Preferred Citation: Carrier, James G., and Achsah H. Carrier Wage, Trade, and Exchange in Melanesia: A Manus Society in the Modern State. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6b69p0gx/
 | Wage, Trade, and Exchange in MelanesiaA Manus Society in the Modern StateJames G. Carrier |
This book is dedicated to Ponam migrants,
in the hope that it will encourage them to
continue to do as they are doing .
Preferred Citation: Carrier, James G., and Achsah H. Carrier Wage, Trade, and Exchange in Melanesia: A Manus Society in the Modern State. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6b69p0gx/
This book is dedicated to Ponam migrants,
in the hope that it will encourage them to
continue to do as they are doing .
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.
Acknowledgments
Like any book written by an anthropologist couple who did fieldwork in the same place at the same time, this book is inevitably a collaborative effort. And, like many anthropologist couples, we have developed an informal division of labor. James Carrier has concerned himself primarily with economics, in the broad sense of the term; Achsah Carrier has concerned herself primarily with kinship and exchange, also in the broad sense. Obviously, these two realms, especially when construed broadly, overlap to a great extent. It is for that reason that we have thought it proper to put both our names on the work and to use "we" instead of "I." Primary responsibility for the organization and writing of this book lay with James Carrier, while Achsah Carrier contributed extensive comments, long discussions, and some written passages, especially in chapters 1, 5, and 6.
Portions of this book are partial revisions of the papers in which we developed our understanding of Ponam economy and society. The most important of these are:
by Achsah Carrier: "Pluralism or integration: The place of Western medicine in Ponam theories of health and disease," in S. Frankel, ed., A continuing trial of treatment: Medical pluralism in Papua New Guinea (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987), and "Ceremonial prestation and the spatial representation of social relations on Ponam Island, Manus Province, Papua New Guinea," MS.
by James Carrier: "School and community on Ponam," Papua New Guinea Journal of Education 15 (1979):66–77; "Knowledge and its use: Constraints upon the application of new knowledge in Ponam society," Papua New Guinea Journal of Education 16 (1980):102–126; "Labour migration and labour export on Ponam Island," Oceania 51 (1981):237–255; "Ownership of productive resources on Ponam Island, Manus Province," Journal de la Société des Oceanistes 37 (1981):205–217; and "Fishing practices on Ponam Island (Manus Province, Papua New Guinea)," Anthropos 77 (1982):904–915.
by James Carrier and Achsah Carrier: "Profitless property: Marine ownership and access to wealth on Ponam Island, Manus Province," Ethnology 22 (1983):133–151; and "A Manus centenary: Production, kinship and exchange in the Admiralty Islands," American Ethnologist 12 (1985):505–522.
Some of these papers we have pillaged extensively for this book. We want to acknowledge the permission for this granted to us by the copyright holders and to note that their permission does not extend to permission to reprint those passages elsewhere. Portions of "Labour Migration and Labour Export on Ponam Island" are included by permission of the editors of Oceania ; portions of "Ownership of Productive Resources on Ponam Island, Manus Province" are included by permission of the editors on Journal de la Société des Oceanistes ; portions of "Fishing Practices on Ponam Island (Manus Province, Papua New Guinea)" are included by permission of the editors of Anthropos ; portions of "Profitless Property: Marine Ownership and Access to Wealth on Ponam Island, Manus Province" are included by permission of the editors of Ethnology ; portions of "A Manus Centenary: Production, Kinship and Exchange in the Admiralty Islands" are included by permission of the American Anthropological Association.
Several of these papers are based on seminars at the University of Papua New Guinea Department of Anthropology and Sociology. We must content ourselves with a blanket acknowledgment of the helpful comments and criticisms made at those seminars. In addition, Robert Foster read an earlier version of this book and made a number of useful suggestions.
We also want to acknowledge the assistance and encouragement of the people and organizations who made this research possible. Dr. David Lancy, principal research officer of the Papua New Guinea Department of Education during our initial period of fieldwork (November 1978 to December 1979), gave important personal, intellectual, and financial support. The University of London Central Research Fund gave financial assistance to Achsah Carrier during our initial period of fieldwork. The University of Papua New Guinea Research Committee gave financial assistance to James Carrier during our return visits to Ponam in 1981, 1982, 1983, and 1986. The governments of Papua New Guinea and Manus
Province gave permission to carry out the research, and the Australian Archives and the Papua New Guinea Archives helped us with documents and the permission to cite them. Also, we owe thanks to V. E. King, who kindly allowed us permission to make use of the information in his 1978 thesis, "The End of an Era: Aspects of the History of the Admiralty Islands 1898–1908." His labors in the records of German firms and administrations made our task of discovering Manus history very much easier.
We owe our greatest debt to Ponam Islanders who, over the years that we have known them, have come to show us what is perhaps the greatest kindness: they have come to treat us as people like themselves. Although we owe debts of varying magnitude to a number of Ponams, we owe special debts to Gabriel Kalan Njoli and Cecelia Mokon, who stood as father and mother to Achsah Carrier and whose domestic arrangements we disrupted so shamelessly in our visits to Ponam between 1980 and 1986, and to Damien Selef Njohang and Martha Pilau, who stood as father and mother to James Carrier, and who were tireless hosts and answerers of questions. We are indebted also to the Mataungan Association of Ponam Island, in whose clubhouse we stayed during our initial period of fieldwork and who provided us with the material comforts that made our adjustment so much easier and our time there so much more productive than it might have been otherwise. Finally, we owe a great debt to Paul and Martha Songo and Tony and Pindramolat Kakaw, Ponams who befriended us in Port Moresby and who stimulated our thinking with their insightful concern with their home society.
Introduction
The Problem of Persistence—Precolonial Forms in Postcolonial Life
Leaving Lorengau, the capital of Manus Province, you have to travel west for more than two hours on a motorized outrigger before the tallest of Ponam's trees begin to appear above the horizon. By then you have passed Hauai, Pitiluh, and Ahus Islands on the right as you move through the Seeadler Harbour, the deep protected channel that separates the mountainous Manus mainland from the string of flat fringing islands off the north coast. After three hours you have cleared Andra Island, the last before Ponam, and you can see the bay and buildings of the Bundralis Catholic Mission on the mainland opposite Ponam.
In the next hour, spent almost wholly in Ponam's long lagoon, your canoe turns seaward until it crosses to the north of the eastern point of Ponam and then heads west again, traveling more slowly, within a few meters of the northern shore. Though Ponam is only a few hundred meters wide, it is three-and-a-half kilometers long, with the village near the western end. You move past the casuarina trees, scrub bush, and occasional coconut stands that are Koliwar, the place of war, where the United States Navy had an airstrip during World War II. Then one small house appears, built on a concrete foundation left over from the war, then another, and you have reached the edge of the village. Past the church, two new houses, and then Ponam begins in earnest: a succession of hamlets, each a cluster of dwellings centered on a kamal or men's house. Some of the dwellings are built on the ground, some one or two meters up on wooden posts; some are a single story and some are two; some are built of sago palm thatch laid on a frame of roughly shaped tree branches, some are plywood or corrugated iron sheets laid on a frame of commercial timber. And everywhere along the beach are canoes—lying at anchor, pulled above the high water mark, or, the big ones of ten or fifteen meters, resting on posts and rollers above the beach.
By now the villagers have heard and seen your canoe, and as you come to land you see a dozen or more coming to the shoreline to help unload the suitcases, string bags, and mats, the kerosene containers, bales of rice, and cases of tinned fish that lay on the canoe's wooden platform. After the cargo is ashore and the canoe beached, you move off to your host's house, accompanied by children precariously balancing bags or cases on their shoulders. As you walk down the wide main streets of the village, string band and rock music from tape players compete with the disembodied voices of people in their houses calling out greetings.
At your host's house there is a meal ready and, since the sun is going down, a pressure lamp is ready for lighting. You get fresh fish, greens boiled in coconut cream, and fried sago with grated coconut—called "Manus-style" in other parts of the country—and more than anyone not brought up on the diet could possibly eat in one sitting. During the meal there is quiet chat about the flight from Port Moresby to Manus, who you saw in Lorengau, and the canoe journey, broken by sips of sweet tea or fish soup. You in turn ask about the latest births, deaths, and marriages, who has paid and who has received brideprice, whose canoe is finally built and ready for launching, and whose is beyond repair and ready to be stripped for usable planks.
The rest of the evening you spend sitting and chatting with Ponams who come to say hello and receive the messages and small packages that island migrants living in Port Moresby have given you to carry home. They sit for a few minutes, chat, chew betel nut, and then move off into the night, calling out "Good night" as they disappear. Because it has been a long day and canoe rides are so tiring, the pressure lamp is turned off at 9:30.
The next day is Friday, and more importantly sona pene , the day before market. During the day and evening most of the islanders are out fishing, trying to catch the extra that they will need when they go to market Saturday morning. The men and women who have spent the morning or afternoon with their small canoes angling and spear gun fishing in the shallow lagoon bring back their fish, clean and gut them, and set them on wire mesh over smoldering fires to smoke them. That evening, as you sit talking with your host, shapes loom momentarily at the edge of the lamp's light, and you hear the padding of feet moving quickly across the hard sand and the murmur of people speaking quickly and quietly to each
other. The cause of the activity becomes apparent when two young men, half walking and half trotting, go by carrying a wood-framed net. Tonight there is a lawin , a netting expedition in the lagoon, one more try to get fish for tomorrow's market.
Saturday is pene , market, and in the morning the seven or eight large canoes that are going to market are made ready. They are taken down to the water and their masts fitted, except for the one that is powered by outboard motor—quicker and easier than sail, but not for free: fifty toea for the journey to market and back. Once the passengers and their wares are aboard, sails are raised, motor is started, and they set off, some to the market at Tulu to the west of Ponam on the Manus mainland and some to the market at Bundralis.
The main thing villagers want at market is their starch for the next week: mostly bundles of sago flour wrapped in sago leaf, but also taro, sweet potato, and tapioca root. They also buy leaf and fern greens, pumpkin, pineapple, grapefruit, and sugar cane, as well as the rarer fruits and vegetables that their market partners bring from time to time. And of course they want betel nut, leaf, and powdered lime, the ubiquitous accompaniment to much of what they do. Islanders get all of this in trade for their fish or cash, either the money they bring with them or the money that mainlanders have paid them for their seafood.
Market over, islanders sail back home, the canoes mostly lower in the water than when they set off in the morning. They are laden not only with mainland produce, but also with purchases from the trade stores at Tulu and Bundralis, both of which carry more goods at lower prices than do the stores on Ponam, as well as goods that individual Ponams have received from their own kawas or trade partners on the mainland: special vines and leaves for making mats, baskets, and arm bands, and sometimes some sago leaf for re-thatching part of a house. Those who have gone to Bundralis bring back mail for the island, held for them at the Catholic Mission there; they may also bring back one or two islanders who have come home on leave and who have decided to save the K60 it costs to charter a canoe from Lorengau, traveling instead for a few kina on the mission boat Martin and sleeping in one of the two or three houses that Ponams have built on the beach near Bundralis, where they wait for Saturday and a lift to Ponam.
The rest of Saturday and Sunday is spent relaxing. People who
got vines and leaves from their mainland trade partners lay them out to dry in the hot afternoon sun. Saturday afternoon and evening there are desultory discussions of whatever news the mail has brought or the mainlanders have passed on, as well as the usual complaints that there was too little sago at market, that the price was too high, and that, once again, mainlanders would not buy Ponam fish.
Sunday is a day of rest, and work of any sort is forbidden. Most islanders go to church in the morning, overseen by the catechist and usually enlivened by an emotional, but always heavily allusive, speech by Ponam's lay church leader, urging that certain unnamed people resolve their unspecified quarrels. Some Sundays nobody is quite sure who the church leader was talking about. In the afternoon some families go for a picnic in Koliwar or find a shady, breezy spot to chat and doze. Men and sometimes women start up games of "five hundred," a variant of gin rummy, and usually some men will start a penny-stakes game of "lucky" in one of the men's houses. Sunday night is spent as Saturday, sitting on the beach, outside a dwelling or in a men's house, chatting, smoking, and chewing betel nut.
The next morning is Monday, and another week begins.
In late 1978, when we first arrived on Ponam, our impression was that people there were closely involved with the outside world and also involved in a complex round of traditional activities. Islanders had a large number of material possessions: pots and pans, sheets, pillows and pillowslips, watches, radios and tape players, in fact a surprising range of paraphernalia intended to make life easier and more comfortable. To complement this they were knowledgeable about the larger world. In due course people asked us about the success of Margaret Thatcher in becoming prime minister, Soviet activities in Afghanistan, and other newsworthy events. Counterpoised to all this evidence of modernity was flourishing tradition. Ponams maintained markets with mainland agriculturalists, as, they assured us, they had done time out of mind, and they traded with trade partners from other areas of Manus as their parents and grandparents had done. They continued to use fishing techniques that patently harked back to their precolonial past and even continued the tedious and time-consuming manufacture of
the shell money that they still used to make brideprice payments. And in everything they did islanders referred back to the ramified network of kinship relations that bound them to each other, shaped who did what, who they did it with, and how they did it, a network that they celebrated and recreated in the scores of ceremonial exchanges, gifts, and payments that filled their year.
Thirteen months of fieldwork and several later visits ranging from two weeks to two months have not led us to change the initial judgment. They have, however, led us to see both the ways that the prosperity and the tradition are problematic and the ways that they are linked together. This curious juxtaposition of prosperous modernity and flourishing tradition calls for comment, for it shapes much of the argument we put forward in this book.
While islanders did many things that were straight out of introductory anthropology courses, these were not embedded in the sort of society those same courses so often portray, subsistence societies relatively little touched by the outside world. Instead, on Ponam the old ways stood together with the new: complex kinship and exchange coexisted with wage employment and commodity relations; elaborate fishing techniques coexisted with tinned fish; traditional markets and trade partnerships coexisted with trade stores, bank loans, and cash transactions between market partners.
This juxtaposition of old and new posed a difficult question: How were we to think about what we knew of Ponam and its economy and society? How were we to come to some sense of which bits were important and of the ways they fit together? The aspects of the old that we saw in fact were, quite often, traditional, in the sense that islanders saw them as being lineally descended from and very much like ancestral practices. However, these aspects existed in a society closely enmeshed in Papua New Guinea's spreading national economy. How were we to make sense of this?
Had we been doing fieldwork in the 1950s or even the early 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.[1] 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: "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 longtime 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, for no one would expect neolithic societies to survive exposure to and incorporation within the collection of British, German, and Australian colonial apparatuses that governed Papua New Guinea. Cosmological upheavals appeared as cargo cults, the vehicles of religious and political reorientation (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 bigmen into entrepreneurs (B. Finney 1973; Meggitt 1971).
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 & Engels 1976, 488). This view, of course, did not merely reflect their assessment of the potency of the productive forces that capitalism unleashed. Rather, it sprang as well from their belief that the falling rate of profit and the periodic crises of overproduction were inherent in capitalism: the one forcing capitalists to search for new and cheaper sources of raw materials and the other forcing them to search for new markets, and both, in other words, forcing capitalism to extend its grasp to ever greater areas of the world.
As the 1970s began to pass, however, it became clear that the penetration of capitalist relations into village life in Papua New Guinea, not to mention the rest of the Third World, was problematic rather than automatic. Tradition, custom, seemed more tenacious than many people expected. So, for example, Harold Brookfield (1973, 127) recanted his earlier belief that Chimbu society
would be transformed by colonization, concluding instead that what was taking place was "simply . . . the partial acceptance of 'modern' innovations into a continuing system whose 'central variables' have not been transformed" (see also Howlett 1973). Likewise, Mervyn Meggitt, speaking of the Mae Engan system of ceremonial exchange, the te, but probably reflecting a more general sentiment about traditional practices, said, "I for one would not assume its demise unless I actually attended the funeral" (Meggitt 1974, 182).
This mood of cautious optimism about the durability of traditional forms of Melanesian life remains an important stream in anthropology. Michael Young, introducing a special issue of The Journal of Pacific History , said of the societies of the Massim area of Milne Bay Province where the kula system of exchange is so important, that "a century of colonial intervention has left them substantially intact. They have managed to absorb new economic relations in ways compatible with traditional values" (Young 1983, 10). And in that same issue, Miriam Kahn (1983) set about explaining how the Wamira people of Milne Bay maintained central elements of their culture in the face of colonization, adapting and adopting colonial introductions that fit traditional Wamira culture and sabotaging the rest.
This concern with persistence has gone hand-in-hand with a tendency to treat village life in isolation from the outside world. This appears strikingly in the long-awaited volume of papers from the first kula conference (Leach & Leach 1983). While many of the papers acknowledge the importance of colonization, the fact that, as C. A. Gregory puts it in his contribution (1983, 103), colonization has served "to integrate the [Milne Bay] province's 108,000 people well and truly into the world economy," generally the importance of colonization is ignored once it is acknowledged, as the authors make no real effort to link the kula, an intensely economic and political system, with the economy and politics of Milne Bay Province. Illustrative of this is the fact that the book's index contains no entries for: government, labor, migration, Milne Bay Province, plantations, provincial government, remittance, or wage.
Important parts of Melanesian ethnography, then, warrant the more general criticism Joel Kahn has made about anthropological studies of peasant societies in general:
Pick up almost any monograph and you will find an introductory statement about the outside society, the total social whole in which the village is embedded, the importance of extra-local ties, etc. And yet I would argue that in most of such cases this holistic view is set aside, and the total social whole ignored in favour of detailed analyses of purely local phenomena. (1980, 2)
Clearly this isolationist approach does not characterize all of Melanesian ethnography; there are anthropologists who have been concerned with the way capitalist colonization has affected village life (e.g., Feil 1982; A. Strathern 1979, 1982). Nonetheless, this is an important aspect of the literature in the region.
Fortunately, Ponam was so closely involved with the outside world that it is impossible for us to restrict ourselves to "detailed analyses of purely local phenomena." The relationship between Ponam and the ever-expanding outside world with which it was related is a central concern of this book.
This relationship is so apparent to us for two reasons. One is our concern to make use of the historical sources that are available for the Admiralty Islands, partial though they are (as we explain in chap. 2). In Papua New Guinea the overwhelming historical fact over the past century has been colonization; therefore, to make sense of Ponam's history, we have to look at the ways this external force impinged upon the island. The second reason is that islanders never approached the sort of self-sufficiency that agriculturalists could achieve. They always traded, for they never grew their own food. This put them among Melanesian trading peoples like the Titan speakers of southeast Manus (e.g., Mead 1930), who were totally landless, and among those from small, infertile islands like Mandok in the Vitiaz Straits between the New Guinea mainland and the island of New Britain (e.g., Harding 1967). Trade being so much a part of Ponam life, it would be impossible to understand the society solely with reference to its internal operations. Instead, we have looked to the regional trade on which Ponam survived and to the ways that colonization and its aftermath disrupted that trade and so disrupted Ponam. In fact, in many ways this book is little more than an extended exercise in describing how islanders coped with this radical alteration of the external world on which they relied for their survival.
Village and Town: The Articulation Model
The view that societies of the Third World were more persistent than the earlier steamroller model of colonization allowed found a timely echo in developments taking place at about the same time among Marxists, particularly developments in their interpretation of the way the encroaching colonial capitalist mode of production articulates with the preexisting traditional modes (see Wolpe 1980). Probably the most influential writer in this area is Claude Meillassoux, especially in his Maidens, Meal and Money (1981). He argued that penetration need not lead to the eradication of precapitalist forms, but rather often results in their encapsulation and perpetuation, not because capitalism is weak, but because the survival of a precapitalist sector is beneficial to capitalism. This is because much of the wage labor in Third World countries is provided by circular migrants, and many of the costs of the reproduction of this labor force are borne by the precapitalist sector, thereby reducing costs to the capitalist sector. Because the circular migrant was reared in the village and will return to the village, his wages (both his direct wage and what Meillassoux calls his "social wage") need cover only the "sustenance of the workers during periods of employment" and perhaps "maintenance during periods of unemployment (due to stoppages, ill-health, etc.)" but not his "replacement by the breeding of offspring" (Meillassoux 1981, 100, emphasis omitted). Indeed, much of the power of capitalism to expand derives from this sort of subsidy of the capitalist sphere by the domestic sphere (e.g., 1981, 138–144; for a description and criticism of this view see J. Kahn, 1980, chap. 10).
Meillassoux's general argument, developed through the consideration of African material, recently has been applied to Papua New Guinea by Peter Fitzpatrick (1980). Much of his analysis of Law and State in Papua New Guinea consists of arguing that colonial and postcolonial government policies served the interests of encroaching metropolitan capital by supporting and solidifying a number of elements of traditional Melanesian life. He points to repeated efforts by colonial administrators to protect village Melanesia from disruption; the result, he says, was the continu-
ation of institutions outside the capitalist-dominated sector which bore the costs of social reproduction and which thus subsidized capitalism by allowing artificially low wages. Likewise, and again following Meillassoux, Fitzpatrick sees the concern for village identity and ethnicity in Papua New Guinea's developing national ideology, exemplified by the legendary diversity of Melanesian societies, as a device that fragments the urban population and hinders the development of class consciousness among the emerging proletariat, again benefiting capital.
This articulation argument, especially as Fitzpatrick has applied it to Papua New Guinea, is macroscopic. It is concerned with the overall articulation of capitalism and the village sector, and Fitzpatrick ignores the sort of detailed analysis of village life that would demonstrate how it is affected by encroaching colonial capitalism. Furthermore, his overall thesis is one of the perpetuation of tradition, explaining just the sort of persistence that anthropologists concerned with Melanesia were beginning to discuss. The upshot of this is that in this model, village and town, tradition and modernity, are separated from each other except at the most macroscopic level. It is not far off the mark to say that while capitalism, according to this model, surrounds and perpetuates traditional life, it does not really impinge upon it; or to repeat what Michael Young said, a century of colonization leaves village life intact.
Not only does the Meillassoux-Fitzpatrick model of articulation warrant a separation of town and village, equally it does not suggest that it is necessary to study village life in its own right. Villages are labor reserves, seats of the domestic mode of production which subsidize encroaching capitalism, and there is little more that we need to know about them. Once capitalism encroaches, villages lose the sort of internal dynamic that was the focus of the whole first half of Meillassoux's Maidens, Meal and Money . Instead, they become passive, locked into their traditionalism and slowly drained of their vitality. Villages do not, then, respond to capitalism in a generative way by becoming something new; they do nothing but decay.
This approach presupposes what we found so curious on our arrival at Ponam and what we found even more curious as we learned more of the society and its past: the nature of its traditional elements. As we shall show, the impact of colonization on Ponam's
trade-based economy led to the modification of some traditional elements and led to the creation of new, traditional-seeming elements. Thus, in suggesting that the survival of tradition is unproblematic, Meillassoux and Fitzpatrick may be misperceiving both the nature of traditionalism and the impact of capitalism.
In a sense, then, Ponams' situation was very much like that of the Dyula of the Ivory Coast, described by Robert Launay (1982). They too survived largely by trade before colonial contact, but they found that colonization destroyed the old economic divisions and relationships on which their trade and their economic survival relied. What Launay has shown is that modern Dyula social organization and practices consist of some elements that developed as a direct response to colonization and some that survived from the precolonial period. "Yet," he points out (1982, 166), "the very features which seem loudest to proclaim the continuity turn out, on closer inspection, to exhibit subtle but hardly inconsequential differences with the way things were." Like Ponam, then, even at the most traditional core of Dyula society lie beliefs and practices that have been shaped by, and thus are linked to, the wider world of which the Dyula have become a part.
This relationship between traditionalism and the impact of colonialism has been highlighted in a striking way by Joel Kahn (1980, chap. 8). He has argued that what previous writers had taken to be traditional social structure in areas of what is now Indonesia, especially the existence of autonomous, self-sufficient communities, was not in fact the persistence of traditional forms. Rather, he says that the existence of these communities was a consequence of Dutch colonial practices in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These practices depressed local commerce, focusing transactions instead on the Dutch and their agents, a step that made villages more independent of each other than they had been previously. Likewise, the growing Dutch policy of taking agricultural produce, especially pepper, in the form of tribute levied on the local leader, strengthened the local kinship hierarchies, the adat . In conjunction with the depressing of local commerce, this destroyed independent commercial agricultural production and strengthened subsistence production. At its height, under what is called the Culture System, these policies produced, at least in West Sumatra, "a static system of corporate
lineage organization, an increased autonomy of village communities . . . and hence what [Kahn has] called the development of a traditional society" (1980, 163–164).
These studies contain a common message. The persistence of traditional social forms in the face of colonization needs to be approached with caution. These forms may not, in fact, be traditional at all (West Sumatra), and apparently traditional practices may be changed in subtle but important ways by colonization (Dyula).
In addition to showing that seemingly traditional elements may be modern, our analysis of Ponam shows another danger of assuming the persistence of tradition. Some elements of Ponam cultural forms survived colonial impact relatively well. However, because of the radical changes in the situation in which they persisted, the practical activities associated with them also changed radically, with radically different social consequences flowing from them. In such a case, persistence occurs at the level of form, but not at the level of substance. Thus, our description of Ponam and its changes since colonization points to an even greater need for caution in assessing the persistence of traditional forms and indeed raises questions about what "persistence" might mean in the face of rapidly changing circumstance.
For Meillassoux and Fitzpatrick, then, the village is not an object of investigation in its own right. This is because their conceptual orientation is from the national sector or economy looking outward. Though it is a bit of an exaggeration to say so, they treat village societies as black boxes, as undifferentiated (and un-understood) entities conceptualized almost exclusively in terms of their colonial and postcolonial economic function.
Thus, the model ignores the sort of intravillage dynamics and intervillage differences highlighted by, for example, Deborah Gewertz's reanalysis (1981) of Margaret Mead's description of gender relations among the Chambri, of the Sepik area. She shows how those relations, which Mead took to be traditional Chambri culture, were instead a result of colonial Australian intrusion and its effects on political and economic relations between the Chambri and their neighbors. Until studies of articulation are prepared to move beyond their macroscopic focus and recognize and try to explain this sort of change, they cannot come to understand how colonization has affected Papua New Guinea villages.
Moreover, because the Meillassoux—Fitzpatrick model does not attend to the details of village life, it does not tell us how articulation actually takes place, does not, except at the grossest level, identify what the mechanisms are that articulate village and town, precapitalist and capitalist social units. The macroscopic relationship is not traced out in any detail on the ground: there is simply no theoretical need to do so. Consequently, the model does not provide an adequate description of the consequences of articulation for the internal organization of villages.
Some work has been done to illuminate, in fact if perhaps not in name, the nature of articulation from the village viewpoint. A fairly early spate of such studies focused on entrepreneurs, the innovative individuals who are the locus of the articulation of the money economy and village life. These entrepreneurs have been 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 . For 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. From our point of view, these sorts of studies present two important problems. The first is their methodological individualism. They are concerned primarily with the individual transactions and histories of individual people, rather than with the organization of village societies. The second problem, particularly noticeable in Finney's work, is that this approach tends to be urban-oriented: people are selected for study precisely because they are doing well in the urban sector.
These twin weaknesses become more apparent if we look at two studies that more clearly represent the two tendencies we have described. One is T. K. Moulik's analysis (1973) of cultural factors affecting cash cropping in various regions of the country. Moulik illustrates what we take to be the inherent methodological individualism in entrepreneurial models of the sort popular in the literature around 1970. Moulik sees entrepreneurs in terms of individual strategies and transactions and does not attend to the more broadly structural factors constraining these entrepreneurs, though to be fair we should note that this individualism was ascendent more generally around this time among anthropologists concerned with Papua New Guinea (A. Carrier 1983, esp. 77–83). Thus, while Moulik's orientation focuses on villages rather than the national
economy, his explanation of variation in entrepreneurial innovation reduces to social psychology: where psychological constraints (for example, a fear of sorcery) are strong, individuals will not be motivated to engage in cash cropping.
The second of these studies is Rolf Gerritsen's description of Highlands entrepreneurs, which, though published relatively late (1981), was undertaken in the early 1970s. Gerritsen avoids the individualistic tendency in entrepreneurial studies. Although he is concerned to study 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 structural factors and processes. However, in doing this he embraces the second problem we mentioned, a strongly urban or national orientation. Gerritsen is much more concerned to establish the existence of an emerging big peasantry in the political economy of the country, to plot its links with the state and its privileged access to state resources, than he is to trace out the social organization of the villages from which these big peasants have emerged, and the way that articulation 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 the emerging big peasants, depending upon one's perspective, to village society. However, difficulties remain. The nature of these is illustrated by Lawrence Grossman's recent description of cattle projects in a village in Eastern Highlands Province (1983). Grossman locates the emerging big peasants firmly in their village milieu, by the simple expedient of looking at village enterprises, cattle projects, rather than individual entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, he fails to link these projects more than cursorily to the social organization of the village in which they occur.[2]
The way that we 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 has moved from town to village, the orientation, the conceptual framework of the study, is still firmly rooted in the national economy. Grossman focuses on village relationships, especially between leaders and participants in the cattle projects. However, his perception of these relationships is shaped by his interest in commodity relations of the sort found in the national economy: he
describes (1983, 67–70) how leaders and participants differ in terms of their investment of labor and money to the projects, and in terms of the distribution of surplus product from the projects. Thus, while Grossman focuses on village relationships, he ends up selectively perceiving and recasting them in terms of the logic of the national economy. The consequence of this, which is almost 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.
While the empirical studies we have described in the last few paragraphs do show an effort to look at articulation from the village end, equally, as we have argued, they are not really satisfactory. Partly this is because these writers did not develop a theoretical framework encompassing both town and village, a framework that is necessary if we are to be able to orient village-level studies systematically to the process of articulation. We think the basis of such a model exists in C. A. Gregory's work.
In his paper "Gifts to Men and Gifts to God" Gregory makes the argument that Western capitalist and Melanesian precapitalist systems are oriented in fundamentally different ways, with the corollary that terms drawn from one are not adequate to describe the other. Gregory characterizes the distinction between these two systems in terms of the distinction between gifts and commodites. He outlines four basic differences between gift—debt and commodity—debt, two of which are important here. One points to fundamental differences between objects and transactors in the two sorts of systems: commodity—debt "is created by the exchange of . . . objects between transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence, whereas gift—debt is created by an exchange of . . . objects between people in a state of reciprocal dependence" (1980, 640).[3] Second, while gift—debt on the one hand "must be explained with reference to the social conditions of the reproduction of people ," such as "clan structure and the principles governing kinship organization," commodity—debt on the other hand "must be explained with reference to the social conditions of the reproduction of things ," such as "class structure and the principles governing factory organization" (1980, 641). For the sake of convenience, and borrowing Gregory's terminology, we will refer to these two realms as the realms of gift relations and commodity relations.
We think Gregory has made a point that is no less important
for seemingly being obvious. The cultural logic and sociological order of the encroaching capitalist system revolve around class and the production relationships that are a part of it, the realm of commodity relations. Alternatively, the cultural logic and sociological order of precapitalist Melanesian societies are quite different, revolving around kinship and the exchange relationships that are a part of it, the realm of gift relations.
An example will help illustrate this point. That example is "wok meri," perhaps most briefly defined as a collective women's saving system around Goroka, in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. As described by Lorraine Sexton (1982), "wok meri" was an attempt by village women to adopt and adapt their own version of important Western economic institutions.
The first point we think worth making is that the Western institution involved was banking, an institution that is concerned with exchange rather than production. Second, in adopting banking—in, if you will, remaking banking into a more comprehensible and congenial form—women recast it in terms of "the social conditions of the reproduction of people ," such as "clan structure and the principles governing kinship organization" (Gregory 1980, 641).
Thus, women involved in the different "wok meri" groups were recruited from the in-marrying wives of men's agnatic lineages. The groups themselves were related conceptually as elements of matrilineages: each group was the daughter of an earlier-formed group which was instrumental in founding the new group, and each group was expected to produce its own daughter by helping to form another group. Furthermore, the main transactions involving groups, one near the time of the foundation of the daughter group and one to mark the end of the main phase of the collection (that is, saving) of money, were modeled explicitly on marriage ritual, though Sexton notes (1982, 177) that she detected in the ritual surrounding these transactions elements of all rituals associated with the female life cycle except menarche.
Our description of "wok meri" is cursory, but it is enough to illustrate the point we want to make. Here, village women typical of the communities in the Goroka area produced an economic institution modeled on the introduced Western institution of the bank. These women did not have to transform the institution they adopted; they could have simply set up informal village-based
banks. However, they did transform it, and they did so in a way that fits Gregory's synoptic characterization of Melanesian precapitalist systems.[4]
This example illustrates the point we drew from Gregory's work. That is, that precapitalist Melanesian systems are dominated by kin relationships and other elements of the "social conditions of the reproduction of people." This has implications for an anthropological approach to articulation, one that recognizes that village systems have their own structures and practices. Even if these villages may be subordinated empirically to encroaching capitalism, the terms and concepts used to describe them should not be subordinated to the conceptual framework of capitalist commodity relations.
Gregory sets out to produce an overall theoretical appreciation of this sort of articulation in his Gifts and Commodities , expecially chapters 6 and 7, "The Transformation of Gifts into Commodities in Colonial Papua New Guinea" and "The Transformation of Commodities into Gifts in Colonial Papua New Guinea." The first of these chapters performs its task admirably. Echoing Meillassoux, it is a systematic description of how gift relations in the village affect commodity relations in the capitalist sector, showing how the domination of gift relations in villages so diffuses the cost of social reproduction that employers in the capitalist sector were able to pay wages well below the actual cost of the reproduction of the labor force, and hence well below the level of wages expected in wholly capitalist systems. Hence, Gregory argues that commodity relations in the capitalist sector of colonial Papua New Guinea were affected by articulation with precapitalist villages and consequently were different from commodity relations in core capitalist areas where this sort of articulation does not take place.
The second of these two chapters is the one that, by its title, bears more directly on the issues we have raised in the preceding few pages. Unfortunately, however, this chapter is unsatisfactory. Certainly it is nothing like the inversion of the preceding chapter that its title suggests: a systematic discussion of the ways that village precapitalist societies have their system of gift relations affected by their link to commodity relations in the capitalist sector. Instead, Gregory contents himself with elaborating an internal classification of gift exchange patterns without reference to com-
modities or commodity relations and with defending the proposition that "the gift economy of PNG has not been destroyed by colonization, but has effloresced. This is reflected in a tendency for European commodities to be transformed into gifts" (1982, 166). The first sentence of the proposition is defended primarily by describing briefly a large number of Melanesian exchange systems; the second sentence, the one with the most interesting implications from our point of view, is left unexplored.
We will attempt such an exploration in this book, showing how the Ponam system of gift relations, the system especially of kinship and exchange, bears the mark of that articulation. In villages like Ponam, systems of kinship and exchange will not be shaped only by factors internal to village life. Instead, they will be shaped as well by their links with the capitalist sector. This point is not, we think, a contentious one.
However much their studies do not always conform to the ideal, anthropologists have long recognized the need to take into account the impact of the outside world in their analyses of village societies. All we are suggesting is that the form of this impact, and thus ways of taking it into account, should be considered problematic. Common sense might suggest that the impact of articulation with the capitalist colonial sector, a sector so oriented to production and commodity relations, would be manifest in the realm of material production and the emergence of commodity relations in the village. Such a view would appear to leave relations of kinship and exchange, especially ceremonial exchange, relatively untouched—barring, of course, the appearance of imported Western commodities as exchange goods. However, the theoretical points we have made here suggest that common sense may be misleading, that kinship and exchange are affected in important ways by articulation, though the form of this impact may not be apparent to those who do not approach it with the sort of perspective we are describing here.
Our point, put most simply, is that a rounded approach would have to try to trace out the articulation between the commodity relations of the national economy and the gift relations of the precapitalist village sector. It is this view of articulation that underlies our objection to the urban and commodity-oriented terminol-
ogy of some village-level studies of articulation. These do not try to demonstrate articulation by looking at the dominant village realm of kinship and exchange, gift relations. Instead they look at what are but the precursors of commodity relations in village life. Failure to look for the signs and processes of articulation in the dominant village realm of gift relations constitutes a failure to see how articulation with the expanding national economy impinges upon the core elements of precapitalist society. Such a limited approach may contain interesting information and insights. However, what it ends up assuming is that the capitalist sector displaces village social organization, not that it articulates with it.
Other anthropologists have tried to identify and investigate the effects of articulation on kinship and exchange. The most obvious example is Deborah Gewertz, whose work on Chambri social relations parallels our interests quite closely, as our earlier discussion of one aspect of her work and our later references to her writing in this book illustrate. Another example is Andrew Strathern, who has dealt with this issue a number of times (most recently 1984), particularly in "Gender, Ideology and Money in Mount Hagen" and "The Division of Labor and Processes of Social Change in Mount Hagen." These papers are partial approaches to articulation, in the sense that they are concerned with events from the village perspective and so do not attempt to analyze changes in the capitalist sector or the ways that these are affected by articulation with villages. However, within the realm that concerns him, Strathern looks at just the sort of issues that, we said, are central both to a theoretically informed view of articulation and to a theoretically informed view of kinship, exchange, and social reproduction.
That is, both of these papers note the way that exchanges, and especially moka (the elaborate regional exchange system), are a crucial aspect of the maintenance and reproduction of social relations among men and between men and women. They then go on to describe the way that the growing colonial and postcolonial impact on Hagen society has affected moka and the relations of which it is a part. Strathern thus demonstrates a sensitivity to the point that exchange and the kin and other social relationships that are bound up with exchange can be understood adequately only if one recognizes that this cluster, crucial to "the social conditions
of the reproduction of people ," in Gregory's terms, is a central aspect of the articulation of capitalist and precapitalist social forms in Melanesia.
We hope that our analysis of Ponam economics, articulation, kinship, and exchange contributes to this understanding.
Our vehicle for describing Ponam's articulation with the developing commodity sector of Papua New Guinea is a presentation of the economic activities and relationships that were the backbone of modern Ponam life: how wealth of different sorts was produced and circulated and, ultimately, consumed. While the economy was the backbone of Ponam, and hence crucial to understanding the society, by itself it was not enough to hold the society up. It needed the muscle and gristle of kinship and descent, religion, ceremony, and all the rest that constituted the tissues that supported, while being supported by, the economic frame. Likewise, even though Ponam is an island, before and since colonization the life of islanders depended on lives beyond the island, and Ponam's way of life was shaped by the way of life of other people in other places. So, in being concerned with Ponam economic activity, we are necessarily concerned with much more than just economics and with much more than just Ponam.
As we have made clear, we do not think it is possible to describe Melanesian societies generally, or Ponam Island in particular, without paying attention to relationships between the society and the outside world, a world that has expanded breathtakingly since colonization. In order that we can deal with this relationship adequately, we divide our description of Ponam economics into three parts: activities revolving around and directed toward local production and circulation, activities revolving around and directed toward overseas production and circulation, and activities revolving around and directed toward the articulation of these two areas of economic life, activities primarily of circulation rather than production. The definitions of "local" and "overseas" are relative, and with the passage of time they have changed a great deal. Because, however, this is a book about Ponam at the time of our fieldwork, generally we construe "local" and "overseas" as they applied at about 1980.
Our distinction between local and overseas is, of course, artificial, because activities in each area affected and reflected the influence of the other, as well as the activities that articulated the two realms. It is not, however, a wholly arbitrary distinction, reflecting as it does the sharp geographical separation of residents and their local production and circulation on the one hand, and on the other the migrants who constituted the dominant direct Ponam involvement with the larger economic order. Moreover, this parallels a distinction that is deeply rooted in anthropological thought as well as in the thought of Ponams themselves, as we shall discuss in chapter 5, the distinction between the traditional and the modern spheres of life.
The first of our spheres is domestic economic activity, production and circulation undertaken by people living on Ponam Island. At the time of our fieldwork this consisted mostly of fishing, the dominant conventional village-based productive activity, and market trade, an important way that islanders secured the necessities they did not produce for themselves. These economic elements deserve to be called "traditional" for two reasons. First, they were central elements of Ponam economic life prior to colonization and so have a historical provenance that many of their other activities lack. Second, they are central elements of the way Ponams saw themselves and their past. Ponam self-conception had many aspects, but one important one was as island people who fish and trade, an identity that they contrasted with mainland Manus people, whom they saw as agriculturalists. At the time of fieldwork, however, these activities were taking place in conditions very different from those that existed before colonization. Thus, even though the physical activities and even many of the social relations that were part of domestic activity survived through time, their social and economic dimensions, invisible but nonetheless real, had changed so much that it is not at all clear that, taken in the round, the fishing and marketing that Ponams did in 1980 were the same things they did in 1880, or even in 1930.
Complementing domestic economic activities were foreign or overseas economic activities. These were foreign because they required a much closer involvement with distant places and people than did domestic economic activities. Thus, we are not referring
to the sort of indirect involvement that comes with being part of an integrated economic system, but direct personal involvement. Foreign economic activities would include migrant labor, cash crop production, and other forms of petty commodity production.
As we have made clear, however, unlike many areas of the country, Ponams grew no crops for sale, manufactured only the smallest quantity of handicraft goods, and sold almost no fish outside their local markets. Thus, for Ponams, as for most of the other societies in Manus Province, the prime foreign economic activity was paid employment away from home, and usually outside the province, primarily in the civil service, the largest employer in the country.
Even though this migration was both relatively recent and alien to what Ponams were accustomed to doing, its consequences had come to shape not only central elements of social life on the island, but also Ponams' self-concept. At the same time that they maintained their traditional identity as island people who fish and trade, they established another, more modern identity, as people who must migrate to seek wealth. And this reliance on migrant labor as the only significant source of cash income for islanders made Ponams very much the circular migrants that the Meillassoux-Fitzpatrick model describes.
Ponam wage employment was not an isolated act or event, and Ponams with paying jobs did not spring into existence their first day at work or cease to exist the moment they quit. Instead, they began to work only after they had been shaped by their childhood on the island and, unlike migrants from many other parts of Papua New Guinea, their years in Ponam's village school, in secondary school, and, increasingly as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, in tertiary institutions. Though they were not so at the beginning, by the 1960s Ponam migrants were thoroughly educated and paid accordingly. If we are to describe Ponam's foreign economic activities, then, it is necessary as well to describe education on Ponam.
These, then, were the two complementary spheres of Ponam economic life in 1980. One was domestic activities, the direct descendents of precolonial economic life. These sprang from the island's and region's endowments of land and sea, sun, wind and rain, and the forms of production and circulation they underlay; they involved relations of exchange and reciprocity; they were
oriented toward subsistence and consumption, and hence ultimately were inward-turning, concerned with the local society and its immediate neighbors rather than the larger world. The other was foreign activities, the consequences of the new relationships islanders entered as a result of colonization. These sprang from the colonial and postcolonial economic order; they involved commodity and wage relations; they were oriented to the national monetary economy, and hence were fairly closely tied to economic relations with Australia, Papua New Guinea's former colonial power, and the international economy generally.
The articulation of the overseas and domestic realms appears in a number of ways in this book. The most explicit discussion, in chapter 6, follows our analysis of these two realms and looks at the way ceremonial exchange mediated between residents and migrants. This mediation tied migrants to home and motivated them to save money and remit it to Ponam, a remittance that produced a number of important results. It subsidized life on Ponam, keeping it pleasant and attractive to migrants, and thus strengthened their commitment to home and their willingness to send money. As part of this subsidy, remittances enabled residents to cope with their deteriorating position relative to their Manus trade and market partners, and so helped maintain that area of local economic activity. Also, it increased the economic significance of ceremonial exchange, making it remunerative to residents in fact as well as in ideology. This seems to have led to an increase both in the frequency of exchange and in the proportion of resident adults participating in it. This had the effect of strengthening the importance of the kin groups that played a central role in this exchange and the kin relationships that shaped people's access to and place in exchange. And in its turn this strengthening helped these groups remain important in the other area of life in which they featured, the ownership of property, particularly property relating to traditional fishing, the main element of domestic economic production.
Somewhat less explicitly we describe other important aspects of this articulation, both as things stood at the time of fieldwork and as they had changed since colonization. What we are concerned with here, however, is the relationship between Ponam social structure and the island's relations with the outside world. As
colonization changed Ponam's significant "outside world" from the rest of Manus to the Papua New Guinea national economy, Ponam's relationship with the outside world changed, and this had important consequences for the ways Ponams related to each other.
Briefly, prior to colonization, when the outside world was the rest of Manus, relations among Ponams were unequal, with the dominant position going to those people having the strongest control over the production and circulation of wealth within the region. However, as the outside world expanded and as the economic importance of Manus itself for Ponam decreased, islanders lost their ability to control significant sources of wealth, and particularly wealth from outside the island, as they became dependent on the emerging national economy. Consequently, no group of villagers was able to control wealth to the exclusion of others, and relations among villagers became more equal. While it is possible that some islanders could develop effective control over significant outside sources of wealth and so assert their dominance over their fellows, by the time of fieldwork this had not occurred, though changes in the organization and operation of provincial government suggested that it could easily occur in the future.
In sum, then, this book uses a description of Ponam economics to address two broader issues. The first of these is the connection between Ponam wealth production and the nature of island social relationships. Our analysis of this connection is made easier by the fact that we are able to trace out changes in both these areas over a substantial portion of the colonial and postcolonial period. Since colonization, and especially since World War II, this connection has been to a large degree the connection between Ponam and the national economy. Thus, we are obliged to address the question of articulation. This is the second of the two broad issues we consider in our study of Ponam society and economy.
Our book is about Ponam Island and Ponam Islanders. However, as our discussion in this introduction has made clear, we think the case we present addresses general anthropological questions and so has a broader applicability to Melanesian societies. We intend our analysis of Ponam to be of more than purely ethnographic interest. We want now to discuss briefly the ways we have attempted to fit our description of Ponam into a larger and more
comprehensive framework and the advantages and dangers inherent in our attempt.
To begin with, we have decided to avoid any extended, explicit comparative discussion, at least once we start our substantive discussion of Ponam in chapter 1. The common practice of a concluding, comparative chapter is useful for those who are presenting a detailed analysis of a society from an area that has been studied extensively. In that sort of circumstance, the weight and detail of ethnographic evidence needs to be deployed before it can be brought to bear in addressing regional ethnographic variations and the issues that those variations allow one to discuss.
Our case is rather different. While Manus may be well known in Melanesian ethnography, in fact it has been studied fairly little. And in any event our purpose is not to address regional patterns or variations. Instead, our aims are less scholarly and more polemical. One aim is to assert that societies in Melanesia are likely to be affected by links with the outside world in a way that has, as we have argued in this introduction, been ignored or slighted by many anthropologists working in the area. A second and related aim is to put forward by example an assertion we have made in the abstract already. That is the assertion that the articulation of a village society with the urban, capitalist sphere is going to have what may be its most interesting anthropological effects in the dominant sphere of village life, that of kinship and exchange.
If we were to pursue a full-blown comparative study in furtherance of these aims we would have to undertake two arduous tasks: an analysis of the ways other anthropologists have ignored the effects of the sort of articulation that interests us, and an analysis of the ways that articulation really is manifest in Melanesian societies. The first task is enough to daunt those much abler than we are, and the results would likely be either highly contentious or soporific. The second task is even more daunting. If our first assertion is correct, and we have already presented enough discussion of Melanesian ethnography to make that at least plausible, then our second task would be almost impossible, for the ethnographies on which we would have to rely would omit just those areas of linkage that we would need to study.
We have, then, made no attempt to present a systematic overview of comparable societies or ethnographies. Part of the reason for this, as our discussion thus far has hinted, is that there has
been little work done in Papua New Guinea or elsewhere in the region that is clearly comparable to our analysis of Ponam: the studies of articulation, migration, and remittance that exist are concerned with very different aspects of these topics. Instead of systematic comparison, we have elected to intersperse comparative comments throughout the book. Further, we have chosen to avoid comparison for its own sake as well as comparison on points of ethnographic interest. Instead, we limit ourselves to comparisons that bear on key aspects of our main arguments.
Made uneasy by the fear that this would limit too much the points of contact between Ponam and other societies in Melanesia, we have sought also to point out the ways that Ponam is unusual. This allows us to indicate points of contact because it necessarily entails comparison with other Papua New Guinea societies, even if only implicitly. When we think it is pertinent, we point out the dimension or variable that concerns us; we place Ponam on that dimension; and we show how the island stands on the dimension compared to other Papua New Guinea societies. This technique allows us to provide a framework of variables important to the issues we address, which readers can use to place Ponam relative to other societies with which they may be more familiar.
We hope this technique allows us to avoid the main disadvantage that Ponam's unusual situation presents, without losing the advantage. That disadvantage is that, because Ponam seems to be extreme on a number of dimensions, often it is not reasonable to generalize from it directly to other parts of Papua New Guinea. Pointing out pertinent dimensions and Ponam's place on them allows us to begin to show in what ways Ponam differs from other societies and what those differences might mean. This in turn allows us to begin to show what Ponam can tell us about other Papua New Guinea societies.
Before concluding this introduction we want to point out the main dimension that concerns us, the degree of village dependence on the urban sphere. Probably the most widely known studies that deal explicitly with the link between villages and the urban sector in Papua New Guinea are Cyril Belshaw's The Great Village , A. L. Epstein's Matupit , and Richard Salisbury's Vunamami , dealing with villages engulfed by, on the edge of, or very close to a city. Ponam looks very different from both the thoroughly urban Hanu-
abada and the more periurban villages of Matupit and Vunamami, villages that maintained significant subsistence and commercial agricultural bases controlled through indigenous systems of land tenure.
Even though Salisbury asserts that Hanuabada and Matupit had been so engulfed that each looked like becoming "a substandard if 'quaint' part of a foreign town" (1970, 174), local custom appears to have remained strong. Thus, for instance, Epstein (1969, 223–224) says that Tolai tambu remained important in affinal exchange, was still controlled by the older generation, and thus still served as a mechanism by which seniors dominated their juniors. As arguments we make in this book imply, we think this survival of indigenous forms of inequality is related to the survival of indigenously controlled productive resources.
