherever there is room, and the remaining food is heaped up on the ground round the tree, where mats have been spread.

In addition to food, shell ornaments, dogs' teeth necklaces, belts, and other valuables were hung in the tree's branches and piled about its base. When everything is ready, all the people are summoned to come and look, and they burst out in exclamations of wonder at the imposing sight of the gaera. A great "kaikai" is held on the dancing ground round the gaera. {ibid. :390) When the food and valuables had been distributed and only the empty gaera tree was left, its master climbed to the top, berated those who had challenged him to the feast, and savored his accomplishment. If the opposing leader had not sponsored a similar feast, he challenged him (as rendered to Landtman in pidgin): "I clear now; I been make gaerafinish.Where you now? You there along water; me there along shore." No words could cut deeper than these. The man alluded to feels his honour at stake, and he and his people will put forth every effort to wash away the shame. They will carry on their garden work with untiring zeal during the next season, {ibid. :395) The most successful Kiwai leaders, called "chiefs" by Landtman, were strongly polygynous and commanded the work of others to such an extent that they themselves did little subsistence labor {ibid.: 168-169). One who is able to entertain many guests enjoys a greater reputation than others . . . "Me fellow look along kaikai," the people say when giving the cause of social pre-eminence. For this reason a man is greatly assisted in his social ambitions by a plurality of wives: "another woman go garden, another woman go take firewood, another woman go catch fish, another woman go cook him husband he sing out plenty people come kaikai." Women of a successful man would sometimes ask him to marry co-wives to help them in their work: It is by no means rare where there is only one wife for her to scold her husband for burdening her with too much work instead of procuring a second wife to share it. "Me tired," she is supposed to say; "make garden, carry firewood, catch

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fish, make kaikai for you - hard work. More better you take him another woman." (ibid.:241) Elema Feasting was also highly developed among Elema, Purari, Asmat, Marind-anim, Keraki, and Kolopom (the last three of these practiced ritualized homosexuality). Among the Elema very large exchanges of pork and shell ornaments were conducted in the course of numerous mortuary and costume rites. Of particular importance were the gift exchanges of the hevehe ceremonial cycle, during which "some forty piles [of food] were ranged in the right order, each consisting of roast sago in wrappings of palm-leaf, pots of stew . . . piles of fresh coconuts, green and yellow bunches of areca-nut, red boiled crabs, and hunks of pork" (Williams 1940:363-364). The gift-giving of food and valuables occurring at the conclusion of this event, as at other ritual feasts, was "in native eyes . . . the climax of the whole ceremony . . . One may see the donors work themselves into what seems like fury, while the recipients, loaded with ornaments as they are but looking very sheepish, are obliged to listen in silence" (ibid. :145). Frequent exchanges were transacted between affinal or matrilateral relatives, with armshells or pearlshells given to wife-givers and pigs given in return (ibid. :61). The uncle or the brother who makes the gift likes to do so with liberality and so enhance his good name. If, on the other hand, he fails to make a creditable showing he is afflicted with maioka, or shame; he feels small; and he may have to endure the actual taunts of those directly or indirectly associated with the gift, for there is no convention of polite silence on such matters. The ideal thing, since the principle of reciprocity holds here as strongly as elsewhere, is both to give and to receive on a lavish scale; but failing equivalent return, a man has his reward in the respect, or even fame, which liberality, or the mere display of wealth at appropriate moments, will bring him. (ibid. :97) In addition to affinal gift giving, Elema conducted large exchanges in hereditary trading partnerships (okeahi) between nonrelatives. These were initiated in each generation by "the spectacular hoera kor, or 'taro tree.'" A tree trunk some twenty meters long was loaded with perhaps 700 taro, "which grow to such splendid proportions at Orokolo," as well as haulms of bananas and bundles of sugar cane. The laden timber required 70 to 80 men to carry it (ibid. :72): Made gay with croton, dracaena, and new white hii [bark cloth] fluttering from arrows as flagpoles, the whole imposing contraption is borne along the beach to

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the eravo [longhouse] of the okeahi who is to receive it. The bearers, as many as can find a place to put their shoulders to, struggle and stagger under the weight. If they actually collapse, or if the bamboo [support] poles crack andfinallybreak in the middle, all the better, (ibid. :72) Williams notes that "nothing reaches more deeply into the soul of an Elema native than does the traffic in ornaments and pigs" (ibid. :91). Elema leadership emphasized generosity in feasting, hortatory control over female labor (though polygyny was extremely rare), and incipient hereditary rank. Gerontocracy was strongly developed, and "in the oldest men of the tribe we meet with something like a ruling class" (ibidrM). Purari Among Purari, just west of Elema, a system of hereditary chieftainship co-existed with general rank classification. Maher (1974) found that Purari maintained a careful genealogy of up to nine generations of chiefs, tracing the origin of Purari spirituality from immunu "life-force" beings to its human distribution in living chiefs and their ancestors. Purari politics cross-cut hereditary rank with competitive leadership grounded in shell ornament exchanges and control of female labor for feast-giving. The aim of precolonial Purari exchange, according to Maher (1967:315f.), was to invest resources and establish debtor relations in order to gain wives and increase one's political power. Rank was formally inherited, but competitive exchange was an important means of maintaining and increasing upward mobility. Maher (ibid.) remarks that: A man's holdings in shell ornaments underlay much of his ability to influence his community, but if he were to have the influence appropriate to a mari [chief] or amua [man of rank], he must also maintain an extensive network of relationships to individuals through regular gifts of food. At feasts, a careful investment of large-scale resources was made, creating exchange debts that were called in to underwrite major feasts by leaders on later occasions. As a result, a village of up to 2,000 persons could be galvanized into concerted action as people responded to the leader's demand that "now was the time for old obligations to be honored." Keen manipulation of the exchange system was particularly important:

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His [the leader's] skill lay in being able to think in terms of large numbers of marriages involving many relatives, occurring through a substantial dimension of time. Most successful men made their moves within a mental perspective of a generation or more. What one contributed today to the bride wealth which a paternal uncle was gathering for his third wife could be influenced by the expectation one had of outliving the uncle and thereby achieving a strong position to claim the lion's share of the bride wealth at the eventual marriage of the uncle's two-year-old daughter, (ibid.) The connection with gender in the production of food for exchange was direct (ibid.): for the ordinary [Purari] man, an extra wife was desirable but not usually possible. For the Purari mari [chief] or amua [man of rank], however, polygyny was essential. Although men had their significant roles in the division of labor, women were the principal providers of foodstuffs.

Williams records an average of 1.5 wives per married man, with chiefs having up to eight wives, and he notes, "In days not long gone by certain Purari chiefs are said (possibly with some heroic exaggeration) to have had eighty wives and more apiece" (1924:55). Asmat It has often been remarked that prowess in headhunting was an important dimension of Asmat leadership (e.g., Zegwaard 1959). Other dimensions of Asmat leadership are much less widely known, and because much of this information is unpublished, a selective synopsis of it is appropriate. Among Asmat as among Purari, polygyny was crucial to male leadership. Not only were multiple wives vital to facilitate extensive affinal alliances and feasting relations, but a man, upon marriage, became the exclusive owner of the sago stands inherited by his wife from her clan (Eyde 1967:227, 255; Trenkenschuh 1982b:46). Control of these sago stands and the female labor to work them was critical to the leader; it enabled him to stage ceremonial feasts and to attract cognatic or distantly related men and their families to himself, thus swelling the size of his settlement. Large settlements as well as strong affinal linkages to other settlements were in turn crucial for the staging of successful headhunting raids and for resisting the raids of others (Eyde 1967). Asmat leaders had several wives as well as additional sexual-exchange partners (papisj), and Zegwaard (1978:18) states, "I know of 6 wives, 10

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wives and even a case of 17 wives [married] to one man." Eyde (1967:228) states: It should be stressed that the equation between prowess in warfare on the one hand, and wealthy plural wives and surplus sago on the other hand, is extremely important. It is by this equation that prowess in warfare becomes transformed into the ability to make massive distributions of food, and thus into political power.

More explicitly, "a successful man, thus, accumulates sago and fishing areas, and the female labor necessary to translate these areas into surplus food to be distributed, by marrying more than one wife" (ibid. :235). Asmat warfare was connected directly to their exchange economy in that the ceremonial cycle of feasting culminated in headhunting. Concomitantly, women disparaged and were loath to marry men who had not proven themselves by taking heads in warfare. Warrior prowess alone, however, was not sufficient to attain high-level leadership: Leadership above the level of the core conical kindred [house-doorway section within the longhouse] is everywhere related to the ability to distribute food in ceremonial cycles, (ibid. :306)

Unfortunately, little is known of the economic, much less the religious, dimensions of the elaborate Asmat ceremonial cycles. Eyde (ibid. :338) summarizes the bare outlines: The ceremonial cycles last from one to several months, while the elaborate ceremonial objects which are the center of interest are fashioned. During this time there are repeated ritual distributions of food in the men's house accompanied by chanting, drumming, the recitation of myths, games, and dancing. The ceremonial cycle concludes with a massive distribution of food and, usually, the public display of the completed ceremonial object. Often, only a few weeks elapse between the conclusion of one cycle and the beginning of another. There can be no doubt that the cycles play an important part in stimulating the overall productivity of the village economy.

Many of the ceremonial exchanges were quite substantial. In the more extravagant climactic distributions, leaders invited large numbers of men to cut sago or obtain other food from the leaders' extended lands, ending in a mass distribution. Food received in the course of ceremonial cycles was later reciprocated (ibid. :343, 348f., 357f.). A particularly important ceremonial concerned the construction and dedication of the Ws-pole, an elaborately carved trunk five to seven meters long fashioned in a series of ancestor and hornbill embodiments

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Figure 2 Asmat bis-po\e. Wood, paint, fibre, 6 m high. The carved canoe with seatedfiguresat the base of the pole is a receptacle for the life-essence of headhunt victims as described in chapter 9. (Illustration after Rockefeller and Gerbrands 1967:302-311.)

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from which an intricately fretted aerial root protruded (figure 2; see Rockefeller and Gerbrands 1967:302-311; Schneebaum 1990:42f.). The poles were commissioned by the leaders of the men's house moieties and took two to three months for master carvers to fashion in a special carving building (Zegwaard 1954; Renselaar and Mellema 1956; see Sowada 1961:47). During this period, the carvers were fed as well as paid for their work by the leader, who also hosted the ceremonial inauguration at which the village as a whole and people from other neighboring villages were feasted. The combined population of these groups was perhaps 2,000 or more. 8 The importance of leaders' own spiritual force and its connection with group reproduction were highly evident in the ceremony's conclusion (summarized by Sowada 1961:38): Moreover, at the completion of the Bis-rite, the ancestor pole used for the occasion is solemnly transferred to the sago groves. Ancestor poles are not fashioned except for noted headhunters. A person of this sort is believed to possess much nammu - mana which permeates the ancestor pole during the Bis ceremony. The pole, once placed within the locus of the sago forest, is released of its mana which in turn is absorbed by the sago palms. Afterward the people, upon consuming the nammu-infested sago, will participate in the strength and the fearlessness of their ancestor. Staging the bis ceremony strongly identified leaders as the paramount living embodiments of spiritual force: not only was the leader himself a renowned headhunter, but he had commissioned the pole to honor his own deceased relatives and had prevailed upon his many wives and widespread kin alliances and dependents to work his extensive sago areas to stage the feast. The planting of the bis-po\e back in these areas to replenish and rejuvenate sago underscores the economic and political as well as the cosmological and military cycle of this undertaking. Not surprisingly, conflict over possession of sago territories was an important underpinning both of Asmat headhunting between settlements and of fission within villages (Eyde 1967; Sowada 1961:36; cf. Zegwaard 1959:1037). Despite granting usufructory rights, Asmat adages strongly counselled: Do not seek any food in another's territory or another's sago area! Another's sago area only gives trouble! (from Drabbe 1959:133; quoted in Sowada 1961:36) Kolopom Among Kolopom, whose sexual customs included ritualized homosexuality, success in feasts of competitive giving, termed ndambu, was

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the sine qua non of political status (Serpenti 1972-73, 1977:ch.6). factions within village wards were paired in feasting opposition and were part of a nested hierarchy of feasting oppositions between village wards as wholes, between village-halves, and between whole villages. Competitive feasts escalated to encompass larger political groups as the mortuary feast cycle progressed, and great food gifts could also be initiated ad hoc by a warrenwundu or "great cultivator" to challenge and defeat a rival. Many garden islands were reserved for competitive feasting exchanges. The largely nonpolygynous men did most of the gardening work themselves. At feasting exchanges, raw foods were heaped up in a large culinary display, including specially cultivated taro up to a meter in length and yams more than two and half meters long {ibid.:28-38). In comparing the size and amount of food given by each side, the prestige of the leaders and their competing factions were fully at stake, and careful tallies were kept of the amounts presented. Leadership depended above all else on the ability to threaten and then formally challenge and oust rivals through competitive food exchanges. When a feast has been a large one, it might take a long period of time to mount a sufficient return feast (Serpenti 19721973:169). Serpenti provides a detailed case study of feasting competition between rival leaders and their factions, noting within this process the: great importance . . . [of] the pure struggle for power and prestige. The derogatory remarks addressed to the opponent . . . arise . . . from one warrenwundu [great cultivator's] ambition to outdo his rivals and thus raise himself a further step on the ladder of social prestige. Not only on subjects directly or indirectly connected with agriculture, but in the most diverse matters, the opinion of the warrenwundu carries great weight. Less important persons will not readily contradict him or ignore his express wishes, for it is in his power at any time to 'defeat' a refractory member of his kwanda [village ward] or paburu [village-half sector] at ndambu [competitive mortuary feast-giving], which would mean public humiliation for the man in question. (1977:235f.)

Serpenti notes that the warrenwundu as leader fixes the times for planting, for rituals, and for competitive feasting; he acts as spokesman for his followers, and in general is the embodiment of his group's influence and prestige. "Through the ndambu-contest against warrenwundu from other local groups he gains prestige and influence

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not only for himself but also for the whole group who helped him" (ibid.:236). Keraki [Trans-Fly] Among Keraki, where ritualized homosexuality was also practiced, large-scale feasting was highly important to male prestige. In Keraki as well as Kolopom, the huge food piles given were carefully recorded by an elaborate set of measuring devices tallying the amount of food given and the length and girth of the largest tubers. The large quantity of yams and the size of display-racks used to hold them for Keraki ceremonial presentation have been mentioned above. Ayres (1983:165) states: To successfully grow big and plentiful yams is a great achievement. A man is a "big man" kavar kambei, by virtue of his success in yam gardening. He will also be known as a "garden man," ndau kamei. To accuse a man of not having many yams, or of growing small yams is a formal insult. Williams (1936:235) notes that "the headmen are expected to stand above others as food-producers and feast-makers." In elaborating this point, he remarks {ibid. :233): There is no doubt that the [Keraki] native is deeply impressed by the sight of a quantity of food . . . and he takes a corresponding pride in being the producer or owner of it. To cast doubt upon the food-producing capacity of an individual or group is a fertile source of quarrels; and an acknowledged type of rejoinder in any dispute is to challenge your adversaries to display as much food as you can display. Unlike Kolopom men, Keraki men were highly dependent on female labor for amassing food stores, and polygyny was frequent. Forty-five percent of married men had more than one wife - an average of 1.55 wives per married man {ibid. :149). Older wives were inherited through the levirate and appear to have been more important to Keraki men as a source of labor than as sexual partners. Commenting on the Trans-Fly emphasis on gardening and cumulative food-display, Williams {ibid. :234f.) remarks that one could write a whole monograph on the social and exchange significance of food in Keraki life. Marind-anim Among Marind-anim, by contrast, the linkage between leadership and the political economy of food and wealth exchange appears weaker than in other south coast culture areas. Polygyny was rare and there appears

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to have been little ethic of competitive exchange in feasting. It is true that subsistence was partially intensive, that feasts were large, and that headmen (pakas anim) were leaders of the men's houses. The ideal pakas anim exerted decisive initiative in many areas: organizing ritual feasts (including setting the day and inviting the guests), organizing hunting andfishingtrips, legitimizing community marriages, supervising and coordinating community garden work, exercising rights over uncultivated land, adjudicating disputes, organizing and leading rituals, and being "the great and uncontested religious leader, listened to in silence and respect by everyone in the village, even by the elders" (South Pacific Commission 1952-53:56f.). The pakas anim nominated his own successor "after exhaustive deliberation with the elder men" {ibid.). His most important function, however, was as the preeminent warrior of the men's house, leading the group in organizing and carrying out headhunting raids. For subsistence, van Baal (1966:20) notes that Verschueren's information is fully corroborated by Wirz's statement that the Marind usually have gardens in many different places and that a man's status is determined by the number and extent of his gardens.

