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Article Excerpt
'Piot, piot, piot. Everyday piot. I'm so sick and tired of piot.' [Isidore 12 June 1998, in English]
Piot was one of the great puzzlements of my fieldwork in the Lihir Islands, New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. It was a concept I heard used continuously throughout my time in Lihir once it had been brought to my attention about six weeks after my arrival. While relations are clearly crucial for the compositions of persons in Lihir, recent theories of relational or socio-centric personhood in Melanesia are not able to fully illuminate piot. Instead piot is one instance which reveals both the relational and individualistic aspects of personhood in Lihir, particularly expressed through themes of fixedness in place and mobility.
THE NATURE OF PIOT
In general, piot is a condition with a number of bodily symptoms that arises when people either leave a house to sleep elsewhere or people come from elsewhere and sleep in a hamlet. While the person who moves feels nothing, those who were occupying the house or hamlet prior to the arrival or departure have a range of symptoms including headache, bodily pain, tiredness, and if already ill they feel worse for one day (generally) after the arrival or departure. Piot makes people sleep until late in the day. I once had my sore throat ascribed to piot by a neighbour as a number of people had returned to the hamlet after a few days absence.
If a person moves between houses owned by a single household, other members of the household will feel piot, but other people in the hamlet will not. Piot is only inflicted on those in the immediate household. However, if someone moves to sleep in the men's house, or leaves it to sleep elsewhere, the entire hamlet will feel piot and sometimes those in neighbouring hamlets will as well. If people arrive from a long distance, or depart to go far away (another island or distant village), piot will be felt by all in the hamlet and sometimes by people in neighbouring ones. Thus the distance of movement often reflects the importance of the occasion of movement, which in turn is reflected in the extent of impact of piot. In the same way, arrivals or departures of a number of people attracted more comments about piot than the movement of a single person.
Piot is experienced by all those in the affected area (household or hamlet) regardless of whether they normally occupy the area, or whether they arrived only a day before the arrival or departure that caused the instance of piot. Likewise, piot is caused by anybody's arrival or departure: be they visitors or owners of the hamlet. Gender seemed to have no impact on either the infliction or experience of piot.
Piot varies in severity: some people are known to cause more intense piot. The subclan Alonsiat on Mahur was renowned for its ability to inflict severe piot, and people in my hamlet would complain when a number of people of that subclan had arrived or left the previous day. The piot I caused was said to be not too bad, but when a friend from Australia visited me, I was told that his piot was severe.
There are a number of ways that piot can be avoided. Bespelled ashes can be sprinkled around the house, which sends piot away. One informant, Ngalparok, said that piot leaves to return to the person who caused it, but gets lost on the road. Another method is to place a bucket of water by the door of the house to capture piot. Ngalparok said piot would put its foot in the water and, feeling the cold, would not want to stay and affect people in the house. One woman, Pketieng, moved houses for one night to avoid piot when her daughter returned from another island and her cross cousin went to sleep in the gardens. She had already been feeling unwell, and didn't want the additional burden of piot the following day. The methods above prevent piot: there appears to be no cure for piot once it has affected people: they must just wait until it has passed.
While piot was characterised above as having legs, feeling the cold or getting lost, in general people do not personify piot, or even have much idea of what it might be. One woman described it as being 'like wind' in that you can't see it, but can feel it. Ngalparok said it is a heaviness that people leave behind when they go, or bring with them from other places when they arrive. Most people, when asked what piot was, or how to characterise it, simply described the symptoms and what causes them.
Above I have been using 'piot' as a noun. People can say 'A piot e se yo lamuel' (literally a piot hit/attacked me today). While it is sometimes used in this way in Lihir, more often it takes the form of a verb. People say 'Blewa na piotpiot' (literally Don't piot). They also say 'O piot eh?' to mean 'Where did you sleep last night?' (literally where did you piot?).