Ponam is set off from these villages by its degree of involvement with the urban sphere. Ponam was much more isolated than Hanuabada, Matupit, and Vunamami, but in some ways its links to town were much more significant. This is because the absence of a local productive base of much significance means that Ponam was much more dependent, even though much more isolated, than the other three villages. The very high degree of Ponam dependence makes it possible to see the effects of dependence clearly. And this is one of the prime virtues of studying so extreme a case.
Thus, in its very extremity, Ponam approximates a pure case, which allows us to see with especial clarity the results of certain processes or the relationship between certain variables, without obscuring, extraneous influences. To draw a parallel from elementary physics: feathers falling in vacuum tubes certainly are unusual, but are quite useful if we want to discern the effects of gravity free from the obscuring influence of air resistance.
While neither anthropology nor our approach to Ponam is as rigorous as elementary physics, the parallel is apt. For example, we have mentioned already that Ponam produced almost no significant wealth, but relied on remittances. This is unusual, but also quite helpful if we want to see the relationship between wealth production and social inequality, or the relationship between village social life and dependence upon circular migration.
Having pointed out a key way that Ponam was unusual, we want to dispel the idea that it was so unusual that it can be ignored
by those concerned with the conventional anthropologist's topics, social relations and structure in rural villages. Although, as we noted earlier, we do not want to undertake a substantial, systematic comparison with other Papua New Guinea societies, we do want to make two comparisons here. These will not prove anything. They will, however, buttress our suspicion that the processes we observed so easily in Ponam are there in much of village Papua New Guinea, albeit in a milder form. The cases that interest us are that of the Chambri Lakes people described in Deborah Gewertz's Sepik River Societies and that of the Gende people of upland Madang, described in Laura Zimmer's "The Losing Game."
The people Gewertz studied were in many ways typical Melanesian villagers. They were relatively isolated from the outside world: they were far from towns, plantations, and mines. Equally, they engaged in no significant petty commodity production of their own and were not dependent on remitted wages for their survival in the way Ponams were. Even so, Gewertz notes some important ways village life had been affected by contact with the outside world.
The effect that concerns her most is indirect, brought about by the imposition of state control of the Sepik region. As was the case with Ponam, which we will describe in chapter 2, this led to significant changes in relations between the fish-producing Chambri and their starch-producing trade and market partners. One consequence of this was the deterioration of local trade. This forced people to begin to look outside the local economy for their necessities, and as part of this Chambri women began to travel farther afield, to marry elsewhere, and to become lost to the village. (As Gewertz's description of men's reaction to the Salvinia infestation of the late 1970s shows, this had a significant effect on the way Chambri men saw their society.)
The upshot of even this relatively mild reliance on external sources of wealth was, as Ponam's case will suggest is likely, the deterioration of preexisting relations of inequality. Gewertz says the consequences "have been destructive of the very relationships Chambri elders hoped to maintain, and the texture of life within the three Chambri villages when I was last in the field can only be described as anomic. No one is sure any longer who is beholden to whom, or of how to establish and maintain social relationships" (1983, 195).
The Gende present a similar picture. Even though Zimmer describes flourishing local production, local trade networks decayed with colonization. This made it harder for the Gende to maintain relations with neighboring groups, relations that, significantly, included the giving and getting of women in marriage. The Gende were not, at the time of fieldwork, close to sources of wage labor, and Gende migrants seem to have been less successful and less assiduous about remitting money home than were Ponam migrants, so that survival still depended overwhelmingly on subsistence production. Even so, Zimmer notes that the deterioration of local trade networks led to an increasing demand for cash and cash goods in exchange. Consequently, social success required access to both Western and indigenous sources of wealth.
The result was that Gende aspiring to full and prosperous adult status had to have migrant relatives remitting money. The net effect was that social success became, in terms of earlier Gende values, capricious: virtue and reward no longer marched together, and the moral, as well as the social, bases of Gende inequality was under threat.
Although these are only two cases, they establish one important point: apparently slight degrees of contact and colonization can lead to substantial changes in apparently purely internal village social relationships, such as those of marriage, gender, ceremonial exchange, and inequality more generally. Ponam's situation was extreme to be sure. However, in attenuated form that situation can appear even in seemingly isolated villages and regions without the long period of intense colonial and state penetration that characterized Manus Province. The lessons that Ponam allows us to draw may apply to many more villages than would naively appear to be the case.
1
Ponam Island, Manus Province
The core of the Admiralty Islands, the main island group in Manus Province, consists of two large islands, Manus and Los Negros. As the map of the Admiralty Islands shows, the main island is Manus, about 50 kilometers long and about 30 kilometers wide, located about 270 kilometers west of New Hanover, in the Bismarck Archipelago, and about the same distance north-northeast of the coast of Madang Province, the nearest part of mainland Papua New Guinea. Los Negros is the smaller of the two, about ten kilometers long, lying at the eastern end of Manus Island, from which it is separated by the narrow Loniu Passage. Manus and Los Negros are surrounded by a number of smaller islands. The high islands of Mbuke, Baluan, Lou, and Rambutyo lie off the southeast coast, the home of the Titan-speaking people Margaret Mead began studying in the 1920s. Extending from the east of Los Negros and running north of it and Manus Island are a string of flat islands, mostly long, narrow sand cays, and where they run along the north coast of Manus they form the outer boundary of the Seeadler Sea, extending about halfway along the north coast. To the west and northwest of Manus are another set of islands: Bipi and Sisi to the west, and to the northwest the islands of Nares Harbour, visited by the Challenger expedition in the 1870s (Moseley 1876–1877). As a whole, the province had a population of 25,844 at the time of the 1980 census (Papua New Guinea 1980).
Ponam itself had a population of about 500, of which about 200 were migrants living elsewhere in the country. It is the western-most of the sand cays that lie along northeast and north-central Manus, and it is about five kilometers off the Manus coast. Like the rest of the sand cays it is small: about 3.5 kilometers long and only about 200 meters wide in the populated area, with a total land area of about 1.4 square kilometers. In many ways land was a less important resource for Ponam Islanders than the sea. Like all coral
Map 1.
Admiralty Islands
islands, Ponam is relatively infertile and Ponams were not, and claimed never to have been, sufficiently interested in gardening to undertake the intensive cultivation techniques necessary to raise crops there. This was particularly true after World War II, when the United States Navy took over the island for an air base and covered much of it with an airstrip of crushed coral concrete. Tree crops, most importantly coconut and casuarina, could grow, but gardening was even more difficult than before, and islanders planted almost no fruits or vegetables.
Ponam's reef is one of the largest in Manus, about eighteen kilometers long and one-half to three kilometers wide, covering a total of about forty-five square kilometers, and fishing was the most important productive activity on the island. Ponams used a variety of modern and traditional fishing techniques and traded their fish for sago flour and other vegetable foodstuffs with people from the nearby villages of mainland Manus. Occasionally islanders sold fish for money at the local or provincial markets, but by and large they bartered instead. Until World War II Ponams survived primarily by this seafood trade, but it decreased in importance since the war and, like other Manus people, they came to rely on cash to buy imported food and manufactures, as well as much local food. Because they had few local sources of income, islanders depended on money sent home to them by migrants working elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, a dependence common throughout Manus.
Ponams used the Western calendar and followed a regular weekly schedule. Friday was sona pene , the day before market, and people who had not already accumulated enough fish usually devoted the day to doing so. Men made a collective fishing expedition on most Fridays. Saturday was pene , market day. On most weeks six to twelve canoes carrying between fifty and a hundred people set off for the mainland at about eight o'clock in the morning, the trip taking as little as thirty minutes sailing with a stiff following wind or more than two hours rowing against it. Usually everyone was home again by early afternoon.
Sunday was a day of rest—Ponams rendered the Commandment in Pidgin: "I tambu long wok Sande"—when islanders did only necessary jobs. Most people attended church in the morning
and spent the rest of the day relaxing, picnicking, or playing sports. Monday was Council Day, when the councillor called people to an early-morning meeting where he reported on Council business, asked for reports from village bodies such as the court or school board, and finally opened the meeting for discussion of any business of public interest, a discussion that often degenerated into acrimony as people aired grievances without resolving them. When the discussion ran out of steam, usually by about eleven o'clock, the councillor assigned tasks. Men generally repaired public buildings such as the school, water tanks, and toilets, while women swept and edged the village streets and the churchyard. Once these jobs were done people's time was their own, to their considerable relief.
There was no regular public business on Tuesday through Friday, and people made their own schedules. Usually islanders rose shortly after dawn, ate breakfast, found tasks to do throughout the day, ate an evening meal at dusk, put the children to bed and then socialized until late, but no one kept to such a schedule all the time. Men fished whenever the fishing was best, which might have been at any time of the day or night, depending upon the weather, the seasons, the moon, and the tide. Women usually fished in the daytime, but had to be awake to clean and smoke the fish men caught, so that their schedule too followed the fishing.
A few activities were dominated by the seasons. The southeast trade winds blew from May to September, bringing good weather and calm seas. The reef rose high out of the water at low tide during this time and women searched the lagoon for sa'ul shells, Imbricaria punctata , which they used to make shell money. This was the most enjoyable season for fishing. Around September the winds began to shift, becoming more variable and the weather more unpredictable, until some time in November the northwest monsoon began. Then the sea was rough and the tides were high, so that the outer edge of the reef just broke the surface during low tide. This was the most difficult season for fishing and enjoying the sea, but it was also the most productive. Unfortunately for migrants, this was the time when they usually had to take their holiday leave. The island would fill up with young people, most of them determined to take their annual leave in the good season
next time. Because so many migrants returned home for Christmas this was also the season for making most important exchanges, for weddings, and for brideprice payments.
Ponam and Manus
Several people have done linguistic research on Manus but there is little agreement among them. According to Healey's review of research in the area (1976, 349), writers agree that the Admiralty Islands languages all are Austronesian, but do not agree on their origin, their number (estimates vary from eighteen to forty), or the way they should be classified. Despite this, it is generally accepted that the Ponam language is unique, though in the same family of languages as those of the neighboring groups. Ponams themselves said that their language was closely related to those of the next islands to the east, Andra, and west, Sori, and the mainland Manus village of Mondropolon. In the most recent survey of Manus languages, Schooling and Schooling came to a similar conclusion. They found that Andra, Mondropolon, and Sori were the most closely related to Ponam, sharing 45 percent, 45 percent, and 38 percent of cognates with it (1980, 31).
Ponams, like other Manus, were multilingual. Most understood all the neighboring languages and several more distant ones, though they might not speak them. Furthermore, all but a few of the most elderly women were fluent Pidgin speakers, and children learned Pidgin only slightly later than their mother tongue. Pidgin was widely used in Manus for private conversations between people of different areas and for public and government business. Even on Ponam itself much public business was conducted in Pidgin. Beginning about 1950, Manus people had English education, and the majority of people who were under forty at the time of fieldwork, as well as a number of older ones, spoke English, but this was heard in villages much less than Pidgin, just as Pidgin was heard less than the vernacular.
The first important ethnographer to work in Manus, Richard Parkinson (1907), divided the people into three culturally and ecologically distinct groups: the Manus, the lagoon- and island-dwelling people of the south and southeast coasts; the Matankor, the
Map 2.
North-central Manus
people of the other offshore islands; and the Usiai, the agriculturalists of the mainland. Parkinson appears to have adopted this classification from the Manus, with whom he was most familiar. Margaret Mead also worked with the Manus and also used this classification. Largely as a result of her work, it has become standard.
However, this simple tripartite division is not satisfactory for several reasons. It gives the false impression that there was little difference within or unity among the Manus, Matankor, and Usiai groups. Of the three, in fact, only the Manus had a single language and culture though they lived in several different villages. The others contained groups that were significantly different from one another. Furthermore, this classification was not used by everyone in the Admiralties. By the time of fieldwork "Manus" referred to the province and all of its people, while those from whom the province took its name usually were referred to by the name of the different villages from which they came. Other groups were referred to occasionally as Usiai or Matankor, but more often by other terms. Ponams, for instance, divided Manus into two ecological groups: islanders (mbroso ), whom they referred to jestingly as the navy; and mainlanders (oisiei ), the army. They used these categories to make rough distinctions between groups of people and ways of life, but also they were extremely conscious of political and geographic divisions within and across these groups: villages, language groups, electoral wards, and regions, such as the north and south coasts, as well as less purely spatial divisions, such as government versus governed, Lorengau versus villages, workers versus villagers.
Although Ponams had ties with people in all parts of Manus, they associated particularly closely with the other people of their electorate, Tulu-Ponam, which consisted of the villages of Aran, Lehuwa, Ponam, Saha, Tulu I, and Tulu II, and the Bundralis Catholic Mission station (see the map of north-central Manus). This electorate was established in 1979, and in 1980 had a resident population of 920 (Papua New Guinea 1980). In many ways, Ponam was a self-contained unit within the electorate. It sent its own councillor to the single Manus Local Government Council until that body was replaced by local level government in 1984 (Pokawin 1983). It had its own village court, aid post, church, and two-class primary school.
The people of the electorate, including Ponams, were Catholic, as were most people on the north-central and northwest coast; they were members of the Bundralis Parish, which was served by a priest and several nuns living at the Bundralis Mission station, run by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. In addition to the church itself, the station contained a girls vocational school, a health center staffed by two nurses, and a large trade store, all of which brought Tulu-Ponam people, and others, to the station frequently. Also, every Saturday there were markets between Ponams and Mondropolons (the people of Saha and Lehuwa villages) at Bundralis, and between Ponams and Tulus at Tulu II. Thus, Ponams had more frequent and regular contact with other villagers of their electorate than they did with people elsewhere.
Most Ponam residents spent most of their time living within this area. Old people rarely left the island, while women with young children or infirm parents rarely spent a night away from home, limiting their travel to the nearby coast or islands. Men, and women without dependents, traveled more. Particularly, they made more trips to Lorengau, the seat of provincial government and commercial center for the Province, but only islanders who ran charter motorized canoes or who owned, and consequently had to stock, trade stores visited town more than four or five times a year, and many went less often than that.
Ponams had relatives scattered throughout Manus, and they should have visited them and taken gifts, particularly when the relatives sponsored exchanges, but in fact they rarely did so unless the kin relationship was quite close, the relative lived nearby, or the exchange was an important one. Similarly, these relatives rarely visited Ponam except under the same circumstances. Ponams explained this by saying that with the monetization of the Manus economy, their kawas , trade partners, were demanding immediate rather than delayed exchange, and thus they were no longer indebted to one another and hence no longer obliged to repay debts or generate credit by participating in exchange (we return to this point in chapter 4).
Ponams, then, found themselves doubly isolated. Located in Manus, a small province a long way from anywhere, Ponams were cut off from the economic and social currents moving through the New Guinea mainland. And within Manus itself, Ponams were
relatively isolated. Ponam was closer to Lorengau than some other Manus villages, though it must be said that the bulk of the people and economic activity was in eastern Manus, to which Ponam was distinctly peripheral.
This spatial separation was compounded by a general wish to be left alone. So, for example, Ponam was one of the last villages in the province to hold out against elected village councillors and the commitment to the Local Government Council that the adoption entailed, yielding only to severe pressure from the colonial administration. Similarly, one of the councillor's main functions was to shield the island from government attention: visiting school inspectors, cultural officers, and the like often found themselves confronted not with villagers, but with the genial, smiling councillor, who agreed wholeheartedly with their suggestions, listened attentively to their instructions, did just about whatever was necessary to speed visitors on their way so that life could continue as usual.[1]
Thus, while Ponam was by no means as isolated as some parts of Papua New Guinea, it was distinguished from much of the country by being far from urban areas and transport routes. This isolation seems to have satisfied Ponams. It also helped throw into relief the importance of migration, for this was just about the only link Ponams had with the rest of the country.
Ponam Social Organization
Although Ponam was largely self-contained, it was not without internal divisions. The main divisions at the time of fieldwork were based on kinship. Ponam was divided into fourteen named and recognized patrilineal property-owning groups. We will refer to these as kamal (literally, male), as Ponams did themselves. Kamal had genealogies ranging from four to seven generations deep, reckoned from mature adults in 1980. Additionally, kamal were divided into sublineages (there were five of these in the largest kamal ) and sub-sublineages, though unlike kamal these had no generic name. Islanders referred to them individually by the name of the subunit's focal ancestor.
Kamal could be referred to in any of three ways, all in principle equally acceptable, though in practice they were not equally common. These were: the name of the apical ancestor, the name of the
land on which that ancestor built the group's first men's house, and the name of the land on which the men's house stood at the time a Ponam wanted to refer to it. In practice, all kamal regularly were referred to by the name of their apical ancestors and by the name of the land on which their men's houses were first built. However, only some kamal were referred to by the name of the land on which they stood at the time of fieldwork. This was because, as a result of changes brought about by colonization, several named plots of land had more than one kamal built on them.
We have described the relationship between a kamal and the land on which it was built for the same reason that we have refrained from referring to these groups as clans. That reason is the fact that kamal were not just patrilineal descent groups, defined by genealogical rules. Rather, they were necessarily property-owning groups. Real property, land and sea and the rights to certain productive techniques and other resources, could be inherited only agnatically, so that only kamal or their constituent subparts could be property-owning groups. But the agnation itself was not enough to make a patrilineage a kamal . Property was essential. A kamal that owned no property simply was a contradiction in terms, even if the patriline's genealogical structure was exactly like that of a kamal .
Of course kamal did not spring into existence automatically at every conjunction of agnation and property. Rather, the conjunction had to be recognized. The moment of recognition was the sahai , a distribution of cooked food that took place at funeral exchanges and at the completion of a new men's house. In the sahai sets of dishes of food were laid out on the ground, one for each kamal , in a stylized map of the village, and the name of the kamal that was to receive each set of dishes was announced. Recognition consisted of having others attend the sahai of one's own men's house raising and agree to receive the dishes of food announced for them, and of having one's kamal announced as a recipient in a sahai given by others. Indeed, property and recognition may have been more important than agnation. At the time of fieldwork Ponams recognized the existence and property rights of one kamal that had no agnates: no living males or unmarried females (a more extended discussion of sahai is in A. Carrier 1987).
As this suggests, Ponam kamal had a strongly jural air about them, and islanders appeared to conceive of kamal and people's membership in them in jural terms. Kin relations among kamal -
mates were conceived of no differently than relations among cognates, and there was no sense that kamal members shared any special common substance. This distinguishes Ponams from the Highlands New Guinea societies Andrew Strathern has described (1973), in which agnates, by virtue of eating crops grown on clan land, come to absorb a common clan essence, as well as from areas like the Trobriands, where the key descent groups, here matrilineages, are each possessed of a special dala spirit and essence (e.g., Weiner 1977). This nonsubstantial Ponam view of agnation is reflected in islanders' notions of conception. They held that the fetus is formed equally by both parents: women not only are full partners in conception, their contribution is not limited to the flesh or skin as opposed to the bone or some part of the body considered to be relatively more important.
While men maintained their membership in their natal kamal throughout their lives, women gave up that membership when they married and took on membership in their husband's kamal . This too reflects the fact that kamal were tied up with property. Socially a wife found it almost impossible to be a full and active member of her husband's kamal . At the simplest and most obvious level, the rules of affinal avoidance prevented her from going into the men's house most of the time and from participating freely in any gathering of her husband's agnates. However, she was fully a member of her husband's property-owning descent group. She had full rights to use her husband's agnatic group property, and any real property that she might own, either as a gift or through inheritance in the case of the failure of her natal patriline to produce male heirs, passed directly to her descendants. It is important to note our use of "directly." The property did not pass from her to her husband to his descendants. This explains why Ponams had agnatic property-owning groups whose apical ancestors were women, a fairly common occurrence as kamal owning rights to fishing techniques often gave participating rights to out-marrying women (patrilineal property-owning groups are described more fully in the discussion of Ponam fishing in chapter 3).
In addition to kamal and their subparts, Ponam also had ken si (literally, one origin), named cognatic stocks descended from every Ponam who had children. Ken si were most important in ceremonial exchange, a common occurrence on Ponam. Usually exchange goods were collected from and distributed to the cognatic stocks
descended either from the sisters and brothers of ancestral members of ego's ascending patrilineal stem, or from the brothers of women who married into the stem, a process described in more detail in chapter 6.
These stocks were not property-owning groups; whatever real property the stock's apical ancestor may have possessed passed to the patrilineal property-owning group which also descended from him or her and which formed the agnatic core of the stock. We said previously that patrilineal descent could be the basis of kamal status only if property belonged to the descent line. This rule is apparent in the fact that at the time of fieldwork there were propertyless patrilines. These were not recognized in any special way: patriline members were treated simply as members of the cognatic stocks descended from the patriline's apical ancestors. Members of stocks associated with a property-owning agnatic core who were not themselves members of that core were in a privileged position relative to the core group's property, for the core group was obliged by Ponam's cultural values to help look after the welfare of those who were members of its ken si , which in practice meant allowing them access to the group's property.
Ponam marriage rules required marriage outside the kamal and prohibited marriage with anyone with whom one shared a great-great-grandparent, though given the small number of Ponams, this rule could not be adhered to in practice; the working rule was no common great-grandparent. Also Ponams preferred to marry other Ponams: at the time of fieldwork 71.5 percent of the 172 married Ponams made their last marriage to other Ponams. Thus, Ponam conformed to Françoise Heritier's suggestion (1981) that societies with a Crow kinship terminology, which the island had, combine overall societal endogamy with a prohibition on the marriage of near cognates. As one might expect, this system produced an extremely dense set of descent groups and an extremely dense web of kin relations and obligations between living Ponams.
Kamal , and hence Ponams, were divided as well into moieties, though these were not marriage classes. The village had a central street running through it which, when extended mentally to the east and the west ends of the island, divided Ponam into Tolau (North, the northern half of the island) and Kum (South, the southern half of the island). Moiety membership was derived from kamal membership, based usually on the half of the island in which
the kamal 's men's house was first built. Moiety membership was, thus, distinct from physical residence, though in fact almost all people lived on their moiety's half of the island.
Although the distinction between Kum and Tolau, northern and southern halves of the island, was important, moieties were not corporate groups and featured relatively little in relations between Ponams. Normally they were activated only when the island as a whole was acting in relation to some outside body. For instance, the Monday village meetings were seen to be an obligation imposed on Ponam by the colonial, and subsequently the provincial, government, and the community work assignments that ended these meetings often were divided along moiety lines. Similarly, when Ponam contributed to the festivities associated with the opening of a new church in a mainland Manus village, a village that had contributed earlier to similar festivities on Ponam, the contribution was displayed and presented as moiety gifts.
There was one other spatial division of Ponam that was significant, though less than it had been before colonization. That was the division into districts: Tonuf on the eastern part of the island, Lahai in the middle, and Ponam on the western part. Islanders said that originally these were political and to some degree linguistic units: there was desultory raiding carried on between districts, and Tonuf people spoke a different language from Lahai and Ponam. By the time of fieldwork, however, the situation had changed markedly.
The history of these changes is complex. As a result of intra- and interisland warfare around the turn of the century all Lahai kamal were wiped out and Lahai property was dispersed among surviving cognates. Thus, "Lahai" became used primarily to refer to a part of the island, though kinship links through deceased Lahais remained important. That same warfare killed most Tonuf agnates, and the few remaining members of the two surviving Tonuf kamal sought shelter with relatives in Ponam kamal , while maintaining both their identity as Tonuf kamal and, of course, their kamal property. Shortly after the turn of the century Tonuf and Lahai lands were sold to the German trading firm of Hernsheim and Company as a plantation and trochus source. This land subsequently was used by the United States Navy for their air base in World War II, and islanders did not buy back the plantation land until the late 1950s. Thus, it was really only after then that Tonuf kamal members could contemplate using their land. Consequently, members of the two Tonuf kamal lived in Ponam while maintaining their identity as Tonuf groups.
At around the time of fieldwork the leader of one of the Tonuf kamal tried to move his kamal men's house back to its ancestral site in south Tonuf, but there was resistance from other kamal members. As the leader himself was a migrant employed in Port Moresby who was on Ponam only a few weeks each year or two, he did not have much success in bringing about the move. Though they complained about the noise and distractions of village life, almost no Ponams really wanted the isolation, however peaceful, of a house in Tonuf.
The last precolonial division of any consequence was the system of nine totemic matriclans. Each Ponam inherited a set of substance taboos from his or her mother, and while each set included some varieties of fish and other foods, no prohibition was sufficiently extensive to cause any real inconveniences (we describe these in more detail later in this chapter). Matriclans also were responsible for life-crisis rituals and other matters bearing on the substance or being of individual Ponams, rather than on jural aspects of their existence, which were the concern primarily of patrilineal property-holding groups.
These divisions into kinship groups and districts were of primary importance on Ponam, but other, new groups, founded as part of the island's efforts to achieve development, cut across these.
There were two youth clubs: Posus, the young men's club, and Nai, the young women's. Nai was founded in the 1960s in order to bring together married and single women to promote child health, new domestic skills, and modern ways of living. However, it quickly became a club exclusively for single women, who met to sew, do handicrafts, play sports, practice and perform dances for provincial celebrations, and participate with other women's clubs in affairs organized by the central Lorengau Women's Council.
Although we have identified Posus as a part of modern Ponam, it is important to remember that associations of young single men were a common feature of precolonial and colonial life in Manus, while associations of young single women were not. Young single men were not expected or allowed to mature as quickly as women. This marginal status predisposed young men to club together, and until colonization put an end to warfare, they formed the core of raiding parties in early Manus. Colonization made the position of young men even more anomalous, for it brought extensive labor migration. Young single men were the most likely to migrate, which led to them becoming more familiar with highly valued
Europeans and their ways than more mature villagers. This imbalance between their subordinate social status and superior experience of European ways provoked young men to criticize the ways and affairs of their elders. This was most marked in Paliau Molowat's New Way movement, a well-recorded combined millenarian and political movement which was widespread in the late 1940s and 1950s (Schwartz 1962), but it occurred in other places and times in Manus in less spectacular ways.
Posus began as a young men's club, but unlike Nai, a number of its members were mature and married; most important among these at the time of fieldwork was the village councillor, whose membership appeared to be motivated in part by the desire to ingratiate himself with club members. Posus also had as members a number of mature women, usually single women or widows, who as a result of membership could make special claims on the club for help with heavy labor. Posus hired itself out to perform jobs requiring many workers, such as building houses or bringing large logs for canoe hulls from the mainland. Individuals could organize relatives to perform these tasks, but many thought it cheaper and easier to hire Posus than to feed and keep peace with relatives while working. Posus also supported several sports teams and a guitar band, which played on the island and occasionally in competitions elsewhere.
Posus and Nai worked together to organize parties on holidays and sometimes simply to bring villagers together. Their young members hoped that these parties would amuse people of all ages, but they also had a more serious motive. They hoped their parties would be neutral and uncompetitive, unlike many traditional festivities, and so provide the occasion for peacemaking. It did not always work out this way of course, and complaints frequently turned back against the clubs as they were accused of frivolity and, more seriously, insubordination. This last accusation was in some sense true, for young people saw themselves as united against the stubbornness of their elders, who in their eyes neither took advantage of modern opportunities nor lived up to the ideals of tradition.
Of greater significance during the time of fieldwork was the division of the island into two factions, one led by the councillor. This split began in 1972 when Ponams, who still resented the council government system the Australians were imposing throughout
the colony, decided to resist efforts to fix taxes by refusing to pay them altogether. After several increasingly violent attempts, the police arrested a number of the strikers and took them off to Lorengau jail. The strikers then sought help from the Tolai Mataungan Association, prominent at that time for its political activism, and one young man was inspired by their help and their example to found an association modeled on and named after theirs. Despite his hopes that Ponam's Montaungan Association would grow to be a Manus-wide force for political change and economic development, it became simply an island party in opposition to the councillor. Its members were men who felt that he had not supported the strikers, or that he had sold them out to the government, or who had personal reasons to oppose him. The founding of the Association was thus the catalyst for the open division of the island into factions reflecting tensions that had existed for some time.
By the time we began fieldwork, in late 1978, Association members saw themselves as the island's third club, a club for adults, and like the other two clubs, they wanted development, to found a business that would bring income and work to the island. But, and again like the two other clubs, they were unable to devise a likely project and unable to raise the funds to start one. Finally, in 1981 they invested what money they had in Papua New Guinea Development Corporation shares. Perhaps because their development activities never really began, the Association became less and less of a coherent political faction. The councillor still had personal opponents, but they no longer had any positive plans to unite them, and in 1985 the club was wound up and its assets dispersed among its members.
In any case, the councillor always had supporters. In the 1979 election he received 59 out of a total of 114 votes, while between them his opponents, two Association men and one neutral, received the balance of 55. Indeed, the councillor had been reelected regularly since his first election in the early 1960s. In this election he, the leader of Kamal Nilo, the traditional war-leaders, defeated Ngih Kawas, former luluai[2] and member of Kamal Kehin. In defeating Ngih Kawas, the councillor broke the hold that Kamal Kehin had maintained on colonial political office since a Kehin had been appointed the first luluai by the Germans, a hold that continued Kehin's precolonial eminence as the leading Ponam kamal .
Although the councillor had ambitions to found community businesses, just as the clubs did, he was no more successful than they. An example will illustrate this. In the 1970s he organized a government grant to build a small wooden wharf intended to make it easier to load and unload cargo and thus easier to develop the island. But as the Association members were quick to point out, the island had no cargo to export or import and no use for the wharf, which subsequently fell into the lagoon. The councillor was, however, able to get government assistance to provide some community facilities: a permanent aid post building, water tanks, and a teacher's house, though the Board of Management of the school also worked on the last. Although these were not what Ponams saw as development, because they did not provide a permanent source of income, islanders did receive construction wages.
As this indicates, the councillor's influence did not derive from his ability to bring development projects to the island or from his ability to mediate between the island and government bodies, though such mediation was one of his important jobs. Instead, it derived from his intimate knowledge of village affairs, his endless willingness to visit, his undoubted skill as a public speaker, and the fact that he participated more fully in exchanges than most people. His influence also derived from his wealth: as aid post orderly he was the only person on the island with a significant regular income. In spite of this, however, he was in no sense a bigman, a local leader of the sort common in the Highlands region of Papua New Guinea (see Sahlins 1963). He had neither clients nor the patronage to attract and hold them, and while he participated quite frequently in exchange, he was not able to manipulate the exchange system to his benefit; indeed he probably would have found such manipulation as immoral as did other Ponams (the operation of exchange is described in chapter 6).
Thus, both the village government and the organizations founded by Ponams themselves had development as their explicit aim, but none had achieved this. The few fervent Association members blamed the councillor for this, while his few fervent supporters blamed the Association; but most people blamed the split itself, arguing that quarreling made it impossible to agree on and carry out any project successfully.
The latest development project at the time of fieldwork illustrates both the political and economic problems Ponams faced:
In 1977 the government encouraged Ponam, along with several other Manus villages, to buy large diesel-powered freezers in order to sell frozen fish in Lorengau. It gave a K3000 grant and made available a K1000 loan, signed by the presidents of the Posus and Nai clubs. There were problems almost as soon as the freezer arrived on the island. Neither Ponam's reef nor islanders' fishing techniques were very productive, and fishing to fill the freezer required people give up fish that they would normally have eaten or taken to market.
The use of the freezer was a constant source of tension revolving around who actually owned it, how it should be managed, and how the proceeds should be divided, though this last question remained moot for as long as it took for islanders to sell enough fish to pay off the debt. In 1978 the freezer broke down and Ponams had to bring a repairman to the island to refill it with refrigerant gas each time they wanted to use it. Finally, low productivity and the low price of fish meant an unattractively low return, varying between K0.22 and K0.58 per man-hour after costs were deducted and money set aside for repair and eventual replacement of the freezer. Individual fishermen usually received less than this, between K2 and K3 for more than thirty hours of work, with the balance going to those involved in other ways. Once the principal on the debt was repaid, in late 1979, the freezer sat idle: no longer motivated by the need to pay off the debt, islanders were unable to contain the tension and animosity that accompanied the operation of the freezer.
In 1980 a Posus member secretly and illegitimately withdrew money from the freezer bank account to repay the interest on the loan, in order, he said, to protect Ponam's good name. In 1982, however, Posus tried to restart the freezer, arguing that if the village as a whole did not want to run the business then Posus would. This revived old arguments: about the ownership of the freezer (the clubs had signed the loan agreement, but Ponams had worked together to pay off the debt); about the unpaid repair bills; and most seriously about the insubordination of Posus, which not only had been instrumental in bringing the freezer to the island in the first place without securing the agreement of their elders, but also proposed to run the freezer as a Posus venture rather than as a common Ponam venture. While these issues were being debated in a public meeting someone slashed the freezer's gas pipe. In short, this development project was not a success.
In addition to the clubs and the island government there were two modern institutions of some importance, the church and the school. The church was not active politically or evangelically, but Catholicism was important to people, particularly in providing an explanation for illness and misfortune (see A. Carrier 1987). The church officials were the catechist, who led the Sunday services, and the church leader, the lay official who ran the practical side of church affairs and also mediated a number of personal quarrels. There was also a committee that managed church funds.
There were two school bodies, the Board of Management, which was in charge of nonacademic school business, and the Parents and Citizens Association, which mediated between parents and the school and raised funds. In 1978 and 1979 both bodies were dominated by Mataungan Association members, and the village councillor, an ex officio member of the Board of Management, went to no meetings. Consequently it was not easy for the board to persuade the councillor to assign people to school maintenance as part of the regular Monday community work assignments. The school buildings suffered: one teacher threatened to stop paying rent for a house that was in bad repair, and a few times during stormy weather school was canceled because the main school building was too frail to protect children from the wind and rain, a frailty board members blamed on the councillor. In 1980 the Association president resigned as head of the Board of Management and the school became more nonpolitical. Perhaps as a result of this, the village was able to raise most of the K20,000 it cost them to build a new community school in 1986.
Land Tenure
As islanders, Ponams occupied both land and sea. While land ownership was important for building houses and securing coconuts, which were an important part of the diet, land is not as significant for understanding Ponam economics as is the sea. Thus, here we will present only a brief description of land tenure. Marine tenure was more complex than land tenure and differed from it in important ways. For these reasons we will treat marine tenure at greater length in chapter 3, which is devoted to Ponam fishing.
Land on Ponam was individually owned, not held in trust by clans or lineages and allocated to individuals by elders, as can occur in other parts of Papua New Guinea. On Ponam there were two sorts of rights in land: usufruct rights and residual rights.
An individual could have usufruct rights in land without owning the land absolutely, and those usufruct rights themselves were absolute. That is, the Ponam who owned usufruct rights in a piece of land had the jural right to plant, harvest, or build on the land, or, indeed, do anything else with it without consulting anyone. These usufruct rights were inherited patrilineally, a man or
woman's sons having an absolute legal claim on a share of the parent's property, a claim that the parent could not void. Daughters lost all legal claim to the inheritance of their parents' property once they were married, but they could be given land by their parents or others, which they would then pass on patrilineally to their own children.
Any landowner had the right to give usufruct rights in land to anyone. The most common land grants were to daughters in cases where the parents had no male heirs, but land grants also could be made to other relatives, inside or outside the kamal , as payments for services rendered or as simple gestures of friendship. Land grants to distant kin or nonkin were unlikely except as compensation (anof ) for injury or loss of some sort, and these were of a different legal status than ordinary land grants.
The same rules of inheritance governed both land that had been inherited and land that had been received as a gift: married daughters received no land as of right. Should a man or woman who owned land die without children and without having made a specific determination of where the land should go, it would pass to the nearest male patrilineal relatives. In order of priority these were the owner's B, FBS, FFBSS, and so on. If there were no male patrilineal relatives, land could be inherited by a woman or her male heirs, such as the deceased owner's D, DS, Z, ZS, FZS, FFZSS, and so forth, though the likelihood of this was much greater if the daughter or the sister, or her descendants, lived on the land and made active efforts to secure the claim.
The individual who owned usufruct rights in land also owned residual rights, which were inherited in exactly the same way as usufruct rights. Residual rights were the rights of an owner and his or her heirs to reclaim any land that had been given as a gift, except where that gift was anof , compensation. (Land given as compensation was completely alienated from the giver and could be reacquired only if it were purchased or given back as compensation for some loss.) Thus, any Ponam who owned usufruct rights could give those rights to another, but the giver and his or her heirs maintained forever, at least in theory, the right to reclaim for any reason any land and any improvements made on it, without compensation, and this right to reclaim could not be given away.
Because anyone who received a grant of land had the right to
regrant that land to another and the right to reclaim that land at any time, many plots of land on Ponam had three or even four residual owners, and very few people lived on land that they themselves owned ab initio , without having received it from anyone else. This is illustrated by table 1, which summarizes the answers Ponams gave to our question: Who owns the site on which your house is built?
Part of the reason for the complexity of the ownership of household sites is historical. As we described already, in the nineteenth century Lahai agnates were eliminated and Tonuf agnates fled to the Ponam section of the island. Furthermore, as a part of colonial administration, islanders were encouraged to set aside a part of their land to use as a cemetery, ending their older practice of burying the dead under the house. Both of these events removed land from house-site use and obliged people to seek land other than their own patrilineal inheritance as house sites. Consequently, at the time of fieldwork the village of Ponam was built almost wholly on land claimed by one kamal , Lopaalek. Almost no islanders claimed, however, to have received their household land direct from this kamal , getting it instead from an intermediate owner. In other words, almost all household sites had been transferred more than once since the turn of the century.
The system we have described is almost certain to produce disputes over land, and such disputes were common at the time of fieldwork. It should be noted that these disputes often passed through an indirect or euphemistic phase before they came to official, public notice as disputes about land. Usually, first the disputants would simply quarrel, gossip, or try in other ways to mobilize public opinion to force their opponents to back down. Few disputes went beyond this stage, and usually at this stage the dispute was not overtly about land in any case. Rather, it was about theft, often of coconuts, a covert way of disputing who owned the tree from which the coconuts came, and thus the land on which the tree grew. Only if gossip and informal action did not work would a claimant take a case to the village court. Again, however, these cases seldom were overtly about land, partly because the village court on Ponam was not empowered to hear cases about land, which had to be referred to the land mediator and the Land Courts. Instead, cases of theft were quite common in the village
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court, and usually they were ways of disputing land ownership without formally doing so.
Land disputes were common enough, in fact, that Ponams, who often viewed such disputes with amusement and detachment as long as they were not directly involved, recognized other, nonjural factors affecting the outcome of disputes about land. These modified the formal rules of land tenure, and particularly inheritance, that we described above. We summarize the informal factors thus:
1. Sons, who have an inalienable right to a share of their father's land, may be disinherited by a strong B, FB, or FBS.
2. A usufruct owner may be prevented from making a land grant or pressured into making a land grant by others who are stronger than he or she.
3. When a land owner dies without heirs his or her land may not go to the nearest patrilineal relative, but to the strongest near relative.
4. A strong patriline may claim residual rights over land that is not its own, and thus take land away from others or prevent its repossession.
5. The more distant one's connection with the usufruct holder, the more strength is required to claim a rightful inheritance or to repossess granted land.
It is important, however, not to draw the wrong lesson from these informal factors. Ponams did not think that these were the real rules, that the formal rules were only for show. Rather, as in many areas of their life, islanders saw both as equally real. The formal set were the rules of proper behavior: people were expected to abide by them and were criticized, often harshly, for any failure to do so. On the other hand, acknowledgment of the informal factors sprang from the recognition that people are guided both by rules and by self-interest and that personal power and predilection, as much as jural rules, affect behavior in particular cases.
Generally speaking, at the time of fieldwork land could not be inherited, given away, or repossessed without a dispute of some kind, and in any dispute the strong had the long-term advantage over the weak. Three kinds of strength were important in Ponam land disputes.
The first and most legitimate was the strength of knowledge. A patrilineal group that could produce reputable elders who were good speakers and who had a facile and detailed knowledge of patriline and land history would defeat a patriline that could not. Patrilines that could not produce this sort of knowledge were reluctant to take cases to the level of formal dispute, most formally a hearing before a land mediator, and so were obliged to forego their claim.
The second important strength was the strength of numbers and persistence. Because no dispute settlement or court ruling was regarded as really final, the losing party was free to reopen the dispute any time it chose to do so. Thus, a patriline that was sufficiently wealthy and persistent, and hence probably more numerous, was able to keep up a steady stream of disputes which would ultimately wear down the weaker, opposing party.
The third important strength was illegitimate strength, the power to intimidate the opposition into surrender. Such power varied from the semilegitimate and overt (such as ostracism, which could be very effective when used by a large group against a small one) to the highly illegitimate and covert (especially sorcery). Ponams no longer used physical violence against each other in disputes over land, but used force against other villages after World War II to protect their claims to areas of the reef and sea.
Although sorcery was a covert weapon that could, in theory, be used in land disputes, and even though in the precolonial period Ponams used sorcery against each other frequently and had a widespread reputation as sorcerers, in the postwar period, islanders said, they did not use sorcery against each other, until a land dispute that arose in the early 1980s. Although Ponam was a relatively small village, there was little real pressure on land until around 1980. This was because high migration rates and relatively low population growth rates in the cohort of marriageable adults meant that the total number of resident households, and hence the total need for land within the village, grew fairly slowly and was met fairly easily by building in the unused areas within the village.
However, around 1980 a number of things happened. Postwar improvements in health care, which decreased infant mortality sharply, meant that the cohort just entering marriageable age, those in their 20s in 1980, was much larger than any previous group: 106 men and women born in 1950–1959 were alive in 1980,
compared to 55 born 1940–1949. Further, stagnation in the national economy meant that a significant proportion of this group did not migrate to jobs elsewhere: 100 percent of the men and 69 percent of the women born in the 1940s had ever migrated, compared to 83 percent and 59 percent of those born in the 1950s; 82 percent of the men and 54 percent of the women born in the 1940s were still migrant in 1980, compared to only 69 percent and 43 percent for those born in the 1950s. In the late 1970s members of this group began to marry and establish their own households, producing a growing pressure on land at a time when much of the vacant land in the village, the land most desirable for housing, had already been put into use. For instance, between 1979 and 1983 the number of resident households rose from seventy to seventy-five, a rate of about 15 percent per decade.
This situation, though difficult, might have been contained through the gradual expansion of village boundaries, though this expansion would have had to be eastward, as land to the west, and especially the northwest, of the village was a belt of scrub separating the village from the cemetery, most unsuitable for habitation.
In the event trouble arose. The precipitating factor was the decision by a resident of a nearby village to go to Ponam and take up his rights as the last agnate of a kamal that had been defunct and not recognized in sahai for many years. To make matters worse, this kamal 's land had been taken over by another, concentrated on the northwestern edge of the village hard against the belt of scrub that isolated the cemetery, a kamal that itself had been ridden with conflict. The combination was too much: the last agnate, an opponent from the Ponam kamal that had taken over the land in question, and a mainland Manus sorcerer all died, and many islanders were convinced that Ponams had called upon outside specialists to make lethal sorcery against each other. (The outside specialist was necessary because no Ponam was a sorcerer.)
Although disputes between Ponams over land were common, disputes over the sea were less so and treated with less urgency, though marine disputes between Ponam and neighboring villages were endemic and taken most seriously. To anticipate several of the points in chapter 3, internal sea disputes were fairly mild and rare because ownership of reef and sea did not preclude nonowners from fishing in the way that ownership of land precluded nonowners from building or planting, and probably also because fishing illegally in someone else's area was much harder to detect than har-
vesting, and especially planting and building, on someone else's land. Nevertheless, marine disputes between villages were analogous to land disputes among Ponams. Reef and sea that belonged to one village effectively were closed to people from other villages, which helps explain the frequency and vehemence of intervillage fishing disputes.
Division of Labor and Relations Between the Sexes
Men had two productive responsibilities, fishing and building. They fished individually with hook and line or spear gun and collectively with spear gun or nets. They also made and repaired much of their own fishing equipment. Ideally, men should have provided enough fish to feed their families as well as accumulating a surplus for market, but some left much of the work to their wives. Since women did not make canoes or do heavy construction, men could not ignore these jobs. Ponams said that a man was not an adult and should not marry until he had built a house and made a canoe and a sail, for a household could not survive without these things. A man's family helped him to build his first house during his engagement (only when a woman came to her husband hastily or without ceremony did a married couple begin life without a house of their own). After his marriage the man maintained the house himself. Married couples also needed at least one canoe and should have had two: a large one for sailing to market and a small one for punting inside the reef. A responsible man with a large family could be expected to have many more than this.
Canoes lasted between three and ten years, depending on the type of wood used, and they needed constant repairs; houses needed complete rebuilding every ten or fifteen years and they too needed frequent repair; when a man's family was expanding he needed as well additional buildings to house them. Thus, men were involved continuously in some sort of building project. In addition to these family responsibilities, men were responsible for the maintenance of their own kamal 's men's house. They cleaned it, swept the ground around it, cut firewood to be burnt there, and cooked the fish eaten there, tasks that were done by women for the dwelling houses.
Couples shared the responsibility for tending their land, for planting coconuts and clearing the underbrush. They also shared responsibility for marketing, though in fact women tended to predominate in marketing. Both men and women attended market, taking goods to sell and trade and taking their own money with which to buy food for the family.
Women had a wide range of responsibilities and claimed to work harder than men. They fished with spear gun and occasionally with hook and line and gleaned the reef for shellfish and other creatures. They cut firewood, gathered coconuts, looked after children, cooked, did laundry, sewed, and cleaned; and because most had high standards, large houses, and many children, these tasks were exacting. Also, they made valuable items of traditional dress (woven bags, skirts, armlets, beadwork, and shell money) given in exchange as well as a number of more mundane items.
Overt sanctions supported this division of labor in only a few areas: women could not make canoes, sails, or men's fishing nets, for such objects, if made by them, would not work well; women were not supposed to participate in men's collective net fishing, or the expedition was likely to be unsuccessful, but sometimes they went as canoe handlers if there were not enough men.
Other jobs were assigned by tradition to the different sexes, but only gossip and shame sanctioned the arrangements. Women were supposed to keep house and men to fish and build, and they were criticized if they did not. However, maintaining the household was more important than maintaining the sexual division of labor, and thus when it was necessary, each sex could do the other's jobs without criticism and indeed could be criticized for not doing so.
The building and repair of houses and canoes were burdensome tasks. While they may not have absolutely required the cooperative effort of people outside the immediate family, certainly the heavy work was made much lighter when it was undertaken by groups of men, and in fact any construction or repair of consequence was a cooperative venture. Thus, because these were men's jobs, men were obliged to cooperate with each other. And this involved men in the informal generation of social debt and credit as they cooperated with other men and called on other men to cooperate with them. Men, in other words, were bound to each other as men through their constant need to cooperate with each other. This
male solidarity was enhanced by the fact that collective fishing, which we describe in chapter 3, was almost entirely a male preserve. And, of course, it was enhanced by the male orientation and ideology of the kamal , the most visible and persistent element of Ponam social order.
Women's situation was very different. The nature of the tasks they undertook was not cooperative, and often the tasks were restricted to women's main area of responsibility, the household. While women often did work together in groups, these groups were primarily for companionship, each woman pursuing and responsible for her own task, albeit in the congenial company of others. Similarly, women's fishing was restricted almost entirely to spear fishing and reef gleaning, usually carried out alone or in mother-daughter pairs. And although married women were full jural members of their husbands' kamal , the rules of affinal avoidance meant that the kamal building itself effectively was closed to them. Finally, although totemic, matriarchal matrilineages were important for every individual's health and well-being, these groups were less structured than kamal and lacked the permanence and visibility of the men's house.
Women were not, however, without ways of maintaining their solidarity as women. Perhaps the most important of these was through the system of formal exchange. While the kind relationships that were celebrated in exchange predominantly linked husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, the organization and especially the operation of exchange was largely in the hands of women: preparing the gifts, gathering them together, deciding on their arrangement and distribution, all these were largely the province of women except in the most formal, and hence least common, of exchanges. Because of the frequency and importance of exchange, women regularly worked together in significant communal activities.
Although men asserted that women should be subordinate to them and although women did not take a public role in political life, they had the same legal rights as men, and men openly acknowledged as well that they had a substantial background influence. Women owned and disposed of property in their own names, earned money and spent it at their own discretion, and gave and received in exchange as men did. The place of women in marriage
highlighted their effective power. A married couple formed an independent economic unit in which each partner acted on the other's behalf in his or her absence. Thus, for example, when a man was absent or incapacitated it was his wife who managed his property and gave to and received from others on his behalf in exchange, not the man's brothers.
The influence of women was clearest in exchange, as we have already mentioned, an extremely important aspect of village life. Although corporate property-owning groups in Ponam were patrilineal, the groups that dominated exchange were the cognatic stocks, the ken si , in which women participated fully, equally, and in their own names and with their own resources. In fact, women usually dominated these exchanges. If a woman was a focal party to an exchange or distribution she organized things herself, though always in consultation with knowledgeable members of her group, themselves usually women.
The only exchange activity closed to women was the public announcement of the distribution of exchange goods, the job of a sohou , a public speaker, though this restriction was absolute only at the main accumulation, prestation, and distribution at exchanges. Lesser accumulations and distributions could be announced by women, as these were much less formal. The sohou , however, had no power of his own, unless the exchange leader was a man who elected to be his own sohou , which happened often enough. When this was not the case, there would be someone, usually a woman, telling the sohou what to say and chiding him when he made a mistake, even in the largest and most formal affinal exchanges.
Even in prestations where a man was the focal party, women were most important, though their position was only advisory. Ponams, both men and women, said that this importance derived from the fact that women spent much more of their time around their households than did men, and so were more likely to observe and participate in the small givings and gettings that renewed the web of kin relationships tying islanders to each other and that influenced how people participated in most formal exchanges. Equally, Ponams said that in many cases the person most knowledgeable about a kamal 's or a ken si 's genealogy was an older woman, and genealogical knowledge was indispensable in formal exchange.