The largest feasts were those celebrated in the wake of successful headhunting expeditions, which could necessitate arranging for sitting and sleeping areas to accommodate 1,500 people (van der Kroef 1952:232). The competitive dimension of feasting and status rivalry, however, is largely absent from Marind politics as portrayed in ethnographic accounts. This absence might in part be due to a deterioration of leadership as a result of heavily armed Dutch intervention and suppression of headhunting, which began in the early 1900s. Probably more important, however, is that the above-mentioned leadership features were closely articulated with, and were in many ways subordinated to, community interdependence in ritual, totemic, and headhunting concerns. This interdependence reflects the overarching mythico-ritual system of phratry organization that linked Marind communities as collective partners (see chapter 8). Van Baal (1966) emphasizes that ritual and political interdependence placed strong constraints on internal political rivalry. Correspondingly, Marind were distinctive and indeed striking among south coast societies by the absence of warfare between their own communities. (Van Baal rightly notes this tendency as being perhaps "the most remarkable of all . . .") Instead, warfare was cooperatively directed against non-Marind-anim in long-distance

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Table 3. Leadership and exchange in south coast New Guinea Group

Rating

Reference

Asmat Kolopom" Marind-anim Trans-Fly6 Kiwai Elema Purari

++ + ++ ++ + ++

Eyde 1967:228,235,349 Serpenti 1977:ch. 6,132 van Baal 1966:65-68,163 Williams 1936:99,149,215,233,235,243 Landtman 1927:168, 247 Williams 1940:13, 49-51, 91, 97f, 145 Maher 1967:315f; Williams 1924:55

Key: -I- + male leadership is highly competitive, including material exchange competition in which male leadership prestige is dependent on polygyny and differential access to female labor. + leaders' prestige is crucially linked to eminence in giving valuables or food in exchange relations, but such gifts do not depend on polygyny or differential access to female labor. leadership is not significantly dependent on eminence in material exchange relationships and not reliant on polygyny or female labor. a Though not common, polygyny was both possible and prestigious among Kolopom. In some respects, Kolopom polygyny was an index or result of productive prowess and material wealth rather than a cause of it; it was the industrious cultivator who could garner enough food/valuables to "meet the demands of the numerous relatives" of more than one wife (Serpenti 1977:132). It is possible that general cultural assessments underestimate the labor that women contributed to Kolopom leaders' productive prowess, since "agriculture is, ideally, an affair of men only, no matter how considerable the women's share may be" {ibid.: 121, my emphasis). It would appear, however, that much - perhaps most - of the physical as well as magical labor needed to become a Kolopom "great cultivator" derived from male effort. Kolopom leadership was highly competitive and may have had polygyny as a significant element ex post facto, but polygyny did not appear to be a prerequisite for leadership success. b Keraki may be contrasted to sago-dependent Oriomo groups of the Trans-Fly, east of Williams' study area, where polygyny was minimal and not related to competitive leadership, which was itself undeveloped (Ohtsuka 1983:15,12).

headhunting raids. Celebration feasts concluding the headhunt were held for allies, including distant allies, who had helped make the headhunt possible (ibid. :24, ch.12, 720f). Comparative assessment of leadership and political economy

With the exception of the Marind-anim, south coast political economies cannot be described as lacking asymmetric or delayed reciprocity, lacking major wealth transactions, lacking fervent leadership competition through exchange, or having low intensity political economy in general (see table 3). In four of the seven language-culture areas, male leadership prestige was highly dependent upon polygyny and differential access to female labor. Again excepting the Marind, none of these features appears incompatible with the highly elaborate myth and ritual

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systems that were of such deep cultural significance in all south New Guinea language-culture areas. A cosmological system with elaborate social concomitants, including ritual homosexuality or ritual heterosexuality, is neither indicative of nor exclusive to significant dimensions of politicoeconomic intensification (or vice versa). In contrast to the New Guinea highlands, however, this intensification did not depend on high population density or a highly localized subsistence base. It depended rather on exploitation of dispersed subsistence resources and a high degree of geographical mobility both in amassing foodstuffs and in aggregating population. These differences mark contrasting configurations of politicoeconomic intensity in highland and south coastal New Guinea rather than polar differences in the scale of politicoeconomic intensification. Great Men or Big Men?

It remains possible that the principles of exchange along the New Guinea south coast contrast distinctively with those found in core areas of highland New Guinea. The most prominent recent model addressing this issue is Godelier's (1986, 1991) typology, which systematically contrasts "Big Man societies" in core highland areas to "Great Men societies" elsewhere in New Guinea, including along the south coast. Godelier suggests that a number of factors co-vary with these exchange types. Big Man societies are reasoned to exchange material wealth for human life and hence to reflect a complex exchange system in which nonequivalent items are transacted. Control over exchange of material wealth in elaborate competitive exchanges is then the key to a coalesced pattern of Big Man leadership. Great Man systems, by contrast, are reasoned to be based on restricted exchange of like-for-like - for instance, a person-for-person model of exchange, as reflected in sister-exchange marriage and blood feuding rather than bride wealth marriage or homicide compensation. Leadership roles tend to be multifarious in Great Man societies and based on spiritual domination or on coercive force rather than on domination by control of material wealth. In short, Godelier's argument suggests the following kinds of antinomies:

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Big Man societies

Great Man societies

Competitive/nonequivalent exchange: bridewealth marriage homicide compensation Leadership domination through wealth accumulation

Restricted/equivalent exchange:

Coalescence of leadership functions (singular leadership role)

sister-exchange marriage blood feud Leadership domination through spiritual prerogative or physical coercion Division of leadership functions (multiple leadership roles)

The distribution of these features can be assessed across the New Guinea south coast; if Godelier's hypothesis of discrete exchange logics holds, we would expect Great Man features to appear as a cluster, with a corresponding absence of Big Man traits. It cannot be assumed that the presence of a given trait necessarily indicates the absence of its logical counterpart. The results do not support Godelier's model (see tables 4 and 5). None of the language-culture groups shows an absence of characteristics from either societal type, and, as shown in table 5, three of them (Asmat, Kiwai, and Elema) show as many or more "Big Man society" characteristics as they do "Great Man society" characteristics. Further, none of the individual features indicates a consistent pattern of restricted exchange or Great Man leadership across the New Guinea south coast. It would hence be difficult to conclude that the south coast cultures fit the Great Man as opposed to the Big Man political pattern. Indeed, only among the Trans-Fly is there a great majority of the former over the latter. The Purari, whose political system included ranked chiefs, paradoxically shows more Great Man than Big Man traits. Overall, the clusters of traits that should co-vary as part of the logic of Big Man or Great Man societies are in fact mixed together complexly in the various language-culture areas of south coast New Guinea. The Asmat case effectively illustrates the intertwining of equivalent and non-equivalent exchange. Legitimate marriage agreed to by both sides (per se) was of three varieties: exchange marriage, bridewealth marriage, and marriage followed by brideservice (Zegwaard and Boelaars 1955:277-301).9 Sister-exchange and bridewealth marriages were both common, the former being characteristic of unions within the men's club house and the latter prevalent among marriages between different club houses (either within or between villages). If a man's relatives could not raise the requisite bridewealth for inter-club house marriage, the groom could be pressed into brideservice.

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Table 4. Big Man society characteristics in south coast New Guinea Homicide compensation +

Bride wealth Asmat Kolopom Marind Trans-fly Kiwai Purari Elema

+ _

_a _

c

-

-

-

+ +

-

+d

Leaders dominate by wealth

Singular leadership

Total "+"

-

+ + + + +/-

3 2 1 1 2 2 3

+b -b + + + +

a

Homicide compensation practiced, but only as part of balanced exchange (Serpenti 1968:125). b Leadership domination pronounced through food exchange competition. c Bridewealth exchanged between agnates to procure "sisters" in marriage, but not transacted between clans. d Holmes (1924:261, 263) states that when battle deaths were not equal, leaders would pressure aggrieved parties to accept material compensation for persons killed or wounded. One cause of quarrels was "damage done to gardens by the pigs of another community and refusal of the latter to compensate the former for their losses." Table 5. Great Man society characteristics in south coast New Guinea

Asmat Kolopom Marind Trans-fly Kiwai Purari Elema a b

Sisterexchange

Blood feuds

+ + (+) + + -

+ + + + + -

Leaders dominate ritually or by coercion + + + + + +

Multiple Total leadership

BM/GMa

Bb

3/3 2/3 1/2 1/4 2/2 2/3 3/2

(-) + (-) + +

3 3 2 4 2 3 2

Ratio of Big Man society characteristics to Great Man society characteristics. Parentheses indicate assessments based on circumstantial or partly conflicting evidence.

The "complex" rather than restricted dimensions of Asmat inter-club house marriage are reflected not only in extensive and obligatory bridewealth/brideservice but in homicide compensation between Asmat villages, particularly those that fought over women and sago areas but did not headhunt each other and might attend each other's feasts (van Kampen 1956:62ff.; see summary in Sowada 1961:53-56). Homicide compensation between such villages could, as in the New Guinea highlands, be standardized, with suggestion made that "the bloodwealth indemnity paid for a murder must not exceed or be less than that amount which is culturally fixed" {ibid. :56; see similarly, Eyde 1967:332).10 Blood-wealth compensation was made directly from the

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Asmat killer through a hole in his longhouse enclosure to the kin of the person killed, the payment including sago, spears, shells, dogs' teeth strings, and carved canoe paddles. It could perhaps be reasoned that Asmat exemplify a "bifurcated" exchange logic, with equivalent exchange practiced close to home and nonequivalent exchange practiced farther away. Yet this, too, is belied by Asmat practices. It was just between socially distant and politically equal Asmat men that restricted exchange in wife-lending was practiced, that is, the reciprocal and simultaneous exchange of wives between two men who had chosen to become papisj, bond-friends (Zegwaard and Boelaars 1955:283-87; van Kampen 1956:73-76; see Sowada 1961:91-95). Papisj relations were politically consequential, and leaders could have a halfdozen bond-friends, allowing them to extend their personal connection with important but unrelated men from numerous different longhouses. The exchange linkage was "as binding as a marriage contract" and enjoined the men who exchanged wives to be, among other things, "sworn blood-friends in war" (Sowada 1961:91, 94). Exact reciprocity among yet more distant social relations is highly evident in the blood feuding without compensation that was endemic between Asmat who were not living in adjacent or allied villages (Zegwaard 1959). As the Asmat case illustrates, the analytic assumption that exchange logics are discrete and internally coherent for entire societies is belied by the evident complexities of belief as well as practice. To sustain such an argument in the face of contrary evidence, one would have to artificially polarize differences between different groups of societies or else force cases into an ever-more-cumbersome proliferation of intermediate or mixed-exchange types. In either event, the Maussian tendency to view a given form of prestation as a total logic for a given society or group of societies is severely compromised. More generally, the structuralfunctional legacy in French structuralism and structural Marxism becomes painfully evident. Whereas the logic of the analyst can be pure, consistent, and discrete, cultural orientations may be diverse and internally conflicted - and the details of exchange correspondingly multifarious. Thomas (1991) has recently made parallel criticisms concerning the relationship between exchange logic, material culture, and colonialism in the Pacific generally. It could be objected that the exchange logics at work may not be adequately reflected in the specific traits listed above and in the bald way they are tabulated in tables 4 and 5. Yet if they do not have systematic empirical reflection in these indices or some analogous ones, the existence of discrete underlying exchange logics at the level of "deep structure" is

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correspondingly called into question. To argue otherwise is to be left with the conclusion that structural models exist only at the level of mind and are not subject to evaluation at the level of social reality (Levi-Strauss 1960; contrast Maybury-Lewis 1960). Comparative interpretations and ethnographic histories

Given overwhelming evidence to the contrary, how has it been possible for images of low politicoeconomic intensity and lack of competitive exchange to become so entrenched in recent generalizations concerning lowland south New Guinea? Part of the answer is that these generalizations are more apt for south New Guinea areas that are lowland but inland as opposed to those along the coast; the difference derives in part from my taking the coastal language-culture areas as a geographic contour. Even so, the regional comparisons of Feil, Lindenbaum, and others have included coastal groups such as the Kiwai, Kolopom, Marind, and Trans-Fly - groups that represent significant exceptions to their generalizations. Differences in the scale of analysis are also important; Lindenbaum, Feil, and (and to a lesser extent) Godelier configure lowland New Guinea by virtue of its contrast to extremely dense population areas of the core New Guinea highlands. Against this elevated baseline (where else in the world does one find politically unranked horticulturists with population densities of 75 or even 150 persons per sq. km?), almost all other tribal political economies can be seen as "nonintensive" or "lacking Big Manship." If one takes the core highlands as a baseline, other areas are easily defined negatively, without adequately considering the distinctive features of political economy that they in fact exhibit. These problems are naturally exposed as the scale of analysis is reduced and comparisons are built up from within rather than between large regions. Factors of ethnographic history, however, are as critically important as boundary configuration and comparative scale. Notwithstanding the ethnographic evidence presented above, ethnographers did not systematically document the details of politics, exchange, and leadership for south coast New Guinea or highlight them in ways that would have made them more easily recognized by comparative analysts. Much of the available information comes from classic monographs based on fieldwork between 1910 and 1940 that contain rich descriptive detail about many topics but tend to be inadequate for understanding political economy. Williams, for instance, notes that an entire monograph could have been written about the importance of food production and distribution in

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Keraki culture but limits himself to the briefest of thin descriptions, ending tersely with "the sound if somewhat platitudinous conclusion that food is sociologically as well as biologically an important thing in Keraki life" (Williams 1936:235). In his Elema monograph, Williams (1940:330) states that in some respects, the enormous and elaborate exchange of gifts among men is: the most serious and important moment in the whole [15-year ceremonial] cycle . . . But the reader need not be wearied with a description of it. Suffice it to say that the gifts were more numerous and the throng of critical spectators far greater than at the morning presentation . . .

At an earlier period, Williams had little notion of the political significance of Purari exchange, reconstructed so vividly more than two decades later by Maher. Williams (1924:200) laments: The inner meaning of this exchange of gifts must be a matter of conjecture. The only explanation ever given me by a native was that this was a suitable occasion for the husband to make a gift to his wife's relatives; he must maintain his good name in their eyes for liberality and wealth.

Van Baal (1966:828) notes for the Marind-anim that though very large feasting exchanges were common, including some at which 50 pigs were killed and sago pallets ten meters long were cooked, There are only a few . . . [descriptions of Marind-anim feasts] which result from systematic observation and even these are incomplete because the marriagerelationships determining the pattern of food-exchange and the technique of the distribution of gifts remained unnoticed or were summarized in empty generalizations plainly indicating that the observer had not the slightest notion of their social relevance . . .

The references to exchange economy and its connection to leadership that are made are often buried deeply in lengthy descriptive monographs that focus primarily on other topics. It is not surprising that the patterns these passages reveal have been overlooked in contemporary analyses of south New Guinea. Comparative analysis accentuates these difficulties when it takes the ethnography of highland and south coastal areas of New Guinea as if they were equivalent to each other. The primary information from each area was collected at different times and with different ethnographic and theoretical objectives. For authors steeped in the recent concerns of comparative highlands ethnography, an uncritical reading of the south coast monographs takes at face value their relative inattention to political

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economy and their emphasis on myth, ritual, and totemism. It is easy in this context to embrace the assumption - so embarrassingly erroneous once clearly stated - that an elaborate religious system is somehow an alternative to or functional replacement for an intensive political economy. Compounding the matter, the early monographs tended to portray individual features of politics and economy as separable and isolated from each other (that is, following in the legacy of Haddon and others prior to the rise of functionalism). Such a trend is evident as well in much of the more recent but fragmentary corpus of ethnography on the Asmat. As a result, the few pieces of politicoeconomic puzzle that are presented in the south coast ethnography tend to be widely scattered and disjointed.11 In the absence of a closer reading, it is all too easy to conclude that south coast New Guinea lacked highly developed competitive exchange systems. These biases are the reverse of those that arose among Melanesianists in the 1950s to 1970s. As discussed in chapter 1, this period saw a shift of ethnographic interest to the New Guinea highlands and a shift of theoretical interest to structural functionalism and then to cultural materialism and Marxism. Greatest attention was given to politics, exchange, social structure, ecology, and processes of politicoeconomic development. In all, it is evident that the conceptual contrast between the New Guinea highlands and the south coast - the former having "Big Men," "competitive exchange," "clan-parishes," and "politicoeconomic intensification," and the latter having "Great Men," "restricted exchange," "nonintensive political economy," and "male status autonomy" - is due in part to the juxtaposition of 1970s theoretical and ethnographic emphases against those of the 1920s. The scope of regional similarities and differences is in fact much more complex and interesting than this simplification implies, and I have created my regional contours in part to highlight this fact. This shift does not obliterate comparison but sharpens understanding of the differences and similarities between important cultural regions. Certainly there are real and significant differences between lowland and highland areas of New Guinea (see chapter 10). And certainly divergence of ethnographic interest stems in significant part from the practices and beliefs found in the regions themselves. Nevertheless, the magnitude and polarity of contrast between regions can become artificially magnified. This problem easily arises when generalizations or theories about one region are contrasted to those from another area that was studied largely at a different time and with a different set of topical and theoretical emphases.

Women's status

Recent analyses have made differing assessments of women's status in south New Guinea. Gilbert Herdt (1984a:66) suggests that female status was particularly low where ritualized homosexuality was practiced, and Harriet Whitehead (1986:286f.) suggests that variations in New Guinea fertility cults illustrate different cultural forms of male dominance. Daryl Feil (1987:ch.7), on the other hand, argues that the status of women was quite high in the "homosexual societies" of south New Guinea. Shirley Lindenbaum (1987:226) suggests for these societies that relations of production were roughly egalitarian, with men having a slight edge, but that men were dominant in cultural practice, since "the production and exchange of semen . . . creates status differences between older and younger men and especially between men and women." Moving beyond a logical configuration of gender and exchange, there is a large and interesting range of variation in female status, both within the central portion of south New Guinea where ritualized homosexuality was practiced and more widely along the south coast. Female status is a notoriously difficult concept, but for heuristic purposes in the present context, I follow Herdt (1984a:66) and Feil (1987:170) and consider high female status to be reflected in (a) women's sexual and marital choice; (b) female acquisition of and control over culturally valued property; (c) female participation in public affairs and ritual celebrations - to which one might add recognition of women's role in cosmological fertility; and (d) low incidence of female pollution beliefs and of generally disparaging images of women. To these, drawing on the work of Sanday (1981), I would add (e) low incidence of wife-beating and domestic violence against women. The

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following sections review available information from the seven south coast language-culture areas for each of these dimensions of female status. Aggregate comparative assessments are then made and competing explanations evaluated. Purari

In most dimensions of female status, Purari women rate quite highly. Concerning women's marital and sexual choice, Williams (1924:53) states that it is quite common for the girl herself to take the initiative and send a small messenger to the man she fancies, either taking a piece of tobacco or asking him for one. This is quite regular, and indeed it is regarded as preferable by some that the girl should make the first move; for such a one, having displayed a genuine preference, was more likely to prove a faithful and contented wife.

Sometimes a girl's brother will approach a man "with a proposal on her behalf" (ibid.). If parents disapprove of a romantic liaison, the woman and her partner can persist to good effect: Should the parents, however, have other plans for their daughter, which are distasteful both to her and to her suitor, the two may compromise the matter by making an affair of it. This is followed by revelations [of their sexual relationship] and I am told, the enraged and disappointed parents will acquiesce, (ibid.)

