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...that if one went to any of the logging concessions in the western and central Gulf Province with a jar of crocodile penis that Filipinos at the camps would buy them for several hundred kina. (1) If you had enough, Tom added, these same men would fly you to the Philippines where you would be given anything you desired--suitcases of money, a car, outboard motors, etc. A crocodile hunter, who participated in the regulated trade of crocodile skins, Tom was curious about how to tap into this curious flow of things, and whether I could help him. (2)
A week later another event transpired involving a different but equally lucrative commodity circulating in the Delta. Several male adolescents had stolen a box that had been temporarily off-loaded from a plane with engine trouble at the Baimuru airstrip. The plane had been chartered by Turama Forest Industries (TFI), a logging company active in the region, and was carrying supplies. The youths stole this particular box because they had smelled its hidden contents: kuku dipi (lit. 'bad /evil smoke') as marijuana is locally known. (3) Following the theft's report by TFI, eight heavily armed members of a mobile unit of PNG's riot police force came from Port Moresby to investigate. During the following month the mobile squad threatened surrounding communities as they searched for this box, and for caches of kuku dipi and illegal homemade guns.
While the box and its contents were never retrieved, several youths suspected of being associated with the theft were severely beaten, as was one adult who protested the police's rough tactics. After a tense three weeks, the mobile squad left as quickly as they had come, their departure by dinghy in the early morning punctuated by the staccato of machine gun fire. While station life drifted back to normal, rumours persisted for months that the mobile squad would return to beat up male villagers and rape women. Within the community of Mapaio the sound of an approaching outboard motor invariably gave rise to shouts of 'Police'e! Police'e!'. The immediate result of this deception was the invariable melt down of young children whose terror amused parents and older siblings, while male adolescents sprinted into the bush to hide.
This particular event and its lingering effects made kuku dipi ethnographically present for me during my dissertation fieldwork (2001-02), and vividly portrayed tensions surrounding this illicit substance. Traded down the Purari River by male youth through a network of friends, kuku dipi is consumed locally, and traded for guns it is rumoured that the American Mafia bring in submarines. Although not grown in the Purari Delta, marijuana has become a new cash crop for disenchanted young men, who in their capacity as middlemen seek material gain in the depressed regional economy. While there can be no doubt that a significant role of the trade is to provide participating men with a means to satisfy their 'commodity hunger' (Wardlow 2006: 32), the trade also enables the forging of new social networks through which these young men confront and transcend village politics. In so doing, these men are not only redefining village social dynamics but also the ways in which masculinity is understood and performed. It is through these profound economic and social effects that this regional exchange (guns-for-marijuana) has become one of the most significant trade networks in the Delta and in the country linking the Highlands to the coastal regions, Torres Straits, Australia and beyond (Kirsch 2002: 56). (4)
The movement of kuku dipi into and out of the Delta is, however, not a solitary phenomenon, but rather part of a larger constellation of informal trade that has emerged alongside the large-scale logging and oil projects currently being conducted in the Gulf Province (Figure 1). (5) These networks involve alcohol, pornography and radios being traded by logging ship crews for sexual services, and various local flora and fauna (i.e., live birds and crocodile skins). These illicit sets of exchange underlie the longstanding legally sanctioned and visible movements of processed sago, betelnut, garden produce and dried fish that people take to the urban centres of Kikori, Kerema and Port Moresby for store bought foodstuffs (i.e., sugar, tinned meats, rice) and other goods (i.e., kerosene, second-hand clothes, shot gun shells). As seen in Tom's comments about crocodile penises, and people's beliefs in submarines, these illicit transactions also involve various sets of speculations about the nature and reasons for these exchanges. These speculations feed into people's understandings of the equally mysterious processes of both development and resource extraction in the Delta, which are equally distant, and largely invisible. An examination of the Purari's speculations about these networks provides insight into communities' understandings of their place within the geopolitics of development, what it is that resource extraction entails, and how they are in turn being transformed.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
In what follows, I unravel aspects of kuku dipi use and movement, as well as some layers of explanation and anxiety concerning kuku dipi within this flow of commodities and their attending speculations. Mapping out the 'speculative biographies' (Walsh 2004: 233), surrounding kuku dipi and other commodities, gives some insight into Purari communities attempts to transcend and cope with the economic and political disparities caused by the Delta's current resource extraction projects. In doing so, I follow Foster's call to examine 'how people in Melanesia, like and unlike people everywhere, rub their dreams and desires--their possible lives--against the exigencies of their actual lives' (1999: 153). Following a short discussion of work on the transformative effects of commodities in PNG, I turn to an outline of the Purari Delta and the current resource extraction projects under way. Doing so allows me to touch upon the host of goods exchanged around these sites before addressing aspects of marijuana's local use and perceived effects, its regional movement, and finally people's speculations about its trade.
SPECULATIVE BIOGRAPHIES OF THINGS AND THEIR WAKES
In his appraisal of anthropological studies of commodities, Foster (2006) remarks on the explosion in the last two decades of studies that, following Appadurai's (1986) and Kopytoff's (1986) seminal essays in The Social Life of Things, trace the movement of everyday things through diverse 'local' and 'global' contexts. It is in these circuits that meanings are fashioned and shed, and the producers and consumers of these objects are alternatively connected or disconnected across geographic, cultural and political boundaries (Foster 2006: 285). Influenced by this trend several studies have emerged that focus on the movement and consumption of commodities in PNG. In his own work on print advertising in metropolitan centres Foster argues for the centrality of commodity consumption in the construction of nationhood (Foster 1995 and 2002). Gewertz and Errington (1996) have examined how discourses around soft-drinks contribute to an emerging modernity among the Chambri. Working with the Fuyuge of Central Province, Hirsch (1990) demonstrates the importance of betelnut in ritual, and how this has contributed to the formation of their understandings of what is a national culture. Similarly, Mosko (1999) documents how the North Mekeo's successful marketing of betelnut has led to a new flow of commodities into communities leading to alternating sets of transformation in villages, gender relations and notions of the person. Without wishing to detract from the nuances of these studies, collectively they show the importance of commodity consumption in PNG and various ways in which commodities transform societies and help with the enactment of new identities and modes of personhood (LiPuma 1998). Not surprisingly the identities that commodity consumption help constitute may be at odds with notions of nationhood. This is a point made clear by Dundon (2004) in her work on the Gogodala of Western Province and is one of the fascinating aspects of marijuana consumption. As noted by Halvaksz and Lipset in this collection marijuana presents an intriguing illicit commodity whose trade and consumption 'both subverts and engages the citizen with the nation-state.'
While marijuana's illicitness adds to its theoretical interest it also presents certain methodological problems (Gootenberg 2005). Within the Purari Delta the moral sanctions against its consumption and trade made...
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