Local Market Trade

Although the precolonial Manus economy had disappeared almost completely by 1980, one important element in Ponam's local trade still reflected the old order: the trade of fish for starch conducted with people on the nearby mainland Manus coast, a trade modified substantially by colonization.^[1]

In 1980, as well as in old Manus, trade was carried on primarily through formal markets. These were established and operated by pairs of kamal, one from Ponam and one from a mainland village. The heads of these kamal were market leaders, responsible for maintaining peace and good order at the market and assuring fair trade. They also adjudicated quarrels, fined people for misbehavior, and could close the market altogether if they wished. Markets were open by right to all people from the market leaders' villages. People from other villages could attend, but only as guests

of people who had the right to be there. Within the market itself, however, anyone was free to trade with anyone else. There was no obligation to trade or refrain from trading with kin, or indeed with any person. In other words, individual market transactions were material rather than social: they pointed to no past or future relations between individual buyer and seller, but were concerned solely with the relationship between fish and starch—recognizing, of course, the fundamentally social nature of these markets, and indeed of all markets, and the fact that the relationship between fish and starch, or between any two items, was shaped by the social relationships embodied in these markets.

By 1980 marketing was a fairly simple affair. On Saturday mornings at around eight or nine o'clock Ponams would set off by canoe to whichever of the two mainland market sites that attracted them: Bundralis, slightly to the east of Ponam, or Tulu, slightly to the west. After the islanders and mainlanders had gathered at the market—typically somewhere between twenty and fifty of each, both men and women—marketing would begin. Physically the markets consisted of two long parallel lines of rough platforms, separated by about seven meters of open space. Mainland marketers put their goods on the landward platforms and Ponams, carrying fish or money, stood in front of the seaward platforms. When the signal was given by a member of the Ponam kamal that was half-owner of the market, islanders moved quickly to the mainlanders' platforms and bought produce, offering either smoked fish or cash.

The most important mainland produce was sago flour, sold in bundles of about five kilograms, enough for meals for about twenty people. Subsidiary mainland foodstuffs included sweet potato, greens of various sorts, eating bananas, and to a lesser degree taro, tapioca root, citrus fruit, pineapple, and cucumber, as well as rarer and more seasonal fruits and vegetables. Additionally Ponams bought sugar cane, primarily as a sweet for their children, and large quantities of betel nut and leaf, and occasionally lime, for themselves.

This buying would continue for ten or fifteen minutes and then taper off, as Ponams returned to their own platforms, where those who had smoked seafoods would lay them out. Overwhelmingly Ponams brought smoked fish to market, supplemented by small

quantities of smoked clam and octopus, plus the occasional fresh fish, or even rarer and more desirable sea turtle, caught on the way to market.

The few mainlanders who were interested would drift over to the Ponam platforms and buy fish, usually for the cash they got for selling their own produce. As well, a few Ponams would buy fish from each other, but this was not common and usually the amounts involved were small. As marketing ended, it was not unusual for marketers, either Ponams or mainlanders, to seek out a trade partner and either offer or ask for leftover market goods. Afterwards, Ponams would make their way back to their canoes and home, and mainlanders would make their way back to their villages.

Because marketing took place so quickly, it was not possible to record transactions as they took place. In order to investigate the market, therefore, during 1979 we carried out periodic surveys of what Ponam households bought, sold, or acquired in trade. Table 11 summarizes the results of these surveys and shows that Ponams spent almost seven times what they earned at their weekly markets.

Not only was sago the primary foodstuff Ponams bought at market, it was their preferred starch, the product on which they spent the most money and about which they showed the most concern. Table 12 shows the average number of sago bundles acquired at Bundralis market in 1979. Note that because the cash price of a bundle of sago was fixed at K1.00, the number of bundles

acquired in purchase or trade converts directly to their cash value. So, for example, Ponams purchased 0.22 bundles of sago each week per capita, for which (because of the standard price) they paid K0.22.

These figures are based on Ponams' own reports of their market purchases. It is likely, however, that they significantly overreported the amount of sago they were able to acquire at market. Rarely were we able to count more than 80 bundles available at Bundralis, the only market open in 1979, much less the 112 Ponams reported getting. Two reasons may exist for this, which will need to be borne in mind when evaluating table 13, which shows the extent to which Ponams relied on the various economic sectors for staple starch. The first reason is that our estimate of the number of bundles available at market may be low, as bundles were never

displayed all at once, but were brought out one at a time as the market progressed, and thus were difficult to count. However, it is also possible that Ponams reported sago bundles acquired in private deals with trade partners as though they were market purchases. Anticipating a point we will develop in this chapter, this may represent an attempt by Ponams to define the nature of their transactions with trade partners, which took place outside the formal structure of the market, as being the same as market transactions: the exchange of equivalents, which did not imply an unequal relationship between transactors.

In order to determine the extent of Ponam dependence on the market and other sources for their basic subsistence, we estimated the amount of starch that they got from each source. In order to do this it was necessary to have some idea of how much starch of what sorts they ate. In order to learn this we observed family meals and interviewed housewives about the meals they prepared.

Ponams relied primarily on sago and rice for their starch. At the time of fieldwork the average Ponam ate two meals a day or fourteen meals a week. On average this was three meals of rice and eleven of sago, though it was true that the number of rice meals varied considerably with the time of year. People ate far more rice during the Christmas holiday season than at other times. One kilogram of rice provided five average meals and one standard sago bundle provided twenty average meals.