Williams (ibid.) concludes that "whatever the method, it appears that the will of the girl is always considered; and indeed, after marriage a woman will not stay with a husband whom she very much dislikes." Concerning property, Purari women received a substantial dowry at marriage, including a stock of armshells and other valuables that were "strictly her own and which she may keep quite separate from her husband's" (ibid. 123). Women passed these valuables on to their own children at death, daughters as well as sons. Purari women also had rights to valuables gained from ritualized extra-marital heterosexuality, and they exerted strong influence in choosing these sexual partners; they do not appear to have been coerced. If a woman fancies a man other than her husband for the nonce, the matter is arranged between the three, presuming the husband is willing. The husband sleeps in the ravi [men's house] and the wife and her admirer spend the night in her house. She invariably receives some gift, such as an arm-shell . . . Such prostitution and wife exchange may take place at any time. In the amina [sexual

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intercourse following the taking of an enemy head] they are carried out with some amount of ceremony. The essential features are, first, that the husband's consent be obtained; and, second, that payment be made. This payment, it should be noted, is actually made to the woman, and not to her husband, though the profits are said to belong to them jointly, (ibid. :56)

Concerning the deployment of valuables, Williams (ibid. :123) observes, "as a rule there is complete confidence between the two [husband and wife], and it is common for the wife to keep in a single hoard all the ornaments they possess." Purari women took a great deal of pride in their capacity to take lovers and obtain wealth, a fact attested begrudgingly by the resident missionary John Holmes (1924:172). Wife-beating among Purari was "deprecated," and domestic violence appears to have been minimal (Williams 1924:60). Further, "a woman who is dissatisfied with her lot in her husband's house will readily desert him for another or else return to her own family, probably to her brother's house." The consequences of abandonment are that if . . . a woman deserted her husband for someone she liked better, he would normally demand payment from the latter, equivalent to the bride-price; and after payment the matter would be allowed to rest, the woman remaining with her new husband, (ibid.57)

On the other hand, women were excluded from most male cult life; there was a general prohibition against their entering the men's house (ravi), where sacred cult paraphernalia were carefully kept. But women were the exclusive singers when Motu traders were hosted (Barton 1910:111), and women of rank or importance were selectively initiated into important cults. Female pollution beliefs appear to have been absent among Purari. Williams (ibid.60) notes that a woman's food-taboos "seem as much in her favour as otherwise." Overall, then, the status of Purari women was very high. This is contrary to what one might expect of gender relations on the basis of other features of Purari society, including strong male status differentiation, exclusion of most women from male cult activities, male prestige dependence on female labor (including polygyny), and emphasis on masculine success in warfare. Despite these propensities, Purari women maintained a great degree of personal control and flexibility in premarital sexuality, in selecting a marriage partner, in

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establishing extra-marital sexual liaisons, in initiating divorce, in remarrying, and in acquiring and controlling property. Kiwai Kiwai women were also generally accorded high status, as documented by Landtman (1927:171-173, 248, 251). Haddon (1927:xvi) emphasizes this point in his introduction to Landtman's volume: Quite a new light is thrown by Landtman on the position of Kiwai women . . . We now learn that they play an essential part in many important ceremonies and that without their aid the men would be helpless; the men recognize this and request their co-operation. The high status of Kiwai women was noted by Hely in the early 1890s (BNG Annual Report 1892-93: 35f.) and has recently been reemphasized by Feil (1987:182). The fertility and magical power of a woman's vagina were central to her high status among the Kiwai. Landtman (1927:248) notes that from a Kiwai perspective: His [a man's] wife, whom he has procured at a very high price, is the source of all his prosperity: 'altogether luck, altogether garden, altogether spear-him-dugong, all he come from woman (through the [vaginal] medicine obtained from her)' . . . A husband was particularly solicitous of his wife to obtain her willing cooperation in a host of ceremonial acts in which her fertility power was used to benefit the couple's pursuits (ibid. :248). A woman's fertility power was allocated in part through sexual intercourse - the mingled sexual secretions being collected and used for diverse growth and strengthening purposes. She could also empower objects simply by passing them near to or touching them with her pubic area. For instance, when a couple planted banana shoots, the woman lies down on her back on the spot where the shoot is to be set, with her knees raised. In Kiwai [Island] she is nude . . . The man, standing astride in front of her, repeatedly passes the shoot underneath her knees and between his own legs, every time taking care that it touches her genitals. This action has a double meaning: passing the shoot under the woman's knees brings fertility to their own garden and also to other people's near by, whereas passing it between the man's legs will "shut" the way to the gardens of others, keeping all the benefit for oneself, (ibid. :90) The importance of female sexuality per se is here underscored by the fact that the man was prohibited from having sexual intercourse with his wife near the garden until it bore fruit (ibid.). In other contexts, by contrast, female sexual fertility power was combined

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with that of male semen. In planting yams, for instance, the first shoot was buried using a bull-roarer "smeared with fluid from the woman's vulva after the man has had connection with her, the purpose being that the instrument, when whirling round in the air, should make that medicine fly all over the gardens" (ibid. :76). Alone as well as in combination with semen obtained through heterosexual intercourse, vaginal fluid was variously put in contact with or coated upon (a) the first yams planted; (b) the place where the shoot later sprouted on the root; (c) where the first few shoots sprouted above the ground; (d) on the first pieces of string with which the yams were tied up; and (e) on the first yam harvested (ibid.:77-80). In some cases, the woman simply put the object against her vagina (there being no mention of prior sexual intercourse); in one instance the woman "smears her hands with fluid from her vulva and tugs at one of the shoots, drawing her hand along it from the ground upward; the old man only looks on" (ibid. :78). The cooperative use of women's sexual power virtually saturates Kiwai cosmological belief and ritual practice. That vaginal potency was important in its own right, and not simply a "vessel" for obtaining male semen, is well illustrated in the rites described above and also by men's concern with their own extra-marital sexuality: A man who has had connection [sexual intercourse] with another woman will come to his wife afterwards on the same day in order to "clear that thing." If not he will be prey to conflicting secret powers, just as a canoe is buffeted about by irregular waves coming from different quarters, say the people, (ibid. :248) Property relations were likewise remarkable; women possessed "property of their own like the men" (with the exception of land), and "without the permission of his wife a man cannot appropriate a thing manufactured by her or given her by somebody else; she has the right to do with it whatever she likes without consulting him . . . Even provisions, etc., brought home by the woman should not be taken away by the man without her knowledge" (ibid. :173). The majority of marriages appeared harmonious, and, as a rarity in New Guinea, "expressions of affectionate and even tender relations between husband and wife could often be noted" (ibid. All). Sometimes, "when the pair were sitting together she would frequently caress him, without any apparent motive, at the same time making quite a pretty face." Government officer Beaver (1920:65) notes, "The position of women in the community . . . is by no means as bad as is usually imagined . . . and there undoubtedly exists an amount of affection

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between husband and wife or wives." Landtman (1927:171) suggests that, occasional outbreaks of temper rarely seem to affect seriously the harmony between husband and wife, because sensitiveness in this respect does not seem to be very great on either side. A badly treated woman canfindrefuge with her own people, and in many cases the husband has to come round, if he is not prepared to lose her for good, an alternative often rather serious to himself. Even adultery has some distinctive dimensions: Adultery on the wife's part does not always bring about divorce, but the case is fought out between the two men, and if the husband survives he generally continues living with his wife as before, (ibid. :251) On the less positive side, Kiwai women were excluded as actors from much cult life of the men's longhouse and from many cult and mythic secrets, and they could be threatened with death to ensure their compliance (ibid. :173). In cases of marital disgruntlement, women might be driven to suicide (Beaver 1920:177). As ritual participants, however, they were fully initiated into the madia cult at age ten to twelve in the male cult house. Here, along with their male counterparts, they were forbidden food and water and were subjected to an elaborate series of impersonated spirits, who attacked them in a mock headhunting raid. As part of the initiation, adult men and women danced, the boys and girls were lavishly feasted, and children of both sexes were given valuables such as shell and feather ornaments and strings of dogs' teeth (Landtman 1927:410). Women also had a separate puberty initiation shortly after their first menstruation (ibid. :238). Though this was less elaborate than male initiation into warriorhood, it entailed a great feast and the erection of a fenced enclosure, called a "skirt-house" (wapo-moto), heaped with valuables and especially with large numbers of grass skirts (made by the girl's female relatives), which were hung in rows for subsequent exchange (ibid. :238; cf. A. Weiner 1976). The girl to be initiated was "beautifully ornamented, much in the same way as men on festive occasions, except that they wear petticoats [grass skirts]" (Landtman 1927:239). The initiand was carried by a maternal uncle to the water's edge, where she was bathed by women, adorned with a new grass skirt, and borne back without touching the ground to the skirt-house. During the proceedings female jokesters, dressed as bedraggled or incompetent men, entertained the crowd with bumbling antics, and "for a long time

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afterward" they became the recipients of food gifts from the initiated girl. The event concluded with a distribution of gifts, the taking of grass skirts, and a large feast. Shortly before marriage, women became participants in the famed mouguru or "life-giving" rites, which were "the most secret, sacred and awe-inspiring ceremony of the Kiwai people" {ibid. :350; see for eastern Kiwai, Flint 1919; Butcher 1964:ch.2O). The festive quality of the rites escalated, with "the whole occasion . . . calculated to cause sexual excitement" (Landtman 1927:351). People came from near and far to share in the dancing and feasting and participate in the serial and largely promiscuous heterosexual coitus that was the focus of the rites. This sexual celebration appears to have been participated in willingly and avidly by women and men alike (ibid. :352). The ritual purpose of the event was to collect co-mingled sexual secretions, which, as the most powerful "medicine," were used for diverse fertility purposes, including particularly the anointing of sago palms to promote their growth. "Everybody seems to be intent upon contributing as much as possible to the medicine, so that the baru [palm-leaf receptacles] are filled up" (ibid.). Intense sexual activity continued for several nights in succession, and "the longer the orgies last, the looser becomes the general behavior" (ibid.). The initiation of women into the mouguru, however, was more traumatic, with verbal instruction in the sexual ways of the rite followed by sexual intercourse, during which some of the girls would "shriek out and try to resist" (Landtman 1954:185). Kiwai women were supposed to use their vaginal power to benefit rather than jeopardize communal pursuits, since secret adultery or illtimed sexual congress with their husbands could be polluting and deleterious to men's activities and ritual performances. Women were subject to menstrual seclusion (ibid. :238), and menstrual blood was particularly feared as a contaminant to male activities such as fishing, hunting, warmaking, drum-making, and canoe building (ibid.'AS, 114, 122, 209). It was also taboo for men to have intercourse with nonmenstruating women before engaging in most of these pursuits (ibid. :250). Menstrual blood was efficacious in some contexts, however, being smeared on leaves and wrapped around bananas to aid their growth (ibid. :93): The female sexual organs are regarded as in high degree the source of all kinds of witchcraft, beneficent as well as malignant; indeed the people maintained that all "puripuri" medicines are directly or indirectly derived from this origin, just as the fingers branch off from the hand, as one of my informants expressed himself. (ibid. :238)

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The general sense one gains from this is that Kiwai men's dominant concern was to supplicate women to use their vaginal power effectively rather than to disparage them for having the potential to do harm. Kiwai marriage customs were particularly interesting, as strong norms of sister-exchange were cross-cut by frequent romantic unions. On the one hand, reciprocal exchange of women was requisite between totemclans in marriage. If an unreciprocated union had already been established, a girl could be commandeered against her wishes to create a balanced marriage exchange (Landtman 1927:244; Riley 1925:48f.). On the other hand, Landtman (1927:243f.) observes that many sisterexchanges were initiated as "love" matches. Aware of the tension between the requirements of sister-exchange and a significant degree of male and female choice, Landtman (ibid.) states, "submissive as the young folks might wish to be to the wishes of the older generation, yet individual love is a marked feature among them." Wooing and courtship formed an important preliminary to many if not most marriages. When parents were opposed to the match, the couple might continue their secret sexual trysts until the girl left with her lover to go to his house, where they both confronted her angry kin. As Cantrell (n.d.) discusses for Gebusi of the Strickland-Bosavi area, a marriage system based on normative emphasis on sister-exchange can accommodate considerable choice and influence by prospective brides (see also McDowell 1978). Though in some instances Kiwai women could be deployed against their will, romantic unions could forcefully exert themselves as an opening round of sister-exchange, deferring the onus of marital reciprocity onto others at a later time (see Landtman 1927:243f.).1 Even when a woman was obliged to fulfill the demands of marital reciprocity, large numbers of classificatory "brothers-in-law" and the possibility of some delay between one marriage and its "balance" could afford a woman latitude in pursuing a liaison with a man whom she preferred within a range of potential mates. It is thus erroneous to assume that the structural logic of restricted exchange tightly prescribed the actions of individual women. For Kiwai, there was a permeable rather than a rigid line between "prescriptive" and "optional" marriage. Marind-anim

Gender relations among Marind-anim also combined sister-exchange with a significant degree of female marital choice. Marind strongly

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favored marriages between age-mates, and van Baal (1966:128) states that: This attitude favours the occurrence of marriages based on mutual love instead of on the pre-arrangements necessitated by sister-exchange. Freedom of choice is favoured, too, by the culturally prescribed form of betrothal: parane. This betrothal occurs at the initiative of the bride-to-be in the context of her peers: It is the girl who takes the initiative by sending her beloved a message that the next night they shall meet to celebrate parane. That night accompanied by a group of girls, she goes to the beach to await the arrival of the boy and his party. . . . Bracing himself, he hands [cassowary quill earrings] to his girl, together with some other simple ornaments. She in turn, gives him apind or pur, a bone implement used for scraping out a coconut . . . In doing so, both pronounce the required formula: "For ever you are my wife (husband)." The formalities having been completed, the bystanders vociferously give vent to their joy and the two groups part company in high spirits, the girls going with the betrothed girl, the boys with the ewati [initiand groom], (ibid. :128f.)

The ensuing marriage takes place upon the approval of the couple's parents, who must reconcile the match with the formal requisites of classificatory sister-exchange.2 If the parents are strongly against the union, a good deal of domestic disagreement may ensue, and the marriage may be precluded (ibid.). On balance, however, van Baal (ibid.'.Yll) suggests that "we should have definite reason to surmise that mutual preference expressed by the young people was more important than having an exchange-partner." He has recently reemphasized this point (1984:139): Their partner is always an age-mate, and usually one of their own choice who and this is even more important - voluntarily agrees to become his wife. Girls are not easily given away without their consent.

None of the early observers of coastal Marind-anim suggested the existence of sister-exchange marriage, but it was stated to be their preferred form of marriage by the Dutch Depopulation Team in the early 1950s (South Pacific Commission 1952-53:62f.).3 This suggestion led van Baal (1966:124f.) to reanalyze the genealogies he had collected in the Marind coastal region, whereupon he found sister-exchange between clans constituted between twenty-four and sixty-two percent of all marriages, depending on the locale in question. When reciprocity at the clan level was deemed impossible, Marind could balance one marriage against another in which the woman was not

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a clan sister of the original groom but was a member of his exogamous moiety. "This latter case, however, becomes very involved" (South Pacific Commission 1952-53:52). Couples who wished to marry but had no possibility of arranging a reciprocating union could give the bride's firstborn child to her natal family in exchange (ibid.). In all, marriage among coastal Marind appears to have combined a great degree of mate choice among young men and women with a tendency toward sister-exchange that was a statistical trend, a cultural predilection, and perhaps also a formal rule. A similar pattern is strongly evident among the Jaquai, to the northwest of the Marind (Boelaars 1981:91-99). Evidence concerning the status of Marind women in marriage is multifaceted (van Baal 1966:166-69, 1984:131). On the one hand, a woman was expected to perform domestic chores for her husband and to serve him food. Wife beating was fairly common, though many women nonetheless exerted significant influence on their husbands. Alder (1922:108, 129), visiting shortly after World War One, stated that Marind women were active participants in public debate, concluding with some hyperbole that "the women literally 'run the ranch.' It behooves the aspirant for leadership to stand well with them . . ."He gives examples of Marind women upbraiding men for lassitude and threatening collectively to withhold sexual intercourse from them until rectifying actions were taken (ibid.:148f., 151). The sexual division of labor - with women doing most of the gardening and sago preparation - appears to have been onerous for women but substantial for men also, particularly before the advent of steel tools (van Baal 1966:167). There are lots of comments made by early observers on the dreadful life of the poor drudge that is the Marind-anim wife, but such conclusions have been refuted by all those who lived long enough in the country to get better acquainted with the daily routine, (ibid. :166)

Concerning the emotional tenor of marital relations, van Baal notes that in many cases, "there is clearly real affection and mutual love between spouses" (ibid. :164). He concludes that "in spite of various reports on wife-beating and harsh treatment of women generally, the relations between spouses are, on the whole, cordial." Like Kiwai, Marind-anim conducted heterosexual rites, called aili or arih, in which substantial numbers of men and women participated in largely promiscuous heterosexual intercourse (ibid. :510, 581f., cf. 558f.,

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629-645; see Alder 1922:144).4 Greater emphasis in retrospective accounts, however, has been placed on Marind otiv bombari, in which one or two young women were each serially engaged in coitus by between five and thirteen men - men of their husband's clan or their guests.5 The purpose, as in the aili and arih rites and as among the Kiwai, was to obtain mingled male and female sexual secretions for diverse strengthening and fertility purposes (van Baal 1966:558f., 581). In otiv-bombari, however, there was special emphasis on promoting the childbearing fertility of the woman herself. The fertility contribution of female sexuality to Marind cosmology is reflected in the fact that, despite male homosexuality, it was sexual secretions obtained through heterosexual coitus that were deemed ritually efficacious - as van Baal emphasizes (ibid. :820; 1984:138). But the sexual intercourse of otiv-bombari was traumatic rather than enjoyable for young women, who were sometimes unable to walk the next day as a result of their sexual ordeal. The slim evidence available suggests that women willingly submitted themselves to otiv-bombari in the belief that it was necessary to enhance their personal fertility as well as that of the Marind cosmos (van Baal 1966:815). The importance of female fertility notwithstanding, one cannot deny the intense sexual domination of young women by Marind men. Otiv-bombari was frequent, being a mandatory accompaniment to a large number of Marind ceremonies (ibid. :810; South Pacific Commission 1955:70-77, 99-106). In addition, van Baal notes that a man could sexually lend his wife and receive payment for this use of her services, and he implies that such arrangements were made without much consideration of the woman's inclination (1984:139; see 1966:814). In ceremonial life, Marind women were excluded from some rituals but were privy to many others. In many cases, they participated in or witnessed most of the ritual ceremony but were not informed of its more secret mythic meanings. Women did have their own series of age-grade and ritual distinctions that paralleled those of the men. Though less ornate than those of their male counterparts, these entailed fairly elaborate decorations and feasts. It is important that semen was applied to girls' bodies to make them strong and more beautiful - a feature in common with initiation rites for boys among the Kolopom to the west and the Onabasulu much farther to the north (ibid. :155; see Serpenti 1984; Ernst n.d.). The context of van Baal's (1966:155) remarks, following on those of Wirz (1922:1:90), suggests that semen was rubbed on Marind women to strengthen them

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and was used to anoint their scarification cicatrices to make the ensuing scars more pronounced and beautiful. Among Kolopom, immediately to the west of the Marind, sexual fluids obtained from heterosexual intercourse were analogously rubbed in cicatrices of boy initiate novices when they entered seclusion in the bachelor's house, that is, to help them grow (Serpenti 1977:164). In the case of Marind women, it is not mentioned how "semen" for skin-strengthening was obtained, though it would be highly consistent with Marind practices and with van Baal's terminology if the substance was in fact mingled male and female sexual fluids obtained through heterosexual intercourse. An analyst prone to extrapolation might perhaps suggest that female sexual substance was appropriated (along with male semen) to help "grow" Marind women. Female pollution beliefs appear to have been largely or totally absent among Marind. In summarizing Marind female status, the English translation of the Depopulation Report (South Pacific Commission 1952-53:60) states: The division of labour between the sexes does not indicate a disproportionate burden on the woman. Dr. van Baal [1934] is right when he says that the woman does the most and the man the heaviest work. When we view the subject of social and religious relations, it strikes us that actually the woman is nowhere regarded as an outsider. They are even initiated into the secret ritual of the tribe, although only in a secondary way. The grouping of the women according to age, associated with their own decorations and adornments, runs parallel with that of the men; they take up their own positions at the great dances and participate actively in all festivals. The woman is not treated as a slave.

