1 Ponam Island, Manus Province
1. We became particularly aware of this protective function when it was informally passed on to us shortly after our arrival in late 1978, a time when we knew remarkably little about Ponam society or the wishes and opinions of islanders. This did not appear to disqualify us in islanders' eyes, and they showed a marked tendency to stay away from our house when we had such visitors and to be uninterested in the visitors themselves and what they had to say. [BACK]
2. "Luluai" is the name given to village leaders appointed by the German and later the Australian colonial administration in New Guinea. Originally a vernacular word of the Gazelle Peninsula in what became East New Britain Province, it has passed into Pidgin and Papua New Guinean English. [BACK]
3. This set of asi is structurally identical to what Mead (1934, 308) and Fortune (1935, 77-79 and passim) called the tandritanitani cult. They say tandritanitani was a curse that could be cast on ego by members of the father's matriline, which they see as evidence that ego maintained a submerged membership in that matriline. Ponams denied that ego's asi formed a descent group of the sort Mead and Fortune describe, a view that is supported by the extensive application of the term. [BACK]
4. Ponam kamal appear to have been agnatic in a way that many Highlands agnatic clans were not. Ponams had no sense that a person's agnatic descendents could ever change kamal in the way that members of some Highlands societies saw that a man's agnatic descendents could change clans. This sense of unyielding agnation may have been possible simply because kamal were not the only important Ponam groups (a similar point is made in Harrison 1984). [BACK]