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...Durkheim developed idea that when collective institutions begin to deteriorate, and the moral norms that otherwise constrain the individual then fail to do so, anomie, or value disorientation, may result. In his famous article, 'Social Structure and Anomie' (1938, 1949, 1957) Merton cleverly refined Durkheim's concept and framework. Anomie, so he argued, is caused by breakdown in agency, which he saw as a relationship between ends and the legitimate means to achieve them offered by society. (1) Essentially, Merton had rephrased Durkheim in instrumental terms. When goals become ill defined, or when they cannot be reached, anomie happens. Merton considered several alternative responses to such frustrating circumstances, of which retreatism, rebellion and deviance were possibilities, among others.
Now, it is the case that in contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG) male youth face just such a predicament, that is, a disconnection between legitimate means and ends. Many young men receive at least minimal Western education, to be sure. And they have no paucity of goals and aspirations in their sights, most commonly wealth, travel, education, political success, or, at the very least, wristwatches, e.g., the possession of little tokens of modernity. But the means, or the agency, are lacking. The national economy fails to produce job opportunities, the state cannot afford providing them with advanced, occupational training (see also Bell, this collection). A gap is created, a gap between goals and desires, on the one hand, and the agency to achieve them, on the other. At the same time, with the atrophy of traditional, local-level institutions, such as ceremonial exchange and ritual, male youth have reduced access to pre-capitalist positions of prestige and power. One outcome, of course, has been raskolism, which I suppose Merton would have classed as deviance, if not also as rebellion. Another outcome, for many, would appear to be what Merton called retreatism, a retreatism that appears as a preoccupation with nonutilitarian forms of minor play, such as penny-ante card games, athletics, and substance abuse. Merton's dysfunctionalism may well point us in the direction of the historical and political conditions that give rise to why youth is sometimes said to be wasted on youth. It does not, of course, provide us with very much theoretical traction on understanding the whole, rupture-prone discourse to which retreatism may give rise, hedonism, patrifilial recrimination, intergenerational protest, etc. That is, it offers no exegetical purchase on the internally specific meanings, rhetoric, tension-filled unity of and problems raised by what I want to call the prosaics (Morson and Emerson 1991) of retreatism, however irreducible they may be.
The goal of this essay, that is to say, is to respond to the problem Mintz posed in my epigraph. I focus on what distinguishes the ordinary (rather than literary) metaphors and images through which marijuana discourse may be understood as culturally characteristic of a particular Sepik society. To do so, I analyze views expressed by constituencies of young, middle- and senior men in a village called Darapap (the ethnographic present being 2001). I focus on their talk about marijuana traffic, consumption and marijuana-related attitudes about the state. But I do not focus on these topics in and of themselves. I neither observed nor studied them in practice. With respect to traffic and consumption discourses, my specific findings are that marijuana is said to be valued (by male youth) as a source of pleasure, a sort of transgressive trade tobacco that is simultaneously a commodity from which money can be made, and as a secular performance enhancer that is a source of agency (Jankowiak and Bradburd 1996). At the same time, its consumption is condemned (by middle-aged and senior generations of men) as a cause of anomie, of local-level disorder, as well as distrust of the state. I argue that marijuana talk has been absorbed into an ongoing, but shifting, discourse that preceded its arrival (cf. Schieffelin 1982). Thus my conceit: in 2001, marijuana talk comprised an important forum in which men engaged one another, not conclusively, but open-endedly. More generally, marijuana talk was another expression of ambivalent dialogue about the uneasy, nervous position of male agency in postcolonial PNG.
MARIJUANA IN THE MURIK LAKES
Darapap is one of five villages that are built along the Murik Lakes, which are an intertidal system of shallow, mangrove swamps located on the North Coast of PNG immediately to the west of the mouth of the Sepik River. The village is made up of extended families that are tied to a number of cognatic lineages. (2) The latter are assembled through ceremonial exchange, that may occur during mortuary rites. There has been a Seventh Day Adventist Mission located in Darapap since 1951 which draws largely on women, children and a few male leaders. The matrilateral Male Cult, which is centered in its hall, is also an atrophied, but still viable presence in the community, as are its allies, the patrilateral Female Cult and the Gaingiin Society, the public masquerade that is made up of initiatory age-classes.
The people who manage to eke out a living between the shores of the Murik Lakes and the beaches of the Bismarck Sea earn money from their fishery, an inconsistent market in tourist art as well as what they receive through their remittance economy. They go and come to market fish and buy goods in Wewak town, the provincial capital, as often as they can, today via banana boats powered by ever-larger outboard motors, rather than by motorized outrigger canoes as they did up through the end of the 1980s. Simultaneously, they go on practising their precapitalist adaptive strategy of aquatic foraging conducted by domestic units of production, that is, by kin groups. They also continue to export seafood and woven Murik baskets in a regional trading system made up of hereditary partners, gifts and fixed exchange rates and barter markets. They thereby import--buy or trade for--everything else in their lives that they cannot pull out of the lakes (Barlow 1985; Lipset 1985; see Tiesler 1969). Today, marijuana has been added to the extensive inventory of trade goods and commodities upon which the people rely.
As elsewhere in the country (see Thomas, this collection), the Darapap call marijuana 'intoxicating tobacco' (spak brus) in Tokpisin, or just 'the smoke' (dispela simok). In their vernacular, marijuana is also classed as a tobacco. It is alternatively called an intoxicating, or, literally, a 'crazy tobacco' (sakain baubau), or, it is condemned as an 'immoral' or, literally, a 'bad tobacco' (sakain mwaro). It is also classed, along with all other purchasable tobacco products as a 'whiteman's tobacco' (yabar sakain). By extension, it is therefore included in the larger class of commodities, technologies, occupations and ideologies that have long distinguished power inequities between, in this case, the people of Darapap, and Western modernity, yabar being a term for a kind of creator spirit (Schmidt 1922) by which colonials were initially referred (yabar goan).
Young Darapap men, so far as I know, did not smoke marijuana until the early years of the 1990s. I am unaware how it first came into use in the villages. That is, I do not know...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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