Van Baal (1984:139f.) concurs with this assessment and finds the status of Marind women "contradictory," that is, with some features indicating high status and some indicating low. Elema

A different constellation of conflicting female status features is found among Elema. Concerning marriage, Williams (1940:53) states, "I do not know of any case of a marriage forced by parents." Courtship was left to the young people's decisions (though premarital sex was discouraged), and "there is no predicting where a boy or girl will find a mate" (ibid.). As a complement to bridewealth, Elema women were provided with dowries that were their own. The dowry included neck ornaments, a few armshells, a dog's tooth necklace, a substantial practical trousseau packed in capacious string bags, and perhaps also a suckling pig and a puppy. Polygyny was extremely rare.

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Once established, Elema marriage was highly resistant to dissolution. A woman could be subject to a significant degree of wife-beating, which Williams (1940:50) describes in a manner best left to speak for itself: Marriages are mostly permanent and a man and his wife get on well together provided she is faithful, a good worker, reasonably obedient, and punctual with his meals. 'Wife-beating' is common enough, but we must not imagine a man belabouring his woman into submission. The beating consists of an angry blow or two, or perhaps a kick with the sole of the foot, and the wife does not take it lying down but breaks into shrill abuse, paying him back with her tongue. She may go to the length of absenting herself for a period, taking refuge with her own people; and if there are continued disagreements she can leave her husband permanently and the union is severed by the restitution of ornaments. A good many women, boiling with indignation and displaying a bruise or weal, sometimes severe but sometimes hardly visible to the naked eye, have appeared before me at different times to make complaint against their husbands.

As for spiritual and ritual practice, Elema women were largely segregated from the men's house and "almost wholly debarred" from ceremonial life {ibid. :25f.). Women could, if infrequently, be owners of the spectacular hevehe mask-designs (though they never wore them), and female owners could pass them on as they chose, though they were excluded from the many years of preparation and ritual that accompanied their production. In the hevehe ceremonial, women at one point dressed up in male costume with weapons to invite male dancers from other longhouses to attend. Other than this, they tended to be a passive audience rather than active participants in the elaborate ceremonial spectacle {ibid. :323f.). Williams does not comment directly on female pollution beliefs. He does state that during male initiatory seclusion, even the remotest and most indirect contact of the novices with women was said to cause their hair to fall out and to prevent their attaining full growth (Williams 1939a, 1940:76f.). Initiands maintained rigid gender seclusion for six months to a year. Alone among the south coast groups, Elema customs show no evidence of indigenous ritual heterosexuality or female contribution to cosmological fertility. Overall, the status of Elema women seems multivalent. On the one hand, they were excluded from a ceremonial role, and there were implicit beliefs in female pollution and little or no recognition of women's fertility importance in the major cults. Elema women were subject to domestic violence, and they appear to have been constrained by domestic obligations and threat of force by their husbands. This is

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consistent with an Elema male gerontocracy that was stronger than that of the other south coast language-culture areas. But Elema women appear to have been freer in marital choice than their counterparts among Marind and Kiwai, where sister-exchange norms exerted some constraint. And Elema women's dowries, which were their own, afforded them control over significant material property. The various features of female status thus seem conflicted. In this respect, Elema were similar to the Marind, though the particular features of high and low female status were different in each case. Asmat

Though there is little systematic information concerning the status of Asmat women, those features that can be pieced together are revealing. Asmat women were excluded from the elaborate ceremonial life of the men's longhouse (yeu/jew), though they could be admitted under special circumstances (e.g., Eyde 1967:89; cf. also Schneebaum 1980:73; Kuruwaip 1984:pt. 2:19, 25). Polygyny and control of female labor in sago production were a significant dimension of male status differentiation, and in cases of polygynous marriage, second wives "may be little more than drudges" unless they were sisters to the first wife (Eyde 1967:194; cf. Trenkenschuh 1982a:46). Wife-beating was assessed by Eyde (1967:192) to have been quite common among central Asmat, and he says, "only where a wife-beating becomes near-murder, or actually results in murder, will her brothers intervene." He documents four cases that came to his attention in which men in fact murdered their wives. Unmarried women could be beaten by their fathers or brothers for promiscuity (ibid. :220). Men appear to have also exercised rights of control over wives in allocating their sexual services to male bond-friends in ritual heterosexuality (papisj) (ibid. :191). Zegwaard states: Occasionally the woman refuses to participate in this [sexual] exchange. The husband, in such a case, is very angry and upset. He will often beat her and also will disappear to another village for a short time to put his wife to shame. (Zegwaard and Boelaars 1982:22) Sowada (1961:91f.) puts a milder interpretation on such events, stating that though a woman should consent to the papisj arrangement, by showing enough disapproval she could herself influence the choice of her husband's exchange partner. Part of Eyde's (1967:207) account could be construed as supporting this assessment. It may also be noted

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that Asmat widows frequently served as "sexual tutors" to unmarried young men (van Kampen 1956:70, cited by Sowada 1961:82). Evidence concerning Asmat marriage is somewhat conflicted but overall suggests low female marital choice. Women were usually five to ten years younger than their husbands (Eyde 1967:198), and exchange reciprocity is described as prospective male in-laws "selecting" an appropriate girl, though her verbal and ritual acquiescence are also noted (ibid. :34), and indeed it is the groom who is ritually "forced" into marriage (Sowada 1961:85-88). Girls were married at puberty or earlier (Zegwaard 1953:3, cited in Sowada 1961:82). In cases of bridewealth marriage the payment was substantial; in one typical and traditional union of this sort bridewealth included eight to ten stone axes, two dog-teeth necklaces, one large triton shell, four bows, a thousand spears and arrows, five to six bone daggers, two birds-of-paradise, and various other feathers and decorations (Trenkenschuh 1982c:31). All this notwithstanding, Zegwaard and Boelaars (1955) document a significant incidence of romantic marriage (worowous), which begins with an extended series of secret trysts. This pattern dovetails with Eyde's (1967:37) remark that sago areas provide u a traditional area for romance between young men and women." Typically, such partners make their intentions public by sleeping in the club house, after which they take refuge with the man's kin until the woman's angry relatives are confronted and bridewealth payment arranged (Sowada 1961:85f.). Asmat women are described as drawn to aggressive husbands renowned for their fierceness and success in headhunting; they disparaged men who had not taken a head and hence remained politically unimportant (e.g., Zegwaard 1959; Zegwaard and Boelaars 1982). That this male aggression also extended to the procuring of women themselves is evident in marriage by abduction, that is, marriage undertaken by capturing a woman against her will and against the wishes of her relatives but followed eventually by payment of bridewealth to the latter. Such marriages, termed okore, constituted eight percent (8/102) of Zegwaard and Boelaars' (1955) sample. In addition to these, abduction of wives without repayment was described as "rampant" (see Sowada 1961:87). Upon marriage, an Asmat woman changed her kindred-group affiliation to that of her husband (van Arsdale 1975:37). As for property ownership, the sago stands andfishinggrounds that a husband gained by virtue of his marriage became his own and were alienated from his wife. Central Asmat thus

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call the husbands, not the wives, the owners, ar arat ow, of sago orfishingareas to which they have gained a right by marriage. Just as a sister is given to her husband, so are her sago paths andfishingareas. (Eyde 1967:255) Women could inherit rights to important song cycles and were ceremonially given ancestral names that perhaps associated them with their husband's kin group (van Arsdale and van Arsdale 1991:20). An elder woman might sit in on men's political discussions and raise women's objections, and she could also lead women in their ceremonial roles (Sowada 1990:68). Evidence concerning pollution beliefs is sketchy but suggestive. Men slept in the men's house away from their wives when the latter were menstruating, and the house built for women in childbirth was "absolutely taboo to men" (Eyde 1967:89, 147). Sorcery was attributed exclusively to women, and Eyde (ibid. :147) suggests that central Asmat men "generally assume that women are hostile to them." Nevertheless, Sowada (1961:81) cites a report that the wife and daughter of one of the most renowned Asmat leaders were shamans. Asmat women complemented men's participation in at least some ceremonies and joined them in the ritual sexuality of collective spouse-exchange at several major rites and in times of political or perceived cosmological crisis. But they were not as complementary or integral to male cult life as were women to the north among the Kamoro (Pouwer 1991:206ff.) or further south among the Marind. The making and empowerment of elaborate ancestral cult embodiments in the men's house was an exclusive male activity. In all, available evidence suggests that Asmat women were subject to a high rate of marital violence, did not control significant material property, often had little marital choice, were subject to some sexual pollution beliefs, but could be active participants in fertility cult activities and might even be spiritual leaders. Kolopom

Information on the status of Kolopom women is piecemeal, but important facts emerge. Women were betrothed in sister-exchange as young girls and were subjected at about age eight to ten to serial sexual intercourse by adult men. The purpose of this coitus was to procure sexual fluids for rubbing on the girl's groom-to-be, to help him grow. When the adolescent boy moved into the bachelors' house, the young girl betrothed to him moved into his parents' house, after which the boy's father exercised sexual as well as social authority over her

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(Serpenti 1984:307). Girls were targeted for serial sexual intercourse especially before headhunts, after selected mortuary feasts, and at the onset of male initiation (ibid. :304, 315). Girls were betrothed as youngsters in part to reduce their opposition to arranged marriage. Once the exchange of girls in betrothal was agreed on, any protests the girl might make were countered by her father's remonstration that the agreement had already been sealed by the drinking of kava (wati) with her prospective parents-in-law (Serpenti 1969:38). As the exchange relationship between the prospective affines deepened, it was increasingly difficult to dissolve the betrothal (ibid. :39). During adolescence but before marriage, a woman might pursue discreet sexual liaisons with a man of her choosing, but these affairs were seldom allowed to compromise her prior betrothal. The options of romantic couples who were going against parents' wishes were few. They could flee in elopement to another village, but this course was dangerous; other villages tended to be hostile, and travelling to them was frequently considered a form of suicide (Serpenti 1968:132). Sometimes a disgruntled woman would indeed take a lethal or sub-lethal dose of poison (Serpenti 1977:182). Alternatively, she might risk a quick elopement with a man visiting from another village, returning with him to his settlement (ibid. :127). Armed protection by her new husband's kin was in this instance crucial, since her relatives were certain to try to take her back by force. If her new husband's kin protected her, the woman might have her first daughter appropriated and given back to her natal settlement in exchange for herself. Beliefs in female sexual pollution appear to have been stronger among Kolopom than anywhere else along the south coast. Men exhibited great fear of menstrual blood, particularly in all gardening pursuits, and numerous precautions were taken to avoid it, including seclusion of women in menstrual huts. Sexual intercourse with adult women was prohibited especially during planting, when men were growing ceremonial crops, before hunting or fighting, during drummaking, when mortuary feasts were being prepared, and during periods of homosexual male cult activity (Serpenti 1977:179). Fear of menstrual contamination may well have underlain the use of prepubescent girls in ritual coitus to obtain sexual secretions for promoting the growth of male initiands (Serpenti 1984:310). Serpenti (ibid.:295) notes that "the fear of heterosexual intercourse in crisis situations sometimes leads to a general avoidance of women." Stringent taboos against even indirect contact with women for everyone connected with male initiation

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epitomized beliefs in the inimicability of women to maleness. This was reinforced in tales of the Kone demon-woman, who tempted men with sex and cut off the penises of enticed victims, taking them home as trophies {ibid. :294). Nonetheless, promiscuous heterosexual intercourse with adult women as well as with girls was an important part of the final feast of the competitive ndambu mortuary ceremonial, when a previous ban on heterosexual activity was lifted, and before and after headhunting expeditions (ibid. :300f.; Serpenti 1977:183). Wives could also be lent as payment for debts between men (ibid. :184). In sum, available information suggests that Kolopom women were subject to (a) little marital choice; (b) sexual domination from a young age; (c) stringent pollution beliefs; and (d) exclusion from male ritual life. Women owned their own subsistence implements but appear to have been excluded from possessing valuables, land, or other significant property, all of which were held by the men of the village ward (kwanda) (ibid.: 120-24). Some wife-beating occurred (ibid.:181), but its relative incidence is difficult to discern. Overall, the status of Kolopom women appears to have been low. Trans-Fly Female status was also low among Trans-Fly peoples, as exemplified by the Keraki studied by Williams (1936). Keraki women were betrothed and transferred when quite young. As among the Kolopom - to whom Trans-Fly peoples appear to have been linguistically and historically related - evidence suggests that Keraki men exercised sexual prerogatives over females before they were pubescent (Williams 1936:146). This is consistent with the Keraki belief that sexual intercourse itself caused the onset of menstruation. Female choice in marriage was virtually nil: The [marital] arrangements, as we have seen, are almost entirely in the hands of the men: it is between them that the pact is made and all that is expected from the prospective wives is acquiescence. At first the latter are for the most part too young to take a very intelligent interest in their future, and certainly too young to make their possibly adverse wishes felt among their elders; though as the affianced bride grows up she may very effectually express her aversion for her husband, either before or after consummation of the marriage, by running away. This indeed occurs frequently enough; but the girl is continually brought back from her parent's village to that of her husband's, (ibid. :137) Williams (ibid. :131f) contrasts the conspicuous absence of courtship and of female assent with the pattern he found among the Purari and Elema

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further east. Divorce was also uncommon and difficult for a Keraki woman to bring about. Sister-exchange marriage among Keraki was strongly prescriptive between clans. Men without a true or closely related clan sister used bridewealth to procure a classificatory female sibling from their more distant agnates. This woman was then deployed in marital exchange. This two-step process of internal bridewealth and external marital transfer could significantly reduce a woman's social and negotiating contact with prospective mates. Polygyny and taking young wives was quite common among Keraki, and forty-five percent of married men had more than one wife (ibid. :149). During the long period of marriage itself, a Keraki woman was subject to the domination of her husband and his clan: Under the patrilocal system and the levirate the bride becomes virtually the property of her husband's group and she is usually in fairly complete subjection to him personally, (ibid. :148) The sexual services of wives were lent (apparently without their consent) to visitors at feasts; visiting men reciprocated by lending their wives at a later date. Williams (1936:159) suggests that wife-lending "is essentially an act of hospitality or friendship," and it is noteworthy that "it was never suggested that wundewunde [wife-exchange] implied any ulterior purpose, e.g., the promotion of fertility." Effective marital subordination of women made wife-beating largely unnecessary; Williams (ibid. :148) remarks, "An obstreperous or disobedient wife may receive a cuff on the ear and is quickly reduced thereby to a submissive mood; but wife-beating is very rare and I do not know of any Keraki husband who could be called cruel." Desertion by a wife, however, particularly by a young wife to a lover in her natal village, was severely punished. After being returned by her own kin, such a woman could be communally raped by the men of her husband's clan. Directed by the husband himself, this serial rape was undertaken "to tame her recalcitrant spirit" (ibid. .164). Women owned no significant property apart from subsistence and personal implements (ibid. :148). Men appear to have harbored strong beliefs in female menstrual and sexual pollution. Men observed several food taboos while their wives were menstruating and feared that exposure to female sexuality would contaminate their bullroarer and initiation practices (ibid. :183, 335). In

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the primal myth, highly secret to men, Woman's vagina and her first menstruation were created when the first bullroarer was wrenched out of her pubic area. While rendering this story, Ayres' (1983:74) male informant noted: When a woman has her monthly period, she doesn't work, she doesn't go to the garden. She just sits. She doesn't eat meat either. We still do these things today. Women were considered highly inimical to the rituals of the male initiation cycle, from which they were emphatically barred. Williams (ibid.: 149) notes: A woman has no political power . . . Nor are there any female practitioners in the accredited branches of magic . . . Lastly they have only an insignificant share in public ceremonial, and no share at all in the esoteric rites or in a knowledge of the sacred myths. Writing of mortuary customs in the same area a half-century later, Mary Ayres (1983:300f.) states, the overwhelming dominance of maleness in Morehead culture is manifested in mourning customs. Men are the preeminent cultural beings who know the inner secrets, the esoteric mythology which accounts for the meaning of many customs. Men control the meanings of things, just as they control women. Williams sums up for the Keraki, "The stature of women in marriage is undeniably very low" (1936:148). Comparative assessments

Female status varies greatly among south New Guinea societies along the criteria of female status delineated above, that is, mate choice, low spousal violence, significant female property ownership, valued participation of women in rituals, and absence of pollution beliefs (see table 6). Indeed, given the larger cultural similarities among all these groups, as discussed in chapter 2, this variation is striking. Female status was very high among Kiwai and especially Purari, conflicted but slightly positive among Marind-anim, slightly lower among Elema, low among Asmat, and very low among Kolopom and Keraki. It lends credence to this range of variation that the three groups studied by F. E. Williams happen to encompass the entire spectrum of female status documented, including high (Purari), medium or neutral (Elema), and low (Trans-Fly). That this range of variation was uncovered and reported in separate cases by a single ethnographer with no theoretical reason to gerrymander such variations makes it unlikely that

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Table 6. Comparative estimates offemale status in south coast New Guinea mate low marital property ritual value & choice violence owned participation Purari Kiwai Marind Elema Asmat Kolopom Trans-Fly

++ +/+/++ (-) —

++ ++ — ? +/-

++ ++ ? + -

+/++ + + -

no female pollution

overall0

+ + (-) — (-)

7 5 1 0 -4 -5 -5

+ + strongly positive + moderately positive +/- conflicting; evidence of both positive and negative features negative — strongly negative ? unknown a A rough overall comparative index of female status (final column) is assessed by according each " + + " a value of +2, each " + " a value of +1, each "+/-" (some evidence both for and against) a value of 0, each "?" a value of 0, each "-" a value of-1, and each "—" a value of-2. Indices in parentheses indicate assessments based on circumstantial evidence.