In addition to this informal influence, women had more secure bases of authority. One of them was their role as asi to ego. "Asi " referred to what is most easily, albeit imperfectly, thought of as classificatory FZ and their daughters. More specifically, it referred to ego's FZ, FZD, FZDD, and so forth, FFBD, FFBDD, and so forth, FFFBSD, FFFBSDD, and so forth, FM, FMZD, FMZDD, and so forth, and others[3] (as this may indicate, and as we mentioned in passing already, Ponam used a Crow kinship terminology). In fact, with the exception of ego's FM, an asi was any person who was called "sister" (naropisok ) by anyone ego called "father" (tama ). Asi had the important power to bless, and somewhat more narrowly to curse, the people who called them asi . This power they shared with their male counterparts, tama. Asi had a protective role, overseeing, albeit in no very formal or rigorous way, their narohamerok (if male) and natuek (if female), those who called them asi . In return, these people were obliged to respect their asi and accede to their requests, both to secure the asi 's blessing and to avoid the curse; asi could curse to make one sterile, promiscuous, or grossly irresponsible, or bless to make one "strong": brave, powerful, clear-headed.
Asi and tama had another important role, but here it was the females who were most in evidence. On the completion of a kamal 's new men's house there was a feast, nominally for those who helped with the construction though in fact for everyone. At this feast, the asi of the members of the kamal put on traditional dress and danced around the men's house, an activity that strengthened their narohamerok in the kamal and the enterprise of which they were a part, the kamal as a whole. While it was most unlikely that all of a kamal 's asi would refuse to dance, individual asi could decline, and a thin and dispirited turnout would be a source of shame to the kamal and a cause of acrimony for months and even years to come.
The other notable source of women's power was the totemic clans, which were matriarchal as well as matrilineal, and particularly the cleansing of the pollution caused by eating a totem, most commonly a totemic fish, handling it, breathing the steam from the pot in which it was cooking or the smoke from the fire over which it was being cured, or eating from a dish or with utensils that had recently been in contact with it. Although the consequences of pollution were mild at first, if untreated it could cause
degeneration—blindness, deafness, baldness, or loss of teeth, depending upon the way the pollution occurred—and ultimately death by premature old age. Cleansing consisted of locating a senior female of the matriclan, preferably the senior female of one's own matrilineage, and having her pray to the ancestral spirits of the matriclan to undo the damage.
The powers of asi and women in the matriclans provided women with real authority, but in a sense these were just embellishments of the fundamental place of women in Ponam society at the time of fieldwork. In terms of kamal women were marginal. They were unstable creatures: born into a kamal , they were likely to marry and hence move out. But on marriage they joined a kamal alien to them, most of whose members, moreover, were forbidden to them by the rules of affinal avoidance. In this sense, then, Ponam women resembled women in many societies in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (e.g., Josephides 1985; M. Strathern 1972), never fully a member of the kamal in which they were born or of the kamal in which they died; though because Ponam was endogamous, women did not suffer because of isolation from their kin, as many Highlands women did.
However, as we have been at pains to point out, kamal were not clans in the sense that the term commonly is applied to kinship or quasi-kinship groups in Papua New Guinea. That is, while kamal were property-owning agnatic groups, they were not the only significant kinship groups in the society, as clans appear to have been the only significant kinship groups in many Highlands societies.[4] Thus, women's marginal position in kamal did not mean they were marginal to the only important groups in Ponam life. Aside from the totemic matriclans, which women dominated, they also were fully equal members of enduring, named cognatic stocks, the ken si that were the significant groups in ceremonial exchange at the time of fieldwork and that seem to have been so as well in early Manus, but that seem absent from much of the Highlands.
We suggest that it is useful to think of Ponam as a society that at the time of fieldwork had a system not of dual descent, but of trial descent. The three elements were the kamal , in which men dominated, the totemic clans, in which women dominated, and the ken si , in which the two were equal. Women's overall position in the society, then, would depend on the state of play of these
three groups and the social and material resources and processes with which they were associated. If pollution and personal substance became less important, the totemic groups would lose some of their significance and women would, presumably, suffer. If property gained in importance relative to exchange, then kamal would overshadow ken si and men would gain.
If, on the other hand, property declined in importance relative to exchange, if, that is, the economic significance of the property that kamal owned declined relative to the economic significance of wealth circulating in and acquired through exchange, then the relations of gender equality in the ken si would be more important than the male orientation of the kamal . This is what happened on Ponam Island.
2
History of Ponam Island
Ponam society had, quite obviously, a past, and we will present that past in this chapter. In doing so, however, we will not be making any arguments about historical necessity or evolutionary sequence. Rather, we undertook historical investigation and we present historical description because we think that these help cast Ponam society in relief, help show what had changed, and hence help suggest the ways different aspects of Ponam economy and society might be related. Equally, since our task is to see how colonization and articulation with the developing capitalist sphere in Papua New Guinea has affected the realm of kinship and exchange relations on Ponam Island, it is necessary for us to present a historical reconstruction of how things were and how they changed. We see history, then, as a source of data that aids understanding of social relationships, rather than as a causal force in its own right. The relationships that concern us particularly are those between the production of wealth and the organization of kinship and exchange.
The history we present in this chapter is, thus, history of a particular sort with a particular purpose. It is essentially a colonial history, an attempt to see what were the main ways that colonization appeared and developed in the Admiralty Islands. As this indicates, what we present is no sort of ethnohistory, no recitation of the way Ponams presented their past to themselves, but is instead the result of our own desire to answer specific questions that were part of our own research project.
Historical Sources
Although we present a history of the Admiralty Islands in this chapter, our construction of that history is, and seems likely to have to remain, conjectural in part. While there is historical infor-
mation of some depth and quality for the region, it seems unlikely that we ever will be able to command the sort of historical resources that have been displayed in Richard Salisbury's presentation of Tolai history (1970) or Peter Lawrence's discussion of the history of the Rai Coast of Madang (1964).
Our basic problem, of course, is that precolonial Manus is inaccessible. If we take "precolonial" to mean "before substantial colonial influence," rather than "before formal colonization," we are talking about events no less than some eighty-five years ago, and perhaps no less than a century ago. Our oldest informant was born around 1910, so even he was able to report only the stories he heard from the members of his parents' generation; for most Ponam adults these are the events of the grandparental generation and before; thus, the number of available Ponam informants is a far cry from the luxuriant supply of eyewitnesses that exists in many parts of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Written sources are somewhat more reliable than this sort of thirdhand oral testimony, or at least we feel more comfortable assessing their reliability and discounting their likely biases. Here too, however, the pickings are relatively slim. The only nineteenth-century sources worth much are German company and official correspondence, analyzed in detail by V. E. King (1978), and the papers coming out of the Challenger visit in 1875 (esp. Moseley 1876–1877). However, these are good for little more than isolated facts: we learned, for instance, that Ponams had enough contact with Europeans around the turn of the century to acquire a reputation as sharp traders. Richard Parkinson spent many years in the Bismarck archipelago before 1900, including the Admiralty Islands, and because he was more of a social observer than the more ephemeral German scribblers, his material is useful for getting a glimpse of life in early Manus. The German South Seas expedition passed through about 1910, but the anthropologists attached to it were more concerned with the minutiae of material culture than social structure or regional economic structure. The last of these relatively early sources was the missions that entered the area, though we hestiate over the adjective "early," because the first mission to establish itself, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC), did not arrive until 1913.
Government reports have been only somewhat useful. The Ger-
man and later Australian Annual Reports usually are too general to be of much use, Manus being as insignificant a backwater then as it was at the time of fieldwork. The more detailed Australian patrol reports for Manus, however, seem to have disappeared in the bombardment of Rabaul in World War II, though there are rumors that returning Australian officials made bonfires of what was left. However these records may have disappeared, disappear they did.
The best early source, though here "early" clearly is a misnomer, comes from 1928, when Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune went to Pere village, and they provide the first real description of life in a Manus society. But even here there are problems. First, Mead and Fortune did not enter the field until well after pacification was complete. Second, Mead at least was much more willing to report generalizations than the facts on which she based them. Third, both she and Fortune were in southeast Manus, also the place where Parkinson and most of the Germans spent their time, so that the bulk of Manus remained a large blank.
So, prior to World War II our sources are limited: Mead and Fortune, aided a bit by Parkinson and the Germans, and some annual reports. This lack of information required us to speculate to fill the gaps, though the sorts of issues that concern us in this book meant there were relatively few gaps. Had our concern been, for instance, symbolism or myth we would have been in an unenviable position. We filled our gaps by starting with what we knew of postwar Manus. From this we tried to figure out the general trajectory of Manus economic and social history for the last forty years or so: the nature of the changes and the nature of the forces that had been responsible for them. These were straightforward enough: a growing dependence on remittances and a deterioration of local trade, brought about in Ponam's case by the increased fishing of the coastal villagers opposite them on the mainland who formerly had lived well inland. We then projected this general trajectory backwards to 1928 and used it to give us a framework through which we could approach Mead and Fortune's work. This helped us to see how kinship and social structure related to economics at that time in a different way than they did during the period of our fieldwork. We then projected further back, to Parkinson and the German material, though this was thin enough that
all we could do was see to what degree it accorded with or contradicted the model we were developing. We could not really use it to elaborate the model much.
It was only at this stage, when we had a fairly complete model, that we began to worry very much about what Ponams had to say about their own distant past. Further, we were concerned largely to get them to address specific issues that our own analysis had suggested were important, rather than to have them present their own construction of the past. In other words, our historical model led us to define certain issues as important, and the questions we asked Ponams were designed first to see if the general model was correct, and second to fill in the important areas in which we wanted more information.
Throughout the later chapters of the book, which deal with the substantive aspects of Ponam economic life, we introduce historical discussions where we think they will be useful for understanding the topics we address. By their very nature, however, those discussions are fragmented. Our purpose in the present chapter is to lay out a systematic history, a background that provides an overall context for the later historical discussion, though inevitably some of those discussions will repeat information presented in this chapter. Because we mean this chapter to provide a general background for the rest of the book, it revolves around the areas that are central to the main themes we pursue later: production of wealth, circulation of wealth, kinship, and ceremonial exchange, their social correlates and the impact colonization had on them.
The Economy of Early Colonial Manus
We begin by describing the system of production, circulation, kinship, and exchange in early colonial Manus, which we think is probably broadly similar to late precolonial Manus, especially in the spheres of production and circulation. We will attend exclusively to the internal economy of early Manus, for unlike many of the regional economic systems in precolonial Melanesia, Manus was rather sharply bounded, being separated from neighboring areas in the Bismarck Archipelago by substantial stretches of open sea.
The region was not, of course, totally isolated. Nonetheless, the trade between Manus and other areas of Melanesia appears to have had no substantial impact on the region, and we ignore it here.
As will be clear, the Manus regional economy was characterized by an extensive division of production within the region and a sophisticated system of circulation that distributed local products throughout the region. Manus, then, was similar to a number of societies in coastal and island Melanesia, where complex systems of production and circulation also existed. The best-reported of these are the Vitiaz Straits trade system (Harding 1967), the system of coastwise and inland trade around Vunamami (Salisbury 1970), and the kula trade in the Milne Bay area (e.g., Malinowski 1922), though this is more famous for its system of circulation of exchange valuables. Although there was some specialized production in the inland Highlands area of Papua New Guinea, this was not developed extensively, and in this region longer-distance trade and circulation seem to have centered around shell valuables (Hughes 1977).
As we said in chapter 1, Manus consists of a relatively large mainland, the adjacent islands of Manus and Los Negros, circled by a number of offshore islands of varying sorts. Before extensive colonial penetration the region had an integrated economic system based on local specialization in the production of goods. There were two main types of specialization,[1] ecological and social. Ecologically the region was differentiated sharply. At one pole were a number of villages built in lagoons or on small infertile islands, whose residents specialized in transport and marine products. At the other pole were villages of mainland Manus, with extensive land resources but in most cases no access to the sea. In between were people from the large, high islands off the south coast who had both gardens and reefs. In addition, a few areas had natural resources of special worth: for instance Lou Island had obsidian, Mbuke and certain mainland areas had pottery clay, and some of the small north coast islands had beds of Imbricaria punctata , the basis of shell money.
This basic ecological division into agricultural and marine societies had an important social underpinning, the relatively continuous warfare between mainland groups and their island and offshore counterparts, especially when either group tried to colonize
the coastal strip. This made it more difficult for any group to have access to both soil and sea, though some did (e.g., Kuluah 1977), so helping maintain the division of production.
Ecological specialization was supplemented by three sorts of social specialization. First is what we call patents, whereby patrilineages or whole villages owned the right to manufacture a specialty or to exploit certain natural resources. Generally these rights were recognized by other communities, but they could be challenged or protected by force. Second is trade monopolies, in which a community controlled trade in a raw material and hence had a de facto manufacturing monopoly. Thus the people of Ahus Island off the north coast had a trade monopoly on pottery clay from a site owned by a mainland group, which gave them an effective monopoly on the north coast production of pots. The third was informal specialization: some individuals or groups were known to be better and more skilled producers of certain goods than others.
Manus, then, was a region in which there was extensive control over certain sources of wealth. Different villages and agnatic groups controlled different productive resources, techniques, and trade routes. There was no overarching regional institution that would recognize and enforce this control, and it seems likely that control was threatened, and had to be defended, fairly often. However, the regional ideology of kinship and patrilineal descent played a significant role in legitimating claims to control over resources and techniques and access to them. Thus, while control may have been tenuous at times, there also was a framework by means of which it was recognized and made legitimate. Here, then, production and kinship meet, as they probably have done throughout Manus history.
As the preceding discussion suggests, many different goods were the subject of specialized production, though both written sources (esp. Mead 1930, 1963 [1930]; Parkinson 1907; Schwartz 1963) and our own informants suggest that different places specialized in different goods and services at different times. These sources indicate that many different sorts of things were local specialties, including: bananas, beds, canoes, coconuts, coconut oil, combs, dancing poles, dishes, dog's teeth, gourds, lime, nets, obsidian, oil containers, pigs, pots, sails, sea transport, shell
money, taro, turtles, war charms, woodwork, and yams. As far as we know, these goods and services, as well as others that were produced or provided more widely, moved or were used throughout the region and were important in every community. This movement entailed an elaborate system of circulation which helped integrate the region into a single complex economic unit. There were three types of circulation: commercial exchange, the direct exchange of goods at preestablished rough prices or equivalents between people who were not necessarily kin; ceremonial exchange, the exchange of gifts between mutually obligated kin as part of the celebration of social events; and trade partnerships, exchange between trade partners or kawas , which falls somewhere between commercial and ceremonial exchange. (We discuss these at greater length in chapters 4 and 6.)
Commercial exchange took place most frequently at the markets located around the coast of the main island, organized and overseen usually by an island or offshore village together with a mainland village, a practice that was rare in early Papua New Guinea, though Salisbury (1970) says it existed in Vunamami. Within the market anyone was free to do business with anyone else. Ponams remembered separate markets with three groups of mainlanders; each was held every three or four days, so there was a market somewhere almost every day. Island seafood and mainland vegetables were the most important goods, but raw materials and manufactures could be traded as well. While marketers and traders often demanded a particular item in return for their own goods, equally, within the market, and indeed everywhere, anything could be exchanged for anything else without prejudice: there appear to have been no formal spheres of exchange (Mead 1930, 122, 130). Supplementing the market trade was a certain amount of direct exchange or purchase carried on at the same time but outside the marketplace, either between relatives or between unrelated people mediated by a common relative. Unlike the market trade, this predominantly was for manufactured goods and raw materials.
In addition to commercial exchange and overwhelming it in ideological importance was ceremonial exchange, the most spectacular form of which Ponams and many others called lapan : prestigious exchanges between the leaders (lapan ) of different commu-
nities, which helped integrate the region socially and economically. Formerly the lapan were a hereditary elite, with individuals and patrilineal groups having the status, and with men passing it on to their children. According to Ponams the primary gift given by the sponsoring village was its main specialist product, so that, for example, Ponam held shell money[2]lapan , Ahus had pot lapan , and Andra had fish lapan . In addition to the major gift-giving and accompanying ceremony that made lapan the preeminent political and ceremonial event, there was the opportunity for trade and commerce generally. Ponams who had seen some of the last lapan described them as being like the Provincial Show, drawing people together from all over Manus for the display of skill and wealth and for the exchange and sale of goods.
The other important form of ceremonial exchange was between affines. Margaret Mead (esp. 1934) has described affinal exchange in the Titan-speaking areas of southeast Manus in the late 1920s. The basic features of her account do not differ significantly from what Ponams told us, and we think her description is generally valid throughout the region. Affinal exchange consisted of an extended series of payments from the husband's parents and siblings to the wife's parents and siblings, and the reverse. The initial exchange took place at betrothal, followed by brideprice, and exchanges at marriage, first pregnancy, the maturity of the marriage, and the death of each spouse. Furthermore, affinal exchanges also took place in association with the totemic life-crisis rituals associated with marriage, childbirth, death, and the termination of mourning, as well as with the various rituals of the life crises of the children of the marriage. Certainly not all of these exchanges were made for every marriage, but many, even most, took place for most marriages, a system that produced a fairly high level of exchange activity.
Affinal exchange was not important only because it created and legitimated social identity and social relations. It was important also because these exchanges served to integrate different communities, though less directly than did the lapan exchanges. Even though Ponam, Pere, and apparently all Manus villages, were primarily endogamous (Schwartz 1963, 62), affinal exchange necessarily involved intervillage trade, because many of the gifts were specialist goods that had to be imported, and because these ex-
changes required more than a single person or his immediate kin could accumulate alone. For both reasons people had to draw on trade partners in other villages.
Trade partners, kawas , relatives in other villages, were used not only for special occasions, but also to help provide basic foodstuffs and other necessities of daily living. As Ponams remembered it, trade partners could sell goods to each other or exchange them directly, but kawas trade also routinely involved long-term, large-scale obligations: a Ponam who wanted sago for a large exchange could present a trade partner with a thousand fish or a belt of shell money a year or more in advance. By having trade partners in different regions of Manus an individual could trade for the products of those regions. In fact, trade partners made travel itself possible, as often it was unsafe to visit where one did not have kin.
As this suggests, a certain amount of intergroup marriage, the basis of the trade relationship, was necessary for the circulation of goods through the region, in spite of the common pattern of village endogamy. While a certain number of exogamous marriages were made normally, a significant number resulted from the capture of women in warfare, for some of whom a subsequent brideprice payment was made. Genealogies of precolonial Ponam show, for instance, that capture marriage was not unusual. Thus, warfare not only helped to differentiate Manus people ecologically, it also helped provide the kinship links between them. However the marriages took place, Ponams married into villages all along the north Manus coast, though not into the south coast until this century, and generally they married people from other offshore islands, rather than from mainland Manus.
Thus, early Manus consisted of a number of separate and often antagonistic village societies in an integrated system of production and circulation. This rested on socially and ecologically based control over production specializations, which was maintained from time to time by force. This division of labor supported and was supported by an extensive system of commercial and ceremonial circulation, itself largely the consequence of marriage, either intravillage marriage, the occasion of affinal exchange, or intervillage marriage, the genealogical basis of kawas trade. The whole system was capped by lapan exchanges, competitive intervillage affairs.
From what we have said, it should be clear that kinship and
marriage played a crucial role in early Manus. We noted that the basis of the legitimation of control over productive resources, techniques, and trade routes was descent, so that production and kinship were closely linked. Likewise, marriage was important, both because it created the bonds of affinity that allowed people to gain access to resources, techniques, and trade routes they themselves did not control, and because it was the reason for affinal exchange, and hence indirectly an important motive for the circulation of goods within the region. Kinship, marriage, and economics came together in affinal exchange, which is important for our understanding both of early Manus and of the effects of colonization.
Affinal Exchange in Early Colonial Manus
We said that affinal exchange played an important part in regional circulation in early colonial Manus. However, affinal exchange was the nexus of other forces which made it even more important. As we said, legitimate control of important aspects of the economy was based on descent constructs. This means that the affinal links solidified in affinal exchange were important for securing access to resources, techniques, and trade routes controlled by others. Likewise, the sheer amount of wealth required to mount an important affinal exchange (especially a brideprice, paid while the husband-to-be was still quite young) created an opportunity for entrepreneurial financiers to play a role. Indeed, to some extent affinal exchange provided the opportunity to negotiate affinity and descent itself and thus the resources to which they gave legitimate access. So it is that around the time of colonization affinal exchange was the place where production, circulation, descent, and affinity all met. The rules and practices of affinal exchange provided a fertile ground for entrepreneurs, offering them both the motive and opportunity for manipulation. This is what happened, and we need to explain how this worked.
At colonization Manus was characterized by pronounced social inequality, with the lapan , the bigmen, gaining their power in a number of different ways, through their manipulation of the economic system. The most obvious was through the control of re-
sources and production. Also, they gained power through debt manipulation in the exchange system. And finally they gained power through commercial activity, mediated by trade partnerships, though this appears to have been more important for the Titans than for many other groups (Mead 1930). Affinal exchange, and marriage more generally, was important in all three of these sources of bigmen's power, illustrating the links between production, circulation, exchange, and kinship. The human link between these different realms was the bigmen, who sought control over each realm to secure control over the others.
Although many people contributed to an exchange, the extensive set of affinal obligations, and particularly brideprice, could only be met by men with a reasonable amount of wealth. Mead (1934) says that while a certain proportion of moderately wealthy Pere men were able to arrange these payments themselves, many were unable to do so, and payments were made on their behalf by their patron, a bigman or aspiring bigman to whom they became indebted. Any man who arranged and financed the marriage of a young man or woman became adoptive father to that person, giving him responsibility for and control over the exchange transaction. Although adoption was extensive, it was not random. Apparently it occurred mostly in just a few circumstances. One was following the death of the father of either the younger siblings or other close relatives of the adopter or his wife. Also important were the adopting of refugees and captives from other villages, of the children of people who were already dependents of the adopter, and of the adopter's spouse's children by previous marriage.
By judicious adoption, then, a bigman could gain control over affinal payments received by his "daughter," thereby increasing his wealth. Equally, he could become responsible for an affinal payment made for his "son," or a return gift made for his "daughter," so putting these people in his debt. This debt put the bigman in a position to command the labor of the people whose affinal payments he financed. Reo Fortune (1935) described how this indebtedness was reinforced by the religious system, the ancestral ghosts who monitored their descendents' behavior and punished those who did not honor their debts. And he notes that this ghostly power extended over adoptive, as well as genealogical, descendents.
Adoption, then, was closely linked to affinal exchange, debt manipulation, and control over labor, and bigmen sought to adopt children before their betrothal and to arrange the marriages of their dependents with the dependents of other bigmen in ways that would further their power and prestige. While extensive adoption was, thus, socially motivated, it is important to note that it had a demographic basis as well. Mead says (1963 [1930], 86) that because of disease and warfare almost no men in early Manus were likely to live long enough to see their own children's marriages, even though most marriages were between couples in their teens, with childbirth following soon after.
Thus, to a substantial degree practical kinship, marriage, and marriage exchange were shaped by the system of adoption and the arrangement and finance of marriages by bigmen. Coupled with this, and reflecting the significance of marriage, was a great emphasis on female virginity, sexual repression, and extreme affinal avoidance (cf. Mead 1963 [1930]).
As we pointed out, the nature of these affinal exchanges was shaped by the ways the system of kinship and exchange meshed with the system of production. Particularly, it was through their influence on and control over the system of kinship and exchange that the bigmen sought to gain control over central elements of the economic system: over production itself and over the commercial activities that sprang from the nature of the division of productive labor in Manus. It was through control of these aspects that the bigmen were able to appropriate wealth produced by the labor of others and so gain the wherewithal to maintain their dominance.
Mead points out that a man whose marriage payments were financed by a bigman was required to work for him to pay off the debt: to catch fish for him, market for him, and visit his trade partners with goods. The dependent in these activities produced wealth, all or part of which was appropriated by the bigman and used to finance further marriage payments, improve his position relative to other bigmen, and so expand his wealth and power. Equally, of course, marriage provided the affinal links that allowed a bigman access to productive resources and techniques owned by others. Likewise, a carefully arranged marriage could allow a bigman to tie himself into trade partnerships with people in other villages and so gain access to the goods there available, as well as
the profits to be gained from trading in them, while assigning much of the work involved in trade and transport to those whose marriages he financed. Entrepreneurial bigmen, then, could and did use affinal exchange to circumvent and manipulate the system of descent-based control over important aspects of economic life in early Manus and so gain access to wealth-production that would otherwise be denied to them.
Domination by bigmen extended over women as well. During childhood and the first stages of marriage, a woman's greatest obligation was to her "father." However, during childbirth and the months immediately after, she was looked after by her "brother," who would carry out certain exchanges for her. Just as whoever arranged a woman's marriage became her father, so whoever arranged these childbirth exchanges became her brother, and bigmen financed many of these as well (Mead 1934, 258–259). In return for this, the women gave their "brothers" shell money and other lesser valuables they produced.
It appears, then, that the size of affinal obligations and the rules of adoption and affinal exchange gave bigmen the opportunity to manipulate the system of kinship and exchange, and the system of descent-based legitimate control of sources of wealth gave them the motive to do so. Put most simply, manipulation of affinal exchanges gave bigmen control over labor and access to trade in specialist goods. They took advantage of these things to create the wealth that allowed them to adopt more children and finance further exchanges.
We want now to show how colonization affected the substance of this system by undercutting its economic supporting structure.
Early Colonial History
The earliest recorded European contact with the main part of Manus was probably by Menezes in 1527 (Hughes 1977, 19), and the first significant contact probably was around the midnineteenth century, through whalers active in the Bismarck Archipelago. Contact intensified after 1870, when the area became a commercial source of pearlshell, tortoiseshell, and beche-de-mer, though it does not seem to have been a significant source of labor in the nineteenth century (Firth 1973, 171–173). By the time of German
annexation in 1884, most Manus were familiar with European goods, if not with Europeans themselves. Iron tools were in use by 1875 on the relatively isolated northwest coast (Moseley 1876–1877, 412), and after the turn of the century Parkinson (1907, 298) saw only metal tools in the region.
At the time of our fieldwork the first non-Melanesian that Ponams could remember was Isokide Komine, who began working in the Bismarck Archipelago in 1902 (Biskup 1970, 103). He was the leading Japanese trader in German New Guinea, and Ponams quickly established friendly relations with him. Most Manus, however, did not have good relations with outsiders during this period. They looted vessels and murdered their crews and lured sound ships to ambush with the same end, attacked trading stations, looted them, and killed whites and their laborers (Sack & Clark 1979). Such attacks usually were made by Titan-speakers, and while they were most exposed to European penetration, it seems likely that in part these attacks were an effort to maintain their traditional domination of local maritime trade in the face of colonization (King 1978, 78). Sporadic German punitive raids were not very successful, and Manus had a bad reputation among Europeans.
Warfare among Manus people seems to have increased as well in the late precolonial and early colonial periods. Groups that were able to capture guns frequently set off raiding, and Ponams were caught up in this. In 1900 they were invaded by an armed group of southern Manus, who swept up around eastern Manus and along the chain of islands off the northeast and north-central coast. Likewise, at about this time Ponams were involved in renewed fighting with their mainland market partners, the Tulu people, though they did not use guns. Ponams said that when Komine's ship wrecked on the north Ponam reef he was carrying guns to Sori Islanders, who were planning to use them to attack Ponam from the west, though German reports do not indicate that Komine was a gunrunner.
If the Germans found it difficult to pacify Manus, largely this was because there were so few Europeans in the area. Continuous European presence began around 1898 with the establishment of a trading station on Kumuli, off southeast Manus. It had two resident agents of the German traders Hernsheim and Company (King 1978, 48; see also Hempenstall 1978, 153). By 1902 there were only
seven resident expatriates (Thompson nd, 6), and the German administration recognized the need for a permanent, well-equipped station in the area (Sack & Clark 1979, 244). Partly as a result of increasing demand for labor, the Germans finally established a permanent station in Lorengau in 1911, and in 1913 claimed control over coastal and island Manus (Firth 1976, 55). In 1915 the new Australian colonial establishment was fourteen white and thirty-three New Guinean police, and as late as 1917 colonial officials in Lorengau were "still involved in attempts to protect Manus coastal villagers against raiders from inland" (Rowley 1958, 40). In 1928 there were only about two dozen whites in Lorengau (Mead 1977, 63), and even at the outbreak of World War II there were only about fifty whites in Lorengau (Jackson 1976, 388).
Although there was no large colonial establishment in the region, economic penetration was taking place. In 1906 people in eastern Manus began to sign labor contracts. In 1908 44 Manus signed such contracts, rising to 823 in 1913 (Firth 1973, 173). In 1906 Hernsheim and Company added six plantations (King 1978, 119) to the two already owned (Sack & Clark 1979, 265). Continuing growth in labor recruiting and plantations was the local manifestation of a tremendous growth in both in German New Guinea between 1900 and 1914, consequent on the recovery and boom in world copra prices after the turn of the century.
These changes affected Ponam. Not long after 1906, Komine, acting for Hernsheim and Company, bought the uninhabited eastern two-thirds of the island and its accompanying reef. He used the land for a plantation and permitted islanders to fish in company waters as long as they sold any trochus they gathered to him. Also, Ponams say that just about all men who became adults after the arrival of Komine signed at least one three-year labor contract, usually for work outside the region. Indeed, the plantations in Manus generally used labor from elsewhere. Like most Manus, Ponams disliked plantation labor, seeking instead work as domestics, boatmen, and best of all policemen, and though many signed initial contracts as laborers, those who could not get better work returned home rather than sign on again.
Although German control was established through force in many areas of Manus, the administrative presence was, apart from labor recruiting, relatively mild after pacification. Missionaries had a greater impact. Methodists and Wesleyans made forays into
Manus at the beginning of the century, but set up no permanent missions (King 1978, 7–8). The first to settle in Manus were the rich German Catholic order, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC) (see Hempenstall 1975). In 1913 they went to Papitalai in eastern Manus but had no success. Subsequently, in 1916 they moved to Bundralis on the north-central coast opposite Ponam (Kelly nd, 16). (Lutherans and Seventh Day Adventists had established themselves by the 1930s [Schwartz 1962, 223].)
At Bundralis the MSC opened a vernacular school in 1918. By 1923 the growing number and linguistic diversity of students forced a shift to Pidgin for teaching and religious work. Catholicism, the dominant religion in north-central Manus, had more impact than German political control. The missionaries forbade magic and sorcery, thereby helping to undercut at least some of the punitive power of Ponam's lapan; banned lapan exchanges—the last Ponam one was around 1924 and the last nearby was on Andra a year later; and required monogamy, which Ponams took to forbid not only polygamy, but also divorce or remarriage after the death of a spouse.
World War I missed the Admiralties. The incoming Australians recognized the village luluais or headmen appointed by the Germans and permitted resident German missionaries to remain, and as far as Ponams remember they continued the German administrative practices (cf. Rowley 1958, 50). However, the Hernsheim and Company plantations were seized and sold to Australian ex-servicemen. In the mid-1920s a man named McEvoy bought the Komine plantation and several others around Manus (Patrol Report February 1949) (hereinafter, Patrol Report will be designated by "PR"). Like Komine, he seems to have got on well with people but had little contact with them.
By the early 1920s almost the entire region had come under full Australian control. While the Germans had not tried to do much more than pacify the area, the Australians slowly began to build a structure of administration and control: they introduced health programs, regular censuses and patrols, the adjudication of disputes, and so forth. Like the administrative presence in Lorengau, however, these were less important than the other forces colonization had set in motion, forces that were to alter Manus radically, if perhaps not very visibly.
The fundamental change was in the economy, for as a result of
colonization, Manus ceased to be an independent system of interdependent villages tied together by a complex division of production and system of circulation. Instead it became a dependent outlier of the main Papua New Guinea economy and through it the Australian economy, consisting of a relatively structureless agglomeration of villages relying less and less on each other to acquire the means of survival, and more and more on remittances sent back to Manus by migrant workers. The old articulated system of locality, production, kinship, and circulation was replaced as the location of the significant sources of wealth moved out of the region and out of the control of village societies. As a result villages shifted their orientation away from each other and toward the outside world and shifted their economies away from specialist production and exchange and toward remittance and consumption. The most important aspects of colonization leading in this direction were the imposition of colonial peace, labor recruiting, and establishing missions,[3] and we will discuss these aspects in turn.
The imposition of colonial peace meant that force could not be used to preserve the ecological and social division of production, though the disappearance of much local manufacturing by midcentury reduced the significance of this. Moreover, in order to make mission and administrative work easier, groups were encouraged to settle on the coastal strip, which many inland and a few island villages did, anxious to have access to both soil and sea. Colonial peace, then, began to undercut the precolonial division of production that underlay much of the integration of the region. This process did not, however, occur quickly. Aerial photographs of areas of the Manus mainland to the west of Ponam taken in the early 1940s show that villagers there were still gardening and living well inland.
While the ending of local warfare released a large amount of time for other activities, labor migration drained productive men away from the region. Between 1905 and 1913 Manus people signed 2321 labor contracts (King 1978, 120). In 1921–1922, 2224 Manus people were employed, out of a total population of 11,622 (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia 1922, 54). If we assume that all migrants were active males, then not only were migrants 19 percent of the total population, they were 38 percent of the males (males = one-half of population), and almost 55 percent of
the active males (active males = two-thirds of males), leading to a significant decrease in the ratio of producers to dependents. Particularly on Ponam this led to a shift in the sexual division of labor, facilitated by the increased security resulting from colonial peace, as women began to travel further afield, participate more widely and directly in all forms of exchange, and take on productive activities previously reserved for men. This gave women greater effective control over the distribution of what they produced than had been possible before, when they were more directly under the control of their fathers, patrons, and husbands.
We speculate that the remaining producers had to devote more of their energies to the production of food or goods to be exchanged for food and less on the manufacture and trade of luxury goods. For example, it appears that as World War II approached Ponams decreased their trade with more distant parts of Manus but maintained their staples trade with adjacent mainland people, with whom they exchanged fish for starch and raw materials. Also, they reduced the manufacture of shell money, in part, they said, because women's labor was needed for subsistence production. Likewise, Mead (1963 [1930], 231) indicates that by the late 1920s in southeast Manus the labor devoted to carved beds and bowls was dropping. This helped break up the region's integrated production and exchange system, replacing it with a collection of pairs of villages—starch and fish producers—trading in essential foodstuffs and raw materials with each other, but trading less and less with other villages. (Remember that inland villages moving to the coast under colonial peace were relatively slow to take up fishing for themselves.) Of course, this shift in trade was facilitated by the manufactured goods workers brought back with them, which replaced Manus manufactures.
The third important colonial introduction was missions. As we noted, they opposed lapan exchanges and thus weakened one of the institutions helping to integrate the region economically, while at least for Ponams their attacks on sorcery and magic served to undercut the power of bigmen. More important, however, were the schools they started. Their immediate effect may have been slight, though it seems likely that basic literacy in Pidgin, which Ponams say the MSC school provided, helped people get jobs outside the plantation sector. More important, the schools helped
establish a taste for education and a belief in the benefits of formal schooling. Certainly Ponams and people from other north-central villages began early to go to school at Bundralis.
As should be clear, colonial peace, labor migration, and mission activity all set up conditions for the destruction of an integrated, independent Manus regional economy. The end of warfare, the loss of labor power to paying jobs, the importation of Western manufactures, and the settlement of people on the coast were incompatible with the extensive social and ecological division of production and the extensive system of ceremonial and market exchanges through which villages converted their specialty items into what they needed to live. While the structure of the descent-based system of control over economic resources and productive activities remained intact, ownership meant less, both absolutely and relatively. The decay of local manufacturing and the old ecological divisions meant that ownership of resources, techniques, and trade routes was less rewarding.
The signs of decay were appearing more frequently, but even so, Schwartz is essentially correct in concluding (1963, 87–88) that this system survived the interwar years. Prior to World War II the bulk of Manus people continued to produce and exchange goods with other Manus people in Manus institutions. The coming war caused the final destruction of the Manus regional system, though paradoxically other consequences of the war meant that many Manus people, Ponams among them, did not realize what they had lost until the late 1950s.
Reorientation and Dependence
The Japanese captured Manus peacefully in 1942 and seem to have been liked by people, at least during the early period of occupation. They had relatively little effect on the economy, for they were few and they imported most of their supplies. Ponams said, however, that they seized large numbers of pigs without compensation, so reducing wealth in the region and thus weakening the exchange system. Equally, they regulated the coastal markets, reinforcing traditional exchange rates and at least along the north coast imposing production quotas. This policy inhibited efforts to adjust either supply or exchange rates to bring them into line with the changing
situations of market producers, though it must be said that markets were slow to adjust after the war as well.
The allied American and Australian invasion of Manus occurred in February 1944, and fighting, largely in the eastern and most heavily populated part of the region, generally had ceased by June. After the recapture of Manus the region was flooded with soldiers, bases, ships, and supplies, as Manus was used for the bombardment of Rabaul and for assaults on islands closer to Japan, notably the Philippines. Of the estimated 14,000 Manus in 1944, 5,000 were supported directly by the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) (Creamer 1948, 11), and it is certain that thousands more received unofficial support. Not only this, but after the war the military left much of its material behind (Schwartz 1962, 230). This led to a shift in trade patterns, as those villages with access to surplus war equipment used it as trade goods, and generally this infusion of wealth masked the rapid deterioration of the Manus productive system. While traditional activities continued, they depended increasingly on wealth acquired outside the traditional economy. Thus, by the early 1950s brideprice payments along the northeast coast included substantial quantities of cash goods and money (£A50 or so) (PR 3-52/53).
Local manufacturing had been fading and the war completed the process. Apparently the last manufacture of consequence was the Ahus pottery, which shut down around 1952 (PR 3-52/53). Quite simply, people saw Western manufactures as better than local equivalents and adopted them. Also, we think Western manufactures were appealing because they could be acquired outside of trade relationships, which, remember, were tense relationships. While cash goods did enter the kawas system, people could get them at stores in their own villages, or have them sent, or paid for, by family members working elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, and thus avoid the inequalities and tensions inherent in gift exchange relationships with more distant kin. This furthered a reorientation away from other Manus people and toward the outside world.
The war had more than just an economic impact. Ponams told many stories of how American soldiers treated them much better than Australians had done before the war. This exposure, plus the fact that many Manus people had occupied positions of power and
authority in wartime, led to dissatisfaction, especially among young men, with the old ways. This was made strikingly apparent in August 1946, when two deputations of Manus men, including the paramount lulai and coming from both eastern and western Manus, approached the commander of the United States naval base at Lorengau and asked that Americans assume control of Manus, as the Australians had done nothing for them.
The Australian officials sent to investigate and to meet with dissatisfied Manus people saw two reasons for the request. One was that there was a growing desire for "political self-determination," which could be countered only with "time and a vigorous programme of native administration designed to give practical effect as quickly as possible to the expressed intention of the Government" (Melrose 1946). The second was a dissatisfaction among returning young men, including those in north-central and northwest Manus villages, with "the high bride price, and the holding of big singsings [ceremonial feasts] at which large quantities of food were eaten and given away." Some village leaders suggested reducing brideprice to a single payment, not to exceed £A10 (Jones 1947). Although it was reported that this limit had been accepted all along the north coast, it was not kept. As we mentioned previously, by the early 1950s large brideprice payments had resumed, if, indeed, they ever really ceased in northern Manus. In the southeast, however, these two sides of the desire to become modern—self-determination and dismantling the old exchange system—took a more durable and spectacular form, the Paliau New Way movement, which we discuss below.
Ponam's history around this time illustrates the disruption and prosperity brought by the war and the fragility of the old Manus economic institutions. At the time of the Allied invasion in February 1944, Ponams fled to the hills of mainland Manus to avoid the fighting, and shortly after their return in early 1944 the United States Navy took over Ponam for an air base (Anonymous 1947) and moved islanders to Andra, the next island eastward. While there they got rations from the military and continued to frequent the base on Ponam, and a number took jobs as ANGAU laborers: in 1944, thirty-two Ponam men were on the ANGAU rolls (PR 2-44/45). After their return home in 1946 they found themselves confronted with a large quantity of surplus military goods: timber, furniture, sheet metal, tools, and utensils.
By August 1944 markets generally had reopened after the fighting (PR 2-44/45), and Ponams say they had barter markets at two coastal sites while they were on Andra. The fragile nature of the economic system is apparent in the fact that around 1946 these markets shut again, because they were unsatisfactory to all concerned, and partly because the colonial administration persuaded people from the coastal villages of Tulu and Lehewua to turn sago stands over to Ponams, though islanders never made much use of them. Also, Ponams traded with Australian and American military personnel at the growing cash market at the military headquarters at Indrim on the northeast Manus coast.
After their return home in 1946 Ponams began to face the problem of life without American and ANGAU support. As their markets were closed, they got most of their starch from trade partners with whom they began to trade cash and cash goods, reflecting both the increased desire for imported goods and the decreasing mainland demand for island fish. This meant that if islanders were to get the starch they needed they had to have a regular source of money. Like many people, Ponams got jobs around Manus, first building, then servicing, and finally tearing down military installations. In late 1952 fourteen Ponams were away from the island working (PR 6-52/53). Like some, but unlike many, Ponams also had access to leftover military supplies, and very quickly these entered the kawas trade.
Around 1951 Ponams formally gave up their mainland sago stands, and their coastal market trade resumed, again barter markets only. The traditional orientation of the market leaders, trying to impose a system of commerce no longer appropriate to the changed demand for fish, meant that these markets were unsatisfactory. However, in other respects this was a time of substantial innovation and reorganization throughout Manus, as people tried to reproduce the Western wealth around them in a number of different ways. These ranged from informal attempts to start businesses, through the cooperative movement, to the most obvious and best reported of these efforts, Paliau's New Way movement (Schwartz 1962), which flourished in the 1940s and 1950s. (Although support faded in the 1960s and 1970s there were signs of a resurgence in the early 1980s [Trompf 1983, 59–60].)
In the New Way Paliau Molowat and his followers attempted to take economic and political control of their own lives by combining
the best traditional and modern ways to produce prosperity in a framework of Manus justice. In their efforts to strengthen Manus society and economy, however, Paliau and his followers advocated policies that would complete the destruction of the ecological and social divisions that underlay the system of village interdependence, including "all the old divisions of rank, clan, ethnic group, and ecological type. . . . The [lagoon dwellers] were to move ashore, the [inlanders] to move to the beach; both were to practice mixed fishing and gardening" (Schwartz 1963, 93). Likewise, Paliau and his followers wanted to eliminate the extensive affinal exchanges that motivated much of the intervillage trade, to eliminate the sexual shame and affinal avoidance that made relations between the sexes and between affines so tense, and to hasten integration with the expanding colonial economy through increasing commodity production.
The cooperative movement was another aspect of the desire to generate wealth. The surge in interest began soon after the war, and in Manus Paliau was advocating cooperatives in 1953 and 1954, consciously anticipating the administration's plan to introduce them shortly thereafter (Schwartz 1962, 335). From 1950 to the mid-1960s, fourteen producers' and consumers' cooperatives were established in Manus, mostly in the areas that followed the New Way (Schwartz 1966–1967, 36). However, they were less successful than either the government or villagers hoped, and failure was common. For instance, of the eleven that were active in 1966, eight were in liquidation or had ceased trading by 1971, at which time an additional twelve, founded after 1966, were still trading (Committee of Inquiry 1972, 305). By 1971 the movement had passed its peak: copra production was 256 tons, compared to a peak of 520 in 1965, and during the same period store sales fell from $A110,000 to $A99,000 annually, while produce sales fell from $A67,000 to $A48,000 (Committee of Inquiry 1972, 63).
Although Ponams, like most of northwest Manus, did not join the Paliau movement, islanders too wanted to produce for themselves the new prosperity. They tried to do this by entering into new economic activities, particularly trade stores. The first Manus trade store license went to a Ponam, and by September 1953 there were five stores in north-central and northwest Manus, four of them on Ponam (PR 2-53/54). We describe Ponam stores in more detail in chapter 4.
Their only other important source of wealth was trochus. Their old plantation was down to 260 trees, and these produced little (PR 8-52/53). Also, Ponams seem to have been unlucky in another source of wealth, war compensation payments. An early 1953 report (PR 6-52/53) says the government recognized as unpaid the war claims of some forty islanders, at a time when almost all claims in Manus had been paid off. This indicates that Ponams got compensation later than most other Manus people, and many claim they never got it. In any event, by early 1951 trochus was £A10 a bag, and the Rabaul buyer Jack Thurston had paid more than £A2000 for Ponam shells (PR 30/6/2 of 1950–51). He was the important buyer of their trochus, and Ponams said that he made only three or four purchases during the boom, which we take to run between about 1950 and 1957, when the price peaked and collapsed.
A number of important events occurred about the time trochus collapsed. The coastal market trade shut down again, and Ponams had their offer to buy the old plantation that Komine established accepted (PR 2-57/58). To help pay for this they withdrew money from their trade stores, which left them with insufficient operating capital. By August 1958 all their stores were bankrupt and the administration ordered them shut (PR 3-58/59). The postwar boom was over, and Ponams, like Manus people generally, were thrown back on their own resources. Their large trade stores, drawing custom and profits from much of the north coast, were closed; their local markets were shut; trochus prices had collapsed; they had spent much of their cash to buy back the plantation, to reclaim their land, even though it contained few trees and produced little copra; their traditional trading partners were fishing for themselves and increasingly were demanding cash and cash goods for sago.
For about the next decade Ponams survived by a postwar version of long-distance trade. They took their fish to where it was expensive (at Indrim until the Lorengau market opened), sold it, and took their money to buy sago where it was cheap (the sago-producing areas west of Ponam). At first the bulk of this sago changed hands within the framework of the system of trade partnerships, albeit for cash and cash goods; by about 1960 this had changed to a free market open to anyone with the money to buy. Their economic activities were contracting, and islanders were concerned more and more with the basics of survival.
Confronted with the failure of internal sources of wealth, many
Manus people looked to paid employment. As we noted, mission education between the wars helped develop a tradition of literacy and numeracy and a desire for Western education, which now began to bear fruit. After the war there was an expansion in education, which was free or of minimal cost, and a shift to English for instruction, and many Manus people took advantage of this in two ways. First, in going to school they increased their ability to get desirable, well-paid jobs, and second, many Manus taught in the expanding school system. By the 1960s, Manus commitment to education was striking. For instance, Ruth Finney (1971, 51) found that for the six provinces she studied, including quite prosperous East New Britain, Manus had the highest enrollment per capita, with 43 students per 100,000 population, at the University of Papua New Guinea and the Administrative College together. The next highest was 28 per 100,000 for East New Britain. Sheldon Weeks's (1976) study of tertiary education in the 1970s shows a similar situation, with Manus students consistently overrepresented at the national high schools, teachers colleges, and two universities. He shows Manus had the highest per capita enrollment in the country in these institutions from 1971 to 1977.
In the 1950s and 1960s migration produced relatively little direct benefit as real wages—especially in the mission primary schools where many Manus worked—were so low that substantial remittances were not possible. However, through the 1960s and 1970s there was a significant increase in real wages at all levels, combined with expanding opportunities for Papua New Guineans at higher occupational levels, so that migrants were in a position to save and remit substantial amounts of money home to their families.
One can see postwar migration as a continuation of prewar trends. But these two waves of migration had different effects. The prewar migration made life more difficult in certain ways, weakening the social and economic underpinnings of Manus life. On the other hand, in the postwar period, and especially after the middle and late 1960s, the money migrants remitted stabilized and even bolstered the region's reoriented, dependent economy, which migration now complemented rather than disrupted.
The postwar period, and especially the period leading up to and following independence in 1975, also saw the development of government spending as a substantial source of income for the region.
The early postwar agitation in Manus led the colonial government to pay more attention to the region, with the consequence that Manus had many schools and health services and a substantial civil service establishment, generating a large amount of wages, much of which benefited the region. The 1970 provincial budget showed the impact of government spending: total revenue for the year was K3.13 million, of which 95 percent was in grants from the national government (Titus 1980, 29), the balance coming from provincial sources. The picture for subsequent budgets was about the same. An estimate for the province as a whole (Lansdell 1981a , fig. 3) gives a total inward flow of K5.5 million in 1980, of which only K0.5 million was in return for goods produced in the province, and showed that the bulk of the inward flow was sent back out again for basic commodities: K4.6 million went out for imported consumable items and a further K0.6 million went for transport equipment and fuel, both of which were used largely for consumption rather than productive purposes.
A survey of five villages in 1980 helps show the extent of this dependence on external sources of wealth (Lansdell 1981b ). Assuming an average of two meals a day per person, the survey showed villagers ate tinned meat or fish in 18 percent of their meals and rice in 14 percent. The overall figure for rural Manus, extrapolated from this survey, was K300,000 spent on these foodstuffs in 1980. On the other hand, K92,000 was spent on local foodstuffs. Thus, almost three-quarters of the rural cash expenditure on food went for imports. This figure would have been higher if all imported foodstuffs were included, and if the urban areas of Lorengau and Lombrum were included. Of course the degree of dependence was not uniform throughout the region: this same survey showed that areas more isolated from Lorengau were less dependent on external sources of wealth than were areas closer to Lorengau.
Through the later postwar period, then, Manus people became more and more dependent on and oriented toward the larger world, as the region ceased to be an integrated, inward-looking socioeconomic unit. As a sign of this, on Ponam during the early 1960s cash and cash goods became important in domestic ceremonial exchange. Whereas the 1940s and 1950s saw the monetization of external coastal trade, by the middle 1960s the thing most directly under the control of Ponams themselves, their own affinal
exchange, had become monetized, and hence relied on involvement with the larger economy.
