Preface

Ponam is a small island off the north coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Ponam had found a relatively prosperous niche for itself in the late 1970s when we first arrived there to do fieldwork. The purpose of this book is to describe that niche and how it developed as well as to provide some suggestions about what may happen to it in the future.

Ponam's prosperity at the time, striking by the standards of many villages in Papua New Guinea, rested on the ability of islanders to do well in school and use their educational credentials to get well-paid jobs, almost exclusively with the civil service. These jobs allowed migrants to send enough money home to their families that island residents were able to buy both the necessities and a number of the minor luxuries of life.

Even though this system of education, migration, and remittance made Ponam something like a suburban bedroom community appended to the country's major cities, many aspects of life in the village were not noticeably touched by urban amenities or practices. Villagers continued to spend much of their time fishing in their extensive lagoon—and if they used nylon line and nets, steel hooks and spears, and commercially made goggles, these introductions seem to have had little impact on either the organization or the techniques of fishing. Villagers continued to travel each week to the two coastal markets they shared with villages opposite them on the Manus mainland—and if they now bought produce with cash more often than they got it in trade for fish, the markets did continue with what islanders asserted were their age-old organization, structure, and animosities. Villagers continued their extensive system of ceremonial exchange—and if rice and tinned fish, clothes, metal dishes, and money appeared alongside sago and smoked fish, mats, wooden dishes, and shell money, the gifts were still made and distributed in profusion to mark the stages of marriage, birth, death, and a host of other less momentous occasions. In short, in many ways traditional Ponam life was fluorishing when we arrived.

This continuing village tradition in the face of Ponam's necessary and necessarily intimate relationship with urban modernity is one of the themes we pursue in this book. So much of what islanders did appeared to be straight out of introductory anthropology courses that Ponam was a tempting place for the anthropologist interested in the classic ethnographic description of traditional social practices and structures in an isolated Melanesian village. However, as our analysis of Ponam developed, and as we argue in this book, it became apparent that the traditional and the modern were not in accidental propinquity, the two realms existing, and analyzable, independently of each other. Rather, the two were in intimate relationship. Islanders' involvement with the modern world was motivated by their conception and valuation of their traditional life, and their traditional life in its turn was made possible by their involvement with the modern world.

If the task we set ourselves in this book is to describe the island's prosperous niche, then the frame that shapes the description is this relationship between village and town, the traditional and the modern. And the lessons that we draw bear on the necessity of seeing villages like Ponam in terms of their links with town: with wage employment, commodities, and the state. Anthropologists regularly pronounce upon the disappearance of the isolated, pristine village, and just as regularly describe villages in ways that ignore the fact that they are neither isolated nor pristine. We hope that our analysis of Ponam will show how important are those regular pronouncements and how partial and misleading are those descriptions.

A Note on the Ethnographic Past Tense

We have elected to refer to Ponam society in the ethnographic past tense, at the risk of appearing to describe a set of social practices that we elicited from a few aged informants, which emphatically is not the case. Because the anthropological convention has been to use the ethnographic present to refer to the society at the time the ethnographer studied it, reserving the past tense for events that had taken place previously, our use of the ethnographic past tense requires comment.

While the ethnographic present is convenient, as well as being easier to read and write for those inducted into it, it has unfortunate consequences. The most important of these is that it lends an air of timelessness to the society the ethnographer describes, and it does so independently of the extent to which the ethnographer is concerned with and aware of historical issues. The ethnographic past, on the other hand, lends an air of historical specificity to an account of a society, inevitably suggesting that what is described is rooted in a particular period and may have been different before that period or may become different afterwards. In other words, it inevitably makes the existence of the social practices being described historically problematic. This is appropriate for what we know of Ponam. The society that we saw had, in important ways, not come into being twenty or even fifteen years before we arrived, and we see no reason to think that much of what we saw would continue unchanged that far into the future.^[1] Given the temporal instability of all societies, and particularly the peripheral societies that many anthropologists study, we feel that the air of historical specificity provided by the ethnographic past tense is appropriate.

A Note on Usage

Words from the Ponam language are italicized and those from Pidgin are put in quotation marks, except for Ponam proper nouns and for those few Pidgin words that have entered common English usage in Papua New Guinea. For Ponam words we have followed Ponam orthography wherever it seemed reasonably consistent. Where alternative Ponam spellings were common, we made our own judgment. We have decided not to use Ponam names for places elsewhere in Manus, relying instead on the standard official names. As Ponam did not mark a plural form in any obvious way, it is necessary for the reader to use context to decide whether a word is used as a singular or plural.

For those who are interested, the pronunciation of Ponam spelling basically follows Pidgin pronunciation, with two important exceptions. First, the letter j is almost always pronounced like the English y . Second, Ponam has an unwritten w sound which frequently appears after the consonants m and p , except where these end a word.

A Note on Illustrative Material

From time to time in this book we include ethnographic or historical discussions to illustrate or elaborate our general points. We mark these off from the flow of the main text by indenting them in the manner of extended quotes. It will, however, be clear from the context that these are illustrations and elaborations rather than quotations.

A Note on Money

Since independence in 1975, Papua New Guinea's unit of currency was the kina (K1 = 100 toea). At the time of our main period of fieldwork, 1979, the kina was worth approximately £0.66, $US1.30, and $A1.20. Since then its value has fluctuated widely, but at the time of writing it had risen against Sterling and the Australian dollar and fallen against the American dollar.