they could be accounted for by idiosyncrasies of ethnographer bias or selective reporting.6 Further, the dimensions of female status considered here appear culturally salient within the south New Guinea context; they reflect local differences in the way female status is experienced and perceived by indigenous actors.7 What accounts for variations in female status along the New Guinea south coast? Perhaps female status varies inversely with the presence of ritual homosexuality; the custom was present in the two languageculture areas where female status was lowest, Trans-Fly and Kolopom. But female status was above average among the Marind-anim, where ritual homosexuality was quite evident. Outside the range of coastal cultures but relevant to this question are data from the StricklandBosavi area, further inland. These suggest that the status of women may be relatively high in some south lowland societies where ritual homosexuality was practiced.8 Conversely, the central Asmat, among whom ritual homosexuality was highly doubtful, exhibited low female status. In all, female status was both low and moderate to relatively high in culture areas where ritual homosexuality was practiced, and female status was low, medium, and high in culture areas where the custom was definitely or likely absent. Neither Feil's assessment nor Herdt's concerning the association of ritual homosexuality with female status is

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borne out. It can be concluded that there is no consistent association between ritual homosexuality and low (or high) female status in south New Guinea. Similar noncorrespondence is found between female status and sister-exchange marriage. This is epitomized by the fact that marital decisions could include a significant degree of female choice in culture areas, such as Marind and Kiwai, where sister-exchange was practiced.9 The overall status of women was not low among Marind or Kiwai, and among Kiwai it was quite high. On the other hand, sister-exchange did associate with very low female status among Kolopom and Trans-Fly people. Thus sister-exchange associates with either low or moderate-tohigh female status. For societies in which marital exchange was truly prescriptive and onerous for women - enforced by binding agreements concerning girls when they were quite young - it did betoken lower female status. Where sister-exchange in fact accommodated a significant degree of female marital choice, however, the status of women could be high. These alternatives demand empirical assessment in each case and cannot be deduced structurally from sister-exchange norms alone. There is no relationship between female status and cannibalism. Whole-body cannibalism of headhunt victims was pronounced among Purari, among whom the status of women was high, and also among Asmat, where female status was low (Williams 1924:107-109; Zegwaard 1959; cf. also Serpenti 1968:122 for the Kolopom). Conversely, cannibalism of enemy victims was minimal - ritual eating of small body fragments only - among both the Kiwai, where female status was high, and in the Trans-Fly, where female status was low (Williams 1936:280; Landtman 1927:151). In addition, low female status is not directly related to the importance of warriorhood for male prestige. Warrior prowess was highly emphasized among Purari and Asmat, among whom female status was respectively high and low. Male warriorhood was also important among the Marind, among whom female status was slightly positive; conversely, it was fairly unimportant (relative to gardening prowess in particular) among Kolopom, Trans-Fly, and Elema peoples, among whom female status was low-to-medium. The lack of association between warfare emphasis and low female status appears to undercut the argument of Langness (1967, 1974) and others who have suggested that sexual antagonism and male domination in New Guinea were associated with endemic warfare that placed a functional premium on male solidarity and promoted gender division and sexual hostility. Indeed, if

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Table 7. Female status and importance of male warrior prestige Female status

Importance of successful warriorhood to male prestige* High

High Medium Low

Purari Kiwai Marind Asmat

Low

Elema Kolopom Trans-Fly

a

As one index of "high" versus "low" warriorhood emphasis, the Marind, Purari, Asmat, and Kiwai emphasized the importance of taking heads as a prerequisite for a man to marry, to give head-names to children, to rejuvenate cult sacrae, or to obtain significant wealth. None of these characteristics applied to Kolopom, Trans-Fly, or Elema peoples.

the Asmat are excepted, a perfect correlation appears between emphasis on male warriorhood and high rather than low female status (see table 7). This conclusion is corroborated on a much larger scale by Whyte's (1978:129f.) under-appreciated cross-cultural analysis, which considered nine dimensions of female status in pre-state societies and found that warfare did not correlate with low female status. As in the present analysis, he found that important dimensions of female status correlated positively with warfare, including a relative paucity of wife-beating.10 Since male warfare success is largely dependent on men's own activity and effort, this association could be construed as supporting the notion that female status is relatively higher in societies where men can attain prestige through activities that do not depend on the appropriation of female labor. What else associates with female status? Interestingly, groups with low female status relied on root crops for their starch staple (Trans-Fly, Kolopom; see table 2, chapter 4). Conversely, as shown in table 8, those with highest female status relied on sago (Purari, Kiwai), and those with mixed dependence on both sago and root crops had intermediate female status (Marind, Elema). Though Asmat remained a deviant case, it may be significant that though sago production along the south coast entails much higher inputs of female than male labor, this labor is often if not typically undertaken by groups of women. In contrast, root crop gardening takes much higher labor inputs per unit of edible food than does sago, and it almost invariably entails a significant amount of male as well as female work - for instance, in felling trees and building fences as well as digging the soil. In terms of the social organization of production, female labor in cultivating root

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Table 8. Female status and starch staple subsistence

Female status

Starch subsistence staple Sago

High

Tubers

Purari Kiwai Marind Elema

Medium Low

Mixed (Sago/Tubers)

Asmat

Kolopom Trans-Fly

crops tends to be individuated and dovetailed with the labor of a husband or agnate. (Sago processing, in contrast, is frequently undertaken collectively by groups of women, who can work the palm to completion once it has been chopped down.) In political terms, correspondingly, root crop gardening contrasts with sago production in being much more frequently associated both with men's status aspirations in subsistence exchange and with their dependence on female labor in these pursuits. This is well illustrated by Kiwai and Elema, who used root crops in competitive exchanges even though they relied largely on sago as a daily starch staple. The cultural significance of root crops versus sago is reflected in fertility and pollution beliefs. The fertility power of women's sexuality was usually irrelevant if not inimical to root crop cultivation - as exemplified, for instance, in practices and beliefs found among Kolopom, Keraki, and Elema. In contrast, female sexuality was often considered positively related to the growth of sago palms where these were central to subsistence, for instance, among Kiwai, Marind, and Asmat. In short, the association between high female status and male warrior prestige, subsistence emphasis on sago production, and absence of root crops as a starch staple all provide circumstantial support for the notion that female status is higher where male prestige is not defined through activities that depend on the appropriation of female labor. This conclusion dovetails with the suggestions of Ortner and Whitehead (1981) that female status is strongly influenced by women's relationship to the circumstances and activities associated with the attainment of male prestige. Such a relationship helps explain low female status among groups such as Keraki and Asmat, among whom highly polygynous men were

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strongly dependent on female labor for exchange and leadership. A closer consideration of other south coast culture areas suggests, however, that this relationship is not as straightforward as it may at first appear. The status of women was particularly high among Purari and Kiwai, but in these societies male competitive exchange was similarly based in significant part on leaders' ability to command female labor through polygyny (see table 3, chapter 4). The Kolopom gender system was particularly revealing in this respect, since female status was low but men's status in competitive exchange was mostly dependent on their own skill and effort in gardening. Indeed, male gardening practices were stringently guarded against female pollution. This protection was especially true for the cultivation of the largest tubers that epitomized competitive food exchange - a pattern reminiscent of the relationship between long-yam raising and gender pollution beliefs in the Sepik (e.g., Tuzin 1972). Polygyny was uncommon among the Kolopom (Serpenti 1977:132). Among Elema as well, gardening was mostly a male pursuit and polygyny rare, yet female status was not particularly high. The conflicting nature of these findings suggest that though female status is likely to be influenced by women's relationship to practices that confer male prestige, the exact nature of this relationship demands further analysis. Several important questions emerge. To what degree was men's prestige in groups such as Kiwai and Purari linked to the magnitude of women's surplus sago production? Were shell ornaments and other valuables that were prestigious in male exchange obtained in (indirect) reciprocity for gifts of female-produced food, or were gifts of sago (or tubers) considered a separate sphere of exchange? Among Purari, a wife's ritual sexual liaisons procured wealth ornaments for the couple jointly, and though subsistence production was generally "not involved in wealth-status rankings" (Maher 1961:80), armshells were nonetheless bought from indigenous Motu trading parties with large quantities of sago (Barton 1910:115). Among Elema, wealth ornaments were procured primarily through gifts of pork. In short, the valuables that conferred male prestige could derive from various sources. To determine the relationship between men's prestige and their reliance on female labor, it is necessary to determine in each culture area what proportion of valuables were obtained through differing means and what the respective roles of women were in each. Further important questions emerge concerning various dimensions of male prestige. What was the relative balance between prestige

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obtained by men in feast-giving as opposed to warrior prowess in societies in which both were important? How did the relative importance of these activities change over the course of the male life cycle? To what extent did ascribed status categories such as rank (Purari) or gerontocracy (Elema) arbitrarily restrict the classes of men vying for prestige through competitive exchange; were all men equally dependent on female labor for their status, or only some? Was this dependence similar for younger men as opposed to middle-aged or older men? Unfortunately, none of these questions can be adequately answered for south coast culture areas, given the information available. We are thus left with the pregnant but partial conclusion that female status, male prestige, and the appropriation of female labor are related in complex ways that demand more refined consideration. The questions raised in reaching this conclusion, however, are potentially valuable; they are empirically answerable in principle and may be useful in further fieldwork and analysis to illuminate the relationship between female status, male prestige, and the appropriation of female labor along the south coast and in other regions. An important analysis that considers these issues among the Etoro of the Strickland-Bosavi area is in process by Kelly (n.d.). Female status and fertility cultism

Gender relations along south coast New Guinea were highly influenced by cosmological beliefs concerning the relationship between women, men, and spiritual and biotic fertility. The most important recent attempt to consider these relationships is Whitehead's (1986) comparative analysis of New Guinea fertility cults. Whitehead suggests that clanship as a fertility idiom was less prominent in lowland than in highland New Guinea, where the "cult of clan" and the connection between clan ancestors and social fertility were strong. For the south lowlands, by contrast, she suggests that "cult of man" and particularly "cult of man-woman" were prominent but that the "cult of clan" was relatively unimportant. It is difficult, however, to classify south coast New Guinea languageculture regions as exemplifying "cult of man," "cult of man-woman," or "cult of clan." These difficulties reveal larger problems of typological analysis and link to difficulties in explaining female status: the great complexity and range of variation in female status along the south coast belies a correspondence with mutually exclusive fertility cult types as structural bases of male domination.

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Language-culture areas along the south coast combined cross-cutting currents of patrifiliation, male-exclusive culthood, and incorporation of female fertility. For instance, Elema and Kiwai placed strong emphasis on patrilineal totem-clanship and identified the large male longhouse with a single patrifiliative group, making it similar in significant respects to a clan parish. Williams (1940:40) details how patriclanship formed the dominant idiom of the large longhouse, founded by an original patrilineage, and how this clan identity and corresponding land rights were extended to in-migrants from other kin groups over a period of a generation or more (see also Holmes 1924:ch.ll). The ultimate result was that "the given local group becomes a [patronymic] descent group." As noted by Schwimmer (1977:23), the details of Williams' account suggest great similarity with the cumulative patrifiliation analyzed by Barnes (1962,1967) for the New Guinea highlands. Even among the most decentralized groups of inland south lowland New Guinea, clan parish social organization can be found. For the Yonggom, Kirsch (1991:15) writes, "typically a clan was divided into several segments, each living in a separate hamlet within a radius of several kilometers." Patterns of cumulative patrifiliation were strongly evident; descendants of non-agnates became affiliated with the local clan and could generally acquire clan membership as well as full property rights (ibid.). Gaining and exchanging shell "money" by raising pigs, exchanging pork, transacting bridewealth, and going on trading expeditions were highly important (Schoorl 1976). Among Kiwai, very large men's houses were associated with individual totem-clans. Landtman (1927:8) states, "In former times it seems to have been the rule that every sufficiently larger totem clan in a village occupied a communal house of its own, which bore the same name as the clan . . ." J. Weiner (1988b) has suggested that Purari had features of social organization that on some dimensions of structural-functional reasoning resembled a segmentary lineage system. For the Marind, the South Pacific Commission Report (1952-53:58f.) suggests that the men's house was a kind of small clan-parish unit within a larger community of several clans.11 Among Asmat, the cognatic club house held exclusive territorial rights and could grow through the absorption of unrelated refugees who changed kin-group affiliation and became members of the dominant or "trunk" group of the village (Sowada 1961:57, 60, 67; Bureau for Native Affairs 1957:29). Eyde (p.c. 1992) suggests that Asmat succession to longhouse sections was patrifilial. Worship of clan ancestors and beliefs in their link to the living were

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highly developed and sometimes central to the cult life of several south coast groups. This emphasis is reflected in the fe-pole ceremonies of the central Asmat (Zegwaard 1954; Konrad et al. 1981); the horiomu ancestor cult of the Kiwai (Landtman 1927:ch.23); and the descent of mana-like power from spirit ancestors through chiefs' genealogies among the Purari (Maher 1961:ch.2; 1974). These cult forms did not preclude and indeed underscored the association between diverse patrifiliative groups that Whitehead emphasizes for lowland areas. These affiliations occurred especially through ritual dualism and were elaborate among Kolopom, Marind, Asmat, and Purari. My point, however, is that idioms of large-scale patrifiliative integration could also be important; these are not mutually exclusive alternatives. Just as the ostensible "patrilineal" norms of the highlands have been shown to be idioms allowing diverse cross-clan affiliations (A. Strathern 1972; Feil 1984; Wagner 1967), so, conversely, affiliation between diverse totem clans along the south coast co-existed with important recourse to patrifiliative idioms. As James Weiner (1988b) has recently suggested, this pattern does not suggest a simple opposition between highland and lowland forms of social organization predicated on structural-functional distinctions. Rather, it reveals the complex process whereby diverse cultural idioms creatively elaborate a range of sociopolitical affiliations. This process continues to evolve in the post-colonial era as new idioms of regional and national identity are negotiated along with existing affiliations of kinship and residence. As Lederman (1989) and M. Strathern (1988) have suggested, such broadening of structuralfunctionalist assumptions is also important in refining our understanding of New Guinea gender systems. Concerning female status, it would be correspondingly difficult to argue that a "manhood" or "clanhood" fertility cult presages low female status or that a "male-female" fertility cult presages higher female status.12 Most south coast groups practiced several different fertility cults; among Kiwai, Marind, Purari, and Asmat, some of these strongly emphasized exclusive "manship," but others strongly emphasized malefemale complementarity. The "cult of man" would appear to have been highly developed among the Purari, and yet female status was high (see Williams 1923b; Holmes 1902). Conversely, Marind emphasized a combination of male and female contributions to fertility, but the status of Marind women was quite close to that among the Elema, where female contributions to fertility were virtually nil. Sexual incorporation

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of women into fertility cultism was in some respects significant among the Asmat, where the status of women appears to have been low. The status of women was high among Kiwai, who had significant dimensions of "cult of clan" and "cult of man" as well as "cult of man-woman." The point, then, is that the range of south coast ethnographic variation belies easy categorization into Whitehead's fertility cult types, and those classifications that might be posited do not correlate as one might have hoped with variations in female status. Conclusions

South coast New Guinea encompassed striking variations in female status: very high, medium/neutral, low, and very low. These variants did not correlate with the presence or absence of: -ritual homosexuality -sister-exchange -cannibalism -fertility cult emphasis on manhood, clanhood, or male-female complementarity A partial correlation exists between high female status and prestige importance or prominence of male warriorhood, between high female status and primary subsistence staple reliance on sago, and, correspondingly, between low female status and primary subsistence staple reliance on cultivated tubers. The relationship between female status and male prestige reliance on female labor is equivocal and demands greater scrutiny, suggesting that a more refined consideration is needed of the relationship between male status, prestige-related activities, and the sexual division of labor than is possible here. The importance of prestige-related labor (and not simply labor contributions overall) is underscored by the cross-cultural findings of Whyte (1978:146) that there is little connection between female status and either female subsistence contributions in the aggregate or female subsistence organization. Overall, our evidence highlights the difficulty of accounting for female status on the basis of factors usually deemed significant in the analysis of New Guinea cultures despite significant ranges of variation in all of the would-be predictors along the south coast. This conclusion is itself compromised by the small number of cases (only seven) but is buttressed qualitatively by the high face value of the data considered, which make clear the weaknesses of the hypothesized associations. These findings support Whyte's (1978:ch.5) general conclusion that

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dimensions of female status are not easily collapsed into a unitary factor and are not easily explained by prime-mover determinants or correlates. The postmodern feminist implications of his conclusion, however, remain to be drawn: not only does female status, like sexuality, not cohere internally as a single entity, but the very attempt to consider it in these terms can impose an analytic strait jacket on the analysis. The kind of analysis pursued in this chapter, though it is valuable for evaluating existing generalizations, needs to be transformed when it comes to positing a better alternative. This conclusion suggests that a more dynamic and processual consideration of female status is necessary. In particular, female status needs to be viewed alongside constellations of inequality that play out among status groups of men and between ethnic groups; inequality between genders is deeply interrelated with the development of other forms of inequality. Since the criteria of worth and status may differ importantly in different culture areas, this relationship needs to be considered at least initially on a case by case basis. This last point may be elaborated. Standardized indexing and typological sorting have inherent limitations in the study of gender inequality; if gender inequality is in important respects a cultural attribution - a differential moral worth attributed to men and women - then the axes of this valuation may differ from case to case.13 For instance, a factor such as presence of menstrual pollution beliefs may not correspond with an equally high degree of female disparagement in all instances; the link between pollution and female disparagement was strong among Kolopom but weak among Kiwai, for whom female sexual pollution simultaneously betokened women's positive sexual value and power. Social indices of female status must stay constant to be useful for comparative analysis, but those particular features that encode prestige and moral worth may be highly variable from culture to culture. Both of these dimensions of female status are important. Neglecting cultural valuations sets up etic discriminators that may not adequately reflect inequality as it is culturally promulgated. But limiting the analysis to cultural evaluation is to risk adopting an ideology that may be compromised if not belied in practice by power relations and behavior. Both of these alternatives are one-sided: it is the relationship between cultural perception and practical result that is central in gender equality and inequality - both for defining these relations and for maintaining or changing them over time. These considerations suggest that cultural and cosmological dimensions of south New Guinea groups need to be analyzed in conjunction

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with the historical patterns of power and practice through which they were actualized. Notwithstanding the difficulty of applying Whitehead's categories to the specifics of south coast ethnography, she has taken a very important first step in initiating this kind of integrated analysis in the New Guinea context. In a sense, the problem of applying her model is one of comparative scale as discussed in chapters 3 and 4; features that seem germane as broad-brush contrasts between large ethnographic regions (such as the New Guinea lowlands versus highlands) appear less satisfactory as the complex range of variation within regions is considered. In each of the constituent culture areas of south coast New Guinea, gender relationship, cosmology, cult organization, and sociopolitical organization were intertwined in a distinctive gestalt-like configuration of internal reinforcement and development. To analyze this interaction with respect to gender inequality, we can draw on an important recent statement by Ortner (1990a). She suggests that the extent and configuration of male dominance versus male-female equality is variable depending on the distinctive interface between cultural valuation of prestige and the political economy of power in each case. The goal is not to assess universals in either the symbolism or behavior of gender, but to illuminate patterns of equality/inequality that link culture and action - to consider dominant patterns of connection between gender prestige and male-female socioeconomic and political inequality in individual cases. Ortner suggests that sociocultural formations do tend towards identifiable patterns of gender hegemony, but that these are empirically variable and cannot be ascertained on the basis of a priori structural assumptions. She further suggests that in any given case, one is likely to find subordinate tendencies that cross-cut dominant ones - minor themes that provide potentially transformatory "counterhegemonies" for the society in question {ibid. :46). In this way, sociocultural formations mediate diverse and even strongly opposed potentials for the development of gender relationships. It is crucial to identify the processes that inform this mediation. Ortner's perspective fits well with the range and diversity of female status both between and within the language-culture areas of south coast New Guinea. It also provides a theoretical impetus beyond the tabulation of female status as an inductive composite of isolated traits, on the one hand, and the establishment of static typologies, on the other. It is at this point that gender links to the theoretical issues raised in chapter 1, that is, the dialectic between cultural impetus and politicoeconomic actualization. These issues will be reengaged in part 3 of the present work.