In addition Ponams ate sweet potato and taro, biscuits and bread. Sweet potato and taro made an insignificant contribution to their diet, and they are excluded from consideration here. While Ponams ate substantial amounts of biscuits and bread, as the data on trade store sales earlier in this chapter showed, usually they ate these as snacks or light meals, and they were additions to rather than substitutes for the main meals of sago and rice. We should note, however, that the amount of bread consumed varied according to whether or not islanders were operating drum-oven bakeries and how many were in operation. More particularly, because two bakeries opened late in 1979 they did not affect the figures given here, but may have affected the amount of sago and rice consumed in 1980 and 1981.

Table 13 shows the approximate proportions of staple starch that Ponams acquired weekly from different sources during 1979.

Their dependence on the market was substantial, approximately half of their starch coming from there. But other sources were important as well. Trade stores were the source of about a fifth of their starch, and a bit over a quarter came from trade partners and free market traders, the independent traders who occasionally brought sago to sell on Ponam, a form of trade we describe later in this chapter.

Changes in Trade Relations

As we described in chapter 2, by 1980 Ponam's market activities and market position had deteriorated substantially from what they were before colonization or even between the wars. Particularly in the years since World War II, the markets were unstable and to a large degree unsatisfactory for all concerned. They appear to have been so because mainland and island villagers no longer were economically interdependent, as they were before colonization.

Interestingly, there remained a steady cash demand for the seafoods Ponams brought to market that mainlanders could not produce for themselves. Primarily these were smoked flesh from varieties of cone shell and smoked octopus, which were difficult to gather in the shoaling, unprotected waters of the mainland shore. In no way were these staple seafoods, however, and Ponams thought gathering them more difficult and less enjoyable than fishing. Certainly they provided a steady supply at market, but equally a small one.

Some degree of instability in these markets seems to have been endemic in early Manus, as market partners often were at war with each other and never were wholly at peace. Mead, for instance (1930, 118) said that precolonial Pere marketing was conducted across "a lattice work [that] was built across a stream, and silent bargaining between men armed to the teeth was conducted by floating taro downstream and flinging the purchasing fish upstream." Indeed, Salisbury's observation that around Vunamami the "men came fully armed to markets" (1970, 177) suggests tension was endemic in island Melanesian markets. While Ponams told no stories quite as dramatic as Mead's, they did say that weapons were carried on market-going canoes, and when tensions were high, armed Ponams would stand just outside the market ground, the market itself apparently being inviolate.

The main problem Ponams faced after colonization stemmed from the fact, discussed in chapter 2, that German and Australian officials encouraged mainland and a few island villages to settle on the coast in order to make patrolling easier. This policy was made possible by the fact that the coastal strip was uninhabited around much of Manus, a consequence of recurrent warfare between islanders and mainlanders settled opposite them in the hills. Initially, Ponam's market partners were hesitant to make the move. During the 1930s, however, they abandoned their inland villages and settled on the coast. This seemed to have little immediate effect on the market, as it took people some time to learn to fish. However, by around World War II the mainlanders living opposite Ponam had begun to fish for themselves and so were decreasingly dependent on the fish that islanders produced, while islanders were still dependent on food grown on the mainland. (However, remember our earlier comment that aerial photographs taken during World War II showed that to the west, between Ponam and Sori Islands, there continued to be extensive gardening well inland from the coast.)

Before the crisis became acute, however, the Japanese invaded Manus. The whole market system went into abeyance for some years because the Japanese controlled local trade directly until they were evicted by the Americans. At the time of the Allied invasion in early 1944 almost all trade in local produce ceased, at first because fighting drove people into hiding, and later because the occupying armed forces provided such generous rations that people had little economic need for trade. As the Americans were replaced first by the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) and then by the returning civil administration, officials tried to reestablish markets, but they had little success. Mainlanders claimed that islanders wanted too much money or produce for their fish, while islanders claimed that mainlanders did not produce enough food for the market and that they were poaching on island waters.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s markets all along the north coast were unstable and often closed for longer or shorter periods. This economic disruption on the north coast found its parallel in southeast Manus in the widespread abandonment of markets in the wake of Paliau's New Way dictum that former inlanders and

islanders, agriculturalists and fishing people, should all live and work together in new coastal villages.

Without traditional markets, Ponams had to look elsewhere for food. Patrol officers tried to compensate for the disruption of the old economic interdependence by arranging for islanders to take over sago stands on the mainland, unconsciously imitating New Way policies. Ponams were given two such stands, but neither was a success. Islanders did not really want to become gardeners, mainlanders did not really want to give their land away, and the scheme fell through in the early 1950s.

Similarly, without traditional markets Ponams had to look elsewhere to dispose of what they produced. They began to sell goods at the government and military station at Indrim and used the cash earned there, as well as their surplus fish, to buy or trade for the produce of trade partners and of free market traders in the sagoproducing areas around Levei and Drehet, on the mainland to the west of Ponam. This system continued, despite the removal of the main market from Indrim to Lorengau in the 1960s, until the mid-1970s, when Ponams and their mainland partners of Mondropolon and Tulu agreed to reopen two traditional markets, one at Bundralis mission station and one near Tulu I. The market at Bundralis remained in continuous operation through the time of fieldwork. The Tulu market was closed in 1977 after a dispute over fishing rights, but reopened in the early 1980s, after which the Bundralis market went into an irregular decline. The number of people going to Bundralis market and the amount of goods they bought decreased, and by the beginning of 1986 Bundralis market had closed once more, though it had reopened for desultory trade by July of 1986.