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...proclaimed several publications the Gogodala had experienced a 'cultural revival' after the destruction of their culture by evangelical missionaries during the colonial period (see for example Crawford 1981, 1976, 1976a, 1975). This revival, initiated by Crawford's interest in local painted and carved objects, culminated in the building of a traditional style longhouse as the Gogodala Cultural Centre. The Centre housed a great number of a revived style of carvings, in the form of elaborately pigmented and decorated canoes, paddles, crocodiles, drums and headdresses, and was opened in 1974 by then Chief Minister, Michael Somare (later PNG's first and current Prime Minister). The Gogodala 'cultural revival', valorised in nationalist discourses as one of the first examples of a new nation's 'unity through cultural diversity' policy, and vilified in other, academic contexts, as 'cultural folklorization', marked a time in which village people experienced a level of personal interaction with national leaders and institutions. (1) It was referred to by some as the 'selling days', when aspects of Gogodala iniwa ela gi or 'customary ways" were marketable (see Dundon 2004). (2)
It was also during this time that there was an increase in the availability of trade-store goods like tinned fish, rice, flour, tea and sugar in Gogodala villages. This was partially at least the result of increased access to money, earned through the production and sale of carvings to tourists, art dealers and the Cultural Centre. At that time, Gogodala recall that many resisted these new foods, increasingly presented at mortuary feasts or village celebrations, sceptical of their value and taste. In particular, older men were repelled by the sweet tea, as its milky texture seemed reminiscent of breast milk. Those in paid employment and younger members of village communities, however, urged them to drink and eat, saying 'Hey, this is what Independence means: you have to wear white man's clothes [and] eat white man's food'. Although some continue to avoid milky tea, such goods are now consumed in many contexts, ceremonial and mundane, as a valuable addition to local food. Mounds of steaming, fluffy rice topped with tinned fish, salt and greens, and pots of sweet, milky tea are common fare at feasts and social gatherings, and are considered both prestigious and healthy foods.
In this paper, I suggest that the confluence of nation and consumption exemplified in such statements, is based on an underlying and, for Gogodala communities, critical transnational relationship with white people. Gogodala attitudes to and understandings of these products, and the effects they have upon their bodies, have developed within the context of both national independence and the articulation of both an intensely local, yet globalising Christianity and a national Church. Like many communities in Papua New Guinea, their relationship with the nation-state is fraught with ambiguity. The Gogodala live in an area that is difficult to reach and have had limited interaction with state institutions or other economic interests. During the colonial period, Western Province was labelled an economic and political 'backwater', and, from the local perspective, the achievement of national independence has had limited impact on the area. The majority of Gogodala profess to be sceptical of the motives and viability of both regional and national governments and their policies, despite recent success of local candidates in the 2002 national elections. Visits by national or provincial politicians, at least until recently, have been generally greeted with tepid interest, indifference, or, sometimes, hostility. Even with the appointment of a Gogodala Provincial Governor and Member of Parliament, few in the community feel that their position has been substantially transformed.
Since Independence, PNG has struggled to encompass the numerous communities, linguistic categories and lifestyles within its national boundaries, and local intelligentsia and political elites have sought to produce salient images and ideals of nationhood, providing the basis of a continuous dialogue about custom and tradition (Foster 1995:1). In this context, processes of nation-making, encompassing both the production of a 'collective peoplehood' and an 'individual personhood' within it, have been dominated by state officials and institutions in their attempts to 'nationalize state structures' that existed prior to the nation (Foster 1995:1). (3) Yet officials and agents of the state have retained only partial control over discourses of nation making, and the production of either collective or individual personhood, particularly in rural PNG. These processes intersect with local community projects that may both challenge and reiterate their central propositions. So much so in fact, that the nation in PNG has been cast as an 'unimagined community' rather than an imagined one (Foster 2002:3; see also Anderson 1983).