Trends in comparative analysis

Chapters 3-5 above illustrate several tendencies in the comparative analysis of ethnographic regions: 1 Particularly on initial analysis, the features considered "characteristic" of a culture area tend to emerge through explicit or implicit contrast with other areas.

Every "figure" requires a "ground." For instance, Melanesia emerged as the region of "Big Man" societies particularly when configured against the "chiefdoms" of Polynesia (Sahlins 1963); interior areas of New Guinea were seen as "secular" in comparison with the "religious" bent of the coastal seaboard (Lawrence and Meggitt 1965). More recently, the New Guinea south lowlands have been asserted to have "low politicoeconomic intensity" and to be "homosexual" and "manhood emphasizing" when configured against the "high politicoeconomic intensity," "heterosexuality," and "clanship" of the highlands. To a significant extent these assessments stem from the terms of contrast themselves. How different south New Guinea fertility cult and sexual practices would seem if configured by regional contrast to northern Australia, native America, or lowland Amazonia, as opposed to the New Guinea highlands. How different the characterizations of highland New Guinea political or religious systems would be if configured as variants of the power-dominant or "open" status systems of Polynesia, rather than as a polar contrast between "Big Men" or "Great Men" and "chiefs" (cf. Goldman 1970).

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2 The features deemed "characteristic" of a culture area vary depending on the geographic contours of the area, and the contours chosen reflect much about analytic agendas as well as ethnographic differences.

Whether south lowland New Guinea can be considered "heterosexual" or "homosexual" depends in part on whether priority is given to the more populous coastal regions, along an extensive east-west axis, or to areas that extend from a narrow coastal section inland to less populated areas. On a larger scale, if Melanesia is perceived to be an area where competitive Big Man or Great Man leadership is paramount but rank and chiefly authority are absent (Sahlins 1963; Godelier 1986), "Melanesia" may be tacitly configured to exclude Fiji and to conceptually marginalize areas such as New Caledonia, the Trobriand Islands, and the Mekeo, which become the cultural equivalent of "Polynesian outliers" (see critique by Douglas 1979; Chowning 1979). If, by contrast, the insular South Pacific is taken as a more inclusive general region, Melanesian "exceptions" become linkages to other areas in the Pacific, minimizing the distinction between Melanesia and Polynesia, as Thomas (1989a) has recently proposed. 3a Large-scale comparisons between ethnographic areas or conceptual types are almost invariably compromised by considering smaller-scale ranges of variation within each individual area or type. 3b Disagreements about appropriate comparative features frequently result from differences in the scale of analysis.

Comparative analysis progresses by positing typologies of large-scale areal or conceptual variation and then critically confronting these with ranges of variation within smaller areas or with exceptional cases. It is almost axiomatic that large-scale types will be modified if not refuted as the complexities of local-level processes and variations are taken into account. It can thus be expected that Big Manship as a coherent leadership type is exploded once the varieties and complexities of indigenous leadership within Melanesia are considered; indeed, the longevity of the Big Man model is striking given the number of critiques it has been subjected to. 1 Analogously, the secular nature of highland New Guinea becomes questionable once its cultural impetus is more carefully considered (e.g., J. Weiner 1982; Wagner 1972; M. Strathern 1988; LiPuma 1988). Conversely, the elaborate politicoeconomic (as well as religious) dimensions of insular Melanesia emerge as the region is more richly documented (e.g., Young 1971; Leach and Leach 1983; Clay

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1986; Brunton 1975; Salisbury 1970; A. Carrier and J. Carrier 1989). In a similar vein, chapters 3-5 illustrate, among other things, that as south coast New Guinea is more closely scrutinized, it becomes highly questionable whether the region was characterized by low intensity political economy, ritual homosexuality, or distinct "cults of man" and "cults of man-woman." The point is not that areal contrasts do not exist but that the process of inferring contrasts tacitly presumes an ideal type - typically in polar contrast to another region - that tends on closer scrutiny to be found unsatisfactory. When assessments propose inter-regional differences, they tend to assume uniformity within each of the regions compared. This uniformity is dispelled once the scale of comparison is reduced and a range of ethnographic variation is considered within each region. The same process occurs conceptually as ideal types not rigidly tied to regional boundaries are proposed and subsequently refuted. For instance, the global contrast drawn by Collier (1988; Collier and Rosaldo 1981) between various types of "brideservice" and "bridewealth" societies practically begs for ethnographic refutation and theoretical recontextualization in Melanesia (e.g., Wood 1987; Kelly n.d.). And within New Guinea, typologies of "cult of clan" versus "cult of man" or "cult of man-woman" (Whitehead 1986) become difficult to apply unambiguously once a range of cases is considered. An extended illustration of these points emerges in recent discussions of Melanesian "Great Men" and "Big Men." Godelier (1982, 1986) suggested that Sahlins' Big Man leadership type was limited largely to core areas of the New Guinea highlands and that his own category of "Great Man" - grounded in his analysis of leadership among the Baruya of the Anga region - applied to many other parts of New Guinea. In important ways, Godelier replaced a Melanesia versus Polynesia leadership typology (Big Man versus chief) with one within Melanesia (Big Man versus Great Man). The larger typology was refuted and replaced by one at a smaller scale of analysis. However, the smaller-scale typology replicates the same structural tendencies as the larger one and is likely itself to be inadequate once the range of variation among "Great Man societies" is considered. This trend is evident in Godelier and Strathern's edited collection Big Men and Great Men in Melanesia (1991). The book's contributors make the Great Man versus Big Man dichotomy squirm if not dissolve by confronting it with a plethora of intermediate cases, counterexamples,

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and intra-societal diversity. It is a measure of the volume's strength that neither Godelier nor his contributors talk past each other; the dialectic between high-level generalization and lower-level refutation is self-consciously maintained as cross-fertilization rather than polarizing into mutually exclusive levels of analysis. To maintain this tension, however, Godelier's Great Man category expands and proliferates while the once-hegemonic notion of Big Man becomes so small and restrictive that it threatens to disappear as an indigenous form. The contributors to Big Men and Great Men consistently suggest that the classic Big Man emphasis on complex and competitive material exchange was intensified if not enabled by Western influence in the course of colonial pacification.2 Even Godelier is surprised to find how rare indigenous Big Men seem to have been (1991:296), and Marilyn Strathern's (1991) introduction and Roy Wagner's (1991) contribution emphasize the ethnographic relativity of Great Man versus Big Man characterizations. That many Melanesianists could now consider "Big Manship" to be (in significant part) a chimerical rendering of indigenous leadership is rather jarring given the concept's previous preeminence in analyses of New Guinea political systems. It is perhaps but a short step from colonial facilitation of Big Manship to seeing it partly (but by no means wholly) as a project of Western post-World War Two cultural attitudes, that is, reflecting back to us our own emphasis on competitive individualism and aggressive materialism. One recalls Sahlins' (1963:289) classic assessment: The Melanesian big-man seems so thoroughly bourgeois, so reminiscent of the free enterprising rugged individual of our own heritage. In contrast, Marilyn Strathern (1988) and others have strongly questioned the tendency of Western ethnographers to assume the selfinterested individual as our basic unit of analysis, particularly when we study people who may have a much stronger notion of collective identity than we do. In recognizing this, we need to welcome critical self-awareness while at the same time not giving up the drive to document and analyze ethnographic diversity as fully, systematically, and with as much nuance as possible. With the de-throning of the Big Man as the typical indigenous Melanesian leader, the bulk of the region's non-rank leadership variation is easily left to reside in the remaining Great Man category,

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which is suddenly uncomfortably large and unwieldy. It is thus not surprising that Godelier (1991) in his most recent formulation finds recourse in a subdivision of Great Man types. One can minimize problems of typological reification by explicitly assessing the range of variation within as well as between comparative units and by honestly addressing the problems and potentials of assuming particular conceptual or regional boundaries. It has yet to be demonstrated that the division between discrete exchange logics in the French structural tradition is paralleled by discrete contrasts between sociocultural groups on the ground. As Wolf (1988) has recently suggested, neither "societies" nor "cultures," much less larger ethnographic regions, have simple boundaries; they are often merely analytic artifacts. This fact places greater responsibility on the analyst to make clear his or her own motivations for marking boundaries, units, and contrasts in a given manner, both over space and over historical time. 4 The features considered "characteristic" of a culture area tend to be configured as a heuristic device to support an analytic agenda.

Max Weber, the father of ideal types in social science,3 realized this explicitly. Indeed, he held that there is apt to be no empirical case that truly conforms to the abstract purity of the type-characterization within its designated region (Weber 1978:ch.l). In addition, Weber clearly realized the intrinsically contrastive nature of ideal types; their value is not only heuristic, but an oppositional form of heurism. (Thus, for example, the Weberian value of characterizing Hindu asceticism as "other-worldly" is precisely the figure/ground relationship it provides with "this-worldly" asceticism in capitalist Protestantism [Weber 1958, 1978].) The admission that ideal types are, after all, only ideal, allowed Weber to complement his typologies with detailed historical analyses of empirical complexities and cross-currents. Anthropology, however, has often neglected this lead, preferring with Radcliffe-Brown to assume that discrete conceptual features exist as real things that are archetypal of broad patterns of life, not only within individual societies, but among groups of them. This turns the finding of areal designators into a mistaken end-in-itself - the "butterfly collecting" of typologies so effectively critiqued three decades ago by Leach (1961). This is a problem that Weber's analysis itself does not fully escape from; in admitting conceptual reification, he embraces it too strongly,

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resulting in a plethora of static types, categories, and definitions that proliferate at times for their own sake. The heuristic purpose of regional characterization and inter-regional comparison requires clear analytic specification. For what purpose is regional characterization/contrast undertaken? In the present case, language-culture areas of south coast New Guinea are configured in order to compare them to existing regional generalizations. The hope has been, on the one hand, to recontextualize existing generalities at a finer level of ethnographic specificity and, on the other, to elucidate meta-tendencies of comparative analysis itself. In part 3 of the present work, a more substantive answer to this question is developed, that is, that two complementary purposes of regional analysis are particularly defensible in the anthropological endeavor. The first of these is to document areal patterns of distinctive cultural richness; the second is to expose patterns of social inequality. 5 Insofar as they become influential, conceptual contrasts between regions tend to become working assumptions. The issue here is reification. Once parameters of contrast are established, boundaries between ethnographic regions or conceptual types tend to be gerrymandered to fit them. Five variations on now-familiar themes can illustrate: (a) If Melanesia has Big Men or Great Men and yet Fiji has had chiefs, then Fiji becomes somehow not quite so "Melanesian." The same is true of New Caledonia, and the Trobriands become anomalous, needing special explanation (Brunton 1975). (b) In the 1950s, African segmentary lineage systems were sought in the New Guinea highlands; one was found among the Mae Enga (Meggitt 1965). But by the late 1960s and 1970s, the New Guinea highlands seemed to be "loosely" structured, a designation that was easily attributed to the highlands as a whole (e.g., de Lepervanche 1967). By the late 1980s, the degree of patrilineal corporate boundedness became an areal contrast between the eastern Papua New Guinea highlands, where it was asserted to be high, and the western Papua New Guinea highlands, where it was asserted to be low (Feil 1987:ch.6). An ironically reified model of kin group flexibility in the latter region was used to call into question the existence of patriclanship even as a dominant sociocultural ideology among groups like the Mae Enga.4

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(c) The political division between Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya developed as an artifact of Western history, conceived along the 141st meridian in 1828 by the Dutch. Yet it is easily reified as a boundary for considering the prehistoric evolution of Papua New Guinea highland societies, eliminating west New Guinea from consideration a priori (Feil 1987; contrast A. Strathern 1990; Ploeg 1988). (d) For south New Guinea, recent work tends to configure the region according to the extent of ritualized homosexuality. This leads to the finding of further presumed structural correlates of homosexuality, such as male domination, restricted exchange, and low intensity politicoeconomic development. Many of these characterizations are questionable when evaluated against the ethnographic evidence available. (e) The reification of "Great Men societies," "Big Men societies," and "chiefly societies" divides areas of Melanesia into a sequence of implicitly unilinear political evolution. As critiqued by Liep (1991), the particular characteristics of these categories make it quite improbable that they could have formed a developmental sequence in any one area, much less be stages lingering differentially in different areas of Melanesia (see also Allen 1984; Lindstrom 1984; Sahlins 1983). In all these cases, terms of ethnographic contrast become reified, themselves determining subsidiary concepts and even the boundaries of ethnographic regions. This can retard adequate consideration of ethnographic variations and historical developments. As Bourdieu (1991a: 223, emphasis original) states, Regionalist discourse is a performative discourse which aims to impose as legitimate a new definition of the frontiers and to get people to know and recognize the region that is thus delimited in opposition to the dominant definition . . . The act of categorization, when it manages to achieve recognition or when it is exercised by a recognized authority, exercises by itself a certain power.

To raise this criticism is far from arguing that regional comparison should be avoided or that it cannot have ethnographic grounding. And as for reification, anthropologists are renowned for exercising their Popperian function, that is, by using ethnographic counterexample to dispel overgeneralization. The point is rather that the boundaries of an ethnographic region vary depending on the key features chosen to characterize it. As importantly, no natural coherence or isomorphism of multifarious secondary features within a region can be "logically"

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presumed. We need to be up front about this in our analyses, more open about the reason our comparisons take the shape that they do, and more careful about delineating the ranges of internal variation that they easily subsume. 6Areal ethnographic characterizations are easily influenced by ethnographic history andparticularly by the theoretical and topical concerns dominant during the primary period(s) offieldwork in a region.

What are the key features of culture area contrast? Bow and arrow culture versus spear culture? Guilt culture versus shame culture? Patrilineal versus matrilineal? Tribal versus chiefly? Perhaps not so obviously bound to history are current Melanesian concerns such as "high versus low politicoeconomic intensity," "homosexual versus heterosexual," or "high versus low female status." Yet in historical hindsight these, too, will likely seem quaint points of societal and regional comparison. To state this is more a truism than a critique, except that the concerns of the day put a deep stamp on the primary ethnographic data collected during that period. Certain areas become "hot spots" of fieldwork and become known through subsequent ethnography as exemplars of certain characteristics. Researchers especially interested in these specialties are steered toward fieldwork in those particular places. To various degrees, this hermeneutic link can make ethnographic characterizations of a region a self-fulfilled prophecy. The Nuer are a grounding bed for the segmentary lineage system; !Kung are the locus of primitive hunter-gatherers; India epitomizes purity and caste hierarchy; Bali features heightened aestheticism; south New Guinea has given us homosexuality. Such crude assessments exert a subtle influence well beyond introductory anthropology courses; as Appadurai (1986, 1988) has suggested, the mapping of "concept" and "place" has a strong if idiosyncratic history in anthropology. Given this, it becomes a very open question whether ethnographic history is itself being adequately controlled for in an ostensibly "controlled comparison" between ethnographic regions (Eggan 1954; cf. LomnitzAdler 1991; Buckley 1989). To answer this question we must pay attention to the comparative historical and theoretical context of ethnography without relinquishing rigorous attention to the ethnographic details themselves. Practically speaking, is there any way out of the seemingly intrinsic problems of comparativism? On the one hand stands the large-scale comparison, approaching the Weberian model both in ideal sweep and in disconnection from fine-grained empirics. Comparative reification

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increases with scale, being most extreme in world-region and worldhistorical models. Analysis in this mode has the strength of synthesis and can serve as a valuable target, stimulating more tightly focused scholarship that refines and refutes its generalities. I have myself adopted a grand-scale comparative perspective on other occasions, for instance, delineating the large-scale trajectory of violence and sociality over the course of human evolution (1987c, 1991) or the divergence between cultural and demographic success in preindustrial cities (1987d). In opposition to this is the Boasian response, which reduces the scale of comparison, refutes higher-order generalities, and spawns relativism. If carried to an extreme, this reaction makes each case totally atomized and incomparable to others. Standing in implicit opposition to both of these strategies is the statistical or "holographic" comparison epitomized by research that relies on the Human Relations Area Files. In this comparative strategy, elaborately typologized places and concepts grid-lock the entire globe and easily proliferate upon their own categorical reifications. The tension between the large-scale, the small-scale, and the statistical comparison is to some extent intrinsic to comparative analysis in anthropology. The tension between these, however, can be made more productive by forwarding premises that link larger-scale trends with smaller-scale diversity. For instance, one may adduce themes that are general to a region but admit important sub-regional variants (Goldman's solution in Ancient Polynesian Societies [1970]; cf. Thomas 1989c). Or, one may adduce polar tensions or forces that seem widespread but resolve differentially in individual cases, for instance, tending toward one or another pole of a continuum (e.g., A. Strathern's [1969] influential analysis of "finance" versus "production" in New Guinea highlands exchange systems). In both cases, admitting intermediate ranges of variation and linking different levels of analysis make ethnographic comparison more dynamic and flexible than static and typological. In general, one helps guard against uniformitarian assumptions by openly exploring the range of variation within a region and coming to conclusions about its characteristics a posteriori rather than a priori. Comparisons between regions can in principle be "built-up" in the same manner, looking critically for similarities as well as differences between the areas compared. This framework, I believe, must include fundamentally the dimension most frequently left out of comparative analyses, including the present critique: the influence of symbolic orientation on social action.5 It is extremely difficult to reconstitute distinctive subjective orientations

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ex postfacto. The necessity of doing so arises quite quickly, however, if one adopts a reductive orientation in which symbolic formations are an epiphenomenon of politicoeconomic, material, structuralist, or social structural causation. In the case of south coast New Guinea, fortunately, there is rich ethnographic documentation of indigenous spiritual beliefs and ritual enactments, and this information can be articulated with what has been uncovered in preceding chapters concerning political economy and gender. As discussed in chapter 1, cultural dynamics can exert crucial influence on patterns of political economy, social organization, and gender relations. In this regard, as Weber suggested in his final programmatic statement on interpretive sociology (1978:ch.l), subjective orientations must be considered in relation to practical outcomes in social action. Taking in hand the insights of Marxist and post-Marxist analysis, such a focus demands dialectical engagement of otherwise static cultural types with social practice, comprehending in the process differentiation and/or domination among genders, male status categories, and ethnic groups. In the process, drawing on structuralism, the developmental generation of cultural permutations can be analyzed to transcend the constraints of extreme relativism without resorting to rigid typological reification. Part 3 of this work attempts such an analysis for indigenous south coast New Guinea.