There are similar conditions to piot described in the literature for Papua New Guinea. Andrew Holding (pers. comm.) says that there is a similar condition called fitum on the neighbouring Tanga Islands. Fajans, in her ethnography about the Baining of East New Britain (1997), describes a sentiment, awumbuk. It is a lassitude that occurs when people leave the hamlet or die. It lasts for three days, leaving people tired, lazy, having a lack of success in activities, and is due to a 'heaviness' that the departing people leave behind. She argues that with the departure the 'socially extended persona is ruptured and individuals must reconstitute their boundaries' (Fajans 1997: 120), and that this is even more pronounced at death (Fajans 1985:380-1; 1997:120-1).
Kuehling, in explicating the nature of the person in Dobu, Milne Bay, describes a 'social syndrome' called gwasa or nadiwala. This too is caused when someone leaves the hamlet, and is experienced through headaches, tiredness and a general feeling of being unwell. Kuehling analyses gwasa in light of personhood, relating that it is something left behind when the person goes away, and its strength depends on the strength of personality. She argues that it is a sanction discouraging people from staying away overnight without good reason (Kuehling 1998:64).
The two syndromes or sentiments described above, awumbuk and gwasa, lend themselves to explanations in terms of the problems of separation of the single person from the group. In an ASAO-net discussion of gwasa in 1997, correspondents raised the issue of loneliness in Melanesia, where persons are often described as relational or as dividuals (e.g. Strathern 1988). However in the case of piot, explanations in terms of loneliness or separation from the group are not sufficient. Piot occurs when people arrive as well as when they go. Nor is it dependent upon close social relations between the person moving, and those in the hamlet. For example, when my friend from Australia left, he'd been on Mahur for less than two weeks, he spoke no Tok Pisin and the inhabitants of the hamlet spoke no English. He was a fairly quiet person, not forceful in personality, and yet the piot he caused was severe. When I asked why some people have more intense piot than others, I was told in Tok Pisin 'i olsem yet' ('its just like that'). Given that piot appears to be an attribute of the person, to better understand piot it is instructive to examine the nature of persons in Lihir.
PERSONHOOD IN MELANESIA
Read's (1955) seminal paper on the person and morality for the Gahuku-Gama was an early forerunner of the flourishing research on personhood in Melanesia which has occurred mostly since the 1980s. The full impact of Leenhardt's Do Kamo (1979 [1947]) was not felt until it was available in English: it took up the issue of the nature of the person in Melanesia, arguing that Melanesians were personages:
He is unaware of his body, which is only his support. He knows himself only by the relationships he maintains with others. He exists only insofar as he acts his role in the course of his relationships. He is situated only with respect to them. If we try to draw this, we cannot use a dot marked 'self' (ego), but must make a number of lines to mark relationships.... The empty space is him, and this is what is named. (Leenhardt 1979:153)
Leenhardt then went on to say that the Melanesian could become a person, primarily in the context of colonialism; by escaping the sociomythic domain (ibid:161-4). The person for Leenhardt is the union of two elements, individuation centred on the body and communal rapport (Leenhardt 1979:168-9). For Leenhardt, then, the Melanesian world was inhabited by both personages and persons at the time of early colonisation.
More recently, Marilyn Strathern (1988) has argued that the Melanesian person and Melanesian sociality are diametrically opposed to that in the West, where the person as unique individual is opposed to society (1988:12-13). It is important to note that Strathern is not concerned with 'specific local contexts for events and behavior' but instead with the symbolism or root metaphor of 'the distinctive nature of Melanesian sociality' (ibid:10). The Melanesian person, the dividual or composite person is 'the plural and composite site of the relations that produced' him or her. The person is an objectification of these relations (ibid:13, 272). Strathern separates the concept of person and agent, the agent being the 'one who from his or her own vantage point acts with another's in mind' (ibid:272). Agency and cause in her analysis are split, agents not being the authors of their own actions (ibid:273). In her analysis, relationships are taken for granted, being prior to the persons which are their objectification (ibid:274). Persons do not act to create or maintain relationships, rather relationships 'are merely the condition for action, not themselves acts' (Strathern 1988:305). Being multiple and composite means that...
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