Basically, this commercialization of the economy and monetization of intravillage exchange remained through the early 1980s. What had changed, strikingly for Ponam, was the amount of money people had to spend. And they had it because since schools reopened after the war, they sent their children to school for as many years as possible and encouraged them to migrate and send money home (see chap. 5). Ponams received enough in remittances that they could afford to exchange cash and cash goods with their trade partners and pay cash for sago in the markets, which reopened for cash and barter transactions in 1977. Almost all the old functional interdependence in Manus was gone, and trade partners traded many imported goods, but at least for a while they did have goods to trade.
Continuity and Change
Although the rules of kinship and exchange appear not to have changed that much since the early colonial period, the economic situation in which these ideologies, structures, and rules existed had changed profoundly, which led to important changes in the social and economic effects of kinship and exchange.
These derive from one fundamental consequence of colonization, the fact that the significant source of wealth for Manus people became located outside the region in the larger national economy, where migrants got their wages, and so moved outside the control of village authority structures. As we have made clear at various points in this chapter, even the agricultural areas of Manus produced relatively little of commercial value; infertile sand cays like Ponam produced nothing.
This shift in the significant sources of wealth led to the disappearance of the economic, and with it the social, power of the bigmen. As local productive resources became less significant, so too did the importance of the bigman's control over them. As almost all the regional division of labor disappeared, so too did the importance of the bigman's control over trade partnerships. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, as local production became less significant, so too did the key to the bigman's power, indebtedness and
the control of local productive labor. (We should note two things: First, improvements in health increased life expectancy greatly, and so removed the demographic motive for extensive adoption. Second, because schooling was free or cheap in the colonial period, bigmen were not able to create clients by financing education.)
Manus people still produced wealth, but through wages earned outside the village, and particularly outside the region. Because most Manus migrants were in administrative or service jobs, rather than in manufacturing, strictly speaking their relationship to the production of wealth was tenuous and complex. For our purposes, however, we treat them as wealth producers by virtue of the fact that they received a wage.
One aspect of the separation of kinship and economics was that it was difficult to arrange marriages between migrants (in fact few tried to do so), so that marriage politics of the overt sort practiced by bigmen disappeared, along with the economic gain arranged marriages made possible. A covert sort of marriage politics remained, though we doubt Ponams thought of it as such. Basically, parents with a daughter who wanted to secure wealth through her marriage had one best strategy: send her to school for as long as possible. If she succeeded she would become a migrant earning a wage, in which case she would send money home. This was also a marriage strategy because as an educated migrant she was in the best possible position to marry an educated migrant Ponam man, in which case she would become the conduit to pass wealth from her husband to her parents. This strategy helped account for the high level of female education among Ponams, and among Manus generally, higher than any other area of Papua New Guinea, and much higher than most other provinces (Weeks 1976).
Paralleling the disappearance of conventional marriage politics, and part of its cause, was the decreasing concern for female virginity and the decreasing need to make brideprice and other affinal exchange payments to legitimate a marriage. Rather, there was an increase in sexual freedom and in relations between the sexes, as well as in the belief that arranged marriages were undesirable, that the couple should marry for love. Likewise, at least on Ponam, the order of affinal exchanges altered. Before World War II brideprice preceded marriage. As part of the social and economic changes of the 1940s, it came to follow marriage rather than being a necessary
precondition for it, and so was no longer the sort of burden it had been earlier. While the vast majority of marriages involved the cycle of betrothal, marriage, and brideprice exchanges, at the time of fieldwork no one challenged the legitimacy of those marriages that did not. Indeed, the irreducible minimum of legitimate marriage became the couple participating in exchanges as husband and wife. What was important, then, was the way they participated in other people's exchanges, not the exchanges centered on them. These various values had gained expression in Paliau's New Way movement. They become understandable against the background of the changes in the Manus economy that altered the relative importance of owned resources, and with it the economics of marriage and the power of bigmen. These changes also help explain the decrease in adoptions, the device that linked bigman and dependent.
Second, the separation of Manus wealth producers from their villages made it harder to appropriate their wealth. The old methods of shame and coercion were no longer applicable, and by 1980 ancestral wrath was seldom linked to failure to pay debts. Instead, more subtle forms of extraction appeared, though we should stress that residents and most migrants described this transfer of wealth as one of willing contribution rather than resented extraction. Under the old system, the rich financier bigmen used exchange to create obligations that allowed them to extract wealth from their poor dependents; however, at the time of fieldwork the relatively poor island residents, who dominated the exchange system, used exchange to create obligations that allowed them to extract wealth from rich migrants (we describe this process in chap. 6).
As this suggests, colonial and postcolonial economic changes affected intergenerational relations. Before these changes, young men were forced to look to their elders if they were to enter adulthood, were to marry. Under the precolonial and early colonial system, brideprice required the accumulation of a significant quantity of valuables—shell money and incised dog's teeth. It was difficult for the young to make or obtain these valuables, and as we have said, many young men could gain access to them only by becoming a client to a financier-lapan . Thus, in some ways early Ponam, and Manus more generally, resembled the domination by elders in what Claude Meillassoux calls the domestic community (1981, 33–49, 78–81). In return for granting access to exchange
valuables, and the wives whose acquisition required them, the mature financier-lapan secured privileged control over labor, natural resources, and trade opportunities. Perversely, this system relied not only on the fact of lineage control of resources, but also on the ability to circumvent that control. In other words, the lapan were able to maintain their dominance because everyone else was obliged to stick to his or her own lineage resources, while the lapan were able to avoid these restrictions, so placing themselves within the kinship system that they had much freer access to sources of wealth, plus of course the client's labor to exploit those resources.[4]
Colonial forces changed this. Especially since World War II, the shift of the brideprice payment until after marriage meant that the young were less constrained by their elders in their attempts to become independent, productive members of the society. This change occurred at the same time that money became an increasingly important element in brideprice payments. Because of the nature of the Manus economy, money was available almost exclusively by wage employment. Not only was this area beyond the control of elders, but they were actually at a disadvantage compared to the young in getting paid jobs. Consequently, the young as a group increasingly became independent of the elders, an independence asserted in the New Way and in other protests which occurred in postwar Manus. Thus, by the time of fieldwork the parents of young men and women, people who were the rebels of the postwar period, often lamented their inability to put pressure on their own maturing children, an inability that many explicitly said came from the fact that young migrants had independent access to money, an access on which their parents depended for the steady flow of remittances. Similarly, by the time of fieldwork most brideprice payments were managed not by the groom's father, but by one of his siblings. Parents still had an important say in these affairs, but their position was no longer dominant. The young had acquired a powerful independent voice.[5]
With the change in Manus production, then, came a great change in social relations. No longer did bigmen dominate marriage and affinal exchange, using them to control productive labor. Although the rules that would allow this domination still existed, no longer was there motive either for ordinary people to seek financier patrons, or for entrepreneurs to seek out dependents.
Instead, marriage reflected the mutual attraction of two people, which was no less real for being influenced by their level of education and place of work. No longer did parties to the marriage and its exchanges face each other as dependents of financiers to whom their financial obligation was overpowering. Instead, the relatives of bride and groom faced each other more directly as wife givers and wife takers, unaffected by the convenient fiction of adoption. No longer were their obligations shaped by their indebtedness to their patrons. Rather, they were shaped by their genealogical and affinal relationships with each other. Kinship, then, became much less of an idiom for expressing and legitimating financial obligation and access to owned resources and became instead an important element in determining the order of marriage and exchange and the economic consequences thereof. As a result of colonization, then, Ponam became dominated by kinship in a way that the precolonial system was not. Even so, however, the system of kinship and exchange remained closely linked to the system of the production of wealth.[6]
Consequently, Ponam at the time of fieldwork looked in many ways like the textbook version of a traditional society: no pronounced social hierarchy and a flourishing system of kinship and affinal exchange. But as we have shown, this traditionalism was itself created and maintained by the island's relations with the encroaching and expanding colonial, and later postcolonial, economy.
Again, however, this egalitarian system was under threat, largely because decolonization meant that Papua New Guineans increasingly were able to control government structures. In Manus, as in a number of other provinces, the late 1970s and 1980s saw the development of provincial governments with increasing budgetary power. As this occurred, provincial politicians and civil servants found themselves with control of substantial amounts of money through their access to discretionary funds, their control over the budgetary process, or through their ability to misappropriate and misuse government funds. (This last option attracted a number of Manus Provincial Government officials, several of whom were arrested and charged for their acts; a former provincial premier was included. Largely as a consequence of this the Manus
Provincial Government was suspended by the national government in 1984, but restored in late 1985.)
The development of provincial government, as well as the establishment of a third, community, tier of government in Manus in 1983, meant that new significant sources of wealth were appearing once again within the province, sources that could be controlled by the enterprising. With this development the potential arose for the reemergence of bigmen, who could convert their control of state resources into social power. Certainly Manus people thought that this was going on, and they were quick to repeat stories of government food, liquor, money, and equipment being used by government officials to develop a following of personal clients.
These tokens of the reappearance of local sources of wealth had implications for the position of women in Manus villages. As we described in chapter 1, women participated equally with men, in their own names, in exchange. At least on Ponam, this arose from two important facts: women were free agents in exchange, or at least as free as men, so that they could manipulate exchange, debt, and credit to suit their own purposes; and women could produce or accumulate their own exchange goods and contribute their own labor, and hence did not have to rely on others to participate in exchange. Migrant women, who were unlikely to work if they were married, were in a less secure position, because they were not able to produce their own wealth or contribute their own labor. However, this was mitigated by two things. First, Ponams said that husbands and wives held personal property jointly, so that a migrant wife had legitimate claims on her husband's wages. Second, husbands specifically were supposed to recognize the problem their migrant wives faced and provide them with enough money that they could participate fully in exchange.
With the reappearance of sources of wealth in Manus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, women faced more profound disadvantages. This was because the world of politics, like the world of work, was largely closed to women. Although Manus did boast one of only a handful of female members of Parliament, provincial government was, like national government, almost exclusively a men's affair. Consequently, women faced the prospect of being cut off from an economic resource of growing importance. Moreover, to the extent
that government wealth was distributed outside the normal exchange system, women would be threatened with the loss of the discretionary authority that exchange allowed them.
Our discussion of the changes in Manus economy and social relations in this chapter brings out the fact that the region is fairly unusual within Papua New Guinea. Unlike most other provinces in the country, Manus was devoid of natural resources of significant commercial worth, and its commercial agricultural potential was poor. And within Manus, Ponam itself was extreme in this regard: the poverty of this sand cay's soil was made almost absolute when the island was converted into an air base during the war.
Ponams in particular, and Manus people in general, were, then, uniquely obliged to live by their wits and their wages, rather than their labor and their produce. This extremity means that we can see with clarity what is often partially obscured in other areas of the country: the effects on social relations of growing involvement with and reliance on the national economy. For Ponams and for Manus people more generally, articulation resulted in a leveling, for the simple reason that sources of wealth were beyond local control.
But sheer involvement with the national economy is not all that set Ponam, and Manus more generally, off from most of Papua New Guinea. Not all forms of involvement are alike, and not all forms of reliance on the national economy are alike. After all, the Tolai people in Vunamami (Salisbury 1970) and on Matupit (Epstein 1969), like the Motu people of Hanuabada (Gregory 1980), were no less involved with and dependent on the national economy than were Ponams.
What was special about Ponam was that the nature of its involvement and reliance put sources of wealth beyond the control of islanders. Education was inexpensive, and so people did not become dependent upon a patron for their schooling. Ponams were well educated, and after the war young people usually did not seek wage work if they were poorly educated, and so people did not become dependent upon a patron for a job. Thus, island migrants were generally beyond the control of island residents, who had to persuade rather than command migrants to remit (we discuss this at greater length in chaps. 5 and 6).
We think that it was this absence of mechanisms through which residents, and hence village power structures, could control the significant source of wealth that caused the leveling of Ponam inequality. Thus, on the one hand, the Ponam case leads us to expect this sort of leveling wherever we find depressed local production and high levels of migration and remittance dependence. We would look for this on islands like Mandok in the Vitiaz Straits (see Pomponio 1983), like Ponam, an island originally heavily dependent on local trade.
On the other hand, where local subsistence resources remain adequate, a long history of high levels of migration can coexist with the continued domination of juniors by their elders, such as is reported among the Kilenge of West New Britain (see Grant & Zelenietz 1980).
3
Local Production: Ponam Fishing
Historically, fishing was the core of Ponam's local economy. It determined the part the island played in the precolonial Manus economy; and even after colonization undercut the old economy, it remained important as a source of food and items for trade, as well as for islanders' conceptions of themselves as sea people, caught in a world in which the demand for what they could produce was falling.
Ponam fishing involved technical operations. However, like the Sri Lankan fishing Paul Alexander has described (1982), the organization of Ponam fishing could not be justified by technical rationality. Alexander argued that for the village he studied, the social organization of fishing, though violating technical rationality, did reflect the economic rationality of the petty entrepreneurs who came to dominate fishing. Ponam fishing, however, was not the production of a commodity in the way that Sri Lankan fishing was, and entrepreneurial rationality could not explain the way islanders did things. Instead, the nonrational complexity of Ponam fishing reflected the importance of relationships of kinship and exchange, as C. A. Gregory suggests is the case in gift-exchange systems (1982).
Ponam Fishing Techniques
While Ponam fishing had incorporated a number of techniques borrowed from the West and from other areas of Melanesia, it remained quite simple technologically and took place predominantly inside the island's extensive shallow lagoon, an environment not really suited to the intensive techniques of commercial fishing. This simple technology was not very productive, which probably was just as well, because even though the lagoon was large, most of it was the barren, striking white sand and occasional coral growths
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that mark a marine desert. We have estimated the production of three collective fishing expeditions in early 1979 and one week of intensive fishing in November of that year. These estimates are summarized in table 2. In labor time we have included the necessary time spent preparing for an expedition and cleaning up afterwards, but we have excluded the time required for cleaning and dressing the catch. As the table shows, productivity varies between about one-half and three-quarters of a kilogram per man-hour.[1]
Ponams maintained a large number of fishing techniques: one of us has identified and described twenty-eight different ones (J. Carrier 1982). However, by the time of fieldwork ten of these had not been used for a long time and a dispassionate observer, as distinct from a Ponam, would have concluded that they were abandoned. Likewise, many of the techniques islanders identified as being distinct differed only in detail: where they were used within the lagoon or sea, whether they were used during the day or at night, and who was entitled to use them. This indicates that Ponams maintained a differentiated body of ways of fishing far beyond what could have been justified by the merely technical requirements of fishing. This intense social differentiation was an important element of Ponam fishing, and it will recur throughout this chapter.
Ponam fishing techniques can be divided into two broad sorts. The first is collective techniques, those which for technical reasons had to be carried out by a group of people working together, and the second is individual techniques, those which could be done by individuals working alone, though for reasons of sociability island-
ers tended to use these techniques in groups. Individual techniques were straightforward: angling, trolling, and fishing with spear gun and goggles. The collective sorts were more complex, and we need to describe them in some detail.
Ponams commonly used three broad sorts of collective techniques: two with nets and one with spear guns. In the first they moved the nets to the fish (encircling net fishing); in the second they drove the fish to the nets (barrier net fishing); and in the third they drove the fish to a central area where they hunted them with spear guns. We will describe these separately.
The basic form of encircling net fishing was lawin , the common varieties differing only in where in the lagoon they could be used and in the number of nets used: seven, eight, or ten. The right to participate in a collective net expedition was restricted to specific agnatic descent lines, which usually had only one or two adult males resident on Ponam. Because control of lineage property passed to the eldest son of the eldest son (and so forth) of the lineage's apical ancestor, the senior lineage male was the net right holder. Frequently this man was either migrant or not as active or interested in fishing as some more junior resident, and this second person was likely to be the net right leader, the person who made the practical decisions about whether to use the net right in any instance and who actually led the crew that used the net right.
We have referred to the right to bring "a net," as Ponams did, even though what was in fact brought was a pair of wood-framed nets, worked as a unit. We refer to each part of the pair as a half-net. Three men were involved in working a net. One man stood in the middle and with each hand held one end of a half-net. The other two men stood, one at each end of the net pair, and held the free ends of the half-nets. Fishermen carried these nets through the lagoon, arrayed like a C. Then they closed the mouth of the C, forming an O, trapping the fish inside. Then they moved the nets on two opposed sides of the circle together, pinching the O into a figure eight. Then they pinched each half of the figure eight, catching the fish in the nets, which they then lifted out of the water. These fish were the collective catch of the net that caught them.
Ponams regularly used three types of barrier net fishing: suwai , huu , and layo . For suwai they strung a long net between two large canoes, preferably across a passage between two coral formations.
At the same time, other islanders in a variable number of kembrul (small one- or two-person canoes) took places in a rough semicircle about a hundred meters from the net. They paddled quickly toward the net with much splashing and shouting, driving the fish before them. When they got quite close to the net they jumped overboard with spear gun and goggles and shot fish on their own. These fish belonged to those who speared them and were not included in the collective catch, even though often they exceeded it. The net was hauled aboard the large canoes, and the fish caught in it became the collective catch.
The second type of barrier net fishing was huu , which used the same handheld nets as lawin . Because the nets had to be held up in the water by fishermen, rather than strung between canoes, islanders did not like to do huu in waters deeper than about two meters, unlike suwai . As in suwai , islanders on huu used kembrul to drive fish toward the nets, and those on the kembrul shot their own fish on reaching the barrier nets. In one variant fishermen arrayed the nets in a semicircle which they closed once the fish were inside, proceeding as in lawin . In the other variant they arrayed the nets in a straight line and lifted them after the fish were driven into them.
The last form of barrier net fishing was women's layo . Women would stand in the lagoon in a rough circle which had a small net, about four meters long and about one meter high, as part of its circumference. They collapsed the circle slowly, poking at rocks and making noise as they did, driving the small reef fish toward the net. Layo had only a collective catch.
The two sorts of collective spear gun fishing were hapahaf and mooha . These differed only in name and ownership, and resembled suwai and huu without the net. (Indeed, suwai was formed by combining hapahaf and a barrier net technique.) Several small canoes formed a large circle centered on a coral formation. With much noise and splashing fishermen paddled toward the center of the circle, where they jumped overboard and speared fish. There was no collective catch.
Social Practices of Fishing
The social practices relating to fishing were more complex than this set of simple technical descriptions suggests. We will begin by discussing the practices surrounding lawin and then consider the
modifications of this basic pattern applicable to other sorts of collective fishing.
Like any collective fishing expedition, a lawin could begin in one of two ways. The men could decide that the condition of sea and sky, in conjunction with their need for fish, suggested that fishing would be fruitful, or word could come that someone had spotted a large school of fish. As will become apparent in our discussion of the ownership of fishing techniques, just where the fish were was important, for the different collective techniques were restricted to different areas of the lagoon; also, the sort of fish spotted could be important.
Crews gathered, put canoes in the water, and got nets on board. Fishermen spoke quietly, and women, children, and men who were not going on the expedition kept away from the area. Women were not allowed to handle the nets and were supposed to have nothing to do with men's collective net fishing, though they did serve as canoe handlers from time to time if there were not enough men available.
Once the expedition was under way, people moved back to the beach area and spoke in normal voices, but those on the canoes kept their voices low. Fishermen poled or rowed to the appropriate area, got the nets into the water, and fished as we have already described. Crews usually were men between fifteen and fifty, but those younger or older occasionally served as canoe handlers. For canoes carrying a single lawin net pair, the absolute minimum crew was three, enough to walk the nets through the water while leaving the canoe untended at anchor. The usual minimum crew was four, and routinely crews ranged upwards to seven.
When they returned, crewmen went to the men's house of the kamal that controlled the lawin . Where individual net rights belonged to lineages in other kamal , people who used those rights might, as an additional mark of esteem, have the right to take their nets and catch to there own men's house. In either case, the leader of the crew using the net right would hand the catch over to the men, women, and children who were waiting to gut and clean the fish at water's edge. A number of fish went into a pot to boil to accompany the tea and fried sago or boiled rice women had prepared to feed the fishermen.
The net right holder, or net leader in his absence, arrayed the fish on palm leaves (lau niu ) and put the most common species of
fish in piles of ten on the leaves, heaping the rest of the fish at one end. People would stroll along the beach comparing catches, an informal competition in which all were interested but which no one took very seriously. In fact, if this display revealed gross differences between catches, fishermen would distribute the fish between the various nets to make them more equal.
After this display the right leader divided the catch into equal shares. Everyone who went with a particular net got one, whether or not he did any work. The holder of the net right was entitled to one, as were the owners of the canoe and the physical nets used (many right holders did not own their own nets). However, except under extraordinary circumstances no one was entitled to get more than one share from a single net's catch, so if the net right holder, canoe owner, or net owner accompanied his right or equipment, he got a single share only, and that as crewman. In any event, the wives, sisters, mothers, daughters, or young sons of those who received a share carried away the fish, which usually were smoked for future use.
The practice for the type of lawin that did not use canoes, lawin kum , was the same except that there was no canoe owner's share. Rather, a share was given to those who carried the catch to shore as the net handlers proceeded through the shallow waters near the beach. Usually these carriers were young men or boys.
Basic practice was the same for the two sorts of men's barrier net fishing, suwai and huu , except that huu did not have the lau niu display. The lau niu for suwai excluded fish speared by those on the small canoes, which as we said did not form part of the collective catch, and shares were given only in respect of the labor, rights, and equipment that were part of the barrier net. Each large suwai canoe, one for each side of the net, had its own lau niu . Women's barrier net fishing, layo , had no lau niu : the catch was divided informally. Finally, because the organized forms of spear gun fishing, hapahaf and mooha , had no central catching device, there was no lau niu , formal count, or formal distribution. The various kembrul simply took their own speared fish home.
Shell Money
Thus far we have looked only at fishing, which is reasonable in view of the importance of fish on Ponam at the time of fieldwork.
However, one other form of marine exploitation was important economically in the past and important culturally at the time of fieldwork. This was the gathering and finishing of Imbricaria punctata , the small shell that was the basis of shell money, sa'ul .[2]
Ponam began making shell money in this century. Islanders said that in the late precolonial period Sori Island, to the west, was the location of the only extensive shell beds in their part of Manus and the place where shell money was made. However, at the turn of the century two things happened. First, a Ponam man from Kamal Kehin married a Sori woman and through her acquired the ability and right to make sa'ul . Second, there was internal disorder on Sori. People there ceased to show proper respect to the patrilineage that controlled shell money production, and as a consequence shell beds began to die out in Sori's reef and began to flourish around Ponam, where Kamal Kehin claimed control of the right to gather shells and convert them into sa'ul .
In corroboration, Parkinson (1907, 318) reported Sori Island as the main shell money source at the turn of the century, while Mead (1963 [1930], 222) said that by 1928 Ponam was the main source.
While sa'ul may have been something like a general medium of exchange in the precolonial period—and Ponams said that anything could be bought with it, usually at rough preestablished prices—by 1980 it ceased to have anything like a monetary role, much less the entrenched role of Tolai shell money, which survived in good health the onslaught of German, Australian, and Papua New Guinean coin and currency, the urbanization of the Rabaul area, and the commoditization of the local economy (see Salisbury 1970). Islanders said that sa'ul was used by Ponams to buy pigs from other Ponams as late as the 1960s, but by the time of fieldwork it was too valuable for anything but affinal exchange, especially brideprice.
Women made sa'ul . They gathered small quantities of shells throughout the months of the southeast trade winds—roughly April to September—when the sea was low and calm enough for them to walk the north barrier reef and spot the shells. After the shells were dried and cleaned, the ends were cut off, and the remaining small ring of shell was smoothed and polished by rubbing on soft stone. When the polishing was completed, the shells, about a third of a centimeter in diameter and a bit over a millimeter thick, were strung together for storage on long ropes. When
enough were accumulated they were used to make valuables, especially belts, about two-thirds of a meter long, decorated with glass beads and bits of cloth. Members of Kamal Kehin had the right to make belts with thirty strands of shell, all other Ponams being confined to twenty strands. The amount of labor involved can be indicated by the fact that a belt of sa'ul would contain from about 7,000 to about 10,000 pieces of shell.
Marine Tenure
The framework in which Ponams organized the technical operations of fishing and distributed the catch was the framework of kinship. The most striking aspect of the importance of kinship for the production of fish was the island's complex system of marine tenure, the elements of which were the ownership of reef and sea, of species of fish, and of fishing techniques. This system fragmented the relatively straightforward technical operation of fishing into a forest of rights and counterrights, each the jealously guarded property of one agnatic lineage or another. And as our description unfolds, it will become apparent that on Ponam the fragmentation of the productive process was developed to a bizarre degree.
Reef and Sea Tenure
Islanders laid historic claim to a large body of water. They said that originally this extended from the eastern tip of the surrounding reef to a point about twenty-five kilometers west of that, the border with the waters of the next island, Sori, and from the shore of mainland Manus to the south, to as far north as anyone cared to go. Colonization brought changes. The eastern end of the reef, part of the waters that islanders said used to belong to kamal of the precontact political unit Tonuf, passed to Andra Islanders as a result of an Australian administrative decision, based on competing claims by some Andra descent groups and the fact that Andra's small reef was inadequate to meet its needs. Also, as we noted in chapter 2, following colonization the people who used to live in inland Manus moved to the coast and took up fishing. In doing so they violated Ponam's claims, and this resulted in a number of court cases and canoe rammings since World War II. Also, with
independence many islanders came to identify the northern boundaries of their waters with the northern boundaries of Papua New Guinea's waters: the 200-mile limit.
Historically, islanders divided their waters into what can be thought of as six different zones radiating outward from the island. As the island was divided into north and south halves, and Ponam, Lahai, and Tonuf sections, so were the waters. However, with the annihilation of the Lahai kamal the old Lahai waters were taken over by surviving cognates. Consequently, by the time of fieldwork island waters were divided into quadrants: Ponam north, Ponam south, Tonuf north, and Tonuf south. The pattern of reef and marine ownership differed in each of these quadrants for ecological and historical reasons. We will discuss the patterns for three of these quadrants, ignoring the Tonuf south waters, as these were used relatively infrequently. These patterns are presented schematically in figure 1.
The simplest pattern of ownership was that of the Tonuf north waters, those to the northeast of the island. The one surviving Tonuf north kamal owned all these waters as a unit, with no internal divisions of any sort. In other words, these waters formed an undivided unit extending from the northeast shore of the island to the boundaries of island waters to the northeast, a result of the peculiar history of north Tonuf. In warfare in the late nineteenth century most north Tonuf males were killed, and only Kamal Lamai survived. By the time of fieldwork it consisted of two adult males, one old and unmarried. Likewise, shortly after 1906 Hernsheim and Company bought the eastern two-thirds of the island and adjacent waters for copra production and as a trochus source. These factors reduced pressure to subdivided north Tonuf waters, even after the plantation was bought back in the late 1950s.
The most complex system was in the waters of Ponam south, those to the southwest of the island. These were divided into a series of ecological zones that succeeded each other outward from the shore in a series of rough bands, each of which was cut into a series of blocks whose shoreward (toward Ponam) and seaward (toward Manus) boundaries were the boundaries of the ecological zones, and whose lateral boundaries were marked by stones, coral formations, and the like. Working outward from Ponam toward the Manus shore, these zones were: a belt of sea grasses (mbrueh ),
Figure 1.
Schematic Representation of the Pattern of Ponam Sea Holdings
a belt of clear sand inside the reef edge (mbrulupapi lon ), the reef edge itself (sesepat ), the outer shoulder of the reef (mbrulupapi huwen ), the deep water of the Seeadler Harbour (yohowan ), the relatively deep reef edge off the Manus shore (sesepat ), and finally the sandy belt inside the reef edge leading up to the Manus shore (mbrulupapi ).
South Ponams did not own all parts of these zones. In particular, they did not bother to claim those sections of the outer reef shoul-
der that had no sea grasses. With grasses these sections harbored sea turtle and hence were useful and owned; without grasses they were useless, and unowned. Likewise, islanders owned only those sections of the Seeadler deeps where there were coral growths coming relatively close to the surface (two to twenty meters), as only these were productive angling grounds. Owning groups for south Ponam waters were lineages and sublineages, and a single group could own several blocks of water that were not contiguous, producing a scattered set of holdings.
The Ponam north waters, those to the northwest of the island, were a middle case. These were split in two different ways. First, with one minor exception the reef edge formed a boundary between holdings, which therefore extended from the shore to the reef edge or from the reef edge outward. Second, the lagoon and sea were broken into radiating blocks by the pattern of holdings. Six different patrilineal groups claimed holdings inside the reef, five patrilineages and a dying kamal whose holding was the only one that extended directly from the shore to the edge of the island waters. The rest of the Ponam north waters outside the reef were divided into two large blocks, one held by a kamal and the other in dispute, claimed by three closely related groups: a kamal and two of its constituent lineages.
This pattern of Ponam north reef and sea tenure appeared to be relatively recent. Islanders said that until the early 1950s Kamal Kehin, traditionally the paramount kamal on the island, controlled all the reef in that area. Their ownership seems to have been similar to some Polynesian and Micronesian systems, as they had the right to close all or part of the reef to catching all or certain sorts of reef creatures. As a practical matter this seems to have been important only for sa'ul for shell money and trochus for sale (islanders did not eat trochus), though Kamal Kehin did not own either of these species. In both cases, Kamal Kehin organized mass gathering expeditions involving people from all parts of the island, not just north Ponams, and would claim a portion of the produce, which some said was as much as a fifth of trochus and a half of finished sa'ul belts.
Islanders said that this system broke down at the time of the boom in trochus prices after World War II:
Ponams made bulk sales under the supervision of Kamal Kehin to the Rabaul buyer Jack Thurston, who was paying A£10 for a bag of trochus. Kehin's ownership could not stand the strain. Three island dissidents urged their fellows not to present their trochus catch to Kehin but to take it directly to their own men's house. The rebellion caught on and the unified system of north Ponam reef and sea ownership collapsed as different north Ponam patrilineal groups claimed various parts of the quadrant.
Islanders disagreed about the nature of the system before European contact. Senior members of Kamal Kehin claimed that the precolonial system was simply carried on by the Kehin domination of north Ponam waters under colonization. However, a number of other islanders claimed that before contact Ponam north waters were divided amongst different patrilineal groups much as they were after the 1950s rebellion. They said that the leader of Kehin became the luluai under the German administration because of his position as leader of the paramount kamal and used the new power to claim all quadrant waters for his kamal .
Countervailing Marine Rights: Species of Fish
Unlike land ownership, reef and sea ownership did not give Ponams exclusive, or even extensive, control over access to and use of what they owned. In fact, and in spite of the importance owning groups attached to their ownership, reef and sea owners owned relatively little. This echoes the point made earlier in this chapter, that elements of Ponam fishing were differentiated far beyond what could be sustained by the technical and economic forces involved. There were two basic sorts of countervailing rights that limited owners' control over their reef and sea. We shall look at the simplest of these first, the ownership of certain species of fish.
A few of the species of fish that islanders caught were owned by particular patrilineal groups. The most important of these were tuna (palieo ), mullet (au ), and sorts of anchovy (pa and hanjef ), all of which commonly come in large schools. These patrilineal groups owned the right to catch these fish, regardless of the techniques used to catch them and regardless of the waters where they were caught. Any fishing expedition intending to catch one of these
species was obliged to get prior permission from the species' owners. However, an expedition that happened to come across a school of these fish and caught them was free from censure so long as the fishermen brought the catch to a senior member of the owning group, as those who had sought prior permission had to do as well. In both cases the owner would return the catch to the fishermen, possibly retaining a few fish for himself if the catch was large. Islanders said that patrilineal groups guarded these rights more closely before World War II than they did at the time of fieldwork, when fishermen and owners did not bother with small casual catches of owned species. However, fishermen did present large catches and did seek permission before setting out to catch an owned species, in which circumstances species owners were still careful to enforce their rights even though the material reward for ownership was quite small.
Countervailing Marine Rights: Fishing Techniques
Waters owners not only lacked complete control of what could be caught in their waters, equally they lacked complete control of the ways that fish could be caught. The easiest way to present this is to use a distinction that Ponams made themselves, between what is lo has (on or of the sea bottom) and what is hire has (in the sea but not on or of the bottom). As a general rule, sea owners controlled the use in their waters of fishing techniques that were lo has but not those that were hire has . Islanders identified five techniques as lo has and twenty-two as hire has , while they were uncertain about one.
The five lo has (bottom) techniques were: jai paha mbrolo hol (common), angling over coral formations outside the barrier reef with a baited hook suspended a few centimeters above the bottom; mbroo (disused), fishing with woven basket traps placed on the lagoon floor; papai (sporadic), fishing with large fixed stone traps; kaletuf ol (occasional), crayfish gathering; and pas (disused), in which the fisherman piled up pieces of coral on the lagoon floor, waited until fish made their homes in it, at which time he surrounded the pile with a net, took the pile apart and trapped the fish in his net. All of these techniques entail objects placed on or
just above the floor of the lagoon or sea, or things caught there. With the exception of the variety of angling mentioned, anyone wishing to use these techniques needed permission of the waters owner, though the techniques themselves were unowned. Anglers needed permission only if they wanted to fish at night using burning palm frond torches, or the postwar equivalent, a pressure lamp, to attract fish.
Only one of these bottom techniques entailed a permanent improvement to the sea floor, the papai stone traps that lay along the north barrier reef. While an individual building one of these traps had to have permission of the waters owner, once it was built it passed to the builder's descendents, and they did not need to ask permission of the waters owner again. In a sense, this paralleled a common aspect of Melanesian land tenure: the person who improves the land by clearing and planting it acquired usufruct rights by virtue of those improvements (Crocombe 1971, 305).
As we indicated, islanders used only two bottom techniques at all regularly, and one only sporadically. The bulk of their fishing at the time of fieldwork used hire has (marine) techniques. As the common marine techniques were used only inside the reef, we limit our discussion to them. These were much more diverse than lo has techniques: some were owned by patrilineal groups and some were not, some could be used only in certain waters while some could be used anywhere, and some required the permission of the waters owner while some did not.
The easiest way of considering marine techniques is to divide them into collective techniques and individual techniques, though as we mentioned earlier, for reasons of sociability Ponams usually used individual techniques in groups. With a few exceptions anyone could use an individual technique in any waters at any time except under specified conditions, while collective techniques belonged to patrilineal groups and were restricted to certain waters, though not commonly the waters of the owning patrilines.
Individual Fishing Techniques
Islanders used a large number of individual fishing techniques inside the barrier reef, and we divide these into three general classes: free, open to all people at all times in all waters; semire-
stricted, open to all people in all waters except under certain conditions; and restricted, requiring the permission of the waters owner at all times. The need for permission was not eliminated if one started fishing in one's own waters and moved on to someone else's waters, except in the case of harpooned turtles, which we discuss in a following section. The free techniques include reef gleaning, which included gathering sa'ul for shell money, and the use of small hand nets (kupen ) and small basket traps (kaafef ). Women were the predominant users of these free individual techniques, and they used them mostly during the day.
Islanders said that in the past women were restricted to these techniques and to areas of the lagoon fairly close to the island because of the risk of raids from nearby villages. Partly as a result of the end of local warfare and partly because large numbers of men became migrant laborers, this restriction relaxed, and by the time of fieldwork women freely used all individual fishing techniques inside the lagoon, and occasionally in the open sea, though generally this remained a male preserve, a sexual division of fishing that seemed fairly common in Papua New Guinea (see J. Carrier 1981, 212).
The two important semirestricted techniques were angling and spear fishing. Angling rights changed with the introduction of steel hooks following contact and early migration.
All forms of angling went under the generic name of jai (literally, fishing line). Residual jai rights lay with a Kamal Kehin patrilineal group, based on their traditional ownership of jai mahan (mahan literally, big, old), fishing with live bait for certain sorts of fish over shallow coral formations in the Seeadler deeps, using hooks of mollusc shell. When steel hooks arrived on the island the patrilineal group allowed people to use them but did not renounce residual control. For reasons we explain below, in the 1930s they tried to withdraw this general permission, but angling was too well entrenched for islanders to give it up. There was widespread violation of the group's edict, and finally they gave up residual control of jai , though not their specific control of jai mahan .
Spear fishing and angling were free to all in all lagoon waters except at night with a pressure lamp. In this circumstance fishermen had to get permission of the waters owner. Anyone using southern waters had to get the permission of the owner of the waters where he or she intended to fish. On the other hand, anyone fishing in the northern waters only had to get the permis-
sion of any northern patrilineal group, whether or not it owned the waters where he or she intended to fish, or indeed whether or not it owned any waters at all. In no case did permission involve any sort of payment or share of the catch; islanders considered this sort of permission as part of the routine of friendly relations. Often individuals granted standing permission to some agnates from related lineages, certain close cognates, and affines.
There were two fully restricted individual fishing techniques used in the lagoon, but one of them was crayfishing, a part of the bottom (lo has ) techniques discussed earlier. The other was turtle harpooning, a postcontact technique always requiring the permission of the waters owners. The differences we mentioned between securing permission for using southern and northern waters apply here as well.
Collective Fishing Techniques
Men controlled most collective techniques, and these can be placed along a continuum: those involving spear guns only, those involving spear guns and nets together, and those involving nets only. As with individual fishing, women's role in these traditionally male techniques changed substantially following colonization. Women faced two restrictions in collective fishing: participation in expeditions and handling the nets. By the time of fieldwork women participated regularly, if mostly unofficially, in collective spear gun fishing and in the spear gun side of mixed gun and net fishing. They did go on men's collective net fishing expeditions, but only rarely, only as canoe handlers, and only when there were not enough men available.
Women had one collective technique, the form of net fishing called layo , which we described previously. This was free to all women in all waters at all times. On the other hand, all men's collective fishing techniques were owned by specific patrilineal groups, which had the right to use them in the appropriate waters. Island men used nine collective sorts commonly and one only a few times a year. For these, ownership included the right to perform the technical operations of fishing with certain sorts of equipment in certain areas of the lagoon. In almost every case these areas cut across waters owned by someone else.
At the time of fieldwork a number of these techniques could be
used in areas of the lagoon which cut across the quadrants into which islanders divided their waters. However, initially rights seem to have followed quadrant boundaries.
Thus, for instance, a group of south Ponam patrilineal groups had the right to use the net technique lawin kum , mentioned already, in the waters of south Ponam, south Tonuf, and north Tonuf. Islanders said that originally there were separate rights for each quadrant. However, in the distant past the north Tonuf right owners gave their rights to the south Tonuf right owners, elements of Kamal Kahu. Subsequently the leader of this kamal asked for allies from the south Ponam kamal to join in his fight with certain mainland Manus groups. In compensation (anof ) for their aid and particularly their casualties, the Kamal Kahu leader gave them these rights. Thus these south Ponam patrilineal groups came to own rights in three quadrants.[3]
Similarly, some three generations before the time of fieldwork, north Ponam and south Ponam patrilineal groups had separate rights for a form of mixed net and spear gun fishing.[4] A south Ponam child shamed his people in the eyes of his north Ponam matrilateral kin in an incident involving this sort of fishing. He had reported that the north Ponams were fishing in waters claimed by his south Ponam agnates. The south Ponams got into their canoes and paddled out to the north Ponams full of accusation, only to discover that they were fishing in their proper waters. To repair this his patrilineal group agreed to join their quadrant rights with those of the north Ponam right holders to form a unified holding.
This historical attachment of certain rights to certain quadrants was not, however, straightforward. Islanders said any technique used in the waters belonging to patrilineages of the Ponam district could be taken over by any Tonuf kamal for use in its own waters without concern for the Ponam technique owners, provided of course that this borrowing did not infringe preexisting rights to the technique in the adopter's waters. Interestingly, this form of adoption did not work in reverse: Ponam groups could not take over the rights to techniques belonging to Tonuf patrilineages. Furthermore, this free adoption did not work across moiety boundaries within Ponam and Tonuf.
Where adoption, from whatever source, infringed preexisting rights, the previous owners would defend their position. An example of this occurred in the 1930s, and led to the Kamal Kehin's attempt to reassert their residual control of angling.
Through relations to groups on the adjacent island, Andra, a Kehin patrilineal group acquired rights to a technique Andra people called
layo , different from the Ponam technique of the same name, and they started to use it in Ponam waters. However, north and south Ponam groups objected, claiming that it was the same as a technique they already owned, suwai , which as we said was a mixed net and spear gun technique. The Kehin members claimed an independent right to use this technique by virtue of their relations to the Andra groups, but as a result of pressure they withdrew their attempt to use layo , and in retaliation tried to reassert control over angling, as we discussed previously.
As we have described, different agnatic groups had property rights in reef and sea, species, and techniques. The rights we focused on in our research were rights in collective net fishing techniques. We did so for two important reasons. First, net fishing ownership was visible in a way that other forms of ownership were not: people either did or did not participate in expeditions; those who participated did so in association with some people rather than others; some rather than others led net rights and distributed the catch. Second, the results of net fishing, unlike the case with other techniques, were a matter of public display, announcement, and distribution, and hence were easier to study than the lone men or women, or the small, fluid groups, who daily went angling or spear gun fishing quietly and without attracting much notice.
Fishing Rights and Social Structure
Net rights were real property and hence belonged only to patrilineal groups, ranging from kamal to sub-sublineages, as we described in chapter 1. However, in a number of cases the people actually exercising net rights did not own them. Of the forty-eight patrilineal groups involved in the techniques considered here, seven had no resident active male members at the time of fieldwork, and of necessity their rights were led by people not owning them. This occurred because all active male members were migrant, in which case the owners' nonagnatic kinsmen or affinal relatives could lead the net right, or because the last male lineage member had daughters but no sons, in which case the surviving women's husbands or sons could lead, though the women remained the recognized owners. Also, there were four cases of lineages that did not lead their own net rights even though there were active resident males. Usually the members of these owning groups were in particularly close association with the lineages that they allowed to exercise
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their net rights, lineages that the owners called patrilateral cross-cousins. As this discussion implies, it was quite rare for a group to control the net right of a lineage to which it was linked agnatically, and it was rare because it would raise questions about the ownership of techniques and the corporate identity of groups in a way that letting nonagnates use them did not.
Owners of net rights in any given form of collective net fishing could be linked in a number of ways. At one extreme were the two variants of lawin jafa . Each of these was owned by a single kamal , though in each case one net right was held by a patrilineage descending from an out-marrying kamal woman, and for each the owning kamal exercised some overall control, reallocating net rights or creating new ones as owning groups died out or became large enough to warrant allocation of a separate net right to one of its parts. The other common Ponam collective fishing techniques were dispersed fairly widely through the island's kamal . Data are presented in table 3.
The distribution of the eight net rights for the variant of lawin jafa owned by Kamal Sako illustrates the relationship between net rights and kamal structure. Figure 2 shows the agnatic descendents of Sako, the founder of Kamal Sako, beginning with his children.[5]
Figure 2.
Genealogy of Kamal Sako Showing Distribution
of Net Rights for Lawin Jafa Sako
It also shows the names of deceased Sako members who were the focal ancestors of the agnatic groups that held net rights at the time of fieldwork. Two net rights, numbers 7 and 8, conformed to the simplest agnatic model: all agnatic descendents of the ancestor, and only they, held the net right, though the ancestor of number 8, Kuem, in generation C, was an out-marrying Sako woman who was specifically given a net right to pass on to her agnatic descendents. The remaining six cases show the complexity of Ponam kinship:
One case is fairly straightforward, that of net right number 1. Here the ancestor, Kuluah Polis in generation D had only one child surviving to maturity, a daughter, Pindriniu Kalo. The net right passed to her, rather than to Kuluah Polis's surviving agnate, his FBS, Phillip Logok. This was both because Logok was not resident on Ponam at the time, and because he already had a net right of his own. Although Pindriniu Kalo held the net right, because she was a woman she could not go on expeditions, and her husband was the leader in her stead.
The remaining cases are somewhat more complex. The net right descended from Moman (no. 2, gen. B) passed in effect to only one of the agnatic lines descended from him, that passing through his son Selef to his grandson Phillip Logok (gen. D). Kuluah Polis, and through him Pindriniu Kalo, would also come under Moman's net right, except that Polis had his own net right, so that his daughter could not claim both.
The net rights descended from Tol Drapi (no. 3) and Ngih A1 (no. 4) in generation C, must be considered together. Notionally, Ngih Al's right passed to all of his agnatic descendents in generations E and F, through his sons Tol and Sepat in generation D. However, Sepat's son, Drapi (gen. E), had a quite large family, and in the 1970s he was awarded the net right of the deseased Drapi, whose namesake he was. Thus, although the Drapi in generation E was an agnatic descendent of Ngih A1, he did not participate in Ngih Al's net right.
The net rights descended from Nese and Paneu jointly (no. 5, gen. B) and from Samoi (no. 6, gen. C) present the most complex picture. Nese's line failed, and indeed the only agnatic descent line coming from either Nese or Paneu passes through Samoi himself. Samoi had three sons, who produced between them a number of sons living at the time of fieldwork, the most important being Pakatau, Buka, Kasi, and Sohou, in generation E. Pakatau and Buka were brothers, the sons of Logok, the eldest son of Samoi, and they inherited the net right bearing his name (no. 6). Samoi's two younger sons, Njohang Tonuf and Soon Sako, each had sons, though to complicate matters, Njohang Tonuf adopted Soon Sako's second son, Sohou, as his heir after many years of childless marriage (indi-
cated by the dashed line in figure 2). Shortly thereafter, Njohang Tonuf produced a true son of his own, Kasi. The net right descended from Nese and Paneu jointly (no. 5) was held by Sohou. Kasi, his FBS and adoptive brother, was a child living away from Ponam at the time. His absence and minority allowed members of Kamal Sako to postpone deciding which net right was his and whether he or Sohou were to be treated as the eldest son of Njohang Tonuf.
The distribution of net rights in the lawin jafa belonging to Kamal Sako illustrates a number of important points about corporate property and kinship structure on Ponam. The first and simplest is that, in spite of the variations, the basic principle of the inheritance of real property was agnatic descent, including descent through lines founded by out-marrying women.
Although agnation was the rule, Kamal Sako did not adhere to it rigidly, and the variations are revealing. Rights were reallocated if a lineage became very large, though by Ponam standards "very large" meant three or more adult males (we present more information on the very small size of right-holding lineages later in this chapter), or when members of the lineage were related only distantly, in effect further apart than FBS. This reallocation was made possible by the demographic vicissitudes of these small groups, with extinction releasing net rights for redistribution, though islanders were perfectly willing to create new net rights if the need arose. A large (again, by Ponam standards) patrilineage that was allocated an additional net right split into two distinct units, defined by their separate net right holdings.
The effect of this was a kind of kinship involution, the production of a number of small named agnatic groups within the overall structure of a kamal that was, in fact, small in absolute terms to begin with. Every one or two adult male members of Kamal Sako was, therefore, a group of its own, with its own rights and privileges. And this involution was common to Ponam kamal : in no way was it peculiar to Kamal Sako. This involution served one further purpose. The constant reallocation of net rights prevented the accumulation of rights in a single patrilineage. The continuing pressure and recurrent desire to reallocate meant that any group that seemed likely to acquire two net rights was itself split internally as rights were allocated to the two newly formed groups. The clearest cases of this were the net rights of Samoi (no. 6) and Nese and Paneu (no. 5), and the rights of Drapi (no. 3) and Ngih Al (no. 4).
Aside from the two variants of lawin jafa that were owned by single kamal , techniques varied in the degree to which there was a hierarchy of net right owners. Some had recognized founding kamal or lineages, some had lineages claiming founder status without general acceptance of the claim, and one was run purely as a cooperative, and a loose one at that.
Commercial Fishing and Social Structure
This domination of fishing by kinship was most pronounced in men's collective net fishing. It applied, however, more broadly, for it was the only way islanders seem to have been able to organize relations between themselves at all amicably. This is apparent if we compare the organization and fate of the two forms of commercial fishing that took place during fieldwork: crayfish sales and frozen fish sales.
Crayfish were common in Ponam waters, but islanders usually did not gather them for their own consumption. However, beginning in the 1950s they did sell crayfish in bulk occasionally to people at the Lombrum naval base and in Lorengau. During the period of fieldwork they made two such sales: one to the provincial government for a banquet, and one to a team of visiting expatriates who intended to resell them to friends. In each case the price of individual crayfish ranged from K1 to K3 and total proceeds were about K300. These sales passed off relatively amicably.
Crayfishing, as we mentioned earlier in this chapter, is a bottom (lo has ) technique, the property of the lineage that owned the waters in which the crayfish were gathered. For the sale to visiting expatriates crayfish were fathered from a number of different portions of the north barrier reef, the best crayfishing grounds. Gatherers were relatives of the owners of the different portions and worked under their auspices. When the crayfish were displayed for sale they were graded by price and size, but crayfish gathered from the different portions of the reef were graded and displayed separately. Where more than one person gathered crayfish from a particular area of the reef, their crayfish were combined with others gathered from that area and did not constitute separate displays. The display, in other words, recreated the social partitioning of the
north barrier reef. When buyers paid for the crayfish, they paid to the person overseeing the display, and he or she divided the money among those who had gathered the crayfish.
The sale to the provincial government was simpler, because all crayfish were lifted from the northeast barrier reef, under the control of a single kamal . Again, gathering was done under the auspices of the kamal leaders—though the two active adult male kamal members did dispute which of them should have general control of the operation. In this sale all crayfish were in a single graded display, recreating the unitary ownership of the reef where they were gathered. The purchase price was paid to the recognized kamal leader (the dispute having been resolved by this time), and he divided it amongst gatherers. As people brought crayfish for sale to the clearing in front of this man's house, where the sale took place, he recorded who brought how many. As all the crayfish were sold, the kamal leader divided the proceeds roughly proportionately to each person's contribution of crayfish.