PART 3 RECONFIGURATION

7 Theoretical reconfiguration

What are the goals of comparative analysis, indeed, of ethnographic analysis in general? What is its purpose and justification? Anthropologists are increasingly cognizant that they are unlikely to predict future sociocultural developments with precision or exert great impact upon their general course of future development. Our role, rather, is as rigorous commentators on the past and present. In this regard, our goal should be to use the tools of social science to further a humanistic perspective as much as the other way around. This agenda does not mean that anthropology is unscientific. Rather, it suggests that we embrace science in the wider sense of rigorous and systematic knowledge - in some ways reflected in the notion of science as wissenschaft and that we take the type and end of knowledge, its human and pragmatic justification, to be important. In studying social life, objectivism should be a tool rather than an end in itself. Indeed, it is just when objectivism is assumed to be a neutral or transparent window upon social reality that its assumptions go most unquestioned and are most in danger of being fulfilled as tautologies. Analysis can take on the guise of an unbiased if not arbitrary search for knowledge while in fact being subservient to unexamined cultural biases that are actualized through the status competition of Western scholarly discourse (Bourdieu 1988a, 1990c; see anthropological case examples in Kuper 1988; Stocking 1987). To minimize such pitfalls, the strengths of detailed scholarship and conceptual sophistication that academic discourse affords and by rights demands need to be trained on clearly specified goals that are not justified by objectivist assumptions alone. In this regard, two complementary goals of ethnographic analysis may be held as particularly meaningful and defensible: (1) to document the

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richness and diversity of alternative cultural formations, and (2) to expose the operation of social inequality and domination. The first goal arises from a hermeneutic concern with actors' subjectivity that can be traced back at least as far as Dilthey. Anthropology draws important passion and rigor from the desire to penetrate the richness of foreign ways of thinking and acting. In American anthropology, this concern has a long tradition in the Boasian legacy as well as from Weber in the Geertzian emphasis on cultural interpretation. Using a higher power of relativism and self-criticism, postmodern approaches in anthropology also draw selectively on this desire to penetrate the Other on his or her own terms. The goal here should be to consider otherness, not just in abstraction, but in living peoples whose knowledge, imagery, and experience enrich and critique our own. Such an interest has had from its beginnings in professional anthropology - and should continue to have in my opinion - a liberal cast of empathic understanding. This implies not so much an Enlightenment desire to expose a single path through ethnographic diversity to human improvement, but the late Foucauldian desire to illuminate a diversity of potential alternatives to choose from. The second, complementary, objective arises from the Marxist legacy in anthropology, whereby analysis of social and material relationships exposes patterns of social inequality and domination. These inequities tend to be legitimated and to varying degrees obfuscated by symbolic formations serving as ideologies. Each of these goals arguably needs the other as a balancing complement. Exploring cultural richness by itself leads to endless relativity. It can also lead to blind empathy or uncritical sympathy, particularly when romanticism in fieldwork makes us excuse forms of domination or suppression we would vehemently oppose in our own society. By contrast, exposing inequalities of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status can sensitize us to analogous or cross-cutting patterns of inequality closer to home, defamiliarizing and deromanticizing the taken-for-granted in an important way. To read anthropology as merely the penetration of people's dissimulations, however, reduces culture to ideology and has the unwitting effect of dehumanizing our subjects of study, including ourselves. It cannot be assumed that all social action is driven by the pursuit of interest at others' expense. Domination and inequality demand consideration because they are common and socially important, not because they are universal or intrinsic to social interaction.

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Both these objectives - the exploration of cultural richness and the exposition of social inequality - are strongly consistent with the humanist tradition of anthropology that is in my opinion one of its strongest assets. These goals, however, are intrinsically competing: are symbolic formations "genuine," rich, and deserving of empathetic analysis from the inside, or are they ideological masks, justifying social and material inequalities that can never be fully exposed from within the reasoning of indigenous cultural logic? Neither of the above two goals can be effectively negated by or, alternatively, made consistent with the other: they are in a formal sense mutually exclusive. As a result, neither the delineation of cultural richness nor the exposure of social inequality can be justified on objective grounds; they work from divergent points of prior assumption. To turn this conundrum into a benefit, however, each goal can be adopted as a check and balance on the other in alternative moments of analysis. They can be used not in attempted fusion, but as parts of a dialectic that drives forward a humanistic anthropology. As two moments of analysis, each invigorates and challenges the other to new levels of sophistication and understanding. It bears emphasis that the goals of documenting cultural richness and critically exposing social inequality are a priori valuations of what is important in anthropological research. As Weber would put it, these emphases are judgments of value. Other anthropologies could have other moral orientations or make alternative point-of-departure assumptions. Within our current discipline of anthropology, however, these twin goals are especially defensible on moral grounds as well as having a substantial intellectual and ethnographic tradition. In contrast to both staunch objectivism and extreme postmodernism, I do not try to avoid explicit value judgments or wriggle out of an authorial mantle. Given that these sticky issues are an inescapable part of authorship, it is best to admit and take responsibility for one's predispositions. From the present perspective, a third dimension of ethnographic analysis - the objectivist "explanation" of sociocultural forms - should be strongly mediated by the above two goals. Though the attempt to explain or account for ethnographic data by using higher-order generalizations is a useful and indeed indispensable analytic tool, this is best combined with a desire to document cultural richness and distinctiveness, on the one hand, and to expose patterns of social inequality, on the other. Without periodic assessment with respect to these or similar pragmatic groundings, authors are increasingly licensed to spin

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rarified personal aesthetics, on the one hand, or to proliferate "facts" and test "hypotheses" that contain unexamined biases, on the other. By itself, objectivism or aestheticism can weave its own justification simply as a token of scholarly capital in academic discourse - to what larger end? The theoretical underpinning for a dialectical analysis of cultural richness and social inequality was discussed in chapter 1 and can be reengaged here, if too briefly, in an historical perspective. Among early social science theorists, it was particularly Weber and the early Marx who attempted to articulate an appreciation of meaning and consciousness with an analysis of social inequality and domination. In more recent anthropological history, symbolic perspectives can be seen (among many other things) to emphasize the subjective and hermeneutic side of this dialectic. They attempt to delineate cultural richness, whether it be through the Geertzian search for local knowledge or the postmodern exposure of irreducible pastiche in polyphonic voices. Symbolic perspectives in anthropology can be a strong impetus to explore alternative subjectivities in all their distinctiveness. In complementary fashion, a material determinist legacy stemming from Morgan and the late Marx and Engels informs approaches as diverse as the cultural materialism of Harris (1979), structural Marxism, and, in an importantly historicized perspective, the anthropological study of political economy and geopolitical domination (e.g., Wolf 1982; Wallerstein 1991). In these perspectives (notwithstanding their huge differences), technoenvironmental and politicoeconomic factors constitute infrastructural determinants that maintain and perpetuate, among other things, large-scale social inequality. This causation occurs regardless of, in spite of, or in concert with, cultural legitimations. On the current theoretical scene, theories of structure and practice developed by Bourdieu, Giddens, Sahlins, and Ortner, among others, bridge and attempt to transcend the longstanding and sometimes pernicious opposition between the above approaches, that is, between cultural interpretation and materialism, or, more broadly, between subjective and objective determinants of social action (see Ortner 1984; cf. Sahlins 1976). One of the strengths of practice theories in anthropology is to incorporate the insights of interpretive and materialist perspectives dialectically, for instance, as dimensions of agency and power that simultaneously inform practice. In so doing, practice theories can treat nuances of cultural richness and sociomaterial dimensions of inequality as complementary rather than as competing foci of analysis. In some prominent theories of practice, however (and particularly in

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Bourdieu's), empathic appreciation of symbolic impetus is undercut by assuming that social inequality drives rather than reflects transformatory cultural change; the Weber of the Protestant Ethic is unduly neglected.1 In the present perspective, politicoeconomic motivation is taken as one important dimension of analysis, but one that must be complemented by considering cultural richness in its own right. On the other hand, the structural(ist) theories of Sahlins (1981, 1985) and the more phenomenological ones of Munn (1986) tend to give too much weight to the staying power of subjective logics already in place. Subjective orientations are viewed as staying basically the same over time; concrete change is explained for the most part by the stasis of subjective orientations as they engage external instigations. Change does not tend to be seen as intrinsic to symbolic formations through their own sociomaterial actualizations. On the present analysis, it is just this dialectic that drives the development of sociocultural formations from the inside. Symbolic orientations do exert crucial influence over what people do; culturally constituted values and orientations motivate action. But cultural determinism is never total, is sometimes systematically compromised, and is regularly confronted by the unforeseen legacy of its own hard-world actualization. This actualization reflects the limits and forces of ecology, technology, demography, trade, the military force of intruding sociocultural formations, and so on. The effects of these limits and forces on action, reciprocally, are mediated by very active and very subjective responses. As Kelly (1985:ch.6) so effectively discusses for the Nuer and the Dinka, sociocultural development and change are driven by the self-destabilizing results that cultural valuations have as they engage their own material repercussions. As he emphasizes, the complex and often unintended sociomaterial consequences of cultural orientation are themselves exacerbated, minimized, or otherwise responded to by symbolic formations themselves. This sociocultural interaction entails a dialectic relationship and not simply the stochastic progression portrayed in cybernetic or variable feedback models. Symbolisms proliferate and change qualitatively in response to their hard-world actualizations; it is not simply the "magnitude" of symbolic categories or cultural emphases that change. In contrast to stochastic change, then, dialectical change entails mutual causality in which symbolic categories are qualitatively revalued through interaction with the tangible properties of their material world (see Sahlins 1981). The outlines and content of data categories cannot be

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taken as constants. And yet, as the Marxist notion of dialectic progression implies, change is not thereby unordered and random; it is progressive and directional. In the present perspective, this systematicity is explained both by the fact that symbolic formations actualize themselves recursively and by the fact that repeated engagement with existential conditions produces regular hard-world repercussions. In terms of method, I start with the distinctive features of symbolic formations in place. Though the degree to which cultural formations are systemic has been much debated in recent years, culture as a diffusely shared set of meanings and values remains an important heuristic concept. As Shore (1988) has suggested, there need be no assumption that cultural meanings uniformly influence or motivate all individuals; taking culture seriously need not deny the polyphony or cacophony of voices that constitute cultural formations. Cultural orientations should be considered first from the inside - from the viewpoint of indigenous actors. They cannot be adequately reconstituted ex post-facto, that is, after universalist assumptions of material determinism or politicoeconomic motivation have already been made. The reverse it not the case, however: internalist analysis of symbolic formations can be supplemented by a subsequent consideration of technoenvironmental constraints and sociomaterial opportunities. Cultural orientations juxtapose in constant relationship with nonsymbolic ecological, material, and demographic processes. Cultural impetus takes on existential dimensions as it is actualized; practice both manifests culture and alters it. This alteration, in turn, rebounds upon and further stimulates the elaboration of endogenous symbolic gestalts. Viewed in spatial or comparative terms, one frequently finds broad sociocultural features shared in common across regions but cross-cut by specific divergences if not polarizations between constituent cultural groups. These divergences are not simply random permutations of cultural form, as Levi-Strauss might have it, but symbolic formations elaborating distinctively in response to the hard-world legacies of their specific prior history. This historical legacy poses realities at once both symbolic and nonsymbolic to which symbolic orientations react and respond. In the south coast New Guinea context, one finds great overall similarity among the seven major language-culture areas (see the conclusion of chapter 2 above and chapters 9 and 10 below). This similarity is cross-cut by symbolic and sociopolitical differences and polarizations, including what Ted Schwartz (1975, cf. 1963) has for

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north Melanesia called "ethnic totemism" - the encoding of cultural identity through strong if not diametric opposition between adjacent ethnic groups on the basis of selective divergences of custom and belief. These markers of cultural differentiation are frequently complemented by differences in residential, sociopolitical, and economic organization. These variations cannot be accounted for on the basis of ecology or material factors alone but stem from the spiralling elaboration of local cultural geists in interaction with the legacy of their own hard-world actualizations. These actualizations, in turn, both reflect and reinforce distinctive differences in the organization of social inequality and domination between genders, between status groups of men, and between ethnic groups. Along the methodological lines sketched above, the seven languageculture areas of south coast New Guinea will be considered as internally configured cultural formations that engage with sociodemographic, environmental, and political constraints and opportunities. Though it might be possible to separate and then cross-tabulate individual factors, such a procedure would compromise a developmental understanding of the sociocultural formation in each case. General features of areal development, however, may be compared and contrasted. I pursue a relatively detailed analysis of the Marind-anim in chapter 8, as their ethnographic material is especially rich and illustrative of developmental dynamics. In chapter 9, I analyze the interface between culture and practice among the remaining six south coast languageculture areas; in the process, I compare them to the Marind-anim and to each other. In chapter 10, regional comparisons are built up, for instance, between the south coast and the New Guinea highlands. For this broader scale of comparison, I identify general commonalities of south coast cultural orientation and their existential results.

8 Marind-anim

Marind-anim provide a convenient point of departure for reconfiguring the comparative analysis of south coast New Guinea. Marind customs and beliefs emphasized themes found in different permutations elsewhere along the south coast, and their sociopolitical and mythic features were both dramatic and distinctive during the early colonial period. Available information is ripe for reconsideration, since the relevant details are meticulously documented but deeply ensconced in van Baal's (1966) huge and wonderful but digressive and complicated compendium of Marind ethnography.l Dema

To comprehend Marind-anim, as van Baal emphasizes, we must start with dema. Dema were at once primordial ancestors, living spirits, clan totems, timeless originators of the universe, and continuing forces of power, awe, and change within the cosmos. The relationship of dema to Marind was not only one of descent but transcended boundaries of linear chronology and social space. Dema created the places of the known world. The stories of their travels, adventures, and torments were a continuing myth-space that engaged all four Marind phratries and moved across the territory in ritual enactment. Girls and particularly boys were indoctrinated and socialized into the dema's way of life; in addition to being initiated into the world of dema-stories and ritual embodiments, they re-learned how to drink water, eat food, gather coconuts, clothe themselves, and obtain enemy heads as taught by the dema. Dema did not exist in distant time; one's grandfather was apt to have lived just after the period of their initial actions. As Verschueren wrote to van Baal (ibid.: 182),

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It is the raconteur's method to present all [mythical] events as actual, as events of the day. Often when listening to a myth being told, I had the impression that it all happened only a few months ago. Dema continued to inform the strange, awesome, and cataclysmic aspects of life, and they could be conjured. Moreover, they were continually brought back into being through human embodiment. The major cults did more than reenact the activities of dema in a panoptic profusion of spectacularly costumed deraa-performers; actors were transformed into dema themselves. Thus, when Wirz saw a demaperformer fall and be strangled senseless by the cords holding his enormous costume edifice, the group silently gathered and performed a ritual to facilitate the dema's departure before the cords could be loosened and the man allowed to struggle back to consciousness. During the promiscuous heterosexual intercourse of the myth-enacting rituals, the serial sexuality of the Marind was that of the dema themselves, and children born to unmarried women as a result of such sexuality were killed: they were not human but were dema-children. After the rituals, raids of headhunting and kidnapping that stretched far outside Marind territory incarnated the head-taking that allowed dema to proliferate and spring forth anew. The universe of dema was multifarious and encompassing. Van Baal {ibid. :180) suggests, we are confronted with . . . a bewildering multitude of dema, each associated with one or more different things, species, or customs, so variegated and numerous as to suggest that everything comes from the dema. That, indeed, is the way the Marind see it when they refer to the dema as the originators of all things. These associations were at one level totemic; dema-affiliations signified various forms of individual, clan, and local identity that were strongly embraced. The pervasiveness of dema in Marind social life suggests similarities with the Dreamtime ancestors of Australian aboriginal populations southward across the shallow Arafura Sea (Stanner 1979:ch.2). Yet there were important differences. The world of the dema was not only primordial but temporal or "in time." Correspondingly, the deep-seated transformation of subjects into totemic objects in Australian ritual, as penetrated by Munn (1969, 1973) comes to a fuller circle among Marind-anim. Dema were subjectified as present beings and Marind

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objectified themselves as creative embodiments who continued the dema's restless wanderings and vital energy. Dema provided not just the authority of age-old sanctity but a license to elaborate their spirit in the present. Although Marind retained a deep sense of personal dignity and self-contained superiority in their ethnic embodiment as dema, they were highly expansionist, melding foreign peoples on all of their borders into their proliferating ritual cults. Being more than vessels of a timeless past, Marind were as active dema-hevoes in the present. Social and mythic complementarity

The relationship between social and mythic organization engages the rich specifics of Marind agency. The atom of Marind residential affiliation was the exogamous boan, a patri-descent construct that flexibly bridged and subsumed what might otherwise be called lineage, clan, and clan-affiliate or phratry levels of social organization (van Baal 1966:87). On a small scale, boan appear to have been basic residential and land-holding units, a small men's house community of about twenty persons on average. Several of these and associated women's houses clustered to form a hamlet (South Pacific Commission 1952-1953:58f.; cf. van Baal 1966:39). The nine major boan names found across Marind territory were classed in a four-phratry system, with boan from all four phratries grouped into moieties within each village. Named villages were extended territorial units of some 100-450 persons dispersed in several hamlets. Villages combined members of all four phratries in quadripartite social organization. This arrangement structured marriage as well as cult life; the boan of the exogamous phratries tended to marry within the village, which was hence largely endogamous (van Baal 1966:45). Major cults, feasts, and accompanying myth-performances required deraa-personae from all four phratries so they could play their respective roles in dramas of collective cosmological rejuvenation. The four phratries were represented in roughly equal demographic proportions across Marind territory (e.g. ibid.:80, annex 3). Van Baal (ibid. :428) notes that "the present system of phratries and clans is a superstructure which, through a long process of adaptation and integration, has superseded and absorbed a multitude of older local clan-organizations, the constituents of which live on in the numerous subclans." Diverse patri-groups could be incorporated into the major totem-affiliations of existing boan, finding their place flexibly at unmarked "lineage," "clan," or "phratry" levels without compromising

