Activist Approaches

To return to my original question: How were we to make sense of Ponam society?

Had it been the 1950s or even the 1960s the answer would have been fairly simple, for common wisdom then suggested that the old ways were fragments of a precontact order that was being destroyed by colonization and the collision with Western capitalism.^[4] In fact, the power of Western society was so great that even indirect exposure to it could transform the old ways, or at least that was the lesson W. E. H. Stanner drew from Richard Salisbury's study of the effects of steel axes on precolonial Siane society in what became Simbu Province in Papua New Guinea: “Steel drove out stone; the new cutting edges saved men's working-time; and from those beginnings, the whole design-plan and dynamism of their way of life changed” (in Salisbury 1962, vi). A few years later, C. D. Rowley, a distinguished and long-time observer

of colonial Papua New Guinea, came to similar conclusions. From contact, Melanesia became “committed to a permanent process of change … from this point, the old order of society is doomed” (Rowley 1965, 94).

The reasons for this change were self-evident. No one would expect neolithic societies to survive the collection of British, German, and Australian colonial apparatuses that had governed Papua New Guinea. Cosmological upheavals appeared as cargo cults, the vehicles of religious and political re-orientation (Lawrence 1964; Worsley 1957). Old trading systems collapsed, pulling down complex sets of economic dependencies and social relationships (Harding 1967; Mead 1968). Tribesmen were turned into peasants and big men into entrepreneurs (Finney 1973; Meggitt 1971).^[5]

This faith in the power of colonization was not limited to Melanesianists, nor was it original with them. Over a century earlier Marx and Engels wrote that “the bourgeoisie … compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them … to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image” (Marx and Engels 1976, 488). This view, of course, did not merely reflect an assessment of the potency of the productive forces that capitalism unleashed. Rather, it sprang as well from a belief that the falling rate of profit and the periodic crises of overproduction were inherent in capitalism; one forcing capitalists to search for new and cheaper sources of raw materials and the other forcing them to search for new markets; both, in other words, forcing capitalism to extend its grasp to ever greater areas of the world.

During the 1970s, assumptions about articulation in Papua New Guinea began to diverge. Even so, a number of researchers continued to use this activist approach, studying the ways in which the encroaching Western world affected village life and people. Noticeable here was a spate of studies focused on entrepreneurs, the innovative individuals who are one locus of the articulation of the money economy and village life. These entrepreneurs were most noticeable in the forward-thrusting Highlands region of the country. The best known of these studies is Ben Finney's Big-Men and Business. With Finney in particular, entrepreneurs are presented as unstable creatures, shuttling back and forth between the two social systems they inhabit, using their gains in one realm to shore up and extend their position in the other. While such studies clearly address the question of articulation, from my point of view they present two important problems. The first is their individual orientation, which makes them prone to the shortcoming described earlier in this paper. Because they are concerned primarily with the transactions and histories of individual people, they may ignore how these affect and even transform the organization of village societies in ways that may not be obvious. The second problem, particularly noticeable in Finney's work, is an orientation toward the urban, more Westernized sphere: people are selected for study precisely because they are doing well in the urban sector.

This is more apparent if we look at two studies that more clearly represent these two tendencies. The first illustrates the individualistic element. It is Money, Motivation and Cash Cropping, T. K. Moulik's analysis of cultural factors affecting cash cropping in various regions of the country. Moulik sees cash-crop entrepreneurs in terms of individual strategies and transactions, and does not attend to the more broadly structural factors constraining or facilitating these entrepreneurs or to the social settings in which they find themselves, though to be fair I should note that this individualism was ascendent more generally around this time among anthropologists concerned with Papua New Guinea (A. Carrier 1984, esp. 77–83). Thus, Moulik's explanation of variation in entrepreneurial innovation reduces to social psychology: where psychological constraints (e.g., a fear of sorcery) are strong, individuals will not be motivated to engage in cash-cropping. In failing to take us beyond the hopes and fears of individual villagers, however cultural the basis of these feelings, Moulik affords us little sense of how village societies are affected by this reorientation to a money economy.

The second of these studies is Rolf Gerritsen's description of Highlands entrepreneurs, which, though published relatively late (1981), was formulated in the early 1970s. Gerritsen avoids an individualistic orientation. Although he is concerned with studying a fairly small group of people, his model defines them not as innovative individuals but as the emerging elements of a new class. Thus, he takes a firm hold of sociological factors and processes. However, in doing this he embraces the second problem I mentioned, a strongly urban or national orientation. Gerritsen is concerned with establishing the existence of an emerging big peasantry, to plot its links with the state and its privileged access to state resources. Although Gerritsen's concern may be for issues that are important in understanding changes in the economic and political organization of Papua New Guinea, it does mean that he slights consideration of the social organization of the villages from which these big peasants have emerged and the way that articulation, which the big peasants embody, links these villages to the national economy and affects their structure.

Since the first wave of these studies around 1970, analysts have become better able to relate entrepreneurs or emerging big peasants, depending upon one's perspective, to village society. However, difficulties remain. The nature of these is illustrated by Lawrence Grossman's description, a decade later, of cattle projects in a village in Eastern Highlands Province. Grossman locates the emerging big peasants firmly in their village milieux, by the simple expedient of looking at village enterprises, cattle projects, rather than just the individual entrepreneurs who might initiate them. However, Grossman rejects a structural approach to articulation (1983, 59–60), arguing that structures themselves cause nothing, that it is necessary to consider “the strategies and aggregate actions of individuals and groups” if one is to understand

articulation. While such an approach can command support, Grossman ignores structure altogether, and so does not investigate the ramifying effects of these strategies and aggregate actions on areas of social life not immediately related to the cattle projects. In other words, he does not consider how a village society, as opposed to certain individuals, articulates with the larger economy, and so fails to link these projects more than cursorily to the social organization of the village in which they occur.

The way that I think he fails to do this illustrates an important shortcoming in much of the recent literature on articulation in Papua New Guinea: the fact that even though the site of the study is the village, the orientation, the conceptual framework of the study, is firmly rooted in the national economy. Grossman focuses on village relationships, especially between leaders and participants in the cattle projects. However, his perception is shaped by his interest in commodity relations of the sort found in the national economy: thus, he describes how leaders and participants differ in terms of the labor and money they invest and the wealth they receive (1983, 67–70). In other words, while Grossman focuses on village relationships, he selectively perceives and recasts them in terms of the logic of the national economy. The consequence, certainly not what Grossman intended, is to elide all village relationships that cannot be reduced to this economistic calculus, and so obliterate differences between capitalist and precapitalist forms.

In sum, while these studies do identify and investigate the activities that link town and village, they adopt individualistic orientations. This problem is not as severe with the later studies as it is with the earlier ones, nevertheless it is there. In failing to consider villages as social units, these authors maintain an isolationist approach to Papua New Guinea villages even while they appear to be linking them to the outside world. They describe how individuals shuttle back and forth between more village-oriented and more Western-oriented activities and realms, but they leave largely unexplored the ways that village society itself, as a set of ordered interactions and practices, is touched by Western impact.