The organization of these two sales was determined by the ownership of the right to gather crayfish, and while a degree of bickering and discontent followed the sales and the distribution of the proceeds, there was no more than would be expected following an exchange of comparable size. This relatively amicable outcome resulted because the preexisting social structure of ownership allowed people to treat the operation like an exchange: each person, linked to the waters owner via a specified kin relationship, contributed crayfish. The waters owner then exchanged the crayfish for money and distributed the money among his contributors (many of whom had their own contributors) in the same way that an exchange payment would have been distributed.
The situation with the frozen fish sales was very different. With the aid of a government grant and a subsidized loan for K1000, Ponam Island got a diesel-powered freezer unit with four cooling chests in 1977. The grant and loan were to the Posus and Nai Clubs, the young men's and young women's clubs. As we described in chapter 1, these were not kin-based groups. They did not participate corporately in island exchange, and their members did not participate individually as club members. Consequently, there was no preestablished structure of kin relationships that could be used to organize the operation of the freezer.
Instead, islanders attempted to establish a community-based organization to run the freezer. They set up a Freezer Committee to oversee operations, with one member from each kamal . They agreed to fish without regard for kin-based ownership of reef and sea, species, or techniques. Perhaps most importantly, because the Freezer Committee and the two clubs did not participate in exchange, the groups to whom the committee allocated the job of catching the fish were not able to treat the fishing as part of an exchange relationship. First they set up unrelated sets of kamal , three or four grouped together largely to make sets of approximately equal size, each set given responsibility for filling one of the four freezer chests. When this created too much dissension they switched to moieties—each being responsible for two chests.
It is true that the organization of fishing made use of kinship-based groups. Both kamal and moieties were, as we said in chapter 1, regular features of Ponam life. However, these groups were not related to each other or to the freezer project as a whole in a way that was tolerable to Ponams. The freezer was not the property of an agnatic lineage, and there was no way that people fishing to fill the freezer could treat their effort as either labor or fish that they were contributing to a relative who would then exchange the fish for cash and distribute the proceeds—precisely the set of transactions involved in the relatively amicable crayfish sales.
In spite of the tension and bitterness caused by these arrangements and indeed by the very existence of the freezer, islanders were willing to work to fill the freezer, and to do so without reward, as the Freezer Committee decided to distribute no money until there was enough in hand to pay off the debt. Many islanders said they were willing to fish only because Ponam's reputation would be sullied if the loan were not covered. Once the committee had accumulated enough to pay off the loan, however, the situation disintegrated. First, the island's good name was secured, eliminating one motive people had to tolerate the freezer and work to fill it. Second, there was then money to distribute, and the distribution further strained the delicate organization of the freezer.
Following a catch and sale in October 1979, the Freezer Committee decided, for the first time, that there was more money in hand than was needed to pay off the loan, and so decided to distribute some of the proceeds of a frozen fish sale. The committee allocated
K300 to be distributed, K150 to each moiety. The distribution of money showed the anomalous nature of the freezer operation and the uncertainty islanders experienced regarding it.
The north moiety marked K50 to go to moiety women and K100 to moiety men. They divided the K100 by seven, the number of moiety kamal involved in the fishing, and so tentatively allocated K14 to each. They then adjusted this figure to take into account differences in the size of kamal and the effort their members made. The result was kamal allocations ranging from K10 to K20. The K50 set aside for women was allocated to them in about the same way. Within each kamal members paid owners for the use of pressure lamps and kerosene and divided the balance equally between the kamal men or women, but with a bit less or more for those whose effort or contribution was particularly small or large.
On the southern half of the island they set aside K100 to divide essentially equally amongst all moiety men, with reduced shares for those who contributed little. Next, K10 went to the women who helped clean the catch. This was distributed equally, except that those women in households without men got larger shares, as they would have no chance of benefiting from the moiety men's shares. Next, K1 was distributed to each of the twenty-eight households in the moiety, and the balance, K12, went to those who provided canoes, lamps, and other equipment.
In other words, islanders used two radically distinct ways of distributing the money. The north distributed to kamal and the South to individuals and households without regard for kinship. This indicates islanders' lack of consensus about how they ought to be organizing the freezer and its operations.
In any event, the strain was too great. Motives to sacrifice to fill the freezer disappeared as the debt was covered, and the tension involved in operating the freezer increased once there was money to be distributed. The freezer was used in October and November 1979, and the proceeds were distributed. Afterwards it was not used again. Instead it was vandalized repeatedly, largely by people releasing the refrigerant gas, and became the focus of accusations of sabotage. Finally, as we said in chapter 1, in 1982 the Posus Club proposed to restart it as a club project. During debates about this, one man slashed one of the main cooling hoses. By 1984 the freezer had deteriorated to the point that it was inoperable.
Demonstrating the importance of kinship in Ponam production, both of these activities made use of kinship organization, even the freezer, a project intended as an innovative commercial activity
divorced from more traditional production. The dominance of kinship organization is made more clear by the different fates of crayfish and frozen fish sales.
The gathering of crayfish and the distribution of the proceeds mimicked the accumulation of goods for a gift and the distribution of a return gift in affinal exchange, so that it was a form with which those involved were familiar. Moreover, people contributed to and received from relatives with whom they had exchange transactions in the past, which provided a set of expectations about how those involved would behave, and with whom they expected to have transactions in the future, transactions that would provide an opportunity to adjust any imbalances or perceived injustices arising from the crayfish sales. In other words, there was a web of mutual, long-term dependence that tied transactors together. This meant that those who felt slighted did not have to seek redress within the crayfish transactions themselves, they could seek it at a later exchange; and they could not go off in a huff, as they knew that doing so would harm a relationship they might very well need in the future. Of course these factors did not prevent animosities, but they did restrain islanders to the point that the sales caused no major disruptions.
The freezer project did not have these advantages. The groups and individuals involved with the freezer were in relationships that were not normal exchange relations. People were not giving fish to relatives, but to an artificial entity, the freezer and its committee. Because these relationships were peculiar to the operation of the freezer itself, they were not supported or constrained by transactions in other circumstances, so that any perceived injustices could only be rectified within the operation of the freezer itself. Moreover, the relations of the freezer were asymmetrical: villagers always gave fish to the Freezer Committee, and when money did pass it always passed from the Freezer Committee to villagers. This reduced the mutual dependence between transactors and reduced still further islanders' opportunity to correct imbalances. The mechanisms of affinal exchange that reduced, restrained, and diffused tensions were not available in freezer transactions. The only way islanders could redress their grievances was by criticizing the freezer project and the clubs and committee behind it, by nonparticipation, and ultimately by vandalism.
These two commercial fishing activities demonstrate in a concrete way just how kinship dominated production. On Ponam, the successful organization of production required not just that kinship groups be involved, for these were involved in the freezer. Instead, it required that the circulation of the product parallel transactions in exchange and the accumulation of goods in exchange. What marked subsistence fishing was that owning groups were agnatic cores of the cognatic stocks that participated in exchange, and owning individuals were people who participated in exchange. This relationship between ownership, distribution, kinship, and exchange is particularly apparent in the economics of collective net fishing.
Ownership and Economic Returns in Collective Net Fishing
There were four basic elements in men's collective net fishing, leaving aside the role of spear gun fishermen in those collective men's techniques that used them: the net right; the physical nets actually used; the canoe to carry the net and men to the fishing ground, though as we noted, lawin kum operated in shallow waters just off the beach and used no canoes; and the labor, the fishermen and canoe handlers who went on expeditions. For ease of presentation, these will be divided into capital (net right, net, and canoe), and labor, a distinction that matched Ponams' conceptions to some degree.
While net rights were the property of patrilineal groups, canoes and nets were the personal property of those who built or bought them, although often these were owned by or closely associated with a pair of brothers or close agnates. Unlike the holder of a net right, anyone could own a canoe or net and could bequeath it to whomever he liked or he could sell it, though typically these things passed to the owner's sons on his death (women seldom owned anything other than small handheld nets). Ownership of canoes and nets was important, because not everyone who had a net right owned the appropriate nets or a canoe large enough to carry nets and crew. However, there were more than enough nets and large canoes on Ponam, and their kamal distribution roughly followed the distribution of active resident male kamal members or associates.[6]
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The distribution of nets and canoes was broad enough that fishermen often were able to secure them without having to look outside the lineage owning the net right. As table 4 shows, where the owning group was below the kamal level, the most common single source of equipment was the owning group itself, while other agnates (that is, kamal fellows in other lineages) were a relatively uncommon source. Where the owning group was a kamal it is not possible to distinguish between lineage-mates and other agnates, and here agnates were the most common source of equipment. When we consider the source of nets and canoes in relation to leaders, who need not be the same as right holders and hence need not be in the right holders' groups, we can see that agnates were the most common source, but again here we can not distinguish between lineage-mates and other agnates.
As we said, labor demand varied from technique to technique. Given the limitations of age and sex, there were no restrictions on who could go on an expedition, and islanders pointed out that anyone who wanted to participate in any net right in any expedition was free to do so. As one would expect, however, recruitment was not random, and there were typical crews for each net right. Table 5 shows summary figures for crews, first in terms of relationship to the lineage or kamal owning the net right, and second in terms of relationship to the net right leader. These figures show that agnates were the most common source of labor, with lineage-
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mates more common than other agnates, and that nonagnatic kinsmen were the second most common source. In fact, nonagnatic kinsmen were almost three times as common as agnates outside the owning group. This parallels the point made earlier, that agnates outside the owning group were unlikely to act as leaders of the owning group's net right. This reflects Ponams' concern with maintaining the corporate identity of the owning lineage and with maintaining clear distinctions among the agnatic units that made up kamal . If we look at relationship to the leader, agnates were the most common source of labor by far, although here it is not possible to distinguish between lineage-mates and other agnates.
We have already described the sequence of events following the return of a net fishing expedition to shore—the way the catch was displayed and distributed—and we have mentioned already the rule against any individual receiving more than one share from the catch of a single net right. The overall consequence of this rule against multiple shares, in conjunction with typical fishing practices, was to reduce the share of wealth going to what we have called capital relative to that going to labor. Thus, for the six techniques considered here, typically there were 133 capital inputs (net right, net, or canoe), all of which would have been rewarded in the absence of the prohibition on multiple shares. However, in fact only 22 shares of fish caught went to capital, so that only 16.5
percent of capital input generated a return. Equally, without this rule there would have been a total of 358 shares, 133 or 37.2 percent going to capital. However, with the rule, only 22 shares, or 8.9 percent of the total of 247 distributed, actually went to capital.
Of course there was nothing to prevent a person with capital contributing to a number of different net rights: letting one group exercise his net right, letting another use his canoe, a third use his net, and going as crew on a fourth, thereby getting a number of shares from a single expedition while not violating the rule against multiple shares from the catch of a single net right. However, this did not happen very often, as the relatively low return on capital implies. The distribution of shares per person shows the rarity with which people did this. For the six techniques, typically there were a total of 247 shares, distributed amongst 243 people. Of these, 239 received only one share, while only four received two shares from an expedition, and none received more.
The evidence shows, then, that there was an equal distribution of wealth from men's collective net fishing. Of the 243 typical participants in these techniques, only 1.6 percent got more than one share from an expedition. Further, relatively little wealth went to reward capital contributions, only 8.9 percent of the total, while only a small proportion of capital contributions, 16.5 percent, got a share of the catch.
The rule against multiple shares was the most important of a number of rules and values that governed the distribution of the catch (described in J. Carrier & A. Carrier 1983, 141–142). While their impact varied, their overall effect was that for men's collective net fishing access to the catch was not and should not have been disproportionately reserved to the owners of the techniques, the various right holders, or to those who provided fishing equipment. These values and practices directed wealth away from owners and to laborers, and away from leaders and to followers. The system tended toward an egalitarian distribution of wealth in fish.
Another way of demonstrating this is to investigate the possibility that technique owners may have been able to secure a proportion of the catch greater than the proportion of the inputs they provided. This can be measured by calculating the efficiency of the different techniques for the groups owning net rights. A technique was relatively efficient for its owners if on average they put in less per share of catch than nonowners and relatively inefficient if they
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put in more. Numerically, efficiency is the percent of shares going to the owning groups from the nets, divided by the percent of the input they provided for the nets. So if, for example, the owners of a given technique got 20 percent of the shares of the catch and provided 20 percent of the input in labor and capital, the technique had an efficiency for them of 1.0. If the owners got only 10 percent of the catch, the efficiency would be 10/20, or 0.5. If they got 40 percent of the catch, the efficiency would be 40/20, or 2.0.
Taking all participants together, each technique had an efficiency of 1, as between them all participants got 100 percent of the shares and provided 100 percent of the input. It follows that if, for the owning groups, a technique had an efficiency of more than 1, then for the nonowners it had to have an efficiency of less than 1, and vice versa. So, an efficiency of less than 1 indicates that for that particular technique the owning groups were underrewarded, while an efficiency of more than 1 indicates that the owning groups were overrewarded, which we would expect if the owners were extracting value from the nonowning participants.
Table 6 shows the efficiency of net right ownership for the individual patrilineal groups owning net rights, ranked by size. The table shows a quite straightforward relationship between size and efficiency. Only the largest groups show an efficiency greater than one. (Disaggregated figures show that only the two groups, in fact kamal , with ten active resident males have an efficiency greater than 1. They average 1.06. The rest are 1 or below.) Further, more than half of all lineages show an efficiency of 0.71 or less, so that their share of the wealth is less than three-quarters their share of the input. Also, as the size of the owning groups decreased, so
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too did efficiency. In other words, there was an economic disincentive to narrow ownership of productive fishing techniques. In practice, then, the economics of technique ownership worked against the owning groups, and particularly against narrow ownership.
Part of the reason for the inefficiency faced by small groups was that they were relatively unable to provide labor, the only contribution regularly rewarded with a share of the catch. As table 7 shows, the smaller groups, those with one or two resident active males, provided less than a third of the labor for the net rights they owned, while the larger groups, those with four or more resident active males, provided more than three-quarters of the labor. The table also shows that the inability of the small groups to provide labor is more pronounced than their inability to provide capital in general, or canoes and nets in particular.
There were, of course, a large number of owned and unowned fishing techniques that have not been considered here, and we have not analyzed the economics of the ownership of reef and sea and of certain species of fish. We have not considered these because, with the insignificant exception of species ownership, the ownership of these resources and techniques had no economic impact of the sort described here. Of all owned fishing techniques, all of which were men's techniques, it was only the techniques
using nets that had any sort of collective catch to be distributed. The other sort of owned technique, collective spear gun fishing, had no such catch: each fisher merely took home the fish he or she speared, as was the case with the spear gun side of the mixed net and spear gun techniques we have considered here.[7] Equally, the owners of the various techniques using spear guns had no form of levy on participants: they required no sort of fee or share of the catch. Thus, for all the owned techniques not analyzed here, ownership bore no relationship to access to wealth: the mechanism for such a relationship simply did not exist and owners made no attempt to impose one.
The absence of material reward in Ponam ownership of fishing techniques is driven home by the fact that net right owners quite commonly would forego their own share of the catch, in spite of the fact that they were doubly entitled: as crewmen and as right owners. On its face this contradicts the idea that owners were able to benefit from what they owned. When asked why they allotted themselves no share of the catch, right owners said that this was because the catch was smaller than they would have liked, so that they did not want to take a share at the expense of others who had participated. In other words, they made the sacrifice in order to acquire a reputation for generosity. And the reason to be generous, they said, was that this would mean that in future expeditions they would have no trouble attracting a crew and thus no trouble getting fish.
However, even the apparent material rationality of the argument that present sacrifice leads to future reward falls to the ground, as Ponams themselves admitted. It does so when it is recognized that the hypothetical future expeditions, in which right owners' present generosity would have been rewarded, in fact would be likely again to produce a catch smaller than the right owner would like. In other words, while at the ideal level present generosity was expected to produce a crew and plenty of fish in the future and thus arguably followed at least formal economic rationality, the realistic expectation of both the outside observer and Ponams themselves was that future expeditions also would not catch enough fish, and so would result in more self-sacrifice rather than material reward.
Pressed further, islanders argued that the motive for generosity was to establish or maintain one's name or repute and the name
or repute of the patrilineage that owned the net right involved. In some sense, then, the point of being a right owner was not to accumulate fish, which could be done more easily in other ways, but to be able to give fish away. This explains Robert Johannes' (1982, 245) observation that in some of the Manus villages he visited "the right to give away fish was the most highly valued aspect of . . . fishing rights," which itself echoes Malinowski's much earlier comment (1918, 90) that among Trobriand fishermen "the privilege of giving is highly valued."
Thus, the distribution of the catch in collective net expeditions matches Gregory's observation that in gift-exchange systems, the goal is not one of maximizing net incomings (1980, 636). However, we cannot accept his analysis without qualification, for islanders did produce an economically rational justification for giving away their share—that it would increase the chances of future fish—a justification that referred to maximizing their long-term incomings. Granted, they abandoned this justification when pressed, but they did produce it. This suggests at the very least that in real, as opposed to ideal-typical, Melanesian societies, there is an ideological element that speaks in terms of accumulation, of maximizing net incomings.
We must, as well, enter a second qualification to Gregory's analytical model. We have established in this chapter that owners suffered materially from their ownership, and that islanders recognized this fact. That owners end up giving away fish does not, however, support Gregory's assertion that "the motivation of a gift transactor is . . . to maximize net outgoings" (1980, 636, emphasis omitted). Clearly, owners were not accumulating, but the way Gregory phrases his idea oversimplifies a more subtle operation. In giving away his share of the catch, the net right owner was not simply trying to give away as much as possible, which is what "maximizing net outgoings" implies. Rather, the owner earned repute by being generous. And the generosity did not lay in the amount given. Rather, it lay in the relationship between what was owned and what was given away. Within the range of normal Ponam net fishing, the right owner who gave away all of his share of a small catch was being more generous than the owner who gave away only a part of a larger share, even though the latter had greater net outgoings than the former.
The repute that the generous right leader earned did have an economic aspect within the realm of fishing itself, but only in a restricted sense. At most, having repute meant that in the future a Ponam would be given fish if others caught them and he did not, but this was not maximizing wealth. Certainly, Ponams agreed, it is nice to know that you will not go hungry when others have fish. However, as a practical matter this was not very important, for the person of repute also was industrious and hence was rarely likely to be without fish. And in any event, as we have shown, being a net right holder was one of the less rewarding ways of getting fish.
Fishing Ownership, Exchange, and Social Identity
What we said in the last few paragraphs raises the question of just what the repute was that the generous net right leader earned by his generosity. It was not symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977), something that could be used routinely to gain advantage in the competition for land, labor, and capital and so converted into significant wealth. This was because repute could not be used, or at least was not used, to lay claims to enough advantage or wealth to create noticeable social or economic inequality.
Answering this question will help explain something we have referred to throughout this chapter, the social proliferation of elements of Ponam fishing well beyond what could be justified or explained by purely technical or rational—economic factors. Ponams owned not only reef and sea, but also had overlapping ownership of techniques and species of fish, a density of ownership that is rare in the literature on Oceanic fishing societies (see J. Carrier 1981). Even though islanders guarded their ownership, they appeared to have little economic incentive to do so: waters owners could control only the use of lo has techniques, those few that pertained to the sea bottom; technique owners gained no material reward, and in fact usually suffered as a consequence of their ownership; species owners occasionally took a few fish from the catch, but this was unusual.
Further, techniques, and particularly collective techniques, were differentiated to an almost grotesque degree. Different groups owned the right to techniques that often differed from others only
because one group rather than another owned it, or because they could use it in a slightly different part of the lagoon or at a slightly different time of day. Similarly, collective net techniques were differentiated internally, in the sense that in all of them, different groups owned distinct rights to participate, regardless of whether or not any group was recognized as the overall owner of the technique. And by the standards of Melanesia, these groups were minute. Only two of the groups we analyzed in this chapter had more than ten resident active males, while thirty-seven had three or fewer and seven had none. And in analyzing fishing to produce these figures, we have ignored the net rights that were not exercised at the time of fieldwork because of the shortage of labor.
This proliferation did not find its basis in the technical aspects of fishing or in the desire to reap material reward, which sets it off from the economically rational proliferation of nets in peasant fishing societies, as described by Paul Alexander (1982) in his discussion of a Sri Lankan fishing village. It could be argued that this simply supports Gregory's point that in societies like Ponam the organization of production reflects the structure of kinship and exchange (Gregory 1982, 91–99). We do not think that this is an adequate explanation, largely because Gregory's description is ideal and does not take into account the immediate social and historical circumstances of the societies with which he is concerned.
Rather, we feel this proliferation rests on two related things: the socioeconomic consequences of fishing ownership outside the realm of fishing itself, and Ponam concern with social identity, the social identity of the lineages involved in fishing and the ancestors whose names they bore. By proliferating what could be owned, islanders expanded the opportunity of sets of agnates to claim the social identity that came with property ownership and the opportunity to benefit from these socioeconomic consequences. Because these points recur in later chapters, we will deal with them only briefly here.
One aspect of the socioeconomic consequences of fishing itself is general to gift-exchange systems. In these sorts of systems the cooperation of one's fellows is always problematic, having to be induced rather than commanded. Consequently, a net right leader could, by being generous, use the catch to generate the social credit that would help induce future cooperation in areas of life other
than fishing, or that could pay back social debts incurred by such cooperation in the past.
The second aspect revolves around the link between lineage, exchange, and identity. This is more complex, and a full discussion of it would require arguments that we develop only later in this book. Simply put, however, colonization led to changes in the economy of Ponam and Manus more generally, as we described in chapter 2. These increased the economic importance of circulation through exchange relative to production. And because postcolonial exchange on Ponam, as well as throughout Manus, was carried out in terms of the cognatic stocks or ken si that descended from the same focal ancestors as the patrilineages that featured in fishing, these ancestors and the descent groups they defined attained both economic significance and frequent social representation and embodiment. Thus, lineages became an important part of Ponams' conception of themselves as a society, an important part of each Ponam's conceptions of his or her own place in society, and an important part of the distribution of the wealth that circulated in affinal exchange.
4
Local Circulation: Ponam Trade
In the preceding chapter we described Ponam fishing, attending particularly to the complex social organization it showed at the time of fieldwork and the way that this reflected the domination of the organization of production by the organization of kinship and exchange. While fishing had always been implicated in the island's relations with the larger social and economic order, by the time of fieldwork Ponams were, more than ever before, fishing for consumption rather than for exchange. It is true that the fish-for-starch trade still existed, but only in an attenuated form. Thus, by the late 1970s the organization of fishing was relatively unconstrained by Ponam's economic relations with the rest of the world; which, however, is by no means the same as saying that the island's economic situation had no effect on fishing.
In this chapter we shift our focus outward and discuss Ponam trade. In this we include the circulation of goods by means other than ceremonial exchange, among Ponams themselves and between Ponams and the outside world. During the precolonial period this trade took place between Ponams and villagers from all along northern Manus, though the most intense transactions were between Ponams and their mainland Manus counterparts. At the time of fieldwork, however, the state of Ponam's and Manus's economy was such that almost all trade was between Ponams and their traditional trading partners on the Manus mainland. This was because colonial penetration, which we described in chapter 2, both undercut and underpinned Ponams' earlier trade relations. It underpinned their trade with nearby agriculturalists, and it undercut the rest.
Island Trade Stories
Before World War II almost everything that Ponams ate or used was grown or made in Manus. By the time of fieldwork this was
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no longer true: most of the material islanders used and a significant proportion of the food they ate came from outside Manus. Almost all of their fishing equipment, much of the material used in making canoes and buildings, all of their tools, clothing, bedding, cooking implements, crockery, sports equipment, and much more, were imported. With only a few basic, but economically important, exceptions, the material basis of Ponam life in 1980 was imported: bought and paid for with cash provided by migrants. Not only were most of the goods Ponams used imported, but also they imported large quantities of these goods. The material standard of living on Ponam, as in Manus generally, was quite high. The investment in imported goods was substantial.
The focus of this reliance on imported goods was Ponam's trade stores, where islanders spent most of their money and bought most of their imported goods. While our analysis of trade stores was hampered by the fact that not all of them kept records, and even fewer kept complete records, we are able to give a rough picture of the economic significance of trade stores for Ponams.
Table 8 shows that islanders spent approximately K13,000 in the five stores that were in operation for the twelve months for which we have a significant amount of data: March 1978 to February 1979. The five trade store owners spent approximately K10,900 in wholesale costs during that time, thus making a gross profit of about K2,100. Out of this they paid shipping costs from Lorengau, the costs of traveling to and from Lorengau themselves, their expenses while staying there, and the maintenance of their stores. Thus the stores' owners appear to have made gratifying, but by no means extravagant, profits.
Certainly none of the store owners could afford to keep large amounts of money tied up in stock that did not turn over rapidly.
As table 9 shows, they kept and sold only a limited range of basic goods, and stores tended to stock and sell similar proportions of the same kinds of goods.
Although the large number of stores on Ponam tended to limit the kind of service the stores could provide, it was not clear that Ponam as a whole suffered from this, and it may well have benefited. It was true that islanders did not have a large trade store on the island offering a large range of goods. Though such a store would have been convenient, they did not really need one, because they were served perfectly well by the store at the Bundralis mission, and in any event enough people traveled to Lorengau on business often enough to shop there with little difficulty.
Having a large number of stores on the island benefited Ponams in a number of ways. First, competition between the stores probably served to keep prices down, and it was true that the store with the lowest prices had the largest turnover. Second, the large number of stores were spread conveniently throughout the village. And finally, the presence of a large number of stores meant that no one store owner could become offensively or threateningly rich from the profits of his store, something that certainly would have caused tension.
Although Ponams themselves did not run stores on the island until after World War II, there had been a bulk store at the Hernsheim plantation before World War I, where islanders traded trochus for twist tobacco and cloth, a practice they continued when the Australian MacEvoy took over the plantation in the mid-1920s. After World War II, however, Ponams entered the trade store business with a flourish, and in the early postwar period dominated trade in north-central and northwest Manus. The first Manus trade store license went to a Ponam, and by September 1953 there were four licensed stores west of Indrim on the north coast. Three of these, together with one unlicensed store, were on Ponam; the fourth was a small store run by the Bundralis mission fathers (PR2-53/54). This flurry of trade stores was supported by a general postwar boom in Manus, caused by high trochus prices, readily available wage labor at military installations, war compensation payments, and the vast amount of abandoned war materiel in the region. However, by the late 1950s trochus prices had collapsed, military bases were shut or shrinking, compensation payments
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had been spent, and war surplus goods mostly were used up. With the end of the boom and the drain on island resources that occurred when Ponams bought back their plantation, all of Ponam's trade stores collapsed, and in mid-1958 the Administration ordered them shut. It was at this time that Ponams relied on long-distance trade at Indrim and the sago-producing areas to the west.
The most aggressive operator on Ponam was Joseph Karin, who opened his store with the profits he made as a labor contractor for the American military. His store carried a broad range of goods, including cooking utensils, clothing, and household wares, shipped from an agency in Rabaul. In the other direction, Karin bought trochus from Ponams for resale to the agency's representative, Jack Thurston. Additionally, he carried goods west by canoe to Lindo, Sori, and Harengan, where he sold them. The collapse of trochus prices caused Karin to go broke. He had bought about £A500 worth of trochus from islanders for resale, only to find out on Thurston's next visit that prices had fallen and the shells were almost worthless. Karin dumped the shells in the sea in disgust.
The trade stores of the less prosperous 1960s were a very different sort from the large emporiums of the postwar boom. Only two postboom trade stores survived for any length of time, both opened in the late 1950s, with a third opening in 1972. These were small stores carrying few goods: rice, tinned fish, tobacco, matches, and a bit of kerosene and tea. Also unlike the earlier stores, they were started and run by individuals rather than groups of shareholders. And it is worth noting that both store owners were employed: one as the aid post orderly, the other as the hygiene officer. Islanders said the stores survived only because their owners subsidized them with their wages: there was too little money circulating on Ponam to support even these two small stores. With the growth of remittances since about 1970, however, things improved, and in 1978 there were five active trade stores on Ponam. One had closed by late 1982 because its owner returned to regular employment outside Manus, another closed in 1983 for the same reason, and the other three were still open in 1986.
Island owners voluntarily classified their stores into two sorts: business stores and customary stores. Of the five stores operating in late 1978, two were customary: they were operated not in order to make a profit, but as sensible ways of using money and helping fellow villagers.
The owner of one of these explained that he ran his store on the money his migrant children sent home. He invested the money in stock, which he ate, sold, or used in exchange as circumstances dictated. When the store's capital was exhausted, he simply asked his children to send him more money. He kept no records and felt no need to, as the store was not a business, but simply, again, a sensible way to use remittance money. He said that putting money into the store benefited him and the community more than his saving it or spending it in some other way.
The other three trade stores were run explicitly as businesses, intended to be self-reproducing and profitable. The owners of these stores saw them as places where they could invest savings in order to provide themselves with a regular income. They kept records, tried to keep track of the profits they made, and tried to increase rather than decrease their operating capital. It is worth noting that these three stores were run by men who were in significant ways marginal in Ponam society.
One store was run by an argumentative old man who had been a rebel in his earlier years: one of the three Ponams who instigated the overthrow of the old Kamal Kehin domination of trochus fishing, which we described in the last chapter. This man had quarreled badly with his natal kamal and was living not in the kamal compound, but on his mother's family's land on the other side of the island.
Another was run by a man in his thirties, a licensed ship's master who quit work to return and look after his aged parents for a few years. This was the man who shut his store in 1982 to return to work. His wife was not a Ponam, but from Bipi Island, at the western end of Manus.
The third store was run by a man in his forties who had for years worked as a hotel and club manager in Rabaul. He was married to a Tolai woman, though when he returned to Ponam in the late 1970s, largely to look after his old and failing mother, his wife did not return with him. Like the first man, he had a reputation for being quarrelsome and was outspoken in his criticism of islanders' inability to organize successful commercial enterprises. He left Ponam in 1983 to resume paid employment.
The fact that the owners of these business stores were marginal in Ponam society, while the owners of the customary stores were not, suggests that running a businesslike store was not fully in accord with Ponam social values, particularly the value placed on gift relationships as the proper form of interaction between islanders. On the other hand, in no sense were these three owners social outcasts—if they had been, no one would have patronized their
stores—and certainly there was no animosity directed against these people because of their business practices.
In addition to the five stores we mentioned, four new stores opened in 1979, two of them intended as business ventures. However, by January 1981 three of the four had closed again. One of the business-oriented stores survived, albeit at a marginal level, and the other closed when its owner left the island.
One of the new stores that was not intended as a business venture was opened by a young man with the money he saved for his wedding. He explained that it would be pointless, and very difficult, simply to save the money until the wedding, but that it would be sensible to invest it in a store where it would make some profit, and where it would be easier for him to resist spending it. His trade store was, thus, a special-purpose short-term investment, rather than a long-term business.
The remaining new store that was not intended as a business venture was opened by a man who had a trade store license that had been held and renewed regularly by his family for some years, though only occasionally did they actually run a store. During 1979 he sometimes sold tobacco and cigarettes from his house, but he did not sell any other goods. After a while he let his project lapse, but figured that he would take it up again later, even though he knew he would never make any profit out of it.
To a degree trade stores were the inverse of the system of migration, remittance, and exchange by means of which wages earned in the commodity sector of the national economy were converted into wealth circulated in the gift sector of Ponam economy, for trade stores reconverted gift wealth into a commodity form. Because stores were run by Ponams, dealings in them were anomalous: Ponams were conducting commodity transactions with other Ponams, people with whom they should have been transacting gifts. Some store owners tried, apparently successfully, to square this circle by asserting that their stores were not businesses intended to make a profit, but merely convenient ways to use remittance money: the store allowed the owner to buy wholesale and so keep his own food costs down, while it benefited other islanders by being a convenient place to buy goods that otherwise could be had only at the Bundralis store or in Lorengau. Indeed, all store owners were quick to assert that their stores helped Ponam and were difficult and time-consuming operations, whether or not they made a profit.
These protestations of benevolence must have had the intended effect. Even though the business-oriented stores were run by people who were relatively marginal to Ponam society, their stores, like the others, were accepted with no more grumbling and complaint than was usual when islanders talked about each other and each other's activities. This was very different from the continuous and only partly veiled bitterness with which islanders talked about their trade and market partners, which we discuss later in this chapter. Equally, Ponams produced no demonology of commodity transactions or profit of the sort that Michael Taussig so colorfully describes for the peasants of the Cauca Valley in Columbia (1977). Ponams were not bemused by profit or commodity transactions, and they were quite willing to accept trade store owners in their midst, though the presence of high profits or obvious wealth might have altered things.
This stands in contrast as well to Ponams' normal intolerance of commodity relations between islanders. A few islanders did, from time to time, try to establish social relations that had an air of commodity transactions about them, but they stopped when their fellows refused to accept the relationships on those terms.
One Ponam became known as a man who could repair metal dishes by soldering the holes in them. He was swamped with requests from all over Ponam. As he explained his problem, he used solder to repair dishes but islanders would not offer any help when the time came for him to buy more solder in Lorengau. Satisfying islanders' requests meant that he had to spend not only his time, but his money. Disgusted, he stopped repairing dishes amidst what he described as a storm of abuse.
Another Ponam, a young man with electrical training, started to repair radios and cassette players. He found that he was using his own batteries to carry out repairs, as well as his own kerosense, because he did most of his repairs at night. Like the first man, he discovered that people were unwilling to help him cover his operating costs, so he too stopped doing this useful work.
What distinguishes this repair work from trade stores is that the repairers were offering something that islanders appear to have seen as being overwhelmingly labor, with only a small amount of commodity thrown in—a few toea's worth of solder, batteries, or kerosene. Trade store owners, on the other hand, were middlemen. They were offering a commodity, with only a small amount of labor thrown in. While apparently islanders were willing to en-
gage in commodity transactions with each other in order to acquire commodities, they were not willing to do so in order to acquire the benefit of someone else's labor or skills.
This set of distinctions helps explain the ready Ponam acceptance of two other commercial activities on the island: drum-oven bakeries and motor canoe hire.
Drum-oven bakeries were an irregular feature of Ponam life. The standard product was yeast rolls made of white or wholemeal flour, sold during the time of fieldwork at three for ten toea. These were popular, often being part of the distribution of cooked food in exchanges, and the two families who ran the ovens never were criticized for their commercial activities.
Motor canoes were a quicker and easier way to go to Lorengau than going to Bundralis and traveling on the mission's copra boat, the Martin . Also they were the easiest way to carry a large quantity of cargo, such as an owner might buy in Lorengau to restock his trade store or a migrant family might bring with them when they returned to Ponam for Christmas leave. Charter fares were about K30 in late 1978, rising to about K60 in late 1984, during which time petrol prices almost doubled, and falling back to K50 by mid-1986. Operators usually got their motors, ranging from twenty-five to forty horsepower, as presents from their siblings or children, and certainly they could not have operated if they had to buy and maintain the motors themselves. Rather, they were treated like customary trade stores: a way of using remittance money that was enjoyable and a bit remunerative for the owner, and beneficial for the island as a whole.
The islanders who ran these businesses, like those who ran trade stores, were free from more than the usual niggling criticism. Rather, they were thought of as people who offered for sale things that they had acquired as commodities: flour for the bakers and petrol for the motor canoe operators. They were middlemen, merchants who transformed and distributed commodites, and who thereby made Ponam life easier and more enjoyable.
The Provincial Market
Trade stores were the most Western-oriented local trade activity in which Ponams participated. We turn now to the first of the locally oriented trade activities that were important for Ponams, the Lorengau market trade.
The Lorengau market, which opened in the early 1960s, was the successor to the cash market at the old ANGAU headquarters at
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Indrim, a market that had been patronized by both Manus people and Europeans. The market was a creation of the government, rather than paired villages, and drew sellers from all over the eastern half of Manus. They came largely to service the urban Lorengau population, which was a bit over 2000 around 1980. Although the market was open every day, Wednesdays and Saturdays attracted far more buyers and sellers than any other days. Main market products were vegetables (with much more variety and much less dominated by starch than was Ponam's local market), fish and betel nut, leaf, and lime. Additionally sellers regularly offered meat, live marsupials as pets or for food, coconut oil, and handicrafts. This broad range of goods reflected the range of incomes and tastes of buyers, who were much more heterogeneous than buyers at local village markets, which may have accounted as well for the fact that the price of sago, and indeed most items, was higher than at the local markets.
In spite of its size and attractions, at the time of fieldwork Ponams made relatively little use of the Lorengau market. During December 1980 we surveyed forty-six households about their use of the market. Of the respondents, twenty-five said that no household member had visited Lorengau market during 1980, and none said that the most recent visit by a household member had been made in the first quarter of the year (that is, January–March). Of the others, one claimed that the most recent visit had been made in the April–June quarter, fourteen in the July–September quarter, and six in the October–December quarter (see table 10). These figures are not perfect, as not all Ponams could remember exactly when they had last been to market, but they are indicative. The
majority of households surveyed had not used the market at all during the year, and of those remaining, more than two-thirds had not used the market during the previous three months. Only two respondents said that some member of their household attended the Lorengau market frequently, by which they seem to have meant more than once every two months or so. Most of the others who had been to market at some time in the past year claimed to visit only two or three times per year.
It was clear from these interviews that certain categories of people were more likely to use the market than others. Most notably, almost all those using the market were women. Only one household reported that a man had taken goods to market, despite the fact that men were more likely than women to go to town on business. Thus, men did not take advantage of trips to town to use the market; women did not ask their husbands or brothers to sell goods for them.
Also it was obvious that older women and young single girls were more likely than others to use the market, apparently because they had fewer dependents. Women with small children or elderly parents, dependents in need of daily attention, felt that they could not leave the island for the several days necessary to go to Lorengau. Almost all of the households that had sent no one to market in the previous year had these sorts of dependents. Additionally, it was noticeable that poorer households used the market more than others. Households headed by single women and households that did not receive remittances from migrants were the most frequent users.
As we said, however, few of those women who used the market did so frequently. They explained that attending the market was time-consuming, difficult, and uncomfortable, and so worth doing only occasionally. Thus, for example, most of those who used the market did so only when they had to go to Lorengau for other reasons. They were willing to combine marketing with other business, but few would go to Lorengau simply in order to go to the market.
The goods Ponam women took to market were smoked fish, clams, and octopus, oil, coconuts, oranges, and occasionally handicrafts or shell money. The amount of money women earned from the sale of these goods usually was small. Women claimed to have
earned K23 on average, with a range of K10 to K45. However, not all of this was profit, as a trip to Lorengau almost always involved some expenses. Women usually traveled to town as passengers on a chartered canoe, for which they paid K2 each way. Very few took food with them, purchasing it in town instead, almost certain to cost no less than K2 for a stay in town of two days. They could possibly get by on less than this, but they were unlikely to forego the temptations that Lorengau stores put before them. Most of the women also spent in Lorengau some of the money they made at market there, primarily for household goods, but most also said that they saved something to bring back to the island.
It appears, then, that Ponams did not make great use of the Lorengau market. They did not attend often or regularly and did not make substantial profits there. Most women, the people who went to market, seemed to use the market as an opportunity to make a little extra cash when they were going to town anyway. They did not see the market as a source of great wealth, and only young single women saw it as an interesting experience in itself.
This light use of the main provincial market at the time of fieldwork reflected the relatively easy access Ponams had to cash gained through remittances from migrant workers. When their situation was more precarious, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ponams were much more involved in the sort of long-distance commercial transactions that trade at the Lorengau market entailed. In the late 1950s the main market in Manus was at Indrim, the administrative headquarters located about three-quarters of the way from Ponam to Lorengau. At that time, Ponam's mainland markets were shut and islanders survived by selling fish for cash at the Indrim market, and later the Lorengau market when it opened in the early 1960s, and using the proceeds to buy starch in the sago-producing areas west of Ponam.
Trade stores and the Lorengau market were the recent additions to the forms of local trade Ponams used at the time of fieldwork. And appropriately, these relied on the sort of commodity transactions that are supposed to characterize Western economic activities, though we did note that a significant proportion of island trade stores were operated according to principles heavily tinged with the principles of gift exchange, supposed to characterize precapitalist Melanesian economic activities.
It is, of course, true that colonization introduced Ponams to a new form of trade: straightforward commercial transactions for Western manufactured goods. This appeared on Ponam the first time that a visiting pearling vessel paid for fresh foodstuffs with twist tobacco, iron tools, and cloth, and it was present on Ponam ever since, both directly in the form of trade stores, and indirectly in the form of the purchased Western goods that circulated amongst Ponams and between Ponams and mainlanders. This form of transaction, rather than the substance of what changed hands, was, however, by no means as novel as idealized constructions of precolonial Melanesian societies indicate. While we must avoid the tedious and usually fruitless arguments about what constitutes a commodity and a commodity transaction, alienation, and all the rest, we hope to show two things in the remainder of this chapter: first, that something closely resembling commodity transactions was and had been an important aspect of Ponam life; and second, that in any case the very notion of commodity, like its unspoken partner "gift," is something that cannot be applied to many practical situations with any degree of confidence. We will do this as a part of our discussion of the three remaining forms of Ponam trade: local market trade, trade partnerships, and free market trade.
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
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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
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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
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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.
Trade Partnerships
Traditionally the main alternative to the markets was trade partnerships, kawas trade, and even though alternative sources of supply had appeared by 1980, kawas remained important. For Ponams the word "kawas" meant a non-Ponam relative, particularly such a relative with whom one had established a trade partnership, an agreement to exchange gifts and make transactions on a regular and friendly basis. Any non-Ponam kin was a potential trade part-
ner, but islanders usually did not have active partnerships with all of their off-island relations.
Prior to World War II Ponams traded seafood and shell money for the food produced by their nearby mainland trade partners and for manufactures produced by mainland and island trade partners in more distant parts of Manus. By 1980 Ponams still gave seafood, but because this was no longer in such demand, they often gave their partners cash or goods that had been purchased with cash, such as rice, clothes, tobacco, or household goods. Also, by that time shell money was so valuable that it was not given except in the most formal of exchanges.
Also, before the war Ponams needed trade partners in both the food-producing and the manufacturing areas of Manus, but this was not true by 1980. Ponams no longer used goods manufactured by other Manus, and indeed by the time of fieldwork no serious manufacturing had been done in the province for over twenty years. As a result, trade relations with people in the areas in which these things once were made ceased to be important. However, Ponam's dependence on the food and raw materials produced on the mainland remained considerable. Thus, what had been a web of relationships tying Ponams directly to villages all along the northern side of Manus became instead a single cluster of relationships with people in the agricultural villages of the mainland close to Ponam.
Ponams still depended on trade partners for some important raw materials, particularly wood and thatch for building houses, and logs for canoe hulls. A Ponam who needed these materials had to arrange to buy them from or be given them by a trade partner because there was no free market in these goods. The only goods available on the open market were imported Western substitutes, vastly more expensive. Islanders also depended on partners when they wanted to buy or trade for large quantities of food, such as might have been needed for exchange, because they could not count on being able to buy large quantities of anything at the markets or from free market traders. Thus, anyone planning a large exchange had to make arrangements in advance with his or her trade partners. However, by the 1970s even this use of trade partnerships was weakening, as many people found it easier and less nerve-racking to buy at least the large quantities of starch consumed during exchanges from stores in Lorengau.
We have no reliable data on just how much money Ponams spent acquiring goods from trade partners and free market traders, and indeed the nature of the kawas relationship precludes this sort of accounting. However, we can suggest a minimum figure. According to table 12 Ponams acquired approximately sixty-three bundles of sago a week from these sources. In 1979, the cash value of these was K63 per week or K3276 per year, but it is difficult to say precisely how many of these were bought for cash. Some of the sago received from trade partners was bought for cash, some was received in exchange for a smaller amount of cash at a later date (in other words, traded for cash), some was received in exchange for seafood, and some in exchange for goods bought with cash, but whose monetary value would be difficult to estimate because often these were secondhand clothes or household goods, which circulated regularly in formal exchange as well as kawas transactions.[2] Nonetheless, it would be reasonable to estimate that Ponams paid cash for about half of the sago they received from these sources, which would amount to K1638 annually.
Of course Ponams also received goods other than sago from trade partners and free market traders, and they paid for many of these with cash. We can not even begin to speculate on the amount of money that Ponams spent on these goods, but we will only stress that islanders spent something well in excess of K1600 on this trade.
The relationship between trade partners was particularly complex at the time of fieldwork, because of changes brought about by colonization. However, it appears to have been complex in precolonial Manus as well. Trade partners should not have had a purely businesslike relationship, but instead were expected to give gifts openly and generously without haggling. It was expected that they would give small gifts when they met, that they would make special visits to each other's villages occasionally to give large gifts or to participate in formal exchanges, and that they would be able to call on one another for help in collecting foodstuffs or other goods for formal exchanges or special projects such as a house- or canoe-building.
Although trade partners were not supposed to keep strict account of how much each one gave to or received from the other, transactions between the two should have been approximately equal, and neither should have gained or lost by the relationship.
If one party felt at a constant disadvantage, he would allow the partnership to lapse or perhaps openly terminate it.
Ambiguity in Trade and Exchange
While gift giving was a part of the relationship between trade partners, Ponams emphasized that kawas also were expected to be willing to make transactions at agreed-upon, fair value. However, the notion of fair value was not straightforward, and it is here that the complexity of the trade relationship as Ponams saw it was most apparent. We said in a previous chapter that trade relations fell somewhere between ceremonial exchange relations and market transactions, which is to say: between mutually obligated kin and relatively unobligated and unrelated transactors.
An analysis of Ponams' relationships with their trade partners cannot be made purely at an analytical level, using, for instance, Gregory's distinction between gift transactions and commodity transactions. This is so for two reasons. First, relations between trade partners did not partake of only gift or commodity aspects, and indeed many Ponam transactions were similarly ambiguous. Second, the nature of a transaction could be a matter of dispute, one party claiming, in effect, that it was more commodity-oriented and the other that it was more gift-oriented. The ambiguities introduced by the divergence in interests and perspectives of the parties involved in a transaction may make it impossible to produce an unambiguous classification of a particular transaction or relationship.
This becomes especially apparent in trade relationships, for Ponams generally thought that starch and other mainland agricultural produce was worth less in relation to fish, cash, and cash goods than did their mainland trade partners. Thus, fair price for a Ponam, and hence a transaction of equivalent values that did not reflect or create inequality or obligation between transactors, was generosity to a mainlander, and hence a transaction of unequal values that created an unequal social relationship, in which the indebted Ponam became subordinate to the generous mainlander. In principle, a deal made at a price midway between what a Ponam and a mainlander thought was fair could result in each party going away from a transaction feeling generous: the Ponam for giving more than what he or she thought the return was really worth, and the mainlander feeling the same.
In practice, however, this situation created unsatisfactory relationships between trade partners. The feeling of generosity each party felt at the completion of the transaction would not be repaid in subsequent transactions, but would instead be the prelude to more generosity. In a sense, this parallels the relationship between net right holders and crewmen in men's collective net fishing, discussed in the preceding chapter. Right holders did not complain about this need for repeated generosity, primarily because they gained esteem in return and because the intense web of kinship and exchange relationships between Ponams meant that this generosity was only one relatively small element of an extremely complex calculus of obligation and counterobligation.
Ponams were not, however, so willing to be perpetually generous, as they saw it, with their trade partners. In precolonial and early colonial Manus partners participated in each other's exchanges and generally interacted with each other in a number of ways, and hence had at least the opportunity to establish reciprocity if they desired. However, these nontrade aspects of trade relationships deteriorated as colonial impact spread, and by the time of fieldwork only closely related trade partners participated in each other's exchanges. This meant that there was no other set of transactions in which the relations of inequality generated by generosity could be balanced. Equally, of course, the deterioration of the Manus economy and decreasing mainland demand for Ponam fish upset the old long-term reciprocity between trade partners and thereby contributed to the deterioration of the more purely social aspects of trade partnerships that would have allowed inequalities to be redressed.
Ponams and mainlanders at the time of fieldwork had not resolved this problem. They coped with it by abusing each other. Ponams regularly characterized mainlanders as lazy, inept agriculturalists who added to their offence by wholesale poaching on Ponam territorial waters. For their part, mainlanders saw Ponams as impoverished, extremely tightfisted, unwilling to trade with grace and civility, and argumentative and combative in the extreme.
It is interesting to note the parallels between Ponams' situation and that of the Chambri Lakes people studied by Deborah Gewertz (esp. 1977). Traditionally, the Chambri fishing people's position resembled that of Ponams after the war, for their sago suppliers appear to have done some of their own fishing and hence were
partly self-sufficient, while the Chambri produced no starch at all and hence were totally reliant on their market partners. Further, the Chambri thought of their sago suppliers rather as Ponams thought of theirs. Gewertz says that the Chambris' sago suppliers were obsequious in their market dealings with the Chambri, and she discusses this in terms of a rather abstract model of social relationships based partly on Gregory Bateson's notion of complementarity and ties it in with Chambri gender relations.
While Ponams' market partners were hardly obsequious and took a dim view of island market and trade habits, it is true that they were much more passive in marketing than were Ponams. It was islanders, not mainlanders, who harangued their opposite numbers about the poor quantity and quality of market goods or occasionally got carried away and attacked market tables with axes. While it might be possible to explain this in terms of a general theory of social relationships, it seems more reasonable to us to explain differences in behavior in these market relations in terms of tension brought about by differences in economic position and by differences in the nature of market transactions.
Ponams' aggressive behavior revolved around their assertion that these market transactions ought to be what we have called commodity transactions and that islanders were not in fact being offered fair value for money. Their market partners, seeing things differently, behaved with a quiet tolerance that befitted their conception of themselves as generous traders who pitied Ponam's poverty, a self-conception springing from their assertion that market transactions were heavily tinged with gift exchange, a consequence of the declining significance of Ponam fish and the growing gap between the customary cash price of sago at the coastal markets and the commercial price of sago at the Lorengau market and in free trade.