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the larger integrity of boan mythic and totemic associations. The boan and their phratries had primary mythic-totemic affiliation with particular dema, but mythic association defined boan identity as much as the reverse {ibid. :93, 96). The attractions of Marind ethnicity combined with the threat of headhunting against outsiders to gradually subsume border groups into Marind social and mythic organization. "There is every reason to reconsider the Marind-anim clan-system from the point of view of actual reality . . . everywhere inducing peoples to adapt their clan-systems to that of the Marind-anim by fitting their clans into one of the categories represented by the nine big names" {ibid. :96f.). Further, "the tendency to assimilate local clan-systems into a kind of overall system is so general that it cannot be new. It must be a very old trend." 2 Through elaborate dual organization, Marind myth and ritual facilitated widespread social as well as cosmological integration. Marind perceived the distinctive myth and ritual variations found elsewhere in their territory as providing important complements and permutations of overarching cosmological motifs. For this reason, visitors from distant Marind villages were welcomed to perform their distinctive demaenactments {ibid.:829-862). This sharing of ritual display dovetailed with the Marind tendency to classify the human and material world according to its similarity or association with known totemic objects, properties, and species {ibid. :196). Grounded in widespread mythico-religious affiliation, Marind were remarkable in their cooperation and alliance. Distant villages, including from the far eastern and western portions of Marind territory, allied in headhunting against non-Marind {ibid. :95). Intra-Marind relations were amazingly non-violent among a population of 8,500 to 10,000 coastal Marind and an additional 6,000 or so Marind in the interior. As van Baal (ibid.:24) puts it, "most remarkable of all is that, in spite of the absence of intervillage authority and organization, they managed to maintain relatively peaceful conditions among themselves." In those episodes of intra-Marind killing that did occur - only two known - the few victims were not beheaded and the parties made peace within a few years (ibid.:6S5, 689, 691). Marind disputes were often dealt with through recourse to sorcery and countersorcery, but accusations were vague and rarely resulted in killing; inter-village sorcery was much less feared among Marind than in neighboring language-culture areas (ibid. :688, 936f.). Violent conflict was infrequent within the village as well. Van de Kolk (quoted ibid. :692) states that "very rarely do men

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of . . . the same village fight each other, which we have always found amazing." These patterns contrast dramatically with the relentless headhunting that Marind directed against foreign ethnic groups. The operation of this unusually cohesive dynamic is revealed through the Marind linkage among moieties, cults, and ethnic sub-groups. Internal dynamics: moieties, cults, and ethnic sub-groups

The symbolically dominant Marind moiety was Geb-ze, associated with the coast, the southeast, fire, sunrise, and the origin of man. In contrast, the Sami-rek moiety was associated with inland areas, swamp, the origin of killing and death, women, and night (ibid. :215-219). In addition to its classificatory function within villages, the binary division between Geb-ze and Sami-rek was overlain with areal ethnic polarities. Sami-rek dema were emphasized in the cult enactments of the Imo Marind, a fierce Marind ethnic group with historical as well as cultural and mythic ties to swampy inland areas. Van Baal presents strong evidence that the Imo Marind originated as a separate inland group with its own tribal cult, subsequently expanding and migrating south toward the coast, where they eventually established a few major coastal villages (ibid. :607, 666). Imo intrusion thus split the pre-existing Marind coastal population geographically in two, and there remained important language dialect differences between the two groups. Cult affiliation reflected this division; intrusive Imo villages resolutely practiced their imo cult, whereas most other coastal Marind followed the mayo cult.3 The myths of the Imo Marind encode a history of antagonism between their preeminent Sami-rek moiety and Geb-ze. For instance, of the five Geb-ze dema in the imo cult enactment, one is raped, killed, and eaten, a second is captured and imprisoned, a third is killed by sorcery and his head cut off (becoming a coconut), and the remaining two themselves facilitate the capture of other Geb-ze dema by the imo (ibid. :435). By the early colonial period, the ethnic and cult relationship between Imo and Mayo Marind had become one of cooperation within a common system of cosmological and social organization. Over time, imo and mayo cults incorporated key dimensions of each other, with Geb-ze themes in particular informing the imo cult as the hidden or secret meaning of the traumatic rites (ibid.:649, 669). Ethnic polarization was subsumed in the same way that polarity between moieties or phratries

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was subsumed within the village: "the tendency to associate every phratry with certain aspects of nature is balanced by a trend to express relations with the favourite characteristics of the opposite moiety" {ibid. :426). As well as entailing mythic performance by actors from both moieties and all four phratries, this trend toward complementarity predisposed affiliation with dema enactments performed in other villages and other Marind ethnic groups. It was on the basis of such affiliation that cooperation between Imo and Mayo Marind was secured for activities such as cooperative headhunting against non-Marind and joint celebration of large head-feasts. Cultic and ethnic cooperation was both a cause and a result of expanding quadripartition across Marind territory. Structuralist logic and ethnic history were here combined. Historically, ethnic myth and ritual affiliations diffused, integrating constituent groups through beliefs and ritual themes subsequently held in common. Structurally, a classificatory propensity for complementary dualism throughout the region provided a framework for recognizing and appreciating alternative mythic and ritual emphases - that is, for seeing them as variants of one's own practices and beliefs. Within these permutations, mayo cultic and associated Geb myth emphases were dominant in historical priority and in recognized classificatory eminence; they stressed life, dry season plenty, birth, man, fire, and beach (ibid. :212-214). This classificatory superiority was not also social, however; it betokened no social dominance of Mayo group "first-comers" versus Imo group "latecomers," in contrast to patterns found in many African and Polynesian societies (see ibid. :98). This fact helps explain the process of ethnic and cultural accretion to Marind ethno-mythic formations. The elaborating dualisms of Marind cosmology integrated diverse mythic and ritual permutations, and in the process, they amalgamated people with different social affiliations and even different ethnic histories. To the north, Upper Bian Marind were amalgamating both their ritual and their political alliance system to the Marind imo, just as the Imo had combined theirs with the mayo (ibid. :606). The Sosom cult among eastern coastal Marind, discussed further below, likely originated as a cultural if not ethnic infusion. And in the far eastern coastal Marind village of Kondo, the rapa cult was being incorporated, combining basic features of mayo cult mythology with a distinctive emphasis on fire (ibid. :563). Myth The dema themes illustrated in myths of human origin had pragmatic as well as aesthetic significance. These themes came to be shared by all Marind, and

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their enactment figured prominently in practices of ritual sexuality, warfare, and sociopolitical organization, as well as in cult performances. Mythic themes were also palpable to Marind in and of themselves; their cycle of associations needs to be sketched before their social influence can be traced (van Baal 1966:pt. II). The multitudinous aspects of Marind mythology gradually reveal a structure of permutation on basic dominant themes. Rather than pre-assess these themes, however, I begin by letting the main stories of the four Marind phratries speak for themselves. Prior to the origin of men, dema were already holding cult-feasts. Traveling underground eastward in two boats (one for each moiety), they were accompanied above ground by a dema-dog. As the dog heard the growing noise of dema tunnelling underground, he dug furiously. Out of two holes, along with gushing water, came the first humans, emerging in two moieties, unformed and looking like fish. 4 The dema Aramemb (founder of Aramemb phratry of the Geb-ze moiety) rescued the first emerging humans from a predatory stork and lit a fire to warm and dry them; the popping bamboo from the fire formed their eyes and ears. Of a common moiety, Geb and Aramemb claimed and took their respective phratry people. The rest were taken by Mahu and Bragai the dema phratry-founders of the Sami-rek moiety. Following their founders, Marind were settled westward as far as the Princess Marianne Strait. Geb in his primary and secondary dema forms is the central figure of Geb-ze moiety and phratry myths. He is initially satisfied with a bamboo instead of a wife but is eventually given a woman by Mahu. He is also a boy or man who lives in a hole on an eastern beach and captures and kills boys. He is found out and cleaned and rubbed with semen by women, and the first banana thus sprouts from his neck. He is sodomized, whereafter he escapes and climbs a vine to the sky to become the moon. In another variant, Geb as a killer of boys is himself beheaded and his glowing head rises in the east to become the sun. Geb is also a giant snake whose snake-son is stolen. Aramemb steals Geb's son back, but the son proceeds to seduce Aramemb's wife. In revenge, Aramemb has the son killed through sorcery; his head is planted and becomes the first coconut tree. Geb mythology establishes the basic Marind mythological connection between heads, killing, coconuts, and heterosexual regeneration. The most important snake-son of Geb is Uaba, who brings his wife

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Ualiwamb, mother of stork and initiation, to a dema feast. Resisting the ritual requirement of serial sexual intercourse (otiv-bombari), Ualiwamb flees to the west, where Uaba trails and finally engages her. They are found trapped in sexual intercourse the next morning by dema who had followed them. Fused in the sexual act, the couple are covered with mats and brought east where they are found by Aramemb, who wrenches Uaba free. Flame shoots from Ualiwamb's vulva (the origin of fire), from whence also emerges the first cassowary and the stork (symbol of the initiate). The fire from the culture-heroes' prolonged coitus spreads westward through the entire country and creates the Marind beach and savannah. The cassowary dema, Dawi (of the Sami-rek moiety), tries to put out the fire by beating it with his wagane (penis/head-hunting club), but merely manages to sever from the mainland a head-shaped island covered with coconuts; it floats west. The headhunting club originates from events following a cult-celebration by the dema. After holding their celebration, the dema travel through headhunting country accompanied by Sok, the beheading-knife dema. The dema Diwa parallels this journey and carries his huge penis over his shoulder like a club, but it violates a young woman, whose mother cuts the phallus off. (Among the Marind themselves, by association, the pahui headhunting club has a female disk through which the phallic male shaft slides. In symbolic castration, the top fretwork of the shaft is smashed over the victim's head and broken off prior to beheading.) Similar to Diwa is Uaba's brother, the violent giant Sosom of the Aramemb phratry, who wears a string of enemy heads. He is beheaded in the west but goes east, enters the vagina of a woman, and is reborn. Growing up, he is loud and obstreperous, and he beats the boys and has sex with the girls until people lose patience and castrate him; in one variant, his penis becomes vaginally locked in sexual intercourse and is cut off by the girl's mother {ibid. :268). Sosom goes off growling loudly, masturbates [his penile stump], and eventually drives off the women and teaches Marind men the homosexual rites of the Sosom male initiation cult, including the use of the bullroarer - simultaneously Sosom's castrated phallus and his loud voice - and the practice of anally inseminating cult novices. In the Sosom rituals, which included promiscuous homosexual intercourse, Marind set up a huge red phallus of Sosom and danced around it, while the deraa-impersonator of Sosom was revealed to the male initiate novices as a real man/inseminator. Sosom was nick-named "anus-man."

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A relinkage of parallel themes is found in the core mythology of the opposite (Sami-rek) moiety. One of the moieties' principal myths, from its Mahu-ze phratry, recounts the travels of the Diwa canoe, which carries dema from a mayo ceremony to a large feast (ibid. :311-314). A dema called Yugil, associated with Diwa, has a similarly huge penis that he carries over his shoulder. While crossing a river, the penis molests a young girl and is cut off by her mother, after which it falls into the water and sticks to the bow of the Diwa canoe. The canoe is overladen with dema and food from the preceding feast; its occupants float downstream and are jettisoned along with food and material items at various locations, with which they are subsequently associated. A sea-snake attacks and capsizes the canoe, whereupon various dema are marooned, including Yugil, the "dema of the penis stump." The canoe continues its journey to the sea and is washed back inland with the tide; the penis ends up in a swamp. Mahu is the dema-ioxm&tr of the Mahu-ze phratry of Sami-rek. He has exceedingly large genitals and copulates frequently with his wife, whereupon she bears him a litter of dogs (which the Marind associate with large genitals, incessant copulation, and excrement). One of these dogs copulates with Mahu's wife, by consequence of which Mahu kills and eats him. But each of the dog's bones comes back to life as a new dog to sniff the excrement of Mahu after he inadvertently defecates near the dog's skeleton. Mahu also has other wives, who, along with his first wife, give birth to sons who become the ancestors of Mahu-ze subclans. Mahu finds one of his wives stealing food, so he ties her up and later gives her to Geb as a wife. Mahu's sons become enraged at the marital gift of their mother; they defecate into coconut bowls and fling the contents at their father. To the Sami-rek moiety also belongs the pig-dema Nazr of the Bragai-ze phratry, the leader of headhunts. Nazr changes back and forth from pig to man; in his pig form he devours sago pith at night (ibid.:409-424). The local people dig a pit-trap, catch Nazr as a pig, and kill and eat him. The bones complain of the cooking heat, leave to bathe, and attack the people of the village. The people in turn shriek like pigs and indeed turn into pigs, and their village becomes forest. Afterwards, Nazr develops a passion for shooting with his bow, and he travels and kills many people and even dema (ibid.:395-403). When he finds a dema he cannot kill, he shoots a pair of copulating snakes and uses them to tie the dema up. Nazr meets his friend Mahu and shows him how to go headhunting and take and process heads; Nazr's many

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children help to make the attack an easy victory. Nazr then steals the heads Mahu has taken; Mahu has to turn himself into a dog to recover them. Mahu is also the possessor of self-processed sago (associated with women) and splits the skull of the dema Wakabu when the latter attempts to steal sago from him. Wakabu washes his split head in a swamp, whereupon grows the first true sago-palm. Bringing the mythology full circle is Opeko-anem, the main dema of the Sami-rek's Bragai-ze phratry. Opeko-anem is the mythical complement to Uaba of the Geb-ze moiety. Opeko-anem and Uaba marry each other's sisters and bring their wives for exchange at the heterosexual

Figure 3 Marind-anim gari sunburst ornament. Made of very light kernel of sago-leaf ribs. Thin, long strips, radially arranged, are lashed and painted in various colors, particularly white, punctuated by darker stars and border. Total diameter 3-4 m. (Illustration after Wirz 1928:plate 100, see also his plates 35, 95 and van Baal 1966:356ff., plate 9.)

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rites of the mayo cult ceremony; from then on, friendship is established between Uaba's boan and the Bragai-ze phratry. Uaba asks Opekoanem to fetch an additional woman for the heterosexual rites and a gari, which in actual cult performances were large sun-burst body ornaments up to four meters in diameter (see figure 3). When Opeko-anem returns with the gari and the young woman attached to him by a spear, the woman resists and stabs him with the weapon that joins them. She carries him off along with the sunburst and begins a long journey, like the sun, from the east to the far west, returning to leave the sunburst near the coast and Opeko-anem upstream. Dema-women who are angry at Opeko-anem for having coerced women into sexual rites tie him upside-down to ironwood pillars in the middle of the river. They also fasten a big woman's apron between his legs to prevent him from copulating. Singing the headhunters song, the dema-women settle nearby to keep watch on their prisoner, remaining there to the present day. Sami-rek myths engage themes of hypersexuality, castration, and the re-birth of heads parallel to those of the Geb-ze, and, like them, they link back to the primordial mayo ceremonies. Nevertheless, they complement Geb-ze emphases with an accent on death, destruction, darkness, night, swamp, and womanhood. Marind myths are clearly amenable to structuralist or Freudian analysis, and the themes presented above are but a small part of an enormous and enormously complex mythological corpus. Associations abound in mind-boggling variants and transformations. Nevertheless, certain basic themes repeat: prolific sexual intercourse, castration, decapitation, rejuvenation, and rebirth. These themes are linked in a distinctive fertility cycle, and they are the means by which dema regenerate in their various incarnations. The resonating permutations of these themes also link the mythic cycles of the four phratries. Through these themes and specific dema-forms, origin and meaning are given to the sun, moon, fire, water, dogs, pigs, snakes, bamboo, coconuts, sago, headhunting clubs, canoes, phalli, women, heterosexuality, homosexuality - indeed, to virtually all objects and features or forces of importance to Marind. Given this scope of reference, it is not difficult to see how new variants, drawing on alternative ethnic topical emphases, were melded with and subsumed by the Marind mythological cycle. Within this mosaic, strong emphasis is placed on the transformatory

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opposition between life-death, coast-inland, east-west, dry-wet, firewater, copulation-killing, male-female, and so on. Marind mythology can clearly be analyzed as a proliferating structuralist logic of antinomy, mediated opposition, and transformation. In addition, however, Marind mythological spirit is highly experiential and social; enacting mythic themes in social behavior and politics was central, not epiphenomenal. Marind emphasized the performative dimension of their cosmology rather than rarifying it as a timeless system of knowledge. They appear to have been untroubled by the inconsistencies, additions, and divergent proliferations of their mythical corpus in different forms. Indeed, they continually embellished their own ritual enactments to creatively elaborate, complement, or disguise various mythic themes. Though a prolonged structuralist analysis of dema myths could be undertaken, the present goal is to consider Marind mythology not so much as a formal system but, as Marind themselves did, in relation to social practice. It is hence the basic themes and their pragmatic interconnection as parts of an enacted fertility cycle that will be stressed. Enacting myth: cults and social action To actualize mythic meanings and imbue these meanings in the young, Marind enacted elaborate cult performances. Dema in spectacular costume were embodied by the coordinated boan of the four phratries, each enacting the dema associated with its particular sub-group. Van Baal's (ibid.:856f.) description of the Sosom dema illustrates the lavish costuming: The demfl-performer is bedecked with an extraordinary variety of ornaments. His face is concealed by a brightly coloured yellow shield representing a bower bird (batend). His head is adorned with birds of paradise plumes, in his ears he wears special ornaments, another ornament keeps his lips sealed, indicating that he is not allowed to speak. All kinds of finery cover his breast and back, and round his waist he has a skirt made of hibiscus-fibres. At the back of his head he proudly wears the humum [sky-cloud] ornament, often of an enormous size. Moreover, each dema-performer has his particular face-painting and also the ornaments which refer to his mythical past. The sequence of dema-enactments was correspondingly elaborate, as illustrated in the humum-angai dance (ibid. :855): The procession of dancers is opened by a number of dem