To what extent, then, does the nation figure in the lives of the Gogodala? I suggest in this paper that, although the nation constitutes a frame of reference for action and articulation among these communities, particularly 'for staging a whole range of collective and personal identities' (Foster 2002:4), it is constantly challenged by a local dialogue that emphasises contiguity between Gogodala and white people. That, as Foster (1995:6) suggests, the nation competes with or invokes other forms of identification such as Christianity. Joel Robbins (1998) has argued that the Urapmin of Sandaun Province, PNG, have a clear concept of national identity and consider themselves first and foremost members of a nation-state. Nonetheless, they are overtly critical of the nation and claim solidarity with a transnational community of Christians. This Robbins (1998:104) labels 'negative nationalism', a state in which the Urapmin unhappily consider themselves Papua New Guineans, a situation they seek to rectify through the realisation of an international Christian community through the apocalypse. Christian narratives about the apocalypse, thus, are the site of potent calls for trans-nationalism, as well as being a crystallisation of 'their nationalist sentiment' (Robbins 1998:104).
For the Gogodala, images and experiences of the nation have always been based on their relationship with Europeans. Expatriate missionaries, primarily from the United Kingdom and Australia, with the Unevangelised Fields Mission (UFM) (later Asia Pacific Christian Mission, APCM, and more recently Pioneers) have made this area of PNG their home since the 1930s, and came to dominate many of the first Gogodala interactions with formal styles of education, biomedicine, money and business. Thus, mission and Christian assumptions about and knowledge of such issues and institutions became central to local understandings of them. This was also the case for consumption. So that, although consumption may well be a vehicle through which people experience and imagine the nation, one of the 'banal' ways in which the nation is experienced in PNG, becoming evident 'through mundane engagements with radio talk show programs and commodities ranging from locally made tinned meat to globally marketed soft drinks' (Foster 2002:2), it may also be the site of contestation and perhaps even the 'unmaking' of the nation. Thus, for Gogodala communities, consumption of 'white man's food' at the time of national Independence 'materialises' not simply a nation, but rather a more substantial and significant trans-national relationship based on Christianity. It is primarily through this Christian relationship, then, that Gogodala articulate the basis of a unified, 'imagined community', rather than through ties to other Papua New Guineans or even Melanesians. This is often referred to in English as 'Christian country', a self designation of difference from other Papua New Guinean communities based on an adherence to a particular form of Christianity and Church (see Dundon 2002, 2004). Thus the consumption of these trade-store goods, still represented as 'white man's [hod' despite their nationalistic or 'Melanesian' overtones, and the adoption of European clothing, is both a significant part of their engagement with the nation-state and the means by which they challenge some of its central precepts.
SAGO AND STRENGTH: WORKING UP A SWEAT
Much has been written on the person or 'experiencing self' in Melanesia since the 1980s (see for example Battaglia 1990: Linnekin & Poyer 1990; Morton & Macintyre 1995; Poole 1982, 1984; A. Strathern & Stewart 1998; M. Strathern 1988). Nancy Lutkehaus (1995:14) notes that one of the major themes to emerge from this material is the significance of substances to the constitution of persons, in particular semen, blood, breastmilk, bones and food. For this paper, I am interested in the last of these, food, and the ways in which certain persons are created by its consumption and production. I do not seek to encompass the myriad ways in which Gogodala understand and experience personhood, but rather provide an exploration of some of the elements of its constitution. (4)
For the Gogodala, consumption has always been a central concern: to be a person is to produce and consume certain products, exemplified in the local idiom 'living on sago' and the practices of ela gi (way of life). The result, Gogodala believe, is a community of hard, strong bodies and moral persons. This is, however, a matter of much negotiation and rumination, and consumption creates a context in which this is debated on a daily basis. Village and townspeople constantly talk about what it is to 'live on sago', a discussion that is often framed in terms of bodily shapes and sizes, and increasingly concerned with the differences inherent in the consumption of trade store foods primarily associated with 'living on money' (see Dundon 2002a). For the majority of Gogodala, the cultivation, production, and consumption of sago and garden foods still serves as the basis of a certain 'way of life' or ela gi. As they live on the floodplain of the Fly and Aramia Rivers, the area is inundated for several months of the year, with canoes the primary form of transport between villages, gardens and sago swamps. Villages, gardens and...
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