Thus, we would argue that the sort of market behavior Ponams and their mainland partners exhibited ultimately was a consequence of different conceptions of the value of sago and fish, with all that this implies. These differences led Ponams and mainlanders to have different senses of what sort of transactions were taking place at market and between trade partners, and hence different senses of how each party to the transaction ought to behave.
We have stressed the imbalance between traders that existed at
the time of fieldwork, and certainly this imbalance was powerful: Ponam's trade partners were fishing for themselves and simply were less interested in what islanders had to trade. We do not mean to imply, however, that all was sweetness and light before inland villagers moved to the coast. Mead's description of precolonial marketing between Titan speakers and their mainland counterparts, some of which we quoted earlier in this chapter, indicates that relations were not harmonious.
Equally, in the same paper, "Melanesian Middlemen," Mead reports without qualification as true what must have been Titans' perceptions of themselves and their counterparts, perceptions that suggest animosity and denigration even greater than that between Ponams and their market partners at the time of fieldwork. She says that "thin, emaciated land people splash about from one small settlement to another, muddy and miserable," that they are "timid, underfed, often bandylegged, fearful of the sea . . . [showing] uncertainty and clumsiness of gesture" (1930, 115), that they are people "whose eye is ever on driving a sharp bargain, whose trade manners are atrocious, and workmanship poor" (1930, 118). On the other hand, her Pere informants "boldly proclaim themselves 'Manus true' [and are] darker, heavier, firmer of purpose." They "have made themselves the richest, most dominant people in the southern part of the archipelago," "a brave and enterprising people, industrious, honest, efficient" (1930, 116, 117, 130).
Certainly there is every reason to believe that precolonial and early colonial trade relations were just as riven with disagreement about just what a fair price and honest trading was, and just who the fair traders were, as was Manus in 1980.
Free Market Trade
It seems that even in the precolonial period there was some sort of free market in Manus. That is, there were some situations in which trade took place between relative strangers without the restrictions inherent in trade partnerships or the market. The most pronounced instance of this was at the time of lapan , competitive exchanges between leaders (lapan ) of different villages, which appear to have been held every few years somewhere in Manus during the precolonial and early colonial period. Ponams said that
lapan exchanges drew people from wide areas, and those attending usually would bring the specialist product of their villages. These they would sell, often at prearranged prices, to whoever cared to buy: for example, clay pots cost a string of shell money the length of the circumference of the pot's shoulder, woven bags cost a string of shell money the length of the base of the bag. Ponams were quite definite that this sort of free trade was a regular and important feature of lapan exchanges and that in principle it could take place in many other circumstances, though in fact it seldom did so.
After the war this free trade expanded. There was a growing market for sago and betel nut, and occasionally for pigs. Individuals from the mainland would amass a stock of sago or betel nut and travel from island to island looking for customers. Occasionally islanders would visit mainland villages in order to seek out people with surplus sago or betel to sell. It should have been possible for islanders to travel to the mainland selling fish or for mainlanders to come to the islands seeking it, but we have no reports of this being done. However, mainlanders and people from other islands did come to Ponam occasionally in order to buy pigs.
During the time of fieldwork free market traders came to Ponam once or twice a month throughout the year, and sometimes more often, especially during the Christmas season. Usually they brought 50 bundles of sago or fewer, but in December 1980, one young man came from Lindo, one of the sago-producing areas to the west of Ponam, with 170 bundles. He had purchased these from his village church group, which had produced them in order to raise money for their New Year's celebrations. He then used his own money to hire a motor canoe to take the sago to the north coast islands, where he knew it would be in great demand. He said that he stopped first at Ponam, planning to sell as much as possible before moving on to the eastward islands of Andra, Ahus, and Pitiluh, and going on to Lorengau if necessary. As it was, he sold all of the sago on Ponam during the afternoon and night he spent there. In order to do so, however, he lowered his prices twice, partly because Ponams complained that the sago was too expensive, and partly, he said, because he felt sorry for the Ponams who had no food. This young man was a commercial trader. He came to Ponam simply because he knew that it was a good market for sago and not because he wanted to trade with kin. He landed his canoe on a public beach, while a kawas would land close to his trade partner's house; he displayed his sago bundles, on which prices had been written, there on the beach in front of his canoe; and he sold them to anyone who wanted to buy. If he gave special discounts to anyone, this was not obvious. But even though this man was a commercial trader, he could afford to
come to Ponam only because he had relatives there, who would feed him and provide him a place to sleep. There was no place in rural Manus for pure commerce.
This case also illustrates concretely the point we made earlier, that there are difficulties that can arise in trying to apply the formal distinction between gifts and commodities in concrete situations. Here the young free trader saw himself as lowering his initially fair prices out of pity for hungry Ponams, as trading in light of a social bond between himself and Ponams: a gift relationship, in which he gave and they benefited. Islanders saw things quite differently. They said his initial prices were much too high—and certainly they were high compared to the price prevailing at the time in market trade between Ponams and their mainland market partners, though they were not high by the standards of the cash market at the provincial capital, Lorengau. Ponams saw no need to be overly generous with this young free trader and so bought little of his sago. After he lowered his prices twice, islanders felt that they were getting a fair price in a commodity transaction.
This case illustrates our point that the nature of the transaction as gift or commodity, and hence the relationship between transactors as socially related or unrelated, need not be at all clearcut. Indeed, the definition can become the focus of political conflict, in this case the recurrent tension between Ponams and their mainland counterparts.
We have described the way that changing Ponam relations with their trading partners was expressed both in forms of behavior and in disagreements about fair price and hence about the nature of transactions. We have not, however, explained why mainlanders continued to trade with Ponams. After all, Ponams produced nothing that mainlanders really needed to survive, though the reverse was not true, while Ponams consistently resisted attempts by mainlanders to raise the price of their produce. We cannot give a completely satisfactory answer to this question, but we can point to some factors that bear on this issue.
First, the things that Ponams and their partners exchanged, money and starch, were different in important ways. Because starch was the result of domestic, subsistence production, it was difficult to calculate its value in cash terms. To some degree, paradoxically, the same could be said to be true of Ponam cash,
for it was acquired as a consequence of social reproduction, an activity that also took place within the domestic community and hence defied any sort of calculation. Moreover, Ponams complicated matters by using remitted money in domestic exchange, further cutting money off from the process that produced it. HOwever, unlike mainland sago, Ponam money had an exchange value stamped on its face and reinforced whenever islanders purchased a commodity in a trade store. Ponams, then, would appear to have had a firmer, more certain sense of the value of what they exchanged at market than did their starch-producing counterparts; they would have been less willing to be persuaded about the value of their exchange good.
Furthermore, Ponams and mainlanders valued money differently. Clearly, they all thought a kina was a kina. However, mainlanders could produce much more of what they needed themselves than could Ponams. They were better able to do without purchased food, for they could grow their own starch and catch their own fish. Ponams, on the other hand, had to acquire everything but fish through some sort of transaction, and both objectively and in terms of Ponams' cultural perceptions, these transactions required money. Thus, if you will, money was worth more to Ponams than it was to mainlanders: islanders had a greater need for money to acquire use values.
Ponams, then, were less willing to negotiate the exchange value of their market good, and they valued their market good more highly than did their counterparts. These two factors suggest that, other things being equal, Ponams would have been more adamant about keeping the price of mainland produce down than mainlanders would have been about raising it.
This Ponam tendency to assign a relatively low cash value to sago would be effective only if an appropriate vehicle existed that would allow them to influence prices. That vehicle was the nature of the supply of sago. Briefly, Ponam was a single community and hence formed a relatively unified group of buyers. Opposite them were a number of separate sago-producing villages, from Mondropolon on the east to Drehet and even Levei to the west. Suppliers from each of these areas knew that if their prices were too high, Ponams would buy elsewhere.
Internal and External Transactions
In our discussion of fishing in the preceding chapter, we said that circulation on Ponam proceeded most smoothly when it was in the form of gift transactions between mutually obligated kin as part of a continuing relationship of transactions. Where these conditions were not met, as was the case with the freezer project, tensions developed that could not be dissipated except by the termination of the relationship. The information we have presented in this chapter on trade stores and drum-oven bakeries indicates that reasonably amicable transactions could take place if the goods transacted were seen as being constituted primarily of items that the transactors acquired as commodities in the first place, rather than being primarily the product of the transactors' labor.
Circulation between Ponams and outsiders was much less bound by the logic of gift transactions, which is in accord with the common anthropological generalization that commodity transactions begin at the water's edge (e.g., Godelier 1977; Gregory 1982; Sahlins 1974). However, just as transactions within Ponam were not gift transactions pure and simple, neither were transactions with outsiders commodity transactions pure and simple. Rather, as our discussion of market trade, trade partnerships, and free market trade shows, these transactions were shaped by a framework of mutual obligation both directly (as market trade and trade partnerships were embedded in relations between kin) and indirectly (as all three were conceived of, carried out, and judged by people who saw gift exchange as one form of transaction and one set of criteria of trade).
It is, then, difficult to disentangle internal and external circulation and lay out one as gift transactions and the other as commodity transactions. This disentangling is even more difficult because of the great importance for Ponams of external trade. Island external trade was not limited to rare or luxury goods traded at odd times. Rather, it was crucial for the daily survival of Ponams. Thus, external trade played a much greater part in Ponam life than was the case for many other Melanesian societies.
As Western impact progressed, this external trade became more
uncertain, because the economic foundation on which it rested began to erode. Ponams sought to make their situation more secure by getting access to the cash and cash goods that increasingly impinged upon their external trade. The main way they did this in the postwar period was through educating their children and sending them out to work and to send money home, our concern in the next chapter.
5
Migration and Remittance
Colonization led to the deterioration of the old sources of wealth in Manus, the realms of production and circulation that we described in the two preceding chapters. This was both cause and consequence of the growing impact of migration in the region, as Manus people traveled to other areas of Papua New Guinea to enter wage labor. The facts are quite clearcut. The 1971 census showed that 14.8 percent of Manus-born people were living outside the province (May & Skeldon 1977, 10) and the 1980 census showed 18.7 percent were living outside the province (Walsh 1983, 79), in both cases the second highest rate in the country, while at the time of fieldwork about two Ponams in five lived elsewhere than at home. This migration had profound consequences for Ponam society, because it made possible the extensive remittances that were crucial for maintaining islanders' standard of living.
In this chapter we provide an overview of the migration system, using as an occasional counterpoint Marilyn Strathern's description of Hagen migrants in Port Moresby, No Money on Our Skins . We use her description for two reasons. First, the bulk of the influential work done on migration in Papua New Guinea has an economic orientation, and little of the more sociological work is as detailed as hers. Second, Hagen migrants at the time Strathern studied them were at the opposite extreme from Ponam migrants. Thus, her work is useful because it helps us keep in mind how different people's migration experiences can be.
We will describe the overall links between education and migration, and between remittances and Ponam cultural values and beliefs, as well as looking briefly at some of the consequences of the island's dependence on migration and remittances. We will reserve for the next chapter our discussion of the actual ways and occasions of remittance and the ways remittances circulated on the island.
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Ponam Migration
The bare facts of Ponam migration at the time of fieldwork are easy enough to relate. Table 14 presents data on the migrant status of adult Ponams (aged 21 and over) living at the end of 1979. For males it shows that for all cohorts except those born in the 1950s, those twenty-one to thirty years old, at least 90 percent were migrants at one time or another in their lives. For adult males taken as a whole, 92 percent ever migrated, while 57 percent were migrant at the end of 1979. As might be expected, women migrated less often, but even so, 45 percent of adult women had ever migrated, and 28 percent were migrant in late 1979.
Reliable historical data on Ponam migration are available only for after World War II, and only for males age seventeen to fortyfive (from De'Ath n.d.). They show that in 1949 only 8 percent of the group was absent, rising to 29 percent in 1961. This rose sharply to 78 percent in 1971 and fell back to 60 percent in 1979. These figures reinforce the points we made previously about the impact of the rapid deterioration of Ponam's economic position at the end of the 1950s and the pressure this put on islanders to look for alternative sources of wealth.
Migration had one immediate effect: it reduced the number of people who had to be supported on Ponam itself. However, Ponam migration had a more substantial effect because of the nature of the jobs migrants had. Unlike those from many areas of the country, Ponam migrants, like Manus migrants more generally, had highstatus, well-paid jobs. Table 15 shows this. At the end of 1979 only one Ponam migrant man in twelve was in unskilled or subsistence
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labor, and only about one working woman in six was so engaged. This contrasts sharply with Melpa migrants in Port Moresby in 1971 (M. Strathern 1975, 9). Omitting the 88 in tertiary education, the police, military, or jail, there were 235 migrant men. Only about one in twenty (twelve in fact) of these were in jobs that required some skills. While there are some difficulties in comparing migrants at the beginning and end of the 1970s, generally Ponams in 1971 were not in jobs of significantly different skill level than they were in 1979 (see table 18, following). The difference between Ponams and Hageners indicates what will become apparent as this chapter progresses, that these two societies produced qualitatively different sorts of migrants through qualitatively different processes.
Because migrants were so skilled and so well paid, they were able to save significant amounts of money to send back home; because of the way they were brought up they were motivated to do so. The consequence of this was that in 1979 Ponam migrants brought or sent home the cash or goods that made the difference between the approximately K5000 that resident Ponams earned collectively and the approximately K25,000 that they spent. Ponam migrants bought, or sent back the money to buy, almost all the island's outboard motors (more than thiry at one time or another:
there were ten working motors on Ponam in mid-1986) and almost all its nets. They paid school fees for almost all Ponam children in high school (fifteen in 1979 and about twice as many the next year), and gave pocket money to the twelve island children who were in tertiary institutions. They paid for all the pigs given in major exchanges, for most of the bags of rice and bales of sugar consumed at these exchanges, and they made the largest contribution to the island's brideprice payments. At a more mundane level they paid for many of the fishing lines, pressure lamps, radios, tape recorders, guitars, clothes, and dishes islanders owned. This high level of remittance was not unique to Ponam. A provincial planning estimate indicates that in 1980 migrants remitted about K1.2 million to the province (Lansdell 1981a , fig. 3), or about K46 for each of the 25,844 residents.
We should point out that though migration and the remittance of wealth back to the village are firmly linked in Papua New Guinean consciousness, the economic importance of this remittance is problematic. Strathern's Hageners certainly remitted little, and their very failure to accumulate a lump sum to take back home with them was an important reason they gave for staying in town. Equally to the point are Louise Morauta's detailed studies of flows of wealth between migrants and residents from a village in the Gulf Province, an area of higher migration levels than Manus. She has shown that even where the apparent flow, especially the flow of cash, was from migrants to residents, a closer analysis shows the net flow of wealth, including cash and cash equivalents, in fact was in the opposite direction (esp. Morauta & Hasu 1979).
Although we do not have detailed data of the sort Morauta gathered, the direction of the flow of wealth between Ponam migrants and residents was so striking that detailed data are unnecessary. Thus, although Ponam's remittance dependency may have conformed to common assumptions, in fact their position was more unusual than it would appear at first glance.
Migrants and Residents
It should be obvious that migration and remittance were fundamental aspects of Ponam life and livelihood. In spite of this, Ponams did not conceive of any substantial qualitative difference
between migrants and residents, which is logical enough in light of the high Ponam migration rates. Those who passed successfully through school and into wage employment did not have any special attributes that made them fundamentally different from those who stayed at home. To some degree this is to be expected, for the relief that migrants were just Ponams in a different place helped tie migrants to the island and so further motivated them to help their kin at home.
By saying that migrants and residents saw themselves as fundamentally alike, we are not saying that there were no differences or tensions between them. It is true, however, that Ponams conceived of differences and tensions largely in relation to specific individuals. A given resident may have thought a given migrant was uncaring, a given migrant may have thought a given resident was greedy, but residents did not see migrants per se as uncaring and migrants did not see residents per se as greedy.
Moreover, while migrants did see the island as backward compared to the amenities of town life, Ponams did not look forward to the chance to shake the island sand off their feet and head for civilization. Islanders certainly wanted the chance to see town, usually by spending some time with migrant relatives. However, as we will show later in this chapter, Ponams viewed Papua New Guinea's cities, and especially Port Moresby, unfavorably, preferring life on the island.
In this respect, Ponam migrants resembled those migrants to Port Moresby and those village school leavers studied by Michael Wilson and his colleagues in the early 1970s (e.g., Harris 1973; Wilson 1976). They found that school leavers generally were not impressed by big city lights, preferring the peace, security, and sociability of village life. Doubtless this attitude partly was the expression of a cultural norm rather than being purely a considered personal judgment. Even so, the norm existed and had its influence, and Ponam residents were ever ready to hear stories about the crime, high prices, and anomie of urban life.
One of the reasons why Ponams saw migrants and residents as being fundamentally alike was the way that islanders understood educational success. While they held that this was essential for access to worthwhile wage employment, as we describe below, they did not adopt the common Western view that it reflected some
inner merit or ability, that it marked some overall worth. Partially, of course, this is the consequence of the fact that Ponam society, like many lowland Melanesian societies, was based on ascription rather than achievement, and partially it is the consequence of the fact that education to a level that Ponams knew to be high by Papua New Guinea standards was common to islanders. This idea that education does not either reflect or instill great worth is manifest in the absence of any substantial relationship between educational attainment and social authority on Ponam in the late 1970s.
There were three sorts of positions of authority[1] on Ponam: hereditary clan leadership (fourteen resident males were recognized or disputed claimants); official elected government positions (village leader, magistrates and other court positions, and school officials—a total of thirteen offices); and elected nonofficial positions (leaders of two village clubs or associations, the church leader, and the catechist—this last was marginally an elected position). These positions of authority are lumped together in this analysis because in Ponam society all offices, including hereditary offices, were distributed approximately uniformly. Thus, there were thirtyone positions distributed amongst sixty-four resident adult males. Of these males, thirty-six held no position, twenty-five held one position, and only three held two positions. (These three held, respectively, hereditary clan leadership and position as catechist, hereditary clan leader and elected village leader, and head of the school Board of Management and leader of an association). In effect, then, holding one position of authority debarred an islander from holding any other position. This indicates that, at least as far as positions of authority were concerned, Ponams did not see a small group of educated people as entitled to monopolize the available offices.
Part of the reason that education could not be used to claim high status on Ponam was that what was taught was seen to be generally irrelevant to village life, and with one important exception this was an accurate judgment. That exception was literacy and numeracy. These were recognized as useful in many situations outside the school. However, it is not the case that these were valued in and for themselves. Rather, they were seen to be like many other sorts of knowledge, useful if you have call to use them. A number of older Ponams said that they learned to read and write Pidgin in the mission school at Bundralis before World War II, but that they
had no one who wrote letters to them, and no one to whom they wanted to write letters, so they lost the ability. In general, these people showed no particular regret. It was simply a skill which they had lost through disuse.
That said, it was true that those in positions of authority, and especially those holding elective positions, were expected to keep records and accounts, to deal with correspondence and forms, and so forth. This suggests some sort of correlation between education and authority, but a correlation that is indirect. Such a correlation did in fact exist. Basically, only a minimum of education was necessary to make a Ponam literate, at least in the way that islanders defined literacy. However, those who did not have this minimum were denied positions of authority. Of the fourteen resident adult men with no education, only three (21 percent) held positions of authority. In all three cases, they held hereditary clan leadership. On the other hand, of the forty-nine with any education, twentyfive (51 percent) held positions of authority. Clearly, the totally uneducated were denied power and authority.
However, this is not the same as saying that there was a straightforward association of education with positions of authority. If we look at the forty-nine resident adult males with any education, we can see how this was so. Excluding those males with no education, a mean education figure was computed for each birth decade. (Because of skewing, a median was used for the 1930s.) Using this mean figure, those in each decade were classified as having above or below that decade's mean. Put more simply, those with education were divided into high and low groups, controlling for age. This operation produced twenty-one with above average education and twenty-eight with below average. Of the twenty-one with above average education, eleven (52 percent) had positions of authority and ten did not. Of the twenty-eight with below average education, fourteen (50 percent) had positions of authority and fourteen did not. In other words, for those with any education at all, which is 78 percent of the resident adult males and all adult males born after 1939, there is no relationship between level of education and having a position of authority.
Thus, education and educational success, the key to successful wage employment, was not a factor that islanders thought differentiated migrants and residents in any substantial way. This, by the way, separated Ponams from some other areas of the country,
where acquisition of Western knowledge was held to endow people with a special facility with Western ways, as well as with the authority that facility brought with it (cf. R. Young 1977). Likewise, because migration was so common, sheer exposure to urban and hence Western ways did not distinguish migrants from residents. Certainly, some migrants did officiously try to develop plans to improve Ponam life, but this did not distinguish them from residents, who were just as likely to produce such plans. In all, although particular migrants may have claimed that their education and sophistication should command the attention of islanders, these were only individual claims. They did not rest on the general claim that extensive education and wage employment qualified one to command respect and claim authority. Which is just as well, for as a whole neither residents nor migrants would have been impressed.
Ponam, then, had changed significantly from what it had been forty or fifty years earlier. As we described in chapter 2, in that earlier period young men, the core of the migrant group, did use their migration experience to claim authority. They criticized village custom and what they saw as the rapacity and backwardness of their elders; they tried to change village life and bring it into line with what they saw as the desirable parts of Western life. These attempts were most striking in the Paliau Movement, but they occurred in other ways in other parts of Manus, as indeed they occurred in other parts of Papua New Guinea (e.g., Peter Lawrence's discussion [1964] of the different waves of cargo beliefs in Madang). As we noted in chapter 1, criticism of elders for their rapacity and backwardness remained, the young giving their parents what those parents had given their own parents a generation earlier. However, in the absence of the historical cleavage between generations that existed in the early colonial period, the intergenerational bickering that existed at the time of fieldwork was unlikely to become anything more substantial.
Education and Migration
Ponam migrants were able to support the island as well as they did because they held jobs that paid well. And they held those jobs in large part because they were well educated. Islanders were
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fortunate in this regard, for the first mission school in the area opened about 1920, offering three years of schooling in Pidgin. Since then, with the exception of World War II, Ponam was well served with education. Table 16 shows the way that islanders took advantage of their opportunity. First of all, it shows that even those in the earliest cohorts had a good chance of some education, except for the earliest women. With one important exception educational levels rose fairly steadily over this century, and that exception is women born in the 1930s. Because of World War II, Ponams of both sexes born in the 1930s had their educational opportunities disrupted. However, this had no lasting effect on men, who generally picked up their schooling after the war when more normal life resumed. On the other hand, parents seem to have thought it was not worth the sacrifice to send their overage daughters to school, so that many simply missed school altogether.
The table also shows that just about all Ponams, of both sexes, born after 1939 completed primary school. This is the group that came of age after the war and hence was able to take advantage of the English language primary school that opened on Ponam in 1952. Initially this taught only grades one to three and was a feeder for the main primary school at Bundralis. Gradually more grades were added, and by 1974 Ponam's school taught all primary grades, taking in a new grade every three years, so that the school taught two grades at any one time, each of about twenty to twenty-five pupils.
Again, Ponam and Manus more generally were unusual in this
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regard. Manus had the best primary school provision of any province in the country (see King & Ranck 1982), the result of both their relatively long colonial experience and the extensive mission influence in the area. Thus, in 1972 and 1982, 88.0 and 94.2 percent of Manus school-aged children were in primary school, in each case at least one-and-one-half times the national average (these figures and those in the next paragraph are from Bray 1984, 74, 79). The 1972 figure was the fourth highest in the country (behind East New Britain, New Ireland, and North Solomons Provinces), and the 1982 figure was the highest.
The province was high on secondary school enrollments as well. In 1972, 27.7 percent of children of the appropriate age were enrolled in secondary school, exceeded only by East New Britain. In 1982, 26.1 percent were in secondary school, the fourth highest (behind East New Britain, New Ireland, and the National Capital District). Similarly, per capita expenditure on secondary schools for the thirteen to sixteen age group in 1976–1977, the only period for which figures are readily available, shows Manus expenditure was the highest in the country, and almost three times the national average. Manus children were, then, exceptionally well provided with schools and consequently were exceptionally able to secure jobs requiring extensive education.
For Ponams, education facilitated migration and was a precursor to it. The relationship between education and migration is presented in tables 17 and 18. Table 17 compares education levels for those Ponam adults alive at the end of 1979, both resident and
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nonresident, who had ever migrated, with the education level for those who had never migrated. As the table shows, wherever a comparison is possible, migrants were better educated than nonmigrants, and in some cases the difference is striking.
Table 18 shows the relationship between education and migration in a rather different way. Instead of describing the mean educational levels of different age and migration cohorts, as did table 17, table 18 is the result of an attempt to reconstruct past migrations, based on the migration history of Ponam men living at the end of 1979,[2] and it is designed to show the changing educational level and job rank for Ponam workers from the 1920s to the 1970s. Moreover, it allows us to see what the relationship is between these two variables. Before we discuss the table, however, a few qualifications need to be made. First, only three living Ponams were working in the 1920s, so we can draw no conclusions from that decade, though we include the information for whatever interest it may have. Second, our assessment of which workers were retiring in the 1970s was frankly speculative in a few cases, as data were gathered in 1979, and some men resident on Ponam who had worked previously in the decade were not sure whether they would seek work again or stay at home. Third and finally, education and job rankings are not strictly comparable over the period the table covers. Education is not strictly comparable, because a year's education in a Pidgin-language mission school in
the 1920s is not the same as a year's education in an English-language government or mission school in the 1950s. Occupation is not really comparable for two reasons: first, occupations open to Papua New Guineans changed over time, which means that the relative status of occupations also changed over time; and second, the real wages for many occupations increased sharply in the 1960s and 1970s.
With those qualifications in mind, what does table 18 tell us? There are two points worth making. The first is that things changed substantially after World War II. Prior to the later 1940s, Ponams had relatively little education and relatively poor jobs, at least compared to what they had after the war. In this they more closely resembled the Hagen migrants Marilyn Strathern describes. Before the war Ponams, even with the mission education that many had, were restricted to low-level work, simply because they were not white. The most to which migrants could aspire was being the master of a small ship, a police noncommissioned officer (NCO), or a driver, and the most that the bulk of Ponam migrants could achieve was jobs as laborers on the wharves in Rabaul or in copra processing plants. Even these jobs were better than contract plantation work, which was the first experience most migrants had of wage labor.
Perhaps because of the low level of their jobs, prewar Ponam migrants resembled Hagen migrants in other respects as well. They were young, single men, as were Hagen migrants (e..g., M. Strathern 1975, 77, 87). The stories they tell indicate that many of them, like Strathern's Hageners (1975, 85–92), left home partly in an effort to escape assuming adult responsibilities and to assert their general independence. And finally, again like Hageners (1975, 11), generally they indicated they were not dedicated to any sort of extended career, but to a more or less limited term of wage employment.[3] A similar pattern appears among migrants from the lowland society of Kilenge, in West New Britain, in the 1970s (see Grant & Zelenietz 1980). Like Strathern's Hageners, primarily they were not well educated and were young single men who were not interested in a career of wage employment. Unlike the Hageners, however, they were urged to migrate by their elders, and they and their stay-at-home fellows saw experience in town as a prerequisite for positions of village leadership in later life.
Returning to table 18, it shows that, starting with those entering the work force in the 1950s, Ponams were fairly well educated and secured good jobs. However, a pattern that is rather more disturbing from the islanders' point of view also is apparent in the postwar figures. Since the 1950s, the mean educational level of new workers more than doubled, while the mean job rank remained broadly the same, whether one considers all workers or just new entries. This is concrete evidence of educational inflation, the demand that those entering particular jobs have more education than those who entered previously. For Ponams, at least, this meant they had to expend greater educational effort to stay in the same general place in the occupational structure and hence had to spend a larger amount of time and money on education after primary school.
Family, Gender, and Paths to Migration
Ponams themselves were well aware of the link between education, migration, and remittances, and they saw education, particularly secondary education, very much as a prerequisite to satisfactory employment. This belief was so strong that islanders said that generally they made no effort to encourage those without secondary schooling to migrate in the hopes of finding work, though as will become apparent, actual practices diverged from this. Instead, these children were expected to stay on Ponam, help their parents, and look after the family property. Thus we asked twenty-one sets of parents what they wanted their child to do if he or she failed to gain entry to secondary school. Of these, sixteen replied with some variant of "stay on Ponam," while only five said they would try to find work or some form of further schooling for their child.
Even though Ponam migrants were so different in many respects from Hageners, for both groups there was a link between education and migration. In spite of the fact that Hagen migrants were so poorly educated, Hageners too believed that migration made relatively little sense for the uneducated. Marilyn Strathern notes that they, like Ponams, thought that migration was a poor alternative to an active life at home (1975, 31–43). There was, however, one important exception: "the one context in which it seems perfectly acceptable to earn abroad is that of the educated worker who can
attain a roughly equal footing with Europeans" (1975, 40). Thus, although Hagen migrants were so poorly educated, this was the consequence of the low education of Hageners generally, rather than a belief that migration made sense for the uneducated. This idea that it is the educated who should be the ones to migrate is supported empirically. Clunies Ross, in his study of a number of areas in the country, found a clear link between education and the likelihood of migration for all age groups in all the areas he studied (Clunies Ross 1984, chap. 6).
Although in the abstract Ponams saw secondary education as a necessary precursor to migration, actual practices were not as simple as parents' stated opinions about what they would do with a child who failed to gain a place in secondary school. We collected data on all children of the parents who had a child in primary school in 1979 or 1976, and the results are summarized in table 19. Of the seventy-four children who did not go to high school, or who failed during high school, thirty-six stayed on Ponam, sixteen went to one of the two vocational centers in Manus but returned home without finding a job, and one worked as a casual laborer with a relative elsewhere in Manus briefly before returning to Ponam. In all, then, fifty-three of the seventy-four ended up on Ponam without having secured, or even seriously sought, regular employment. Another seventeen pursued education or work with reasonable success. Finally, four got jobs with or under relatives away from Ponam (in three cases as commercial fishermen, two in a concern run by a Ponam in Rabaul). On the other hand, of the sixty-five Ponams offered a place in high school, fifty-three accepted. Of these fifty-three, only fourteen failed or left high school for reasons other than to go to work. Thus, much more than those whose children were denied a place, parents whose children were offered a place in high school could look forward to a successful future for their children and some degree of financial security for themselves.
Overall, these figures suggest that those without access to a place in secondary school in fact were much less likely to pursue further education and seek employment. (The vocational-technical schools in Manus were seen as easy ways to learn a few skills useful in village life; they were not treated as serious postprimary education.) However, table 19 shows that this difference, between
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those who made it into secondary school and those who stayed home, was much less clearcut than parents presented it.
In particular, the table shows that these beliefs about the link between education and migration applied differently to daughters and sons. This is most apparent among those not offered or refusing an offer of a place in secondary school. In this category are thirty-nine males and thirty-five females. Of the males, sixteen had some sort of job and four were pursuing further education outside the province, a bare majority of twenty of the thirty-nine. For females, on the other hand, only one of the thirty-five was at work or pursuing further education outside the province. In other words, females who did not get a place in secondary school were precluded from further education or employment.
This restriction of girls who did not get secondary school places to life in the village must be balanced against the fact that Ponam girls and boys had roughly equal chances of going to secondary school. Of the boys in our selected group, 47 percent went to secondary school, compared to 42 percent of the girls, hardly a striking difference. Moreover, excluding those still in school at the time, boys had an attrition rate of about two in five, while for girls it was a bit less, one in three.
In other words, girls and boys had roughly comparable chances (about 28 out of 100) of getting from the end of grade six to the end of grade ten. Where they differed, and the difference is substantial, is in their access to alternative routes to education and employment. Girls were almost completely dependent on regular secondary education if they were to migrate to work from Ponam: they had to do well to get out. Boys, on the other hand, were much less dependent on high schools: they could try to migrate with less education than could girls. Consequently, young (and hence predominantly unmarried) female migrants could be expected to have more education than young male migrants, as table 17 shows was the case: 9.6 years as opposed to 9.2 years. Of course, for more mature Ponams marriage would begin to mask this effect. As migrant husbands married less well educated nonmigrant women and took their wives back to town with them, the mean education level of migrant women would drop.
For both males and females, the routes to migrant or resident adulthood were shaped by forces outside the immediate control of
the individual migrant, and quite often these forces reflected the situation of the person's natal family. The most obvious of these was being offered a place in secondary school and the decision whether or not to accept it. These events took place before the child was considered to be old enough to make an independent decision, though parents did take the child's wishes into account. Instead, this onset of the sequence of events leading up to migration was a decision made by the parents and intended to be one that reflected the needs and resources of the family as a whole.
This was because migration was justified only if the parents expected to benefit more than would be the case if the child stayed home doing the chores, learning the valued skills, and watching over the property rights that were basic to daily life. And generally Ponams thought migration would be of more benefit only if the child completed at least four years of high school, and thus had access to jobs that paid well enough for the child to live comfortably and still remit significant amounts of money home (a few hundred kina per year). As we have shown, the actual pattern of migration in the 1970s roughly conformed to this parental calculus. Although by no means all stayed home, the bulk of those who failed to get a secondary school place, and thus who were precluded from high-paying, high-status jobs, did not seek to migrate and look for work.
Here again Hagen migration stands at the other end of the scale from Ponam. Even though Hageners disapproved of migration among the unskilled and uneducated, this disapproval was countered by a positive valuation of independence and self-assertiveness (described in M. Strathern 1975, 137–150), though it is not clear how much this positive valuation was limited to migrants themselves. In any event, the decision by unskilled Hageners to migrate usually was "either against the expressed wishes of their parents and other kin or, because disapproval is expected, kept secret from them" (1975, 90). It was, in other words, an independent decision. On the other hand, as we have shown, on Ponam the decision to migrate followed the decision about secondary education, a decision that the would-be migrant was not really able to influence, a decision that reflected the needs of the family and the child's position in it, rather than the likes and dislikes of the child. Though our overall characterization of Ponam must be modified somewhat in light of the pattern of migration among males
who did not complete secondary school, it does point to a pattern that is at the other extreme from that of Hageners.
The importance of family events was not limited to the onset of migration. These events were important as well in determining the end of employment and the return home. Migrants generally expected to retire when they were about fifty years old. However, at the time of fieldwork twenty men of working age had migrated and then returned home apparently for good. While their decisions to return were no doubt affected by their personal predilections and their job prospects, their position in the natal family and events taking place within that family had an important impact. Thus, of these twenty, fourteen were eldest sons or eldest socially effective males, and another was a younger son specifically asked by his father to return. In almost all cases, they returned after their fathers died or became ill or became unable to care for themselves and their wives. (Only one daughter came back to look after an aged parent.) In other words, migrants who ended their migration earlier than normal generally did so when family events required that a migrant retire to look after his parents and take over the leadership of the family.
It should be clear, then, that family events far beyond the individual child's control influenced heavily the beginning and end of the migration sequence. Ideology and practice meshed here. The child was not expected to be a free agent until he married and began his own family, but was held to be subordinate to the needs and desires of the parents, the heads of the family. And even after the child became a parent, he was under pressure to quit work and return to Ponam if his own parents were no longer capable of looking after themselves and maintaining their social and lineage identities.
As our discussion indicates, Ponam migration does not seem amenable to the sort of analytical model that has been widely used in studies of migration in Papua New Guinea (e.g., Conroy 1970; Conroy & Skeldon 1977; Curtain 1978; Skeldon 1978). This model is economistic, and in its concern with costs and benefits it presupposes an atomistic villager, weighing up and rationally calculating kinas gained and lost by going or staying. As Clunies Ross summarizes the core of this model, its basic idea is that
decisions to migrate would be related to the difference between the rural income which the potential migrant would enjoy if he did not migrate and the income which he could expect in formal urban employment multiplied by the perceived probability of obtaining such employment. If the latter of these two figures was higher than the former for some potential migrants, migration from villages to towns would take place. (1984, x)
We do not doubt that economic factors influence migration decisions on Ponam and elsewhere in Papua New Guinea. Equally, however, the last few paragraphs have shown the inadequacy of an atomistic, economistic approach. Rather, it makes as much sense, if not more, to locate decisions to migrate within the status of the natal family and the individual's position within it. Indeed, though he has not followed up this insight, Clunies Ross himself recognized in an earlier paper that "decisions to migrate may . . . be taken less individualistically than this account assumed. Anecdotes . . . suggest a kind of family division of labour" between children and their parents (1977, 21). (The atomistic, rationally calculating model of Melanesians is criticized as well by C. A. Gregory [1982].)
This is most obvious in the decision to retire prematurely. As we showed, the bulk of such returning migrants retired in order to assume the leadership of their natal family, to protect its interests and represent it in exchange when their parents died or became too old to carry out these tasks. The case with the onset of migration is less straightforward, as the child's primary and secondary school performance had an important impact. Nonetheless, even here parents were swayed in their decisions by the need to maintain an active, resident family unit. This need loomed larger for their younger children, by which time one or more older children were likely to be established in employment and the parents themselves were likely to be approaching old age.
We must, of course, be cautious about drawing any general conclusions about decisions to migrate and return among Ponams, because their position at the time of fieldwork was so unusual. Life at home was relatively pleasant, both socially and materially, encouraging migrants to maintain a strong commitment to home. This in turn depended on a peculiar set of social and historical circumstances that were already, by the mid-1980s, beginning to
change (see chapter 2). Even so, Ponam suggests that the sort of move to permanent urban residence that Louise Morauta has noted (1979) need not be a universal process, but needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Certainly some Ponams became permanent urban residents or became lost to the island in some way, though the very fact that they were lost meant it was hard for us to learn of them. However, the fact remains that family factors and a strong commitment to home meant that in the 1960s and 1970s migrants did go home, and in the 1980s migrants generally found any other future inconceivable. Whether their children, often born and raised in town, will see Ponam in the same light is a very different question (see Morauta & Ryan [1982] for a discussion of this point).
Ideology and Belief, Migration and Remittance
The link between the family, education, migration, and remittance was, then, quite strong. The decision to migrate was determined in important ways by the child's parents, and the decision to retire was shaped by the migrant's position in his natal family and the family's stage in its life cycle. And, of course, migrants were expected to save money and remit it to their natal family. Three different elements of Ponam beliefs and social values were important in solidifying and taking advantage of this link. They were: parental beliefs about the nature and purpose of education, their beliefs about proper filial behavior, and Ponam beliefs about the precarious status of their island home. We will examine each of these in turn.
Parental Beliefs about Education
Ponam parents certainly saw the education of their children as leading to migration and remitance. We conducted interviews with all families that had children in the two most recent graduating classes of the island primary school at the time of fieldwork: 1976 and 1979. When they were asked why a particular child of theirs went to secondary school, or why parents in general sent their children to school, their routine response was: So the child can get a good education, get a good job, and send money home to Ponam.
Of the thirty-three sets of parents asked, thirty-two said children were sent to school so they could find paying work; and of these, twenty added that they expected their children to send money home. If anything, these interview results understate the case. We made no effort to ask if parents did in fact expect an economic return, and yet almost two-thirds of parents spontaneously said that they wanted their child to get an education so he or she could get work and send money home. The most laconic answer to these questions was perhaps the most indicative: "Get knowledge, get work, help me."
Not only did parents expect children to get work and send money home, in most cases they saw the money they spent on education as an economic investment. Of course, this is not to say that all parents thought about all their children all the time in these terms. When things were going smoothly—when the parents were getting remittances or had reasonable expectations of them—this interest in investment was hidden. Instead, parents invoked two of the normal Ponam ethics: first, the exchange ethic, whereby the parents helped the child and now the child, like a good Ponam, is helping the parents; and, second, the egalitarian ethic, whereby the child, again like a good Ponam, is helping the aged parents who can no longer look after themselves and their other children effectively.
The interest in investment came to the surface in those few cases where things went wrong:
One man, whose sons had succeeded in getting jobs but had failed to send home what he considered to be sufficient money, made a point of saying that he had paid his children's school fees without help from anyone, but that now, although he had asked them for money, they had not sent any, so that he was cross. He added: "They do not want to care for us after I paid their way through school. They think only of themselves."
Another man, in a slightly different situation, had children who had not succeeded in getting jobs that paid well enough. When asked if he would send the youngest of his many children to primary school, he said: "I am cross now, I will not pay the fees. I paid fees for all my children, and no one helped me, and now I have no one to send me money. I will not pay the fees."
Another token of this appeared in parents' considerations of postsecondary education. Many children went to teachers' or
nurses' training schools after finishing high school, and many parents were pleased with the arrangement, not just because of the relative job security offered by such training but also because it was short. The child would begin work more quickly than would be the case if he or she attended a more protracted course offered by the University of Papua New Guinea, the University of Technology, or the Goroka Teachers' College.
One man was asked what he would like his youngest son to do, assuming he completed secondary school. He said: "When he finishes grade ten I will think of something. But I do not like university and things that have long courses. You have to remember the money. You stay in school for five years and earn nothing. It is better to do something that takes only two years, like teacher training." Like many parents, he wanted his child to finish schooling in the shortest time possible (and with the lowest cost possible) and yet get qualifications that would give him a secure and well-paid future.
Of course it is unlikely that parents would prevent their children taking up a university place were it offered. What is important, however, is that parents discussed postsecondary education in largely economic terms.
Beliefs about Proper Filial Behavior
These beliefs about the purpose of education and its relationship to migration and remittance were paralleled by the way parents thought about and influenced their children's educational careers. The crucial stage of education for Ponam children was entry into secondary school. While it is true that entry into secondary school depended on success in the examination at the end of grade six, parents were by no means powerless. They were quite aware that they could give more or less encouragement to, or put more or less pressure on, their different children, and for many parents the youngest child, especially if a girl, was under very little pressure to study, being marked instead to remain on Ponam and help the parents. Parents also could discourage one or another child from going to secondary school were the child offered a place, or even forbid the child to go. Because of the relatively high secondary school fees, children could not support themselves in school, and they could not get help from other relatives in the face of their
parents' refusal without risking a permanent breach among all concerned.
The decision about whether or not to encourage a child and pay secondary school fees was one of the social practices intended to assure that only children who were most likely to send money home were encouraged to pursue education and outside work. This diverted parental investment away from those children who were seen to be least likely to remit money.
Parents judged how likely a child was to perform well and remit money, often expressing this judgment in terms of an assessment of the degree to which the child was industrious and obedient. However, given the gender bias we have shown in Ponam educational practices, it should come as no surprise that parents were more likely to support their sons than their daughters through school. As table 19 shows, even though a full complement of daughters were educated and went on to outside work, twelve daughters who were offered secondary school places did not go, whereas all the sons offered a place went.
Ponams occasionally explained these refusals of a secondary school place as voluntary. However, in most cases it was the parents who refused permission for the daughter to go to high school or made it clear that they would be happier if she stayed home. They often justified this by invoking a common Ponam dictum: Daughters are a risky proposition. They were thought likely to be seduced away from work and into promiscuity and shame by the wily young men they would meet "outside." Even if, through moral fiber, she resisted the snares set for her by young "foreign" men, a daughter ran the risk of marrying a man from outside Manus, in which case, they said, she would quite likely follow her husband, lose interest in Ponam, and not care for her aged relatives. This was a real danger, though not only for daughters, because exogamous marriages frequently resulted in islanders losing contact with the married couple. Even parents who sent their daughters to high school would relate this list of risks, but then add that they had trained her well and judged that she would not succumb.
Even though parental refusals applied in practice only to daughters, Ponams did not explain their refusals in purely gender terms. Instead they said that what they considered was the chances that
a child would succeed and send money home. Islanders said that if parents had a child who looked particularly unreliable, irrespective of the child's sex, they would not support the child through high school, nor would they encourage the child to seek employment. Obviously these judgments worked against girls rather than boys, and gender ideology clearly influenced decisions about who would go to school and who would not. The fact remains, however, that parents explained their judgments in terms of the likelihood that the child would remit and that daughters were not automatically excluded on those grounds: as we have shown, daughters were not that much less likely than sons to go to secondary school.
We have shown that parents thought of their children's education as a cost that they expected to generate a cash return. Also, parents reared their children in a way that furthered these economic goals, intentionally or otherwise. Even though parents encouraged their children to get a good education and to migrate, remittances would come only if they motivated children to set aside a part of their earnings to send home. Important elements of the way Ponams saw their home island helped provide this motivation.
Beliefs about the Precarious State of Ponam
For Ponams, their island was home, and as home it was the place where the food was tastiest, the weather best, the life most enjoyable—and it was worthy of their support for these reasons alone. Their understanding and judgment of home was not, however, simply a judgment of Ponam itself. Rather, it took shape as part of a substantial, categorical distinction islanders drew between home and town. The elements that help make up this distinction helped to link migrants to their village and helped to assure continuing commitment and support.
Briefly, Ponams saw their island as a haven of safety and right behavior in their world, a world increasingly dominated by a fundamentally alien Western modernity. They saw town life as unsafe and unstable, reasonable assessments in view of the widespread concern about crime and the high rates of circular migration in urban Papua New Guinea, and the high rate of employee transfer that was characteristic of those holding the sort of middle- and
upper-level civil service jobs Ponams had. They contrasted this unfavorably with the security and stability of village life. For Ponams more than for many groups, this was exacerbated by the fact that they were few and dispersed in urban areas, so that they could not reproduce a microcosm of village life in town, a point we discuss later in this chapter.
Parallel to this, they saw towns as being dominated by Western social relations, in which all transactions were seen as commodity transactions. Islanders regularly reported that when Europeans invited each other to dinner in their homes, the guest was obliged to pay for his or her meal—"even your own brother," islanders would add in gleeful shock. This contrasted strongly with Ponams' view of their own society, one in which commodity relations and the strict calculation of debt and credit were almost totally absent. Rather, they saw island relationships as those of generosity and mutuality, in which all people cheerfully and unstintingly help each other, and this description often carried the rider that those who do help in this way will find that their help will be reciprocated and their houses will be "full to the rafters with food."
The attachment to Ponam was made more urgent by the fact that islanders saw their home as being threatened. They saw the peace and security as being threatened, as it always had been threatened, by incursions by people from neighboring villages who invaded their waters, stole their fish and turtles, and threatened their very existence. Likewise, islanders saw these same people, and particularly those from mainland villages, as disrupting and threatening their traditional way of life. Islanders said these people had stopped participating in Ponam ceremonial exchange and were reluctant to treat their island trade partners with the respect and generosity that they had in the past.
More generally, islanders bemoaned their deteriorating relationship with their traditional market and trading partners, a deterioration that unfairly meant that they now had to find the cash to get the things they used to get in trade for fish. They said that since World War II these people took to sea fishing and were violating Ponam waters. They said also that these people produced too few bundles of sago to meet their demands at the weekly market, set aside too little to barter for the fish that Ponams brought and marked too many for cash sales only, charged too much in fish and money for the few they did bring, and refused to buy fish for
cash. In short, islanders saw the market as operating almost entirely to their disadvantage: not only was the starch supply insufficient, a decreasing proportion of that supply could be acquired in exchange for Ponam's staple, fish.
All this meant that islanders had to find ways to produce their own starch or get the money that increasingly was necessary to buy mainland starch. However, like the mainland people we described in the last chapter, islanders were constantly aware of, and constantly talked about, the absence of economic opportunity on Ponam and hence the inability of islanders to help themselves. For instance, they talked continually about the fact that during World War II the island was covered with a coral airstrip and sprayed with chemicals so that, as they argued, the ground was not suited for even minimal gardening or cash cropping. This, they believed, prevented them from earning money through copra and forced them to spend money to buy the produce they could have grown themselves if the island's soil had not been polluted and debased.[4]
Children grew up in this unhappy atmosphere, and those who worked away from home were impressed with it anew each time they returned on leave. The lesson was not lost. Young working Ponams said they felt truly sorry for their parents and siblings who had no way to raise the money they needed so much, and so they sent cash home to alleviate the hardships of island life. Migrants, then, did not see themselves repaying an onerous and resented burden of debt, such as Mead (1963 [1930]) described amongst the Pere of southeast Manus. Sending money home was a positive act positively valued. It was not the partial cancellation of a negative social balance.
Here once more Ponam differed from Hagen. While Ponam residents and migrants saw the island as almost completely unproductive, Hageners felt that there was ample scope for homebased productive activity, especially coffee gardens and trade stores. As Marilyn Strathern summarized the attitude, migration "is regarded by those at home [as well as by many of the migrants she describes] as expensive in terms of the bisnis opportunities the migrant forfeits" (1975, 40). Hageners, then, migrated in spite of the range of productive opportunities at home, while Ponams migrated because of them.
In sum, Ponams saw their island as a highly valued home that
was under threat from an increasingly unpleasant world. While town life had its attractions, fundamentally it was alien and stressful. Moreover, even other Manus villages posed a threat to Ponam. In these circumstances it is not surprising that many migrants saw the island as a preserve, a place that needed their support if it was to survive. This led them to pay close attention to events at home, and to support the island with their wealth.
Employment and Motivation to Remit
Thus far we have looked at factors affecting the likelihood that children would go to secondary school, as well as the set of beliefs and values in which children were socialized, in order to show some of the reasons why migrants sent money home. In addition, once Ponams left the island and began to work, other forces that encouraged remittance came to bear on them, forces that sprang from the employment practices that affected them. Some of these made them independent from the village and some made them reliant.
A number of these factors reflect the unusual nature of Ponam migrants. As we have pointed out before, they were elite migrants, distinct from the relatively poor and unskilled migrants who have attracted anthropological attention in Papua New Guinea (see Levine & Levine 1979; May 1977). Similarly, there were few Ponams and consequently few Ponam migrants. The high status and small number of these migrants should not be taken to constitute just a quantitative distinction between Ponams and those from other areas. Instead, these differences meant that Ponam migrants were in a situation qualitatively different from most others.
