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Article Excerpt
Abstract
This paper contrasts models of increasing social integration in the central valleys of the New Guinea highlands advanced by Watson, Modjeska and Golson with that of a society constructed entirely differently at the eastern end of the central mountain chain, that of the Upper Watut of Morobe Province. Watut settlements were traditionally locked into a cycle of fission, foundation and accretion caused by the inability of lineage mates to live together without conflict. At a point in the recent past, population growth transformed the system into one of expansion and the conquest of new land until this was arrested by the advent of the colonial period.
Introduction
In the influential collection of papers drawn together some twenty years ago by Andrew Strathern (1982) and dealing with the growth and emergence of social differentiation in highlands societies, Nicholas Modjeska (1982) advanced a set of arguments about the social relations of production in highland societies. These aimed to revise prevailing ideas of purely environmentally driven social and economic change in the literature of the origins of these societies. As set out in his ANU doctoral thesis (1977), Modjeska's ideas had already brought about profound change in the way the long agricultural sequence at Kuk was interpreted. Jack Golson's contribution to the Strathern volume (1982) set out to incorporate Modjeska's critique into his own thinking about Kuk, Mount Hagen and the wider prehistory of highlands societies.
In this paper I want to look at some of the unfinished business left over from the Modjeska-Golson exchange. Although it was not entirely comprehended by me at the time, I was originally recruited by Jack 'to test the propositions about the history of Mount Hagen society which have been advanced here ... the most profitable line of approach is likely to be to trace the development of exchange systems ... axe stone is a ... promising prospect' (1982:135). (1) I did what he said reasonably quickly (Burton 1984), but am now able to fill in some other gaps that may not have been apparent at the time.
Sent by Jack to the Wahgi to find dei Kunjin wusingal ('the exchange pathway of Kunjin axe stone'), I serendipitously followed it. I then went on fieldwork in many other societies of the New Guinea region: transiently among the Ningerum, Yonggom, Awin, Boazi and Zimakani of the Fly River catchment, and more systematically on the Rai coast, in New Britain, in New Ireland, and among the Biangai and Watut peoples of Wau and Bulolo, and now in Torres Strait. During these projects, I have tried to carry with me the questions that were indeed advanced by Jack Golson, but at the same time balancing them with the sharp injunction of the Papuan coast specialist, Dawn Ryan, who said to me in 1982, after listening to yet another conference paper on pigs and big-men, 'the highlands isn't the only place where interesting things happen' (my words that soften Ryan's fiercer sentiments).
I air these points because I want to make a particular intellectual pitch. It is based on two appeals.
The first is that, in our endeavours to make sense of the pasts and presents of Papua New Guinea societies, there is a constancy about the way we tend to compact our explanations over time and, weeding out inconsistencies, try make them more widely applicable. No problem so far: this is healthy academic 'making sense of things'. Unfortunately, applicability can easily shade into uniformity and then into a dangerous expectation of conformity in the way others explain things that is crushingly negative to dissonant field observations. Lawrence's introduction to The Garia (1984) makes only too clear what can happen when an ethnographer finds a social system that fails to conform to expectations. Lawrence gave several apologies for being slow in publishing, but in reality the 30-year delay in writing his monograph was due to theoretical obstacles erected in by academic colleagues in the 1950s. (2) These particular obstacles no longer exist; nonetheless vigilance is always required to ensure we do not erect new barriers to observation in the new ways we invent to explain things.
My second appeal is that, of all the practitioners of all the disciplines of science, we of all of them must be especially careful to allow for the complexity and diversity that we are always saying is present in Melanesia: why, we have yet to count the societies of the region, so we should at least refrain from and fitting the few that we know about quite well into a limited number of moulds. (Of course, we may have given up counting by now; my point is not about counting.) I go out of my way to draw attention to this, because the delicate tension between lumping and splitting is not always accepted by indigenous Papua New Guinea writers. Bernard Narokobi, for one, has clearly set out an intellectual project to find commonalities across traditional Melanesia--or in his words 'classical Melanesia'. In doing so, he actually lays out his credentials as a 'lumper'. There are many examples in his writing:
A village recognises itself as an independent, autonomous social unit ... identity constitutes the unit as a 'corporation', an entity. (1989:21-22). Acknowledged leaders are essential to any community ... (1989:23). Melanesian societies were largely non-expansionist ... organised warfare was controlled by relatively balanced killings to maintain equilibrium (1989:30).
These kinds of comments have a clear purpose in a nation-building exercise but it means that there will be times when taking up the contrary position of being a 'splitter' will not meet with universal acclaim. Nevertheless, I put it that it must always be our goal to alternately seek universal principles or accommodate variability--to 'lump' or 'split'--without prejudice, and that we must always give priority to well-reasoned observation.
