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...spread throughout nation has meant that communities must confront its economic and physiological effects, not to mention issues of criminality. Needless to say, it presents a moral dilemma for youth and leaders alike raising questions about the role of the state in defining and controlling the circulation of such substances. While placing them in conflict with community leaders, young Biangai men find marijuana to be meaningful.
Differentiated according to strength and color, and compared to plants once used by their ancestors, 'spak brus,' as it is locally called, (1) is attributed with properties that effect changes in social relations and personal efficacy. Furthermore, contrary to Strathern (1987), marijuana is now seen a substance capable of transforming the bodies of some of its users. This is particularly true in the emerging discourses of habitual use. In this paper, I will examine these competing discourses of marijuana as they emerge in the communities around Wau (Morobe Province, PNG). I consider the way in which this new commodity is becoming locally meaningful and is emerging as a powerful substance in the lives of young men and women. Its prominence in local discourse, I conclude, is as much a product of community-state relations as it is a product of the drug's physiological and economic impact.
THE UPPER BULOLO
The Biangai reside in seven main villages along the Upper Bulolo River, just inland from the township of Wau. Villages are organized around a system of cognatic land-based groups, or solonarik (see Burton 1996; Halvaksz 2005; Mitio 1981; Oullette 1987). Each community consists of at least three distinct solonarik, with garden lands organized through namesakes, first rights designation at birth, and marriages. While sweet potatoes are the primary crop, yams are central to the identity of mytho-poetic history of Biangai. In addition to coffee, a variety of indigenous and European introduced fruits and vegetables are grown for market. However, many young men find temporary employment in the area with logging and mining companies, or occasional labor in small-scale alluvial mining.
Wau was the site of gold rushes in the 1920s, which eventually gave rise to large scale international dredging and deep mining in the areas between Wau and Bulolo. For Biangai, this early extensive contact with both government and development forces has transformed both their social lives and economic encounters (Halvaksz 2006b; Martin and Oullette 1981). Since the first miners, Biangai have both willingly and eagerly sought to engage their Euro-Australian counterparts in exchanges of produce and labor. Mining, logging, ecotourism, cash crops, and now marijuana, are among the many ways that they have sought to make such encounters. However, marijuana's imagined potential places it in an increasingly prominent position in the youthful desires for development.
RELATIONS WITH AND WITHOUT SUBSTANCE
In an earlier commentary on the broad category of drugs found throughout the Pacific, Strathern argued that while drugs do 'create effects and interpersonal relations of a special kind,' they do not effectively change social relations because as substances they are 'short-term, unmediated, and in this sense without substance to them' (1987:244). She reserves substances for a specific class of material including bodily fluids, foods and items of exchange that effect transformations in bodies. While such exchanges can either be mediated or unmediated, the substances that are exchanged are always 'other-producing', meaning that persons are composed and grown through the created social relations.
It is an argument that Strathern elaborated on in the Gender of the Gift (1990), and is a central thesis in the analysis of Melanesian ideas of reproduction and personhood (i.e. Foster 1995; Leach 2003; Lipset 1997; Mosko 2001; Wiener 1992). Furthermore, Strathern makes a distinction between mediated and unmediated exchanges. Both can effectively grow the body and maintain health (Strathern 1990: 288), and both kinds of exchange involve the replication of substances. Unmediated exchanges that do effect transformations in the body are typified by those between parent and child, mother and fetus, 'or ties with kinsfolk based on asymmetry and dependence, source and product' (Strathern 1990:267). These are characterized as growing the body. Accordingly, growth of the fetus derives from the contribution of paternal and maternal substance to the offspring (with some variation in the degree and kind of contribution attributable to descent system), and, in adulthood is revealed in the health of the person.
Unmediated exchange also speaks to 'the harm that one body can do to another because of its very nature,' in short because of pollution and magic (Strathern 1990: 105). As Meigs argued for the Hua, substances 'may have positive or negative value' depending on the context of use or exchange (1984:112). They effect transformations in the health and wellbeing of the person, positively or negatively. In contrast to 'drugs,' Strathern argues that unmediated exchanges of these sorts do effect long-term transformations in the bodies of persons and in their relations.
Biangai ideas about reproduction and substance are not dissimilar to this configuration. Cognatic, they value the contribution of male and female substance to the growing fetus, and all types of exchanges create relations that make up a person. Missionized in the 1930s, with their cult houses destroyed shortly after Second...
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