Most obviously, and in common with those from elsewhere in the country, migrants were far from home, and communication was difficult. This freed them from direct control by village authority structures. Unlike more numerous migrant groups, however, there were so few Ponams, and they were so scattered, that it was difficult to reproduce village authority structures in the towns. This set off Ponams from those groups of migrants whose numbers were sufficient to make the areas in Port Moresby where they settled a second village, generating bilocal societies and so reinforc-
ing social control of migrants. (Ryan [1968] and Salisbury and Salisbury [1972] provide classic examples of migrants who do reproduce village authority structures in towns.)
For instance, there were only about thirty Ponam adults living in Port Moresby in 1980, one of the two largest concentrations in the country (the other was in Rabaul). About half of them were employed, the other half being dependent wives and relatives. And because, like most Manus, employed Ponams had high-level jobs, they were assigned housing by their employers and so were scattered throughout the town. As a consequence, they were less cohesive than they would have been if they had lower-level jobs, or no jobs, and so lived in more homogeneous squatter settlements. Likewise, because they generally held good jobs their employers provided family housing, which enabled married migrants to bring their immediate families with them to town, also freeing them from village influence. Village authority over migrants was weakened further by the absence of any substantial village-level commercial production in Manus. Ponam migrants did not have copra, coffee, or cocoa holdings, or fishing or craftwork businesses that could have absorbed their interest and made them to some degree hostages to events at home.
Other employment practices, however, reinforced migrants' reliance on home. Because they did hold good jobs, they benefited from free transport back home each two years, and most were quite eager to return for the holidays. Also, many were called on to travel as part of their jobs, and when their work took them to Manus usually they took the opportunity to visit home. And when they were ready to return to town, residents loaded them down with betel nut, smoked octopus, beadwork, letters, and verbal messages for other absentees, making this stream of visiting migrants a vehicle to strengthen the ties that bound town and village.
More importantly, most migrants were neither rich enough nor poor enough to live in town after retirement. If they were rich enough, they could have bought a house and saved enough to support themselves in town. If they were poor enough, like many urban migrants, they would have had to build their own houses in squatter settlements and find local ways to supplement their wages. As it is, most migrants fell between these poles of relative independence and lived in housing provided by their employers
and contingent upon their continued employment. Consequently they expected on retirement to have to return home (or to their spouse's home if they married elsewhere). Ponams were, then, unlikely to follow the pattern of growing urban permanence that Morauta and Ryan described among Malalaua residents in Port Moresby (1982).
In other words, not only did employment practices enable migrants to keep in touch with home, housing policies obliged them to do so. Formally, any Ponam had, simply by virtue of descent group membership, inalienable rights in land to build a house and plant some coconuts, rights in reef and sea and techniques for fishing, and claims upon kin for labor. In practice, however, the prospects for migrants after they returned to Ponam were much less certain. Land and labor were in short supply, and there always was the fear that neighbors would fiddle the boundaries and that kin would challenge the genealogies. As we said in chapter 1, the formal rules of inheritance existed side-by-side with a set of informal understandings about the processes of inheritance, understandings that meant that migrants could not be certain of a peaceful and pleasant retirement. The generous migrant of good repute who returned regularly to Ponam was not immune to the dangers threatening his status and property in the village, but certainly he was threatened much less than the stingy migrant who stayed away from the island.
Migration and Remittance Dependence
For all the reasons we have outlined in this chapter, Ponam parents were motivated to support their reliable children through school, and successful children were motivated to work, save, and remit money home. This was a beneficent cycle. If migration and remittance were common, at least the material standard of living on Ponam would be relatively pleasant, which would make life on the island attractive to migrants. Similarly, there would be relatively few families without a migrant member remitting money, which would reduce the demands made on any one migrant by more distant kin, which in turn would help reduce tension between migrants and residents. Consequently, migrants' commitment to
home would remain strong, remittances would stay high, and the cycle would begin again. And if, as might be expected in the next ten or twenty years, children of migrants were to grow up in town and lose interest in Ponam, that would at least help reduce the number of people who would retire to the island and put pressure on its land and sea.
At the same time, however, there was a more malign cycle at work, for successful dependence on migration and remittance not only made island life more attractive to migrants, it also made island life more dependent on continued migration and remittance. Of course, as we described in chapter two, historical events undercut the old Admiralties economy, thereby forcing Ponams to look to the growing national economy for their wealth and their livelihood. However, these events did not require that Ponam accommodation to changing times take just the form it did. Rather, the onset of successful remittance dependency introduced factors that made it less likely that islanders would be able to develop local sources of wealth and so become at least partly self-reliant.
First, and most obviously, the large amounts of money migrants sent home reduced financial hardship and so reduced the need for islanders to find their own local sources of wealth. We are not asserting that only hunger causes cash cropping or begins businesses. Nonetheless, the presence of one successful source of income will reduce at least some of the need to find another, especially when we are talking not about one such source on the island, but one for each family that had a migrant child.
Second, because migrants sent money back in fairly large amounts, the marginal value of money to islanders decreased. This is important because of the economic opportunities open to Ponams. Although the ground was poor and the Lorengau markets far away, individuals or small groups could have engaged in petty copra or fish dealings, yielding an individual return of perhaps K10 twice a year from copra or K10 every two months or so from fish. The large amounts of money migrants sent home made a marginal K10 note six or eight times a year seem relatively insignificant, and so reduced the pressure to undertake these petty dealings, especially as proceeds almost certainly would have to be distributed to relatives.
Third, and perhaps more important, the bulk of remittances was distributed within and under the rules of the exchange system, a process we describe in the next chapter. This further inflated monetary expectations within the system, putting greater pressure on people to dissipate what money they had by sending it into the bottomless pit of exchange. Moreover, this strengthened the exchange system socially and made it more important financially. In other words, remittances helped maintain and strengthen a system that inhibited the personal accumulation of wealth, making conventional economic development more difficult.
Fourth, when migrants sent money home, they sent it to individual families—usually their parents or siblings. Unlike the older sources of wealth on Ponam, education and migration seem never to have been dominated by financier-bigmen. Consequently there was no mechanism that would funnel remittances into the hands of kamal or village leaders. This wide dispersal of remitted wealth raised the economic significance of the individual relative to the community and the extended kin group. In fact, on Ponam community resources were too small to make it worth any sustained effort to mobilize them, especially in view of the acrimony that was sure to follow. As a result, even when they needed money for something that clearly would have benefited the island as a whole, people did not look to the community. Instead, they looked to relatives working away from home. By reducing the significance of community resources, this remittance dependence also reduced the tendency to develop a community orientation and thus the likelihood of generating communal or corporate income-producing projects.
To sum up: the remittance system reduced the need to develop local sources of income. It strengthened the exchange system and the financial demands that it placed on people. This inhibited the accumulation of wealth by individuals and thus reduced the chances that individual islanders would have been able to develop income-producing projects. Also, it increased the financial significance of the individual relative to the community, thus inhibiting centrist orientations, and so reduced the likelihood of starting corporate projects requiring either capital or communal labor. In this situation it is difficult to see how more conventional forms of
economic development could take place. The island's social and economic structures simply were not geared to that sort of thing.
Looked at in another way, the system of migration and remittance produced a set of social and economic consequences that facilitated its own continued efficient operation. It inhibited corporate activity and increased the social need for money. This helped maintain the perceived poverty of the island and strengthened the exchange system and so encouraged children to migrate to jobs and send money home.
The prosperity that Ponams had achieved at the time of fieldwork could be expected to survive only to the extent that the historical conditions on which it depended persisted. Moreover, the uncontrollable outside world that had granted islanders the opportunity to achieve that prosperity was changing again, in unsettling and potentially threatening directions. These changes reflected, in their different ways, the end of the colonial age in Papua New Guinea.
Colonization incorporated the territory within the larger Australian political and economic system. This incorporation led to the establishment of a structure of state institutions, the colonial administrative apparatus, a structure that was generally beyond the direct control of Papua New Guineans themselves. And this structure, being funded by the Australian government, rested on a financial base that, ultimately, was more secure than that which Papua New Guinea itself could offer. With the end of colonial control in 1975 the financial basis of the state became much more fragile, as Papua New Guinea became subject to the vagaries of world markets for primary products in a way that it had not been when it was under Australian control. And, state resources and expenditures became subject to direct control by Papua New Guineans, including those who formed the emerging national elite.
Immediately following independence, Papua New Guinea was solvent and even mildly prosperous. However, by the early 1980s this prosperity was threatened by the low prices being offered for primary goods, and especially the gold, silver, and copper being dug in such quantities at Panguna and Ok Tedi, mining operations on which the government relied for a large portion of its revenue. This, and the generally depressed state of the world economy in the early 1980s, obliged the government to reduce the size of the civil
service by some 3000 posts in 1983. This reduction affected Ponam directly as islanders were fired in this process, and it reduced the likelihood that subsequent cohorts of Ponams could find work.
Even without this reduction Ponams would have found it difficult to maintain their earlier success in getting high-level jobs. This was because the employment boom in the 1960s and 1970s was a one-time occurrence, brought about by the simultaneous expansion and localization of the civil service. By the early 1980s this process was essentially complete, and even though Papua New Guineans seemed less committed to lifelong careers than were the Australians and other foreigners they replaced, it was unlikely that job turnover would have been sufficient to allow the high levels of recruitment that occurred during the earlier boom.
The chances that later cohorts could get jobs were reduced even further by changes in educational provision. Nationally, and partly as a response to political pressure, provision of education expanded through the 1970s and 1980s. It is true that the early educational advantage Manus shared with parts of East New Britain, New Ireland, and Central Provinces was bound to erode as more schools were opened in more parts of the country. However, this trend was accelerated by a central government policy specifically intended to equalize educational provision on a per capita basis throughout the country. Thus, even though, as we noted earlier in this chapter, Manus was strikingly well served by schools, the gap was narrowing (see Bray 1984, passim). We have already shown part of the effects of this loss of educational advantage: the group of men born in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1970s, a group without the pronounced educational advantages available earlier, was in a less favored position when the time came to seek work. Consequently, this group had a lower percentage of migrants than the age cohorts preceding it.
This policy of equalization found a threatening echo at provincial level. In the 1970s access to secondary school in Manus was determined by the pupil's performance on a standard examination in grade six. All pupils scoring above a certain level were offered a place in one of the province's high schools, a level determined by the number of grade six pupils and the number of secondary school places available. In spite of the fact that Manus was relatively small and homogeneous, pupils from different villages per-
formed very differently on the standard examination. This produced pronounced inequalities between villages. For instance, in 1979 54 percent of all grade six children were offered places. However, individual village schools ranged from a high of 90 percent (twenty of twenty-two pupils offered places) to a low of 25 percent (four of sixteen): for Ponam the figure was 72 percent (eighteen of twenty-five) being offered places.
After 1980 the provincial government changed its selection policy, requiring that the same proportion of children from each community school with a grade six be offered places in secondary school. (The actual proportion would depend, of course, on the number of secondary school places available and the number of children in grade six.) Thus, for example, had this policy been in effect in 1979, when, as we said, 72 percent of Ponam grade six students were offered places, only 54 percent would have been offered places, a reduction of about a quarter. Obviously, the effect of this policy was to reduce the proportion of Ponams who would be able to get the education needed for well-paying jobs, and so it threatened the island's economic future.
The factors we have mentioned thus far affected Ponams' chances of entering the labor force at a level high enough to allow remittances. In addition, another set of changes was taking place that appeared likely to affect migrants' motivation to remit, though the overall effect it could be expected to have was less clearcut.
In our discussion of their relationship to home we said that Ponam migrants were not rich enough to survive in town after retirement, and that this obliged them to maintain their social and lineage identities at home, and hence to remit money. However, with the gradual emergence of a politically powerful urban elite able to influence the allocation of state resources, the position of at least some Ponam migrants was beginning to change. The reason was that moves were being made to improve the fringe benefits, and particularly the wealth and financial security, of high-level government servants. These reflected the fact that the public service, where most Ponams were employed, had the most effective organization and representation of any body of workers in the country and hence was the best equipped to advance its own interests, usually in fact the interest of the higher level of employees (Amarshi, Good & Mortimer 1979, 135–145). Two strik-
ing examples of this were the sale of government housing stock and the introduction of pensions.
In an effort to shed large areas of its reponsibility in the early 1980s, the National Housing Commission decided to sell off many of its houses to sitting tenants, provided they were citizens. Moreover, sale prices were remarkably low and mortgages were offered with concessional rates of interest. People who took advantage of this scheme would be free of one important pressure obliging them to look to the village: owning their own houses, rather than being housed by their employers, they would not be forced out on retirement. A very few people benefited even more. They were able to buy a house while they were tenants and then be allocated another house when they changed jobs. These people were able to rent out the houses they were buying, extremely advantageous given the high levels of rent in the free housing market in Port Moresby.
Additionally, Papua New Guineans in the public service were able to benefit from the noncontributory public service pension scheme, and those in private employment were, after 1981, able to contribute to the National Provident Fund. While the standard of living a pension would provide certainly was not generous, a higher-level government employee who purchased a house and could look forward to a pension could afford to be much less assiduous in maintaining ties to the village than was the case before these benefits were available.
Both the sale of government housing and the operation of pension schemes furthered the interests of higher-level government bureaucrats. In doing so they reduced to some degree the need migrants had to plan for a retirement in their home villages and hence presumably reduced pressure to remit. Similarly, these policies reduced migrants' disposable, and hence remittable, income by the amount of their mortgage payments and, for those in the private sector, pension fund contributions. One would expect that these policies would reduce the transfer of wealth from town to village while migrants were actually employed. However, it is quite possible that they would have another, more positive, effect on this flow.
Ponam migrants genuinely preferred the island to town and looked forward to their retirement there. Similarly, they knew that
life in Port Moresby was expensive, even for those drawing a full salary. In other words, although the housing and pension policies could be expected to reduce migrants' present remittances, it was not clear that they would produce enough retirement income to make an old age in Port Moresby appealing to more than a few migrants. If this were the case, these schemes could have the effect of increasing the wealth migrants brought back to Ponam with them when they retired.
We are not, of course, in a position to make any firm predictions about the consequences of these policies on the net flow of wealth: there are too many uncertainties. For example, a migrant couple in Port Moresby with a house and pension would be more likely to stay in town if some of their children had jobs in town than if this were not the case. Thus, what one could call the rate of attrition among migrants would be difficult to predict. Similarly, such a couple, if they decided to retire to Ponam, would find it relatively hard to appear needy to their migrant children, and this presumably would reduce future remittances. Equally, of course, if such parents let their migrant children occupy their own houses, the rate of remittance and ties to home in the next generation would almost certainly increase. To compound this there is the uncertainty of state pension schemes: levels of payment, degree of indexation, and taxable status are political decisions which can be changed in the future.
In sum, the future of Ponam's prosperity was uncertain. Changes in educational provision and overall employment levels certainly would have threatened that prosperity. Employment practices, we have argued, have less predictable effects, but a decreased commitment to Ponam and decreased remittances certainly were possible.
6
Internal Exchange
By the mid-1980s Ponam had been colonized for a century, strongly influenced by Western ways, and made dependent on the modern, cash sector of the Papua New Guinea economy. In spite of all this exposure, however, Ponam had not turned into a carbon copy or mirror image of colonial capitalism, had not been flattened by the steamroller of the world capitalist system. Islanders continued a large number of practices that, if not necessarily precolonial, clearly were traditional, in the sense that they were not what islanders imported from the colonizing Germans and Australians, but rather were descended from and hence harked back to what had existed in the past. We are not, of course, arguing that Ponam was unbowed, much less untouched, by colonization and the development of the state of Papua New Guinea. Rather, these traditional practices were what set Ponam Island and Ponam Islanders off from the outside world, the peculiarities of the Ponams that made Ponam peculiar in the eyes of Ponams themselves. They were elements that Ponams used to set life on the island off from life in towns, and particularly Port Moresby, the place that epitomized urban life not only for Ponams, but for most Papua New Guineans.
In other words, islanders saw themselves and their world in terms of the distinction we drew at the beginning of this book, the distinction between the local and the distant, the traditional and the modern, the rural and the urban.
But equally, this division is artificial. Although Ponams thought of themselves in terms of a separation between their island and the outside world, between island ways and town ways, these two realms were joined, as we have pointed out in various ways throughout this book. The customary daily round on the island was not independent of the existence of the outside world and the part Ponams played in it: on the contrary, the survival of Ponam tradition required that Ponams participate in modernity.
Thus, in chapter 3 we argued that the proliferation of Ponam's complex traditional system of marine tenure was in part a consequence of the way that the ownership of fishing rights related to participation in exchange, coupled with the fact that migrants contributed to those exchanges. Similarly, in chapter 4 we showed that modern monetary relations had penetrated Manus to the extent that Ponams had to participate in the urban, wage-earning economy if islanders were to be able to continue to participate in their traditional trade partnerships and coastal markets. And in chapter 5 we showed that at the overall level Ponam and the outside world were linked through the formal education and migration of islanders and the money these migrants sent home. We showed that the very idea that Ponam was a besieged seat of tradition standing in opposition to the encroaching modern world helped motivate migrants to remit money. And we showed that employment practices in the urban areas obliged migrants to maintain their social identities and lineage memberships at home and obliged them to remit money. The traditional and the modern, Ponam and town, were intertwined in a number of ways.
In this chapter we want to look more closely at the link between the traditional and the modern, by looking at what was probably the dominant mechanism by means of which money went from migrants to residents. That mechanism was ceremonial exchange on Ponam, the activity that, along with fishing, lay at the core of Ponam tradition and self-concept.
The flow of wealth migrants sent to the island was not simply spontaneous remittance, an unregulated practice reflecting only the state of the bank balances of migrant workers. Certainly some of this flow was ad hoc, the result of relatives at home asking for money at a time when a migrant had a bit extra, a private affair shaped only by the desires and abilities of the parties involved. Generally, though, this was not the case. The flow of wealth did not depend merely on the spontaneous generosity of migrants or the ability of residents to make eloquent presentations of their need. Rather, ceremonial exchange, a regular social mechanism existing above and beyond the needs and abilities of individual residents and migrants, drove migrants to look back to Ponam and drove residents to look outward to migrants. In other words, while the broad sociological factors we described in chapter 5 underlay
the general flow of wealth from migrants to residents, the system of ceremonial exchange and the needs it generated provided an important part of the specific instances in which that flow took place.
Before describing what Ponam ceremonial exchange was, we must state clearly what it was not: competitive. There were subtle points of competition in Ponam exchange, but by the standards of exchange in most of Melanesia, Ponam exchange was a relatively placid affair. The sort of animosity that Michael Young (1971) described on Goodenough Island in Milne Bay Province, like the sheer competitiveness of the moka exchange system in Mt. Hagen (see A. J. Strathern 1971) or the hekara or boubou exchanges in Hanuabada (see Gregory 1980), simply did not exist on Ponam.
Competitiveness had been a prime feature of the old lapan exchanges which were made between villages. In this vein, it is worth noting that the one prestation we saw that was explicitly competitive, like the one we heard of that was competitive, was made by Ponams to people from elsewhere in Manus. However, by the 1970s intervillage prestations were rare.
A concomitant of the absence of competitive exchange was that Ponams did not participate in cycles of exchange for exchange's sake. The relationships that exchanges were supposed to legitimate and the events they were supposed to commemorate were not merely pretexts for mounting a display of wealth. Rather, the exchanges were directly dependent upon those relationships and events. Further, they were supposed to be, and were in fact, proportional to them. A brideprice payment, a totemic rite of passage payment, and a first fruits prestation were proportional to the significance of their occasions, not to the wealth or power of the principals involved.
This absence of competition meant that the relationship between Ponam migrants and residents was very different from, for example, what Laura Zimmer (1985) describes among the Gende of the uplands of Madang Province. There, remittances were funneled into the system of competitive exchange, which led to substantial inequalities of wealth and power, based to a significant degree simply on who had an employed migrant relative who sent money home and who did not. Money was sufficiently important in exchange and sufficiently hard to get locally that those without employed migrant relatives frequently were forced out of the ex-
change system, no matter how assiduous they were at their gardens and piggeries. The upshot was a weakening of cohesion in the society as the ranks of those unable to participate grew, a weakening that the Gende themselves saw and sought to combat.
Of course there were many reasons other than the absence of competitive exchange for the disappearance of gross inequalities on Ponam, and we have described some of the more important ones in previous chapters. However, the nature of Ponam's exchange was an important cause of its relative equality. Indeed, unlike the Gende, the Ponam mix of migration, remittance, and exchange was a glue that helped hold the society together, rather than a solvent causing it to fall apart.
Ceremonial Exchange
On Ponam there were dozens of occasions on which individuals were required to exchange gifts with relatives. The most important of these occasions were weddings, brideprice payments, and funerals, but also there were numerous others. Exchange was basic to Ponams', and indeed to all Manus people's, pride and self-identity. Furthermore, there was no evidence that exchange was weakening on Ponam. In fact, some islanders said that it was becoming more intense and important as time progressed.
In order to be accepted as a mature and responsible adult in Ponam society, an individual was obliged to participate in formal exchange. Anyone who refused to do so would be without status and without moral character. As Ponams saw it, an individual's greatest responsibility was to his family, and one of his greatest obligations to his family was to help them in exchange. Where family obligations conflicted with others, the obligations to the family, and particularly the obligation to participate as part of the family in exchange, were expected to prevail. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this institution for Ponams and their culture and self-concept.
Not only did exchange occupy an important place in Ponam culture and islanders' self-concept, it was important in the pragmatic give-and-take of daily life. By this give-and-take we do not mean the petty exchanging of minor goods that is important in
many Melanesian societies, for such exchanges were relatively rare on Ponam. Instead, we mean the give-and-take of cooperation. Islanders needed the cooperation of their fellows in such tasks as building a house or canoe, cleaning a road, clearing bush, and many of the activities necessary for daily life. While in theory this cooperation could be expected automatically from certain classes of kin, in practice, as is true generally of societies oriented toward gift-exchange rather than commodity transactions, the cooperation needed to be induced. This inducing required that the person seeking the cooperation either had already established social credit with the person or people whose cooperation was sought or could be expected to discharge at some later date the social debt that such cooperation would create.
However, because there was on Ponam relatively little informal exchange or prestation, many social debts and credits were settled in formal exchange, which presented no problem for most people as these exchanges were so frequent. On the other hand, anyone who wanted to avoid participating in formal exchange would have found it difficult to manage debts and credits, and so would have found it difficult to induce the sort of cooperation needed to live a reasonably comfortable life. Islanders were quite aware of this practical utility of participation in exchange and so felt obliged to take part.
Although exchange took place on other occasions, the cycle of marriage and funeral exchanges were the heart of the Ponam exchange system. They involved the greatest amount of time and wealth and had the most far-reaching consequences. The cycle of marriage payments legitimated not only the marriage itself, but also the right of the children to agnatic group membership, and thus to the property owned by that group. Similarly, the funeral exchanges marked the final compensation by the person's matrilateral relatives to important elements of his or her patrilateral kin for their nurturing and support of the deceased. (A detailed description of the cycle of affinal and other exchanges is beyond the scope of this chapter. Those who are interested should consult A. Carrier [1987]; A. Carrier & J. Carrier [1987].)
Perhaps appropriately, marriage and funeral exchanges were always tense and usually acrimonious affairs. Relatives would
claim that they were slighted in the exchange, or drag up an old or new grievance to justify slighting someone else. Disputes about kin group membership and about who really owned the land on which the exchange took place, important in asserting group identity and relationships, were a continual worry. The constant need to balance rights and duties, obligations and counterobligations, drove most leaders of exchanges to distraction, and they vented their anger in vicious muttered comments about the idiocies rampant among their relatives.
All of these tensions put a heavy burden on those closely involved in exchange, and islanders recognized this burden in their assertion that exchange, and especially marriage and funeral exchange, was the hardest work that there was on Ponam: certainly harder than any physical labor islanders undertook. There was almost universal sympathy for exchange leaders and a real appreciation of the leader's relief when the payment was finally presented to the focal recipient, almost invariably accompanied with the words: "For better or for worse, it is yours to worry about now."
As the preceding few paragraphs may suggest, formal exchange on Ponam, and indeed throughout Manus and Melanesia more generally, was complex and involved large numbers of people in lifelong obligations. Although the system of exchange varied somewhat from event to event, the basic pattern was as follows (note that in this hypothetical example we refer to all participants as though they were living, resident males, though in fact this never was the case):
One individual or family, A , had an obligation to make a gift to another, Z (see diagram 1). A received help in making this gift from his agnates and cognates, B , who received help from their cognates and affines C , and so on back to the most peripheral contributors, those who received help from no one. On the day of the exchange, A would present the goods that he himself had acquired and those that had been given to him by his relatives to the person to whom he had the obligation, Z . Z would then distribute shares of this gift to his own agnates and cognates Y , who would give shares to their own cognates and affines X , who would pass shares on to their cognates and affines W , and so on to the most peripheral recipients, who redistributed to no one.
At a later date Z would be required to make a return gift to A . He would be helped to make this gift by all those kin to whom he geve a share of A 's initial gift, and they would be helped by all those to whom they had distributed their shares and so on. In an important
Diagram 1.
The Pattern of Formal Exchange
exchange A easily could have received helping gifts from more than a hundred relatives, and Z might distribute what he received to a similar number (see table 20). A stylized pattern of the collection and distribution of initial and return gifts is shown in diagram 1.
This rapidly ramifying pattern of exchange contribution and distribution meant that Ponam affinal exchange was quite dense: it involved a high proportion of the adult population, many of them participating in more than one capacity and on both sides of the exchange. (We have the impression that, compared to most Papua New Guinea societies, Ponam exchange was frequent, the breadth of participation among islanders was high, and the proportion participating in more than one capacity was high. However, this is only an impression. We have found no detailed quantitative studies of the sort that would allow us to make a firmer judgment.)
The degree of involvement is illustrated by the distribution of tobacco as part of two engagement prestations that took place in 1979. In these prestations the family of the intended groom marked the engagement by giving a small quantity of tobacco and money to the family of the intended bride (four or five pounds of twist tobacco at about thirty sticks per pound and about K10 in cash). The tobacco and money were distributed by a senior member of the intended bride's family. The distribution was to mark those who would be expected to participate in subsequent exchanges regarding the marriage, and the web of relations it marked out constituted the sal (literally, road) or kin links that were to be "remembered" or activated for the exchange.
Participation in the distributions consisted of being given some of the tobacco, which may have been kept or passed on to another person. Recipients need not actually have handled the tobacco. In some cases the tobacco given was disposed of according to the recipient's wishes.
Thus, a Ponam may have made his or her wishes clear prior to being given tobacco, in which case the donor could, and at times would, have given the tobacco directly to the person the recipient had designated, stating that it came paro sal a (literally, on the road of) the bypassed recipient—that is, according to his or her wishes and in his or her name: it was not at all unusual for a Ponam to designate his or her spouse as intended recipient, and to have gifts given to the designated spouse directly, in the name of the bypassed spouse.
In other cases, typically with Ponams who were absent from the island at the time of the distribution, either temporarily or because they were migrants, the donor would pass the tobacco on to the person to whom the absent islander would have been expected to give the gift in turn.
One of the reasons this system of bypassing and indirect participation was possible was that the rules and practices of exchange at the time of fieldwork sharply limited the range of people from whom a Ponam could receive or to whom a Ponam could give. Islanders did not exchange freely with more distant relatives. This limitation made it impossible to compete for partners with each other, a sort of competition common in the New Guinea Highlands. Instead, they exchanged within a narrow compass of kin, primarily children, siblings, parents, parents' siblings, and close cousins. This restrictive circle helped account for what we noted in chapter 4, the fact that kawas , kin from other villages, seldom were involved in Ponam exchange, just as Ponams seldom were involved in theirs. Recalling a point we made in chapter 5, this preference for exchange with close kin tended to decentralize island society, because it made it relatively difficult for people to use their wealth to dominate exchange and create obligations in the way that occurred in Highlands New Guinea societies. The structure and practices of Ponam exchange at the time of fieldwork were simply too rigid to encourage the emergence of bigmen.
Further, the generally accepted rules and practices of exchange determined what should be done with any gift a person received. For married adults it went like this:
Any gift received from a member of one's Iowa or kindred (a cognate other than a descendent) should have been given to one's own child. If the child were unmarried, the gift automatically would go to the child's other parent (that is, gifts between spouses were indirect, through their children; childless couples presumed a hypothetical child). If the child were married, the gift might have gone to the child's other parent, but more often it went, again via a real or hypothetical child, to his or her spouse. Conversely, any gift received from a child should have been given to members of the recipient's Iowa .
Larger and more important gifts could be distributed formally to the principal groups making up one's Iowa , the set of cognatic stocks from whom ego would expect to receive help in an important prestation (these are described below, in the section on exchange and redistribution). Smaller and less important gifts would be distributed informally to ego's closer cognates and agnates.
Leaving aside the niceties of the system, and particularly the formality that spouses gave to each other through their children, the overall effect was that gifts went from cognates to affines to cognates to affines, and so on. Structurally, then, gifts could not be contained within a descent group, again as appears to have been the case in many Highlands societies, but were dispersed quite widely.
For example, in the first engagement distribution considered here the tobacco received by the intended bride's family was broken into eight unequal portions. One went to the bride's father and one to each of his three brothers; each of these people divided the gift among his spouse and children. One of the four remaining portions went to the bride's mother, one went to the bride's FFB's descendents, one went to her FFZ's descendents, and one went to a pair of clans distantly linked with her own. Thus, within just one or two transactions the gift already was dispersed widely outside of the intended bride's natal clan. Of course, further transactions would distribute the tobacco still further, offering anyone who wanted to participate in the distribution an opportunity to do so.
Table 20 shows the varieties of participation for the distribution of the tobacco in these two engagement prestations. In this table we have avoided the complication of gifts through children by looking only at the participation of adults. For the first distribution there were 125 adults on Ponam at the time. Of these, 113 (90 percent) participated. At the time of the second distribution there were 139 adults on Ponam, of whom 122 (88 percent) participated.
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Thus, about nine out of ten of the island's resident adults participated in these distributions as kin of the family of each intended bride. Almost all of them would, of course, expect to participate as kin of the groom's family as well.
Given the fact that Ponam was highly endogamous, it is not surprising that many people could activate more than one road to the intended bride through the rapidly and distantly ramified kinship web that the distribution of this tobacco marked out. As table 20 shows, the majority of people participated in terms of only one of the kinship links the spreading tobacco traced. However, about a fifth of resident participants who received a share of the distribution did so by two roads, and a bit less than a fifth were linked by three or more.
The distribution of participation also bears out the point we made earlier, that exchange structure and practice made it difficult for any small set of islanders to dominate the exchange system by consistently being the focus for a large number of transactions in different exchanges. Taking intense participation to mean activating three or more roads, a similar number of residents participated intensely in the first (twenty-three) and second (nineteen) distributions. However, only seven people participated intensely in both: three old widows, one old unmarried woman, one old married woman, one old man, and one active adult man. Likewise, a majority of intense participants were female: twelve of twenty-three in the first distribution and thirteen of nineteen in the second. These points buttress an observation we made in chapter 1, that women played an important role in exchange, which in turn helped them to maintain a secure position in island life.
The goods given in formal exchange on Ponam varied with the occasion, but the most important goods were shell money, dog's teeth, cash, rice, sugar, flour, other imported foods, sago, woven bags, lime gourds, wooden tables, grass skirts, imported clothing, and enamel dishes. It is worth noting that Ponams rarely gave their own staple product, fresh or smoked fish, in internal exchange. The total value of goods given in exchange varied enormously from event to event, though the basic pattern of exchange was fairly constant. On a relatively unimportant occasion the initial gift might have been worth as little as K50 or K100 around the time of fieldwork, but on a major occasion such as a brideprice the initial gift could be worth more than K10,000.
The value of the things circulated during the entire exchange would be more than this, however. First of all, almost all exchanges entailed njamis , a meal prepared by those who received the main gift and given to those who brought the main gift, effectively all of those who contributed to the gift. In addition, funeral exchanges and celebrations of the construction of a new men's house entailed a large distribution of cooked food to the whole island, distributed to each kamal and consumed by its members, called a sahai . Third, a return gift, the kahu , was obligatory in all but funeral exchanges. Usually this was about a third of the value of the initial gift, and it too was received with the distribution of cooked food, njamis . And fourth, wedding exchanges involved a formal sit-down meal for everyone on the island. Taking all the major and minor gifts, meals, and expenses into account, we estimate that the total value of the things given in an exchange usually was about twice the value of the initial gift. Thus, for example, an initial brideprice payment of, say, K5000 would be met with a return gift of goods worth about K1500, and a further K3500 would be spent on cooked food and ancillary items.
Formal exchange on Ponam thus involved both a large number of people and a great deal of wealth. Also, it was extremely time-consuming because these exchanges were held so frequently. Table 21 lists the exchanges that took place on Ponam between 1 December 1978 and 1 January 1980 and that involved essentially all resident adult Ponams. (We do not list the numerous smaller exchanges which involved fewer Ponams.) Most of these exchanges took at least two days—one for making the initial payment and one for making the return gift—and many took even longer. For
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each day on which an exchange took place, each participating adult could expect to contribute up to one full day's labor.
This table shows that during thirteen months Ponams spent seventy-six days involved in important exchanges and that the initial gifts given during this period totalled approximately K27,000. Because, as we noted previously, the total value of goods given in an exchange was roughly twice the value of the initial gift, the total value of the goods circulated through these exchanges was about K55,000. In addition to these more traditional exchanges, Ponams also held public parties modeled on traditional exchange on New Year's Day, Independence Day, and other holidays, as well as to celebrate the opening of public buildings, to welcome visitors, or on other occasions of general importance. Nine such parties were held between November 1978 and January 1980, costing approximately K100 each. This brought the total number of days devoted to exchange to eighty-five and the total cost to a bit over K55,000.
Besides these major events, each Ponam also participated regularly in minor exchanges involving fewer people. These smaller exchanges were held to mark personal events, such as the completion of a canoe, net, or sail, the harvesting of first fruits from an important tree, an unusually large catch of fish, the curing of an illness, the settling of an argument, and so on. Although these
exchanges involved fewer people, they followed the same general pattern as the larger ones and were just as time-consuming for those involved. We estimate that most people participated in exchanges of this sort about ten times during the period of fieldwork, and while it was not possible to get precise figures for the amount of money spent on these exchanges, it was almost certain to exceed K5000.
In summary, then, the average adult Ponam was involved in formal exchange of one sort or another on about 95 days of the 390-day period for which we have good information, and the island spent something like K60,000 on exchange during that time. Converting this to annual figures, we find that the average Ponam adult was involved in an exchange on 89 days of the year, or about one day in every 4, and Ponams collectively spent something over K55,000 on exchange during the year. It should be obvious, then, that exchange was of overwhelming social and economic importance for Ponams.
Exchange and Remittance
Thus far we have pointed to the cultural importance of exchange on Ponam and have described the pattern in which exchange took place during the time of fieldwork and the amount of time and money devoted to it. We want now to turn to a slightly different question: the importance of exchange in the circulation and distribution of Ponam wealth. Here we will discuss only two of its more important aspects. We will look at the way exchange operated to draw wealth back on to Ponam from migrants working elsewhere and the way it operated to redistribute wealth within the island.
As we explained in chapter 5, Ponams living on Ponam earned for themselves only a small fraction of the money that they spent each year, the difference being provided as remittances of cash and goods from migrants. Much of the wealth remitted was sent or brought to Ponam specifically to be used in exchange, because migrants, like residents, gained identity, respect, and credit by participating in exchange. This money came in two ways.
The first, simplest and least spectacular was money going to the island as a response by migrants to requests for help from residents. Quite commonly a resident who was confronted with an exchange obligation would write or send word to a migrant, typically
a child or a sibling, asking for money to participate. Usually this money would enter the exchange in the name of the resident, rather than the migrant. However, everyone knew which residents were rich enough to use their own money and which were not, and everyone knew which residents had children or siblings in wage work, so that everyone knew when a resident's contribution to an exchange came from a migrant. And if the return gift that the resident received was large enough to redistribute, it would be passed on in the migrant's name to those to whom the migrant would be expected to pass any return gift. This sort of assistance was indistinguishable from the normal help given residents by their close migrant kin, and though the amount entering exchange this way from each migrant was small, the total was not insignificant.
The second way exchange was supported by migrants was more spectacular. This was the participation in their own names by migrants who were closely related to the focal donor of an exchange, usually siblings and first cousins. In some cases the participating migrants would return to Ponam for the exchange, in others they would send back the money together with instructions for its use.
The impact of this sort of participation by migrants in affinal exchange appears in the comparison of two brideprice payments: one in September 1979 and one in January 1980.
The first was largely a Ponam affair, indeed, unusually so. Only one of the groom's brothers had a secure job, and the groom's lineage was relatively isolated genealogically. The total brideprice paid was K1356, of which K150 (11 percent) was given in the name of migrants. The groom's migrant brother gave K100 of this K150, and we have reason to believe that much of the remaining K50 in fact was given by residents in the name of migrants. While it is not clear how much this was the case, we are confident that an estimate of 10 percent of the entire brideprice coming from migrants is adequate to generous.
The second brideprice was dominated by migrants. The groom, himself a migrant who was paying brideprice while he was home on leave, had several fairly close relatives who were migrants, and as a resident of Port Moresby he was in a good position to cajole his migrant kin into participating. In this case the total payment was K3412.50. While the difference in amounts between this and the previous brideprice is striking, what is more to the point is where the money came from. There was one gift of K567, which was of multiple and hence confused origin. Excluding that gift leaves a total payment of K2845.50, of which K2345 (82 percent) was from migrants. If the uncertain payment is included and assumed to be
about half from migrants and half from residents, then of the payment of K3412.50, K2628.50 (77 percent) was from migrants.
A point worth mentioning here is that the amount generated locally for each of these brideprices was approximately K1000, and our impression from the other brideprice payments we saw is that this was generally the case.
Residents were quite aware of the way that large affinal exchanges drew money from migrants back to Ponam. In fact, they did what they could to help this process along. They announced brideprice payments two or three years in advance, scheduling them to suit the vacation schedules and financial resources of those migrants who could be expected to participate significantly in the exchange. And they kept up a steady stream of letters and telephone calls to migrants to keep them interested and informed. As one old man on the island explained, one of the first things residents wanted to find out when a migrant returned to Ponam to conduct or participate closely in a brideprice was how much money he or she was bringing on behalf of other migrants, who would be participating indirectly. This was a matter of some urgency to residents, who felt that if little money came in from the outside, islanders would merely end up uselessly shuffling their own money back and forth, benefiting no one.
However much migrants contributed, residents would benefit little from that contribution if migrants received a significant share of the distribution of initial and return exchange payments and if they took that share away from Ponam. However, because of the way the system operated, even though migrants contributed heavily to exchange, they did not receive a share of the return gift unless they were present on the island at the time. The process worked this way.
Consider diagram 1 again. Migrant C wanted to participate in exchange. In order to do this he sent money home to B , the relative he would have assisted had he been living at home. B gave the money (or goods bought with the money) to A , who made the major presentation to Z . When Z made a return gift, A would give a share to B . Under ordinary circumstances B would then give the bulk of the share to C ; but in this case C is absent. B therefore would give C 's share directly to D , in the name of C. D was the relative to whom C would have given the bulk of his share had he been on Ponam to do so. If D were absent, it would go to E , following the same logic.
Similarly, when the focal recipient Z distributed the payment to
the various Y s, who redistributed to their respective W s, any share that went to a migrant would automatically be redistributed in the migrant's name to those to whom he normally would have passed his share of the gift. This, however, did not mean that the migrant was absolved of responsibility to contribute to the return payment.
In other words, the migrant C contributed to the exchange, but did not share in the return; his share was taken by the relatives to whom he would have given most of it anyway. Likewise, the migrant W did not share in the distribution of the initial payment, his or her resident relatives receiving it instead in the migrant's name.
Thus, because exchanges were heavily supported by absent migrants, who did not receive return payments themselves, resident islanders made what one could think of as a profit out of exchange: residents as a group received more in exchange than they contributed to it. It was this profit, of which islanders were quite aware, that made debts and credits in other areas of Ponam life so important.
Of course, migrants who were closely related to the focal parties of an exchange might very well participate directly in the exchange and so be present when distributions of gifts or return gifts were made. In such cases our visiting migrant would not be bypassed. However, he or she would, in the normal course of events, be expected to redistribute the bulk of what was received to those to whom the gift would have been redistributed in the migrant's absence. Even when a visiting migrant retained a portion of a distribution, he or she was expected to use it to support those with whom he or she was visiting during the stay—usually parents or affines. Thus, even if a migrant were present to receive a distribution in person, the bulk of the wealth would go to residents in one way or another; it would not leave the island when the migrant returned to town and work.
Although migrants did not receive a material return for their participation in exchange, they did receive something. Migrants who sent money home or who returned home themselves to participate in exchange did so because they wanted to fulfill their obligations to their kin, to enhance their own reputations as good and thoughtful Ponams, and build up their social credit, things that they could do best through active participation in exchange. And yet migrants, who usually were absentees, could participate
only with the help of someone else, someone who would buy the goods to give, prepare them, deliver them to the appropriate recipient, and see that an adequate return was made. Ponams did not, however, see this as an economic transaction. Migrants did not think of themselves as buying a place in the exchange system with the money they sent home, and residents did not think of themselves as selling their labor in exchange for migrants' cash. Both groups thought of themselves simply as participating in a single web of exchange relationships which extended to whatever places interested Ponams lived.
Exchange and Redistribution
Just as the exchange system operated to pull wealth onto the island from outside, so it operated to assure that wealth was fairly equally distributed among island residents. Even though some families received significantly more money from migrants than others, disparities of wealth on Ponam were relatively small. Inequalities of income were neutralized in large part by the exchange system.
In very simple terms, the process by which exchange equalized the distribution of wealth was this: the size of a helping gift that any individual gave to a relative ideally should have been determined by his or her kin relationship to that relative. That is, referring again to diagram 1, A would receive a number of gifts from those relatives labeled B, but the size of those gifts would vary. Close relatives such as siblings would give larger gifts than more distant relatives such as cousins. Similarly, the various B s would receive larger gifts from their close kin than from more distant ones. We are, of course, presenting something of an ideal, as personal animosities could and did affect the way gifts were given on the donor's side and distributed on the recipient's side. However, this ideal was one that Ponams espoused and was the basis of their judgment of people's behavior in exchange. Moreover, behavior conformed to the ideal more often than not.
The logic behind the varying sizes of gifts was that the focal donor in an exchange should receive help from members of the ken si , the cognatic stocks, descended from the siblings of his agnatic stem: the siblings of himself, his F, FF, FFF, and so on, back to the last remembered ancestor, usually the founder of ego's kamal . As well,
Diagram 2.
A Stylized Representation of Cognatic Stocks in Ego's Kindred
gifts should have been received from the natal cognatic stock of ego's M and to a lesser extent FM. It is important to note, however, that contributions to ego were group rather than individual gifts. Thus, the stock descended from ego's FFZ give a collective gift in the name of that FFZ. They do not give separate gifts in their own personal names. Diagram 2 illustrates this in simplified form.
In the diagram, the numbers 1–7 and the letters A–E are the cognatic stocks who contribute to ego's affinal exchange payment. (Note that in fact stock 1 is ego's B , and the matrilateral stocks usually were not as differentiated in exchange as they are in the diagram.) The size of the gift given by the stocks should decrease the more distantly they are related to ego, and of course the more distantly they are related the more likely they will be to have a large number of living members. Thus, the size of the gift a person gives should drop off sharply the more distantly related he or she is to ego, the focal donor in the exchange.
The contribution of each of the cognatic stocks in diagram 2 would be assembled at the house of the leader of the stock. The members of the stock were structured in the same way that the focal donor's relatives were structured, shown in diagram 2, which is an agnatic stem when read upward from ego, but a cognatic stock when read down from the top.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that those who are in the cognatic stocks that contribute to ego's payment themselves recruit assistance in the same way ego does in diagram 2: they too call on the stocks of the siblings of their agnatic stems, their M and their FM, though unlike the focal donor, who was making a payment to his affines, members of these subsidiary stocks received assistance from their
own affines as well as their cognates, affines who could recruit assistance from their own cognatic stocks in turn.
In fact, in large exchanges this sort of recruitment of assistance could ripple outward in as many as four or five stages. This indicates two things. First, the model given in diagram 1 is grossly simplified, though it does give a hint of the operation of exchanges. Second, a point we have mentioned already, this pattern of recruitment and distribution quite quickly leaps agnatic descent lines and involves large numbers of participants.
We said that the sizes of the gifts should have been determined by the kin relationship between the donor and the recipient. This rule was followed with the gifts made by the various cognatic stocks to the focal donor, and it was not uncommon for stock leaders to add to or take away from their stocks' gifts after they had been displayed in order to put them in the proper size relationship with the gifts from other stocks as they were put out on display. In the case of individual contributions to stock gifts, however, gift size was influenced also by the wealth of the donor; some individuals simply had less to give than others.
Ponams recognized that this was inevitable, and they stressed that wholehearted participation in exchange was more important than the size of the gift given. They said that a poor man who gave generously of what he had, even if it was only his time or a few sticks of tobacco, would be recognized as participating fully. While this was to some extent an idealized statement, our observation was that contributions from those recognized to be poor were judged accordingly. Thus, in some sense individual participation was reckoned in terms of the degree of sacrifice a gift entailed, rather than its absolute size. This parallels the point we made in chapter 3 in our discussion of the ownership of fishing rights: social credit was generated by the degree of generosity involved, rather than just the total amount of wealth passed.
The significance of all this for understanding the redistributive nature of Ponam exchange becomes apparent when we look at the rules by which return gifts were distributed.
Distribution was not simply the inverse of accumulation. A would give a larger return to his close relatives than to his more distant ones, but once goods moved beyond the focal parties the rules of distribution changed. When B distributed the goods he got
from A , he was expected to give equal shares to all those who helped him, regardless of the size of the gifts they gave. Similarly, when a C distributed what he got from a B he was supposed to give equal shares. Of course, it would have been possible for a B or a C to accumulate goods by refusing to redistribute a payment, or by redistributing only a part of it. However, islanders expected that any gift of any size would be redistributed, and they were not disappointed. Indeed, the focal recipient in an exchange and those to whom he or she distributed the gift often decided to forego their own share of the gift in order to forestall or still the complaints of those who might have felt that their share of the return gift was too small, behavior resembling that of the net right leaders we described in chapter 3.
The consequence of the way that gifts were distributed and redistributed was that those who gave large gifts (those who were closer to the recipient and those who were relatively wealthy) received a disproportionately small amount of the return gift, while those who gave smaller gifts (those who were more distant from the recipient and those who were relatively poor) received disproportionately larger shares. In other words, in any exchange wealth tended to be distributed from those who were close to the donor and from the wealthy to those who were more distant and to those who were poor. Thus, the rules of exchange worked to insure the relatively even distribution of wealth on the island, to insure that wealth flowed from those who had it to those who did not.
Ceremonial exchange, then, served a number of important purposes that broadly can be considered economic, both for the island as a whole and for individuals. For the island it was an important mechanism that encouraged migrants to send or bring their wealth back to Ponam, and thus helped keep the society reasonably well off. For individuals, exchange did two things. First, it was the way that residents could share in the wealth that migrants sent back to the island. Second, it was the field in which people could establish social credit and cancel social debts and so induce the cooperation necessary for life on Ponam. For migrants the cooperation meant that they could maintain their social identity and their claim on lineage property, while for residents the cooperation meant that they could call upon their kin to provide assistance, especially labor, when it was needed.
Lesser Exchanges
We have described affinal exchanges in some detail because they, and particularly brideprice payments, were the largest and most ceremonial of the exchanges that islanders carried out during fieldwork, because they involved the greatest amount of wealth, because they most directly showed the way exchange practices served to draw money to the island from migrants, and because they had the greatest cultural and social importance for islanders. There were, however, a variety of exchanges carried out on Ponam, some of which we have mentioned in passing. Generally these followed the principles underlying affinal exchange, so that they too helped, albeit to a lesser degree, to draw wealth to Ponam and redistribute it relatively equally. Here we will describe two of the most important of these: mbrolofau , best described as a life crisis ritual, and njames , payments to cure illness caused by ancestral ghosts.
Mbrolofau was the ceremonial prestation that islanders performed the first time a Ponam returned to the island from a distant place, effectively from outside of Manus, or came to Ponam the first time if they were born outside Manus. This prestation was not optional, but was made for just about all Ponams in the appropriate circumstances. It was made in order to compensate a person's asi and tama for the blessings they gave when he or she first returned to the island. The blessings were part of a ceremony called ken dof paton (literally, to strengthen). The ceremony itself took place at water's edge when the person first came ashore from the canoe. The returner's asi and tama (classificatory FB, FZ, FZD, FZS, and FMZS) had the special power to bless and curse the people to whom they were asi and tama .[1] The asi and tama sprinkled sea water on the returning islander, struck him or her with the leaves of certain plants, and shouted out their blessings: usually a very jolly affair and often a bit ribald. A few days later, the returner's matrilateral kin made the mbrolofau payment to the asi and tama who performed the blessing or were otherwise involved in the ceremony. As this brief description indicates, mbrolofau was another one of the class of ceremonies that we have already mentioned, in which a person's asi and tama protected, nurtured, and served the person, and for which they were given payment by the person's matrilateral kin.
As we said, the mbrolofau payment was made by the strengthened person's matrilateral kin to his or her patrilaterals. In the case of a child of migrants, this meant that payment was made by the migrant's wife's family to the migrant husband's. As a practical matter, however, the migrant husband, being employed, was expected to provide his wife with the money to buy the goods that constituted part of the mbrolofau payment: the clothes, dishes, and small amounts of cash that supplemented the baskets and mats islanders themselves made that were the core of the payment. The migrant husband also was expected to provide much of the uncooked food that was the kahu , the return payment, as well as much of the njamis , the cooked food that was distributed during the exchange. The recipients of the mbrolofau payment and return payment distributed the goods to their kin, and usually the amounts were large enough to warrant one or two subsequent redistributions. These took place in the general way we described previously.