Modjeska's argument--a sketch
In Modjeska's 1982 paper, the first section concerns two systemic models in which feedback loops centred on pig production offer an explanation for the societal forms that emerged in the highlands. The first of these--originated by Watson (1977) as a variant of the familiar Boserup (1965) model of population stimulus for technological change--posits a growing human population depleting its natural environment and wild protein sources. Escape is attained by planting more sweet potato and feeding it to growing herds of domestic pigs. This in turn leads to the clearance of even more forest and, if people are better nourished, to a greater human population and so on as the cycle continues. This is termed the 'ecological use-value' model (Modjeska 1982:54).
Unlike Watson, Modjeska does not seek to explain the growth of polities ('tribes', 'clans') in the highlands in terms of the need to respond to the environmental and economic changes that accompany population growth in all flavours of Boserup-derived models.
Instead, what he says is that fundamental changes in the realm of society itself must first occur. In particular, there must be a transition from the kind of society in which the exchange or slaughter of pigs is unimportant, to one in which pig kills and exchanges fulfil essential social and political functions, such as we see in the highlands today.
Modjeska contrasted the Duna, with whom he lived, with their near-neighbours the Kaluli. Duna society is kept running by 'mediative substitutions', that is to say the exchange of pigs, axes, plumes, tree oil, dogs' teeth and other valuables for homicide compensation and brideprice. In contrast the Kaluli are representative of people who prefer 'reciprocal identical actions': that is to say revenge killings and direct sister exchange.
Modjeska mayor may not entertain the belief that at some time in the pasta social transformation took place to create societies of the latter kind out of the former, along the lines posited by Rubel and Rosman (1978). Regardless, a transformation must occur between types of societies where the relation between it and its underlying resource base follows what he calls an 'ecological use-value' model to other types of societies where the relationship follows an 'exchange-value' model (Modjeska 1982: Figs. 1 & 2) for the emergence of larger polities to occur.
[FIGURES 1,2 OMITTED]
In Modjeska's argument, the environment weakens as a primary limiting factor in the face of population growth, and 'increasing intergroup network complexity' and 'increasing intergroup competition' (1982:56) become more important as restraints on continuing system growth. It is not therefore an ecological remedy that is needed to permit continued growth but for some means of conflict mediation. This places an increasing premium on the acceptance, by members of the society set in opposition to one another, of the substitution of things (pigs, valuables) for human lives (homicide victims, brides). Once this has occurred, the scaling-up of pig production then fuels the possibility of 'larger' societies, wider networks, bigger big-men, increasing populations, and so on.
Unfortunately, like Watson before him, Modjeska neither had a real means of observing the moment of this innovation nor was he able to draw on ethnographic examples that could convincingly show the narrowing of the gap between these two highly contrasting ways of organising a society to a point where a crossing-over could be imagined.
The case of the Watut
I will now introduce the case of the Watut, whose recent pre-contact history contrasts starkly with the societies discussed by Modjeska, Golson and, for that matter, Watson. The Watut are speakers of Hamtai (after the eponymous ancestral place near Kaintiba in Gulf Province) one of the eleven Anga languages (Lloyd 1973) that make up one of the largest inland culture areas in New Guinea (Figure 1). They are known ethnographically through the work of Beatrice Blackwood (Blackwood 1950, 1978) who spent seven months in their area in 1936-37; O'Neill (1979), a gold miner who worked leases in the area about five years before Blackwood's visit, also makes reference to people and places that are readily recognisable. (3)
The Watut live as swidden gardeners in a mid- to upper-montane rainforest environment (1000-2000m) and traditionally had a comprehensive ethno-pharmacological knowledge and made heavy usage of bush resources. Their population density ranges from about 2.0/[km.sup.2] to perhaps 20.0/[km.sup.2.] in localised parts of Slate Creek. Setting aside possible differences in soils and rainfall, the ecological base of their subsistence economy bears comparison with many well studied fringe highlands groups such as the Tsembaga (Rappaport 1968) or Bomagai-Angoiaing Maring (Clarke 1971), the Daribi of Karimui (Wagner 1967), further 'mountain Papuans' on the south side of the highlands (Weiner 1988), or mountain dwellers in near-neighbouring valley systems such as the Kunimaipa (McArthur 1971) or Tauade (Hallpike 1977) of Central Province.
Like those groups, their principal crop is sweet potato, grown without mounding or soil tillage and accompanied by ancillary crops such as sugarcane, bananas and greens.
However, this is about as far as the comparisons with these other societies...
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