We use the generic Ponam term njames to refer to the activities involved in locating the cause of and in curing illness caused by ancestral ghosts, though as was the case with mbrolofau, njames actually refers to only one part of the cycle of activities. (This njames should not to be confused with njamis , the meal of cooked food mentioned in the preceding paragraph). While affinal exchange payments occurred in a relatively fixed and predictable sequence, njames could be repeated as often as a person suffered an illness caused by ancestral ghosts, which could be several times a year in exceptional circumstances. Also, at least from the point of view of those who accept Western medical theory, njames differed from affinal exchange in that it could be invoked at will, whenever someone successfully claimed to be suffering a suspected ancestral illness.
Although Ponams were quick to make use of the Western medical services offered at the village aid post and at the health center nearby, at Bundralis, failure of these services to identify and cure the disease was taken to mean that the illness was one of many miiri paro on (literally, sickness of the earth), and hence had to be identified and treated using non-Western, village techniques. One of the common forms of miiri paro on on Ponam at the time of fieldwork (described in A. Carrier forthcoming) resembled what
Reo Fortune (1935) described for the Pere people in the late 1920s. That is, it was thought to be the consequence of the loss of part of the sufferer's soul, taken by a patrilineal ancestor of the sufferer. The ancestors acted this way when they saw that relations between their descendents were improper. In Pere in the late 1920s the impropriety was likely to be sexual or involved the failure to fulfill exchange obligations. In Ponam in the late 1970s, however, the impropriety was any unresolved serious dispute. And unlike the Pere, Ponam's ancestors usually made the innocent suffer: islanders explained that if only the guilty suffered, people would not bother to clear the matter up.
Locating the cause of such an illness required that the sufferer's relatives come together and confess the disputes and grievances that both separated them from and linked them to the person who was ill. Small payments then were distributed amongst the participants and the process was over. If the parties honestly confessed the dispute that brought down the ancestral wrath, a cure would take place. If not, the process would likely be repeated.
This linked migrants to the island in a number of ways. If a migrant was a fairly close relative of a resident who was seriously ill, the migrant was under pressure to send money home to facilitate the njames , or even go home to participate. Equally, a migrant who was ill would send money to his or her family on Ponam and request them to hold a njames and locate and remove the cause of the illness. In both cases, ancestral illness and the njames that was supposed to cure it helped assure that migrants were reminded of the correct form of social relationships among Ponams, relationships that included employed migrants supporting their resident parents and siblings, and it provided another occasion on which migrants were expected to remit money.
Mbrolofau and njames were only two of the practices that linked migrants to residents and that helped draw wealth, and especially money, back to Ponam: payments were involved as well in gathering first fruits, in canoe-building and house-building, and in ceremonies surrounding birth, marriage, and death. Migrants were not involved in all of these all the time, but their overall effect was to enmesh migrants in the range of exchanges and payments that took place on Ponam, and so draw money on to the island and distribute it to residents.
By themselves these lesser exchanges did not have the impact of the large affinal exchanges, though certainly they were a way that villagers drew money in from migrants. They were, nonetheless, important, for they helped to maintain the kinship links between migrants and residents and among residents that become important in the large affinal exchanges. They were, in other words, the steady maintenance and repair of the structure of Ponam kinship, keeping it in readiness for the stress of affinal exchange.
Migration, Remittance, and Ceremonial Exchange
Taken together, the arguments we made and the processes we described in this and the last chapter suggest something of a symbiosis between resident and migrant Ponams, and we want to end this chapter by looking at this.
One way to approach this symbiosis is by laying out what C. A. Gregory (1982, 30) identifies as the process of social reproduction. It consists of eight elements, divided into two broad areas: "the production, consumption, distribution and exchange of things on the one hand; the production, consumption, distribution and exchange of people on the other [combined] into a structured whole." As a result of changes brought about by colonization, this structured whole became fragmented spatially and socially in a new way. Crucial aspects of the realm of the production of things split off from the island and became located in those areas of the country where Ponams had wage employment, while most of the process of social reproduction remained on Ponam. This involved islanders in a bizarre sort of division of labor, with one group providing, directly or indirectly, many of the material objects necessary for the life of Ponam society, while another group provided the necessary ceremonies and transactions. In brief, material goods went from migrants to residents, while symbolic goods went from residents to migrants.
This division of labor, and the symbiosis springing from it, helps both to explain and summarize much of what we have described in chapters 5 and 6. For instance, it helps explain the fairly sharp way that island ideology demarcated Ponam and the outside world: the island was a unique place, different even from neighboring
Manus villages, the place from which social identity sprang and the place where that identity was recreated and reproduced. Alternatively, the outside world, particularly the world outside of Manus villages, was one where real, proper social relations were scarce. It helps explain as well the idea that Ponam itself was poor, a place where the material necessities of life could not be created, and hence a place that required the support of employed migrants. Likewise, it helps to explain the intensity of exchange on the island and, a point we have only alluded to previously, the absence of ceremonial exchange among Ponams in the towns,[2] for the celebration and recreation of social identities and social relationships was the task of islanders just as the production of wealth was the task of migrants: residents had by their activities to recreate not only the society resident on Ponam, but also the social identity and relationships of migrants. And it helps explain the intensity of migrants' commitment to home: few migrants became "lost" to villagers or lacked a strong commitment to Ponam. It may even explain why migrants generally refrained from trying to dominate residents, refrained from using remittances as a threat to gain power at home: both migrants and residents needed what only the others could provide.
There was nothing logically necessary about this symbiosis: it developed out of historical contingency and its continued existence depended on historical contingency. For instance, its successful operation relied in part on the nature of the Ponam migration process and the sorts of jobs migrants got, things that depended on institutions and practices outside of island control. Since World War II, and especially since the early 1960s, these migrants generally had been successful in completing secondary school. Not only was the success good for migrants' self-esteem, their secondary education reaffirmed their identity within Ponam society simply because in most cases it was made possible by the sacrifice made by the child's parents, elder siblings, or other close relatives in raising the necessary school fees. In addition, as we noted in chapter 5, migration was explained by Ponams themselves largely in terms of the needs of the child's family and the child's ability to help meet those needs, terms that stress the links between migrants and their resident kin and the way the child is benefiting those residents.
Ponams, then, tended to migrate in situations that emphasized their social identity within the Ponam kinship system, and that gave them esteem, both for their educational success (itself facilitated by kin who paid the fees) and for the sacrifice they were making by migrating and remitting. Migrants were likely to start off, then, with a strong and positively valued Ponam identity. While we did not investigate the matter in any detail, it seems plausible that such people would be committed to the maintenance and perpetuation of their identities as Ponams and the system of social relations that gave their identities meaning. This is, of course, the implication of our observation that those migrants who retired to Ponam earlier than expected tended to be eldest sons or eldest socially effective sons whose parents had died or become too aged to maintain the family's social identity.[3]
Other contingencies, beyond the control of Ponams, affected the need that migrants felt for the social identity and relations that residents could provide, and thus affected the continued existence of this symbiosis. As we noted in chapter 5, for example, employment and housing policies in Papua New Guinea, as they affected Ponam migrants, meant that those migrants had a material interest in maintaining their own social identities, the mechanisms that would create social identities for their children, and the village system of the allocation of land. Without these, they and their children would have no place to go in their old age. Equally, however, as we noted in the last chapter, changes in housing and employment policies after about 1980 may very well weaken the need of migrants to be able to claim village land, and hence may weaken the need of migrants for the social reproduction that villagers could offer them.
Similarly, matters of national ideology have shaped migrants' orientation toward home and the social and symbolic structures that it reproduced. For example, Papua New Guinea is renown for its cultural diversity, and regional and ethnic allegiances are an extremely important part of national life. This orientation toward village identity was strengthened by a belief, now more prominent and now less, in the importance of rural Melanesian values and practices, both for the well-being and for the identity of Papua New Guinea. This stress on village life and village roots, at least at the ideological level, was an external factor that encouraged
migrants from Ponam, as well as those from other places, to value their village-based social identities and social relations, and thus to value and participate in the activities that reproduced them. This village orientation becomes particularly problematic, from Ponams' point of view, in light of Peter Fitzpatrick's argument (1980) that this ideology of village identity was in important respects a consequence of capitalist colonization of Papua New Guinea and of colonial and postcolonial government policies intended to hinder the formation of a self-conscious and articulate urban proletariat. Once again, traditional elements of Ponam life, including the elaborate system of exchange that was crucial to the reproduction of social identities and relations, appear to have survived because of the society's links with the national economy.
This division of labor between migrants and the wealth they produced, and residents and the social structures and identities they produced and reproduced, was in many ways the core of Ponam's adaptation to colonization.
7
Conclusions: Colonization, Articulation, and the Evolution of Ponam Society
In this book we have described important aspects of Ponam life, particularly production and sources of wealth, and their associated social relations. One of our goals in these descriptions has been to show how Ponam society was affected by its relations with the outside world and by the ways that outside world was changing. In this concluding chapter we want to bring these descriptions to bear on some of the issues that we discussed in the Introduction. Cast in their broadest terms, these were the nature of the relationship between villages and the increasingly capitalist outside world, and the nature of the continuing radical differences between village and capitalist social forms. The more immediate forms these issues take are the nature of articulation and the question of the persistence of tradition. These two issues are related to each other and to the broader question of how we ought to approach village societies in Papua New Guinea, how we ought to conceive of them.
Articulation
The most common model of articulation available to anthropologists is that developed by Claude Meillassoux and applied to Papua New Guinea by Peter Fitzpatrick. In the Introduction we raised some objections to this model, including the point that Meillassoux and Fitzpatrick take a macroscopic and urban- or capitalist-oriented view of articulation, with the consequence that they are insensitive to the way things look from the village viewpoint.
In fact, for anthropology this macroscopic view and capitalist orientation is a strength of the Meillassoux—Fitzpatrick model. This is because it obliges ethnographers to look beyond the immediate vil-
lages they study; because it forces them to recognize the influence that capitalism has in Third World societies; because it emphasizes that an important fact about these diverse village societies is that they are related to a relatively uniform capitalist sphere, which they subsidize by producing migrant workers. In other words, by shifting the ground of anthropological description, the model stresses the common and important colonial and postcolonial situation of rural societies.
Only slightly less important, the model makes the point that the influence of colonial and postcolonial capitalism on village societies does not necessarily appear in a familiar guise. In other words, the spread of capitalism does not mean that villagers put down their feathers, spears, and digging sticks and pick up their cloth caps and lunch pails. Instead, the essential noncapitalist nature of village life is preserved. Thus, this model corrects, or at least complicates, the idea that the growth of capitalism "creates a world after its own image" (Marx & Engels 1976, 488).
Our study of Ponam Island in no way contradicts this point. For Ponam and places like it, the impact of colonization did not turn village social relations into class relations. But this tells us something negative, not something positive. It tells us that capitalist penetration did not turn Ponam into a working-class suburb of urban capitalism or into a collection of petit bourgeoisie. But it does not tell us what Ponam did become.
At this point the sweep and generality of the articulation model becomes a liability. In being so general that it allows and obliges anthropologists to look to the common situation of the societies they study, the model becomes relatively unable to deal with the more detailed aspects or local consequences of that common situation. And once we try to use the model for more detailed descriptions of the nature of articulation in order to get some clues about what villages actually are like, it loses much of its power.
As an example of the difficulties one encounters on trying to elicit more detailed descriptions, consider Meillassoux's analysis of the way villages subsidize the capitalist sphere. We do not disagree that, overall, there may be a subsidy of the capitalist sector by villages, but this overall view may hide more than it reveals. For historical, and also probably for cultural, reasons, certain ethnic groups and regions within Papua New Guinea have been favored
by the expanding national economy. Areas of Manus, East New Britain, and Central Provinces are the most obvious examples. If Ponam was at all typical of villages in these areas, then arguably they were being subsidized rather heavily by the national economy, rather than subsidizing it with their underpaid labor. In other words, while overall in Papua New Guinea there may have been a net flow of wealth from village to town, equally some villages and regions enjoyed a net flow of wealth in the opposite direction: from town to village. One can, then, say that some villages and regions were subsidizing the urban sector and through that were also subsidizing other villages and regions. The web is more complex than Meillassoux's analysis allows.
The Ponam case raises doubts about the adequacy of the articulation model in another way. By the time of fieldwork Ponam, at least, had relatively little local production. This would seem to locate it beyond the limits that Meillassoux (1981, 129–133) says cannot be crossed if the domestic community is to survive, if the village is not to crumble into starvation and disorder. The apparently inexorable economic logic he invokes does not seem to apply to Ponam. In part this is because the orientation of the model makes it difficult to deal with intervillage relations, one of the things that seems to have been pertinent for Ponams. If we were to try to explain this problem with Meillassoux's analysis in Meillassoux's own terms, we would speculate that islanders were able to avoid the Meillassouxian crisis, assuming such a crisis is indeed a necessity, by exploiting mainland Manus starch producers by extracting a hidden subsidy in the form of underpriced foodstuffs. Put most simply, mainland villagers charged less for their produce than it would have cost them to grow that produce had their production been fully monetized and capitalized.
Meillassoux recognizes that "subsistence goods bought on the local market, if they are produced in the domestic sector, will be sold below their value because of the labor rent they also contain" (1981, 115). Because he looks at market produce only as a commodity consumed by migrant workers, he has not seen that this subsidy applies as much to goods sold in intervillage markets as it does to goods sold in town markets. Workers are not only sustained and maintained, they are also reproduced, and if market produce con-
tains a hidden subsidy, it also subsidizes that reproduction. Of course this subsidizes the capitalist sector. However, it also subsidizes those village societies that, like Ponam, survive by migration and remittance, by reproducing labor and converting it into cash in the capitalist sector.
By reducing village costs of reproduction, this subsidy reduces the portion of remitted wealth that must be spent on reproducing the labor that will be transferred to the towns, and so the subsidy increases the portion that can be used for domestic consumption to maintain and reproduce nonmigrant villagers. Some of this subsidy was fed back to Ponam's market and trade partners, hidden in the goods islanders produced and traded with mainlanders. However, because Ponams were more likely to trade cash and purchased commodities than were mainlanders, and because, as we noted in chapter 4, Ponams fought so hard to keep the price of mainland produce down, the hidden subsidy flowing from island to mainland Manus is likely to have been less than what flowed from mainland to island.[1]
A more general and a more specific criticism come together here. The general criticism we have made already: the model does not provide a framework sufficiently detailed to make theoretical sense of or account for the details of the process of articulation or local variations in it. The more specific criticism points to the inadequacy of the impression the model gives, that the shock of capitalist penetration leads to the decay of precapitalist villages as they are drained of their labor and their internal dynamic through underpaid circular migration. These two criticisms come together, because a more detailed framework, more sensitive to the process of articulation as it affects villages, might very well have shown the shortcomings of the prediction of decay.
Most simply, Ponam did not cease growing and changing, did not start decaying, once capitalist colonization impinged. Part of the reason for this was that articulation led to a net transfer of wealth to Ponam, because of the special position of Ponam migrants in the labor force. Part of the reason for this also, we suspect, was the hiddden subsidy Ponam got through its mainland market trade. Certainly the old Manus system, and Ponam's place in it, ceased its self-contained evolution and development. But this can
be treated as cessation and decay only if one posits a hypostasized and isolated "domesic society" with its own private evolutionary trajectory. Meillassoux at times seems to do this, but such a supposition begs more questions that it answers.
The point of these criticisms is to bring evidence about Ponam's articulation to bear on the Meillassoux—Fitzpatrick model, to show that we need to do what that model does not encourage us to do, look at articulation from the village perspective. This change of perspective will enable us to see what the sweep of the model hides, the change in noncapitalist social forms that articulation brings about. We said in the introduction that we thought C. A. Gregory's Gifts and Commodities provided a foundation on which we could construct a model that encouraged an understanding of articulation from both an urban capitalist and a village noncapitalist perspective and so would allow us to overcome the partiality of the Meillassoux—Fitzpatrick model.
The model embedded in Gregory's work directs us to look for the effects of the articulation of capitalist and noncapitalist spheres in the dominant realm in each sphere. Thus, following Meillassoux, Gregory looks at wage and commodity relations in the capitalist sphere and seeks to identify the ways that these are affected by articulation: the ways that these are different from wage and commodity relations in capitalist spheres that are not articulated with a village noncapitalist sphere. This aspect of articulation has not been an important concern in our analysis of Ponam society and economy. However, it is important that we stress it here, as we stressed it in the Introduction, because it must be fully half of any complete understanding of articulation.
However, because this book is a study of articulation from the village perspective rather than the capitalist perspective, we are willing to accept Meillassoux's description of the effects of articulation, as well as Fitzpatrick's and Gregory's application of Meillassoux's model to Papua New Guinea. In accepting these descriptions we are not, in any event, asserting that these three men have produced an adequate description of the effects of articulation on the urban capitalist sphere, for that sphere is beyond our area of knowledge. What we are asserting, however, is that they have asked the right questions.
Articulation from a Village Perspective
The inverse of these questions are the ones we have addressed in this book: What are the ways that the kin and exchange relations in the village sphere are affected by articulation? How are they different from such relations in village societies that are not articulated with an urban capitalist sphere? We have, in other words, produced an extended replacement for what we said in the Introduction was Gregory's inadequate attempt to answer this question, his chapter "The Transformation of Commodities into Gifts in Colonial Papua New Guinea," in Gifts and Commodities .
Although the issue appears in many places in this book, our most extensive discussion of the ways that Ponam relations of kinship and exchange were affected by articulation with the encroaching capitalist sphere is in our historical presentation in chapter 2 and our description of exchange in chapter 6. To summarize what we said in those chapters, the linking of Ponam, and Manus more generally, to colonial capitalism sharply altered the relationships among kinship, exchange, and wealth, as the productive resources that kin groups owned, the trade links kinship permitted, and the wealth local labor could produce all lost much of their importance. As imported manufactures came to displace local goods and as wage labor came to be an important source of wealth, the operation of practical kinship and affinal exchange shifted. The financier-lapan found it harder to attract clients and found it more difficult to control wealth, and so they disappeared. And partly because of this, extensive adoption died out and affinal exchange began to operate differently, becoming a system much more rigidly structured and much more egalitarian, as people came to participate because of their position in the kinship system, rather than because of their obligations to lapan or in terms of the kin manipulations that financiers carried out. Affinal exchange, then, ceased to revolve around relationships between competing financier-lapan , and came instead to revolve around relationships among sets of siblings: the young on Ponam and their employed brothers and sisters, from whom they hoped to extract wealth to use in exchange.
Although this set of changes was the most systematic and the
most dramatic, other changes appeared as well. To expand a point we mentioned in chapter 2, the forms capitalist and colonial institutions took in Papua New Guinea generated the need for certain sorts of labor: first sheer muscular strength, as Papua New Guineans were restricted to unskilled laboring jobs; later educated labor, as Papua New Guineans moved into the expanding positions open to them in the public service. Both of these needs could be met best by young men, first because of their physical strength and stamina, and later because the expansion of the school system meant that the young, and especially young men, were educated better than their elders.
These labor needs meant that it was the young who had the greatest access to Western goods and wealth. After an initial period of conflict between the older and younger generations, most visible in Manus in complaints after World War II about oppressive exchange obligations, the dominance of parents over their children was broken. No longer did Ponam and much of Manus resemble the sort of domestic community Meillassoux described, in which parents controlled the wealth necessary for brideprice and so were able to dominate their children. Instead, these children, secure in their access to wages, were able to run their own affairs, and so reverse the older gerontocratic system. The organization and timing of exchange waited on the needs, desires, and resources of the siblings rather than the parents.
Here it will be useful to pause for a moment and recall evidence from one of the Papua New Guinea societies that we mentioned in the Introduction, Matupit. We noted that Matupit was becoming engulfed by the growth of Rabaul, and so was much more obviously linked to the urban sphere than Ponam. However, we took exception to Richard Salisbury's suggestion (1970, 74) that it was becoming "a substandard if 'quaint' part of a foreign town." We did so because, even though Matupit was so enmeshed with Rabaul, the Matupi people continued to have a significant local resource for the production of wealth controlled by indigenous structures: land. And A. L. Epstein's observations support this. Tolai tambu remained important and Tolai elders continued to control it and so continued their domination of the young. We are not suggesting that young Matupi men were powerless or that nothing had changed. We are, however, asserting that where local sources
of wealth remain significant, and where these sources remain under indigenous control, then intergenerational relations are likely to resemble Meillassoux's domestic community more than they do on Ponam.
Our examples of changing exchange relations and changing intergenerational relations illustrate the way that articulation affected relations of kinship and exchange. They suggest as well some of the dangers that ethnographers face when they begin to talk about the persistence of traditional elements in village life.
The first difficulty is that what seems traditional may not be so. As we said in the Introduction, in many regards Ponam, at the time of fieldwork, resembled quite closely an unreflective image of a traditional society. In many ways, in fact, it was Durkheim's segmentary society of mechanical solidarity. Kin groups were not differentiated by function, descent-based lineages were the most pronounced element of social organization, exchange relationships were dictated by kin relationships. However, as we have made clear, these traditionalistic elements of Ponam life were not in fact traditional. Rather, they came about because the effects of colonization included the destruction of most local production and much local trade. As a consequence, the different economic functions of kin groups disappeared, the financier—client relationships that cut across the structure of descent-based lineages died out, and the power of financier-lapan to dominate and order exchange relationships evaporated.
In pointing to the fact that much of what looked traditional on Ponam was in fact a consequence of colonization, we are not arguing that Ponam life changed totally with colonization, that all the old was swept away. In fact, a great deal of what Ponams did in 1980 was very much like what they did in 1880. But this survival in itself points out the second difficulty that anthropologists face when they begin to talk about persistence, the difficulty of deciding what persistence means. There are two related aspects to this.
One aspect lies in the implication that persistence is evidence of either the strength of village societies in their resistance to colonial incorporation, or the weakness of colonial penetration itself. We can illustrate the nature of this difficulty by looking at the persistence of Ponam's coastal market trade. We have no reason to doubt that as an institution, these markets persisted from precolonial
days. The difficulty lies in deciding what lessons we are to draw about Ponam strength, or colonial weakness.
It is not clear that we can draw any lesson at all. Colonial penetration undercut the old functional basis of the market trade, as we described in chapter 2, by allowing inland villagers to settle on the coastal strip, previously usually a no-man's land, and take up fishing. However, because of Ponam's success in the system of wage labor and remittances, villagers had enough money that they could, however much they might have grumbled, afford to buy for cash what before they got in exchange for fish. In this case, persistence was the consequence both of direct colonial power and policy and of fortuitous circumstance. But in any case, this persistence could not be used as evidence of the power of Manus people to resist colonial impact, to maintain their institutions in the face of colonial intrusion; or, what is the same thing said in a different way, this persistence could not be used as evidence of either the weakness or beneficence of colonial penetration in Manus.
The other aspect raises more fundamental questions about what persistence means. Consider Ponam kinship. Many of the rules of descent and affinal exchange survived colonization fairly well. Ponam kamal , with their patrilineality and property, still existed in 1980 and showed no signs of weakening. Likewise, most of the system of affinal exchange continued. Ponams continued to make prestations on engagement, continued to make brideprice payments, and continued to make funeral exchanges. Even the ancestral ghosts continued to monitor relations among their descendents. However, as we have described, these things existed in very different social and economic contexts than they had a century earlier. The corollary of this is that their social and economic consequences were very different. They used to be part of the regulation of local production of wealth and were the mechanism for generating and legitimating the inequality between financier-lapan and their clients. By 1980 they were more notable as devices for drawing wealth on to the island from employed migrants and for allowing resident individuals and kin groups to secure for themselves a share of the distribution of that wealth. And, of course, we just made a similar point about the persistence of Ponam's coastal market trade.
To hark back to an older anthropological rhetoric, we can say that a number of Ponam culture traits have survived. But to hark
back to an older anthropological issue, we doubt that it is very rewarding to focus on culture traits in isolation from the context in which they exist and the part they play in social and economic life. Viewed in their broader context, these traits, seemingly persistent when viewed in isolation, appear to have changed radically.
These points suggest that the question of persistence is likely to be a false trail that anthropologists would not benefit from following. Some of our findings and arguments about Ponam economy and society suggest that other trails attracting anthropological attention may be false as well.
For instance, it is clear that Melanesian societies do not exist in splendid isolation, untouched by the colonial and postcolonial world. And of course no anthropologist would assert bluntly that they do exist in isolation. But isolation need not be an all or nothing affair: it can be taken to apply to different parts of society differently. Thus, for instance, some anthropologists might feel that the realm of kinship and exchange is relatively isolated, touched perhaps by the appearance of imported commodities as exchange goods or the use of modern transport to get to or from exchanges, but in all not noticeably affected by the impact of Western capitalist forms. Such a view is at least implicit in some of the recent and influential work on kinship and exchange in Melanesia (e.g., Damon 1983; M. Strathern 1984; Weiner 1979, 1980).
However, if the model of articulation that we have used in this book is correct, then it follows that the question of isolation is more complex than it might appear. The realm of kinship and exchange is not shielded from the impact of colonization and hence is not relatively isolated. Instead, because this realm is dominant in gift-exchange systems, we would expect the effects of colonization and the concomitant articulation with the capitalist sphere to appear here especially. Discerning these effects may be difficult, because the impact of colonization will be transmuted by the process of articulation. Thus, we would not expect the signs of this impact to appear necessarily in forms that obviously echoed capitalism, but we would expect them to be there nonetheless.
Certainly these signs were there on Ponam, and certainly they were there in a transmuted form. Commodities appeared as gifts to be sure, but not commodity relations. Rather, there was a more pervasive shift in the structure, practices, and function of kinship and exchange, the very pervasiveness of which made it more dif-
ficult to see. Of course Ponam is an extreme case, because the effect of colonization on Manus trade was both so total and so visible, and we are not asserting that Ponam is like every place. But we see no reason to conclude that Ponam is like no place, that articulation and its effects on kinship and exchange are absent in other areas of Melanesia.
Likewise, our point that the consequences of capitalist contact appear in transmuted form suggests that it would be misleading to look only for the appearance of directly capitalist forms in village life, or to use a conceptual framework derived from encroaching capitalism. The use of such a framework would make it difficult to see the effects of articulation, for it would not enable us to see the sort of effects on kinship and exchange that articulation had on Ponam. Looking for capitalist forms would, as we said in the Introduction, mean looking for displacement rather than articulation. Displacement may, of course, take place in villages in Melanesia, and it is important to describe it and its effects when it does appear. The danger, however, is in seeing displacement as the main way, or even the only way, that colonial contact affects village societies.
These comments indicate what our study of Ponam has already demonstrated, that it is not the case that the impact of capitalist colonization shocks villages into immobility and decay. Instead, we think it is more appropriate to see the consequences of colonization on village life as generative. On Ponam, contact put old forms of social organization and practice in a new context and led to the creation of new forms. As we have pointed out, these do not mimic capitalism or preserve tradition, nor are they some average, some balance between the two. They are not traditional, and so should not be described and analyzed without close attention to the impact of colonization; and they are not capitalist, so they should not be described and analyzed solely in terms of capitalist forms and social relations. Rather, they are contemporary indigenous forms, which need to be described and analyzed with regard for both their links to and their differences from the capitalist world surrounding them.
Notes
Preface
1. The rapidity of this change raises an awkward question for us, as well as for any anthropologist working in a similar rapidly changing setting: just what is it that we have studied and described? This is too subtle a question to deal with here. All we can say is that we have studied and described a set of social and economic relationships that existed on a particular small island at the time we were there—and even this is a simplification, for those relationships were changing as we watched. By observing this set of relationships we have learned something about the range of possible relationships, and we are able to use this to reflect on some issues that concern anthropologists. Whether we have learned about Ponam society, or indeed even what that phrase might mean beyond a convenient designation of a particular conjunction of people, time, and place, is an issue we leave to those whose familiarity with metaphysics is greater than our own.
Introduction The Problem of Persistence—Precolonial Forms in Postcolonial Life
1. This characterization, and the discussion that follows, is a simplification, and inevitably an exaggeration, of what we see as the development of an important stream in Melanesian ethnography. This discussion is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the literature, and at every stage instances can be found that contradict our assertions. Even so, we think we have identified an important aspect of anthropology in Papua New Guinea, an aspect whose importance is not dependent on the presence or absence of alternative and even competing intellectual developments.
2. Grossman intentionally 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 tell us how a village society, as opposed to certain individuals, articulates with the larger economy.
3. Those familiar with Gregory's work may have noted that we omitted his point that gift exchanges involve inalienable objects, while commodity exchanges involve alienable objects. The reason for this omission is that we believe this characterization is incorrect. We find much more provocative the point made by a colleague, Marc Schiltz (1987), that the two systems are distinguished not by the presence or absence of alienation, but by the point at which this alienation takes place. In capitalist economies it takes place at the point of production, and hence it is relations of production that are most elaborate and receive the most cultural attention. Alternatively, in many Melanesian gift systems, it takes place at the point
of exchange, and hence it is relations of exchange that are most elaborate and receive the most cultural attention. This sort of alienation in exchange is described in Josephides (1985).
4. A different form of economic organization occurred among women in the Goroka area who were more familiar with Western social and economic ways. This was the Goroka Women's Investment Corporation, also described by Lorraine Sexton (1983). This was a fairly straightforward women's investment group that ran small businesses around Goroka. More Westernized women apparently did not feel the need of their less Westernized village counterparts to transform capitalist institutions to suit a precapitalist cultural idiom.
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.
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.
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.
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).
2 History of Ponam Island
1. Schwartz's classification of production specialization in Manus (1963, 77-79) is slightly more complex than the system we prefer to use.
2. Shell money was one of the two forms of money used in precolonial Manus, the other being dog's teeth. Both were used inside and outside the market to purchase anything—vegetable food, seafood, raw materials, pigs, turtles, or manufactures—as well as to make ransom, adoption, or
marriage payments, and the like (Mead 1930, 121-122). As Ponams explained it, these were to Manus people what gold is to Europeans: intrinsically valuable and inherently beautiful. Because of this they were suitable as money itself and for making special objects of ceremonial value.
3. Establishing plantations had less effect than these three main factors. According to the report to the League of Nations in 1921-1922 (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia 1922), 2.4 percent of the region's approximately 1000 square miles of land was alienated, much of that on the coastal strip that had been a no-man's land in many parts of the region before colonization, and by no means all the alienated land had been planted. As far as we can tell, Schwartz (1962, 224) is broadly correct in concluding that in being colonized "the people of the Admiralties suffered little physical deprivation. Most villages lost little or no land," though obviously some villages did suffer. However, plantations provided a demand for local foodstuffs to feed laborers prior to the switch to the standard diet of rice and tinned beef and provided a demand for pearl shell and trochus. Satisfying these demands diverted labor from old productive activities to new ones.
4. We are grateful to Paul Alexander for suggesting that we think of lapan this way. Such a view parallels, of course, the basic point that Ron Brunton (1975) has applied to inequality in the Trobriands, that those who are a crucial nexus in the flow of wealth are able to secure privilege thereby.
5. The same opening up of migration and remittance that undercut intergenerational inequality also laid the basis for inequality along a new dimension within generations: between employed migrants and unemployed villagers. By the time of fieldwork this had not taken on the fairly open and exploitative nature of the earlier relationship between financier- lapan and their dependents. For reasons that we mention later, there was no particular evidence that such exploitation was likely any time soon.
6. This connection between decreasing control over wealth by bigmen, and changes in the social hierarchy and the reproductive system, are not peculiar to Manus. Thus, for instance, Andrew Strathern (1982, 313-316) points out that as access to wealth—cash income in his example—broadened in Mt. Hagen, inequalities deteriorated, both among men (as the category of "workers," kintmant , disappears), and between the sexes (as women insist on greater control over the money they help to make and begin to participate directly in moka), though as he noted elsewhere (1979, 533-534), bigmen have tried to control and appropriate new sources of wealth, just as early Pere bigmen tried to appropriate the wealth brought back by returning migrant workers (Mead 1963 [1930], 234).
3 Local Production: Ponam Fishing
1. This productivity is roughly in line with the results of a study of angling productivity by the Manus Provincial Government (1980, Appendix 7): 0.87 kg/man-hour of actual fishing time. If we assume that each hour of angling requires one-third to one-half an hour spent preparing for fishing, cleaning up afterwards, and getting to and from the fishing grounds, the range of angling productivity is about 0.6 to 0.65 kg/man-hour, broadly comparable to Ponam figures.
2. One other marine activity of importance was turtle fishing, the techniques of which are described in J. Carrier (1982). It was of some economic importance prior to World War II and even more in the precolonial period. Ponams did not, apparently, trade very much in sea turtle in this early period. However, they did hire themselves out as turtle catchers, using a technique called haliki . Turtle had an important place in prestation and feasting in early Manus, and Ponams said that they were recognized as specialist turtle fishers. Someone needing turtle would request that a haliki be carried out, providing a quantity of valuables and foodstuffs as advance payment. Total payment was increased fairly often by the fact that the operation of the haliki was thought to be harmed if the person requesting it failed to maintain correct social relations with his own kin. If the haliki ran into trouble and if it were decided that the cause lay in the actions of the person requesting it, he was obliged to make a further large payment.
3. Around 1980 the leader of Kamal Kahu, a migrant normally living in Port Moresby, tried to reclaim the south and north Tonuf rights to this technique, claiming that the gift to south Ponam kamal was revokable. Members of these kamal successfully resisted this attempt, saying the rights were given in compensation and could be reacquired only if Kamal Kahu made a generous payment to the current right holders. This payment was conceived of as a new transaction, unrelated to the original compensation except by the Kamal Kahu leader's desire to regain old kamal property.
4. In fact, three generations ago there was no spear fishing, only what islanders defined as its antecedent. This is described in J. Carrier (1981, 213).
5. While the repetition of names across generations was a common feature of Ponam genealogies, it is exaggerated in figure 2 by our decision to use birth order names wherever appropriate. For first-born to eighth-born sons, these are: Tol, Ngih, Selef, Sepat, Soon, Kupe, Kuem, and Kalai. Ponams had birth order names for daughters, but as women figure so little in figure 2, we have not used them, except where they are the way a woman is commonly remembered: Aluf Kuem and Pindriniu Kalo.
6. Associate status occurred in the case of five resident men who had immigrated to Ponam and had no formal kamal membership.
7. Spear gun fishers typically provided their own small canoes for those techniques in which they participated, and it was considered very rude for a share of the catch to be offered to the owner of a borrowed canoe. Likewise, owners of reef and sea did not request compensation for allowing people to fish in their waters either normally or when permission was needed.
4 Local Circulation: Ponam Trade
1. Manus coastal fish-for-starch trade resembled closely what Richard Salisbury (1970, 176-178) reconstructs as the precolonial market trade around Vunamami, near Rabaul. It is true that for much of Manus the fish-producing villages were on islands while around Vunamami they were on the coast, but the overall logic of the two systems is quite similar
with the important exception that Manus appears not to have had a second and third tier of markets inland of the initial fish-for-starch markets. This was probably because Manus was so much smaller, less fertile, and less populous than the Gazelle Peninsula.
2. These goods in particular illustrate the point, made by Gregory (1982) among others (e.g., A. Strathern 1984, 92-95), that a single item or class of items can be a commodity, purchased from a store, and an exchange good, given in formal exchange.
5 Migration and Remittance
1. Here we restrict ourselves to males. Positions of authority on Ponam were a male preserve, with the exception of the leader of the Nai Club, the young women's club. We eliminate the Nai Club from our considerations here.
2. As this is so different from the other tables in this discussion, it is worth spending some time explaining how it was produced. Using the life histories we gathered in our fieldwork, we constructed a migration chronology for each individual male (we did not gather these data for women, as they migrated to work less often and for fewer years than men). Our concern was for the decade they began to work and for the decade they quit work for good (that is, we ignored brief spells out of work). Then, decade by decade, starting with the earliest decade in which living Ponams entered work, we tabulated the number of Ponam men working at any time during that decade. The results of this are the various ns in table 18. For each of the men at work during that decade we computed their educational level. We used these to produce an average educational level for all workers, new workers, and retiring workers, for each decade, as shown in the table. Finally, we ranked each job on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, and computed for each worker the mean rank of the jobs he held during the decade. From these we computed mean job ranks for all workers, new entries, and retiring workers, for each decade, again as shown in the table. Illustrative occupations and their rankings are: 1—plantation workers, cargo carrier; 2—trochus diver, factory hand; 3—ship's crew, fisherman, malaria control officer; 4—police and defence force private, domestic servant; 5—store clerk, all drivers, all self-employed; 6—primary school teacher, police and defence force NCO; 7—patrol officer, secondary school teacher; 8—hotel manager, provincial radio station manager; 9—middle-level public service; 10—senior-level public service, ordained priest.
3. Marilyn Strathern (1975, 44) argues that one should not see migration experience merely as a function of how long a set of people have been in contact with Europeans and the employment they offer—where they stand, in other words, in relation to the labor frontier. Accepting this point, it is nonetheless true that the migration experiences of groups with a similar degree of colonial experience, here prewar Ponams and Hageners around 1970, show many similarities.
4. Of course, sociological and ideological, as well as strictly agricultural, factors prevented cultivation. Even without using compost or fertilizers
available on the island, Ponams could have produced a reasonable supply of greens and a moderate number of sweet potatoes for personal consumption. Islanders tended to ignore this.
6 Internal Exchange
1. There was no simple reciprocal term for these asi and tama , collectively called tamatu . Formally, the reciprocal for tama was narok , and the reciprocal for asi was narohamerok , for males, and natuek , for females. Islanders commonly used the Pidgin ''pikinini'' (literally, child) as a collective reciprocal, which captures the relationship of dependence and nurturing well enough.
2. Migrants did have a range of celebrations of their own. These marked important events in the lives of their children—birthdays, first communions, graduations—and they celebrated church and state holidays. Clearly migrants were strengthening important social and symbolic elements in their lives. They did not, however, undertake the ceremonial prestations of the sort described in this chapter, prestations crucial for one's social identity as a Ponam, rather than as a parent, a citizen of Papua New Guinea, or a Catholic.
3. Certainly we would expect Ponam migrants to be more committed to the symbolic goods that home offered than were the Hagen migrants Marilyn Strathern described (1975). In contrast to Ponams, they were likely to have little or no education and were likely to migrate as an act of rejection of their social identity at home and of the system that gave that identity meaning. And Strathern notes that Hagen migrants, though obviously ambivalent, felt a burden of debt existed against them at home because of their absence, so that they did not want to go home without substantial money on their skins to discharge that debt and retrieve their social identities. This isolated them from home in a way that simply did not exist for Ponam migrants. The case of Kilenge migrants, though not as extreme, is closer to Hageners than to Ponams. These migrants were seen to contribute nothing of much consequence to Kilenge society, though there was always hope that a migrant would succeed in town. However, their migration was not an act of rejection of Kilenge society. Rather, some town polish was thought desirable among the Kilenge. Further, it appears that for many young village men, their migration and return were influenced by the wishes of their elders (Grant & Zelenietz 1980, 229) and hence are more likely to have been affirmations of their village identity than rejections of it.
7 Conclusions: Colonization, Articulation, and the Evolution of Ponam Society
1. We have other, more fundamental reservations about Meillassoux's and Fitzpatrick's work (not least the hyperbolic language in which it is couched). Fitzpatrick, for example, portrays Melanesia in terms of the two-dimensional stereotypes embodied in his chapter titles, "The Colonized," "The Peasantry," and so forth, lacking any sensitivity to the differences between the sorts of people, situations, and relationships that he condenses into his knockabout characters. This may, of course, be
inherent in any attempt to force recalcitrant real life into the neat, theoretically determined molds he uses, molds that may, in fact, be quite inappropriate (cf. Lloyd 1982). More fundamentally, Meillassoux generally ignores the complicating factor of productivity. When he does, fleetingly, consider it, he is led to admit that the greater productivity of labor in the capitalist sector may allow workers to be paid more than they would be worth in the domestic community, even while being underpaid in terms of the hypothetical cost of their reproduction in the capitalist sector (Meillassoux 1981, 128). This raises the possibility that, at least in terms of Meillassoux's economic calculus, circular migration may in fact benefit both sectors, a possibility apparent in the case of Ponam and one that would pose serious problems for the moral thrust of Meillassoux's theoretical view of the expanding and destructive nature of capitalism.
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Index
A
Adoption, 72 -73, 89 -90
Affinal exchange. See Ceremonial exchange
Articulation:
anthropological approach to, 14 n. 2, 15 -19
Chambri, 27 -28
effects of, 229
effects of, on village life, 18 -20, 233 -234, 237 -238
and flow of wealth, 229 -231
Gende, 29 , 203 -204
and intergenerational relations, 233 -235
in Papua New Guinea ethnography, 7 -8, 13 -15, 17 -20
theory, 9 -13, 228 -229, 231 n. 1, 231 -232
and tradition, 201 -202, 235 -236. See also Tradition
B
Brideprice. See Ceremonial exchange
Bundralis market. See Markets, local
C
Ceremonial exchange, 203 -206
early colonial, 68 -69, 71
history, 89 -90, 233
and inequality, 72 -73, 91 -92, 203 -204, 210 , 219
and inequality, early colonial, 72 , 74
lesser exchanges, 221 -224
and Manus economy, early colonial, 69 -70, 72
participation in, 209 -210, 213
participation in, by migrants, 215 -217, 223
redistribution in, 219 -220
and remittance, 213 -215
and social identity, 204
and social obligation, 204 -205
structure of, 206 -210, 215 -220
value of, 211 -213
Chambri Lakes villagers. See Gewertz, Deborah
Clans. See Kamal
Cognatic stocks, 40 -41. See also Ceremonial exchange, structure of
Colonization:
impact of, in ethnography, 5 n. 1, 5 -7, 237
of Manus and Ponam, 74 -77, 78 n. 3, 152
Commercial fishing:
and gift relations, 122 -123
social organization of, 118 -121
Commodity relations among Ponams, 140 , 142 , 148
Commodity transactions, 146 , 159 -161
D
Dependence:
on imports, 134 -135, 154
on towns, in Papua New Guinea villages, 26 -27
on towns, on Ponam, 22 , 27 , 87 -88, 193 -196, 224 -225
E
Education:
and gender, 172 -173, 180
history, 77 -80, 173
and inequality, 94 -95
and intergenerational relations, 172
provision, 173 -174
and status, 169 -172
Education and migration, 85 , 174 -175, 178 , 180
attitudes toward, 177 -178, 181 , 186 -187
and gender, 180 , 187 -188
history, 175 -177
influence of parents and family factors, 180 -183, 186 -188
investment orientation, 184 -188
recent changes in, 196 -198
F
Fish freezer, 46 -47, 119 -122
Fishing:
ecological zones, 104 -106
practices, 98 -100
productivity, 96 -97, 97 n. 1
species ownership, 107 -108
waters ownership, 103 -107. See also Net fishing
Fishing techniques, 97 -98, 102 n. 2
collective, 98 -99, 111 -113
history, 110 -113
individual, 109 -111
ownership, 108 -113
ownership, and kinship organization, 113 -114, 116 -119
proliferation of, 96 -97, 131 -132. See also Commercial fishing;
Net fishing
Free trade, 160 -161
G
Gender division of labor, 55 -57
and fishing, 110 -111
history, 78 -79. See also Women
Gender relations, 57 , 59 , 93 -94
changes in, 89 -90
and education, 172 -173, 180
and education, and migration
180 , 187 -188
and markets, 144 . See also Women
Gende villagers. See Articulation, Gende
Gewertz, Deborah, 12 , 27 -28, 157 -158
Gifts and commodities, 15 , 130 , 146 , 149 -150, 156 -163
Gregory, C. A., 15 n. 3 , 15 -18, 130 , 156 , 224 , 232 -233
H
Hagen migrants. See Strathern, Marilyn
Hire has. See Fishing techniques
I
Inequality, 24 , 71 -74, 88 -90, 92 n. 6, 92 -95
and ceremonial exchange, 72 -74, 91 -92, 203 -204, 210 , 219
Inheritance, 48 -49, 52
Intergenerational relations, 43 -44, 82 , 90 -91
and articulation, 233 -235
and education, 172
K
Kahn, Joel, 7 -8, 11 -12
Kamal , 38 -40, 60 n. 4
and property, 39 -41
and sahai , 39
and women, 40 , 60
Kawas. See Trade partnerships
Ken si. See Cognatic stocks
Komine, Isokide, 75 -76
L
Labor migration. See Education and migration
Migration
Land disputes, 50 , 52 -55
Land tenure, 48 -50
Lapan , 72 -74, 88 -92
Lapan exchange, 68 -69, 77 , 159 -160
Lo has. See Fishing techniques, ownership
M
Mainland-island relations, 83 , 157
Manus: geography, 30 , 33 -34, 66
historical sources, 62 -65
languages, 34
population, 30
provincial government, 37 , 86 -87, 92 -93
social divisions, 34 , 36
Manus economy:
disintegration, 77 -80
early colonial, 66 -68, 70 -71
early colonial, and inequality, 72 -74
early colonial, and lapan , 71 -72
effects of World War II, 81 , 83
late colonial, 83 , 86 , 88
and New Way movement, 83 -84
post-World War II collapse, 85 , 138
and provincial government, 86 -87
and remittance, 87
Marine tenure. See Fishing, waters ownership
Markets:
local, 146 -148
local, early colonial, 68
local, expenditure in, 148 -149
local, history, 83 , 88 , 151 -153
local, post-World War II, 83
provincial, 142 -145
Marriage, 41 , 89 -92
early colonial, 70 -71
Mataungan Association. See Ponam, Mataungan Association
Matriclans, 43
Mbrolofau. See Ceremonial exchange, lesser exchanges
Mead, Margaret, 12 , 34 , 36 , 59 n. 3, 64 -65, 72 -73, 92 n. 6, 158 -159
Meillassoux, Claude, 9 , 10 , 90 -91, 228 -232, 231 n. 1, 234
Migrants:
attributes of, 166 -167, 172 -173
dependence on Ponam, 192 -193, 224 -227
dependence on Ponam, recent changes in, 198 -200
motives, 169
Ponam, general, 21
social identity, 225 n. 2
villagers' perception of 168 -170. See also Ceremonial exchange, participation in;
Ceremonial exchange, and remittance;
Remittance, motivation for
Migration, 9 -10, 83 , 165
and ceremonial exchange, 89 -90
early colonial, 76 , 78 -79
history, 85 -86
and inequality, 88 -90
and intergenerational relations, 176
Ponam, general, 22 . See also Education and migration;
Remittance
Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, 37 , 76 -77, 79 -80
Moieties, 41 -42
N
Nai Club, 43 -44
Net fishing:
contributions to, 123 -125, 128
distribution of catch, 100 -101, 125 -129
ownership of, efficiency, 126 -128
ownership of, and generosity, 129 -131, 157
ownership of, and social identity, 113 -114, 124 -125, 132
ownership of, and social obligation, 132 -133
participation in, 123 -125, 128 . See also Fishing
New Way movement, 43 -44, 83 -84, 89 -90
Njames. See Ceremonial exchange, lesser exchanges
P
Parkinson, Richard, 34 , 36 , 63 -65, 74 -75
Pere villagers. See Mead, Margaret
Ponam:
church, 47
Community School, 48
districts, 42 , 50
Mataungan Association, 44 -45
plantation, 42 , 76 -77, 85 , 136 , 138
time reckoning, 32 -33
village government, 32 -33, 36 , 38 , 44 -46, 48
Ponam Island:
geography, 30 , 32
population, 30 , 32
Posus Club, 43 -44, 46 -47
R
Remittance:
amounts, 86 , 167 -168
and ceremonial exchange, 87 -88, 202 -203
motivation for, 188 -189, 190 -193, 198 -200
Ponam reliance on, 23 , 193 -196. See also Education and migration;
Migration
Reproduction. See Social reproduction and material production
S
Sago. See Starch
Sea tenure. See Fishing, waters ownership
Shell money, 69 n. 2, 101 -103
Social reproduction and material production, 224 -227
Starch, 148 -151, 155
Strathern, Andrew, 8 , 19 , 92 n. 6
Strathern, Marilyn, 165 -168, 176 n. 3, 176 -178, 181 -182, 190 , 226 n. 3
T
Totemic groups. See Matriclans
Trade:
in Chambri Lakes, 157 -158
conflicting perceptions of, 156 -162
precolonial, 8
Trade partnerships, 37 , 153 -156, 161
in early colonial Manus, 70
history, 154
reliance on, 154 -155. See also Trade, conflicting perceptions of
Trade stores, 135 -136
and articulation, 140
history, 84 -85, 136 , 138 , 140
owners of, 139 -140
types of, 138 -139
Tradition, 6 -7, 10 -12, 21 , 92 , 236 -237
and articulation, 201 -202, 235 -236
Tulu market. See Markets, local
U
Urban life, attitudes toward, 188 -189
W
Warfare, 66 -67, 70 , 75 , 78
Women, 57
authority as asi , 59
early colonial, 74
education of, 89
and fishing, 99 , 109 -111
and formal exchange, 57 -58, 210
and kamal , 55 , 60
and matriclans, 59 -60
and migration, 93
and property, 40 .
See also Gender division of labor;
Gender relations
World War II, 80 -83, 152
Designer: U.C. Press Staff
Compositor: Janet Sheila Brown
Text: 10/13 Palatino
Display: Palatino
Printer: Braun-Brumfield, Inc.
Binder: Braun-Brumfield, Inc.
Preferred Citation: Carrier, James G., and Achsah H. Carrier Wage, Trade, and Exchange in Melanesia: A Manus Society in the Modern State. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6b69p0gx/